Their elapsed time inside the formation was nine minutes, nineteen seconds. Barker stopped again, his feet and pincers hooked in the network, hanging motionless, looking back over his shoulder as Hawks came up. Barker’s eyes were desperate. He was breathing in gasps, his mouth working. Hawks clambered to a stop beside him.
The net of fractures began to break into dagger-pointed shards, falling away, leaving great rotten gaps through which swirled clouds of steel-gray, smoky particles which formed knife-sharp layers and hung in the great open space above the footing to which Hawks and Barker clung, and whose fringes whirled up and across to interlock the layers into a grid of stony, cleavage-planed crosshatchings which advanced toward them.
Barker suddenly closed his eyes, shook his head violently in its casque, blinked, and, with a tearful grimace, began to climb up the net, holding his left arm pressed against his side, clutching above him for a new handhold with his right as soon as his weight was off each toehold which his left foot discarded.
When Hawks and Barker emerged at the rim of the net, beside the drifted armor which lay under its crust of broken dagger-points, their elapsed time inside the formation was nine minutes, forty-two seconds. Barker faced the observing team through the wall, and stepped out onto the open Moon. Hawks followed him. They stood looking at each other through their faceplates, the formation directly behind them.
Barker looked at it. “It doesn’t look as if it knows what we’ve done,” he said over the radiotelephone circuit.
Hawks cast a glance behind him. “Did you expect it to?” he shrugged. He turned to the men of the observer team who were standing, waiting, in their moonsuits, their faces patient behind the transparent plastic bubbles of their helmets.
“Did you gentlemen see anything new happen while we were in there?”
The oldest man on the team, a gray-faced, drawn individual whose steel-rimmed spectacles were fastened to an elastic headband, shook his head. “No.” His voice came distorted through his throat microphone. “The formation shows no outward sign of discriminating between one individual and another, or of reacting in any special way to the presence of more than one individual. That is, I suppose, assuming all its internal strictures are adhered to.”
Hawks nodded. “That was my impression, too.” He turned toward Barker. “That very likely means we can now begin sending technical teams into it. I think you’ve done your job, Al. I really think you have. Well, let’s come along with these gentlemen, here, for a while. We might as well give them our verbal reports, just in case Hawks and Barker L had lost contact with us before we came out.” He began to walk along the footpath toward the observation bunker, and the others fell in behind him.
4
Gersten knelt down and bent over the opened faceplate. “Are you all right, Hawks?” he asked.
Hawks L looked muzzily up at him. There was a trickle of blood running out of the corner of his mouth. He licked at it, running his tongue over the bitten places in his lower lip. “Must have been more frightened than I thought, after M drifted away from me and I realized I was in the suit.” He rolled his head from side to side, lying on the laboratory floor. “Barker all right?”
“They’re getting him out of the receiver now. He seems to be in good shape. Did you make it, all right?”
Hawks L nodded. “Oh, yes, that went well. The last I felt of M, he was giving the observation team a verbal report.” He blinked to clear his eyes. “That’s quite a place, up there. Listen — Gersten—” He looked up, his face wrinkled into an expression of distaste as he looked at the man. When he was a boy, and suffering from a series of heavy colds, his father had tried to cure them by giving him scalding baths and then wrapping him in wet sheets, drawing each layer tight as he wound it around Eddie Hawks’ body and over his arms, leaving the boy, in this manner, pinned in overnight. “I — I hate to ask this,” he said, not realizing that his face was turned directly up at Gersten, “but do you suppose the crew could get me out of my suit before they do Barker?”
Gersten, who had at first been watching Hawks with interest and concern, had by now become completely frigid and offended. “Of course,” he said and stalked away, leaving Hawks L alone on the floor, like a child in the night. He lay that way for several moments before one of the technicians who stood in a ring around him realized he might want company and knelt down beside him, in range of the restricted field of vision through the faceplate opening.
5
Hawks M watched the chief observer close his notebook. “I think that does it, then,” he said to the man. Barker, who was sitting beside him at the steel table, nodded hesitantly.
“I didn’t see any lake of fire,” he said to Hawks.
Hawks shrugged. “I didn’t see any jagged green glass archway in its place.” He stood up and said to the observer team, “If you gentlemen would please refasten our faceplates for us, we’ll be on our way.”
The observers nodded and stepped forward. When they were done they turned and left the room through the airtight hatch to the bunker’s interior, so that Hawks and Barker were left alone to use the exterior airlock. Hawks motioned impatiently as the demand valve in his helmet began to draw air from his tanks again, its sigh filling his helmet. “Come along, Al,” he said. “We don’t have much time.”
Barker said bitterly as they cycled through the lock, “It sure is good to have people make a fuss over you and slap you on the back when you’ve done something.”
Hawks shook his head. “These people, here, have no concern with us as individuals. Perhaps they should have had, today, but the habit would have been a bad one to break. Don’t forget, Al — to them, you’ve never been anything but a shadow in the night. Only the latest of many shadows. And other men will come up here to die. There’ll be times when the technicians slip up. There may be some reason why even you or perhaps even I, will have to return here. These men in this bunker will watch, will record what they see, will do their best to help pry information out of this thing—” He gestured toward the obsidian hulk, toppling perpetually, perpetually re-erecting itself, shifting in place, looming over the bunker, now reflecting the light of the stars, now dead black and lusterless. “This enormous puzzle. But you and I, Al, are only a species of tool, to them. It has to be that way. They have to live here until one day when the last technician takes the last piece of this thing apart. And then, when that happens, these people in this bunker will have to face something they’ve been trying not to think about all this time.”
Hawks and Barker moved along the footpath.
“You know, Hawks,” Barker said uncomfortably, “I almost didn’t want to come out.”
“I know.”
Barker gestured indecisively. “It was the damnedest thing. I almost led us into the trap that caught me last time. And then I almost just stayed put and waited for it to get us. Hawks, I just — I don’t know. I didn’t want to come out. I had the feeling I was going to lose something. What, I don’t know. But I stood there, and suddenly I knew there was something precious that was going to be lost if I came back out onto the Moon.”
Hawks, walking steadily beside Barker, turned his head to look at him for the first time since they had left the bunker. “And did’ you lose it?”
“I — I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it for a long time, I think. I feel different. I can tell that much.” Barker’s voice grew animated. “I do.”
“Is this the first time you’ve ever done somettung no other man has done before? Done it successfully, I mean?”