The Forever Man Page 8

  He could and did hide from his friends that it was not wine, women and song he needed, but AndFriend and space. He was certain he had also hidden it successfully from Mollen, and from Mary—whom, in any case, he had not seen in person since that first night in the lab. What concerned him more was whether he was being successful in keeping the depth of his need hidden from the physician to whom he had to report almost daily.

  It was evidently part of the whole package of surveillance, control and so forth set up around him, that his state of health be monitored and recorded on what was effectively a twenty-four hour a day basis. The Medical Officer, also a full colonel, who examined him three times a week or more, was probably the one person to whom Jim talked at all openly.

  Part of this was because there was no one else Jim felt safe talking to about himself. The other part was that whatever the physician’s actual specialty was—and he had told Jim once, when the visits had first started, but Jim had since forgotten—Jim gradually came to feel that there was something about the other that hinted at a touch of the psychiatrist in him. Not that Jim had any experience with psychiatrists; but there was a way the other man had of listening to him that seemed different from the listening of other doctors to whom Jim had gone.

  He told himself he had an unduly suspicious mind. Nonetheless, he found himself saying more than he had intended, so that he was surprised to hear the words coming from his own mouth.

  The procedures daring Jim’s visits were ordinarily route. Unless there were lab samples to be taken from him, it was merely a matter of Jim’s being scanned by a number of esoteric instruments, after which he sat down for a few words with the physician before being turned loose once more.

  “You’re losing weight again,” said the physician, checking through the papers that were the hard copy of Jim’s file and lay on the desk before him. He was a tall, gangling man in his early fifties with a high forehead, a straight nose and a surprisingly gentle, small smile that came at unexpected moments.

  “All right, Doc,” said Jim. “I’ll eat more.”

  The doctor glanced up at him from the papers.

  “You could try exercising less,” he said.

  “And then what’d I do with my time?”

  “There’s always your job,” said the doctor.

  “What job?”

  The doctor smiled his small smile.

  “I don’t know what to do with you,” he said, sitting back with a sigh. “The first person I’ve ever treated who tried to kill himself with good health. But, you know, I’m serious about your cutting back on the physical activity.”

  “For God’s sake, Doc,” said Jim. “Don’t ask me to do that. The only time I can forget about things is when I’m running or swimming or sweating it out to the point where I haven’t got any energy left over to think with. I’ll get more food down me. I don’t mind eating; it’s just that it’s kind of a chore these days.”

  The doctor scribbled on a prescription pad, tore off the sheet he had written on and handed it to Jim.

  “Take these, two a day, when you get up and when you go to bed,” he said. “They ought to increase your appetite.”

  Jim looked at the piece of paper in his hand, dubiously. He was not a pill-taker by preference.

  “It won’t make me dopey, will it, Doc?” he asked. “I mean, it isn’t some sort of tranquilizer?”

  “I guarantee it won’t make you dopey. Let’s just hope it makes you more interested in food,” said the physician. “Well, that’s it, then. See you Thursday.”

  “Right,” said Jim, getting up.

  He left.

  At first it did seem that the pills gave him a little more appetite. At any rate, he made a point of getting more food inside him whether his body craved it or not, and his weight came back up a few pounds. But then he leveled off and stayed where he was on the scale in the doctor’s office each time he came in. He suggested once to the doc—since the pills had given him no feeling from taking them at all—that he was willing to up the dosage, if that would do any good.

  “I think not,” said the physician. “You’re taking about what you should of that, right now.”

  So, he kept forcing the food. It was a problem, because he did not sleep better. Sometime about this period, also, his hours of slumber began to be occupied not so much by dreams of his stealing AndFriend and escaping into space, as with nightmares in which the lab suddenly burnt down and people would not let him go in and help keep the fire away from AndFriend—which bothered him even though he knew an ordinary fire would not harm the ship. Or he would dream that there had been a sudden earthquake that opened a fissure right under Mary’s lab. All that was needed was someone to go in and hook a cable around AndFriend to keep her from being dropped into the lava-hot interior of the earth, but they held him back from doing so because it was “too dangerous.”

  Meanwhile, Mary’s staff—he still had not seen her in person since that first visit to the lab—began to call him in more and more frequently. They were on a new kick now, as he entered the ninth month of his captivity on the Base. This one had him still wearing his space suit while listening, over and over again, to the voice recordings of himself, Mary and Raoul Penard when they had taken his Wing out to meet La Chasse Gallerie in Laagi territory, and convoy her home here to the Base. When he had listened to it all the way through, they would ask him questions about who had said what to who. It was like being on the witness stand in an endless court trial.

  When they got him to the point where he knew the recordings by heart, they switched to having him work with recordings in which one of the voices was edited out, and he spoke the words of that speaker; and it finally ended with him playing, over and over again, the part of Raoul.

  They kept it up until, among his other dreams, he began to dream that he actually was Raoul; or rather what was left of Raoul as a mind, locked in the sliced and broken metal that was La Chasse Gallerie. Curiously, these dreams were not unpleasant. But finally his appetite gave up for good. He would get to sleep, sleep for about two or three hours, dreaming nightmares, and then wake. Only getting out under the night sky in his running gear and covering four or five miles would rub out the memories of those dreams and let him get to solid sleep for a few hours. He even tried the desperate measure of getting drunk to make himself sleep, but that did not work either.

  “Alcohol may help put you out,” his doctor told him, “but after a few hours, it turns around and makes you wakeful again.”

  “I’ve got to do something. Can’t you just give me a sleeping pill, Doc?”

  “That’s only a temporary solution and this is a continuing problem,” said the doctor. “Maybe that medication I gave you for your appetite is working against you now, instead of for you. Let’s try taking you off it.”

  So Jim went off the pills. The first night he slept marvelously, the next night not so well. By the end of a week he was back with the dreams and the starlit runs again. He could feel himself beginning to lose his grip; and he found himself taking it out on the physician in a way he would never have considered doing, a year previously.

  “It’s this goddamned bird-in-a-gilded-cage life they’ve got me living!” he said. “I could take it if I could only get a taste, just a taste of space, once in a while. If they’d only let me take AndFriend out once a week—once a month, even! If they’d only let me see her!”

  “You might be right,” said the doctor. “But I don’t have any say about that. Have you tried putting in a formal request to visit your former ship?”

  “Ever since this thing started. Ten months now!” said Jim. “I put in a written request through channels two and three times a week. All they do is come back disapproved.”

  “Bring the next one to me. I’ll add a letter and sign it,” said the doctor.

  Jim did.

  It came back disapproved.

  He called Mollen and was told that the general could not be reached right now, but that his request t
o talk to the general would be passed on to the general.

  Mollen did not call back that day or the next.

  Jim called again.

  That day Mollen did not call back, either.

  Jim called again. Still, there was no call-back from Mollen’s office, and Mollen had made no other effort to contact him.

  That night, after one more of the innumerable sessions in Mary’s lab in which Jim was made again to play through the conversation of Raoul’s rescue, saying what Raoul had been heard to say while this was going on, he had a new nightmare.

  This time when he was Raoul, however, on becoming aware of AndFriend and the rest of the Wander Wing that was convoying him back to Base, he broke off his litany of poetry and recitation.

  “No, you don’t!” he howled out the earphones of all their suits, swung La Chasse Gallerie in a hundred and eighty degree turn and headed away from Earth, back into enemy territory.

  The dream changed, without reason but without surprising Jim, as dreams have a habit of doing. He found himself still in his space suit, standing on the observation platform of one of the big command ships on the Frontier, watching in a screen as AndFriend drove across into Laagi territory.

  “What’re you doing?” Jim shouted at the gunnery command officer, standing next to him and also watching. “There’s a whole flight of Laagi ships coming up on her!”

  “Oh, I thought they told you,” the gunnery command officer answered cheerfully. “They were through with her in the lab, so they decided to get some use out of her as an unmanned drone to draw Laagi fire, so we can make a study of how the aliens attack. Look at them now, will you? They’re moving in, now. Now they’re really starting to slice her up.”

  “Unmanned? No!” cried Jim. His gaze was back on the screen, which now showed AndFriend being killed and destroyed. “Baby, don’t just run straight like that. Cut! Cut and run! Fire back...”

  In his mind’s eye he saw his own empty command chair, with the buttons he could have touched if he was there, the controls he could have used, if he was in the seat. Sweat sprang out all over him; and meanwhile, beside him, the gunnery command officer continued his cheerful chatter about how badly AndFriend was being destroyed, as if it was a game, an entertainment…

  Jim woke, throwing off the bedcovers in one wild movement. The underwear which years of ship’s duty had conditioned him to use as nightwear was glued to him by the perspiration that soaked it. Still caught up in the emotions of seeing AndFriend destroyed while he ached to save her, he stripped off the sodden T shirt and shorts and stumbled into the shower to pour gallons of water on his shaking body. After which he dressed in his running clothes and went out under the unchanging stars to run the streets through the Base until he was limp with exhaustion.

  The next day he went in person to Mollen’s offices.

  The general was out, he was told.

  He said he would wait.

  He was told politely that he was not allowed to wait.

  “Then send for the Military Police,” he told them, taking a chair, “because I’m waiting!”

  He waited. There was a good deal of excitement with officers of various ranks up to and including a one-star general who came and told him he could not stay. He did not answer, merely sat.

  Eventually they left him as he was.

  The day wore on. No one came out or went in through the door to Mollen’s inner, private office. Clearly he was not there. He did not come in from the corridor door, either. The afternoon passed. Jim was not conscious of the hours passing either slowly or fast. It was simply time to be put in. He did not read. He did not think. He simply sat and waited. At last, with the afternoon far advanced, the captain on at the desk in the outer office got up and went out briefly.

  When he returned, he was accompanied by two tall MPs with holstered sidearms and the flaps buttoned down. No nightsticks. The captain cleaned up his desk. He went out and the door closed behind him. The two MPs took positions, standing one on each side of the closed door. Jim hardly paid them any attention.

  Together the three of them spent the night. On the rare occasions when Jim got up to go to the men’s room down the corridor, one of the MPs went with him and came back with him. Toward morning, Jim may have dozed in his chair. But he was not conscious of having slept, and if he had, he had not dreamed while he was asleep.

  At dawn two other MPs replaced the Military Police who had been there all night. One of them brought a plastic cup of coffee and put it on the chair next to Jim’s. Jim looked at it and realized he was thirsty. He drank it; but he could not have said, a second after finishing it, whether it had been black, or whether it had had cream and sugar in it.

  A little before 7 A.M., the corridor outside began to sound with the feet of incoming workers. At a little after seven, the corridor door opened between the two MPs and Mollen strode in, followed by the same captain who had sat at the outer desk yesterday.

  Mollen jerked his head at Jim.

  Jim got to his feet, awkwardly. He was dully surprised to find how stiff his body was after his long sitting. He followed the general into the private office.

  This office had padded armchairs before its one large desk. Mollen took the chair behind the desk and gestured Jim to one of the facing, padded ones.

  They looked at each other.

  “Well?” said Mollen. “You ready to go back into space again?”

  Jim stared at him dumbly and the silence lengthened out between them, until Jim realized that the question had been for the record. And for the record, which was undoubtedly a voice and picture recording going on at the moment, he would have to give an answer.

  “Yes sir,” he croaked.

  Mollen opened the he croaked. wide drawer in the middle of his desk, fished around and came up with a document that seemed to consist of half a dozen or so sheets of paper, heat-stapled together. He passed it across to Jim.

  “Sign this.”

  Jim took it and blinked at it. He tried to read through it, but his brain was almost as numb as his body. It read something like the document he had been required to sign upon getting his commission, about the Official Secrets Act and penalties for his disregarding it. Essentially these papers before him, once signed, put him completely at his government’s disposal—which seemed like doing the thing twice-over, since as a Frontier pilot he was already the government’s, to use or throw away.

  In any case, it did not matter. AndFriend and space were all that mattered. He signed it with a pen the general handed him and passed both pen and document back. Mollen waved it for a second in the air.

  “You can have another look at the file storing this any time you want to,” the general said, “unless you ever become a civilian again or you’re put on a different status. Then that file’ll be closed to you. Understand?”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “Good.” Mollen’s voice became more genial “From now on you report every morning to the lab proper—Mary’s work area. For now, for God’s sake get back to your quarters and get some sleep.”

  Chapter 7

  Jim did go back to his quarters and he did sleep—for about seven hours. At the end of which time he woke up feeling terrible generally, but very happy for reasons he could not, in the first minute or two, remember. Then he recalled the long wait in Mollen’s office and what had happened after the general had showed up; and his sensations of feeling terrible settled down to the recognition that he was merely very hungry, ready to eat anything digestible—in large quantities.

  He checked his wrist-com. It was midafternoon. He got up, showered, dressed and went to the Officers’ Club, where he found the menu available at that hour to consist only of sandwiches. He proceeded to eat perhaps a dozen of these and wash them down with several bottles of ginger ale, no great amount, but the food and drink together in his stomach acted on him like knockout pills. He made his way heavily back to his quarters, undressed and fell asleep again… and this time he slept until a
fter five-thirty the following morning.

  His body had become used to running. It wanted to get out and move, but he was once again as hungry as a bear in spring. He had breakfast, put aside the desire to run and went directly to Mary’s lab.

  “Credentials, sir?”

  It was a different face beyond the transparency, but the uniform and the routine were as usual. Except that this time, for the first time in months, there were no lab workers waiting to take him off for their eternal tests. He showed his credentials.

  “You’ll have to wait for the Head of Lab, sir. If you’ll take a seat, she ought to be here in the next ten or fifteen minutes,” said the guard.

  He found a hard seat on a bench built into the wall across from the transparency. He grinned. From cooling his heels in Mollen’s outer office to cooling his heels in Mary’s surveillance entrance. That was progress.

  It was, however, nearly three-quarters of an hour before Mary showed up. Jim did not care. He was this far and he did not intend to move unless they carried him out. When at last Mary did come in from the street, she had Mollen with her.

  “Told you he’d be here at the crack of dawn!” said Mollen. If Jim had not been feeling so happy, he might have allowed himself a small sense of injury. Dawn had been a good three hours earlier.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t had more time to talk to you myself all these past months,” Mary said directly to Jim. She looked at him, he thought, sympathetically. “You’ve lost weight.”

  “Nonsense!” said Mollen. “He’s in top shape. Aren’t you, Jim?”

  “Yes sir. Top shape,” said Jim. He grinned at Mary. Today he even loved her.

  “Come along.” Mary and Mollen showed their credentials to the guard in movements that betrayed an infinity of repetitions.