The Forever Man

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “You’re going to have to be more specific than that,” said Mary.

  “All right, I will. Now, we’ve been taken out here and dropped off, out of sight, so to speak, of our galaxy centerline. But we have what the ancient seamen of Earth didn’t have, which is a chronometer—in fact three of them, not counting the one in my mind—which are accurate to such a small fraction of a second that for ordinary practical purposes we can ignore the inaccuracy. Also, we have a ship’s memory which can recall every phase-shift, how far and where to, and every turn and twist on ordinary drive and calculate all these to tell us where we’ve gone since we left Earth.”

  Mary sighed with relief. A mental sigh, observed Jim, was impossible to describe. It was like a promissory note of what would, if there had been a body to do it, have been an exhalation of breath.

  “Then we do know where we are right now.”

  “Well—again, yes and no,” said Jim. “Yes, we know where we are right now because in addition to what I’ve just told you, my memory banks were supplied with the point where that last guide ship dropped us off; although I didn’t know it, until his lights flashing farewell released the lock on that section of memory. And, no, because all we know is where we are in relation to Earth, the Frontier and the galactic centerline. What we don’t know is where what we’re looking for is located.”

  “But all you have to do—” Mary broke off. “Oh, I see.”

  “Exactly,” said Jim. “The proper course for us would be to head back toward the galactic centerline and follow right down it to the Laagi world or worlds. But if we do that, we’ll run into large numbers of their fighting spaceships long before we get to our destination—let alone, beyond it into the unknown territory. Our only hope is to go forward out here, essentially paralleling the centerline until it’s safe to turn in toward it again and find ourselves beyond the other side of Laagi territory, in the unknown.”

  “And if we turn inward toward the line too soon, we run into Laagi warships,” said Mary.

  “Right. And if we go too far and turn in too late, we’ll end up at where the centerline is, according to our calculations, but not knowing where we are in relation to anything but it. Should we assume in that case that we’re still short of unknown territory and head on down-galaxy along the line, or figure we’ve overshot it, and turn back along the centerline in that case essentially guaranteeing that we’ll run into Laagi if we’re wrong?”

  “There’s got to be some way around this,” said Mary.

  “Oh, I forgot one possibility. What if there’s nothing to be found beyond Laagi territory within any practical distance? Do we keep on? Do we turn back—”

  “There’s a method they used to use for zeroing in artillery fire,” began Mary. “You deliberately fired your first shot to strike beyond the target, the second shot short. Then you fired a little short of your long shot or a little farther than your short shot and kept on increasing or decreasing your range until you ‘zeroed in,’ as they used to say, on the target—”

  “Correct, first time out. My compliments. That’s exactly the method we’ll be using. We deliberately jump for what we are as sure as can be is beyond the Laagi home base—which we estimate to be about as far from the Frontier in its direction as Earth is in its, on the other side of it. We jump beyond the home base, or hope we have, but short of the farther limits of Laagi territory. Then, taking advantage of the fact that we’re only one alien ship and in where they’d never expect to find us, we sneak in toward the centerline and see if we can’t spot evidence of Laagi space travel or living centers, before whichever it is spots us.”

  He paused.

  “Am I making sense to you so far?”

  “Yes,” she answered, “go on.”

  “Well then,” he said, “if, by doing all this, we reach the centerline without running into any such evidence and conclude we’ve overshot the Laagi territory, we go out away from the line again, to what we think is a ‘safe distance’, and head back parallel to it, in the direction of the Laagi center, and then, in again. If we don’t find any evidence, we repeat and go back farther. If we do, we repeat and go outward again, toward galaxy center but not as far as we went before, and nose in again. Finally, this way we establish where Laagi territory ends on the down-galaxy side; and we’re ready to go hunting for Raoul’s ‘Paradise’.”

  “Raoul,” said Mary almost wistfully, “didn’t do all this inning and outing.”

  “No, Raoul sailed straight through the heart of Laagi territory and let them cut him to ribbons,” said Jim. “The only reason they didn’t blow La Chasse Gallerie into cosmic dust was because somehow, even without drives, he couldn’t be stopped and held still long enough to be blown up. You and I, we’ve got a ship to protect, to say nothing of ourselves. Come to think of it, what does happen to two minds when a ship is destroyed out from under them? Do they die, too, or are they left just drifting in space—”

  “Let’s face that possibility when it comes,” said Mary.

  “We don’t have any choice but to face it when it comes. I was hoping for a little advance notice.”

  “Well, I don’t have any answer for you. That’s why there’s no point in facing it beforehand,” replied Mary, almost tranquilly. “Shall we begin?”

  “We’ve already begun,” said Jim. “I’ve been setting up an automatic pattern of jumps to take us forward, in and out, just in case for some reason I shouldn’t be able to command the ship. So hang on, here we go.”

  After those words, the actual going was anything but dramatic. They shifted ten times—even though they were out of their bodies, the shifts were perceptible as a sort of hiccup in attention—and at last swam in what hardly looked any different than the point in galactic space where their last guide ship had left them.

  “Now we try going in… very carefully,” said Jim.

  He mentally ordered about the controls; and Mary was knowledgeable enough about ship-handling to realize he was reorienting the hull prior to the shift, so that they would come out facing in the direction they wanted, which in this case would be toward the centerline. Then he began a series of phase-shifts, shorter and shorter jumps, until he was down to a final shift that was no farther than AndFriend’s instruments could see.

  “According to the calculations of the instruments—and mine,” said Jim, “we ought to be within three light-years’ distance of the centerline. If we’re right in the assumption of everybody back home, and the Laagi use a centerline very close to ours, then the area we’re in ought to have traffic of Laagi ships up and down the line. We’ll just have to park here, wait and see.”

  “And if nothing comes along by the time we get tired of waiting?” Mary asked. “Do we go all the way out again, or do we just edge back up the line?”

  “The first way’s safe but slow. The second ought to be faster, but risky—assuming we’re moving into a higher incidence of Laagi traffic.” Jim hesitated. “I know what I’d do. What would you do?”

  “Inch back up the line at this distance from it,” said Mary without hesitation.

  “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  “Because your choice was going back out again, was it?”

  “No,” said Jim glumly, “because I’d made the same choice. Now we don’t have any excuse for not doing it. And we could stub our toe on a Laagi ship this way before we know it.”

  They began going up-galaxy. Jim estimated they were now more than half a light-year out from the centerline; and he kept his phase-shifts to just within the limit of the ability of his instruments to spot a Laagi ship. He and Mary fell into a silence with which they both seemed to be content, for it was only briefly and occasionally broken during a period which their ship’s chronometer measured as a little over fourteen hours.

  The procedure was to make the shift, pause, scan all instrument-visible area and, if anything shiplike was observed, to creep up on this with tiny phase-shifts of no more than a few hundred kilometers until it bec
ame clear that what they were seeing was not an alien vessel. Then they would make another jump forward to the limit of their instruments’ scanning ability, and another close investigation of the new area if there seemed to be reason for it.

  At the end of the slightly more than fourteen hours, however, Jim suddenly grunted and began coding for a shift of a full five light-years more out from the centerline.

  “What is it?” demanded Mary. “Did you see something?”

  “No,” said Jim. “Just back-of-the-head hunch. I can’t explain it to you any better than that.”

  “Come to think of it,” said Mary, “you’ve mentioned several things—a chronometer in your mind, and your own mental calculations as to where we were, in addition to the calculations of the ship’s instruments. Now this. Is there something about you I ought to know?”

  “Nothing miraculous,” said Jim. “You remember my talking about the early days of ocean navigation? Even with a sextant and a good chronometer, it was quite a trick to cross the Atlantic and have the first land you sighted turn out to be the point you were aiming at. But some navigators then seemed to have a knack for it. Some of us space jockeys seem to have a knack for interstellar navigation. That’s all.”

  “That’s quite a lot, it seems to me,” said Mary. “In fact it’s right on the edge of being almost too much to believe.”

  “Ever hear of a homing instinct in animals—not merely birds but domestic dogs or cats?” said Jim. “The Polynesian navigators watched the action of waves to guide themselves in crossing great stretches of the Pacific in small ships not much bigger than large canoes. The Aleuts up near the North Pole, back home, had something like seventeen different names for different kinds of snow in their language. Their children would play in snowdrifts—but never in the ones that would fall in and bury them. When you asked them why they picked one snowdrift over another, they essentially said it was obvious. I’m one of the ones with a knack for intragalactic navigation—that’s one of the reasons it was my Wing that went after Raoul.”

  “All you’re saying, really,” said Mary, “is ‘trust me’.”

  “Right. Trust me. I trust my instinct,” said Jim. “While you’re at it, remember that all the instruments in Raoul’s ship had to have been long gone by the time he started to come back to Earth. But he traveled in the right direction. How do you suppose he knew his way?”

  Mary said nothing for a long moment.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “But—”

  “Hold it!” Jim interrupted suddenly. “Bandit! Straight out!”

  Sure enough, there it was on the long-distance screen. Just the barest pinpoint of light at the moment, but with the halo around it that identified it as something radiating as no natural object would.

  “How can you tell it’s a Laagi? Maybe there’s something unknown out here—” began Mary.

  “It’s Laagi. I can feel it.”

  “Going away from us? Or coming toward us?”

  “That I don’t know—yet. I’ve put the instruments on it. Indications right now are it’s traveling parallel to us and about half a light-year in from us. But whether down-galaxy or up-galaxy, I’ve no way of knowing until we’re closer to it.”

  “Can it see us?”

  “I don’t know that either,” said Jim. “I’d bet a month’s pay it hasn’t—yet. A lot depends on which way it’s going, whether it’s facing toward or away from us.”

  “With screens looking every which way, that shouldn’t make any difference,” Mary said.

  “It does, though. Human—I mean, Laagi nature. Our attention and theirs, too, seems to be directed most of the time in a ship-forward direction, one of the things that makes us assume they’ve got eyes looking forward, like animal predators and humans, and not out to each side like birds and prey animals. If it’s headed this way, he’s going to see us sooner or later, unless we move. And if we move, we’re bound to attract the attention of his instruments.”

  They waited.

  “He’s traveling down-galaxy. Looking toward our direction,” said Jim finally.

  They waited a little longer.

  “He’s seen us. He’s turned in our direction. Stand by for him to jump into battle range of us.” Jim’s mental voice had become remote, businesslike. He felt as well as heard it in his own mind as he was used to hearing it, talking to his Wing on the Frontier, just before contact with an approaching gang of Laagi ships.

  “Oh, God!” said Mary. “And we’ve hardly started.”

  “Don’t worry, baby.” Jim could feel that if his body had been with him, it would be grinning, the same way the combat-recorder films always showed him grinning as he went into battle; and not even he could tell if it was to AndFriend, to Mary, or to both of them he spoke: “If he gets close enough to hurt you, I’ll kill him.”

  Chapter 13

  The Laagi ship made a phase-shift just as Jim said this, and suddenly it was big enough to be pictured as something more than a dot on their longest-looking screen.

  “I’m wrong,” said Jim. “It’s not us he’s aimed at. From this angle he’ll pass us but only at better than instrument mid-range. Either he’s got a destination off to one side of the centerline, or…”

  He fell silent.

  “You mean we could be in among the star systems having Laagi-occupied planets?” Mary asked.

  “Your guess on that’s as good as mine,” said Jim slowly. “But it looks like he’s going to pass us by at a distance which could mean his instruments don’t see us.”

  “Don’t Laagi instruments see as far as ours?”

  “We don’t know for sure—just the way we don’t know so much about them,” said Jim. “But it’s a good angle. I mean, like I said, we’ve noticed that when we’re at an angle to them, they don’t seem to see us as well as from more head-on angles—or up close; distance helps, too. It’s all guesswork because on most things their ships can do as well, or better, and our own ships are under orders to act on that premise. Actually, fighting them, I get the impression there’re weak spots in their observation. And that’s the way most combat pilots feel. If we’re right, it could explain why sometimes they turn and run—if you want to call it running—when you’re sure they’re ready to joust.”

  “You’re thinking of just letting him go by?” Mary said. “But aren’t we a sitting duck here, if he suddenly starts turning toward us?”

  “If we move we might attract his attention, as I mentioned,” said Jim. “Remember, we’re where no Laagi ship is going to expect to run into something like us—particularly just a ship alone, the way we are. If he’s really not seen us, and if he’s really headed by us, we can sit still and he’ll never know we were here. Or if he does, maybe he’ll take us for an experimental new design of Laagi ship. Or—oh, I don’t know…”

  “I’ve never known you to hesitate like this,” Mary said. “Why’re you willing to take such a chance he’ll go by without seeing us, or even seeing us without attacking us?”

  “Because,” said Jim slowly, “I don’t think he’s armed.”

  There was a second or two of pause.

  “Why? What makes you think that?” she said. “More to the point, what makes you think it so strongly you’re ready to gamble our whole mission on it?”

  “I can’t tell you exactly why. It’s the way he’s acting. Look at him. He’s three-quarters on to us—his whole side’s a target. Just a little more on that same course and I could cut him wide open with a beam. Then it’d take less than a minute to stand in beside him close enough to drop a mine that’d blow him apart a second after we were out of range of it, ourselves. Why’s he taking a chance like that, unless he’s unarmed and doesn’t see us?”

  “You’re still gambling,” said Mary flatly.

  “But with something at stake,” muttered Jim. “Suppose he’s expected somewhere and they come out looking for him when he doesn’t show up… and scoop up some dust they can identify as part of his ship? Wo
uldn’t that mean killing him would be like a flag planted to tell them we’ve been here?”

  There was another pause.

  “It could be. All right,” Mary said. “You’re the expert on alien ships. It’s up to you.”

  “We’ll sit,” said Jim.

  They sat.

  The Laagi ship went by in one phaseshift and vanished from their instruments with a second.

  “Of course,” said Mary when it was gone, “you know it might just have pretended to go innocently by because it was unarmed; and it’s right now reporting us to the nearest equivalent of military authorities the Laagi have.”

  “In which case,” said Jim, “the sooner we get out of here, the better.”

  He was setting up a phase-shift for AndFriend as he spoke.

  “Down-galaxy, I think,” he said, “now that we’ve found Laagi space traffic this far up. As far as his reporting us goes, if you were a Laagi military commander and you heard of a human ship where we just were—just which way do you think that ship might have jumped after it was last seen? And how far away from that point where it was seen could it be, by the time you can get your own fighting ships out after it?”

  Mary said nothing.

  “So if you were such a military commander,” said Jim as they shifted, “wouldn’t you find it a lot easier and safer just to file a report and let it get tangled up in the bureaucratic wheels, rather than take a chance on something that might possibly be the figment of a civilian pilot’s imagination?”

  “You’re really assuming they’re like humanity,” said Mary.

  “Well, we’ve got nothing else to base assumptions on,” said Jim. “And a lot of what we’ve seen of them does parallel what we’ve got and what we do. We use a theoretical centerline. They seem to, too. Our ships are shaped differently from theirs, but they phase-shift to cover large distances just as we do. They use cutting weapons that seem developed from lasers, like we do. Their fighter ships are only big enough for a crew of two individuals. They seem to think in terms of a Frontier in space, just like we do…”