The Forever Man Read online

  “Acknowledge!” snapped Jim, dropping his own slow computing. He keyed for data, saw the data light flash and knew he had received into his computing center the information for the jump back to Earth. “Hang on Lela!” he shouted. “Here we go—”

  He punched for jump.

  Disorientation. Nausea. And…

  Peace.

  AndFriend lay without moving under the landing lights of a concrete pad in the open, under the nighttime sky and the stars Earth. The daylight hours had passed while Wander Section had been gone. Next to AndFriend lay the dark, torn shape of La Chasse Gallerie, and beyond the ancient ship lay Lela. A hundred light-years away the Frontier battle would still be raging. Laagi and men were out there dying, and they would go on dying until the Laagi realized that Wander Section had finally made good its escape. Then the Laagi ships would withdraw from an assault against a Frontier line that well over a hundred years of fighting had taught was permanently unbreachable by either side. But how many, thought Jim with a dry and bitter soul, would die before the withdrawal was made?

  He punched the button to open the port of AndFriend and got clumsily to his feet in the bulky suit. During the hours just past, he had forgotten he was wearing it. Now, it was like being swaddled in a mattress. He was as thoroughly soaked with sweat as if he had been in swimming with his clothes on.

  There was no sound coming from La Chasse Gallerie. Had the voice of Raoul Penard finally been silenced? Sodden with weariness, Jim could not summon up the energy even to wonder about it. He turned clumsily around and stumbled back through the ship four steps and out the open port, vaguely hearing Mary Gallegher rising and following behind him.

  He stumped heavy-footed across the concrete toward the lights of the Receiving Section, lifting like an ocean liner out of a sea of night. It seemed to him that he was a long time reaching the door of the Section, but he kept on stolidly, and at last he passed through and into a desuiting room. Then attendants were helping him off with his suit.

  In a sort of dream he stripped off his soaked clothing and showered, and put on a fresh jumper suit. The cloth felt strange and harsh against his arms and legs as if his body, as well as what was inside him, had been rubbed raw by what he had just been through. He walked heavily on into the debriefing room, and dropped heavily into one of the lounge chairs.

  A debriefing officer came up to him and sat down in a chair opposite, turning on the little black recorder pickup he wore at his belt. The debriefing officer began asking questions in the safe, quiet monotone that had been found least likely to trigger off emotional outbursts in the returned pilots. Jim answered slowly, too drained for emotion.

  “…No,” he said at last. “I didn’t see Swallow again. She didn’t acknowledge when I called for Formation B, and I had to go on without her. No, she never answered after we reached the Frontier.”

  “Thank you, Major.” The debriefing officer got to his feet, clicking off his recorder pickup, and went off. An enlisted man came around with a tray of glasses half-filled with brown whisky. He offered it first to the pilot and the gunner of the Lela, who were standing together on the other side of the room with a debriefing officer. The two men took their glasses absentmindedly and drank from them without reaction, as if the straight liquor was water. The enlisted man brought his tray over to where Jim sat.

  Jim shook his head. The enlisted man hesitated.

  “You’re supposed to drink it, sir,” he said. “Surgeon’s orders.”

  Jim shook his head again. The enlisted man went away. A moment later he came back followed by a major with the caduceus of the Medical Corps on his jacket lapel.

  “Here, Major,” he said to Jim, taking a glass from the tray and holding it out to Jim. “Down the hatch.”

  Jim shook his head, rolling the back of it against the top of the chair he sat in.

  “It’s no good,” he said. “It doesn’t do any good.”

  The Medical Corps major put the glass back on the tray and leaned forward. He put his thumb gently under Jim’s right eye and lifted the lid with his forefinger. He looked for a second, then let go and turned to the enlisted man.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “You can go on.”

  The enlisted man took his tray of glasses away. The doctor reached into the inside pocket of his uniform jacket and took out a small silver tube with a button on its side. He rolled up Jim’s right sleeve, put the end of the tube against it and pressed the button.

  Jim felt what seemed like a cooling spray against the skin of his arm. And something woke in him after all.

  “What’re you doing?” he shouted, struggling to his feet. “You can’t knock me out now! I’ve got two ships not in yet. The Fair Maid and the Swallow—” The room began to tilt around him. “You can’t—” His tongue thickened into unintelligibility. The room swung grandly around him and he felt the medical major’s arms catching him. And unconsciousness closed upon him like a trap of darkness.

  He slept, evidently for a long time, and when he woke he was not in the bed of his own quarters but in the bed of a hospital room. Nor did they let him leave it for the better part of a week. He had had time, lying there in the peaceful, uneventful hospital bed, to come to an understanding with himself. When he got out he went looking for Mary Gallegher.

  He located the geriatrics woman finally on the secret site where La Chasse Gallerie was being probed and examined by the Geriatrics Bureau. Mary was at work with the crew that was doing this, and for some little time word could not be gotten to her; and without her authorization, Jim could not be let in to see her.

  Jim waited patiently in a shiny, unlit lounge until a young man came to guide him into the interior of a vast building where La Chasse Gallerie lay dwarfed by her surroundings and surrounded by complicated items of equipment. It was apparently a break period for most of the people working on the old ship, for only one or two figures were to be seen doing things with this equipment outside the ship. The young man shouted in through the open port of La Chasse Gallerie, and left. Mary came out and shook hands with Jim.

  There were dark circles under Mary’s eyes and she seemed thinner under the loose shirt and slacks she wore.

  “Sorry to hear about Swallow,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Jim, a little bleakly. “They think she must have drifted back farther into Laagi territory. The unmanned probes couldn’t locate her, and the Laagi may have taken her in.”

  Mary looked steadily at him.

  “That’s what chews on you, isn’t it?” she said. “Not knowing if her pilot and gunner were dead or not. If they were, then there’s nothing to think about. But if they weren’t… we never know what becomes of them—”

  He shook his head at her in a silent plea and she broke off.

  “Fair Maid made it in, safely,” he said hoarsely. “Anyway, it wasn’t about the Section. I came to see you.”

  “No.” Mary looked at him with a gentleness he had not seen in her before. “It was about Raoul Penard you came, wasn’t it?”

  “I couldn’t find out anything. Is it—is he alive?”

  “Yes,” said Mary. “He’s alive.”

  “Can you get through to him?—What came to me,” said Jim quickly, “while I was resting up in the hospital, was that I finally began to understand the reason behind all his poetry-quoting, and such. It struck me he must have started all that deliberately. To remind himself of where he was trying to get back to. To make it sharp and clear in his mind so he couldn’t forget it.”

  “Yes,” said Mary nodding. “You’re right. He wanted insurance against quitting, against giving up.”

  “I thought so. You were right.” Jim grinned with a slight grimness at her. “I’d been trying to quit myself. Go find something that could quit me. You were right all the way down the line. I’m a dragon-slayer. I was born that way, I’m stuck with it and I can’t change it. I want to go through the Laagi, or around them and end this damn murderous stalemate. But I can’t live long e
nough. None of us can. And so I wanted to give up.”

  “And you don’t now?”

  “No,” said Jim slowly. “It’s still no use, but I’m going to keep hoping—for a miracle.”

  “Miracles are a matter of time,” said Mary. “To make yourself a millionaire in two minutes is just about impossible. To make it in two hundred years is practically a certainty. That’s what people like me are after. If we could all live as long as Penard, all sorts of things could be possible.”

  “And he’s alive!” said Jim, shaking his head slowly. “He’s really alive! I didn’t even want to believe it, it was so farfetched.” Jim broke off. “Is he—”

  “Sane? No,” said Mary. “And I don’t think we’ll ever be able to make him so. But maybe I’m wrong. As I say, with time, most near-impossibilities become practicabilities.” She stepped back from the open port of La Chasse Gallerie, and gestured to the interior. “Want to come in?”

  Jim hesitated.

  “I don’t have a secret clearance for this project—” he began.

  “Don’t worry about it,” interrupted Mary. “That’s just to keep the news people off our necks until we decide how to handle this. Come on.”

  She led the way inside. Jim followed her. Within, the ancient metal corridor leading to the pilot’s compartment seemed swept clean and dusted shiny, like some exhibit in a museum. The interior had been hung with magnetic lights, but the gaps and tears made by Laagi weapons let almost as much light in. Pilot’s compartment was a shambles that had been tidied and cleaned. The instruments and control panel were all but obliterated and the pilot’s comchair half gone. A black box stood in the center of the floor, an incongruous piece of modern equipment, connected by a thick, gray cable to a bulkhead behind it.

  “I wasn’t wrong, then,” said Jim, looking around him. “No human body could have lived through this. It was the semianimate control center that was running the ship as Penard’s alter ego, then, wasn’t it? The man isn’t really alive?”

  “Yes,” said Mary, “and no. You were right about the control center somehow absorbing the living personality of Penard. —But look again. Could a control center like that, centered in living tissue floating and growing in a nutrient solution with no human hands to care for it—could something like that have survived this, either?”

  Jim looked around at the slashed and rained interior. A coldness crept into him and he thought once more of the legend of a great ghost cargo canoe sailing through the snow-filled skies with its dead crew, home to the New Year’s feast of the living.

  “No...” he said slowly, through stiff lips. “Then... where is he?”

  “Here!” said Mary, reaching out with her fist to strike the metal bulkhead to which the gray cable was attached. The dull boom of the struck metal reverberated in Jim’s ears. Mary looked penetratingly at Jim.

  “You were right,” said Mary, “when you said that the control center had become Penard—that it was Penard, after the man died. Not just a record full of memories, but something holding the vital, decision-making spark of the living man himself. —But that was only half the miracle. Because the tissue living in the heart of the control center had to die, too, and just as the original Penard knew he would die, long before he could get home, the tissue Penard knew it, too. But their determination, Penard’s determination, to do something, solved the problem.”

  She stopped and stood staring at Jim, as if waiting for some sign that she had been understood.

  “Go on,” said Jim.

  “The control system,” said Mary, “was connected to the controls of the ship itself through an intermediate solid-state element which was the grandfather of the wholly inanimate solid-state computing centers in the ships you drive nowadays. The link was from living tissue through the area of solid-state physics to gross electronic and mechanical controls.”

  “I know that,” said Jim. “Part of our training—”

  “The living spark of Raoul Penard, driven by his absolute determination to get home, passed from him into the living tissue of the semianimate controls system,” went on Mary, as if Jim had not spoken. “From there it bridged the gap by a sort of neurobiotaxis into the flow of impulse taking place in the solid-state elements. Once there, below all gross levels, there was nothing to stop it infusing every connected solid part of the ship.”

  Mary swept her hand around the ruined pilot’s compartment.

  “This,” she said, “is Raoul Penard. And this!” Once more she struck the bulkhead above the black box. “The human body died. The tissue activating the control center died. But Raoul came home just as he had been determined to do!”

  Mary stopped talking. Her voice seemed to echo away into the silence of the compartment.

  “And doing it,” said Mary more quietly, “he brought home the key we’ve been hunting for in the Bureau all this time. We pulled the plug on a dam behind which there’s been piling up a flood of theory and research. What we needed to know was that the living human essence could exist independently of the normal human biochemical machinery. Now, we know it. It’ll take time, but someday it won’t be necessary for the vital element of anyone to admit extinction, unless whoever it is wants to.”

  But Jim was only half-listening. Something else had occurred to him, something so poignant it contracted his throat painfully.

  “Does he know?” Jim asked. “You said he’s insane. But does he know he finally got here? Does he know he made it home?”

  “Yes,” said Mary. “We’re sure he does. Listen…”

  She turned a little away from Jim and spoke out loud, as if Raoul was right around a corner, hiding there in the ship’s interior.

  “Raoul?” she said.

  ...And softly the voice of Raoul Penard spoke from the ship’s hull all around them, as if the man was talking to himself. But it was a quieter, happier talking to himself than Jim had heard before. Raoul was quoting one of the poems of William Henry Drummond again. But this time it was a poem entirely in English and there was no trace of accent in the words at all...

  O, Spirit of the mountain that speaks to us to-night, Your voice is sad, yet still recalls past visions of delight, When ‘mid the grand old Laurentides, old when the Earth was new, With flying feet we followed the moose and caribou. And backward rush sweet memories, like fragments of a dream, We hear the dip of paddles…

  Raoul’s voice went on, almost whispering, contentedly to itself. Jim looked up from listening, and saw Mary’s eyes fixed on him with a strange, hard look he had not seen before.

  “You didn’t seem to follow me, just now,” said Mary. “You didn’t seem to understand what I meant. You’re one of our most valuable lives, the true white knight that all of us dream of being at one time or another, but only one in billions actually succeeds in being born to be.”

  Jim stared back at her.

  “I told you,” he said, “I can’t help it.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” said Mary. “You wanted to go out and fight the dragons, but life was too short. But what about now?”

  “Now?” echoed Jim, staring at her. “You mean—me?”

  “Yes,” said Mary. Her face was strange and intense, and her voice seemed to float on the soft river of words flowing from the black box. “I mean you. What are you going to be doing, a thousand years from today?”

  Chapter 5

  Jim had more than a month of accumulated leave time coming and he took it. He wanted to go someplace with the feel of hot sand under his bare feet and the smell of sea in the breeze. He wanted to forget about space and about Raoul Penard and La Chasse Gallerie; he wanted to forget about the old Canadian poems and songs, and about Mary Gallegher. Above all, he wanted to forget what she had said the last time they had talked. Instead he wanted to fill his mind with wine, women and song. But he lied to himself.

  So he went off, relying on sand, salt-smelling breezes and the touch of women to burn all he wanted to forget out of his mind. He went
to a place in Baja California called Barres de Hijo and signed in at a resort there. It had everything he was looking for, including charterboat fishing for sailfish and tarpon. It also—or rather the resort hotel he stayed at—had a swimming pool at which he met a fellow vacationer named Barbie Novak, who did fit his ideas of beauty and liked him even better when she found out he was one of the Frontier Guard pilots, on leave.

  The days and nights, consequently, were a pleasant blur with Barbie for a companion, until she had to go home; and following that there was a girl named Joan Takari. But morning after she had left he found himself lying alone on the beach, hoping she had gotten home all right; and he could not remember her face.

  So instead of looking around for more women to companion him, he took to sitting and walking by himself, lying on the beach and listening to the waves or seated up on the rocks overlooking a part of the shore that had no beach, watching the surf crash on the blue-black boulders below in white foam.

  It was not, he concluded, that he wanted to live forever. But nonetheless Mary’s words from their last meeting stuck in his mind. In a way they had taken the place of the emptiness inside him—which was still there, but was now like a dark cavern into which a small aperture had broken, letting in a single ray of light.

  He had dreamed of space and wanted it from the first time he had realized it was out there—which was earlier than he could remember. All his life had pointed him at it. It was his arena in which he could do something… something of lasting effect. What he would do and how he would do it, he had no idea. But he was like someone who dreams of a much-wanted place, in a mountain so far off it was like a blue cloud on the horizon of his babyhood, but always there, day after day. And one day he had started to walk toward that mountain.

  He had had no idea what roads led to it, what waited for him along the way, or how he would find his path and keep from going astray. But he had been determined to keep heading toward it until he reached it; and then he was determined to find on it the place of which he dreamed. It was a case of just always going forward. That way he could never go wrong because all roads led there eventually. All roads, in fact, were one road as long as he kept searching—the Forever Road, he had named it in his mind.