Rogue Moon

“Well — I don’t know, exactly. Except that it wouldn’t feel right, just sort of letting it drop. There’s — I don’t know, exactly, what you’d call it, but there’s a pattern to life… Ought to be a pattern, anyhow: a begi

“I can see that it might be necessary to believe that,” Hawks said patiently.

“You still don’t give an inch, do you?” Co

Hawks said nothing, and Co

Hawks sat back in his chair and looked at him expressionlessly. “Where are you going?”

Co

“Is Claire going with you?”

Co

“Exactly the way you pla

Co

“Well, no,” Hawks said. “Barker and I are still not finished.”

“I am,” Co

“Then you’re the wi

“Sure,” Co

“And that’s what it always is. A contest. And then a wi

“Goodbye, Hawks.” He turned away, and hesitated. He looked back over his shoulder. “I guess that was all I wanted to say.”

Hawks said nothing.

“I could have done it with a note or a phone call.” At the door, he said, “I didn’t have to do it at all.” He shook his head, puzzled, and looked to Hawks as if for an answer to a question he was asking himself.

Hawks said gently, “You just wanted to make sure I knew who the wi

“I guess,” Co

The next day, when the elapsed time was up to six minutes, thirty-nine seconds, Hawks came into the laboratory and said to Barker, “I understand you’re moving into the city, here.”

“Who told you?”

“Winchell.” Hawks looked carefully at Barker. “The new perso

Barker grunted. “Co

“I wish you’d keep the house. I envy it.”

“That’s none of your business, Hawks.”

But, nevertheless, the elapsed time had been brought up to six minutes, thirty-nine seconds.

On the day that the elapsed time was brought up to seven minutes, twelve seconds, Hawks was in his office, tracing his fingertip down the crumpled chart, when his desk telephone rang.

He glanced aside at it with a ificker of his eyes, hunched his shoulders, and continued with what he was doing. His fingertip moved along the uncertain blue line, twisting between the shaded black areas, each marked with its instruction and relative time bearing, each bordered by its drift of red X’s, as if the chart represented a diagram of a prehistoric beach, where one stumbling organism had marked its labored trail up upon the littered sand between the long rows of drying kelp and other flotsam which now lay stranded under the lowering sky. He stared down raptly at the chart, his lips moving, then closed his eyes, frowned, repeated bearings and instructions, opened his eyes and leaned forward again.

The telephone rang once more, softly but without stopping. He tightened his hand into a momentary fist, then pushed The chart aside and took the handset off its cradle. “Yes, Vivian,” he said.

He listened, and finally said, “All right. Call the gatehouse, please, and clear Dr. Latourette for a visitor’s pass. I’ll wait for him here.” He put the telephone down and looked around at the bare walls of his office.

Sam Latourette knocked softly on the door and came in, his mouth quirked into a shy half-smile, his footsteps slow and diffident as he crossed the room.

He was wearing a rumpled suit and an open-throated white shirt without a tie. There were fresh razor nicks on the underside of his jaw and on his neck, as if he had shaved only a few minutes ago. His hair was carefully combed; still damp from. the water he had used on it, it lay in thick furrows with his scalp visible between them, as though someone had found an old papier-mache bust of him and from an impulse of old fondness, had refurbished it as well as was possible under the circumstances.

“Hello, Ed,” he said gently, extending his hand as Hawks got up quickly. “It’s been a while.”

“Yes. Yes it has. Sit down, Sam — Here; here’s the chair.”

“I hoped you could spare the time to see me,” Latourette said, sinking down. He looked up apologetically. “Things must be moving along pretty fast now.”

“Yes,” Hawks said, lowering himself into his own chair. “Yes, pretty much so.”

Latourette looked down at the chart, which Hawks had folded and put down on the far end of the desk. “It looks like I was wrong about Barker.”

“I don’t know.” Hawks moved a hand toward the chart, then withdrew it and put his hands back in his lap. “He’s making progress for us. I suppose that’s what counts.” He watched Latourette uncertainly, his eyes restless.

“You know,” Latourette said with that same embarrassed twist of his features, “I didn’t want that job with Hughes Aircraft. I thought I did. You know. A man — a man wants to keep working. Anyway, that’s what he’s supposed to want.”

“Yes.”

“But you know I don’t get drunk. I mean, I — I just don’t, Oh, at a party, maybe. I used to. But not — Well, not because I’m mad and want to break things. I was never like that.”

“No.”

Latourette laughed, swallowing the sound. “I guess I was just trying to tell myself I really was mad at you. You know — trying to make myself feel like some kind of tragic figure. No — no, I didn’t want to go to work. That’s all, I guess. What I really wanted was to just go and sit in the sun. I mean, my job here was finished, anyway — and you had to start breaking Ted Gersten in. Would have had to, sooner or later, anyhow.”

Hawks put his hands on the edge of his desk. “Sam,” he said steadily, “I don’t know to this day whether I did the right thing or not.” He said, “I panicked, Sam. I got scared, because Barker had gotten to me.”

Latourette said quickly, “That doesn’t mean you were wrong. Where would any of us be if we didn’t play a sudden hunch? Now and then, you have to move fast. You look back later, and you see that if you hadn’t, everything would have gotten to be too much to handle. The backs of our minds are smarter than we are, sometimes.” He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket without looking down, his fingers plucking uncertainly into his pocket while he stared fixedly into the air, as if what he were saying had been thought out ahead of time, in some rehearsal of what he and Hawks would say to each other, and as if his actual attention was on something he was not yet sure he was ready to say.

“I’ll be going into a hospital tomorrow,” he went on. “It’s pretty much time for it. I mean, I could stay out a little while longer, but this way it’s over with. And, you know, I could stand to go on morphine… or whatever it is. It’s getting pretty itchy,” he said off-handedly. “And anyhow, the government sent a man around the other day. Didn’t outright tell me to do anything, but I think they’d be happier if I was someplace where it doesn’t matter what I say in my sleep.” He made a sophisticated grin. “You know. Big Brother.”