CHAPTER THREE

The suit lay open on its long adjustable table like a sectioned lobster, trailing disconnected air hoses from its sides, its crenelated joints bulging arthritically because of the embedded electric motors and hydraulic pistons that would move them. Hawks had run leads from a test power supply into the joints; the suit flexed and twitched, scraping its legs ponderously on the table's plastic facing, writhing the tool and pincer clusters at the ends of its arms. One of the Navy men wheeled up a compressed air cylinder and snapped the air hoses to it. At Hawks' nod, the helmet, crested with reinforcing ridges, its faceplate barred by a cross-hatch of steel rods, hissed shrilly through its intakes while the table surface groaned.

"Leave it, Ed," Sam Latourette said. "These men can handle that."

Hawks looked apologetically at the Navy team of dressers, who had all turned their eyes on Latourette. "I know that, Sam."

"Are you going to wear it? Leave it alone!" Latourette burst out. "Nothing ever goes wrong with any of the equipment!"

Hawks said patiently: "I want to do it. The boys, here—" He gestured toward the dressers. "The boys don't mind my playing with their erector set."

"Well, this fellow Barker's down at the gate. I just got a call. Give me his pass and stuff, and I'll go down and get him."

"No, I'll do that, Sam." He stepped back from the table, and nodded toward the dressers. "It's in fine shape. Thank you." He left the laboratory and went up the stairs to the ground floor.

Outside, he walked out along the fog-wet black asphalt driveway toward the gate, which was at first barely visible through the acrid mist. He looked at his wristwatch, and smiled faintly.

"Well, morituri te salutamus, Doctor," Barker said as he stepped through. "We signify your status at the point of our death."

Hawks' face twitched. "I've also read a book," he said softly, and turned away. "Put your badge on and come with me."

Barker took it from the gate guard, who had logged its number, and clipped it to his Basque shirt pocket, falling into step with Hawks.

"Claire didn't want me to come," he said, cocking his head up sideward to glance significantly at Hawks. "She's afraid."

"Of what I might do to you, or of what might happen to her because of it?" Hawks answered, keeping his eyes on the buildings.

"I don't know, Doctor." There was wariness in Barker's tension. "But," he said slowly, his voice hard and sharp, "I'm the only other man that's ever frightened her."

Hawks said nothing. He continued to walk back toward the building, and after a while Barker smiled once again, thinly and crookedly, and also walked with his eyes only on where his feet were taking him. . . .

Hawks unlocked the door of his office and let Barker in ahead of him. He turned on the lights and motioned toward the visitors' chair.

"Please sit down. I have to tell you, now, what this is about—and where you're going."

Barker sat down carelessly. "I'd be grateful, Doctor."

Hawks arched an eyebrow. "Would you?" He sat down and faced Barker across the desk, much as he had faced Rogan. "Now, this is going to be a long story.

"It begins with the fact that we have a matter transmitter—that is, a piece of electronic equipment which produces the effect of moving an object from one location to another at the speed of light." Hawks looked across the desk at Barker.

"And you want to test it on me," Barker said.

"It's been tested hundreds of times. Dozens of men have gone through it with no visible difficulty. It's been in operation for a year. I haven't come anywhere near your part in this, as yet. But there is one thing I particularly want you to remember; like any other piece of electronic hardware, it actually sends nothing but a signal. It is a communications device, not a boxcar. This fact enables us to do more with it than simply send a man from one place to another. Like any other communications device, it transmits information which the receiver converts into a systematic result intelligible to the unaided human senses.

"A radio, for example, does not broadcast voices. It takes the air vibrations from a voice striking its microphone diaphragm, converts these into electronic motion, and transmits the result to a receiver.

Each sound vibration has its analogous burst of electrons, and these bursts—these bits of information—are what the receiver is given to work with. The receiver takes them, and converts them into the motion of a speaker cone. The cone vibrates against the air, and produces sounds, which the listening human ear interprets as human speech. And so a radio is a speech transmitter—or a sound transmitter, rather. But the work is done by the movements of subatomic particles, which neither you nor I can see at work, or trace in their motions.

"A television transmitter does much the same with the gradations of light and shadow that impinge on the lenses of its cameras. The TV receiver takes its information and systematically excites the phosphors of the picture tube. We see a moving picture, and so in a sense a television transmitter is a picture transmitter. But, again, what is actually being transmitted is information.

"There is no physical movement of a voice or an image through an electronic device. In the same way, there is no movement of a man through the apparatus down here.

"The scanners, vectoring on each particle of the atoms that make up the man, detect the motion and arrangement of those particles. This is expressed as data, in the form of electron bursts, which the machine then transmits to a receiver. The receiver takes similar particles from a local supply, and manipulates them into identical arrangements and motions. The process proceeds at the speed of light, over a near-infinite bandwidth. No activity within the human body takes place at that speed. Therefore, the original man is torn down by the scanner and an identical man is built up in the receiver so rapidly that no sensation of dissolution can possibly occur. A man entering the transmitter can have a half-completed thought—that is, a half-completed movement of electrons along a chain of brain cells —and the man in the receiver will complete it. He will complete it without a jar, even though there might have been a transmission lag of moments, or days, or even years, if we transmit from a tape, because for him the process will have been instantaneous. He will be the original man in all respects, with his memories, his personality, his half-exhaled breath of air—except for one thing; not one particle of his body will be the same as the particles in the body that was scanned. That body is gone—torn down and converted into the energy that drives the transmitter. It has to be that way. We can correct perfectly for the impact of the scanning beams themselves on the particles of the original body, but the impact must exist—there has to be resistance for the scanners to feel."

Barker leaned back. "And that's how I die? But it's not real death, as long as I don't feel it and can step out of the receiver. What do I care where my particles come from?"

"That's not how you die. You're quite right—if a man can step out of the receiver and feel himself to be the same man who went into the transmitter, you could say that for all practical purposes no one has died.

"No, that's not how you die. What I've described to you is the experimental system Continental Electronics set up last year, and which was scheduled to begin experimental line-of-sight wireless transmissions to a receiver in the Sierras, some time right about now. Everything was going smoothly, for an experimental project, and we were even beginning to think of setting up a corollary staff to begin theoretical research into exactly what electrons were being manipulated, and how, to reproduce what portion of the scanned object. It was my hope that sometime within my lifetime wc would be able to manipulate individual electrons without the use of billion-dollar equipment covering several city blocks.

"All that is temporarily gone by the board. We're on a crash footing, here, and the thing we're after is practical results, nothing else. And that happened because of this."

He reached into a desk drawer, took out a map, unfolded it, and laid it down on the desk, facing Barker. "This is a map of approximately fifty square miles of the surface on the other side of the Moon."

Barker whistled softly between his teeth. He leaned forward. "Rough country," he said, looking at the painstakingly drawn hachure marks. "How'd you get this?"

"Topographical survey." Hawks touched a black-lined square on the map. "That's a Navy base. And this"—he touched an irregularly-shaped black area near the square—"is where you're going."

Barker frowned at it. "This what you showed me that ground photo of?"

"But that came a good deal later. Very early this year, the Air Force obtained one radioed photograph from a rocket it attempted to put into a Lunar orbit. The attempt failed, and the rocket crashed, somewhere beyond the edge of the visible disk. But that one photograph showed this."

He took a glossy enlargement out of its folder and passed it to Barker. "You can see how bad its quality is: almost hopelessly washed out and striated by errors in transmission from the rocket's radiophoto transmitter. But this area, of which a part is visible in this corner, is clearly not a natural formation."

Barker raised his eyebrows. "Whose?"

"No one's. No one's on Earth. We know that, and nothing more about its origin." He looked across the desk. "I'm deadly serious, Barker. So was the government. With rocketry in its present state, there was no apparent hope of investigating that formation before the Russians did. There was therefore every expectation that the Russians would be able to make a first-class scientific discovery— almost certainly one that would tip the balance decisively; possibly one which might involve the entire world in traffic with extraterrestrial beings. It was vitally necessary that we somehow get there first; find out what that thing was, who put it there, and why."

"So you went on a crash basis."

"Precisely. After repeated attempts, the Army managed to drop a relay tower on the edge of the visible disk, and a rudimentary receiver, fairly near the unknown formation. A man was sent through to set up another receiver which would accommodate construction and exploration equipment; the Moon project began."

"And what did it find out?"

"About the formation? It found out it kills people."

"In unbelievable ways, Doctor? Over and over?"

"Characteristically and persistenyly, in ways beyond the comprehension of human senses. I'm the one who kills them over and over."

Barker and Hawks looked at each other. Finally, Barker smiled. Hawks frowned, and said:

"The Lunar formation has been measured, it is roughly a hundred meters in diameter and twenty meters high, with irregularities and amorphous features we cannot accurately describe. We know almost nothing of its nature. But the first man to investigate it—the man who first went up through the small receiver—went into it against orders while waiting for the Navy crew to come up. 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."

"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 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, half a million years.

"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 technicians trained to 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 chart-maker.

"It's my direct responsibility that you are now that man; it's my direct responsibility that the formation will, I hope, kill you again and again."

"Well, that's 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. He picked up another folder and thrust it into Barker's hands.

"Look those over. There is 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 described in more precise terms, and it cannot 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. We know the following things about its interior:

"A man inside it can be seen, very dimly, if we know where to look. He cannot see out as far as we know—no one knows what he sees; no one has ever come back out of it. Non-living matter, such as a photograph or a corpse, can be passed out from inside. But the act of doing so is invariably fatal to the man doing it. That photo of the first volunteer's body cost another man's life.

"Any attempt to retrace one's steps within the formation is fatal. The formation also does not permit electrical signals from its interior. You will not be able to maintain communication, either by broadcast or along a cable, with the observers in the outpost. You will be able to make very limited hand signals, and written notes on a tablet tied to a cord, which the observer team will attempt to draw back after the formation has 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 arm motions required to write the English word 'yes,' either with the left or right hand.

"We don't know why. We only know what a man can and cannot do while within the formation. Thus far, we have charted a safe path and safe motions to a distance of some twelve meters. The survival time for a man within the formation is now three minutes, fifty-two seconds. And that is almost all we know. We've been going at this thing for months—and it's too slow. It's too wasteful. Our equipment is crude. Our experience is nil. And our time is running out. The recent Russian circumlunar rocket couldn't possibly have shown them anything. The base is camouflaged. In any case, their photographs cover an area of over seven million square miles. The entire Navy installation, and the formation, are contained within an area of about one square mile. But their next show may be in a lower orbit.

Or they may put an expedition up there-they already have a telemetering robot installation somewhere on the visible disk. There's no telling what might happen if they found out we were there, and what we're doing. It's got to be finished—and we have to hope we will find something that will give us a decisive edge in a very short period of time.

"And so I'm hoping you'll work out better than the other men we've sent into the formation."

Barker grinned coldly. "You mean, I might last a few seconds longer than the average man? And that would be a significant gain?"

"No, Barker," Hawks said tiredly. "No—we developed a system. There is no reason why we cannot transmit your signal into two receivers, one on the Moon and one here in the laboratory. That way, we have two Barkers; call them Barker M and Barker L, for convenience. Barker M goes into the formation, does what he can, and dies. Barker L remains in the laboratory, and lives, and furnishes us with two new Barkers the next day."

Barker whistled softly, again. "Foolproof."

"Foolproof, and too slow. We gain very little by it—Barker M might prove a little tougher than the average volunteer. I doubt it. They've been very good men. But in any case, all we'd get from him would be the same driblets of information we've gotten before. That's not enough. No, we modified that system some time ago.

"You see, we found out something. We found that the M and L volunteers showed signs of confusion when they emerged from their respective receivers. For a short time—a moment—the L volunteer behaved as though he were on the Moon, and vice versa."

Barker's eyes widened. "You're kidding—"

"No. Apparently, since so many of the environmental conditions were the same—the two men were both in their units, remember— and since they had identical brains with identical thought chains— we had stumbled on a limited, almost useless form of"—Hawks' mouth twitched distastefully—"telepathy.

"We worked with it. We began introducing a high order of similarity into the M and L environments, and then we arranged the suits so that the L volunteer's sensory receptors would furnish his brain with no data. We stopped up his eyes and ears. We deadened his skin. We partially narcotized him. As we hoped, his brain began hunting for data, as any brain will if it stops getting continuous proof that it is alive. It had only one place to find that data—in the sensory impressions that were registering on the M brain.

"The contact fades, of course. Soon enough, despite anything we can do, the L brain begins to record a trickle of stimuli which come from its own body, and the contact fades sharply. But we can maintain it for nearly twelve minutes, which is more than enough.

"So," Hawks finished, "now we have a means of instantaneous, complete communication with the M volunteer. The L volunteer's brain records everything he feels, everything he sees, everything he thinks. And the information remains there, after the M volunteer dies, and could be extracted by interviewing the L volunteer.

"There is only one drawback. When the M volunteer dies, the L volunteer shares his feelings." Hawks looked steadily at Barker. "Ro-gan. And others before him. They go insane, and the information is lost. So that's your special qualification, Barker. No man can stand to die. But we're hoping you won't go mad when you feel it. We're hoping you'll enjoy it. Over and over again."

Barker straightened his shoulders into perfect symmetry, threw the folded windbreaker half across his back, and stepped past Hawks into the laboratory. He walked out a few feet into the main aisle between the cabinets holding the voltage regulator series and put his hands in his pockets, stopping to look around. Hawks stopped with him.

All the work lights were on. Barker turned his body slowly from the hips, studying the galleries of signal-modulating equipment, and watching the staff assistants running off component checks.

"Busy," he said, looking at the white-coated men, who were consulting check-off sheets on their clipboards, setting switches, cutting in signal generators from the service racks above each gallery, switching off, re-setting, re-testing. His glance fell on the nearest of a linked array of differential amplifier racks on the laboratory floor. "Lots of wiring. I like that. Marvels of science. That sort of thing."

"It's part of a man."

"Oh?" Barker lifted one eyebrow. His eyes were dancing mockingly. "Plugs and wires and little ceramic widgets," he challenged.

Hawks said: "That entire bank of amplifiers is set up to contain an exact electronic description of a man. His physical structure, down to the last moving particle of the last atom in the last molecule in the last cell at the end of his little toe's nail. It knows, thereby, a good deal more than we can learn—his nervous reaction time and volume, the range and nature of his reflexes, the electrical capacity of each cell in his brain. It knows everything it needs to know so it can tell another machine how to build that man.

"It happens to be a man named Sam Latourette, but it could be anyone. It's our standard man. When the matter transmitter's scanner converts you into a series of similar electron flows, the information goes on a tape, to be filed. It also goes in here, so we can read out the differences between you and the standard. That gives us a crosscheck when we need accurate signal definition. That's what we're going to do today. Take our initial scan, so we can have a control tape and a differential reading to use when we transmit tomorrow."

Barker smiled. "Ain't science great?"

Hawks looked at him woodenly. "We're not conducting any manhood contests here, Barker. We're working at a job. It's not necessary to keep your guard up."

"Would you know a contest if you saw one, Doctor?"

Sam Latourette, who had come up behind Barker, growled: "Shut up, Barker!"

Barker turned casually. "Jesus, fellow,  didn't eat your baby."

"It's all right, Sam," Hawks said patiently. "Al Barker, this is Sam Latourette. Doctor Samuel Latourette."

"I've been looking over the file Personnel sent down on you, Barker," Latourette said. "1 wanted to see what your chances were of being any use to us here. And I just want you to remember one thing." Latourette had lowered his head until his neck was almost buried between his massive shoulders, and his face was broadened by parallel rows of yellowish flesh that sprang into thick furrows down the sides of his jaw. "When you talk to Doctor Hawks, you're talking to the only man in the world who could have built this." His pawing gesture took in the galleries, the catwalks, the amplifier bank, the transmitter hulking at the far wall. "You're talking to a man who's as far removed from muddleheadedness—from what you and I think of as normal human error—as you are from a chimp. You're not fit to judge his work, or make smart cracks about it. Your little personality twists aren't fit for his concern. You've been hired to do a job here, just like the rest of us. If you can't do it without making more trouble for him than you're worth, get out—don't add to his burden. He's got enough on his mind already." Latourette flashed a deep-eyed look at Hawks. "More than enough." His forearms dangled loosely and warily. "Got it straight, now?"

Barker's expression was attentive and dispassionate as he looked at Latourette. His weight had shifted almost entirely away from his artificial leg, but there was no other sign of tension in him. He was deathly calm.

"Sam," Hawks said, "I want you to supervise the tests on the lab receiver. It needs doing now. Then I need a check on the telemeter data from the relay tower and the Moon receiver. Let me know as soon as you've done that."

Barker watched Latourette turn and stride soundlessly away down along the amplifier banks toward the receiving stage, where a group of technicians was fluoroscoping a series of test objects being transmitted to it by another team.

"Come with me, please," Hawks said to Barker and walked slowly toward the table where the suit lay.

"So they talk about you like that around here," Barker said, still turning his head from side to side as they walked. "No wonder you get impatient when you're outside dealing with the big world."

"Barker, it's important that you concern yourself only with what you're here to do. It's removed from all human experience, and if we're all to go through it successfully, we must try to keep personalities out of it."

"How about your boy, over there? Latourette?"

"Sam's a very good man," Hawks said slowly.

"And that's his excuse."

"It's his reason for being here. Ordinarily, he'd be in a sanatorium under sedation for his pain. He has an inoperable cancer. He will be dead next year."

They had passed the low wall of linked gray steel cabinets. Barker's head jerked back around. "Oh," he said. "That's why he's the standard man in there. Nothing eating at the flesh. Eternal life."

"No usual man wants to die," Hawks said, touching Barker's shoulder and moving him gently toward the suit. The men of the Navy crew were darting covert glances at Barker only after looking around to see if any of their team mates were watching them at that particular instant. "Otherwise, the world would be swept by suicides."

Hawks pointed to the suit. "Now, this is the best we can do for you in the way of protection. You get into it here, on the table, and you'll be wheeled into the transmitter. You'll be beamed up to the Moon receiver in it—once there, you'll find it comfortable and easily maneuverable. You have power assists activated by the various pressures your body puts on them. The suit will comply to all your movements. I'm told it feels like swimming. You have a selection of all the tools we know you'll need, and a number of others we think might be called for. That's something you'll have to tell us afterward, if you can. Now I'd like you to get into it, so the ensign and his men, here, can check you."

The naval officer in charge of the specialist crew stepped forward. "Excuse me, Doctor," he said. "I understand the volunteer has an artificial limb." He turned to Barker. "If you'll please remove your trousers, sir?"

Hawks smiled uncomfortably. "I'll hold your jacket," he said to Barker.

Barker looked around. Beads of cold moisture appeared on his forehead. His eyes were suddenly much whiter than the flesh around them. He handed the windbreaker to Hawks without turning his face toward him. He opened his belt and stepped out of the slacks. He stood with them clutched in his hands, looked at Hawks, then rolled them up quickly and put them down on the edge of the table.

"Now, if you'll just lie down in the suit, sir, we'll see what needs adjusting." The ensign gestured to his team, and they closed in around Barker, lifting him up and putting him down on his back inside the opened suit. Barker lay rigid, staring up, and the ensign said: "Move yourself around, please—we want to make sure your muscles make firm contacts with all the servomotor pressure plates."

Barker began stiffly moving his body.

The ensign said: "Yes, I thought so. The artificial limb will have to be built up in the region of the calf, and on the knee joint. Fidanzato—" He gestured to one of his men. "Measure those clearances and then get down to the machine shop. I want some shim plates on there. I'm sorry, sir," he said to Barker, "but you'll have to let my man take the leg with him. It won't take long. You can just lie there comfortably meanwhile. Sampson—help this man off with his shirt so you can get at the shoulder strap."

Barker jerked his arms up out of the suit, grasped the edges of the torso backplate, and pulled himself up to a sitting position. "I'll take my own shirt off, Sonny." His eyes were whiter. A flash of pain crossed Hawks' face as he looked at him.

Fidanzato walked away with Barker's leg. Hawks said: "Excuse me," quickly, and crossed the laboratory floor to where Sam Latourette was working. "Sam. How's it going?" he asked gently.

"Fine," Latourette said over his shoulder. "Just fine."

Hawks caught his lower lip between his teeth. "Sam, you know, he's putting a lot into this, too. It may not look like it to most people, but he's a complicated—"

"Everybody's complicated. I'm complicated. You're complicated. Everybody bleeds inside for some reason. What counts is the reason. I don't think his is any good at all. He's wild and unpredictable." Latourette pawed clumsily at the air, red-faced. "Ed, you can't use Barker! You can't afford it. It won't work—it'll be too much! My God, you've known him one day and you're already involved with him!"

Hawks stood still, his eyes shut. "Don't you think he'll work out, Sam?"

"Listen, if he has to be put up with day after day, it'll get worse all the time!"

"So you do think he'll work out." Hawks opened his eyes at Latourette. "You're afraid he'll work out."

Latourette looked frightened. "Ed, he doesn't have sense enough not to poke at every sore spot he finds in you. It'll get worse, and worse, and the longer he lasts, the worse it'll be!"

"But what has it got to do with the work?" After a moment, he sent Latourette back to the transmitter, and walked across the laboratory toward Barker.

When Barker's leg came back, Hawks stood watching it being refitted. Bulges of freshly ground aluminum were bolted to the flesh-colored material. Then he was put in with the first of his undersuits.

Barker sat on the edge of the dressing table, smoothing the porous silk over his skin, with talcum powder showing white at his wristlets and around the turtle neck. The undersuit was bright orange.

"I look like a circus acrobat."

Hawks looked at his wristwatch. "We'll be ready to scan in about twenty minutes. I want to be with the transmitter crew in five. Pay attention to what I'm going to tell you."

"Is there more?"

"There are details. I've told you all there is to the program. You're an intelligent human being and perhaps you'll be able to think out the details for yourself. Some or all of them," Hawks said. "Nevertheless," he went on after a moment, "I want to remind you. This is the first scan. We have no control tape on you—that's why we're taking this scan now. So the fidelity of the transmission depends entirely on how good our basic hardware is—on how little static is permitted to appear as noise in the speaker cone, if you want a simple analogy. Even after we have a file tape, we have to introduce a statistical correction in each transmission, to account for the time lapse between the making of the tape and the time of the transmission.

"But this first time, you're trusting entirely to our skill as engineers. There won't be any gross errors. But there may be errors our equipment is too crude to correct or control—naturally, we can't know that.

"You have to realize—we don't know why the scanner works. We have no theory in this field. We only know how it works, and that may not be enough.

"Once the scan is in progress, we can't correct any errors. The equipment is in motion, and we can only make sure it keeps moving. We're blind. We don't know which bit of the signal describes which bit of the man, any more than Thomas Edison knew which bit of scratch on his first recording cylinder contained which precise bit of 'Mary Had A Little Lamb.' We never know."

Barker said patiently: "Would you please make your point, Doctor? I know this is a crash program, and we're all in a hurry."

"A man is a phoenix, Barker," Hawks persisted. "He has to be reborn from his own ashes, for there isn't another being like him in the Universe. If the wind stirs the ashes into a parody, there is nothing we can do about it."

Barker said: "So what does it all add up to—am I taking a chance on coming out so hashed-up I'd be a monster who needed killing?"

Hawks shook his head quickly. "Oh, no, no—I told you; there won't be any gross errors. This is a simple business—transmitting along a cable to the receiver here. You may not be able to remember whether your first schoolbooks were covered in red or blue. Or you may remember incorrectly. And who could check it?"

"And that's all? For Pete's sake, Doctor, so what?"

Hawks shrugged uncomfortably. "I don't know. I suppose it all depends on how much of yourself you feel can be lost without your dying as an individual. But, remember—the equipment doesn't know, or care, and we at least don't know."

Barker smiled up viciously. "Just so long as you care, Doctor."

Hawks came up to the transmitter, where Sam Latourette was waiting for him.

"All set, Ed," Latourette said. "Anytime," he said with a bitter look toward Barker.

Hawks took a deep breath. "Sam, I want to talk to you for a minute." He walked toward a quiet corner of the laboratory, and Latourette followed.

"What's the trouble, Ed?"

"Sam, do you want me to put Ted Gersten in charge of the project right now?"

Latourette turned pale. "Why? What for? Don't you think I can handle it?" He blushed suddenly. In an embarrassed mumble, he said: "Look, it bothers me, but not that much. I've got a few more months left before I have to . . . you know, go to the hospital. I mean, sure, I have to take a lot of aspirin these days, but it's not bad."

Hawks grimaced. "Sam, I need him more than I do you." He turned away suddenly, and stared at the wall. "Either leave him and me alone, or I've got to take you off this project. All it would take would be one slip—one dial setting wrong, one calculation off by a decimal place, and I wouldn't have him any longer. Do you understand what I'm saying, Sam? Unless you can put yourself in a state of mind where you won't be liable to make that mistake—unless you can calm down, and leave us alone—I can't risk it. All right, Sam? Do you understand?"

"Ed. . . God damn it, Ed . . ."

Hawks turned around. "Let's get things rolling, Sam." He walked toward the transmitter. He looked more like a scarecrow than ever.

"We're going to wheel you in now, Barker," Hawks said into his chest microphone.

"Roger, Doctor," came from the p.a. speaker mounted over the transmitter's portal.

"When you're in, we'll switch on the chamber electromagnets. You'll be held in mid-air, and we'll pull the table out. You won't be able to move, and don't try—you'll burn out the suit motors. You'll feel yourself jump a few inches into the air, and your suit will spread-eagle rigidly. That's the magnetic field. You'll feel another jolt when we close the chamber door and the fore-and-aft magnets take hold."

"I read you loud and clear."

"We're simulating conditions for a Moon shot. I want you to be familiar with them. So we'll turn out the chamber lights. And there will be a trace component of formalin in your air, to deaden your olfactory receptors."

"Uh-huh."

"Next, we'll throw the scanning process into operation. There is a thirty second delay on that switch on the scanner; that same impulse will first activate certain automatic functions of the suit. We're doing our best to eliminate human error, as you can see."

"I dig."

"A general anesthetic will be introduced into your air circulation. It will dull your nervous system without quite making you lose consciousness. It will numb your skin temperature-and-pressure receptors entirely. It will cycle out after you resolve in the receiver. All traces of anesthesia will be gone five minutes after you resolve."

"Got you."

"All right. Finally I'm going to switch off my microphone. Unless there's an emergency, I won't switch it on again. And from this point on, the microphone switch controls the two servoactivated ear plugs in your helmet. You'll feel the plugs nudging your ears; I want you to move your head as much as necessary to allow them to seat firmly. They won't injure you, and they'll retract the instant I have any emergency instructions to give you, if any. Your microphone will remain on, and we'll be able to hear you if you need any help, but you won't be able to hear yourself.

"You'll find that with your senses deadened or shut off, you'll soon begin to doubt you're alive. You'll have no way of proving to yourself that you're exposed to any external stimuli. You will begin to wonder if you have a mind at all. If this condition were to persist long enough, you would go into an uncontrollable panic. The required length of time varies from person to person. If yours exceeds the few minutes you'll be in the suit today, that'll be long enough. If it's less, we'll hear you shouting, and I'll begin talking to you."

"That'll be a great comfort."

"It will."

"Anything else, Doctor?"

"No." He motioned to the Navy crew, and they began rolling the table into the chamber.

Hawks looked around. Latourette was at the transmitter control console. Then his glance swept undeviatingly over Weston, who was leaning back against an amplifier cabinet, his arms and ankles crossed, and over Holiday, the physician, standing tensely pot-bellied at the medical remote console.

The green bulb was still lighted over the transmitter portal, but the chamber door was dogged shut, trailing the cable that fed power to its share of the scanner components. The receiver chamber was sealed. The hiss of Barker's breath, calm but picking up speed, came from the speaker.

"Sam, give me test power," Hawks said. Latourette punched a console button, and Hawks glanced at the technicians clustered around the input of the amplifier bank. A fresh spool of tape lay in the output deck, its end threaded through the brake rollers and recording head to the empty takeup reel. Petwill, the engineer borrowed from Electronic Associates, nodded to Hawks.

"Sam, give me operating power," Hawks said. "Shoot." The lights over the transmitter and receiver portals leaped from the green bulbs into the red. Barker's breath sighed into near silence.

Hawks watched the clock mounted in the transmitter's face. Thirty seconds after he had called for power, the multi-channel tape began to whine through the recording head, its reels blurred and roaring. A brown disk began to grow around the takeup spindle with fascinating speed. The green bulb over the receiver portal burst into life. The green bulb came back on over the transmitter.

The brakes locked on the tape deck. The takeup reel was three-quarters filled. Barker's shallow breath came through the speaker.

Hawks said, "Doctor Holiday, anytime you're ready to ease up on the anesthesia. . . ."

Holiday nodded. He cranked the reduction-geared control wheel remote-linked to the tank of anesthetic gas in Barker's armor.

Barker's breathing grew stronger. It was still edging up toward panic, but he had not yet begun to mumble into his microphone.

"How does it sound to you, Weston?" Hawks asked.

The psychologist listened reflectively. "He's doing pretty well. And it sounds like panic breathing; no pain."

Hawks shifted his glance. "What about that, Doctor Holiday?"

The little man nodded. "Let's hear how he does with a little less gas." He put his hands back on the controls.

Hawks thumbed his microphone switch. "Barker," he said gently.

The breathing in the speaker became stronger and calmer.

"Barker."

"Yes, Doctor," Barker's irritated voice said. "What's your trouble?"

"Doctor Hawks," Holiday said from the console, "he's down to zero anesthesia now."

Hawks nodded. "Barker, you're in the receiver. You'll be fully conscious almost immediately. Do you feel any pain?"

"No!" Barker snapped. "Are you all through playing games?"

"I'm turning the receiver chamber lights on now. Can you see them?"

"Yes!"

"Can you feel all of your body?"

"Fine, Doctor. Can you feel all of yours?"

"All right, Barker. We're going to take you out, now."

The Navy crew began pushing the table toward the receiver as Latourette cut the fore-and-aft magnets and technicians began un-dogging the chamber door. Weston and Holiday moved forward to begin examining Barker as soon as he was free of the suit.

Hawks walked to the control console. "All right, Sam," he said as he saw the table slip under Barker's armor. "You can slack down on the primary magnets."

"You figure he's all right?" Latourette asked in a neutral voice.

"I'll let Weston and Holiday tell me about that. He certainly sounded as if he's as functional as ever." He essayed a Utile chuckle.

"Okay," Latourette said.

Hawks began again, gently: "Come on, Sam—let's go for a walk. We'll have Weston's and Holiday's preliminary reports in a minute. The boys can start setting up for tomorrow's shot."

"I'll start setting up for tomorrow's shot," Latourette growled.

Hawks sighed. "All right, Sam," he said and walked away.