Tongues of the Moon

Maybe, thought Broward, it would be better if the plant was never taken out of the tanks. Most of mankind had gotten along quite well without nicotine before Columbus, and they'd be much better off without it now. Be that as it might, Scone's act was entirely unexpected.

"You smoke?" he said to the sergeant.

"Not for long," the sergeant replied. "I got half a pack left, and I'm nursing that."

"Here," said Broward, handing the carton to him, "take a couple of packs. Pass the rest around among your men."

Broward raised his hand to stop the sergeant's protests. "I have to quit sometime; I may not live long enough to get through a pack. No use wasting them."

He turned away and said, "Let's go, Moshe."

They entered the ship through an airlock and seated themselves in two chairs placed just before the control panel and observation screen. The sergeant pressed a button on the panel; long slender rods topped by curved metal plates rose from orifices in the chairs and clamped themselves around the heads, chests, arms, and legs of the two seated men. The sergeant then pressed another button; nothing seemed to result from the action. But the sergeant, testing, found that he could not push his hand through the "stasis" field that now surrounded the two. He signalled to them, and both depressed a plate on the right arm of their chairs. Immediately, the sergeant could extend his hand as near them as he wished.

"The stasis is O.K.," he said. "Reactivate it now."

Broward and Yamanuchi settled back. The plates on the rods were not restraining devices but reminders that they must stay in the chair. One of the peculiarities of the not well-understood stasis was that a material object on the outside of the field could not pass through, not unless it was hurled with much more energy than the muscles of a man could expend. Light and sound could pass through the stasis both ways, and a man within it could easily walk out through it. If, however, during the state of terrific acceleration that would be experienced by the ship on most of its journey to the Earth, a man within stasis were to stick so much as a finger through the field, he would be sucked out into the "normal" fields and would be subject to them. That is, he would be crushed to death.

though they were expecting and had experienced the sensation, they were away from the moon and in the glare of the sun. Before them, on the control panel, the red light in the G column crept upwards; they were already past fifty gravities.

The round of the Earth, dark on their left, luminous on their right, perceptibly ballooned. Outlines of the continents and the flashings of the sun from the oceans and big lakes were missing. Since that fatal day, the Earth had been covered with clouds. Even the ice caps of the Poles were smudged.

The two men were silent for a long time. Broward found himself reaching towards his pocket for a cigarette. He smiled, but he wondered if he had not been too impulsive in giving away all his tobacco. Not that he could smoke now, anyway. Light and sound and air could travel through the barrier. Theoretically, it was safe to smoke, but regulations forbade.

Broward turned his head to look at Moshe on his left. Moshe had his eyes closed, and he was smiling slightly.

"Thinking of women again?" said Broward.

"Bagels and lox," said Moshe. "Sara Bagels and Judith Lox, that is."

Moshe laughed, then said, "I'm lying. I was thinking of my mother and father."

"And you can laugh?"

"Laughter and tears are means of relieving tension. Sometimes, I laugh when others cry, and vice versa. Maybe it's because I've had to dissimulate all my life. It's not easy to be a Jew."

"You're not a Jew," said Broward.

"Tell the others that. Tell them that being a Jew is a matter of one's religion, not of one's genes or whatever faith one's parents happened to be."

"That's all in the past," said Broward. "People will forget after a while. Even if there is some slight feeling left in their relations with you, your children won't be affected by it"

"My parents made an effort to educate me in their religion. Secretly, of course. Nominally, they were atheists, but they celebrated all the old ceremonies: Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and so on. They even gave me a Bar Mitzvah; there were twelve others present then, all masked, of course, so nobody would know who they were. Although I was the only one who didn't know. Maybe they were afraid I'd turn them in. Rightly so. Not that I did or even thought of doing so for a moment. I mean they were right not to take the chance that I would.

"But I went through the ceremony only to please them; I had no interest whatsoever or belief in perpetuating their faith. I just wanted to forget about the whole ridiculous and tragic thing."

He was silent for a moment, then said, as if continuing aloud his thought and as if not addressing Broward, "But I can't forget. It's not that a voice has spoken to me out of the fire in the bushes. But there's a voice. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof."

"You're letting the events of the last two weeks get to you," said Broward. "The old world is destroyed, and there's nothing you can do about it. But we do have a new world to make, and if we profit by the mistakes the old world made, well..."

"You have as much chance getting everybody to agree on what the brave new world should be as Scone will have on getting everybody to agree to make the Moon a New America," said Moshe.

Broward did not reply. It was true that Moshe was a member of his Athenian party, but Broward had all along felt that Moshe had joined him only in protest against the Communists. He did not have a sincere or deep belief in the principles Broward expounded. Not in the ability of men to carry out the principles, anyway. When Moshe had lost his faith in the God of his fathers—if he ever had any—he had also lost his faith in men.

The rest of the way the two talked about trivial things, about those they knew on the Moon, about friends and enemies they had known on Earth, their childhoods, jokes. Exactly one and a half hours after they had hurtled from the surface of the Moon, an alarm rang through the ship. This, as the appropriate blinking light on the panel validated, was the signal that the ship was begi

They waited, silently, while the ship plunged into the clouds that blanketed the planet. Broward showed his nervousness by the swift tapping of his fingers on the chair-arm; Moshe hummed softly. Outside, all was gloom except for flashes of lightning in the distance. Suddenly, they were in a heavy rain.

"We're on the nightside," said Moshe. "Out of contact with the Moon. There's nothing to keep us from taking off again, keeping the Earth between us and the Moon until we are out of detection range."

"Where would we go?" said Broward. "And why should we go?"

"Ganymede. Mercury. Ganymede'd be better. Did you ever read the report on the complex of caverns in it? A whole city could hide there and never be found. As to why, well, why go back to a people that hate you or, at least, have contempt for you? Or to a leader that wants to use you as tools for his own twisted ideology, not as a human being with rights and desires of his own? And..."

"Forget it. I'm just talking. First, let's find what we came for, then..."

Their goal was ten kilometers off the coast of the East Siberian Sea, near the city of Yakan, and a quarter of a kilometer beneath the surface. The ship took them to the exact spot—or so the instruments indicated—and then it poised ten meters above the waves. So thick was the mixture of smoke and fog, that the two men could see nothing. They had not glimpsed the land once during their descent. Broward had wanted to see something of the devastation. At the same time, he did not want to see it. He was not sure that he could bear the sight. Knowing about it had been almost too much; to view the glassed-over and fused cities that had suffered direct hits, to see the shattered remnants of the areas that had been on the fringes, to have to see the thousands, the millions of bodies of those who had died from radiation, the human beings, the animals, birds... this was more than he could endure even to imagine. No, he was glad that the smoke from burning cities and the forests hid dead Earth.