The Forever Man Page 10

  “Oh, he told you that, did he? Damn him!” said Mary. “This is one thing he’s going to get straight right from the beginning. Where are you now?”

  “Still at lunch in the Officers’ Club. At the phones. I left him at the table and told him I had to go look for a message for me at the front desk.”

  “Good. When you get back to the table, tell Amos they also told you there was a message for him to call me.”

  “…I’ll do that.”

  “Fine. And do what you want this afternoon. That’s from me!”

  “Thanks,” said Jim.

  Mary broke the connection and he went back to Neiss.

  “Oh, by the way,” he said, sitting down. “There was a message there for you, too. You’re to call Mary at the lab, immediately.”

  “Oh my God!” said Neiss, jumping to his feet. “Something wrong with the equipment? Did she say?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jim innocently. “There was just the message to call her.”

  Neiss went out of the dining room literally at a run. When he returned he was not exactly scowling, but he was not happy.

  “It looks like we’ll have to pat off those tests on you this afternoon after all,” he said abruptly, sitting down again.

  “Ah,” said Jim.

  Amos looked at him. It was not a friendly look, but the unfriendliness was impersonal, the way a bear stung by a deer fly will turn and clout the bear eating blueberries next to him.

  They began in earnest the next day. Apparently, Neiss needed, or at least wanted, a complete physical report made on Jim by his own staff. He was not interested when Jim volunteered the information, as he did once, that most of these scans and examination of physical samples from him merely duplicated what the Medical Section of the Base kept on all Frontier pilots, active or inactive. The first few days were given completely over to simply testing Jim. If they tested Mary equally, they did it somewhere else and with a different team. Neiss’s staff seemed fully occupied with Jim.

  But once the testing was over, they got down to work. To Jim’s surprise, this turned out to be the same old business of rehearsing what had been said by Penard, Mary and himself on the mission to convoy Penard home. Only this time, when Jim spoke his own words as they had been taped, Mary was there and also spoke hers. The only voice that was not live was that of Raoul.

  Jim had no great objection to this, now that he was close to being reunited with AndFriend. But he did object—without success—when Amos began a different stage of work in which he and his staff occupied themselves with Jim alone, and used drugs. They were, apparently, now that they had finished building a physical profile of him, engaged in building a mental one.

  This consisted of electrically probing his brain cells for reflexes and memories, and of searching his unconscious, particularly his dream patterns. Jim found himself hating the thought that someone like Amos had access to his mind and could see the evidence of his love for AndFriend and space. Also, the business of using the drugs was itself unpleasant. Jim did not like pills, and being under their influence. He liked injectable chemicals even less; and many of the unnamed substances Amos’s staff put into his bloodstream or flesh had side effects that clouded his mind or disorganized his body for up to twenty-four hours—and on rare occasions, even longer.

  He had been allowed an hour and a half in the morning by Mary for his physical conditioning, plus as much of his free time as he wanted to use for it. The latter allowance was really the best, because Mary was adamant, even in the face of disagreement by Mollen, against the idea of working Jim any more than an ordinary eight hours a day. And evidently she had the final say in such matters, for Jim found himself turned loose at no later than five o’clock every evening.

  He still could not leave the Base without special permission, which was just as hard to come by. But he had, if he wanted, enough evening hours to satisfy anyone, as he thought. The only drawbacks were the side effects of the drugs, which sometimes made him unable or unwilling to exercise in the evening hours as usual, plus something he had not expected.

  That was that it was he, now, who hated to waste the hours exercising. He no longer wanted to kill time; he wanted to get a particular task done as swiftly as possible, and that particular task was the business of finishing the training that Mary, Mollen and the rest required of him.

  The shape of the work was beginning to become apparent to him. He was, indeed, beginning to feel closer to Penard every day. It was not so much that he was establishing an identity with the mind of the man in La Chasse Gallerie—to whose audible wanderings, received from a voice transmitter that had been set up in place of the one that no longer existed in the torn ruins of the fighter ship, they now let him listen regularly. It was more as if it was beginning to be that he and Raoul were alone together in a universe of other people who did not understand; and it seemed to him, from time to time, that he comprehended things in what Raoul said of which none of the others listening were aware and for which there were no words.

  Chapter 8

  She liked walnuts, sleeping late in the morning, almost any chicken dish, horseback riding poetry, candlelight, Mozart and Prokofiev among classical composers, Degas and Chagall among classical painters—also the pointillist painters in general. She did not like green peppers, steak (much), most abstract art, music playing while she worked—or any distraction, however slight, from the task at hand—and any failure to get things correct.

  She also, Jim thought, was in love with Raoul but recognized the emotion as a hopeless one. If she was in love, it was with the image of a man she had largely fashioned for herself from the sound of his voice and the choice of the poetry he quoted. All these understandings came to Jim little by little as he and Mary worked together, or were worked together under the direction and treatments of the staff of Amos. They came not as something directly sought for by Mary, Amos, or even by himself, but as inevitable bits of knowledge unavoidably attached to information about her understanding of Penard and her own field of work—all of which it was necessary that he come to know.

  The result was that somewhere along in the process he found he had completely ceased to dislike her. He still felt no great kinship for her, but there was a sympathy for her in him that he would not have thought possible before he staged the sit-in in Mollen’s outer office.

  What she had deduced about him he had no idea and felt that he would rather not know. At least, he felt he could trust her to keep the information to herself, as he would keep the information he had gained about her to himself.

  It was a silent pact that both recognized and which drew them closer together. Another cause for a bond between them grew from their habit of having lunch together—just the two of them. The announced reason for this, by Mary, was so she could continue briefing Jim on some of the matters that were secret even from Amos and his staff. The unofficial reason, clearly understood by Jim, was to give them both a break from the company of Neiss, who, though he probably could not help it seemed to have an irritating effect on anyone with whom he came in contact.

  This personality quirk in Neiss was one of the topics they talked about, one day in the third week of their lunching together in Mary’s quarters, which were spacious enough, and evidently designed to be able to, hold official entertainment functions.

  “…All he has to do,” said Mary, “is stop pushing people around for five minutes. Give them a chance to relax.”

  “He doesn’t dare, I think,” said Jim. “I’ll bet he’d scare himself to death if he didn’t keep the pressure on himself, as well as on everybody else, all the time. My guess is he doesn’t feel safe unless he’s being aggressive.”

  “A little aggressiveness is all to the good in just about everyone,” said Mary. “A little more than a little, you can put up with. But he’ll wear you down, just defending yourself.”

  “Unless he wears himself down first,” said Jim. “You’re the one who gets the brunt of it.”

  �
�Because I’m a woman,” said Mary moodily.

  “Because you’re his superior,” said Jim. “I think it’s more than that, than your being a woman.”

  “Because I’m a woman and his superior,” said Mary. “One compounds the other as far as he’s concerned. But you seem to be able to disarm him, almost. He picks on you, but only as if from a sense of duty.”

  “I let a lot of what he does bounce off. That robs him of the emotional reward, and tires him out,” said Jim. “You can exhaust yourself a lot faster punching hard at thin air than you can punching something solid.”

  “And it doesn’t take it out of you?” She looked keenly across the, small table between them.

  “A little,” said Jim. They were getting uncomfortably close to the fact that he would put up with anything to get back into space, even if the anything consisted of a platoon of Amos Neisses taking turns working him over. He suspected Mary knew this, just as he had come to know things about her.

  “When can I see AndFriend again?” he asked.

  “Taking a page from Amos’s book, are you?” Mary deliberately helped herself from a dish on the table, offered it to him, then pulled it back. “That’s right, you don’t like broccoli.”

  “When can I—”

  “You can’t, not now or for some time to come,” said Mary flatly. “There’re reasons. I can’t tell you why you can’t. I’m sorry. If there weren’t reasons, you could see her this minute.”

  “What do you want from me?” Jim heard the weariness in his own voice. “I know everything Raoul said forward and backward. I know everything you said, and I said, after we picked up the Chasse Gallerie. I know as much about what you’d want done with anything I might find as you do, yourself. When does this stupid business of drug, drug, drug and question, question, question, stop?”

  “You love that ship,” said Mary.

  “You know that already,” Jim answered.

  “Would you die for her?”

  The question caught Jim unprepared. He floundered in silence for a moment.

  “Die for her?” he echoed finally. “If you mean if some idiot was trying to blow her up or some such thing, would I take a risk to try to stop him? Sure, I would! But how do you die for a ship? There isn’t any way to do anything like that.”

  Mary nodded. Which, Jim thought, was no kind of answer at all.

  “Well, tell me!” he said. “Is there some sort of danger to AndFriend? What’re you talking about?”

  “No. And I won’t talk about it anymore, either,” she said. “I’ve got your answer, and for any more information, you’re going to have to wait.”

  And, true to her word, she refused to say any more on the subject.

  That one question of hers, however, had the effect of unlocking the door to the closet of Jim’s anxieties all over again. For some time he had been conscious of a growing, nagging discomfort. He had assumed when Mollen had told him that he was to be given a chance to get back into space that it would be only a matter of time before he was there. And he had assumed after being let in to see AndFriend that first morning with Mollen and Mary that from this point on he would no longer be refused access to the ship.

  But he had been. He had not been let inside the tent that hid her, since. Gradually, in consequence, he had begun to slip back into the state of mind he had been in before he sat down in Mollen’s outer office and refused to budge; only now the state was worse because the effects of the drugs they were always pumping into him made him imagine and dream more vividly than ever.

  His nightmares began to return. His appetite went, then his sleep began to suffer; and this time all his running, swimming and other activity brought him no relief. A worry about AndFriend grew in the back of his mind and stayed with him, awake and asleep.

  He began to fumble his answers and forget things during the sessions with Mary and Neiss’s crew. A new fear awoke in him and grew. It was a fear that somehow he had become unfit, or was in the process of becoming unfit to take a ship like AndFriend into space—let alone beyond the Frontier.

  He got into a blazing argument one lunchtime with Mary in her quarters, as a result.

  “Of course I’m not doing well!” he shouted at her. “I had about three hours of real sleep last night. That was all. If you’d let me at AndFriend, or at least give me some idea of what all this is about, maybe I could sleep nights. You and Neiss—yes, and Mollen, too—are deliberately wrecking me in the name of trying to build me into something. What? And why? Goddamn it, tell me why! Tell me!”

  He heard himself repeating the words like a ten-year-old in a tantrum and with a great effort made himself stop. Mary was sitting across the table looking at him.

  “And don’t look at me like that!” he broke out all over again. “What’s the use of looking at me as if you feel sorry for me, when you’re the one who’s putting me through it? I went a year —almost a year—before you even got me into this present crazy program. We’ve been at it three months, and I’m worse off than ever, and I can’t see where you’ve got a thing from me to pay for it.”

  He was shaking, shaking all over.

  “Either let me in on what’s up or turn me loose,” he said. “One way or another.”

  “And what would you do if we turned you lame?’ asked Mary softly.

  “Probably blow my brains out!” He slumped in his chair. “How do I know what I’d do? I don’t know anything anymore. I hardly know who I am, and in a couple more weeks or months I won’t even know that!”

  He stopped talking. Mary said nothing; they eat in silence, while the fury gradually drained out of him and the shaking slowed into stillness.

  “I know what we’re putting you through,” said Mary at last, gently. “I know it. Louis Mollen knows it, and we both hate it. Amos doesn’t hate it, of course. He’s not capable of seeing you as anything but a lab animal. But Louis and I—you may not believe this, but it’s the truth—have been suffering right along with you from the start. Believe me, we’re doing this because we’ve got no choice. Can you believe that?”

  “Not really,” he said dully. “It’s gone on too long.”

  “See if you believe this, then,” she said, “and in telling it to you, I’m breaking security, because I’m telling you more than you realize. It’s been necessary to bring you right up to the breaking point—and you haven’t broken easily. But the human mind can only take so much… and now I think you’ve had it.”

  He stared at her. It was more nonsense.

  “What I’m saying is, hang on a little longer. Hang on to your sanity. It won’t be long, now.”

  He did not know whether to believe her or not; but in fact, there was no place else for him to go, nothing else for him to do but keep on with her, with Neiss and the whole business. But it not only continued as if she had never given him any promise of the fact they were nearing an end, at all; it got worse.

  The drugs they were using in the lab sessions now seemed to leave him foggy-minded and at least a little disoriented all the time. So that the very days themselves ceased to exist separately, but strung themselves together in a long chain of links, each link exactly like and part of, the link preceding and the one following.

  As a result, he hardly reacted when the whole process transferred location. He, Mary, Neiss and his staff were all loaded aboard one of the big command ships scheduled to go on post and phase-shifted out to the Frontier.

  The last week’s lack of sleep and drug-disorientation had been particularly hard on him—or perhaps he was beginning to be weakened, Jim thought, to the point where what would ordinarily not bother him, bothered him noticeably. Whatever the reason, he who had never had shift-sickness during all his time in space, was thrown into a paroxysm of nausea by the shift out to the Frontier. The attack was bad enough so that they had been on station at the Frontier for at least a couple of hours before he was able to get up out of his bed and leave the cabin. And Mary had told him to come to the bridge as soon as they we
re on station.

  He still felt a steady, low-level sickness in the pit of his stomach; and both his vision and his balance were not normal. As a result, even under the ship’s artificial gravity that was less than nine-tenths of Earth’s, it took effort on his part to make the trip up five levels and along half the length of the vessel to get to the bridge. His legs gave at the knees with weakness and all his senses were distorted, so that even though he knew it was not physically so, he felt as if the deck slanted to either the right or left under his feet as he walked. Any attempt to adjust to a slant to the right found him feeling as if the floor now tilted left; and the ship-green walls on either side of him seemed to lean with their tops either inward or outward from him.

  But he made it, and the shipman on guard duty at the port giving entrance to the bridge examined his credentials and then let him through. He stepped unsteadily into a room less than five paces from back to front but running the full width of the ship. Two multi-instrumented control positions, both of them empty as the ship was now holding station and on auto-direction, were to his right and left, perhaps four full meters apart and right up against the vision screen that ran the full length of the forward wall.

  This vision screen displayed a number of “windows.” The full left half of it was a single window that looked across the Frontier into the Sector guarded by the fighter ships under this ship’s command. The right half of the screen was displaying a number of windows showing close-ups of the fighter ships in the Wings under command here, some of them, Jim knew, more than five light-years distant from where he stood.

  A command officer of the ship stood before the large left segment of the screen, watching. A hand-control in his right palm blinked with code lights from the various instruments at the compositions, and his hand-control was now emitting a steady buzzing that warned of Laagi ships coming out toward this sector, though they were evidently still too far off to be shown in the screen.

  The buzzing ground away irritatingly on Jim’s eardrums, and the red coveralls uniform of the command officer seemed unnaturally garish against the green of the walls and the black of the screen with its thick sprinkling of starlights. In fact, everything in the command room, seen with his present distortion of vision, seemed to stand out in ugly fashion from everything else there, as if an emphasized three-dimensional space was in effect. There was an unnaturalness about all of it; and the buzzing of the hand-control, irritatingly, sounded far louder than it should have in Jim’s ears.