The Two Timers

VII

Jake Larmour stared wearily through the curved viewscreen of his crawler at the flat, monotonous surface of the Moon. He kept the vehicle’s motors running at maximum revolutions, but the western rim of the Sea of Tranquility, towards which he had been driving for the past two hours, seemed as far away as ever. At intervals he yawned widely, and between times whistled a thin, sad tune. Jake Larmour was bored.

Back in Pine Ridge, Wisconsin, the idea of being a radar maintenance man on the Moon had seemed glamorous and exciting. Now, after three months of patrolling the line towers, he had reached the stage of crossing off the days on a calendar hand-drawn for that express purpose. He had known in advance that the Moon was dead, but what he had not anticipated was the way in which his own spirit would quail in the face of such complete and utter absence of life.

If only, he thought for the thousandth time on that trip, if only something would move out there.

He was leaning back in an extravagant yawn, arms stretching as far as was possible in the crawler’s cockpit, when something flickered and vanished on the surface of the crater bed about a hundred yards ahead of him. Larmour instinctively hit the brake and the vehicle whined to a stop. He sat upright in his seat, scanning the ground beyond the viewscreen, wondering if his imagination was beginning to act up on him. Several elongated seconds dragged by while the lunar landscape waited complacently for eternity. Larmour’s hand was moving towards the throttle levers when he saw the movement again, off to the left, and a little closer.

He swallowed hard. His eyes had focused more quickly this time and he had made out a fluffy gray object — about the size of a football — which had popped up above ground level for an instant before vanishing downwards. As he watched, the phenomenon was repeated three more times, always in a different place.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said aloud. “If I’ve discovered Moon gophers I’ll be famous.”

Trembling a little, he reached for the radio button, then remembered there was too much of the Moon’s humped back between him and Base Three to allow contact. Beyond the screen a fluffy ball peeked up impudently and disappeared. Larmour hesitated for only a second before he disconnected his relief tube, sealed up his pressure suit and began making all the arrangements necessary for a human being to observe before setting foot on the Moon. A few minutes later, suppressing a sense of unreality, he left the crawler and began moving uncertainly towards where he had seen the last flurry of movement. As he walked he kept his eyes open for the lunar equivalent of gopher holes, but the blanket of eons-old dust was smooth except for the untidy sutures of his own footprints.

Abruptly, several of the fluffy balls sprang up within a radius of fifty paces, making him snatch for breath. Summoning his presence of mind, he kept his gaze fixed on the spot where the nearest materialization had taken place. Larmour reached the place, laboring with his inexpert low-gravity shuffle, and his gingery brows knit together as he saw there was no hole which could possibly contain the furtive gray entity he was seeking.

He knelt down to alter the direction of the light rays reflecting from the dust, and thought he could discern a shallow, dish-shaped depression with a minute dimple in the center. Becoming more and more puzzled, Larmour gently scooped the dust away with his hands until he had exposed the surface of the rock three inches below. There was a neat circular hole of about an inch diameter, looking as though it had been put there with a masonry drill. He pushed one finger into the hole, then jerked it out again as heat seared through the insulation of his glove. The surrounding rock was practically red hot.

Larmour sat back on his heels and stared at the black circle in perplexity. His mind was wrestling unsuccessfully with the problem it represented, when another gray ball appeared momentarily only a few feet away. This time he felt the ground tremors, and then suddenly he had the answer — the hideous, deadly answer.

On the Moon — with no air to buoy up its separate particles — a cloud of dust remains small and compact, and vanishes back into the ground almost as quickly as the eye can follow. And the only thing which would kick up such a cloud, human agencies excepted, was a meteor impact!

Larmour had left the safety of his vehicle and was walking about unprotected amid a meteor shower of unprecedented intensity, a hail of bullets fired a billion blind years earlier. Groaning at his own stupidity and lack of experience, he stood up and ran with ballooning Moon-steps towards the waiting crawler.

An obsolescent, four-engined aircraft was patiently clawing its way across the night skies of Northern Greenland. Inside its drumming, cylindrical belly, Denis Soderman carefully tended his banks of recording equipment, occasionally adjusting verniers, keeping the research plane’s inhuman and far-reaching senses at their keenest. He worked with the abstracted efficiency of a man who knows his job is important but who believes he was cut out for higher things.

Some distance forward of Soderman’s station, the senior — Dr. Cosgrove — sat at a makeshift desk, running gray paper tape though his hands like a tailor measuring cloth. His still-young face looked old and tired in the clinical light from the overhead tube.

“We don’t need to wait for a computer to process this lot, Denis,” Cosgrove said. “The solar corpuscular streams are obviously boosted way beyond normal. I’ve never seen readings like this, even with freak sunspot activity. The Van Allen belt must be soaking the stuff up like a sponge, and with those reports of fluctuations in the solar constant we got today from M.I.T., it looks…”

Denis Soderman stopped listening. He was adept at shutting out the older man’s ruminative voice, but this time it was more than a mere defense mechanism against the effects of unbridled pedantry. Something had happened to the aircraft. Seated far back from the machine’s center of gravity, Soderman had experienced a subtle, queasy corkscrewing motion. It had lasted perhaps half a second, but Soderman was a talented amateur pilot and had found something disturbing in the idea of a hundred-ton aircraft flicking its tail like a salmon. Emulating his electronic charges, he spread the network of his senses as wide as possible. For a few seconds he picked up nothing but the normal sensations of flight, then it happened again — a momentary lift and twist which made his stomach contract in alarm.

“They’re having trouble up front,” he said. “I don’t like the way this old bus is flying.”

Cosgrove looked up from his perforated streamers. “I didn’t feel anything.” His voice registered disapproval of Soderman’s lack of concentration on the job at hand.

“Listen, doctor. I’m way out on a limb here in the tail and I can feel — “

He broke off as the aircraft suddenly lurched sideways, shuddered, righted itself and became ominously quiet as all four engines cut out at the same time. Soderman, who had been lifted out of his seat and smashed against his instrument arrays, struggled to his feet and ran forward past Dr. Cosgrove. There was a noticeable slope in the gangway, showing that the aircraft was now flying in a pronounced nose-down attitude. A gray-faced second officer collided with him in the doorway to the flight deck.

“Get up to the tail and get your backs against the lavatory bulkhead! We’re going down!” The officer made no attempt to keep the panic out of his voice.

“Going down?” Soderman shouted. “Going down where? There isn’t a field within three hundred miles.”

“Are you telling me there’s no field?”

Even in a crisis the airman was jealous of his superiority over ordinary mortals, resentful at having to discuss the affairs of his aerial domain with an outsider.

“We’re doing everything we can to restart the engines, but Captain Isaacs isn’t optimistic. It looks as though he’ll have to try setting us down on the snow. Now will you go aft?”

“But it’s dark out there! Nobody could put a ship down — “

“That’s our problem, mister.” The officer pushed Soderman up the swaying gangway and turned back to the flight deck. Soderman’s mouth was dry as he moved aft, following the stumbling figure of Dr. Cosgrove.

They reached the conical tail-section and sat on the floor, backs braced against the cool metal of a major bulkhead. This far from the center of gravity each control movement made by the pilot was felt as a great, wild swing which gave Soderman the conviction the final catastrophe had arrived. With no sound from the engines to mask it, the passage of the fuselage through the air was loud, variable, menacing — the gleeful voice of a sky which could feel an enemy’s strength bleeding away.

Soderman tried to reconcile himself to the thought of dying within a matter of minutes, knowing that no combination of luck, pilot’s skill and structural integrity could enable the aircraft to survive contact with the earth. In daylight, or even in moonlight, it might have worked, but in pitch blackness there could be only one outcome to this rushing descent.

He clenched his teeth and vowed to go out with at least as much dignity as Dr. Cosgrove seemed to have mustered — but, when the impact came, he screamed. His voice was lost in a prolonged metallic thunderclap, then the plane was airborne again in a crazy, slewing leap, culminating in another incredible blast of sound which was compounded by the clattering of moveable objects bounding the length of the fuselage. The nightmare seemed to last for an eternity, during which all the interior lights were extinguished, but it ended abruptly, and Soderman discovered he was still breathing — miraculously, impossibly alive.

A few minutes later he was standing at an emergency door peering into the night sky at the glowing face of his savior.

Striated curtains of red and green light shimmered and danced from horizon to horizon, illuminating the snowscape below with an eerie, theatrical brilliance. It was an auroral display of supernatural intensity.

“This illustrates what I was saying about the Van Allen belt being overloaded,” Dr. Cosgrove commented emotionlessly behind Soderman. “The solar corpuscular stream is washing the upper atmosphere with charged particles which are draining into the magnetic poles. Their display, to which it seems we owe our lives, is only one facet of…”

But Soderman had stopped listening — he was too busy with the pleasurable business of simply being alive.

Dr. Fergus B. Raphael sat quietly at the wheel of his car, staring across the oil-dappled concrete of the university parking lot.

He was seriously contemplating driving away towards the ocean and never being heard of in academic circles again. There had been a time when he had tackled his work with supreme enthusiasm, undeterred by the realization that — in the very nature of things — he would never achieve the rewards which were possible for workers in other fields. But the years had taken their toll, the years of living on the wrong side of the scientific tracks, and now he was tired.

He put aside the daily pretense that he was free to drive away from his obsession, and got out of the car. The sky was overcast and chestnut leaves were scuttling noisily before a cold, searching wind. Raphael turned up his coat collar and walked towards the unremarkable architecture of the university. It looked like being yet another very ordinary day.

Half an hour later he had set up the first experiment of the morning. The volunteer was Joe Washburn, a young Negro student who had shown flashes of promise in a previous series of tests.

Raphael raised a microphone to his lips. “All set, Joe?”

Washburn nodded and waved to Raphael through the window of his soundproof booth. Raphael moved a switch and checked with his assistant, Jean Ard, who was sitting in a similar booth at the opposite side of the laboratory. She gave him an exaggeratedly cheerful wave, which Raphael took as an indication that she too was feeling depressed. He started the recording machine, then leaned back in his chair, unwrapping a cigar, and watched the visual monitors with dutiful eyes.

Not for the first time, he thought: How long does this farce have to go on? How much proof do I need that mind-to-mind communication is impossible?

Jean Ard keyed in her first symbol and a triangle appeared on her monitor. Her face was impassive behind the thick glass of the booth and Raphael wondered if she always tried to concentrate and project, or if she ever just sat there, pushed buttons and thought about her evening date. A few minutes later Washburn’s monitor lit up — a triangle. Raphael ignited his cigar and waited, wondering how soon be could break off and go for coffee. A square appeared on Jean’s monitor, followed by a square on Washburn’s. She tried a triangle again, and Washburn matched ber. Then a circle and a star, and Washburn registered a circle and a star. In spite of himself, Raphael’s pulse began to quicken and he felt a recurrence of the old nervous fever which might have made him a chronic gambler had be not found a way to sublimate it in research. He watched closely as Jean continued keying in at random the five abstract symbols they used in the telepathy experiments. Eight minutes later she had gone through a complete test sample of fifty projections.

And Joe Washburn’s score was exactly fifty.

Raphael stubbed out his cigar with a shaking hand. He felt deathly cold as he raised the microphone, but he kept his voice as flat as possible to avoid injecting even the minutest disturbance into the experiment.

“That was all right for a warm-up, Jean and Joe. Let’s run through another set.” They both nodded. He moved a switch and spoke to Jean only. “I’d like you to use both the abstract and the related symbols this time.”

He hunched over the console and watched the monitors with the eyes of a man playing Russian roulette. The addition of the five meaningful symbols — tree, automobile, dog, chair, man — brought the range up to ten, and made a freak run of success that much more difficult.

Washburn made one mistake in the next series of fifty, and no errors at all in the following three sets. Raphael decided to introduce the demons of emotion and self-consciousness.

“Listen, you two,” he said thickly. “I don’t know how you’re doing it, but you’ve been scoring virtually one hundred percent since this experiment started, and I don’t have to tell you what that means. Now let’s keep blasting away at this thing till we see how far it’s going to go.”

Washburn made four mistakes in the next set, two in the following set, and none in the five further tests which Raphael put him through before switching off the recording equipment. Both Jean and Washburn had to examine the print-out for themselves before they accepted that the whole affair had not been a trick devised by Raphael to introduce a new experimental factor. When the truth had sunk in they stared at each other with cautious, wondering eyes.

“I think it’d be a good idea if we had some coffee now, Jean,” Raphael said. “This needs some thinking about.”

While Jean was fixing coffee, Joe Washburn wandered around the laboratory grinning, shaking his head and driving his fist into the palm of his left hand. Raphael lit another cigar and put it out almost immediately, realizing he would have to tell somebody about what had happened. He went to the phone and was on the point of lifting it when it rang.

“A long-distance call for you, Dr. Raphael,” the university operator said. “It’s Professor Morrison calling from Cleveland.”

“Thank you,” Raphael said dully, shocked at the coincidence. He had been going to call Morrison, who was his closest friend among the handful of men still working in the unfashionable field of extrasensory perception. Somehow, he had a prescient awareness of why Morrison was calling, and the feeling was confirmed when he heard the other man’s excited tones.

“Hello, Fergus? Thank God I got hold of you — I had to get this off my chest to somebody before I exploded. You’ll never guess what’s been happening here.”

“I will,” Raphael said.

“Try it then.”

“You’ve begun getting hundred percent successes in telepathy experiments.”

Morrison’s gasp of surprise was clearly audible. “That’s right. How did you know?”

“Perhaps,” Raphael said somberly, “I’m telepathic too.”