“Oh, I’ll stick around, Doctor,” Barker answered lightly.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Barker, you’re not being easy on me at all, are you?”
“You’re not doing so well by me, Doctor.”
Hawks’ right hand stirred the pile of folders, and he looked down at them. “You’re right. Mercy is only a recent human cultural invention.” He said in an overprecise tone, “Let’s get to work. Earlier this year, the Air Force obtained one radioed photograph from a rocket which it attempted to put into a lunar orbit. The rocket came much too close, and crashed somewhere beyond the edge of the visible disk. By fortunate accident, that one photograph showed this.” He took an eight-by-ten glossy print enlargement out of its folder and passed it to Barker. “You can see it’s almost hopelessly washed out and striated by errors in transmission from the rocket’s radiophoto sending apparatus. But this area, of which a part is visible in this corner — here-is clearly not a natural formation.”
Barker frowned at it. “This what you showed me that ground photo of?”
“But that came a great deal later. All this showed was that there was something on the Moon whose extent and nature were not determined by the photograph, but which resembled no lunar or terrestrial feature familiar to human knowledge. We have, since then, measured its extent as best we can, and can say it is roughly a hundred meters in diameter and twenty meters high, with irregularities and amorphous features we cannot accurately describe. We still know very little of its nature — but that’s beside the immediate point. When this feature was discovered, it became important to the government that it be studied. It had been pretty much expected that the far side of the Moon would show nothing startlingly different from the visible disk. Considering the unequal state of Russian and U.S. rocketry, it was now clear that if we did not move rapidly, the Russians had every chance of making a first-class discovery, whose nature we could not guess but whose importance might well be major — perhaps even decisive, as far as control of the Moon was concerned.”
Hawks rubbed his eyes. “As it happened,” he went on softly, “the Navy had some years previously signed a development contract with Continental Electronics, underwriting my work with the matter scanner. By the time of the Moon-photo rocket, the experimental system you see down in the laboratory had been built and, despite its glaring crudities, had reached the point where it would consistently transmit a volunteer from the transmitter into the laboratory receiver without apparent damage. So, at a time when we were thinking of beginning experimental wireless transmission to a receiver in the Sierras, the government instituted a crash program to send volunteers to the Moon.
“A great deal of additional money was expended for equipment and personnel and, after a series of failures and near-misses, the Army rocket team was able to drop a relay tower on this side of the Moon’s disk, near the edge. Then a very sketchy receiver was dropped, rather haphazardly, near this—” he tapped the chart frustratedly — “this formation. And a volunteer technician was broadcast through the relay tower into the receiver, which was barely large enough to hold him. Once there, he was supplied through the receiver. He was able to reach the rocket containing the relay tower, set it firmly on a stable base, and erect a plastic camouflage and meteorite impact-absorption hood over it. Using parts which were transmitted to him, he then built the receiver and return transmitter we are using now. He also erected rudimentary living quarters for himself, and then, apparently, began investigating the unknown formation against orders without waiting for the arrival of the Navy specialists who now crew the outpost.
“He wasn’t found until several weeks ago. His was the second photograph I showed you. His body was inside the thing, and looked to the autopsy surgeons as though he had fallen from a height of several thousand meters under Terrestrial gravity.”
Barker’s mouth hooked briefly. “Could that have happened?”
“No.”
“I see.”
“I can’t see, Barker, and neither can anyone else. We don’t even know what to call that place. The eye won’t follow it, and photographs convey only the most fragile impression. There is reason to suspect it exists in more than three spatial dimensions. Nobody knows what it is, why it’s located there, what its true purpose might be, or what created it. We don’t know whether it’s animal, vegetable, or mineral. We don’t know whether it’s somehow natural, or artificial. We know, from the geology of several meteorite craters that have heaped rubble against its sides, that it’s been there for, at the very least, a million years. And we know what it does now: it kills people.”
“Again and again, in unbelievable ways, Doctor?”
“Characteristically and persistently, in unbelievable ways. We need to know every one of them. We need to determine, with no margin for error or omission, exactly what the formation can do to men. We need to have a complete guide to its limits and capabilities. When we have that, we can, at last, risk entering it with trained technicians who will study and disassemble it. It will be the technical teams which will actually learn from it as much as human beings can, and convey this host of information into the -general body of human knowledge. But this is only what technicians always do. First we must have our chartmaker. It’s my direct responsibility that the formation will, I hope, kill you again and again.”
“Well, that’s a fair warning even if it makes no sense. I can’t say you didn’t give it to me.”
“It wasn’t a warning,” Hawks said. “It was a promise.”
Barker shrugged. “Call it whatever you want to.”
“I don’t often choose my words on that basis,” Hawks said.
Barker grinned at him. “You and Sam Latourette ought to do a brother act.”
Hawks looked carefully at Barker for a long time. “Thank you for giving me something else to worry about.” He picked up another folder and thrust it into Barker’s hands.
“Look those over.” He stood up. “There’s only one entrance into the thing. Somehow, our first technician found it, probably by fumbling around the periphery until he stepped through it. It is not an opening in any describable sense; it is a place where the nature of this formation permits entrance by a human being, either by design or accident. It cannot be explained in more precise terms, and it can’t be encompassed by the eye or, we suspect, the human brain. Three men died to make the chart which now permits other men, who follow the chart by dead reckoning like navigators in an impenetrable fog, to enter the formation. Other men have died to tell us the following things about its interior:
“A man inside it can be seen, very dimly, if we know where to look. No one knows, except in the most incoherent terms, what he sees. No one has ever come out; no one has ever been able to find an exit; the entrance cannot be used for that purpose. Non-living matter, such as a photograph or a corpse, can be passed out from inside. But the act of passing it out is invariably fatal to the man doing it. That photo of the first volunteer’s body cost another man’s life. The formation also does not permit electrical signals from its interior. That includes a man’s speaking intelligibly inside his helmet, loudly enough for his RT microphone to pick it up. Coughs, grunts, other non-informative mouth-noises, are permissible. An attempt to encode a message in this manner failed.
“You will not be able to maintain communication, either by broadcast or along a cable. You will be able to ,make very limited hand signals to observers from the outpost, and you will make written notes on a tablet tied to a cord, which the observer team will attempt to draw back after you die. If that fails, the man on the next try will have to go in and pass the tablet out by hand, if he can, and if it is decipherable. Otherwise, he will attempt to repeat whatever actions you took, making notes, until he finds the one that killed you. We have a chart of safe postures and motions which have been established in this manner, as well as of fatal ones. It is, for example, fatal to kneel on one knee while facing lunar north. It is fatal to raise the left hand above shoulder height while in any position whatsoever. It is fatal past a certain point to wear armor whose air hoses loop over the shoulders. It is fatal past another point to wear armor whose air tanks feed directly into the suit without the use of hoses at all. It is crippling to. wear armor whose dimensions vary greatly from the ones we are using now. It is fatal to use the hand motions required to write the English word ‘yes,’ with either the left or right hand.