“How do you want me to talk about it?”
Hawks answered rapidly.
A vein bulged down the center of his forehead.
“Do you want me to talk about what we’re here to do,
or do you want me to say something else?
Are you going to argue morality with me?
Are you going to say that,
duplicate man or no duplicate man,
a man dies on the Moon and makes me no less a murderer?
Do you want to take me to court and from there to a gas chamber?
Do you want to look in the law books
and see what penalties apply to the repeated crime of systematically driving men insane?
Will that help us here?
Will it smooth the way?
“Go to the Moon, Barker.
Die.
And if you do, in fact, find that you love Death as feverishly as you’ve courted her,
then, just perhaps,
you’ll be the first man to come back in condition to claim revenge on me!”
He clutched the edge of the opened chest plate and slammed it shut.
He held himself up with the flats of his palms on it
and leaned down and his face was directly over Barker’s faceplate opening.
“But before you do,
you’ll tell me how I can usefully do it to you again.”
– Algis Budrys –
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Cover detail: Richard Powers did a remarkable job of capturing the essence of the novel’s plot within a single painting.
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Here’s the another venue of Rogue Moon: The December, 1960, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Mel Hunter’s whimsical robot, here seen amusing himself (itself?) with wind-up dolls of people-in-pajamas, appeared on a number of TMFSF covers.
