The Forever Man Read online

  “How deep?” he asked.

  “At least eighty light-years in toward the heart of Laagi territory,” said Mollen bluntly. “If you want to turn it down, Jim, say so now. The man who pulls this off has got to go into it believing he can make it back out again.”

  “That’s me,” said Jim. He laughed, the bare husk of a laugh. “That’s the way I operate, General. I volunteer.”

  “Good,” said Mollen. He sat back in his chair. “There’s just one more thing, then. Raoul Penard is older than any human being has a right to be and he’s pretty certainly senile, if not out-and-out insane. We’ll want a trained observer along to get as much information out of contact with the man as we can, in case you lose him and his ship, getting back. That calls for someone with a unique background and experience in geriatrics and all the knowledge of the aging process. So Mary, here, is going to be that observer. She’ll replace your regular gunner and ride in a two-man ship with you.”

  It was like a hard punch in the belly. Jim sucked in air and found he had jerked erect. Both of the others watched him. He waited a second, to get his voice under control. He spoke first to the general.

  “Sir, I’ll need a gunner. If there was ever a job where I’d need a gunner, it’d be this one.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Mollen slowly—and Jim could feel that this answer had been ready and waiting for him—“Mary, here, is a gunner—a good one. She’s a captain in the Reserve, Forty-second Training Squadron. With a ninety-two point six efficiency rating.”

  “But she’s still a weekend warrior—” Jim swung about to face her. “Have you even done a tour of duty? Real duty? On the Frontier?”

  “I think you know I haven’t, Major,” said Mary evenly. “If I had you’d have recognized me. We’re about the same age and there aren’t that many on Frontier duty.”

  “Then do you know what it’s like, Captain—what it can be like out there?” raged Jim. He was trying to keep the edge out of his voice but he could hear it there in spite of all he could do. “Do you know how the Laagi can come out of nowhere? Do you know you can be hit before you know anyone’s anywhere near around? Or the ship next to you can be hit and the screens have to stay open—that’s regulation, in case of the one-in-a-million chance that there’s something can be done for whoever’s in the hit ship? Do you know what it’s like to sit there and watch someone you’ve lived with burning to death in a cabin he can’t get out of? Or spilled out of a ship cut wide open, and lost back there somewhere… alive but lost… where you’ll never be able to find him? Do you know what it might be like to be spilled out and lost yourself, and faced with the choice of living three weeks, a month, two months in your suit in the one-in-a-million chance of being found after all, or of taking your x-capsule? Do you know what that’s like?” “I know of it,” said Mary. Her face had not changed. “The same way you do, as a series of possibilities, for the most part. I’ve seen visual and audible recordings of what you talk about. I know it as well as I can without having been wounded or killed myself.”

  “I don’t think you do!” snapped Jim raggedly. His voice was shaking. He saw Mary turn to look at the general.

  “Louis,” she said, “perhaps we should ask for another volunteer?”

  “Jim’s our best man,” said Mollen. He had not moved, or changed his expression, watching them both from behind the desk. “If I had a better Wing Cee—or an equal one who was fresher—I’d have called on him or her instead. But what you’re after is just about impossible; and only someone who can do the impossible has a hope of bringing it off. That’s Jim. It’s like athletic skills. Every so often a champion comes along, one in billions of people, who isn’t just one notch up from the next contenders, but ten notches up from the nearest best. There’s no point in sending you and five ships into Laagi territory with anyone else in command. You simply wouldn’t come back. With Jim, you might.”

  “I see,” said Mary. She looked at Jim. “Regardless, I’m going.”

  “And you’re taking her, Jim,” said Mollen, “or turning down the mission.”

  “And if I turn it down?” Jim darted a glance at the general.

  “I’ll answer that,” said Mary. Jim looked back at her. “If necessary, my Bureau will requisition a ship and I’ll go alone.”

  Jim stared back at her for a long moment, and felt the rage drain slowly away from him, to be replaced by a great weariness.

  “All right,” he said. “All right, Mary—General. I’ll head the mission.” He breathed deeply and glanced over Mary’s coveralls. “How long’ll it take you to get ready?” “I’m ready now,” said Mary. She reached down to the floor behind the desk and came up with a package of personals: sidearm, med-kit and x-box. “The sooner the better.”

  “All right. The five ships of the Section are manned and waiting for you,” said Mollen. He stood up behind the desk and the other two got to their feet facing him. “I’ll walk down to Transmission Section with you.”

  Chapter 2

  They went out together into the corridor and along it and down an elevator tube to a tunnel with a moving floorway. They stepped onto the gently rolling strip, which carried them forward onto a slightly faster strip, and then to a faster, and so forth until they were flashing down the tunnel surrounded by air pumped at a hundred and twenty miles an hour in the same direction they traveled, so that they would not he blown off their feet. In a few minutes they came to the end, and air and strips decelerated so that they slowed and stepped at last into what looked like an ordinary office, but which was deep in the heart of a mountain. —This, the memory returned to Jim, in case the Transmission Section blew up on one of its attempts to transmit. The statistical chance was always there. Perhaps, this time…?

  Mollen had cleared them with the officer of the duty guard and they were moving on through other rooms to the suiting room, where Jim and Mary climbed into the unbelievably barrel-bodied space suits that were actually small spaceships in themselves, and in which—if they who wore them were uninjured and still would not take their x-pills—they might drift in space, living on recycled air and nourishments until they went mad, or died of natural causes.

  —Or were found and brought back. The one-in-a-million chance. Jim, now fully inside his suit, locked it closed.

  “All set?” It was Mollen’s voice coming at him over the aud circuit of the suit. Through the transparent window of the headpiece he saw the older man watching him.

  “All set, General.” He looked over at Mary and saw her already suited and waiting. For a moment it struck Jim that she might have been trying to suit up fast to show she was something more than a weekend warrior, and he felt a twinge of sympathy toward her. With the putting on of his own suit, the old feeling of sureness had begun to flow back into him, and he felt released. “Let’s go, Captain.”

  “Stick with —‘Mary’,” she said, “and I’ll stick with ‘Jim’.”

  “Good luck,” said Mollen. Together, Jim and Mary clumped across the room, waited for the tons-heavy explosion door to swing open, then clumped through.

  On the floor of the vast cavern that was the takeoff area, five two-man ships sat like gray-white darts, waiting. Red “manned” lights glowed by each sealed port on the first four they passed. Jim read their names as he stumped on forward toward the open port of the lead ship, his ship, the AndFriend. The other four ships were the Swallow, the Fair Maid, the Lela and the Fourth Helen. He knew their pilots and gunners well. The Swallow and the Fourth Helen were ships from his own command. They and the other two were good ships handled by good people. The best.

  Jim led the way aboard AndFriend and fitted himself into the forward seat facing the controls. Through his suit’s receptors, he heard Mary sliding into the gunner’s seat, behind and to the left of him. Already, in spite of the efficiency of the suit, he thought he could smell the faint, enclosed stink of his own sweat; and, responding to the habit of many missions, his brain began to clear and come alive. He plu
gged his suit into the controls.

  “Report,” he said, One by one, in order, the Swallow, the Fair Maid, the Lela and the Fourth Helen replied. “—Transmission Section,” said Jim, “this is Wander Section, ready and waiting for transmission.”

  “Acknowledged,” replied the voice of the Transmission Section. There followed a short wait, during which as always Jim was conscious, as if through some extra sense, of the many tons weight of the collapsed magnesium alloy of the ships’ hulls bearing down on the specially reinforced concrete of the takeoff area. “Ready to transmit.”

  “Acknowledged,” said Jim.

  “On the count of four, then,” said Transmission Section’s calm, disembodied voice. “For Picket Nine, L Sector, Frontier Area, transmission of Wander Section, five ships. Ready to phaseshift. Counting now… three—” The unimaginable tension that always preceded transmission from one established point to another began to build, a gearing-up of nerves that affected all the men on all the ships alike.

  “Two…” The voice of Transmission Section seemed to thunder at them along their overwrought nerves. “One…”

  “…Transmit!”

  Abruptly, a wave of disorientation and nausea broke through them, and was gone. They floated in dark and empty interstellar space, with the stars of the Frontier area surrounding them, and a new voice spoke in their ear.

  “Identify yourself,” it said. “Identify yourself. This is Formidable, command ship for Picket Nine Sector, requesting identification.”

  “Wander Section. Five ships.” Jim did not bother to look at his instruments to find the space-floating sphere that was Formidable. It was out there somewhere, with twenty ships scattered around, up to five and a half light-years away, but all zeroed in on this reception point where he and the other four ships had emerged. Had Jim been a Laagi Wing or Picket Commander, he would not have transmitted into this area with twenty ships—no, nor with twice that many. “Confirm transmission notice from Earth, Five ship Section for deep probe Laagi territory. Wander Section Leader, speaking.”

  “Transmission notice confirmed, Wander Section leader,” crackled back the voice from Picket Nine. “Mission confirmed. You will not deship. Repeat, not deship. Local Frontier area has been scouted for slipover, and data prepared for flash transmission to you. You will accept data and leave immediately. Please key to receive data.”

  “Major—” began the voice of Mary, behind him.

  “Shut up,” said Jim. He said it casually, without rancor, as if he was speaking to his regular gunner, Leif Molloy. For a moment he had forgotten that he was carrying a passenger instead of a proper gunman. And there was no time to think about it now. “Acknowledge,” he said to Picket Nine. “Transmit data, please.”

  He pressed the data key and the light above it sprang into being and glowed for nearly a full second before going dark again. That, thought Jim, was a lot of data—at the high-speed transmission at which such information was pumped into his ship’s computing center. That was one of the reasons the new mind-units were evolved out of solid-state physics instead of following up the development of the older, semianimate brains such as the one aboard the ancient La Chasse Gallerie. The semianimate brains—living tissue in a nutrient solution—could not accept the modern need for sudden high-speed packing of sixteen hours’ worth of data into the space of a second or so.

  Also, such living tissue had to be specially protected against high accelerations, needed to be fed and trimmed—and it died on you at the wrong times.

  All the time Jim was turning this over with one part of his mind, the other and larger part of his thinking process was driving the gloved fingers of his right hand. These moved over a bank of one hundred and twenty small black buttons, ten across and twelve down, like the stops on a piano-accordion, and with the unthinking speed and skill of the trained operator, he punched them, requesting information out of the body of data just pumped into his ship’s computing center, building up from this a picture of the situation, and constructing a pattern of action to be taken as a result.

  Evoked by the intricate code set up by combinations of the black buttons under his fingers, the ghost voice of the mind-unit whispered in his ear in a code of words and numbers hardly less intricate.

  “…transmit destination area one-eighty Eli Wye, Laagi Sector L 4 at point 12.5, 13.2, 64.5. Proceeding jumps 10 Eli Wye, R inclination 9 degrees Frontier midpoint. Optimum jumps twelve, 03 error correctable on the first shift…”

  He worked steadily. The picture began to emerge. It would not be hard getting in. It was never hard to do that. They could reach La Chasse Gallerie in twelve phase-shift transmissions or jumps across some hundred and eighty light-years of distance, and locate her in the area where she should then be, within an hour or so. Then they could—theoretically at least—surround her, lock on, and try to improve on the ten light-years of jump it seemed was the practical limit of her pilot’s or her control center’s computing possibilities.

  With modern phase-shift drive, the problem was not the ability to jump any required distance, but the ability to compute correctly, in a reasonable time, the direction and distance in which the move should be made. Phase-shifting was an outgrowth of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of physics that had enunciated the fact that it was possible to establish either the position of an electron, or its speed of movement, but not both at the same time. When a ship activated a phase-shift it did not move in the ordinary sense of that word. Effectively, for a timeless moment its speed became zero and its position universal. It was everywhere and no particular place. Then its position was established at the destination point which had been calculated for it and its speed became relative to its position at that point.

  The problem with phase-shifting lay in that calculation. Of necessity, it had to take into account the position and current movement of the ship about to make the jump and the position and movement of the destination area—this in a galaxy where everything was in relative movement, and only a mathematical fiction, the theoretical centerpoint of the galaxy from which all distances were marked and measured, was fixed.

  The greater the distance, the more involved and time-consuming the calculations. The law of diminishing returns would set in, and the process broke down of its own weight—it took a lifetime to calculate a single jump to a destination it would not take quite a lifetime to reach by smaller, more easily calculable jumps. Even with today's ships it was necessary calculation time-factor that made it impractical for the human and Laagi races to go around each others’ spatial territory. If we were all Raoul Penards, thought Jim grimly, with two hundred and more years of life coming, it’d be different. —The thought chilled him; he did not know why. He put it out of his mind and went back to the calculations.

  The picture grew and completed. Re-keyed his voice to the other ships floating in dark space around him.

  “Wander Leader to Wander Section,” he said. “Wander Leader to Wander Section. Prepare to shift into Laagi territory. Key for calculations pattern for first of twelve shifts. Acknowledge, all ships of Wander Section.”

  The transmit section of his control board glowed briefly as the Swallow, the Fair Maid, the Lela and the Fourth Helen pumped into their own computing centers the situation and calculations he had worked out with his. Their voices came back, acknowledging.

  “Lock to destination,” said Jim. “Dispersal pattern K at destination. Repeat, pattern K, tight, hundred kilometer interval. Hundred kilometer interval.” He glanced at the sweep second hand of the clock before him on his control board. “Transmit in six seconds. Counting. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Transmit—”

  Again, the disorientation, and the nausea.

  Strange stars were around them. The mind-unit’s lights glowed while it verified their position and adjusted the figures for the precalculated next jump. After a time it whispered in Jim’s ear again, and— “Check Ten,” whispered Jim. It was the code for “make next jump immediately.”

&n
bsp; “Three. Two. One. Transmit—”

  Once again the wrench of dislocation. Nausea. Lights glowed in silence as time passed again— “Check Ten…

  Ten more times they shifted, silent tension reflecting the waits for calculations while they floated, only lights in the silent darkness. Then they were there.

  In darkness. They were alone amongst the enemy’s stars. None of the other ships registered on the instruments.

  “Report,” ordered Jim to the universe at large.

  “Swallow...” came a whisper in his earphones as from somewhere unseen a tight beam touched the outside of the AndFriend, carrying its message to his ears. “Fair Maid…Lela...” A slightly longer pause. “Fourth Helen.”

  Fourth Helen was always a laggard. Jim had warned her pilot about it a dozen times. But now was not the hour for reprimands. They were deep in Laagi territory, and the alien alert posts would have already picked up the burst of energy not only from their initial transmit from Picket Nine, which had been precalculated by the com-ship there over the hours since La Chasse Gallerie had been discovered—and which consequently had been able to send them with some accuracy half the distance to her—but from the succeeding jumps that had brought them lightyears deep into Laagi territory. Communication between the ships of the Section must be held to a minimum while the aliens were still trying to figure out where the chain of shifts had landed the intruders.

  Shortly, since they must know of the approximate position of La Chasse Gallerie, and have ships on the way to try to kill her again, they would put two and two together and expect to find the intruders in the same area. But for the moment Wander Section, if it lay low and quiet, could feel it was safely hidden in the immensities of enemy space.

  Jim blocked off outside transmission, and spoke over the intercom to Mary.

  “All right, Mary,” he said. “What was it you wanted to say Frontier?”

  There was a slight pause before the other’s voice came back.