“He’s an Immigrant. Aren’t you going to test it?”
“No! I told you your suggestions were impractical. You’re not an experimentalist, and what looks good in your mind doesn’t necessarily work in the real world of instruments, of randomness, and of uncertainty.”
“The so-called real world of your laboratory.” Her face was flushed and angry and she held her clenched fists at chin-level. “You waste so much time trying to get a vacuum good enough—There’s a vacuum up there, up there on the surface where I’m pointing, with temperatures that, at times, are halfway down toward absolute zero. Why don’t you try experiments on the surface?”
“It would have been useless.”
“How do you know? You just won’t try. Ben Denison tried. He took the trouble to devise a system he could use on the surface and he set it up when he went to inspect the Solar batteries. He wanted you to come and you wouldn’t. Do you remember? It was a very simple thing, something even I could describe to you now that it’s been described to me. He ran it at day-temperatures and again at night-temperatures and that was enough to guide him to a new line of research with the Pionizer.”
“How simple you make it sound.”
“How simple it is. Once he found out I was an Intuitionist, he talked to me as you never did. He explained his reasons for thinking that the strengthening of the strong nuclear interaction is indeed accumulating catastrophically in the neighborhood of Earth. It will only be a few years before the Sun explodes and sends the strengthening, in ripples—”
“No, no, no, no,” shouted Neville. “I’ve seen his results and I’m not impressed.”
“You’ve seen them?”
“Yes, of course. Do you suppose I let him work in our laboratories without making sure I know what he’s doing? I’ve seen his results and they’re worth nothing. He deals with tiny deviations that are well within the experimental error. If he wants to believe that those deviations have significance and if you want to believe them, go ahead. But no amount of belief will make them have that significance if, in fact, they don’t.”
“What do you want to believe, Barron?”
“I want the truth.”
“But haven’t you decided in advance what the truth must be by your own gospel? You want the Pump Station of the Moon, don’t you, so that you need have nothing to do with the surface; and anything that might prevent that is not the truth—by definition.”
“I won’t argue with you. I want the Pump Station, and even more—I want the other. One’s no good without the other. Are you sure you haven’t—”
“I haven’t.”
“Will you?”
Selene whirled on him again, her feet tapping rapidly on the ground in such a way as to keep her bobbing in the air to the tune of an angry clatter.
“I won’t tell him anything,” she said, “but I must have more information. You have no information for me, but he may have; or he may get it with the experiments you won’t do. I’ve got to talk to him and find out what he is going to find out. If you get between him and me, you’ll never have what you want. And you needn’t fear his getting it before I do. He’s too used to Earth thinking; he won’t make that last step. I will.”
“All right. And don’t forget the difference between Earth and Moon, either. This is your world; you have no other. This man, Denison, this Ben, this Immigrant, having come from Earth to the Moon, can, if he chooses, return from Moon to Earth. You can never go to the Earth; never. You are a Lunarite forever.”
“A Moon-maiden,” said Selene, derisively.
“No maiden,” said Neville. “Though you may have to wait a long while before I confirm the matter once again.”
She seemed unmoved at that.
He said, “And about this big danger of explosion. If the risk involved in changing the basic constants of a Universe is so great, why haven’t the para-men, who are so far advanced beyond us in technology, stopped Pumping?”
And he left.
She faced the closed door with bunched jaw muscles. Then she said, “Because conditions are different for them and for us, you incredible jerk.” But she was speaking to herself; he was gone.
She kicked the lever that let down her bed, threw herself into it and seethed. How much closer was she now to the real object for which Barren and those others had now been aiming for years?
No closer.
Energy! Everyone searched for energy! The magic word! The cornucopia! The one key to universal plenty! ... And yet energy wasn’t all.
If one found energy, one could find the other, too. If one found the key to energy, the key to the other would be obvious. She knew the key to the other would be obvious if she could but grasp some subtle point that would appear obvious the moment it was grasped. (Good heavens, she had been so infected by Barren’s chronic suspicion that even in her thoughts she was calling it “the other.”)
No Earthman would get that subtle point because no Earthman had reason to look for it.
Ben Denison would find it for her, then, without finding it for himself.
Except that— If the Universe was to be destroyed, what did anything matter?
12
Denison tried to beat down his self-consciousness. Time and again, he made a groping motion as though to hitch upward the pants he wasn’t wearing. He wore only sandals and the barest of briefs, which were uncomfortably tight. And, of course, he carried the blanket.
Selene, who was similarly accoutered, laughed. “Now, Ben, there’s nothing wrong with your bare body, barring a certain flabbiness. It’s perfectly in fashion here. In fact, take off your briefs if they’re binding you.”
“No!” muttered Denison. He shifted the blanket so that it draped over his abdomen and she snatched it from him.
She said, “Now give me that thing. What kind of a Lunarite will you make if you bring your Earth puritanism here? You know that prudery is only the other side of prurience. The words are even on the same page in the dictionary.”
“I have to get used to it, Selene.”
“You might start by looking at me once in awhile, without having your glance slide off me as though I were coated with oil. You look at other women quite efficiently, I notice.”
“If I look at you—”
“Then you’ll seem too interested and you’ll be embarrassed. But if you look hard, you’ll get used to it, and you’ll stop noticing. Look, I’ll stand still and you stare. I’ll take off my briefs.”
Denison groaned, “Selene, there are people all around and you’re making intolerable fun of me. Please keep walking and let me get used to the situation.”
“All right, but I hope you notice the people who pass us don’t look at us.”
“They don’t look at you. They look at me all right. They’ve probably never seen so old-looking and ill-shaped a person.”
“They probably haven’t,” agreed Selene, cheerfully, “but they’ll just have to get used to it.”
Denison walked on in misery, conscious of every gray hair on his chest and of every quiver of his paunch. It was only when the passageway thinned out and the people passing them were fewer in number that he began to feel a certain relief.
He looked about him curiously now, not as aware of Selene’s conical breasts as he had been, nor of her smooth thighs. The corridor seemed endless.
“How far have we come?” he asked.
“Are you tired?” Selene was contrite. “We could have taken a scooter. I forget you’re from Earth.”