“No,” he agreed. His face was drawn with fatigue. He sat with his chin on his chest, his knees against the dashboard. “It’s—” He waved his hand vaguely at the looming, tile-roofed bulk, the walls vined by cracks which had been plastered over and repainted with brush-wide stripes of paint fresher than the original overall coat. “It’s a place.”
“Don’t you ever miss the farm country? Open fields? Woods? A clear sky?”
“There weren’t many open fields,” he said. “It was mainly chicken farming, and everything was filled up with one- and two-story lines of coops.” He looked out the window. “Coops.” He looked back at her. “You know, chickens are highly subject to respiratory ailments. They sigh and wheeze and snore, all night, by the thousands — a sound that hangs over entire townships, like the moaning of a distant crowd, weeping and deprived. Chickens. I used to wonder if they knew what we were — why we made them run in pens, and eat at feeding troughs, and drink at spigots. Why we kept the rain off them, and broke our backs carrying wet mash to them. Why we went into their coops, every week, and scraped their droppings out from under their roosts, and tried to keep the coops as clean of diseasebreeding areas as possible. I wondered if they knew, and if that was why they groaned in their sleep. But of course, chickens are abysmally stupid. Of all the living things in this world, only Man thinks like Man.”
He opened the car door, half turned to step out, and then stopped. “You know — You know,” he began again, “I do talk a lot, when we’re together.” He looked at her apologetically. “You must get awfully bored with it.”
“I don’t mind.”
He shook his head. “I can’t understand you.” He smiled gently.
“Would you like to?”
He blinked. “Yes. Very much.”
“Maybe I feel the same way about you?”
He blinked again. “Well,” he said. “Well. I’ve been sort of assuming that all along, haven’t I? I never thought of that. I never did.” He shook his head. He said ruefully, “Only Man thinks like Man.” He got out of the car, and stood beside it looking in at her. “You’ve been very good to me tonight, Elizabeth. Thank you.”
“I want you to call me again as soon as you can.” He frowned suddenly. “Yes. As soon as I can,” he said in a troubled voice. He closed the door and stood tapping his fingers on the sill of the opened window. “Yes,” he said. He grimaced. “Time runs on,” he objected under his breath. “I’ll — I’ll call,” he said to her, and walked away toward the apartment house, his head down, his arms hanging at his sides, the large hands opening and closing out of rhythm with his steps, his path a little erratic, so that he had wandered from one side of the walk to the other before he reached the apartment-house door and began fumbling one-half-room efficiency flat.
Finally, he got the door open. He turned, looked back, and waved stiffly, as if not sure he had really finished their conversation. Then he let the arm fall, and pushed the door open.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Barker came into the laboratory the next day with his eyes red-rimmed. His hands shook as he got into his undersuits.
Hawks walked up to him. “I’m glad to see you here,” he said awkwardly.
Barker looked up and said nothing.
Hawks said, “Are you sure you’re all right? If you’re not feeling well, we can cancel until tomorrow.”
Barker said, “Just stop worrying about me.”
Hawks put his hands in his pockets. “Well. Have you been to see the navigating specialists?”
Barker nodded.
“Were you able to give them a clear account of yesterday’s results?”
“They acted happy. Why don’t you wait until they get it digested and put the reports on your desk? What does it matter to you what I find up there? Just as long as I keep making distance, and don’t crack. Isn’t that right? You don’t care what happens to me; all I’m doing is blazing a trail so your smart technicians won’t trip over anything when they go up to there to take it apart, right? So what’s it to you, unless you lose me and have to go find a new boy, right? And how would you do that? How many people do you suppose Connington has plans for in the back of his head? Not plans that lead to this place, right? So why don’t you just leave me alone?”
“Barker—” Hawks shook his head. “No, forget it. There’s no use talking.”
“I hope you can stick to that idea.”
Hawks sighed. “All right. There’s one thing; this is going to go on day after day, now, astronomical conditions permitting. It won’t stop until you’ve come out the other side of the formation. Once we start, it’ll be difficult to interrupt our momentum. But if there’s ever a time when you’d like to take a break — get some rest, work on your cars; anything — if it’s at all possible, we’ll do it. We—”
Barker’s lips curled back. “Hawks, I’m here to do something. I intend to do it. It’s all I want to do. All right?”
Hawks nodded. “All right, Barker.” He took his hands out of his pockets. “I hope it doesn’t take too long to do.”
Hawks walked down the corridor until he came to the navigating section. He knocked, and stepped in. The men of the specialist team looked up, then went back to huddling over the large-scale map of the formation which occupied the twelve-foot-square table in the center of the room. Only the Coast Guard officer in charge came over to Hawks as the others patiently made marks on the large plastic sheet with bits of red chalk on the ends of long wooden pointers. One of them was standing at a tape recorder, his head cocked as he listened to Barker’s voice.
The voice was low and strangled. “I told you!” it was saying. “There’s a sort of blue cloud… and something that seems to be moving inside it. Not like something alive.”
“Yes, we have that,” a team member’s patient voice replied. “But how far from where you were standing on the white sand hill was it? How many steps?”
“It’s hard to say. Six or seven.”
“Uh-huh. Now, you say that was directly on your right, the way you were faced? All right, now, then what did you do?”
“I walked about six feet out onto this ledge, and turned left to follow it around that red spire. Then I—”
“Did you notice where the blue cloud was, in relation to you, as you made that turn?”
“I was looking back over my right shoulder at it.”
“I see. Would you turn your head to that angle, now, so I can get a better idea? Thank you. About twelve degrees from dead right. And it was still six or seven steps away in straight-line distance?”
The team member stopped the tape, ran it back, and began playing it again. He made a note on a work sheet.
The Coast Guard officer asked Hawks, “Can I help you with anything, Doctor? We’ll have all this written up and ready for you in a few hours. As soon as it’s done, we’ll shoot it right up to your office.”
Hawks smiled. “I didn’t come here to chivvy you along or get underfoot. Don’t worry, Lieutenant. I just wanted to know how it looks in general. Is he making enough sense to be of any help to you?”
“Doing fine, sir. His descriptions of things in there don’t agree with anything the other reports gave us — but then nobody seems to see the same things. What counts is that the hazards are always located in the same relative positions. So we know there’s something there, and that’s enough.” The lieutenant, a lean, habitually gloomy man, smiled. “And this is a lot better than trying to make sense out of a few scribbles from a slate. He’s given us a tremendous amount to work with, just in this one trip.” The lieutenant rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s kind of a relief. There was a while there when we were beginning to be pretty sure we’d be eligible for retirement before that thing—” he nodded toward the map — “got itself finished.”