The Forever Man Read online

  It was immediately apparent why the Laagi ships had the pregnant look that was so characteristic of them. The second member of the ship’s crew did not sit behind the first as in the human ships, but directly underneath the first. There was nothing between the two positions and they were close enough that even humans could have reached down, or up, as the case might be, and clasped hands with a shipmate.

  But whoever had been the pilot and gunner of this ship—if indeed that was the way the Laagi divided up the duties of the two who operated the vessel—they were now long dead, even though Jim felt that the interior of the ship still held an oxygen-bearing but unearthlike atmosphere that his body would have tolerated only with difficulty. It was a somewhat sulphurous atmosphere, as far as his sensing of it could tell him, but what less odorous gases it held beyond that he had no way of telling.

  The two operating positions in the ship were up front before an open space that was divided into open compartments which could have been bunks or storage spaces. The operating positions consisted essentially of two metallic-looking vertical rings encircling what looked like oversize golf tees. These had their base on flooring behind the rings and angled forward so that the cup of the tee-structure sat in the center of the ring, the cup itself tilted so that it sat horizontally—that is, parallel to the floor below.

  The inside of the ring was studded with what were easily recognizable as controls, buttons and small levers. On the cup itself sat something almost indescribable; what looked like a pile of hooplike rings of bone or cartilage from a quarter to a half-meter in diameter, enclosed with what might have been a dark, thin, leatherlike skin that was, however, now dried and cracked open under its own weight to show hooplike bones beneath. It was hardly possible to relate the remains of skin that rested on and hung down from the two cup-ends with any imaginable shape of living creature.

  The instruments and controls also seemed nonfunctioning. Experimentally, Jim willed some of the buttons and switches into movement, as he was used to doing with those in AndFriend, but nothing happened. The ship was dead—powerless. He was left with the enigma of what he had found, plus something else he could not identify and which he was not entirely sure he would have noticed if he had been there in the flesh.

  It was a strangeness—a purely nonphysical feeling that compounded the disgust he might have felt in a charnel house with the sadness of a graveside and a feeling of despair. Now that he had noticed it, it grew on him, mounting steadily from a whisper toward a scream in his mind; and he literally fled, in his point of view, to a position on the outside hull of the alien ship.

  Back out there, he became conscious of the fact that Mary was still calling him.

  “Jim! Can you answer me, Jim? Try to answer me if you can—make any kind of answer….”

  There was no note of desperation to be heard in her voice, but he was suddenly conscious of what it might be like for her to find herself alone in a ship, nothing of which she could control, and cut off from contact with the only other person she could possibly reach.

  “I’m sorry, Mary!” he called back. “I’m fine. I’ll be right back there. Hold on…”

  He moved his point of view back across the connecting sliver, through the robot and back into the ship. Mary’s presence seemed to him to be gaunt with tension, for all the steadiness of the voice he had heard her using.

  “Jim! What happened? What’s over there? Why didn’t you answer me—”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t realize you weren’t with me. Come to think of it, why weren’t you with me?”

  “I think I was, in a way,” she answered. “I could feel something. Something terrible. But I couldn’t seem to get you to answer.”

  “There’s what’s left of two Laagi there,” Jim said. “They and their ship must have been dead a long time. I’ll send Fingers over to break open the entry port, go in and make pictorial records of everything there. Then we’ll get away from here and look the pictures over and see if we can understand some things—”

  He broke off suddenly.

  “Now why didn’t I think of sending the robot in there in the first place?” he said. “That would’ve been the sensible thing to do, instead of cutting off a sliver to connect us—”

  He interrupted himself.

  “No, come to think of it, I’m glad I went the way I did. There’s something, a feeling I could feel there that won’t be in any pictures. I think it was what those Laagi were feeling when they were there… when they died. The record the robot’ll make won’t give us any of that and we’d never have known it was there. Didn’t you say you felt something, too?”

  “Yes,” said Mary. “Just a touch. But something… I can’t describe it.”

  “I can’t either,” said Jim. “But I’m going to try and so were you. Let’s compare notes on it and see if we can’t come up with some idea of what it felt like in our human terms.”

  While he was talking, he was already dispatching the robot to the Laagi ship. The robot, in fact, was effectively an all-tool, one of the most useful bits of equipment aboard a fighter ship. It had been originally designed merely as something that could repair damage to the ship at a time when the pilot and the gunner might be either too occupied in fighting for their lives, or wounded and incapable of making necessary repairs themselves. It was a device with a squat little barrel of a body and numerous flexible arms. The body held, in addition to its independent motive system, the innumerable tools that could be attached by it to any of the arms; it had evolved to the point where it had become the potential solution to any need by pilot or gunner for anything from food and drink to a wound needing emergency medical attention.

  It was also used by crew members to find any small thing that might have been accidentally dropped and which had rolled away out of sight into any of the tiny nooks and crannies produced by the equipment tightly crammed into the interior of the vessel.

  But none of that was on Jim’s mind now. What was concerning him at the moment was a guilty conscience at having let Mary go unanswered and unknowing while he marvelled at his discoveries aboard the Laagi ship. The fact that she had not complained about it, or acknowledged it, except by the momentary expression of the emotion in her mental voice when he once more spoke to her from back aboard AndFriend, made it worse.

  He found himself wanting her to complain, so he could excuse himself more fully. But whether she understood his reasons or not, complaining seemed to be the one thing she was absolutely refusing to do. It left Jim uncomfortable with the feeling that he was now in debt to her, and he did not see any way by which he might get out.

  On the other hand, if she thought that having him in debt to her was going to make him more likely to give in to her wishes…

  He checked himself on that thought. They had just finally got on good terms with each other and here he was starting to think in terms of an argument. The robot came back aboard with its recording job accomplished and Jim immediately phase-shifted a full light-year from the dead alien ship.

  “Look,” he said, once they had made the shift. “I didn’t mean to ignore you when I was on the Laagi ship. It was just that I was hit so hard by the differences aboard there. Also, I could hardly hear you when I was on the outside of that ship; and inside, I don’t think I was hearing you at all.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Could you move anything in the ship?”

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t try anything but the controls; I could move them—but nothing happened. No telling how long that ship’s been sitting there. You’ll see what I mean when we look at the pictures Fingers took. I’m sure that ship’s engines and everything operable about her’s been dead for a long time. What was left of the two Laagi who’d crewed her—well, as I say, you’ll see the pictures for yourself. Maybe they’ve been dead for centuries.”

  “And the other Laagi never came and got the ship, when we’re this close to their civilization centers?” she
said.

  “Maybe they couldn’t find it? Finding just one ship, even if you know its position within something like a couple of times instrument range, can be pretty rough. If this vessel was as much as a light-year out of position, their chances of finding it…”

  His voice trailed off.

  “We found it,” said Mary. “In a matter of centuries, you’d think they could do that well if they wanted to.”

  “We didn’t really find it,” said Jim. “We stumbled across it.”

  “Don’t split hairs,” said Mary. “We were looking for Laagi ships, and it’s right on the centerline. If we could stumble across it going right down the centerline, you’d think they’d be bound to find it doing the same thing. What did these Laagi look like? I know I’ll be seeing the pictures as soon as the robot gets them stored and on the screen, but what I want to hear is your personal opinion.”

  “I don’t know what they looked like,” said Jim, a little irritably. “I didn’t see them, you know. I just felt them, along with everything else about the ship. But they were sort of collapsed in on themselves, I’d say. They don’t seem to have a structured skeleton inside them, the way we do. You’ll have to look at the pictures and make up your own mind about it. Fingers, where are those pictures you just took?”

  The robot had been waiting for a specific command to show them. Its first task had been to store what it had recorded from its own memory to the ship’s memory, relating it to anything already in the ship’s memory to which it seemed pertinent. Jim could merely have “remembered,” therefore, what the robot had seen. But Mary, of course, could not do that. She would have to see the actual pictures on the screen.

  As soon as Jim spoke, the screen lit up.

  The robot had used his own exterior lights to illuminate what he was to record. To Jim, who had felt what was in the alien ship before seeing it, what he looked at now seemed garish under the bright white light in its shapes and strange colors. It was as if some maker of commercial entertainments had created a mock-up of what he had experienced directly.

  Gone—he had hardly expected it to be otherwise—was the disgust-charnel house-sadness that had seemed to touch him while he had been in the other ship. But surprisingly also gone was the sense of something built and used by aliens. Besides the impression that what he looked at was a commercial mock-up of something alien was the sense that the film merely showed the interior of a different model of fighter ship, one that could as well have been designed and built by humans.

  Because the effect of seeing it was so less than he had expected, therefore, he was taken unprepared by the wave of excitement that reached him from Mary.

  “Jim! They’re mummified. As if they’ve been there for centuries!”

  He did not say, “That’s what I just told you.” Suddenly, he was very aware of her reactions. They were a blend of fascination and a curiosity that was so profound in her that it could almost be described as ravenous.

  “Jim,” she said. “I’ve got to analyze all of this. You’ll have to order the controls for me. Tell your robot to give me, up on the screen, the results of his gas samples of the interior atmosphere first, and after that the results of the scrapings he made of every surface, and then after that the measurements and interior views of those two Laagi bodies—”

  “Wait a minute!” Jim said. “What do you mean, gas samples, scrapings, all this other stuff? A fighter ship robot—”

  “Yours was updated so I could use him as a research tool. Just do what I’m asking you to do, Jim. I’m sorry there wasn’t time to tell you everything we’d done to make my end of this trip productive. Now, first the scrapings… “

  Jim did as she said, ending up by running the ship’s artificial intelligence in calculations under her directions using values she had somehow derived from what the robot had reported, on a number of experiments Jim had never suspected it of making on the alien vessel.

  “How did you know we’d run into a derelict Laagi ship?” he asked.

  “We didn’t. This was just general purpose facility built into AndFriend, and so forth, so I could investigate anything we did run into. Would you mind holding the questions for the moment, Jim? I’m up to my ears in these calculations.”

  He gave up and simply waited her out, ordering the ship and its parts to respond to her wishes as she expressed them through him. Eventually, she came to an end of her labors.

  “Well,” she said in his mind, and he felt a note of satisfaction in her mental voice, “this tells us a lot. Only it raises more questions than it answers.”

  “Doesn’t everything about the Laagi?” said Jim sourly. But his own curiosity was getting the better of him. “What did you find out?”

  “Mainly just enough to raise more questions, as I said,” she answered. “Call up the list of values I’ll give you now, and I can show you a mock-up on the screen of what I think those two Laagi looked like when they were alive.”

  He did so, and stared with disbelief at what appeared in the tank of the screen before his control chair.

  “That?” he said.

  “Well, not exactly that,” she said. “It’s anyone’s guess whether they use vision the way we do, or a sense of smell or hearing, or communicate with sound waves. So I haven’t tried to put in eyes, a nose or a mouth; but the rest is what the calculations from evidence tell me.”

  What he saw on the screen looked, more than anything else, like a barrel set up on end and covered with a gray, wrinkled skin like elephant hide. The wrinkles indicated skin so excessive at two points near the top and another two points at the bottom, that it looked as if the Laagi must have at least double the outer covering it needed. There was a small, domelike mound in the center of the top surface of the body that could be imagined as something in the way of a head, unless it was just an unusual bunching of the excess skin.

  The whole shape sat like a barrel perched on its base in the cup of the golf-teelike chair in the center of the ring of controls around it. There was nothing about what Jim saw that indicated how the Laagi could even reach the controls in the ring, let alone make use of them to operate a spaceship capable of fighting it out with something like AndFriend.

  “What bothers me more than anything else—” said Mary, and fell silent. He could imagine her frowning at the screen, the arches of her eyebrows flattening out. The flash of imagination brought up a memory of her whole person, as he had seen her, back on Earth. Animation of her features changed her completely, he thought. If she only realized this, she could do both herself and everyone else a favor by letting her emotions show more often in her expression. Animated, she was attractive. It was almost as if she had developed the severe, unchanging cast of her features as an armor at some time, and it had become habit. Here, where that look frozen on her did not interfere with his perceptions of what she was thinking at him, he was enjoying the sight of an inner Mary Gallegher that was much more human and personal.

  “What bothers you?” he asked.

  “The neatness of it,” she said. She gave him a different set of instructions for the screen; and the gray, featureless, barrellike image was replaced by one which was a great deal smaller, sitting in the cup of the tee-shaped control seat. This smaller image consisted of a stack of bodily support members—the bones or cartilage of the Laagi body—which were all wheel-shaped with what must be strengthening, rodlike pieces dividing the interior shape of each wheel into triangular sections. There were larger wheellike members in the center of the stack, much smaller wheellike members at the top and bottom of the stack and a sort of skullcap of the same material sitting at the very top, the basis of that mound which Jim had assumed had been the alien’s head and which undoubtedly was the equivalent of the human skull itself, as a protection for the Laagi brain or its equivalent.

  “I see what you mean,” he said. “It looks almost as if those bones, or whatever they were, were stacked up for inspection. But the skin was all over the place.”

  “It c
ouldn’t very well be otherwise. There’s twice as much of it, at an estimate, as there was body to cover. But the alignment of those skeletal elements almost has to mean those Laagi were placed in the position we found them in. Or set themselves up. And if they set themselves up, why?”

  “I don’t know. But that brings me to an important question,” said Jim. “Does anything you found out give you any clue as to what killed them—or why they died?”

  “No,” she said emphatically. “Nothing, whatsoever.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” said Jim.

  At his command, the image they had been watching vanished from the screen and a series of conical, three-dimensional diagrams began to appear. “What’re you doing?” asked Mary.

  “My turn to say shut up and don’t bother me for the moment,” answered Jim. “I’m running a number of possibilities.”

  “Possibilities? Of what?” asked Mary.

  He did not answer. His mind was too busy trying to remember and cover all the variations of the problem he had begun to try out on the screen. Mary did not speak to him again. After a while he blanked the screen.

  “Ready to explain?” asked Mary.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Though actually there’s not much to tell you. I’ve been plotting possible approach routes to put that Laagi ship where we found it, and nothing much makes sense except the fact that in that ship these Laagi were traveling directly along the centerline, the way we’ve been, headed for whatever’s down-galaxy from here. If that’s what they were doing, why did they stop at just that point? Why did they die here? Or were they killed and their ship stopped?”

  “I don’t follow you,” said Mary. “Killed? By who?”

  “That’s the question,” said Jim. “And you know the only answer I can come up with? If they were killed, it was by somebody from down-galaxy doing the equivalent of coming up the centerline—or firing whatever they fired to stop the Laagi, up the centerline. If that’s so, that paradise Raoul kept talking about may have some real snakes in it. Because I don’t know of anything, and I can’t imagine anything, that would stop a Laagi fighter ship dead, kill its movement, kill its crew, and leave them all looking as if nothing had touched them.”