So this,
he
thought,
is sanity.
He let his brain absorb the sensations of relaxed
well-being that were flooding in from every part of his body. In this
mood, everything connected with the process of being alive was good. He
could have got immense pleasure from a thousand simple things that had
been forgotten somewhere along the way -- climbing a hill, drinking beer,
chopping wood, writing a poem.
He put his hand on the cool skin of Kate's thigh. "How do you feel?"
"All right." Her voice was sleepy, remote.
Breton nodded, looking at the room through his brand- new eyes.
The baffled sunlight had a yellowed, Mediterranean quality about it,
restful yet absolutely clear. And it revealed no flaws in his Time B
universe. A strangely relevant fragment from. an old poem drifted into
his mind.
The painted sceneries recall
Such toil as Canaletto spent
To give each brick upon each wall
Its due partition of cement.
He raised himself on one elbow and looked down at Kate. "My name should
have been Canaletto," he said.
She stared up at him, half-smiling, then turned her face away and
he knew she was thinking about John. Breton sank down on his pillow,
absentmindedly sliding a finger beneath the strap of his watch to touch
the hidden lump of the chronomotor module buried beneath his skin. John
Breton was the one flaw in the Time B universe.
But that state of affairs was strictly temporary.
VII
Jake Larmour stared wearily through the curved viewscreen of his crawler
at the flat, monotonous surface of the Moon. He kept the vehicle's motors
running at maximum revolutions, but the western rim of the Sea of
Tranquility, towards which he had been driving for the past two hours,
seemed as far away as ever. At intervals he yawned widely, and between
times whistled a thin, sad tune. Jake Larmour was bored.
Back in Pine Ridge, Wisconsin, the idea of being a radar maintenance man
on the Moon had seemed glamorous and exciting. Now, after three months
of patrolling the line towers, he had reached the stage of crossing off
the days on a calendar hand-drawn for that express purpose. He had known
in advance that the Moon was dead, but what he had not anticipated was
the way in which his own spirit would quail in the face of such complete
and utter absence of life.
If only, he thought for the thousandth time on that trip, if only
something would move out there.
He was leaning back in an extravagant yawn, arms stretching as far as
was possible in the crawler's cockpit, when something flickered and
vanished on the surface of the crater bed about a hundred yards ahead
of him. Larmour instinctively hit the brake and the vehicle whined to
a stop. He sat upright in his seat, scanning the ground beyond the
viewscreen, wondering if his imagination was beginning to act up on
him. Several elongated seconds dragged by while the lunar landscape
waited complacently for eternity. Larmour's hand was moving towards
the throttle levers when he saw the movement again, off to the left,
and a little closer.
He swallowed hard. His eyes had focused more quickly this time and he
had made out a fluffy gray object -- about the size of a football --
which had popped up above ground level for an instant before vanishing
downwards. As he watched, the phenomenon was repeated three more times,
always in a different place.
"Well, I'll be damned," he said aloud. "If I've discovered Moon gophers
I'll be famous."
Trembling a little, he reached for the radio button, then remembered
there was too much of the Moon's humped back between him and Base Three to
allow contact. Beyond the screen a fluffy ball peeked up impudently and
disappeared. Larmour hesitated for only a second before he disconnected
his relief tube, sealed up his pressure suit and began making all the
arrangements necessary for a human being to observe before setting foot
on the Moon. A few minutes later, suppressing a sense of unreality,
he left the crawler and began moving uncertainly towards where he had
seen the last flurry of movement. As he walked he kept his eyes open
for the lunar equivalent of gopher holes, but the blanket of eons-old
dust was smooth except for the untidy sutures of his own footprints.
Abruptly, several of the fluffy balls sprang up within a radius of fifty
paces, making him snatch for breath. Summoning his presence of mind,
he kept his gaze fixed on the spot where the nearest materialization
had taken place. Larmour reached the place, laboring with his inexpert
low-gravity shuffle, and his gingery brows knit together as he saw
there was no hole which could possibly contain the furtive gray entity
he was seeking.
He knelt down to alter the direction of the light rays reflecting from
the dust, and thought he could discern a shallow, dish-shaped depression
with a minute dimple in the center. Becoming more and more puzzled,
Larmour gently scooped the dust away with his hands until he had exposed
the surface of the rock three inches below. There was a neat circular
hole of about an inch diameter, looking as though it had been put there
with a masonry drill. He pushed one finger into the hole, then jerked
it out again as heat seared through the insulation of his glove. The
surrounding rock was practically red hot.
Larmour sat back on his heels and stared at the black circle in perplexity.
His mind was wrestling unsuccessfully with the problem it represented,
when another gray ball appeared momentarily only a few feet away. This
time he felt the ground tremors, and then suddenly he had the answer --
the hideous, deadly answer.
On the Moon -- with no air to buoy up its separate particles -- a cloud
of dust remains small and compact, and vanishes back into the ground
almost as quickly as the eye can follow. And the only thing which would
kick up such a cloud, human agencies excepted, was a meteor impact!
Larmour had left the safety of his vehicle and was walking about
unprotected amid a meteor shower of unprecedented intensity, a hail
of bullets fired a billion blind years earlier. Groaning at his own
stupidity and lack of experience, he stood up and ran with ballooning
Moon-steps towards the waiting crawler.
An obsolescent, four-engined aircraft was patiently clawing its way across
the night skies of Northern Greenland. Inside its drumming, cylindrical
belly, Denis Soderman carefully tended his banks of recording equipment,
occasionally adjusting verniers, keeping the research plane's inhuman
and far-reaching senses at their keenest. He worked with the abstracted
efficiency of a man who knows his job is important but who believes he
was cut out for higher things.
Some distance forward of Soderman's station, the senior -- Dr. Cosgrove --
sat at a makeshift desk, running gray paper tape though his hands like
a tailor measuring cloth. His still-young face looked old and tired in
the clinical light from the overhead tube.
"We don't need to wait for a computer to process this lot, Denis,"
Cosgrove said. "The solar corpuscular streams are obviously boosted
way beyond normal. I've never seen readings like this, even with freak
sunspot activity. The Van Allen belt must be soaking the stuff up like
a sponge, and with those reports of fluctuations in the solar constant
we got today from M.I.T., it looks . . ."
Denis Soderman stopped listening. He was adept at shutting out the older
man's ruminative voice, but this time it was more than a mere defense
mechanism against the effects of unbridled pedantry. Something had
happened to the aircraft. Seated far back from the machine's center of
gravity, Soderman had experienced a subtle, queasy corkscrewing motion.
It had lasted perhaps half a second, but Soderman was a talented amateur
pilot and had found something disturbing in the idea of a hundred-ton
aircraft flicking its tail like a salmon. Emulating his electronic
charges, he spread the network of his senses as wide as possible. For a
few seconds he picked up nothing but the normal sensations of flight,
then it happened again -- a momentary lift and twist which made his
stomach contract in alarm.
"They're having trouble up front," he said. "I don't like the way this
old bus is flying."
Cosgrove looked up from his perforated streamers. "I didn't feel
anything." His voice registered disapproval of Soderman's lack of
concentration on the job at hand.
"Listen, doctor. I'm way out on a limb here in the tail and I can
feel
-- "
He broke off as the aircraft suddenly lurched sideways, shuddered,
righted itself and became ominously quiet as all four engines cut out
at the same time. Soderman, who had been lifted out of his seat and
smashed against his instrument arrays, struggled to his feet and ran
forward past Dr. Cosgrove. There was a noticeable slope in the gangway,
showing that the aircraft was now flying in a pronounced nose-down
attitude. A gray-faced second officer collided with him in the doorway
to the flight deck.
"Get up to the tail and get your backs against the lavatory bulkhead!
We're going down!" The officer made no attempt to keep the panic out of
his voice.
"Going down?" Soderman shouted. "Going down where? There isn't a field
within three hundred miles."
"Are you telling
me
there's no field?"
Even in a crisis the airman was jealous of his superiority over ordinary
mortals, resentful at having to discuss the affairs of his aerial domain
with an outsider.
"We're doing everything we can to restart the engines, but Captain Isaacs
isn't optimistic. It looks as though he'll have to try setting us down on
the snow. Now will you go aft?"
"But it's
dark
out there! Nobody could put a ship down -- "
"That's our problem, mister." The officer pushed Soderman up the swaying
gangway and turned back to the flight deck. Soderman's mouth was dry as
he moved aft, following the stumbling figure of Dr. Cosgrove.
They reached the conical tail-section and sat on the floor, backs braced
against the cool metal of a major bulkhead. This far from the center
of gravity each control movement made by the pilot was felt as a great,
wild swing which gave Soderman the conviction the final catastrophe had
arrived. With no sound from the engines to mask it, the passage of the
fuselage through the air was loud, variable, menacing -- the gleeful
voice of a sky which could feel an enemy's strength bleeding away.
Soderman tried to reconcile himself to the thought of dying within a
matter of minutes, knowing that no combination of luck, pilot's skill and
structural integrity could enable the aircraft to survive contact with
the earth. In daylight, or even in moonlight, it might have worked, but in
pitch blackness there could be only one outcome to this rushing descent.
He clenched his teeth and vowed to go out with at least as much dignity
as Dr. Cosgrove seemed to have mustered -- but, when the impact came, he
screamed. His voice was lost in a prolonged metallic thunderclap, then
the plane was airborne again in a crazy, slewing leap, culminating in
another incredible blast of sound which was compounded by the clattering
of moveable objects bounding the length of the fuselage. The nightmare
seemed to last for an eternity, during which all the interior lights
were extinguished, but it ended abruptly, and Soderman discovered he
was still breathing -- miraculously, impossibly alive.
A few minutes later he was standing at an emergency door peering into
the night sky at the glowing face of his savior.
Striated curtains of red and green light shimmered and danced from horizon
to horizon, illuminating the snowscape below with an eerie, theatrical
brilliance. It was an auroral display of supernatural intensity.
"This illustrates what I was saying about the Van Allen belt being
overloaded," Dr. Cosgrove commented emotionlessly behind Soderman.
"The solar corpuscular stream is washing the upper atmosphere with charged
particles which are draining into the magnetic poles. Their display,
to which it seems we owe our lives, is only one facet of . . ."
But Soderman had stopped listening -- he was too busy with the pleasurable
business of simply being alive.
Dr. Fergus B. Raphael sat quietly at the wheel of his car, staring across
the oil-dappled concrete of the university parking lot.
He was seriously contemplating driving away towards the ocean and
never being heard of in academic circles again. There had been a time
when he had tackled his work with supreme enthusiasm, undeterred by
the realization that -- in the very nature of things -- he would never
achieve the rewards which were possible for workers in other fields. But
the years had taken their toll, the years of living on the wrong side
of the scientific tracks, and now he was tired.
He put aside the daily pretense that he was free to drive away from his
obsession, and got out of the car. The sky was overcast and chestnut
leaves were scuttling noisily before a cold, searching wind. Raphael
turned up his coat collar and walked towards the unremarkable architecture
of the university. It looked like being yet another very ordinary day.
Half an hour later he had set up the first experiment of the morning.
The volunteer was Joe Washburn, a young Negro student who had shown
flashes of promise in a previous series of tests.
Raphael raised a microphone to his lips. "All set, Joe?"
Washburn nodded and waved to Raphael through the window of his soundproof
booth. Raphael moved a switch and checked with his assistant, Jean Ard,
who was sitting in a similar booth at the opposite side of the laboratory.
She gave him an exaggeratedly cheerful wave, which Raphael took as an
indication that she too was feeling depressed. He started the recording
machine, then leaned back in his chair, unwrapping a cigar, and watched
the visual monitors with dutiful eyes.
Not for the first time, he thought:
How long does this farce have
to go on? How much proof do I need that mind-to-mind communication
is impossible?
Jean Ard keyed in her first symbol and a triangle appeared on her
monitor. Her face was impassive behind the thick glass of the booth and
Raphael wondered if she always tried to concentrate and project, or if
she ever just sat there, pushed buttons and thought about her evening
date. A few minutes later Washburn's monitor lit up -- a triangle. Raphael
ignited his cigar and waited, wondering how soon be could break off
and go for coffee. A square appeared on Jean's monitor, followed by a
square on Washburn's. She tried a triangle again, and Washburn matched
ber. Then a circle and a star, and Washburn registered a circle and
a star. In spite of himself, Raphael's pulse began to quicken and he
felt a recurrence of the old nervous fever which might have made him a
chronic gambler had be not found a way to sublimate it in research. He
watched closely as Jean continued keying in at random the five abstract
symbols they used in the telepathy experiments. Eight minutes later she
had gone through a complete test sample of fifty projections.