“No.”
“It does. Nobody knows why.
She turned to face him and he caught her hands. They were wet and cold, stirring ghastly memories far back in his mind. He kissed the chilled fingers, making his own private penance.
“Don’t do that.” She tried to pull her hands away, but he tightened his grip.
“Kate,” he said urgently. “I lost you nine years ago — but you lost something, too. John doesn’t love you, and I do. It’s as simple as that.”
“It isn’t safe to make snap judgments about John.”
“For me it’s safe. But just look at the facts — he went off to work this morning as if nothing had happened. Leaving us alone. Do you think I’d leave you alone with a declared rival? I’d…” Breton left the sentence unfinished. He had been going to say he would kill his rival first.
“That was John acting hurt. He tries mental judo, you know. If you push, be pulls. If you pull, he pushes.”
Kate was speaking quickly, in desperation, as Breton drew her to him. He slid his fingers gently up the fluted back of her neck, through the hair and gripped her head, turning her face to him. She resisted for a few seconds, then — all at once — came to him with mouth wide open. Breton kept his eyes open during that first kiss, trying to imprint the moment on his mind, to raise it beyond time itself.
Later, as they lay in the parchment-colored light of the shuttered bedroom, Breton stared at the ceiling in wonderment.
He put his hand on the cool skin of Kate’s thigh. “How do you feel?”
“All right.” Her voice was sleepy, remote.
Breton nodded, looking at the room through his brand- new eyes. The baffled sunlight had a yellowed, Mediterranean quality about it, restful yet absolutely clear. And it revealed no flaws in his Time B universe. A strangely relevant fragment from. an old poem drifted into his mind.
The painted sceneries recall Such toil as Canaletto spent To give each brick upon each wall Its due partition of cement.
He raised himself on one elbow and looked down at Kate. “My name should have been Canaletto,” he said.
She stared up at him, half-smiling, then turned her face away and he knew she was thinking about John. Breton sank down on his pillow, absentmindedly sliding a finger beneath the strap of his watch to touch the hidden lump of the chronomotor module buried beneath his skin. John Breton was the one flaw in the Time B universe.
But that state of affairs was strictly temporary.
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
