The Forever Man Read online

  He was like a man imprisoned in darkness and pressure, caught in a cavern, underground. How to start? He knew nothing about the alien body around him. In fact, the truth was, there was no certainty that it was a body and not some mechanical which had been much more cleverly constructed by the Laagi than Fingers had been by human engineers. Or Squonk could be a biological robot grown to order from cultures of alien flesh belonging to the Laagi or some other species under their control—

  He checked himself suddenly. His mind was running wild. The thing to concentrate on, he told himself, was how similar Squonk’s body was to the animal bodies of Earth, not let his imagination run to wild imaginings of difference. Alien or not, if it was a body as he knew bodies, it lived and died, it ingested fuel material and excreted wastes. It would need the equivalent of a brain and a heart to circulate the fuel from the ingested material to the living parts of its body needing that fuel. And a liquid circulatory system would be more efficient than any solid manner of delivery… which meant it had the equivalent of a blood system. Which meant that if he could just reach that blood—call it the circulatory—system, he could travel it until it led him to the brain. Wherever the brain was, the mind ought to be available.

  But first he had to find a conduit of the circulatory system. Like someone lost in a vast continent, he needed to find a river and follow it to the equivalent of the sea, and the sea to a particular place on the shore of the sea. He tried moving the injected material the way he had moved the AndFriend when his mind had been free to do so.

  He moved, only a tiny distance, but he moved. However—a second later, the material enclosing him moved suddenly, taking him with it; and in panic, he recoiled.

  He found himself back in the ship as a whole.

  “I can see—oh,” said Mary, her voice going from excitement to the flatness of disappointment. “It didn’t work.”

  “No, that’s not what happened,” he answered. “I panicked. I moved the injected material and—look at Squonk. He’s scratching himself. When I felt the pressure of that, inside his skin, I automatically ran.”

  In fact, Squonk was rubbing the tip of one tentacle energetically at the area on his left leg where the material had been injected.

  “I think I can go back into him, all right… ” he said, reaching out once more with his mind for the AndFriend material lodged in the little alien.

  Suddenly it was dark again. He was back.

  He tried moving once more, but this time more slowly and carefully. Twice, he was shaken, as a cave-in victim might be shaken by earthquakes in the earth or rock that held him, but he kept going. After a time that he had no way of measuring, he poked the front end of his material into a less solid space.

  He explored it. He was all but certain it must be the equivalent of a blood vessel, but it was very small. Still, his material was small enough to fit even into this narrow passage. He slipped all the way in, and tried to sense, by touching the surrounding walls, whether he was being carried along with the fluid that must surround him now.

  He was apparently, he decided, being carried backward. He reversed his own point of view in the scrapings and thought of himself as going forward. It was either a long time or a short—once more he had no way of knowing—but he was eventually carried along and into a larger pipeline with a stronger flow.

  He had no way of knowing for certain where he was in Squonk’s body, but the same sort of feel that had helped him in dead reckoning gave him the general feeling that he was in the body of Squonk, rather than still in the leg where the scrapings had been injected. He oriented his material now to touch the walls of the conduit along which he was being carried by whatever fluid was Squonk’s equivalent of a bloodstream. Within the fluid, he was essentially weightless. He could only feel the pressure of its current. If he could just feel the stresses on the solid wall material, however, he ought to be able to tell in what direction gravity was pulling upon them. He blamed himself for not trying to judge, when he was first injected into Squonk’s flesh, which way the stress of gravity was pulling on that flesh.

  This way would be more difficult…. Again he did not know how long he tried to feel what he wanted to feel, but finally he became sure that the stream he was in was flowing horizontally against the pull of gravity—

  Without warning, he was tumbled and thrown in a dozen different directions in quick succession. He had come to some intersection, or maybe it was even the equivalent of Squonk’s central pumping organ for the circulatory system; Squonk’s heart, in short…

  In desperation he began to move his material in what he conceived to be one steady direction. For a while more he was buffeted, not knowing if he was making any progress or not, and then the maelstrom of forces upon him settled down to a single powerful flow that was clearly against gravity.

  He was on his way upward. If Squonk’s brain was in his equivalent of a head, as the skullcap-like piece of bone cartilage among the body parts left of the long dead Laagi in their derelict ships had indicated the Laagi brain was, then he was finally on the right track.

  It was, perhaps, his lucky day. The flow took him up to a point where it suddenly dispersed itself into innumerable smaller channels.

  He nosed into the material surrounding the small conduit into which he had been carried. Beyond the conduit wall, the solid body material was different, softer.

  “It could be brain,” he said, speaking to Mary for the first time in a long while.

  “Then, if you could find an impulse-carrying fiber,” Mary said, “you might be able to read whatever message that fiber was carrying, and then spread out your awareness from there.”

  Smart, thought Jim. But he did not say the complimentary word aloud for her to hear.

  “I’ll see if I can tell the difference in textures,” he said.

  He probed the material close about himself.

  He touched something, solid within solid. What it was, he did not know at the time and later on it was too late to go back and reconstruct what it was. But suddenly light flooded in around him. He saw the interior of AndFriend through Squonk’s eyes.

  The cleaning was just being finished. As he watched, Squonk turned toward the entry port, carrying the perceptions of Jim and Mary. The entry port opened. They and Squonk went out.

  “How do you like that?” he shouted mentally at Mary, his grudge toward her for the moment completely drowned in triumph. “Here we go! Five minutes more and we ought to be close enough to touch some of those Laagilike figures we saw from the ship!”

  But he was wrong. Having left AndFriend behind it, and once more down upon the concrete of the great stretch surrounding the ship, Squonk was beginning—slowly, painstakingly and industriously, to clean his way toward the distant buildings and the strips of dark green where other, distant figures had been seen moving.

  Chapter 16

  “This is terrible!” said Mary. “How can we see anything if Squonk won’t look at anything but what it’s working on at the moment? Why didn’t we think of a simple problem like this?”

  “Because you didn’t know you’d be putting the material from AndFriend into a creature that never looks at anything but what it’s working at. Though, come to think of it, during work hours, a lot of us humans do the same thing,” Jim answered.

  “But what are we going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jim. “But I’m thinking. If you don’t mind, I’d rather do that than talk.”

  “And another thing—” Mary was beginning; but he shut his mind to her mental voice, something that was easier to do because of the strange effect that made it sound now as if it came from some distance.

  He did indeed want to think. In fact his mind had been running along certain lines since he had first started trying to find his way through the body of Squonk to the physical organ that was the seat of its mind.

  He had been very lucky, he thought—there was no other word for it—to find the nerve, or conduit as Mary called
it, to Squonk’s vision. But the prospect of carefully examining, millimeter by millimeter, some distance of sandy-hued pavement as Squonk dusted it was no more attractive to him than it was to Mary.

  The first question, therefore, was what could be done about the situation—Mary’s question just now. The second, and more important question, was what his own individual relationship was to Squonk in the first place.

  Probably the first question could not be answered until the answer to the second question was found and understood. The second question had come to mind when he had suddenly begun to wonder—and this was the sort of thing he would have immediately begun to talk over with Mary under ordinary circumstances, but not now—why, looking out through Squonk’s eyes, which were physically different in a large degree from his human eyes, he should still see the interior of AndFriend and the pavement outside his ship as a human would see them.

  Which raised the interesting question: was he actually seeing what he was seeing through Squonk’s eyes, at all?

  Now, with AndFriend, he had seemed to be able to use the outside surface of its metal hull as eyes. And, come to think of it, not just as one eye or a hundred thousand eyes, covering the ship’s outer surface area, but as a pair of human eyes might see. Not only that, hadn’t he been able to look right through the opaque plastic of the tent enclosing the ship and La Chasse Gallerie when he first woke up as AndFriend, back at the Base?

  Something was definitely not as he had originally assumed it to be.

  Which brought him back to the question of whether he was actually seeing what he thought he was seeing, through Squonk’s eyes. How was he actually seeing? Was it mechanical or physical seeing at all? Or was it, perhaps, something entirely different?

  Mary herself had said that she and those like her had no idea of how his transfer to AndFriend had actually been accomplished. Had he really been sensitized to his ship, or had that been part of what Mary had called possible mumbo-jumbo, nonsense masquerading as an explanation for something for which so far there was no known explanation?

  Had he actually been in the scrapings that had been injected into Squonk, or had the scrapings been merely an excuse for more of the unexplainable magic that had allowed first Raoul, then him, to move their minds out of their bodies into something else?

  Suppose it was all magic—call it “magic” for want of a better word. Or call it excorporal transport, to get away from the connotation that magic was something that had no rational explanation.

  If it had nothing to do with the injected material, then perhaps he could do anything he wanted from the viewpoint of Squonk, generally. Look out through Squonk’s skin and shell with his own accustomed human vision, as he had with AndFriend.

  Why not?

  It was worth a try.

  The first thing to do, he told himself, was eradicate the illusion.

  I am not seeing out through Squonk’s eyes, he told himself firmly but silently. I am not seeing through Squonk’s eyes. I am not connected to Squonk’s eyes…

  Abruptly, he could see nothing at all.

  “Jim!”

  It was a cry of alarm from Mary.

  “Jim!” she shouted at him again. “What’s happened? Jim, can you answer me? Answer me!”

  But he had no time to spare at the moment to answer anybody. On the verge of panic he was telling himself—I’m Squonk. I am Squonk. Squonk and I are one thing. I am Squonk. I am Squonk—he was trying very hard to feel like Squonk—Squonk is me. I am Squonk, just like I’m AndFriend. AndFriend—Squonk, no difference. I am Squonk—”

  Equally suddenly and without warning, light flooded back in on him. But now he was able to look around at whatever he wanted to see and see it. With relief, he noticed that they were already a good third of the way to the dark green pathways, on which there were others like Squonk and also … his mind boggled. The bipeds he had briefly and distantly seen before, and which he was looking at now, couldn’t be Laagis. They simply could not be the same race that had battled with humans so fiercely all these years—

  “…Jim!” It was pure alarm in Mary’s voice. “Oh, my God, Jim, are you all right? Answer me. If you can answer at all, speak to me!”

  “It’s all right,” he said soothingly. “I just found out how to use all of Squonk’s exterior surface as eyes, just as I do on AndFriend.”

  Mary was anything but soothed.

  “Why didn’t you answer me, if it’s so all right?”

  “Actually I could, but I was busy just at the moment—”

  “Busy, and you let me go on calling and calling—and thinking—how was I to know what’d happened to you? You just left me there imagining all kinds of things had happened to you and never stopped to think how I might be worrying… worrying what I was going to do if something had happened to you? You just forgot about me. Did you ever stop to think what it might be like for me, helpless here and calling, calling and still not getting any answer from you? Well, did you?”

  “As a matter of fact—”

  “As a matter of fact, no. You didn’t. All right, I know you’ve got no reason to worry about me after what we did to you to get you here; but to let me sit in the dark, without any answer, imagining no one knows what had happened… you could have said a word, just a word…”

  She stopped talking. There was a wave of emotion perceptible from her; and Jim found himself feeling far more guilty than he would have anticipated. Well, he had been busy… Of course, to her…

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think—”

  “You certainly didn’t!”

  “But the reason I wasn’t answering wasn’t because of well, because of what you and the rest did to get me here. It was because I had my hands full. I didn’t know if I’d get sight back, myself. I was putting all my mind to doing that; and, to tell the truth, it never occurred to me you’d be frightened.”

  “I wasn’t frightened! I was—yes, I was frightened. Of course I was frightened. You seem to keep forgetting I’ve got no control over anything, by myself. I’m completely dependent on you. What was I supposed to imagine when suddenly everything went dark and you wouldn’t answer? Not that you condescend to answer me half the time, anyway…”

  She broke off suddenly. Her mental voice stopped. He tried desperately to think of something to say which would mend matters and could think of nothing.

  “Oh, Jim,” she said after a long moment, while he was still searching and researching his mind for the proper words to make her feel better. “Never, never do that again!”

  “I won’t,” he said.

  “It was a lousy thing to do,” she said, but less emotionally.

  “I won’t do it again,” he said, trying the magic words for a second time, since they seemed to have had a good effect.

  “If you do,” she said coldly, in a totally different mental tone, “you might remember that there are things I can do, too, that you might not like. Don’t push me too far, Jim. There’s only the two of us and it’s best for both of us if we’re considerate of each other. Now, let’s forget it. How did you manage to get this kind of seeing that doesn’t use Squonk’s eyes?”

  “It’s… well, it’s not easy to explain,” said Jim cautiously. “I don’t know if I have the words. I guess I just exercised whatever it is that lets me use the outer surface of the hull of AndFriend to see with, as I said; but I don’t know how I do that, so I really don’t know how I did this. But about not answering you. If I could just explain to you how it was for me, switching over, just then—”

  “I said, let’s forget it.”

  “Well, all right then,” he said, “if that’s what you want.”

  “That’s what I want,” she said.

  They fell into silence again. Surreptitiously, Jim tried urging Squonk to abandon his cleaning of the surface and simply go directly to the nearest green path. Nothing happened. He tried again, and still nothing happened.

  He considered giving up and simply waiting it out u
ntil they got there. He was refusing to look directly at the creatures he had suspected to be Laagi. He wanted a closer view of them before he let his mind acknowledge the unbelievable—that creatures like these were the enemies that he had shaped his whole life to face in space conflict. He concentrated on the minimal facts; that what was left in his mind from that first glimpse was a vague, uncertain image of upright bipeds of various heights with waving arms.

  Mary, on her part, was also not saying anything—for which he was grateful. He had the feeling, though he could not pin it down, that she was studying what could be seen ahead of them and lost in that.

  They reached the first green path eventually, and Squonk turned to its left and headed off along it at an angle toward the nearest of the beehive-shaped buildings—which, now that they were closer, Jim could see had no windows. Or at least, those close enough for him to get a good look at showed no sign of windows. The doorways into them were apertures in the shape of a triangle with its vertical sides bulging outward, a shape that echoed the shape of the buildings themselves. Squonks and—well, call them Laagi for the moment, anyway, thought Jim—entered and emerged from these doorways to move out along one of the green paths. Between the buildings, he now saw, there was no space except that taken up by the green paths, the surfaces of which seemed to be soft and yielding under the red pads of hard flesh that passed for their own Squonk’s feet, like padded carpeting.

  “They must really be the Laagi,” said Mary’s voice in his mind, unexpectedly.

  So she had been struggling with herself over believing that to be true, also.

  Jim finally let himself look squarely at the closest of the biped figures.

  “Yes,” he agreed glumly. “But it doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  “It’s certainly hard to believe,” she said. “I suppose they could be another tame underspecies like the Squonks, but they don’t act like Squonks. They act like this is their world. And look—those doors on the buildings are sized just right for them. The Squonks wouldn’t need entrances that tall.”