The Forever Man

by Gordon R. Dickson

  It was a moment before she answered.

  “You’re entitled to your opinion,” she said. “I’m entitled to tell you when you’re wrong.”

  “When you think I’m wrong.”

  “All right, when I think you’re wrong.”

  There was another pause.

  “Now we’re arguing about arguing,” said Mary.

  Squonk opened its eyes, rolled over on its feet, elongated them and stuck its head out once more. “Hello, world,” it seemed to be saying.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jim. “I’ll try to do better.”

  “Me too,” said Mary. “Squonk’s awake.”

  “It didn’t sleep very long,” said Jim. “Now what?”

  For Squonk had just left the line of its fellows and was ambling back toward the rear of the building. It entered the eating room there, which was clearly divided into two areas, one for Laagi and one for squonks. In both the squonk and Laagi areas there were what seemed to be buffets, each against a wall at an opposite end of the room. In the Laagi area, groups of two to eight or ten were standing around pedestals on which sat what looked like large silver basins, eating to the accompaniment of a large amount of arm waving and alterations in leg and body size. Every so often one of the Laagi eating in a group would turn and leave and eventually a new Laagi would join a group, evidently bringing with him, her or it a double handful of materials from the buffet.

  These, it dumped into the silver bowl and began, with the others, to eat the new mixture. It was plainly the mixture of everything in the bowl they were all eating, for occasionally a Laagi would reach in and stir the contents of the bowl.

  Squonk had meanwhile approached the buffet at the squonk end of the room and was browsing along it, stopping to briefly intertwine tentacles as it encountered other squonks engaged in the same activity. This touching seemed more in the way of a perfunctory, if friendly, greeting or self-identification than anything else, since it was very brief and the two squonks, having touched tentacles, thereafter paid no attention to each other.

  The buffet on the squonk side was considerably longer and contained more dishes—in this case, actually shallow pans about half a meter long and half a meter wide. The reason for the difference became apparent immediately, for instead of picking food from their buffet and carrying it off to eat it at pedestals, of which there were none at their end of the room, the squonks simply ate as they went along the line of the buffet. There was not as much variety as Jim had assumed at first glance. A number of trays of each item were set out in rotation. So that if Squonk was browsing at one and another squonk came along and found the contents of that pan interesting, it could simply move on to find one from which the contents were not currently being taken.

  Jim’s reaction to Squonk’s eating was a touch of nausea. For the first pan the small, shelled alien approached had what appeared to be a mass of wriggling worms sticking their heads up out of a layer of moist earth; and Squonk immediately began to gather in tentacle-loads of worms and earth indiscriminately and start stuffing them into its mouth. Jim felt an echo of his nausea also through his mental contact with Mary.

  “Watch the Laagi, ignore this,” Jim said.

  “Nonsense,” said Mary. “I’ll get used to it. I’m trying to watch both, to tell you the truth.”

  Jim, challenged, felt bound to get used to Squonk’s eating habits himself. In addition, he reminded himself, he was at the moment more interested in squonks than in the master race that directed them. Watching Squonk feed through a variety of trays holding food, invariably live, but existing sometimes in what appeared to be earth and in others what appeared to be water or other liquids—unless the opaque ones were just water clouded with suspended material—Jim came to the conclusion that squonks were basically carnivores.

  Unless what he was seeing were plant forms that had an animal-like mobility. Bit by bit, he became used to both Squonk’s diet and its methods of feeding. Privately, he bet himself that what was in the silver bowls of the Laagi was equally live, or live-looking.

  A strange contrast, if he was right. Here was a ruling race that looked like adult, human-sized toys—almost as if they could be rather silly-looking pets, themselves—who nourished themselves on small animals that still had life in them when they were introduced to the mouths that devoured them. Shouldn’t throw the first stone, Jim reminded himself. It was almost a foregone conclusion that a Laagi would be horrified by some … some? By many of the things done by humans, if that Laagi should ever find itself on Earth and watching humans act as they normally did.

  Squonk finished eating and went off to the waste-disposal room. Jim made himself remember how once in Italy he had encountered a restroom toilet that was nothing but a hole in the floor with a tile edge on which one squatted. So it should not be so surprising to find a room filled with holes in the floor, here on the Laagi world. The holes were the same all over the room, but Jim noticed that they were laid out in two separate sections, with only a few squonks presently in the one part and a few Laagi in the other.

  Squonk was returning up the line of other squonks to his former place in it, when Jim had an inspiration. Once more he developed an image in his mind of a Laagi talking to Squonk.

  “Good squonk,” the image was saying, “hard-working squonk. The—" Jim envisioned AndFriend standing under its restraining, knife-edged arches. “It needs a special cleaning for special visitors. Good squonk, clean it up right away, will you? That’s a fine, excellent squonk… “

  He continued talking, giving out the same order while holding the image in his mind… and Squonk continued up the line, past the place where he had waited before, and went out of the building.

  “Where’s it going now, do you suppose?” Mary asked.

  “I’m betting—I mean I’m hoping—” answered Jim, “that it’s going back to AndFriend. I’m trying an experiment to see if I can direct it.”

  “Jim! You think you can? If you can…”

  “We’ll know in a bit,” said Jim.

  After some distance down the green pathways had been covered it became apparent Squonk was indeed headed back toward the ship. “If you can make it go where we want to—how’d you do it?” said Mary.

  “It’s a little hard to explain,” said Jim. “I’ve been giving him mental pictures of a Laagi giving him orders, in a sense.”

  “How did you know how the Laagi give squonks orders?”

  “I didn’t,” Jim answered. “I’m not speaking to his mind as much as to his emotions, I think. I just pictured a Laagi that spoke to Squonk the way I’d speak to a dog back home. Pet animals on Earth don’t understand human words in the same sense we do, either, but they get the idea. So, evidently, does Squonk.”

  “But it’s so surprising he didn’t even question you,” said Mary. “I mean, from Squonk’s point of view you must have seemed like a ghost voice coming out of nowhere to tell it what to do. But you say that didn’t seem to disturb it at all?”

  “Yes,” said Jim. “I really didn’t have much hope it would work. But it did. Maybe we’ll find out why, later.”

  “Animals,” said Mary, “and even humans for that matter, respond to certain stimuli by reflex. There was that sad case just last year or so of a wolf who’d been raised as a pet, and seemed so friendly and gentle, just like a dog in every way. And then one day a very young child got into the back yard where it was kept, and the wolf killed it. They reconstructed the fact later that the child had unwittingly duplicated the actions of a wounded prey animal, and the wolf attacked it out of hunting reflex. It could be that work here is a sort of reflex for these squonks and you somehow triggered that reflex by what you did to it.”

  “Anyway,” Jim said, “it worked. Here we are at the ship.”

  So they were. Mary’s happiness and excitement over the fact that Jim had been able to send Squonk there, however, turned to dismay, when Squonk entered the ship and actually began cleaning.

  “But it’ll ta
ke forever if it goes over the whole interior of the ship again,” said Mary. “Can’t we stop it, somehow? This time could be used to a lot better advantage getting an idea of the way the city’s laid out.”

  “I’m afraid to give a counterorder right away,” said Jim slowly. “Squonk could decide that if he was told to do something, then told not to before he’d done it completely, then what he was hearing couldn’t be real orders. We might lose whatever control I’ve got over him. Do you want to take that chance?”

  “No! No, of course not,” said Mary. “All the same…

  All the same, she was not happy about waiting. But they both decided that it was better not to take chances. The opportunity to control Squonk was too valuable to risk merely for the sake of saving a few hours.

  They waited Squonk out, accordingly. As he was finishing up, Jim brought up the question what to do next.

  “Have him take us out around the city in general,” said Mary.

  “I don’t know that can be done—just that way,” said Jim. “He only travels in order to get to some work or other. I think I’m going to have to give him a specific job to do that’ll require him to take us where you want to go. And I don’t know what kinds of work he might be asked to do. Let’s start at the beginning. Think of a particular place you want to go to.”

  “Tell him to take us to the place where the Laagi rest.”

  “Too general,” objected Jim. “Rest could mean sleeping on the job the way we saw those Laagi doing it.”

  “If they actually were sleeping,” Mary said. “Maybe that was just something they do when they want to think undisturbed.”

  “After what we went through with Squonk?” asked Jim. “Squonk was certainly sleeping. I still say ‘rest’ is too general a command. Even ‘the place where Laagi sleep’ could be too general. Also we’re assuming there is such a place—”

  “I’ve got it!” Mary broke in on him. “Tell him to find something. Something that can’t be found, so he’ll have to hunt all over the city for it. Tell him he’s to find a… a key, a regular metal key to a lock. Explain that the key is a part of this ship that belongs with it and he’s to get the key and bring it back here and we’ll show him where it fits into the ship.”

  “Umph!” said Jim—or would have said it if he had had a body with the vocal apparatus to make the sound. As it was, he was simply silent for a moment, in surprise.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Mary.

  “Nothing,” he said. “That’s a very good solution you’ve come up with. I’m not so sure I know how to go about putting the idea of it across to Squonk, though.”

  "Why?”

  “Again, it’s too general. I’d have to make it specific, somehow. Then, there’s the problem of how to picture something Squonk’s never imagined before, using the materials out of its own imagination.”

  “Just picture the key to the lock on the front door of your own quarters,” said Mary. “That’s alien enough and simple enough.”

  “Yes, but the trouble is he doesn’t seem to see what I’m thinking, he just picks up whatever emotion I broadcast. For example, when I thought of Squonk cleaning this ship, I came down heavy on disgust at having the inside of the ship dirty and worry about someone important coming to see it. I think that’s what he picked up—those feelings. How do you get across an emotion about something a squonk’s never seen or imagined—wait a minute. I think I’ve got the answer. We don’t have to. I’ll just broadcast worry about something lost and a feeling that it may be in one of the buildings of the city and imagine that if Squonk went into the city, it could look for whatever it was. Then when Squonk goes and we see a building you want to go into, I’ll broadcast hope that the whatever may be in it. I can even direct Squonk from place to place inside the building, for that matter. When you want time to observe in one particular place, I can broadcast a desire to search that place millimeter by millimeter.”

  “You know,” said Mary after a moment, “this is insane, talking to an alien through emotions. The first assumption I’d have made about the Laagi, or any creature from one of their worlds—if there are other worlds where they live—was that our emotions would be so different from theirs that that was one element where we’d never match in any particular. Now you’re saying we can feel so much the way they do that we can actually make a language in common out of the fact. It’s crazy.”

  “You were the one who brought up the business of parallel evolution.”

  “That was referring to their developing a technology. But this… “

  “On the other hand, maybe it isn’t a matter of emotions at all. Maybe I’m communicating with Squonk in some completely other way. You know, when I do communicate with it, I don’t think of talking to a squonk. I think of talking to a sort of dog—which is just a convenient way for my imagination to handle it, nothing more. Maybe pure mental communication’s a universal language and it’s only our bodies that make us not understandable to each other. People without a language in common can get their feelings across—”

  “With sounds or facial expressions or body language,” put in Mary.

  “Well, the Laagi language seems to be just that—a body language. If it grew out of similar emotional roots, it could have end products that were like ours. After all, both we and the Laagi live in the same universe and relate to the same physical laws of that universe.”

  “You’re guessing,” said Mary. “I’m… I don’t know where to begin to point out how many things could be wrong with ideas like that.”

  “Oh, hell!” said Jim. “Maybe it’s all just black magic—my communicating with Squonk. Anyway, it worked to get the critter here. Besides, come to think of it, you’ve just given me a valid reason to interrupt the ship-cleaning beast—we’ve just discovered something’s missing. Here I go.”

  Squonk had just begun his cleaning of the space suit locker. Jim pictured himself once more in his mind as a Laagi, gesture-talking to the small creature.

  “Key? Where’s the key?” he had the Laagi signaling. “The key’s not here. Where’s the key? It must be lost. Oh my, the key’s lost…”

  “I thought you had all sorts of objections to using the idea of a key as what was lost?” said Mary; and Jim realized that in his concentration he had thought the words spoken by his emotional image out loud, as far as Mary was concerned.

  He made a mental note to avoid making that sort of slip from now on. He had better get in the habit of delivering his orders to Squonk silently, as far as she was concerned. Otherwise he could let slip information he had intended to keep to himself.

  “Well, I needed to picture something concrete for my own imaginational purposes,” he said now. “Actually, once I thought about it, it doesn’t matter what we send Squonk hunting for as long as he knows a Laagi—I mean me—is going to recognize it when he finds it. It’s just like saying ‘Rabbit! Rabbit!’ to a dog you’re about to take rabbit hunting. He’ll perk up his ears and look around even though he hasn’t heard or smelled a thing—”

  “Would you hunt rabbits with a dog?”

  “Actually no,” Jim said, “so you don’t have to sound horrified. I’m as squeamish as you are. I tend to identify with the rabbit. But it’s not the dog’s fault he gets all excited at the idea of catching and killing a rabbit—”

  “Look! What’s happened to Squonk?”

  Interrupted, Jim looked. Squonk had come to a dead stop, just as it was, head nose-deep into the space of the locker, tentacles extended and poised. It looked like a toy the motor of which had just run down.

  “What’ve you done to him, Jim?”

  “You know as much as I do about what I’ve done to him!” said Jim, irritated. “You heard what I was trying to tell him. I don’t know why he’s suddenly gone paralyzed like that.”

  “He’s been asked to do the impossible, that’s what it is,” said Mary. “It’s my fault! I shouldn’t have suggested using something completely out of his knowledge as the lost item.
If I only hadn’t said that—”

  Squonk started to move again. Its head went completely in among the space suits hanging in the locker and the tentacles immersed themselves to their full lengths in the same space.

  “There, you see,” said Jim. “You were worried about nothing. He doesn’t have the foggiest notion what a key is, but he’s hunting for something loose in the locker—what did I tell you?”

  Squonk had just backed out of the locker, with his tentacles holding a spare space suit oxygen-recycling unit. Jim hastily envisioned a Laagi being disappointed.

  “No. Not key. Too bad. No key there. Where could that key have got to? Not on the ship. Maybe in one of the buildings of the city. Maybe we could go look in a building where it might be—”

  Squonk carefully closed the door of the space suit locker and headed for the entry port.

  “Now we can start to do things!” Mary’s voice in Jim’s mind was jubilant. “Jim, you’re a wonder!”

  “I am?” said Jim, startled, not so much by the concept as by Mary’s voicing it.

  She did not seem to notice his reaction.

  “What I want to do first,” she said, “is find some place where the Laagi are standing around doing nothing but talking…”

  Chapter 19

  “—No! Wait! Stop him!” Mary interrupted herself as Squonk headed toward the entry port.

  Jim did.

  “So,” he said, “Squonk’s been promoted from an ‘it,’ has he? Probably high time. I’ve been getting him mixed up with other ‘its’ every time I try to talk about him and things. Just remember it was you who renamed him, not me.”