The Forever Man Read online

  In fact, it let itself be carried through two upper levels of the building before stepping off on the third. Here the available circular expanse of floor held no tables, but groups of Laagi clustered around larger assemblies of whatever it was they built here and of which what Squonk carried was evidently a part, for the creature carried his burden up to one of the groups and waited to have it taken, then turned to head back downstairs once more.

  “There ought to be some way we could stop it!” Mary’s voice, sharp with frustration, sounded in Jim’s head. “I want to see what they’re building here, and maybe we could figure out the ultimate use of whatever it is. If we could only get Squonk to stay, somehow!”

  Oddly enough, Jim was thinking the same thing, for the same reasons, plus a few of his own. He had long since been caught up in an eagerness like Mary’s to find out about the Laagi and everything to do with them. He also would have liked time to examine more closely what was being built on this floor. In addition, however, he was still concerned with the problem of how to communicate with Squonk, with a view to controlling the small alien.

  “Did you hear me, Jim?” Mary was asking as Squonk boarded the screw-elevator for the down ride. “If Squonk spends all its time doing nothing but working here and cleaning AndFriend every so often, how are we going to get a look at the Laagi civilization as a whole? Is there any chance, do you think, that we could transfer to another Squonk, or even to one of the Laagi?”

  “I wouldn’t think trying to transfer to one of the Laagi might be very smart,” said Jim slowly. “Squonk might not be aware of us being here in its mind, but a Laagi might—particularly if we started talking to each other. Come to think of it, he might even understand what we’re saying.”

  “I don’t see how,” said Mary doubtfully. “Our mental concepts have got to be so different from any alien’s that they wouldn’t make sense to him—or it.”

  “Are you so certain about that?” asked Jim. “Remember, there’s lots of parallels between our civilization and this one. We’ve got ships, they have ships. We’ve got buildings, they’ve got buildings. Just like us, they go places, build things, and so forth. Wasn’t it you who said they were probably using something like a body language to communicate? So, we communicate, they communicate. We may translate our thoughts into noises and they translate them into arm jerks, but if the thought’s the same—we think of what’s underfoot, and what’s underfoot to them is what’s underfoot to us—wouldn’t our thought about it, which we think of as a sound, be seen in the mind we were occupying as an arm jerk that meant ‘underfoot’?”

  Mary did not answer immediately. Jim found himself feeling a little smug about the success of his argument.

  “You’re still anthropomorphizing,” she said though, when she did answer, “still thinking of them in human terms. The thoughts behind our respective symbols may compare, but we and the Laagi may look at things so differently that our thoughts would be gibberish to them. For example, suppose for the Laagi, there’s no specific term for ‘underfoot.’ The whole concept of something beneath the feet, upholding you, is thought of in terms of who it upholds, or of why it was built, or what color it is… or anything.”

  “Hmm,” said Jim. He did not know what else to say. It was disconcerting to make a masterful argument and immediately have someone find a hole in it. Then inspiration came.

  “But the point is,” he said, “that we don’t want to draw the Laagi’s attention to the fact we’re in its mind at all. Talking gibberish could sound that alarm just as loudly as saying something the Laagi could understand.”

  “Unless they thought he was crazy.”

  “Do you want to take the chance?” demanded Jim.

  “No,” said Mary reluctantly. “I guess not. What’s the chance we might be able to transfer to another squonk?”

  “I’m still trying to learn about this one,” said Jim. “Maybe—but give me some time yet. I understand from our point of view we’ve got lots of time, so we might as well use it.”

  Mary did not dignify that final statement with a reply.

  Squonk took them back to the waiting line. It was, Jim noticed, glowing all over with satisfaction at what it had just done. Why it should be so pleased with such a simple errand when it had not radiated any unusual happiness over the very careful job it had done of cleaning AndFriend, puzzled Jim. Tentatively, he concluded that the pleasure of a squonk might have something to do with whether one or more of the Laagi was involved in what the squonk did.

  They were something like faithful dogs, these squonks. He considered that idea. It was a farfetched comparison, based only on the pleasure plainly felt by their Squonk on only two instances. Perhaps he should try to go about this more logically.

  Item: he could feel strong emotion from Squonk.

  Item: he did not know if Squonk could feel any emotion from him or Mary. In fact—

  Item: he did not know if the Squonk knew they were in its mind. It could be that it did not feel or hear their presence at all; or it could be feeling or hearing them, but simply ignoring what seemed to have no relation to its ordinary existence.

  What he needed was some way of testing out whether Squonk could hear them or not; and preferably it should be a test he could make without Mary knowing he was trying it.

  That brought up the question of what Mary could overhear from his mind. He could hear her only when she thought directly at him. Plainly, she could hear him when he thought directly to her. But she had not seemed to hear him when he was simply working out some kind of mental problem, as when he got together with AndFriend’s calculating equipment to plot the most promising search pattern to find the second Laagi derelict.

  On second thought, it had been plain enough all along that Mary could not hear his thoughts, or he hers, unless they deliberately broadcast them to one another.

  Back to squonks, which were a legitimate subject for investigation. Why not try using the image-making part of his mind, imagine himself speaking directly to Squonk as he would to Mary, and see how it would react?

  He pictured himself as a Laagi, praising this particular squonk.

  He was vibrating his right arm up and down with feather touches on Squonk’s outstretched neck. “Good squonk,” he was transmitting to it with his feather taps. “Good, good squonk! Hard-working, noble squonk. Fine, industrious squonk…”

  To his delighted surprise, he was beginning to feel a wave of answering emotion from Squonk. It was responding exactly as if an actual Laagi was praising it with the arm signals. Jim found himself getting into his role as a Laagi, expanding his praise. Working off the feedback of Squonk’s emotions he thought he could almost feel, in muscles and tendons he did not have and had never had, the effort behind the touchings that were causing such pleasure in Squonk. He became aware, suddenly, that Squonk was now attracting the attention of its fellow squonks in the waiting line.

  Squonk had already begun to extend its neck in delight at being so praised. In a moment it would roll over on its back with both of its red feet stiffly pointing upwards in the air. Hastily, Jim cancelled the image and the thought.

  Think about something else, he told himself hastily. But he did not have to work very hard at doing so, because at that moment Mary herself unknowingly lent a helping hand.

  “Isn’t our Squonk acting rather peculiarly?” she asked.

  “Is it?” he said, for the Squonk, praise withdrawn, had already retracted its neck, although its emotions still radiated a joyous feeling. “I didn’t notice.”

  “It was acting the same way it acted when that Laagi petted it, on our way here. It stuck its neck out just the way it was sticking it out before.”

  “Oh? I’m sorry I didn’t notice that,” said Jim. “I was thinking.’

  “I wish you wouldn’t go off into these thinking trances,” said Mary. “Or at least, tell me how I can rouse you, when you do. Something critical might happen and you wouldn’t notice; and I wouldn’t be able to get y
our attention in time—just the way it was now.”

  “Did you think it was critical? Squonk sticking his neck out?”

  “I don’t know. But he had the other squonks on both sides of us looking at him as if he was doing something extraordinary.”

  “Maybe squonks do what he was doing just for exercise—or practice, sometimes even when no Laagi’s around. Or he could just be remembering it to the point where he acted it out. The other squonks could be staring at him because they were jealous.”

  It sounded like a thin explanation, even to Jim.

  “Perhaps… ” said Mary doubtfully.

  “You, yourself, said there could be any number of reasons for the things they do that we’d never guess because their alien minds give them a different understanding of the universe they perceive—or something like that.”

  “I know,” said Mary. “But all the same I’d like to know why Squonk did it. The information might help us to understand the Laagi. Any information could help.”

  “You’re right, of course,” said Jim. He hesitated for a second, but then decided it would not be unadvisable to tell her of the possibility.

  “I’ve been playing with our Squonk, with the back of my mind,” he told her. “I’m trying to find some way to get through to it so that I can order it the way a Laagi would, to go places and do things. If it works, we can direct him to take us around the city—maybe.”

  “Good!” said Mary. “That’s very good.”

  “Glad to hear you agree.”

  “Jim, you do just marvelously, with or without my ideas,” she said. “I’ve been hard to live with, like this. I know it. I always am. I get the bit in my teeth and I’m ready to trample anyone who gets in the way. I’m a louse.”

  “What of it?” said Jim. “I’m a louse, myself.”

  You certainly are, said the back of his mind. Jim winced. Happily, winces were one of the things Mary was not able to see.

  “Not like me. I tell you, you don’t know me,” said Mary. “Anyway, I’m ready to dance over the fact you think you might be able to direct Squonk around the city. Will you let me know how it goes—your trying to do that, I mean? Otherwise I’ll only keep guessing but not wanting to keep asking you for progress reports.”

  “I’ll keep you up to date.”

  The conversation broke off, leaving Jim feeling a guilty sensation. He tried to get rid of this by reminding himself of how Mary, General Mollen and the rest had gotten him into this situation, but found little or no help now in that fact. The insult had lost its force. What’s wrong with me, wondered Jim? One kind word from her and I roll over on my back like a squonk.

  However, it was a lot more pleasant being on friendly terms with her, like this.

  At this point Squonk suddenly retracted its legs until they were barely showing above its red feet, pulled in its neck until its head had disappeared, with the exception of its nose and mouth, closed its eyes and once again rolled over on its back. This time, however, it rocked back and forth a few times gently as its shell lost its momentum from the movement, and was still.

  Chapter 18

  “It’s not dead, is it?” asked Mary.

  “No,” said Jim, “just sleeping. These squonks must go to sleep wherever the mood strikes them. Come to think of it, I’ll bet the Laagi do, too—sometimes anyway. Remember the ones we saw near the entrance that had their legs, arms and heads all pulled in and were just sitting there like a cylinder on the floor?”

  “But what makes you so certain it’s sleep and not something else?”

  “Because it’s dreaming.”

  “Dreaming?” Mary hesitated. “You mean literally dreaming, the way you and I dream?”

  “That’s right. I can catch parts of it. It’s like looking at a crazy recording made up of snippets from half a hundred different records.”

  “I wish I could reach the creature with my mind the way you do!” Mary said. “What’s it dreaming about? Can you see what its dreams are?”

  “If I try,” said Jim. “Look, why don’t you not say anything for a while, so I can concentrate on this? What it’s dreaming about is clear enough; it’s just that I have to concentrate all my mind to really see it. Not that any of it’s so remarkable. All the dreams are about work.”

  “Work?”

  “Work. Now, if you’ll let me—”

  “Sorry. Go ahead.”

  Mary fell silent.

  Jim had been telling almost the complete truth. It was true that he had to concentrate in order to experience at second hand what Squonk was dreaming. But a deeper reason for his wanting Mary not to disturb him was that he wanted time to evaluate anything to be learned from the dreams, so that he could decide whether it might pay him to keep the knowledge to himself or not. The insult might have lost its force, but he was still determined to get away from the hold Mary had on him, if only to prove he could.

  Squonk’s dreams had a quality as alien as the creature itself. It occurred to Jim after some minutes that they might not be dreams in the human sense so much as some sort of sorting or memorizing process. But there was no doubt that they were, to say the least, pleasant to the dreamer. There was an emotion of strong satisfaction emanating from Squonk.

  But the dreams were hardly more than flashes of episodes. Squonk cleaning AndFriend. Squonk cleaning the outer walls of a building. Squonk cleaning the pavement outside AndFriend, then carrying assemblages of parts from this floor to upper floors of this building. Squonk running a machine which cut segments from a living, green, flat creature; segments which Squonk and other squonks took out and laid down between newly built buildings to grow into pathways of the sort that it had traversed in coming to this building. Squonk hunting for something a Laagi had misplaced, a small part which was needed to fit in with other parts…

  Interestingly, Squonk did not dream about being praised, either by the Laagi he had encountered on his way to this job or Jim’s praising. In the dreams, however, there appeared at least three other Laagis who had put it to work at various things at various times. Jim got the impression Squonk would take orders from any Laagi. In fact, the relationship between Squonk and Laagi might be a lot less like the canine-human relationship Jim had been comparing it to.

  But it was undeniable that Squonk existed here for the purpose of taking orders from Laagi. In fact, it was eager to do so. The kind of work did not seem to matter. It was the fact that there was work available that was the attractive thing from Squonk’s point of view.

  “By God!” said Jim suddenly.

  “What?” Mary’s voice seemed to pounce upon him.

  Out of nowhere, Jim had been struck by a startling suspicion; this was that it was not the Laagi as individuals to which Squonk was attached, but to those aliens as suppliers of work. Work, it seemed, was Squonk’s pleasure. Work that had been publicly acknowledged as having been done was the greatest pleasure of all. But Jim hesitated to pass this hypothesis on to Mary right now. For one thing, it might not be true. For another, it might contain the germ of something useful to him, privately, in making his escape from the hypnotic control. He chose instead something he had noticed about Squonk’s dreams and which should be more interesting to her, anyway.

  “You know,” he told Mary now, “nothing in any of these dreams of Squonk’s shows either Laagi or squonks doing anything but working. I mean, there haven’t been any glimpses of homes or sleeping places or recreation areas.”

  Mary apparently thought about this for a minute.

  “You mean that squonks may not be allowed into such areas?”

  “That,” said Jim slowly, “or maybe even the Laagi don’t have them. They might sleep on the job, too, and do nothing but work.”

  “That’s unthinkable,” said Mary. “Unless all the Laagi we’ve seen so far are slaves, or something like that, tied to their work like galley slaves used to be chained to their oar. A technological civilization at all comparable to ours would have to have some reward for working that
constantly. Otherwise there’d be no reason to develop a technology. To assume they do nothing but work doesn’t make sense. The most primitive humans had more work than they could handle. It was the need to get in out of the rain and get free from having to be always gathering more wood for the fire that gave rise to technology.”

  “In our case,” said Jim.

  “Any technological civilization has to have been built in response to a need. All right, you imagine a reason for being built at all, otherwise.”

  Jim tried, and found he could not, at least on short notice like this.

  “All right, a technological civilization has to have rewards,” he said. “Squonk sleeps, therefore the Laagi and other species here sleep. So there should be sleeping places—unless they do sleep on the job, as I said—and as our Squonk seems to be doing right now. And so there ought to be recreation areas… or at least nonwork areas, reward areas. For the moment, I’ll agree.”

  “I don’t know why we have to argue over everything,” said Mary.

  “Everyone’s unique,” said Jim. “I’m not you and you’re not me. That means you’re not going to see and do things the way I’d see and do them, at least part of the time. So there’s always a difference of opinion.”

  “This much?” said Mary.

  “… Maybe.”

  “I really don’t deliberately start out to argue with everything you say,” said Mary. “It’s just that… “

  “I’m wrong.”

  “Well, yes. Frequently you’re wrong, particularly when you’re in an area I know something about. When you were driving AndFriend, I didn’t argue with you, because that was something you knew something about. But in the areas of sociology and psychology, I know a lot more than you.”

  “Human psychology and sociology.”

  “The point is you don’t know anything at all in those areas.”

  “The point is we’re dealing with an alien culture where neither one of us is an expert. Correct? Where your human knowledge applies, you could be in a better position to make guesses than I am—maybe. But since we’re both in unknown territory, the only thing that’s certain is the fact neither one of us knows anything for sure. You could be right on the basis of what you’ve learned. But unlearned as I am, I could be right on the basis that I see things a little differently than you, being a different person, and I might just see something you don’t see. So am I or am I not entitled to an opinion, in your opinion?”