But not for Andy Brooks. Yet there was no turning back now. Murder was also an infringement of Class-A Law—but that might be considered an accident; anyone could fall from a balcony, or jump.
Andy thought, briefly, of his wife. Very briefly. She was dead. It didn't seem very important whether she was dead or not. She had stood in his way; that had been important. There had never been anything between them anyway but a silent bitter futile hatred for each other's unattractiveness. She loved Clifford Marlowe, the great Actor; he loved Glora Delar, the Actress. No mortal could compare with either of them; no one felt any emotional regard for anyone else. Emotion was confined to the Sensory Shows. A time for emotion and dreaming and wish-fulfillment; a time for Working—the two never got mixed up. That's what Personology had told him.
Brooks was trying to figure out what he would do when the rocket hit the Moon, when it dropped into the depth of Theophilus' 18,000 foot, 65 mile-wide crater and into the City of Stars. He was concentrating on that when the bulkhead door began to open.
Brooks gnawed at his lips as he crouched behind the door. The Security Guard entered, checking probably for possible weight shift. Holstered to the belt of his gray uniform was a neurotube and a meson blastgun. The continuing cold war with the Eastern Alliance necessitated constant preparedness against possible espionage. That's what Personology said.
As the Guard turned to exit, he saw Brooks. His eyes widened remarkably. His hands moved out as though questioning Brooks' reality. Without thinking, Brooks leaped, his breath breaking harshly. The Guard grabbed wildly at Brooks' wrist and they fell back, scrambling and grunting. The fall broke the Guard's hold; Brooks slammed the drill against the Guard's chest and squeezed the trigger release.
The gentle whir of the drill was drowned by the Guard's short, incredulous scream of pain. Blood spilled over the drill and ran down Brooks' arm as the Guard rolled lifelessly against the wall, trembled slightly with the dropping, decelerating motion of the rocket.
Brooks leaned against the wall. The silence was vast. He looked at his fingers as he sensed the rocket settling. It was done, really done now; he could not change it back. His wife's body falling into the blackness had seemed a kind of unreal thing, but this was horribly real. The Guard would never worry any more about dreams, or about reality, either. Maybe he was luckier than most, maybe luckier than Andy Brooks, the mechanic who had stopped machinery no mechanic could repair.
This was murder for which Andy would pay, but that didn't matter. He had broken a Class-A Law when he boarded the moon rocket. There were no degrees of guilt. The thought gave him a kind of freedom inside, a sudden snapping of strings and singing of breaking wires.
He took the neurotube from the Guard. It did things to the nervous system, including paralysis and blackout. Its sustained use could cause death. He didn't take the meson blastgun; it was too lethal, and he was afraid of it. He slipped along the grillmesh corridor and crouched outside the door into the pilot's cage. He stared at the pilot's back, past the pilot into the view screen. The Moon was as big as Earth below, sharp angles of light and shadow, gigantic craters and pools of glaring frozen lava.