His eyes returned to the Barker lying in the suit. “Someone else will hold Claire in his arms tonight. Someone else will drive-your car and drink your whisky. You are not the Barker I met in your house. That man is gone. But no Barker has known death yet — no Barker has had to go into a place from which there is no return. You can get out of that suit at this moment, Barker, and leave here. I would.” He watched the man intently.
After a moment, Barker’s mouth opened into a deadly, silent laugh. “Come on, Doctor,” he said. “Not when I can already hear the music.”
Hawks pulled his hands out of sight behind his back. “All right. Then there is one last thing. When we began using this technique, we discovered that the L volunteer showed signs of momentary confusion. He behaved, even though safe in the laboratory, as if he were the M volunteer on the Moon. This confused period lasted only a moment or two, and swiftly waned into awareness. We put the phenomenon aside as one of the many things we must neglect now and reserve for study when the urgent problems have been solved. Many things have been put aside in that manner. But we received reports from the Navy crew Moonside that the M volunteer was unaccountably losing time — that he was disoriented for several seconds after he resolved in the receiver. Perhaps from brain damage, perhaps from something else — we did not know, at the time, but it was something new, and it was losing effective time for the volunteer.
“That was an urgent problem. We solved it when we considered the fact that for the first time in the universe as we know it, two identical brains existed in it, and at the sante moment of time. It became apparent to us — unwilling though some of us were to accept the conclusion — that the quarter-million-mile distance separating them was no more important an impedance to their thoughts than a line scratched across his path is to a journeying man. You can call it anything you like. Telepathy if you want to, however you may feel about what is to be included in scientific nomenclature, and what is not.” There was a momentary look of faint distaste on his face.
“It had no chance to be true communication, of course. Almost instantly, the two brains ceased being identical. The two volunteers were receiving vastly different sensory impressions and recording them in their individual brain cells. In seconds, the two minds were far apart, and the thread, frayed, came unraveled and broke. M and L were no longer the same man. And never, even at the first instant, could they simply ‘speak’ to each other in the sense of passing messages back and forth like telegrams. Nor, it seems to me, will that sort of objective, uninvolved communication ever be possible. To be able to read a man’s mind is to be able to be that man — to be where he is, to live whatever he is living. Even in this special case of ours, the two men could only, for one decaying moment, seem to be of one mind.”
Hawks looked around the laboratory. Gersten was watching him patiently, but standing idle, his preparations done. Hawks nodded absently, and looked back at Barker.
“We saw,” he finished, “that we had here a potential means of accurately observing a man inside the lunar f ormation. So that is why we set up the physical circumstances of the Moon shots as we do. Barker M will resolve on the Moon, where the sensory-blocking devices in his armor will stop operating because they are out of range of our lowpower controls here. He will come out of anesthesia and be able to move and observe normally. But Barker L, here, will still be under our control. He will be receiving no outside stimuli as he lies cut off inside his armor. His mind will be free of the environment of this laboratory, accepting whatever comes to it. And only what is in Barker M’s mind can come to it.
“Barker L, too, will seem to himself to be on the Moon, inside the formation. He won’t know he is Barker L. He will live as though in the M brain, and his organic structure will record whatever sensory perceptions the M body conveys to its brain. And though, of course, no method could prevent an eventual increep of divergent stimuli — the metabolic conditions of the two bodies gradually become less and less similar, for example-still the contact might last for as long as ten or fifteen minutes. But, of course, it never has.
“You’ll know you’ve reached the limit of our previous probes when you reach Rogan’s body. We don’t know what killed him. It hardly matters what it was, except that you’ll have to evade it, whatever it was. Maybe the condition of the body will be a useful clue. If it is, it’ll be the only useful thing we’ve been able to learn from Rogan. Because when Rogan L, down here, felt Rogan M die, up there, Rogan L could not feel anything except Rogan M’s death. The same thing will happen to you.
“Barker M’s mind will die with his body, in whatever particular way the body is destroyed. Let’s hope this happens at the end of a little more than two hundred and thirty-two seconds elapsed time, rather than less. It’s bound to happen sooner or later. And Barker L’s mind, same down here in the L brain, will nevertheless feel itself die, because it isn’t free to feel anything of what is happening to its own body. All its life, all its memories, will suddenly culminate. It will feel the pain, the shock, the as yet totally indescribable anguish of the end of its world. No man has been able to endure it. We found the finest, most stable minds we could among physically suitable volunteers, and without exception, all the L volunteers were taken out of their suits insane. Whatever information they had to give us was lost beyond all hope, and we gained nothing for our expenditure.”
Barker stared flatly up at him. “That’s too bad.”
“How do you want me to talk about it?” Hawks answered rapidly. A vein bulged down the center of his forehead. “Do you want me to talk about what we’re here to do, or do you want me to say something else? Are you going to argue morality with me? Are you going to say that, duplicate man or no duplicate man, a man dies on the Moon and makes me no less a murderer? Do you want to take me to court and from there to a gas chamber? Do you want to look in the law books and see what penalties apply to the repeated crime of systematically driving men insane? Will that help us here? Will it smooth the way?
“Go to the Moon, Barker. Die. And if you do, in fact, find that you love Death as feverishly as you’ve courted her, then, just perhaps, you’ll be the first man to come back in condition to claim revenge on me!” He clutched the edge of the opened chest plate and slammed it shut. He held himself up with the flats of his palms on it and leaned down until his face was directly over Barker’s faceplate opening. “But before you do, you’ll tell me how I can usefully do it to you again.”
3
The Navy crew pushed Barker into the transmitter. The lateral magnets lifted him off the table, and it was pulled out from beneath him. The door was dogged shut, and the fore-and-aft magnets came on to hold him locked immobile for the scanner. Hawks nodded to Gersten, and Gersten punched the Standby button on his console.
Up on the roof, there was a radar dish focused in parallel with the transmitter antenna. Down in the laboratory, Will Martin pointed a finger at the Signal Corps technician. A radar beep travelled to the Moon and returned. The elapsed time and doppler progression were fed as data into a computer which set the precise holding time in the delay deck. The matter transmitter antenna fired a UHF pulse through the Moon relay tower into the receiver there, tripping its safety lock so that it would accept the M signal.