“Can you put in five minutes’ maximum physical effort this afternoon?”
“I’d say so if I couldn’t.”
“All right, then. Five minutes is all you’ll have. Now — this is where you’re going.” He touched the map. “This is the explored part of the far side of the Moon.”
Barker frowned and leaned forward, looking down at the precisely etched hachurelines, the rectangle of territory bounded by lightly sketched areas marked: “No accurate data available.”
“Rough country,” he said. He looked up. “Explored?”
“Topographical survey. The Navy has an outpost located—” he put his finger down on a minute square — “there. Just over the edge of the visible disk at maximum libration. This—” he pointed to a slightly larger ragged circle a quarter inch away — “is where you’re going.”
Barker lifted one eyebrow. “What have the Russians got to say about all this?”
“This entire map,” Hawks said patiently, “encompasses fifty square miles. The naval installation, and the place where you’re going, are contained within an area half a mile square. They’re almost the only unnatural formations at all visible from overhead. The others are the matter receiver beside the naval station and a relay tower near the edge of the visible disk. They’re camouflaged — all but the place you’re going, which can’t be hidden. But the radiophotos from last month’s Russian circumlunar rocket take in an area of at least seven million three hundred thousand square miles of lunar surface alone. Could you see a fly on the side of the Empire State Building’s television tower? Through dirty glasses?”
“If I was up there with it.”
“The Russians are not. We think they have a telemetering robot installation somewhere on the visible Isk, and we expect them to rocket men up to it sometime next year. We haven’t yet found it, but the statistical prediction locates their base about six thousand great circle miles from our installation. I don’t feel we need worry about asking anyone’s permission to go ahead with our program. However that may be, we are there, and this is where you’re going today Now let me tell you how all this happened.”
Barker leaned back in his chair, folded his arms, and arched his eyebrows. “I like your classroom manner,” he murmured. “Have you ever considered a teaching career, Doctor?”
Hawks looked up at him. “I cannot let you die in ignorance,” he finally said. “You’re — you’re free to leave this room at any time and terminate your employment here. Connington delivered your signed releases and contract to the company this morning. If you’ve read your contract, you’ll remember the clause that permits you to cancel.”
“Oh, I’ll stick around, Doctor,” Barker answered lightly.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Barker, you’re not being easy on me at all, are you?”
“You’re not doing so well by me, Doctor.”
Hawks’ right hand stirred the pile of folders, and he looked down at them. “You’re right. Mercy is only a recent human cultural invention.” He said in an overprecise tone, “Let’s get to work. Earlier this year, the Air Force obtained one radioed photograph from a rocket which it attempted to put into a lunar orbit. The rocket came much too close, and crashed somewhere beyond the edge of the visible disk. By fortunate accident, that one photograph showed this.” He took an eight-by-ten glossy print enlargement out of its folder and passed it to Barker. “You can see it’s almost hopelessly washed out and striated by errors in transmission from the rocket’s radiophoto sending apparatus. But this area, of which a part is visible in this corner — here-is clearly not a natural formation.”
Barker frowned at it. “This what you showed me that ground photo of?”
“But that came a great deal later. All this showed was that there was something on the Moon whose extent and nature were not determined by the photograph, but which resembled no lunar or terrestrial feature familiar to human knowledge. We have, since then, measured its extent as best we can, and can say it is roughly a hundred meters in diameter and twenty meters high, with irregularities and amorphous features we cannot accurately describe. We still know very little of its nature — but that’s beside the immediate point. When this feature was discovered, it became important to the government that it be studied. It had been pretty much expected that the far side of the Moon would show nothing startlingly different from the visible disk. Considering the unequal state of Russian and U.S. rocketry, it was now clear that if we did not move rapidly, the Russians had every chance of making a first-class discovery, whose nature we could not guess but whose importance might well be major — perhaps even decisive, as far as control of the Moon was concerned.”
Hawks rubbed his eyes. “As it happened,” he went on softly, “the Navy had some years previously signed a development contract with Continental Electronics, underwriting my work with the matter scanner. By the time of the Moon-photo rocket, the experimental system you see down in the laboratory had been built and, despite its glaring crudities, had reached the point where it would consistently transmit a volunteer from the transmitter into the laboratory receiver without apparent damage. So, at a time when we were thinking of beginning experimental wireless transmission to a receiver in the Sierras, the government instituted a crash program to send volunteers to the Moon.
“A great deal of additional money was expended for equipment and personnel and, after a series of failures and near-misses, the Army rocket team was able to drop a relay tower on this side of the Moon’s disk, near the edge. Then a very sketchy receiver was dropped, rather haphazardly, near this—” he tapped the chart frustratedly — “this formation. And a volunteer technician was broadcast through the relay tower into the receiver, which was barely large enough to hold him. Once there, he was supplied through the receiver. He was able to reach the rocket containing the relay tower, set it firmly on a stable base, and erect a plastic camouflage and meteorite impact-absorption hood over it. Using parts which were transmitted to him, he then built the receiver and return transmitter we are using now. He also erected rudimentary living quarters for himself, and then, apparently, began investigating the unknown formation against orders without waiting for the arrival of the Navy specialists who now crew the outpost.
“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.”
Barker’s mouth hooked briefly. “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 its true purpose might be, or 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, a million years. And we know what it does now: it kills people.”
“Again and again, in unbelievable ways, Doctor?”
“Characteristically and persistently, in unbelievable ways. We need to know every one of them. 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 trained technicians who will 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 chartmaker. It’s my direct responsibility that the formation will, I hope, kill you again and again.”