The Forever Man Read online

  “The same situation could also be an argument that nobody from down-galaxy killed the Laagi.”

  “Then why are they dead? Why is their ship still here—why didn’t other Laagi come and get it and the dead bodies of their own people? What it all adds up to is a very uneasy feeling in me that somewhere beyond where that dead ship floats there may be a civilization that could swat us the way we’d get rid of a fly, and who don’t like visitors. Accordingly, I’ve been looking at ways we could explore around such a civilization’s territory without making the mistake of moving too far in on it; just so we, too, don’t end up as neat piles of skin and bones.”

  “We can’t,” said Mary. “Remember? Our skins and bones are back on Earth, being kept alive as part of live bodies waiting for us to come back to them.”

  “It was a figure of speech,” said Jim. “In any case, AndFriend can be killed, the way that Laagi ship was. I mean she can be reduced at least to a gas cloud of her component atoms; and if she is, what happens to you and me, the essential you and me? Do we disperse with the gas or do we simply float forever in the interstellar void?”

  “All right,” said Mary, “what you’re saying is, it may be dangerous down-galaxy; and you want to go out from the centerline and probe for the dimensions of any danger that might be there.”

  “Right. And we start by finding another derelict Laagi ship, if there are any. In other words, we’ll lay back from a position level with that dead ship in relation to the centerline while moving outwards from the centerline and carefully probing ahead with the instruments, to see what we find.”

  “Great,” said Mary.

  “I’m serious!” he retorted.

  “So am I,” said Mary; and he realized there was indeed nothing sarcastic or sardonic about the tone of voice he felt from her. “I think it’s a fine idea, Jim.”

  “Well… good then,” he said, touched with embarrassment. “Here we go.”

  He began to shift AndFriend out from the centerline, once more in phase-jumps that were just within the limits of the distance at which her instruments could recognize the presence of another ship. Time went by.

  “Damn! Look!” he said suddenly. “Right out there at the instrument limit! It looks like another ship.”

  It was another ship, exactly like the one they had examined before, headed down-galaxy, and showing no sign of life aboard as they approached it. When they came within a hundred meters, Jim sent the robot across.

  The pictures it brought back showed no important difference from what they had both seen in the pictorial record of the first derelict.

  “It tells us one thing, though,” commented Mary as they were looking at the scene displayed in the tank of AndFriend’s main screen. “What happened to this one must have been close in time to what happened on the other ship. The two Laagi aboard here are also decomposed to skin and skeletons.”

  “Maybe they decompose faster than humans,” said Jim. “How long does it take the human body to turn into nothing but skin and bones?”

  “I don’t know. It’d depend on conditions, I suppose,” answered Mary. “But these bodies have been dead long enough for all internal soft material—flesh, muscles, tendons, organs, to decay and end up as either dust, or part of the captive atmosphere of the ship. That’s got to be a very long time, unless you’re right and the Laagi decompose a lot faster than we do. And I don’t think that’s so.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the samples your robot brought back showed evidence of oxidation, not only in the material left from the soft parts of the bodies, but in the scrapings of metals and other materials from parts of the ship. That means that their atmosphere, like ours, has to have some oxygen in it—though how much is a question. Let’s look farther out and see if we can find a ship with bodies that haven’t decayed so much.”

  Jim felt the emotional equivalent of a shudder.

  “It’s a ghoulish business,” he said. Part of his mind was equating these long-dead Laagi with human pilots he had known who had never come back.

  They searched outward, and in the next hundred hours of ship’s time, they found seven more Laagi ships, all pointed down-galaxy, all with nothing left of their crews but skin and rigid interior body parts.

  “And they’re all on a line,” said Jim, “all level with each other, pointing down-galaxy. What gets me is why they were all killed at this distance from Center and why we can go up alongside them, this way—theoretically as far into the unknown enemy’s territory as they did—and not even feel or see anything dangerous.”

  “Maybe the enemy was here once, but now it’s gone,” said Mary.

  He had found that little by little he had been building a mental image of her from his memory of what she looked like. In the process his imagination had made her look a good deal less severe. It also made their mental conversations more pleasant. It was much easier, he found, not to take offense from the image in his imagination than it had been from the real Mary. Consequently, he answered this last suggestion more tolerantly than he might have if the two of them had been inhabiting AndFriend in their proper bodies.

  “Then we’re back against the question of why their own people haven’t come and collected them,” he said.

  “There could be good reasons from their point of view, that humans wouldn’t understand,” Mary answered. “There could even be reasons we might. Maybe they left them here to commemorate something? A battle—”

  “It was no battle these ships died in, or their crews,” Jim said.

  The sudden hoot of a proximity alarm came hard on the heels of his words. He shifted the view in the screen suddenly to show the space up-galaxy behind them.

  “Oops,” he said. But the lightness of the word did not match the emotion coloring it.

  The instruments showed five bright dots with halos, coming at AndFriend from five different directions, marking out a half-globe of space up-galaxy at the limit of the instruments’ views. A half-globe with flat and open side down-galaxy only.

  “Laagi?” asked Mary.

  “Who else could they be?” Jim considered the screen bleakly. “It crossed my mind they might pick us up on instruments, when we started examining these dead ships of theirs. If there’s another, enemy civilization down-galaxy, they’d not let their frontier with it go unmonitored. But, idiot that I was, I didn’t worry enough about Laagi observers. I actually forgot about that danger—and that’s what being all by yourself with a lot of empty space around can do for your sense of alertness.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Shift out of here—a long jump. A long, long jump; so far they’ll need ten years to look through all the space I could have gone into.”

  The Laagi vessels were closing fast, in ordinary drive at accelerations that must be close to what their pilots could stand. They could reach AndFriend in minutes now of her interior ship’s time. Unexpectedly, he heard words from Mary that made no sense at all.

  “I’m sorry, Jim,” he heard her saying. “I’m really very, very sorry…”

  Chapter 15

  He was lying on a flat surface.

  He was under gravity. He was landed.

  Two great, flat hoops, edge-down, of metal, or at least of something that shone like polished steel, were anchored in the hard surface on which AndFriend lay and curved over her, at a third of her length in from each end of her. The hoops were five meters wide and narrow, but with their edges that faced down toward AndFriend narrowing to a few microns of thickness, so that they were like enclosing, curved knives ready to slice her open if she should try to lift.

  In one wild reflex he flung his orders at the phase-drive engines, ordering them to phase-shift immediately, shift a full five light-years away, at once.

  Nothing happened. The control studs that should have depressed themselves on the com-section in front of his empty control chair did not stir. AndFriend did not stir.

  He threw all his will, all his longing to escape
into a command for the ship to phase-shift; and, when she continued to stay where she was, kept pushing against nothingness, driving, willing AndFriend to shift to safety.

  And still nothing happened.

  “No!” his mind cried

  It was a long, drawn-out cry, like the howl of a trapped animal. Dimly he was aware of Mary trying to speak to him.

  “I can’t move her!” he shouted voicelessly at Mary. “What’s wrong? Where are we? How’d the Laagi do this? How’d they get us here? What happened? What’s happened to me?”

  “… Jim, don’t,” Mary was saying to him.. “Jim, don’t fight like that. Please. It won’t help and you’ll only hurt yourself more. There’s nothing you can do. You can’t move AndFriend now. The Laagi think they have us like they had Raoul—only they didn’t try to anchor him down; and we’ve just got to stay put, for a while at least.”

  Like a trapped animal crouching in the cage that held him prisoner, he snarled at her.

  “What happened? What did they do to me?”

  “The Laagi didn’t do anything, Jim. Only bring us in and try to lock us down here with those arcs they’ve set up over AndFriend. I’m so sorry, Jim, but I had to. It wasn’t them who stopped you from getting away from them, and it’s not them that’s keeping you from shifting clear now. It was me.”

  “You?” He raged at her. “You? Have you gone crazy, letting them make prisoners of us?”

  “No, Jim. Please. Listen. This was something I had to do. It was planned this way from the start, if it looked like the Laagi might capture us the way they captured Raoul. It was something more important than anything else, if we could find out more about them and then try to bring the information back…”

  “You just gave them AndFriend? You gave them me? Without warning? Without asking? How did you knock me out? What’s happened to me that I can’t move her?”

  It was the third time he had been handled like someone untrustworthy, and it was the limit.

  “Oh, Jim!” It was as impossible as the situation they were in now that he could feel from Mary Gallegher an emotion that was the equivalent of tears. But it was so. “It wasn’t even Louis who decided to do this; it was the people who give him orders. The only way they agreed to this expedition was if our primary mission was to bring back information about the Laagi.”

  “What did you do to me?” He hated her now and knew she was feeling that hate. “How could you come between me and AndFriend like this?”

  “Jim, try to understand, please… ” she said. “I haven’t come between you and AndFriend. It was just that, during one of the sessions when we had you under hypnosis near the end, you were implanted with a command that could make you unable to use your ability to do anything with her. It was just as if we’d told you about a command that could make one of your arms paralyzed and useless. We couldn’t risk you doing what we knew you’d do if we saw something like those Laagi ships coming at us.”

  “I was going to save us, that’s all!” he said fiercely.

  “Yes, and that’s what we didn’t want happening. We needed to let ourselves be captured so that we’d finally have a chance to see the Laagi and understand their civilization, and how they work and why they fight us so—”

  “Nevermind that. I don’t remember a thing after I said I was going to shift out of danger. Was that command of yours supposed to knock me out, too?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes. Jim, it had to. It was the only safe way. Then I had another command, the one I used just now, once we were safely captured, to bring you back awake again, but still not able to move AndFriend.”

  “Safely captured!” he said savagely. “That’s a little bit of a contradiction, isn’t it?”

  “But we can get away when we want—when we’ve learned what we came here to learn,” she said. “Once you’re able to move AndFriend again, you can shift right out from under those knives. The Laagi did just what we expected. When they didn’t find anybody aboard us, they thought we were a derelict. Just as they thought La Chasse Gallerie was a derelict, except that later on she took off under Raoul’s power and escaped from them. But they’re only expecting that this ship has something automatic about it that doesn’t require it to have a pilot to use ordinary drive, and that’s what the arcs over us are there to stop happening. They don’t realize that we’re here and a part of the ship, and that you can phase-shift right out from under this kind of restraint once you’re able to move.”

  “Once I’m able to move,” he echoed grimly, mockingly. “Once you take my handcuffs off… which’ll be when you’ve seen enough of the Laagi, which’ll be when you’re satisfied. I’ve got no say in the matter, have I—for all your saying you’re so sorry about doing this? You want to prove you’re really sorry? Turn me loose now and let me have a choice about whether we stay or go!”

  “I can’t!” she said. “I can’t, Jim!”

  “You won’t—that’s what you mean. You don’t trust me not to take off the minute you let me go,” he said. “You and the general didn’t trust me enough to tell me I’d be going into space as a ship rather than a man, you didn’t trust me enough to tell me you bought this trip from the higher-ups by promising to let the Laagi capture us if the chance came up. Now you won’t trust me with control of the phase-shift equipment aboard my own ship. Let me tell you something, lady. You’re either going to have to trust your partner, or you’re never going to get back to Earth with anything you learn about the Laagi. And furthermore, I’m going to take back control of myself, the ship, you, and everything else, as soon as I can.”

  “If we can find out what we need to learn about the Laagi,” she said unhappily, “it won’t matter, then. But I can’t turn you loose, Jim. You just gave the reason yourself.”

  “That’s right. But while you study the Laagi—and I leave that all to you—as I say I’m going to be doing my damnedest to find some way around this lock you’ve got on me. And what do you want to bet I don’t find one?”

  “Even if you do,” she said, “Jim, please, think before you take us away from here. We’ve got a chance to learn something we’ve needed to know for nearly two hundred years. It could save no one knows how many lives and ships. It could even possibly save our whole race. There’s no way of telling how much it’s worth to study the Laagi up close like this.”

  He said nothing. The anger in him was like something solid and hard—an anvil upon which he was hammering out thoughts of escape and vengeance.

  They were together in silence for a somewhat considerable stretch of time, possibly a few hours, possibly much longer, during which Jim paid attention to nothing beyond AndFriend’s interior, and even that he was conscious of only with the periphery of his mind. Events and actions had become largely subjective to his attention as a bodiless mind. Just now he was lost in himself, thinking furiously of everything he had ever read or heard concerning hypnosis, hoping to recall something that would have to do with someone freeing himself or herself from just such a command as Mary had acknowledged putting upon him.

  But nothing came out of his memory that was at all helpful. He was still going around and around over what little he knew about the subject when there was an unexpected interruption. The entry port swung outward as the inner door of the airlock between port and door swung open. A breeze of outside atmosphere came into the ship, which, last Jim remembered, had lost its atmosphere with the coming and going of the ship’s robot in space. The air was accompanied by a creature a little more than a meter in height and looking like a cross between a small, bent old man wearing a shell bulging outward on his back, and a snail walking—not on a snail’s normal, single footpad, but on two very short, thick legs that ended not in feet, but what looked like pads of heavy skin six or eight millimeters in thickness.

  The head was like the head of a turtle, with two very small but very bright, black eyes that were closely side by side and facing forward. They seemed, however, to be able to move about considerably as the skin h
olding them moved; because the first thing the figure did on entering was to pause and direct one eye forward in the ship, while the other eye moved to look toward the back of AndFriend’s interior. At the same time a globe the size of a tennis ball that was floating in the air just above the creature’s head came alight with a brilliant, yellow illumination that would have made the interior painfully bright if Jim and Mary had been using human eyes to see it with.

  The same light made it clear that the shell of the creature was a light tan mottled with irregular black patches, the visible parts of the soft body were dark brown, and the soles of the feet—it appeared from their edges—were a bright red. A second later half a dozen tentacles of the same red color whipped out from under the top edge of the shell, between where the creature’s shoulders would be if it had shoulders under there. These tentacles probed the air as if testing the atmosphere.

  “Now, what’s this?” he said to Mary, startled for the moment into forgetting his anger against her.

  “One of the local species that seems to coexist with the Laagi,” answered Mary. “They’re workers. This one comes about once a week to clean us up.”

  “Clean us up?”

  “I know,” said Mary. “There’s nothing here that really needs cleaning. But it comes anyway.”

  “What’s it called?” asked Jim, observing in fascination as the creature turned and began to explore the surface of the inner wall of the ship to its right with its tentacles.

  “I don’t know what the Laagi call it,” said Mary. “I call it Squonk, after the janitor of an apartment building where I once lived.”

  “‘It’?” echoed Jim. “If your janitor was a he, I’d think—”