The Forever Man

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “You really don’t know how you do it?” demanded Mollen.

  Jim shook his head. Then realized he had only thought of shaking his head and that, of course, nothing about AndFriend had moved.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” said Jim. “I see you, I hear you, I can move. I am—right now, I really am—AndFriend. Maybe that’s the difference. The only one who could be La Chasse Gallerie was Raoul.”

  “Yes,” said Mary somberly. “I think you’re right. We finally decided it was something like that, ourselves.”

  “But it worked with me,” said Jim.

  “No—” began Mollen.

  “No,” said Mary in the same moment; and Mollen stopped trying to answer. “I decided the process hadn’t worked for me because even when I thought I was part of La Chasse Gallerie, I really wasn’t. I was part of Raoul. The bonding was based on some sort of emotional tie. Do you remember my mentioning the matter of you loving your ship, when I talked to you at the Officers’ Club about this project, long ago?”

  “I remember,” said Jim.

  “I think I also said something about how poltergeist phenomena might be related to Raoul’s ability to move a spaceship that no longer had any engines to take off from a planet’s surface and move itself through space. I had the idea then that an intolerable situation was the trigger for a parakinetic individual using such abilities. But it wasn’t so much the situation as the individual’s response to it. A fury at the intolerable situation—which meant some kind of frustrated love as the obverse.”

  “Raoul’s love for his ship—and his home?” said Jim.

  “And my—my bond with Raoul.”

  “Why don’t you want to say you loved him?” asked Jim, realizing, strangely, the moment he had said it, that this was as unusual a thing for him to say as Mary’s avoidance of the word he had mentioned. “Most women don’t have any trouble saying the word ‘love’.”

  “I’m not ‘most women’—I’m me!” flared Mary. “Besides, how would you know?”

  “I guess I wouldn’t,” said Jim, out of the strange painless honesty that was part of him in the place where he now lived.

  “Then I’ll go on,” said Mary. “The point I’m making is that if the joining between the mind of one person and another person or thing requires a powerful love, then simply the mechanical means we’d used to put me in with Raoul wouldn’t work to produce a spaceship with only a human mind flying it. A human mind that would not only be in, but be able to control what it was in, had to have three qualifications. It had to know that it was possible for it to be in a ship—and there were only you and me who’d actually experienced Raoul’s being in and flying La Chasse Gallerie. It also had to be in an intolerable situation; and it had to have the bond of an overpowering love with what it would become part of.”

  She stopped.

  “Am I making sense to you?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Jim, “I understand.”

  “If I was right, the hypothesis offered an explanation, not only for poltergeist activity, but for ghosts haunting houses or certain locations, or of human spirits taking over other people, or things, and operating through them.”

  Again she paused.

  “Go on,” said Jim.

  “It was all we had to work with,” she said, almost defensively. “So we set out to try it out on you. We deliberately kept you from AndFriend; and we wore you down with frustration. All the time, of course, we were studying you. Under hypnosis, we found what we wanted. It was your dream of AndFriend being used as a target drone to study the Laagi responses, and when we thought we had you at the breaking point, we arranged to reenact it for you.”

  She stopped once more. Jim did not say anything.

  “Well, it worked,” she said at last. “You’re perfectly free to hate me all you like for doing it. I thought it was something that had to be done, and I did it.”

  “I authorized it,” said Mollen. “I told you, Jim, it was my responsibility.”

  “How did Mary get back into her own body?” asked Jim.

  “When I faced the fact that there was no Raoul Penard there for me to love,” Mary used the last word emphatically, “I simply woke up in my own body, where it’d been kept and cared for. They’d tried to bring me back by hypnotic signal—I think you know what I mean. I was given an order under hypnosis to come out of that hypnosis when a certain person told me to. It was to be Louis, here, telling me to come back. They tried it. When they found they couldn’t communicate with me and Raoul was still going on with his own talking, they had Louis call me back. But I didn’t come. Only when I faced the fact there was no real Raoul there—then I came back, of my own accord.”

  “What you’re telling me,” said Jim, fascinated by his own calmness, “is that you don’t know how I’ll ever get back into my own body.”

  The moment that went by without an answer was long enough so that the truth became obvious.

  “It’s worse than that, isn’t it?” he said. “You don’t think I ever will get back?”

  “I’m sorry, boy,” said Mollen. “It’s my responsibility, as I keep saying. But you’re right.”

  “AndFriend isn’t like Raoul,” said Mary. “She’s exactly what you knew she was. You’d have to want to leave her… enough. And that may—”

  “Be impossible,” said Jim.

  “Yes.”

  This time the silence was very long indeed. Jim was trying to live with the idea of his situation, to gather in the full meaning of it. The other two said nothing, as people say nothing, watching the critical moment of a medical operation through the glass window of an observation booth.

  “You did this all for a purpose,” said Jim finally. “You did it because you want me to do something. That reason you had for sending me back into space, General—with the small difference that you didn’t tell me you were sending me back this way. No, wait—”

  He stopped Mollen as the other was beginning to speak again.

  “Don’t tell me again it’s your responsibility. I’ve heard that. I know it’s your responsibility. And I know you did it because the people who tell you what to do made it your responsibility. It doesn’t matter who’s responsible. The only thing that matters is why you did it—what’s the mission you had for me?”

  “Have you looked at yourself? I mean, at AndFriend?” asked Mollen. “Can you look at yourself?”

  “Yes. You mean the new fusion engines and all the rest of it,” answered Jim. “I know it’s there, just as you said it would be. But you know, I don’t need it, any of it. I can go wherever I need to go the same way Raoul did, the same way I lifted off the floor, just now. Wait a minute, though—I can’t phase-shift without using the ship’s equipment. But the regular drive equipment you could have just as well left off.”

  “Perhaps,” said Mollen, “but we weren’t taking any chances. Also, if you were captured…”

  “By the Laagi.”

  “Yes,” said the general with a small sigh, “by the Laagi. If they capture you, we want you to look as if you needed a human being in you, to run you; but the human being just happens to be missing.”

  “So, you want me to go deep into Laagi territory,” Jim said, “deep enough so I could be captured instead of just shot to pieces?”

  “Not exactly,” said Mollen.

  “No?” Jim was surprised, and was startled to realize that it was the first time since his waking as part of AndFriend that he had felt that emotion.

  “We want you to go out around Laagi territory, just as I said in my office.”

  “Then why could I be captured?”

  “Because we want you to go beyond Laagi territory, around the other side of Laagi territory; and we’ve no way of knowing how far they’ve gone on that far side. Since Raoul’s already been there, they may be watching for you there. We don’t know. But there’s that chance. But if you’re captured, maybe you’ll have a better chance of escaping if they think you need someone to fly
you.”

  “You want me to find whatever it was Penard found,” said Jim. “Don’t you think you better tell me now what you think it was?”

  “We don’t know. That’s a fact, Jim. It seemed to be some sort of paradise, from Raoul’s point of view. The point is, there was this paradise and then there was something else there, too. It’s that something else that’s got us sending you out there.”

  “What was it? Animal, vegetable or mineral?”

  “That’s what we don’t know.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Jim. “Granted that Raoul thinks it’s in a paradise. If nothing more’s known about it—”

  “Sorry. Back up and start again,” said Mollen. “I’m doing a bad job of explaining. It’s whatever else it is, and whether or not that’s connected with the paradise part, that really interests us. Because we think it might also have something to do with how Raoul got to be part of La Chasse Gallerie—and because he claims the Laagi don’t know it’s there.”

  “They don’t?” said Jim. “Raoul claims they don’t?”

  “That’s what we gather from what he says,” replied Mollen.

  “How can the Laagi not know it’s there if it’s right on their back doorstep, if we’re on their front doorstep, speaking in interstellar space terms. They ought to be able to see it, too, or at least, I assume the assumption is Raoul saw it.”

  “I don’t know. The best people we’ve put on it can’t guess,” said Mollen. “But can you imagine what it’d mean if there was someone or something we could work with, that the Laagi couldn’t even imagine, let alone see? It might mean the end of this long war with them after all. It might mean we could open the way we want to the inner parts of the galaxy.”

  Chapter 10

  Jim / AndFriend lay thinking. The human race had been at war with the Laagi so long, over five generations, that the contest had become something that was almost as taken for granted as the physical facts of the universe itself. It seemed they had always been at war with the Laagi. They would always be at war with them… these aliens, these people no human had ever seen, whose worlds no human had ever seen; but only the hulls of their heavy-bellied space warships. It was almost as if Mollen had suggested altering all the continents of Earth into unfamiliar shapes.

  It was not just what he wanted, of course. It was what everyone wanted. No more of this war which had drained Earth’s resources and brought her nothing in return—unless it was the feeling of being safely entrenched behind a line of fighting spaceships. But with no more Laagi to fight, what was next?

  Hopefully, they could then go out to colonize livable worlds, wherever these could be found, which had been what they had been engaged in when they found that there were no ready-to-live-on planets within practical phase-shifting distances, unless they were the worlds already occupied by the Laagi or in that area of space to which the Laagi barred the way.

  No one even knew why the Laagi fought. They had attacked, on contact, the first unarmed human spaceships that had encountered them. Clearly, they would have followed this up by carrying their attacks against Earth, itself, if the aroused world had not hastily combined to arm and man the defensive line in space that was the Frontier. Clearly, the Laagi wanted colonizable planet—space, too; and in spite of the fact no human had ever seen one, Earth must be enough like their world or worlds to be usable.

  In the early years after human and Laagi ships had first encountered each other, their ships had come close enough to be observed just outside Earth’s atmosphere. But meanwhile Earth had been frantically building ships fitted for space combat; and by the time the first of these went up in effective numbers, hunting for the Laagi, they had to travel almost as far as the present Frontier before encountering any of them.

  But beyond the Frontier all the military strength of Earth had not been able to push, in well over a hundred years. The larger a fleet of fighter ships with which they tried to penetrate, the greater the number of Laagi ships that came to oppose them. Were the Laagi from one world or many? Were they paranoid or reasonable? What were they, physically and mentally?

  No Laagi ship ever surrendered. They fought or ran, but once engaged in combat they kept fighting until they were destroyed, or destroyed themselves. Continual efforts to find a way of capturing a Laagi ship had been without success. There seemed to be the equivalent of a dead-man’s switch in each of their ships that triggered its destruction if it became too badly crippled either to run or fight any more.

  Now Mollen was suggesting that if Jim was lucky in finding what Mollen and Mary seemed to hope was out there, the years of fighting the Laagi might be over. The mountain was far off still on his horizon, but now a road had appeared that might lead him to it.

  “Jim?”

  It was Mary’s voice, speaking to him.

  “Yes?” he answered.

  “You haven’t said a word for nearly an hour,” said Mary.

  “We thought we’d give you time to think over what Louis just said. But it’s been nearly an hour, as I say.”

  “Has it? I’m sorry,” said Jim. “Time feels a little different to me now. Did you say something to me that I didn’t answer? What was it?”

  “We didn’t,” said Mollen. “But we were just about to. Do you think you’d have any trouble phase-shifting wide of the Frontier, whether you use your fusion engines or not; and then coming in again, say, fifty light-years farther on, to see if you’re beyond Laagi territory?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Jim. “It may take some time, but if time’s not important—by the way, where’s my body? What’s happening to it?”

  “It’s being cared for,” said Mollen. “As long as you come back within an ordinary lifetime, it’ll be waiting for you. Actually a straight out, down, in and out again and back shouldn’t take you more than a matter of weeks at the outside.”

  “Then I’m ready to go anytime,” said Jim. “It’s not as if I need to pack a suitcase, is it? You’re talking to a ship, General, not a pilot.”

  “Louis means, are you mentally ready to go?” Mary asked. “We’ve been putting you under considerable strain for the last year. No one expects you to just bounce back from that and take off.”

  “You know,” said Jim, “it’s strange, but there’s nothing to bounce back from. Even if it’d turned out you didn’t have a good reason for putting me here, there’d be nothing to bounce back from. I’m different now, that’s all, in some way I can’t explain. You know, come to think of it, it’s almost as if I was thinking like a ship, instead of a man.”

  “Maybe we should have the doc give him some tests,” said Mollen, very nearly under his breath.

  “To see if my mind’s all here?” Jim said. “It’s all here, I promise you. It’s just that—it’s different, now.”

  “I don’t know…” grumbled Mollen.

  “Maybe I ought to say it’s something like being perfectly free to think without all the body-feelings that used to interfere with thoughts, like static,” said Jim. “Anyway, if you want me to leave this minute, I can.”

  And he once more lifted AndFriend a hand’s breadth from the floor.

  “No. Wait. Come down!” said Mollen.

  Jim rested the weight of his ship-body back on the floor.

  “There’s more to it than you know just yet,” Mollen said. “We’ve got tapes of parts of what Raoul said that we’ve never let you hear before—tapes about whatever it was he ran into that gave him that idea of a paradise, and that the Laagi didn’t know it was there. Are you ready to hear those now?”

  “Certainly,” said Jim. “Now or anytime. You know, it’s funny. Time doesn’t seem to mean the same thing to me now. Maybe I don’t sleep anymore, like this. No, wait a minute; I did sleep for a while, didn’t I? How long was I asleep?”

  “Asleep?” said Mollen. “Maybe forty minutes. We thought you’d be out for hours.”

  “Forty minutes!”

  For the first time Jim paid close attention to
the faces of Mary and Mollen. They both looked strained and tired. Mollen, perhaps because of his age, looked very tired indeed.

  “Just a second,” said Jim. “What time is it now?”

  “Now? Early morning—” Mollen looked at his wrist-com. “Four hundred thirty-seven.”

  “Four A.M.! You’re the ones who’re not up to tapes,” said Jim. “Why don’t you both go and rest? You can show me the tapes after you’ve had some sleep.”

  “And what’ll you be doing meantime?” Mary asked.

  “Me?” Jim was surprised by the question. He thought for a moment. “I’ll think, I guess. Anyway, minutes, hours, days… it doesn’t make all that much difference to me.”

  “Why not?” asked Mary. “Can you tell me why not?”

  Jim thought about it.

  “No,” he said. “It just doesn’t. It’s like the business of my lifting myself off the floor to show you I could do it, earlier. I don’t know how I do these things. I seem to be something like a stone-age savage. I know what I can do with my body, but I can’t tell you why or how.”

  “I’d still like to have you try to answer—”

  “Mary,” said Jim. “If you like, you can stay and we’ll talk as long as you want. It won’t make any difference to me. You can go until you fall over. But the general’s going to fall before you do. And the truth is, you probably need sleep as much as he does. Why don’t you go get some, and come back when you’re rested. I’ll still be here and just the same.”

  “You’re not just trying to get rid of us so you can be alone?” growled Mollen.

  “Not particularly,” said Jim. “In fact, I don’t really know whether I’ll think at all while you’re gone. I think I’ll think, but I won’t know until I’m left alone. Did you ever find out whether Penard slept, or just sat there and thought?”

  Mollen grunted, wordlessly.

  “No,” said Mary, “there was no way to check.”

  “Well, there you are,” said Jim. “It’s up to you. But why don’t you both get some sleep?”