The Forever Man Page 21

  “Yes,” said Jim. “But they look like gingerbread men in three dimensions.”

  “More like big rubber dolls,” said Mary.

  They were both right, Jim thought. The Laagi either varied in size and length of limb, or were able to vary, but outside of that, they seemed identical, with no differences that would indicate two or more sexes. They were gray-skinned, roundbodied and round-armed. To be more precise, their bodies looked like tanks covered with gray skin, their legs and arms were like thick sections of rubber hose attached two at the bottom of the tank and two at the top; like human legs and arms, but unlike human limbs in that they seemed to have no joints, but to bend like the rubber hoses they resembled. Their legs ended in pads of muscle—but merely a darker gray, not red-colored like those of the Squonks—and their arms either seemed to end in stumps or stubby fingers, depending upon the individual.

  They were all in motion, whether they were traveling one way or another on the green strips, or congregated in groups of two to half a dozen, in which case their legs were still, but their arms were in constant motion, waving up and down, stretching out or shrinking to a shorter length. Occasionally, the legs of one of those walking or standing would also lengthen or shorten, for no apparent reason.

  Their heads were like small, absolutely round balls, covered by the same colored flesh and half-sunk into the wrinkled skin at the top of the tanklike body. They had, like the Squonks, two tiny but brilliant black eyes side by side and buried in the flesh of what might be called their faces; though they did not seem to move these eyes about individually, as the Squonk’s eyes had on its entering AndFriend. There were as well a couple of vertical slits, slanting toward each other at the top, where a human nose would be, and a horizontal slit where a human mouth would be. This mouth opened slightly and shut itself again, from time to time, when they were standing congregated together. But their arms in particular were always in motion, waving up and down, bending, extending and shortening. But mostly waving.

  And with all this, they made no sound to each other.

  It was unnatural by human standards. There were the small noises made by Squonks and of Laagi walking along the paths; there was the sound of wind among the buildings; even something very small that could have been the alien equivalent of either a bird or insect whirred once across the path at about average Laagi height. But the Laagi mouths produced no words, nothing that could be considered sound at all.

  “This is your department,” said Jim. “I don’t get it. Why do they bother getting together that way if they aren’t going to talk? How can they be a civilized race in the first place if they don’t communicate?”

  “They’re pretty clearly communicating,” Mary’s voice in his mind would have sounded almost disinterested if it had not been for its undercurrent of emotion, an almost feverish thread of excitement he could feel from her. “There’d be no point in them getting together like that unless they were communicating. But it’s not with sound. My first guess is they’re signaling to each other.”

  “Signaling?” echoed Jim. He stared at the jerking and waving arms of the grouped Laagi. “I suppose you could make a fairly complex language out of body signals. But one good enough to discuss the technological and other aspects of a civilization that could produce fighter ships as good as ours—in some cases better?”

  “Most of our own technology isn’t really dealt with in verbal terms,” said Mary. “We use mathematics, drawings, models—all sorts of means besides our common, everyday spoken language—”

  She broke off, for Squonk—their Squonk, THE Squonk, had suddenly turned slightly and headed into the midst of one of the groups of Laagi and to one in particular. It came to a halt before that Laagi and stretched its neck out in an absurd gesture that looked as if it was asking to have its head cut off.

  The Laagi it had come to lowered one of its rubbery arms with a swiftness that made it look as if it intended to deliver a blow. But instead of landing heavily on the neck of Squonk, the skin of the descending arm barely touched the neck skin of the smaller creature and vibrated, so that through Squonk’s nervous system, the feeling of touch that came to Jim was like that of a feather being rapidly tapped very lightly against the creature’s neck.

  “What in all the universe… ?” said Mary.

  “I don’t know. But it—Squonk—loves it,” said Jim. “It must be—oops!”

  The last ejaculation came from the fact that the Squonk had begun to shudder in what seemed an ecstasy of joy. It shortened its legs until its body was touching the ground and suddenly rolled over on its shell with its red feet sticking up in the air. The Laagi vibrated the underside of its arm against the soles of the Squonk’s feet in turn, while the Squonk shuddered happily. Then the Laagi gave one of the upturned legs a soft shove, the Squonk rolled back, right side up, lengthened its legs and left the group.

  “I think it was just praised,” said Jim, after a little silence between himself and Mary.

  “Or caressed, petted the way you might pet a dog.”

  “No, I really think praised is the word,” said Jim. “Feel the way it’s feeling right now. It’s satisfied, like someone who’s just done something it felt good about doing.”

  There was the slightest pause.

  “Jim,” said Mary, and he got the definite feeling that she was not happy saying it. “I can’t feel any kind of emotion from Squonk. Are you sure you can?”

  “Of course I’m sure—you can’t?” answered Jim, startled.

  “I wouldn’t say I couldn’t if I didn’t.”

  “No, of course not. But that’s strange.”

  “Not so strange.” Mary’s mental voice was almost bitter. “I’m just a passenger in you, after all. I don’t have any direct connection with Squonk.”

  “Do you with me? I mean, with the way I feel?”

  “Some,” she said. “Except when you shut yourself off from me.”

  “I don’t do that!”

  “You do it all the time!” She hesitated. “Actually, it’s probably a good thing we can shut each other out sometimes. You wouldn’t want to know what I’m feeling all the time, would you?”

  There was something tentative about this last question, as if the question had some hidden purpose.

  “Well, no. Of course not,” he said. “You’re right, of course.”

  “Well.” There was relief in her voice. “There you are. Now what were you about to say when Squonk went to get petted—or praised, or whatever?”

  “What was I going to say?” He frowned. “I don’t think I can remember… oh, yes, I was going to say that Squonk was perhaps going to that particular Laagi for orders and we might learn something about how Squonks and Laagi work together by what Squonk does now. But Squonk was only there to get petted, after all.”

  “Wait a minute—maybe not,” said Mary.

  “Maybe not?”

  “What the Laagi did with his arm in touching Squonk,” said Mary. “The Laagi could have been praising it, just as you said. But he could also have been talking to it. In fact, he could have been giving it orders.”

  “You said you couldn’t feel the Squonk’s emotions,” said Jim. “You should have, then. That Squonk was awfully happy for something just getting orders to do something. It was… ecstatic’s a good word for what it seemed to me to be feeling.”

  “Maybe it likes to work.”

  “That much?”

  “How do we know how much Squonks like to work?” demanded Mary. “A sheepdog likes to herd sheep. A sled dog likes to pull a sled with the rest of the team. A Squonk may be like that, only more so. How do we know?”

  “We don’t,” said Jim. “But it’s hard to believe.”

  “So we’ll find out.”

  “Ask it, I suppose,” said Jim.

  “No. Just observe. What did you do when you were a boy?”

  “Went to school. Played games,” answered Jim. “What did you do when you were a girl?”

  “That�
��s the difference,” said Mary. “I began observing and studying from as far back as I can remember. I think I told you I couldn’t wait to get away from home. My mother and father—”

  She broke off suddenly.

  “I talk too much about them,” she said.

  Jim found himself not knowing what to say.

  “I think you only mentioned them to me once before,” he told her at last.

  “Is that all? Well, it doesn’t matter, anyway. All I was going to say was that they were completely useless people. What they did with their lives could have been done by any of millions of other people in the world and nobody would ever have known the difference. I decided as far back as I can remember it wouldn’t be that way with me. I’d be a student and a worker; and I’ve been just that, ever since then. That’s one of the differences between me and other people.”

  “Like me,” said Jim.

  “Well, if you want the truth, yes. Like you. You just grew up, didn’t you? You let things happen?”

  “Not exactly,” said Jim. “All kids, as I might have said to you at one time or another, want to be Frontier pilots. I stuck with it.”

  “That’s commendable,” said Mary, “that you stuck with it, I mean. There are better things to do than be a fighter pilot. But it’s not quite what I’m talking about.”

  “What made you bring the subject up, then?”

  “Because when I said we’ll find out how much Squonk really likes working, you made a joke about it, as if it was something that couldn’t be done. It can be done. By observation and deduction.”

  “I see. Sorry. I’ll know better next time.”

  “And you don’t need to be flip about it.”

  “Tell me,” said Jim, “just what is it I’ve done lately to rub you the wrong way?”

  “I’m ready to go to work and you’re playing!” blazed Mary. “Do you mind shutting up and getting out of my way, if you can’t be helpful?”

  Jim thought of saying that he thought he had been, then decided saying so would merely continue an argument he could probably not win. Probably, in fact, there was no argument he could hope to win with Mary. So it would be wisest not to get into any. Not that he had planned to get into this one.

  At any rate, he had his own plans, and his own work to think about.

  “I wonder,” said Mary, as if she had completely forgotten her emotion of a moment before, “just where Squonk is taking us.”

  They did not have long to wait for an answer, because very shortly, Squonk turned into the entrance of one of the larger, beehive-shaped buildings.

  Chapter 17

  Jim had expected anything but what he saw, which was, at one and the same time, tidy but enormous. Just inside the entrance and stretching away from it for a large distance, in fact for what must be right to the inner surface of the building’s main wall, all the way around it, were long tables or desks perhaps a meter in width and three meters apart and as long as the circular shape of the room permitted them to be, depending on which chord of the circle they struck.

  At these desks, on both sides, Laagi stood or sat in cup-shaped seats like those Mary and Jim had found in the derelict alien ships, like assembly workers in a factory, except that their work was not done in part and then passed on. Here, Laagi were building different small mechanisms from a pile of component parts right up to the point of complete assembly. At which time, a squonk, summoned by some means Jim could not make out, would come scurrying over to take the finished work and carry it off.

  Some of the workers were not working. These were neither standing nor sitting in the cupshaped chairs, but had pulled themselves into the smallest possible compass, arms, legs and head retracted almost completely into the body, so that they sat motionless on the base of their trunks looking more like round, skin-covered barrels than anything else.

  Mary and Jim’s Squonk went directly over to the farthest wall of the room, where it took up a position partway down a long line of squonks who appeared to be waiting there.

  “Now what?” said Jim.

  Mary did not answer. After a moment, one of the squonks farther down the line suddenly darted out to the nearest bench, took a completed assembly about the size of something that could be enclosed by Jim’s two human hands, if he had had them handy, and went off toward the back of the building.

  They waited. Other squonks went to pick up completed assemblies from Laagi. Apparently, there was either a specific Laagi that a specific squonk carried for, or else there was a rotational system that took the squonks to be messengers in some particular order.

  Mary was silent. She was evidently busy observing and deducing. Jim decided to get busy with his own work in that line, particularly with his private thinking that had to do with his breaking loose of Mary’s hypnotic control over him.

  He seemed to remember that no hypnotic command lasted forever, but weakened over time. How much time was something he had no means of guessing. In any case he did not intend to wait around for release, if only for the fact that it would be more satisfying to break loose than to wait tamely until he was released.

  His mind had fastened on the fact that Mary had said she could not feel the emotions of the squonk, She had also admitted not being able to feel Jim’s emotions, some of the time at least. Jim suspected that “some of the time” was any time when they were not in direct mental contact, talking together. It was this apparent inability of Mary’s that his mind had fastened on, like the mind of a chess player who has just spotted what he believes to be a weakness on the part of his opponent.

  The fact of the matter was, he admitted to himself, it was no longer anger that was driving him, but something like a spirit of competition. In essence he had been challenged by being put under hypnotic control and there was something ancient and stubborn in him that had always risen to a challenge. In fact, as he had discovered one day when he had managed to get a surreptitious look at the results of some tests they had given him while he was being trained to be a Frontier pilot, that response was something that made him good at that particular job. In truth, he operated best, the examiner had noted on them, when under challenge.

  The months of mental and other misery Mary, Mollen and others had put him through in the process of getting him to become one with AndFriend, he dismissed without another thought. He had deliberately chosen a life that involved hardship and pain, even on the training level. No, what had sparked off the sudden fury in him was something entirely different. It was his own conviction—in fact, he was proud of the fact—that he would have freely volunteered to let himself be captured and held on a Laagi world, so that the aliens could be observed; if all of them, from Mary on up, had only given him the option. The fact that they had not, he read as a fear that he might refuse. They had not trusted him to accept the duty—and that was an insult.

  And it was the insult that had made him angry.

  But he had always been one of those people who take fire swiftly, only to have trouble nursing the coals of an anger for any great length of time. He simply got tired of being angry with anyone or anything after a while, and forgot what had put a torch to his emotions in the first place. He even had always been a little puzzled by people who could nurse a grievance for years or a lifetime.

  So, he was actually no longer angry with any of them—least of all with Mary, who was plainly the kind of person who became obsessed with whatever they put their hands and mind to. But he was acutely conscious now of being in a contest with Mary for control of himself; and he was not in the habit of losing such contests.

  He concentrated on the fact that Mary was blind to all of Squonk’s emotions and some of his. A part of his mind was insisting that in that fact there was something he could use to set himself free.

  What he wanted, he had already told himself, was some way he could control Squonk without Mary knowing he was doing it. How that was to come out of the fact that she could not sense the squonk’s feelings, or his under certain conditions, was
still obscure. But if there was anything there, it ought to give up its juices if he chewed it over in his head enough.

  He wondered if Squonk could be made to feel his own, human, feelings—

  These thoughts were unexpectedly interrupted as they suddenly went into motion at high speed. Squonk had almost leaped forward and was, judging from what they had seen so far from it, doing its kind’s equivalent of running headlong toward the solid, vertical panel supporting the long worktable just in front of them. Jim braced himself for an impact against the support, which looked decidedly solid, but something very like a trap door swung up out of Squonk’s way a fraction of a second before its nose touched it and Squonk hurtled through the aperture.

  At the same pace, it went through trap doors in the supports of the next four tables in order across the room; but after passing through the fourth, it spun left and went down the aisle to a Laagi, who handed it an assemblage of small parts about the size and shape of a loaf of bread.

  Squonk’s tentacles enclosed it tenderly and lovingly. This Laagi did not touch Squonk in the way that the alien on the path had done, but Jim felt a somewhat lower level of pleasure and pride warming the emotions of the creature he and Mary now inhabited. Squonk turned and, in squonk terms, ran for the back of the building.

  The rear of the building turned out not to have tables taking up all possible available space. A section had been reserved there at the very back for two rooms, one being apparently an eating room and one a waste-disposal room. Jim had only a glimpse of these through the portals leading into them, however, for there was something else in the area to which Squonk galloped at full speed, carefully carrying its burden.

  It was a large screw-type elevator. An apparently endless, turning spiral of something that might be metal that wound its way vertically up through a hole in the floor to and through the ceiling overhead. Squonk ran up onto this and stopped, letting himself be carried upward. Considering the creature’s energy during the last few seconds, Jim had half-expected it to keep running up the turning and climbing platform of the elevator to add its speed to the mechanical lift. But Squonk was evidently satisfied to wait in this instance.