Read Online The Devil's Mirror by Ray Russell - Free Book Online Page A

when I am still in Moskva, I am told much about international cooperation and coexistence. But I am told also, in subtle ways, of wholesome competition, that it is socialist realism to be friends with my partner yet loving rivals. There must be a total dedication on my part, it is suggested, a healthy striving to be best —not for myself, not for vanity, but for glory of all Soviet peoples.’
    ‘Sounds kind of familiar, Vanya,’ I say.
    You also?’
    ‘Me also. What are you getting at, buddy?’
    ‘I do not know,’ he says, turning away from me. ‘I do not know what I am... getting at.’
    A long silence sets in. We just do our job. We don’t say anything we don’t absolutely have to say. But upstairs, in the old headbone department, each of us can almost hear the other guy’s wheels just a-clickin’ away: each of us knows that his survival, his own personal survival, depends on team work—up to a critical point, that is, the exact moment of which neither of us has figured out yet. At any time before that point, neither of us can destroy the other without destroying his own self. But we blow, both of us, that when that critical moment comes—in the next hour, or the next day, before we land on the Moon or after—with cold clean scientific ruthlessness (made acceptable, you dig, by the knowledge that there’s no point in both of us cashing in), one of us will decide that the other is suddenly expendable. Clickety-click. Those wheels keep turning.
    Sleep? Forget it.
    So it’s a couple of tail-dragging travellers who set down on that chunk of green cheese right on schedule, just sixty-five hours after lift-off from Earth. The blasts from our new style vernier rockets are like columns of fire, burning holes in the Moon as they pinpoint us gently down to the surface. We open the hatch. Vanya steps aside and waves me ahead. I hang back, and we do the old ‘After you’ routine. Neither of us wants to turn his back on the other. Finally, Vanya climbs out of the hatch and becomes the first human being to set foot on the Moon. He whips around right away, of course, and watches me as I follow close behind him.
    I won’t go into all the jazz about the weird sensation of Earth-minus gravity, and the way that moon-stuff crunches soundlessly under your boots—you’ll get all that in the official log tape, and besides, you’ve seen it in old movies. But the thing you don’t get in the log and the movies, the thing you’ll never get unless you stand up there yourself with your body one-sixth Earthweight and nothing, not even air, between you and the stars, and see old Earth hanging like a big dinnerplate in the black sky, is that feeling of... hell, I don’t know what to call it. Anything you’ve ever been, any ego you ever had, any high and mighty opinion you ever had of yourself, is all wiped away by a big eraser, and you’re naked, you’re something else, you’re not even you anymore, you’re very small and very big at the same time, you’re humble and glad about it, you’re brand new, clean, purged, free, fresh, reborn.
    Vanya feels that way, too, I can tell. I can tell by the look on his face through the helmet. Well, we snap our pictures and dig up our samples and tape our notes. It doesn’t take very long, we’re not supposed to stay there very long, and then it’s time for us—for one of us—to climb back in the bucket and lift-off for home sweet home. That means it’s zero hour, the moment of truth, time to separate the men from the boys.
    We face each other. I hear him over the helmet radio, not saying anything, just breathing. I don’t know how long we just stand there.
    ‘Buddy,’ I say. Just that, no more. Then, ‘Buddy, we can’t let them do this to us. We can’t let them... manipulate us like this. We can’t play into their stinking hands.’
    ‘I do not know what you mean, Johngenry.’
    The hell you don’t. You almost said it yourself, out there in deep space, when you said