By Earthlight Part 1

By Earthlight.

by Bryce Walton.

The rocket skin was like a dun-colored wall in the dim light under the hill. Three anonymous men who were beyond suspicion, who had worked on the rocket, were taking Barlow up in the elevator, up along the rocket's curving walls.

Earlier, scores of men had climbed up many ladders to various platforms where doors opened into the rocket's compartments for the insertion and repair of the many highly-specialized instruments.

_It was still--so d.a.m.n still here!_

Some guards were way down below somewhere in the shadows, but they didn't notice anything. The three men were regular workers and there were last minute things to be done. It all looked quite logical.

Over in the blockhouse, some of America's most important political and military figures were sitting over instruments and charts, waiting, discussing.

One of the three men was talking, explaining things to Barlow about the rocket, about the pressure-suit he was to wear. Barlow listened and got it all straight. Barlow was helped into the suit. It weighed 700 pounds, and after they had encased him in it--all but the huge helmet-plate--he lay there absolutely helpless, on a dolly, waiting to be rolled into the rocket's compartment.

The anonymous faces he'd never seen before, and would never see again, looked down at him. He blinked several times and moistened his lips.

The suit was like a lead coffin. He didn't feel dead, but supposedly dead and unable to tell any one. A ridiculous way to feel!

What was the matter with him? He'd expected to die, all the time, from the start. Everybody died! Few could experience what he was experiencing. Death was worth this. One last kick, the biggest kick of all for Hal Barlow. You lived for kicks, so what was the matter?

He couldn't move his limbs; he could barely lift his head. Encased in 700 pounds of suit. Helpless. A pencil-flash flickered on and off. A couple of eyes shone. A whisper. "The kit is fastened to your belt.

The instructions are in an air-tight capsule inside the kit. If you're caught, and the paper's removed, it will disintegrate; now we'll slide you inside."

The helmet slid over his face. It was absolutely dark. The suit, all-enclosing mobile shelter, atmosphere-pressure, temperature-control, mobility and electric power to manipulate tools. Its own power plant. It reprocessed continuously the precious air breathed by the occupant, putting it back into circulating supply after enriching it. The rocket was cold and alien and it would support no life; the suit alone protected him.

The rocket was just metal and gadgets; only the suit stood between him and an agonizing death from acceleration, deceleration, extremes of heat and cold.

The dolly was rolling him in through the small opening. His encased body being slid, stuffed, jammed into something like a wad of ammo into a barrel. His body was entirely constricted. He couldn't hear anything. It was black. He could shift his ma.s.sive helmet slightly. It clanged against metal, and the sound inside the helmet was like rusty thunder.

His blood boiled softly. He felt like a child shut up in the dark. He thought of the radio in the suit, and desperately manipulated the controls by the small control-panel in the metal hand of the suit.

The voices seemed to quiet whatever had been boiling up in him. He had started to scream; he remembered that now. Somehow, with an intense effort, he had suppressed the scream, clamped his teeth on it. Now the voices helped. He realized how much time had pa.s.sed in the quick pressured dark. Voices preparing to send the first rocket to the moon.

Quiet voices with all the suspense and tension held down by long military habit.

He had started being afraid. More than that. He had been going to scream. He--Hal Barlow! Where was the excitement, the great thrill, the big kick he had antic.i.p.ated, to compensate for a voluntary dying?

He felt only anxiety. Afraid the terror would return. He had never admitted fear before. He thought back a little, trying to recall something that would explain the fear.

"_X minus one!_"

He felt as if an immense cyst of suppuration had burst inside of him.

Sweat teared his eyes.

_If they had psyched me, I'd know. I wouldn't be afraid. What would they have found? Why am I afraid now when I've never been afraid in my life?_

Or had he? He couldn't remember. He tried to think of something immediate....

Two hours before, Barlow had paused on the second floor of the men's barracks on the White Sands, New Mexico, Proving Grounds and looked put. He shivered a little. It was a lonely spot, maybe the loneliest in the world. Especially at night. Even here, Barlow managed to be with someone most of the time--but the same dullards got boring. Even women (like Lorraine), who said they loved him, were futile companions; a guy whose future was death couldn't get emotionally involved.

He went into his three-room dump and switched on the radio at once. He needed the sound of voices and the music. He started to undress in the dark. But the cold and frigid moonlight came in and shone on the bed; it revealed the body lying there. The face looking up at Barlow was his own! His breath thinned. His hands were wet.

It did him a lot more justice than any mirror, or the reflection in a woman's eyes. The half-boyish, half-man face with the thin wiry lips, the blond curling hair and the sun-burned, cynical face. The blue eyes that seemed never quite able to smile. The face on the bed never would; it was dead.

Barlow turned. Part of the shadow in the corner moved. A voice.

"D-716."

The 16 meant that this was that number among the hundred possible goals of duty and sacrifice. The D of course meant Death, and Barlow had known since having been given the number years ago what his end would be.

There were many other ways, some worse than dying. Loss of ident.i.ty by plastic surgery. Barlow's appearance had been thoroughly altered three times. Some had volunteered for the torture and concentration camps of the East. Barlow had done that, too; anything for kicks.

He'd never bothered to indoctrinate himself with the philosophy of the Brotherhood with its seven rituals of self-denial and discipline, its long program of learning the love of humanity, the unity of each with all people and with the Universe.

He had his own philosophy. You were born, and then you died; the rest was just a living job.

You lived as an individual, and not as a cog--if you had the guts for it. You lived for the excitement and the thrill of danger and the maintenance of individuality--if you could. Otherwise you might as well die when you were born--because then the stretch between wasn't worth the price.

That was Barlow's way. Only the _manner_ of dying was important.

Everybody had to die. All that the Brotherhood really worked for was the goal of enabling everybody to live as long as possible, and finally to die with dignity and moral integrity. Barlow didn't need their philosophy; basically, that was all he, too, really wanted--maybe.

The man was indistinct in the shadows. An anonymous figure without a name. "The man on the bed has made the supreme sacrifice for the cause."

"So he's dead," Barlow said casually. "So what?"

"It took a lot of work to make such an exact resemblance. One of our members brought him in through the guards in a supply truck. It's easy to bring in a dead man who'll never go back out--except as someone who was already in. You of course."

"No one will know what is to happen to the real me then?"

"No one. It will be a.s.sumed that you committed suicide."

Barlow grinned thinly.

"There's been no change in your att.i.tude? Your willingness to--"

"Die? None. Willing Barlow, always ready to drop dead at a moment's notice."

"You're the only one of the Brotherhood who's never submitted to the rituals and the psyching; we hope that isn't bad. Your service has been excellent. But I wish you had submitted to a psyching before this a.s.signment, because there's one basic weakness, an Achilles Heel, in everyone, and on an a.s.signment so vital as this, it would be worth knowing, in advance...."

"Get someone else if you're worried."

"You're the only member we have, who's inside the grounds here, who can stand the acceleration and deceleration."

"Ah," Barlow exclaimed. "This sounds big."

"It couldn't be bigger," the anonymous man said. "Than a one-way trip to the moon!"