Algis Budrys - Rogue Moon

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ROGUE MOON

by Algis Budrys

thereof.

All characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to persons

living or dead is purely coincidental.

An Original Gold Medal Novel. GOLD MEDAL BOOKS Fawcett Publications, Inc.

Greenwich, Conn.

LARRY SHAW

Journeyman Editor

Halt, Passenger!

As you are now, so once was I.

As I am now, so shall you be.

Prepare for Death, and follow me.

--New England gravestone motto

ROGUE MOON

CHAPTER ONE

Late on a day in 1959, three men sat in a room.

Edward Hawks, Doctor of Science, cradled his long jaw in his outsize

hands and hunched forward with his sharp elbows on the desk. He was a black-

haired, pale-skinned, gangling man who rarely got out in the sun. Compared to

his staff of tanned young assistants, he always reminded strangers of a

scarecrow. Now he was watching a young man who sat in the straight chair

facing him.

The young man stared unblinkingly. His trim crewcut was wet with

perspiration and plastered by it to his scalp. His features were clean, clear-

skinned and healthy, but his chin was wet. "An dark . . ." he said

querulously, "an dark and nowhere starlights. . . ." His voice trailed away

suddenly into a mumble, but he still complained.

Hawks looked to his right.

Weston, the recently hired psychologist, was sitting there in an

armchair he'd had brought down to Hawks' office. Weston, like Hawks, was in

his early forties. But he was chunky where Hawks was gaunt; he was self-

possessed, urbane behind his black-rimmed glasses and, now, a little

impatient. He frowned slightly back toward Hawks and arched one eyebrow.

"He's insane," Hawks said to him like a wondering child.

Weston crossed his legs. "I told you that, Dr. Hawks; I told you the

moment we pulled him out of that apparatus of yours. What had happened to him

was too much for him to stand."

"I know you told me," Hawks said mildly. "But I'm responsible for him. I

have to make sure." He began to turn back to the young man, then looked again

at Weston. "He was young. Healthy. Exceptionally stable and resilient, you

told me. He looked it." Hawks added slowly, "He was brilliant."

"I said he was stable," Weston explained earnestly. "I didn't say he was

inhumanly stable. I told you he was an exceptional specimen of a human being.

You're the one who sent him to a place no human being should go."

Hawks nodded. "You're right, of course. It's my fault."

"Well, now," Weston said quickly, "he was a volunteer. He knew it was

dangerous. He knew he could expect to die."

But Hawks was ignoring Weston. He was looking straight out over his desk

again.

"Rogan?" he said softly. "Rogan?"

He waited, watching Rogan's lips move almost soundlessly. He sighed at

last and asked Weston, "Can you do anything for him?"

"Cure him," Weston said confidently. "Electroshock treatments. They'll

make him forget what happened to him in that place. He'll be all right."

"I didn't know electroshock amnesia was permanent."

Weston blinked at Hawks. "He may need repetitive treatment now and then,

of course."

"At intervals for the remainder of his life."

"That's not always true."

"But often."

"Well, yes . . ."

"Rogan," Hawks was whispering. "Rogan, I'm sorry."

"An dark . . . an dark. . . . It hurt me and it was so cold . . . so

quiet I could hear myself."

Edward Hawks, D.Sc., walked alone across the main laboratory's concrete

floor, his hands at his sides. He chose a path among the generators and

consoles without looking up, and came to a halt at the foot of the matter

transmitter's receiving stage.

The main laboratory occupied tens of thousands of square feet in the

basement of Continental Electronics' Research Division building. A year ago,

when Hawks had designed the transmitter, part of the first and second floors

above it had been ripped out, and the transmitter now towered up nearly to the

ceiling along the far wall. Catwalks interlaced the adjoining airspace, and

galleries had been built for access to the instruments lining the walls.

Dozens of men on Hawks' staff were still moving about, taking final checks

before closing them down for the day. Their shadows on the catwalks, now and

then occluding some overhead light, mottled the floor in shifting patterns of

darkness.

Hawks stood looking up at the transmitter, his eyes puzzled. Someone

abruptly said, "Ed!" and he turned his head in response.

"Hello, Sam." Sam Latourette, his chief assistant, had walked up

quietly. He was a heavy-boned man with loose, papery flesh and dark-circled,

sunken eyes. Hawks smiled at him wanly. "The transmitter crew just about

finished with their post-mortem, are they?"

"You'll find the reports on your desk in the morning. There was nothing

wrong with the machinery. Nothing anywhere." Latourette waited for Hawks to

show interest. But Hawks only nodded his head. He was leaning one hand against

a vertical brace and peering into the receiving stage. Latourette growled,

"Ed!"

"Yes, Sam?"

"Stop it. You're doing too much to yourself." He again waited for some

reaction, but Hawks only smiled into the machine, and Latourette burst out,

"Who do you think you're kidding? How long have I been working with you now?

Ten years? Who gave me my first job? Who trained me? You can keep up a front

with anybody else, but not with _me!_" Latourette clenched his fist and

squeezed his fingers together emptily. "I _know_ you! But--damn it, Ed, it's

not your fault that thing's out there! What do you expect--that nobody'll ever

get hurt? What do you want--a perfect world?"

Hawks smiled again in the same way. "We tear a gateway where no gate has

ever been," he said, nodding at the mechanisms, "in a wall we didn't build.

That's called scientific investigation. Then we send men through the gate.

That's the human adventure. And something on the other side--something that

never bothered mankind; something that's never done us any harm before or

troubled us with the knowledge that it was there--kills them. In terrible ways

we can't understand, it kills them. So I keep sending in more men. What's that

called, Sam?"

"Ed, we _are_ making progress. This new approach is going to be the

answer."

Hawks looked curiously at Latourette.

Latourette said uncomfortably, "Once we get the bugs out of it. That's

all it needs. It's the thing that'll do the trick, Ed--I know it."

Hawks did not change his expression or turn his face away. He stood with

his fingertips forced against the machine's gray crackle finish. "You mean--

we're no longer killing them? We're only driving them insane with it?"

"All we have to do, Ed," Latourette pressed him, "all we have to do is

find a better way of cushioning the shock when the man feels his death. More

sedatives. Something like that."

Hawks said, "They still have to go into that place. How they do it makes

no difference; it won't tolerate them. It was never made for human beings to

have anything to do with. It was never made for the human mind to measure in

human terms. We have to make a new language for describing it, and a new way

of thinking in order to be able to understand it. Only when we've finally got

it apart, whatever it is, and seen, and felt, and touched and tasted all its

pieces, will we ever be able to say what it might be. And that will only be

after we've been through it, so what good will our new knowledge do these men

who have to die, now? Whatever put it there, no matter why, no human being

will ever be able to live in it until after human beings have lived through

it. How are you going to describe that in plain English so a sane man can

understand it? It's a monstrous thing we're dealing with. In a sense, we have

to think like monsters, or stop dealing with it, and let it just sit there on

the Moon, no one knows why."

Latourette reached out sharply and touched the sleeve of his smock. "Are

you going to shut the program down?"

Hawks looked at him.

Latourette was clutching his arm. "Cobey. Isn't he ordering you to

cancel it?"

"Cobey can only make requests," Hawks said gently. "He can't order me."

"He's company president, Ed! He can make your life miserable. He's dying

to get Continental Electronics off this hook."

Hawks took Latourette's hand away from his arm and moved it to the

transmitter's casing. He put the flats of his own palms into his back pockets,

nicking up his white laboratory smock. "The Navy originally financed the

transmitter's development only because it was my idea. They wouldn't have

vouchered that kind of money for anyone else in the world. Not for a crazy

idea like this." He stared into the machine. "Even now, even though that place

we found is the way it is, they still won't let Cobey back out on his own

initiative. Not as long as they think I can keep going. I don't have to worry

about Cobey." He smiled softly and a little incredulously. "Cobey has to worry

about me."

"Well, how _about_ you? How much longer can you keep this up?"

Hawks stepped back. He looked at Latourette thoughtfully. "Are we

worrying about the project now, or are we worrying about me?"

Latourette sighed. "All right, Ed, I'm sorry," he said. "But what're you

going to do?"

Hawks looked up and down at the matter transmitter's towering height. In

the laboratory space behind them, the technicians were now shutting off the

lights in the various subsections of the control array. Darkness fell in

horizontal chunks along the galleries of instruments and formed black

diagonals like jackstraws being laid upon the catwalks overhead. It advanced

in a proliferating body toward the solitary green bulb shining over the "NOT

Powered" half of the "Powered/NOT Powered" red-and-green legend painted on the

transmitter's lintel.

"We can't do anything about the nature of the place to which they go,"

Hawks said. "And we've reached the limit of what we can do to improve the way

we send them there. It seems to me there's only one thing left to do. We must

find a different kind of man to send. A man who won't go insane when he feels

himself die." He looked quizzically into the machine's interior.

"There are all sorts of people in the world," he said. "Perhaps we can

find a man who doesn't fear Death, but loves her."

Latourette said bitterly, "Some kind of psycho."

"Maybe that's what he is. But I think we need him, nevertheless." All

the other laboratory lights were out, now. "What it comes down to is that we

need a man who's attracted by what drives other men to madness. And the more

so, the better. A man who's impassioned by Death." His eyes lost focus, and

his gaze extended itself to infinity. "So now we know what I am. I'm a pimp."

Continental Electronics' Director of Personnel was a broad-faced man

named Vincent Connington. He came briskly into Hawks' office and pumped his

hand enthusiastically. He was wearing a light blue shantung suit and russet

cowboy boots, and as he sat down in the visitors' chair, puckering the corners

of his eyes in the mid-afternoon sunshine streaming through the venetian

blinds, he looked around and remarked, "Got the same office layout myself,

upstairs. But it sure looks a lot different with some carpeting on the floor

and some good paintin's on the walls." He turned back to Hawks, smiling. "I'm

glad to get down here and talk to you, Doctor. I've always had a lot of

admiration for you. Here you are, running a department and still getting in

there and working right with your crew. All I do all day is sit behind a desk

and make sure my clerks handle the routine without foulin' up."

"They seem to do rather well," Hawks said in a neutral voice. He was

beginning to draw himself up unconsciously in his chair and to slip a mask of

expressionlessness over his face. His glance touched Connington's boots once

and then stayed away. "At least, your department's been sending me some

excellent technicians."

Connington grinned. "Nobody's got any better." He leaned forward. "But

that's routine stuff." He took Hawks' interoffice memo out of his breast

pocket. "_This_, now--This request, I'm going to fill personally."

Hawks said carefully, "I certainly hope you can. I expect it may take

some time to find a man fitting the outlined specifications. I hope you

understand that, unfortunately, we don't have much time. I--"

Connington waved a hand. "Oh, I've got him already. Had him in mind for

a long time."

Hawks' eyebrows rose. "Really?"

Connington grinned shrewdly across the plain steel desk. "Hard to

believe?" He lounged back in his chair. "Doctor, suppose somebody came to you

and asked you to do a particular job for him--design a circuit to do a

particular job. Now, suppose you reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a

piece of paper and said, 'Here it is.' What about that? And then when he was

all through shaking his head and saying how it was hard to believe you'd have

it right there, you could explain to him about how electronics was what you

did all the time. About how when you're not thinking about some specific

project, you're still thinking about electronics in general. And how, being

interested in electronics, you kept up on it, and you knew pretty much where

the whole field was going. And how you thought about some of the problems they

were likely to run into, and sometimes answers would just come into your head

so easily it couldn't even be called work. And how you filed these things away

until it was time for them to be brought out. See? That way, there's no magic.

Just a man with a talent, doing his work."

Connington grinned again. "Now I've got a man who was made to work on

this machine project of yours. I know him inside out. And I know a little bit

about you. I've got a lot to learn about you, yet, but I don't think any of

it's goin' to surprise me. And I've got your man. He's healthy, 'he's

available, and I've had security clearances run on him every six months for

the last two years. He's all yours, Doctor. No foolin'.

"You see, Doctor--" Connington folded his hands in his lap and bent them

backward, cracking his knuckles, "you're not the only mover in the world."

Hawks frowned slightly. "Mover?" Now his face betrayed nothing.

Connington chuckled softly to himself over some private joke that was

burgeoning within him. "There're all kinds of people in this world. But they

break down into two main groups, one big and one smaller. There's the people

who get moved out of the way or into line, and then there's the people who do

the moving. It's safer and a lot more comfortable to go where you're pushed.

You don't take any of the responsibility, and if you do what you're told,

every once in a while you get thrown a fish.

"Being a mover isn't safe, because you may be heading for a hole, and it

isn't comfortable because you do a lot of jostling back and forth, and what's

more, it's up to you to get your own fish. But it's a hell of a lot of fun."

He looked into Hawks' eyes. "Isn't it?"

Hawks said, "Mr. Connington--" He looked directly back at the man. "I'm

not convinced. This individual I requested would have to be a very rare type.

Are you sure you can instantly give him to me? Do you mean to say your having

him ready, as you say, _isn't_ a piece of conspicuous forethought? I think

perhaps you may have had some other motive, and that you're seizing on a lucky

coincidence."

Connington lolled back, chuckled, and unwrapped a greenleaved cigar from

the tooled leather case in his breast pocket. He snipped open the end with a

pair of gold nippers attached to the case by a golden chain, and used a gold-

cased lighter set with a ruby. He puffed, and let the smoke writhe out between

his large, well-spaced teeth. His eyes glinted behind the drift of smoke that

hung in the air in front of his face.

"Let's keep polite, Dr. Hawks," he said. "Let's look at it in the light

of reason. Continental Electronics pays you to head up Research, and you're

the best there is." Connington leaned forward just a little, shifted the cigar

just a little in his fingers, and changed the curve of his smile. "Continental

Electronics pays me to run Personnel."

Hawks thought for a minute and then said, "Very well. How soon can I see

this man?"

Connington lolled back and took a satisfied puff on the cigar. "Right

now. He lives right nearby, on the coast-- up on the cliffs there?"

"I know the general location."

"Good enough. If you've got an hour or so, what say we run on down there

now?"

"I have nothing else to do if he turns out not to be the right man."

Connington stretched and stood up. His belt slipped below the bulge of

his stomach, and he stopped to hitch up his trousers. "Use your phone," he

muttered perfunctorily around the cigar, reaching across Hawks' desk. He

called an outside number and spoke to someone briefly--and, for a moment,

sourly--saying they were coming out. Then he called the company garage and

ordered his car brought around to the building's main entrance. When he hung

up the phone, he was chuckling again. "Well, time we get downstairs, the

car'll be there."

Hawks nodded and stood up.

Connington grinned at him. "I like it when somebody gives me enough

rope. I like people who stay suspicious when I'm offerin' them what they

want." He was still laughing over the secret joke. "The more rope I get, the

more operating room it gives me. You don't figure that way. You see someone

who may give you trouble, and you close up. You get into a shell, and you stay

there, because you're afraid it may be trouble you can't handle. Most people

do that. That's why, one of these days, I'm goin' to be president of this

corporation, and you'll still be head of the Research Division."

Hawks smiled. "How will you like it, then, going to the Board of

Directors, telling them my salary has to be higher than yours?"

"Yeah," Connington said reflectively. "Yeah, there'd be that." He cocked

an eye at Hawks. "You mean it, too."

He tapped his cigar ash off into the middle of Hawks' desk blotter. "Get

hot, sometimes, inside your insulated suit, does it?"

Hawks looked expressionlessly down at the ash and up at Connington's

face. He reached into a desk drawer, took out a small manila envelope, and put

it in his jacket. He dosed the drawer. "I think your car is waiting for us,"

he said quietly.

They drove along the coastal highway in Connlngton's new Cadillac, until

the highway veered inland away from the cliffs facing onto the ocean. Then, at

a spot where a small general store with two gasoline pumps stood alone,

Connington turned the car into a narrow sand road that ran along between

palmetto scrub and pine stands toward the water. From there the car swayed

down to a narrow gravel strip of road that ran along the foot of the rock

cliffs only a few feet above the high-water mark.

The cliffs were sheer and composed of some rough, crumbling stone that

had fissured vertically, leaving narrow guts whose bottoms were filled with

the same detritus that had been used to form the road. The car murmured

forward with one fender overhanging the water side and the other perhaps a

foot from the cliffs. They moved along in this manner for a few minutes,

Connington humming to himself in a tenor drone and Hawks sitting erect with

his hands on his knees.

The road changed into an incline blasted out of the cliff face, with the

insecure rock overhanging it in most places, and crossed a narrow, weatherworn

timber bridge three car-lengths long across the face of a wider gut than most.

The wedge-shaped split in the cliff was about a hundred feet deep. The ocean

reached directly into it with no intervening beach, and even now at low tide

solid water came pouring into the base of the cleft and broke up into

fountaining spray. It wet the car's windshield. The timber bridge angled up

from fifty feet above water level, about a third of the way up the face of the

cliffs, and its bottom dripped.

The road went on past the bridge, but Connington stopped the car with

the wheels turned toward a galvanized iron mailbox set on a post. It stood

beside an even narrower driveway that climbed steeply up into the side of the

cleft and went out of sight around a sharp break in its wall.

"That's him," Connington grunted, pointing toward the mailbox with his

cigars "Barker. Al Barker." He peered slyly sideward. "Ever hear the name?"

Hawks frowned and then said, "No."

"Don't read the sports pages? No--I guess not." Connington backed the

car a few inches until he could aim the wheels up the driveway, put the

transmission selector in Low, and hunched forward over the wheel, cautiously

depressing the accelerator. The car began forging slowly up the sharp slope,

its inside fender barely clearing the dynamited rock, its left side flecked

with fresh spray from the upsurge in the cleft.

"Barker's quite a fellow," Connington muttered with the soggy butt of

his cigar clenched between his teeth. "Parachutist in World War Two.

Transferred to the OSS in 1944. Specialized in assassination. Used to be an

Olympic skijumper. Bobsled crewman. National Small Arms Champion, 1950. Holds

a skin-diving depth record. Used to mountain climb. Cracked an outboard

hydroplane into the shore at Lake Mead, couple of years ago. 'S where I met

him, thne I was out there on vacation. Right now, he's built a car and entered

it in Grand Prix competition. Plans to do his own drivin'."

Hawks' eyebrows drew together and then relaxed.

Connington grinned crookedly without taking his eyes completely off the

road. "Begin to sound like I knew what I was doin'?"

Before Hawks could answer, Connington stopped the car. They were at the

break in the cleft wall. A second, shallower notch turned into the cliff here,

forming a dogleg that was invisible from the road over the bridge below. The

driveway angled around it so acutely that Connington's car could not make the

turn. The point of the angle had been blasted out to make the driveway perhaps

eighty inches wide at the bend of the dogleg, but there were no guard rails;

the road dropped off directly into the cleft, and either leg was a chute

pointing to the water a hundred feet below.

"You're gonna have to help me here," Connington said. "Get out and tell

me when my wheels look like they're gonna go over."

Hawks looked at him, pursed his lips, and got out of the car. He

squeezed out between it and the cliff, and walked to the point of the dogleg.

Standing with the tips of his black oxfords projecting a little way over the

edge, he looked down. The spray veiled the bottom of the gut. Hanging from two

of the projections in the rough walls were a small automobile fender and a

ragged strip of fabric from a convertible top. The fabric was bleached and

raveled. The paint on the aluminum fender was rotten with corrosion. Hawks

looked at them with intent curiosity.

Connington let down his window with a quick whirr. "Barker's," he said

loudly over the sound of the surf in the cleft. "He put it in there last

month. Almost went with it."

Hawks ran the tip of his tongue over his front teeth, under his lip. He

turned back to the road.

"O.K., now," Connington said, "I'm gonna have to saw around this turn.

You tell me how much room I've got."

Hawks nodded. Connington swung the car as far around the dogleg as he

could, backed, stopped at Hawks' signal and moved forward again. He continued

to repeat the maneuver, grinding his front tires from side to side over the

road, until the car was pointed up the other leg of the driveway. Then he

waited while Hawks got back in.

"We should have parked at the bottom and walked up," Hawks said.

Connington started up the remaining incline and pointed to his feet.

"Not in these boots," he grunted. He paused, then said, "Barker takes that

turn at fifty miles an hour." He looked sidelong at Hawks.

Hawks looked back at him. "Sometimes."

"Every time but one. He hasn't slowed down since then." Connington

chuckled. "You see, Doc? I rub you the wrong way. I know I do. But, even so,

you've got to learn to trust me, even if you don't like or understand me. I do

my job. I've got your man for you. That's what counts." And his eyes sparkled

with the hidden joke, the secret knowledge that he still kept to himself.

At the top of the incline, the driveway curved over the face of the

cliff and became an asphalt strip running beside a thick, clipped, dark green

lawn. Automatic sprinklers kept the grass sparkling with moisture. Cactus and

palmetto grew in immaculate beds, shaded by towering cypress. A low, cedar-

planked house faced the wide lawn, its nearer wall of glass looking out over

the cliff at the long blue ocean. A breeze stirred the cypress.

There was a swimming pool in the middle of the lawn. A thin blonde woman

with extremely long legs, who was deeply suntanned and wearing a yellow two-

piece suit, was lying face-down on a beach towel, listening to music from a

portable radio. An empty glass with an ice cube melting in its bottom sat on

the grass beside a thermos jug. The woman raised her head, looked at the car,

and drooped forward again.

Connington lowered a hand half raised in greeting. "Claire Pack," he

said to Hawks, guiding the car around to the side of the house and stopping on

a concrete apron in front of the double doors of a sunken garage.

"She lives here?" Hawks asked.

Connington's face had lost all trace of pleasure. "Yeah . . . Come on."

They walked up a flight of flagstone steps to the lawn, and across the

lawn toward the swimming pool. There was a man swimming under the blue-green

water, raising his head to take an occasional quick breath and immediately

pushing it under again. Beneath the rippling, sun-dappled surface, he was a

vaguely man-shaped, flesh-colored creature thrashing from one end of the pool

to the other. An artificial leg, wrapped in transparent plastic sheeting, lay

between Claire Pack and the pool, near a chrome-plated ladder going down into

the water. The radio played Glenn Miller.

"Claire?" Connington asked tentatively.

She hadn't moved in response to the approaching footsteps. She had been

humming to the music, and tapping softly on the towel with the red-lacquered

tips of two long fingers. She turned over slowly and looked at Connington

upside down.

"Oh," she said flatly. Her eyes shifted to Hawks' face. They were clear

green, flecked with yellow-brown, and the pupils were contracted in the

sunlight.

"This is Dr. Hawks, Claire," Connington told her patiently. "He's vice

president in charge of the Research Division, out at the main plant. I called

and told you. What's the good of the act? We'd like to talk to Al."

She waved a hand,. "Sit down. He'll be out of the pool in a little

while."

Connington lowered himself awkwardly down onto the grass. Hawks, after a

moment, dropped precisely into a tailor-fashion seat on the edge of the towel.

Claire Pack sat up, drew her knees under her chin, and looked at Hawks. "What

kind of a job have you got for Al?"

Connington said shortly, "The kind he likes." As Claire smiled, he

looked at Hawks and said, "You know, I forget. Every time. I look forward to

coming here, and then when I see her I remember how she is."

Claire Pack paid him no attention. She was looking at Hawks, her mouth

quirked up in an expression of intrigued curiosity. "The kind of work Al

likes? You don't look like a man involved with violence, Doctor. What's your

first name?" She threw a glance over her shoulder at Connington. "Give me a

cigarette."

"Edward," Hawks said softly. He was watching Connington fumble in an

inside breast pocket, take out a new package of cigarettes, open it, tap one

loose, and extend it to her. Without looking at Connington, she said softly,

"Light it." A dark, arched eyebrow went up at Hawks. Her wide mouth smiled.

"I'll call you Ed." Her eyes remained flat, calm.

Connington, behind her, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, closed

them tightly on the filtered tip, and lit the cigarette with his ruby-studded

lighter. The tip of the cigarette was bound in red-glazed paper, to conceal

lipstick marks. He puffed on it, put it between her two upraised fingers, and

returned the remainder of the pack to his inside breast pocket.

"You may," Hawks said to Claire Pack wtih a faint upward lift of his

lips. "I'll call you Claire."

She raised one eyebrow again, puffing on the cigarette. "All right."

Connington looked over Claire's shoulder. His eyes were almost tearfully

bitter. But there was something else in them as well. There was something

almost like amusement in the way he said, "Nothing but movers today, Doctor.

And all going in different directions. Fast company. Keep your dukes up."

Hawks said, "I'll do my best."

"I don't think Ed looks like a very soft touch, Connie," Claire said,

watching Hawks.

Hawks said nothing. The man in the pool bad stopped swimming and was

treading water with his hands. Only his head was above the surface, with short

sandy hair streaming down from the top of his small, round skull. His

cheekbones were prominent. His nose was thin-bladed and he had a clipped

mustache. His eyes were unreadable at the distance, with the reflected

sunlight rippling over his face.

"That's the way his life's arranged," Connington was now mumbling to

Claire Pack spitefully, not seeing Barker watching them. "Nice and scientific.

Everything balances. Nothing gets wasted. Nobody steals a march on Dr. Hawks."

Hawks said, "Mr. Connington met me personally for the first time this

afternoon."

Claire Pack laughed with a bright metallic ripple. "Do people offer you

drinks, Ed?"

"I don't think that'll work either, Claire," Connington growled.

"Shut up," she said. "Well, Ed?" She lightly held up the thermos jug,

which seemed to be nearly empty. "Scotch and water?"

"Thank you, yes. Would Mr. Barker feel more comfortable about getting

out of the pool, if I were to turn my back while he was fastening his leg?"

Connington said, "She's never this blatant after she's made her first

impression. Watch out for her."

She laughed again, throwing her head back. "He'll come out when he's

good and ready. He might even like it if I sold tickets to the performance.

Don't you worry about Al, Ed." She unscrewed the top of the jug, pulled the

cork, and poured a drink into the plastic top. "No spare glasses or ice out

here, Ed. It's pretty cold, anyhow. All right?"

"Perfectly, Claire," Hawks said. He took the cup and sipped at it. "Very

good." He held the cup in his hands and waited for her to fill her glass.

"How about me?" Connington said. He was watching the hair stir at the

nape of Claire Pack's neck, and his eyes were shadowed.

"Go get a glass from the house," she said. Leaning forward, she touched

the side of her glass to Hawks' cup. "Here's to a well-balanced life."

Hawks smiled fleetingly and drank. She reached out and put her hand on

his ankle. "Do you live near here, Ed?"

Connington said, "She'll tease you and dig at you, and then she'll chew

you up and spit you out, Hawks. Give her half a chance, and she will. She's

the biggest bitch on two continents. But you've got to figure Barker would

have somebody like her around."

Claire turned her head and shoulders and looked squarely at Connington

for the first time. "Are you trying to egg me on to something, Connie?" she

asked in a mild voice.

Something flickered in Connington's face. But then he said, "Dr. Hawks

is here on business, Claire."

Hawks looked up at Connington curiously over the rim of his cup. His

black eyes were intent for a moment, then shifted to Claire Pack, brooding.

Claire said to Connington, "Everybody's everywhere on some kind of

business. Everybody who's worth a damn. Everybody has something he wants.

Something more important than anything else. Isn't that right, Connie? Now,

tend to your business, and I'll manage mine." Her look came back to Hawks,

catching him off guard. Her eyes held his momentarily. "I'm sure Ed can take

care of his own," she said.

Connington flushed, twisted his mouth to say something, turned sharply,

and marched away across the grass. In a flash of brief expression, Claire Pack

smiled enigmatically to herself.

Hawks sipped his drink. "He's not watching any longer. You can take your

hand away from my ankle."

She smiled sleepily. "Connie? I torment him to oblige him. He's forever

coming up here, since he met Al and myself. The thing is--he can't come up

alone, you understand? Because of the bend in the driveway. He could do it if

he gave up driving those big cars, or he could bring a woman along to help him

make it. But he never brings a woman, and he won't give up either that car or

those boots. He brings a new man almost every time." She smiled. "He asks for

it, don't you see? He wants it."

"These men he brings up," Hawks asked. "_Do_ you chew them up and spit

them out?"

Claire threw her head back and laughed. "There are all kinds of men. The

only kind that're worth anyone's time are the ones I can't mangle the first

time out."

"But there are other times after the first time? It never stops? And I

didn't mean Connington was watching us. I meant Barker. He's pulling himself

out of the pool. Did you deliberately place his artificial leg so he'd have to

strain to reach it? Simply because you knew another new man was coming and

would need to be shown how fierce you were? Or is it to provoke Barker?"

For moment, the skin around her lips seemed crumpled and spongy. Then

she said, "Are you curious to find out how much of it is bluff?" She was in

complete control of herself again.

"I don't think any of it is bluff. But I don't know you well enough to

be sure," Hawks answered mildly.

"And I don't know you well enough yet, either, Ed."

Hawks said nothing to this for a moment. "Are you a long-time friend of

Mr. Barker's?" he asked at last.

Claire Pack nodded. She smiled challengingly.

Hawks nodded, checking off the point. "Connington was right."

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ROGUEMOONbyAlgisBudrysCopyright1960byAlgisBudrysFirstPrintingNovember1960Allrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereof.Allcharactersinthisbookarefictionalandanyresemblancetopersonslivingordeadispurelycoincidental.AnOriginalGoldMedalNovel.GOLDMEDALBOOKSFawcettPublications,In...

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