There was a sudden horrendous clatter, to which no one in the room seemed to pay any attention except the unfortunate squonk which had been the cause of it. Certainly, thought Jim, Laagi must be absolutely without a sense of hearing; and probably the squonks were, too. What he had heard had been the very noisy result of two of the chair-carrying squonks colliding to send the chairs they had been carrying crashing to the floor.
What had happened had clearly been an accident. The tentacles of a squonk appeared extremely nimble, but there was obviously a limit to the amount of strength they possessed. One squonk seemed able to carry one chair comfortably by curling all its tentacles around the shaft that supported the seat. One squonk was also all that was needed to set the chair upright when it had been brought to the Laagi wanting it. The lower end of the support rod fastened itself by some invisible means firmly and automatically to the floor when the chair was set up. Apparently this adhesive, or otherwise self-fastening end, of the shaft of the chair being carried by one squonk had touched and fastened itself to the leg of one carried by mother. Tripped up, or perhaps overbalanced by the unexpected double weight, both chairs and the squonk that carried one had tumbled to the floor.
One squonk hurried off, leaving things as they were. The other pushed itself back to its feet, using its tentacles. It then tried to pick up the chair it had originally been carrying and found it firmly attached to the other chair. After a few seconds of futilely trying to lift the awkward structure composed of the two joined chairs, the squonk put it down and scurried over to another squonk headed away after having just delivered another chair.
The second squonk stopped, the two entwined the ends of their tentacles momentarily, and the second squonk hurried away, while the first returned to the tangle of the joined chairs. After a few minutes, the second squonk—at least Jim thought it was the second squonk, since the creatures all looked so much alike that it was difficult to be sure—returned with what looked like a small rod with a sort of pistol grip at one end, held in one tentacle.
The second squonk touched the far tip of the rod to the point at which the chairs joined, both squonks took hold of a chair apiece and pulled with what seemed to be considerable effort; and the two chairs parted. Taking a chair apiece they trotted off and were lost in the crowd from the point of view afforded Jim by Squonk himself.
Jim watched them disappear, fascinated. It was the first time he had seen anything resembling communication or teamwork among the squonks. He continued to watch the room carefully, hoping for some further evidence of squonk cooperation, but no reason for such activity evidently occurred. He had seen, however, two squonks not only communicate, but solve a problem on their own without specific orders from any of the Laagi standing around; and that, he told himself, was food for thought.
Chapter 20
“Jim. Jim!”
“All right, all right,” said Jim, “I heard you the first time. What is it?”
“You were sleeping again.”
“I was not. I was thinking. Nevermind… what do you want now?”
“I want you to stop Squonk,” said Mary. “Make him stand still—or better yet make him back up about two meters. There’s a pair of Laagi I particularly want to keep observing.”
“I don’t know if I can,” said Jim.
“Why not?”
“Well, I mean, I probably can tell him to stop searching, but I’m trying to think of a reason for it that’ll make sense. The way we had to work out a way of sending him hunting for something, that made sense to him. Also, have you thought that if he suddenly just stops doing anything out here where he is, he may attract attention to himself?”
“What if he does?”
“If he attracts the attention of the Laagi, one or more of them might just come over to find out what he’s doing here.”
“We haven’t seen any evidence that squonks can talk to Laagi,” said Mary.
“No, but maybe there’re other ways a Laagi could find out what Squonk’s doing here. The Laagi might be able to identify Squonk as the one of his kind who’s supposed to be cleaning AndFriend periodically and has a part-carrying job elsewhere; and so might wonder what he’s doing here, instead. Even if the Laagi doesn’t do any more than wonder, he might end up ordering Squonk back to his parts-carrying and Squonk might well listen to that Laagi and obey it, in spite of whatever I could say to him. Do you want that?”
“No. No, of course not.” Mary paused. “But I’ve absolutely got to keep observing these two Laagi awhile longer. They’re acting different from any others we’ve seen so far.”
“These two right next to us?”
“That’s right.”
“All right,” said Jim. He pulled the now familiar trick of imagining himself as a Laagi giving gesticulated orders to Squonk.
“Good Squonk,” he thought. “Stop. Wait just where you are for the moment. I may have new orders for you in just a little bit.”
Agreeably, Squonk froze in position, which at the moment was the one best adapted to minutely searching the open floor of the room along a line that was carrying him away from the two Laagi Mary had indicated.
“There. See?” said Mary. “There’s no problem in stopping him.”
“Stopping him wasn’t what I was worried about,” Jim said. “What I was worried about—”
“Will you please not talk for a few minutes?” said Mary. “These two are definitely unusual. I want to be able to concentrate on them and I can’t do that with you jabbering.”
On the verge of arguing, Jim suddenly realized what had really bothered him about the peremptory order had been Mary making sure she had the last word—as usual. He kept his silence accordingly and took a closer look at the two Laagi himself. They were both seated and they were by themselves—a group of two. Not only that, but the space around them was larger than around any of the other groups, as if the other Laagi were politely avoiding any intrusion on them.
The two also gave the impression of being very punctilious in their communication. When one gesticulated, the other did not—of course that was the way it was also more or less, but only more or less, among the other Laagi. But what was unlike anything Jim had seen between these aliens before was that each time one of the two stopped talking, there was a moment of complete motionlessness on the part of both individuals before the one who had not been gesticulating started to reply.
“Did you notice how they pause?” Jim asked Mary.
“Of course,” said Mary. “But there’s more than that going on here, different from ordinary Laagi conversation. If you notice, the gestures of these two are slower and more deliberate than those we’ve been seeing.”
“Maybe they’re a couple of old Laagi,” said Jim.
“Perhaps,” murmured Mary quite seriously. “Also, their gestures are more emphatic—look there!”
The one of the two who was currently gesticulating had suddenly pulled his head down completely out of sight into the top skin-folds of his body and ceased movement entirely. After a long moment his head slowly came out once more.
Unexpectedly, Mary laughed; and Jim found himself with the sort of feeling that in the flesh would have signaled a grin. At the same time he was not exactly sure why what they had seen had struck them both as so funny. He finally decided it was the jack-in-the-box effect of the head pulling in that had triggered off the sense of ridiculousness in both Mary and himself. It was as if two human heads of state had been discussing a serious political matter with all the normal solemnity of rhetoric; and one of them had suddenly stood on his head to underline the point he had just made.
In any case, the one who had just pulled in his head—
“Call him ‘A,’” said Jim thoughtfully.
“Call who ‘A’?” demanded Mary.
“The one who just pulled his head in,” said Jim, “and call the other one ‘B.’ Now, it looks as if A’s made his point and is through arguing for the moment.”
“How do we know
they’re arguing?” said Mary. “You’re right, though. Now, B’s starting to talk.”
B was indeed beginning to gesticulate. But its movement were both slow and large, involving much lengthening and shortening of its limbs and body. After a relatively small number of gestures, B also swiftly and definitely pulled his head down out of sight, kept it there for perhaps a full minute, and then stuck it out again. Both Laagi rose from their seats and went off in different directions.
“Some sort of conclusion achieved,” said Mary.
“Or the breakup of a lifelong friendship over some matter of principle—” began Jim. But he was interrupted.
A squonk had come up to Squonk and was running the tips of its tentacles over Squonk’s motionless body. Around them, it seemed that every other squonk in view who was not burdened with a chair or otherwise obviously occupied, was also headed in Squonk’s direction.
“Squonk, go back to what you were doing!” said Jim hastily.
Squonk started to move. He lifted his head, exchanged a brief tentacle-touch with the other squonk who had been feeling him over, and went back to his careful search of the floor before him. The squonk who had been examining him went away. Those others in the distance who had been headed toward them also turned off in other directions.
“You see?” demanded Jim. “The minute a squonk—or a Laagi—stops doing anything, it attracts attention.”
“You’re right,” said Mary briskly. “However, it’s all fixed. Now, I’ve got a report to dictate. Are you ready?”
“Ready as I ever will be,” said Jim.
Mary began dictating. There was some general data on the other Laagi she had observed in communication, in the room they were now in; but the bulk of her report, once she got into it, was to all effects almost a gesture-by-gesture recounting of the exchange between the two Laagi they had just been watching.
Mary’s reports, Jim had noted, came out in short, declarative sentences. The words she chose were simple and the meaning unmistakably clear. She did not ramble. She must, thought Jim as he carefully repeated after her, have had considerable experience dictating such reports. The thought, for some unknown reason, reminded him of a question that had occurred to him from time to time lately. He waited until Mary was done to ask it.
“Tell me,” he said then, “when do you sleep?”
“When you do,” answered Mary.
“Oh?” Jim thought this over. “And why don’t I ever catch you doing it?”
“Because I don’t sleep as much as you do,” said Mary. “I never did sleep much. I could get by on four or five hours a night indefinitely when I was in my body; and I think I can do a lot better now, if I want to. So I just wait until you’re asleep before dropping off myself—and only then if there’s nothing going on I want to observe.”
“That still doesn’t explain why I’ve never woken up and caught you at it.”
“When you wake up, I wake up,” said Mary. “I set myself to do that, and it works. Also, it always takes you some few minutes to come to when you do wake up, so you don’t realize I’ve just woken up, too. Of course, most of the time, even if I go to sleep after you do, I wake up long before you wake up.”
“Score another one for you,” said Jim.
He had been joking, but the tone of Mary’s answer was completely serious.
“If you say so,” she answered absently. Jim was nettled in spite of his earlier good intentions.
“Tell me,” he said, “did it ever occur to you it might be to your benefit to make friends with the people you work with?”
“Why?” said Mary, almost fiercely. “That’s right, why? The job’s the thing. If the work gets done, who cares how the people doing it get on together?”
Jim took a few seconds to absorb that.
“I think you really mean that,” he said at last.
“I do,” said Mary. Suddenly one of the changes in her that was as astonishing as the sort of attitude Jim had just been questioning her about seemed to take her over. “Sorry, Jim. I don’t deliberately set out to be hard to coexist with. It’s just that what we’re involved in here is one of the most important things any members of the human race have ever tied into; and something like that is so much more important than friendship, or sleep, or anything else, that there’s no comparing them.”
“It’s also true,” said Jim slowly, “that it’s a job as big as the Laagi race itself. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to be done by one person, or two persons, alone.”
“Whoever comes after us is going to build on what I do now,” said Mary. “I owe it to give them as much as I can. That’s that. If you don’t like it, you can lump it!”
Mentally, Jim opened his mouth to answer her, then closed it again. It was no use. He and she seemed to talk different languages.
But it started him on a new line of thought.
There had been something approaching a violence in the emotion he had felt from Mary just now; a violence he had not felt from her before. It was nearly as if she was reacting to him as a competitor, or even an antagonist. He compared that emotion in her with his memory of her, when he had first come out of his trance, to find himself in hypnotic shackles with AndFriend, locked down on the surface of this alien world.
She had been entirely different then. She had seemed honestly regretful at what she obviously felt she had had no choice but to do, and apparently honestly concerned at what it had done to him. Now she was all claws and teeth. Why? Unless—wild as it seemed—there was something about studying the Laagi that had triggered off the change in her.
He tried to imagine what that might be. It could hardly be the example set by the Laagi themselves. So far they had seen no sign of anything even approaching violence of emotion in the Laagi, let alone any evidence of brutality or worse; and even if they had, why having observed it should cause Mary to change her attitude toward Jim was a mystery. Like the squonks, all the Laagi did, apparently, was work. Work and keep working.
The only connection between that unceasing activity and either Jim or Mary was the fact that Mary was also a worker. But even she could not work around the clock, seven days a week, for a lifetime; which was what—so far—it looked like the Laagi did. Could she really get by on four hours’ sleep a night, indefinitely? Jim himself had occasionally found it necessary as a Frontier pilot to go on five or six hours’ sleep out of each twenty-four for spells of up to several weeks; and the lack of sleep had wrung him out. Of course, different people had different requirements as far as sleep went….
More to the point, had she really been able to do her sleeping only when he was sleeping, and wake before or at the moment he woke—
“Jim!” She was calling him now. “What’re you doing with Squonk? I don’t want him to go back over there to the wall again; I want him to keep on working through the crowd out here in the middle of the floor. Jim!”
“I didn’t tell him to do anything,” replied Jim. For Squonk had suddenly turned and was headed as Mary said, toward the wall, the base of which he had searched some hours past. “Squonk! Good Squonk, don’t go that way. Come back to where you were.”
But Squonk had reached the wall by this time. He leaned up against it, shortened his legs, fell over on his back and lay rocking gently on his shell, with his two red feet facing upward toward the distant ceiling.
“Well,” said Jim after a moment. “Apparently when it’s time for him to sleep, he sleeps.”
“Can’t you wake him up?”
“How?” asked Jim.
“I don’t know. You’re the one who runs him. Think of something. There must be something—some sort of emergency signal that’d bring him to.”
“Maybe there is,” said Jim. “But don’t you think you’d better just let him sleep when he’s used to sleeping, if you want to keep him in good shape for your own use? How would we go about getting another squonk if something happened to him, or he got so tired he stopped paying attention to what I said to him
? The way he didn’t listen to me just now, when I told him to stop going toward the wall.”
She did not answer. He thought he again felt a deep anger in her, anger at him as well as at Squonk. But he could not be sure. It was difficult for him to do much more than guess at her emotional state unless she spoke, and then her feelings came through loud and clear as an overriding quality on the words she said. He told himself that he might have been imagining it in this instance; but from then on he watched for a number of things during the time that followed after Squonk came out of his brief period of sleep and responded to Jim’s commands in his old obedient manner.
In the weeks and perhaps months of local time that followed—the day here seemed to be somewhat longer than twenty-four of Earth’s hours, although without access to the ship’s instruments, it was impossible to compare the two until they got back to AndFriend—they saw, and Mary dictated, reports on an astonishing amount of information about the Laagi.
They penetrated to the city’s outskirts, and discovered that there, it stopped abruptly with the last building and beyond this was a scrub-brush type of open country with hard-packed sandy soil, bushes, or perhaps small trees that seemed capable of pulling up their roots at will, moving slowly to a new location and putting them down again. This open country was also plentifully sprinkled with evidence of more primitive life forms, from conical mounds that resembled large ant hills several meters in height, to communities of smaller mounds no larger than a human fist, from which in the daytime emerged a number of small trotting, flying or hopping creatures, possibly insects, that apparently fed off the vegetation or each other.
They ventured a short distance out into this countryside, until Squonk became too upset to go farther. But once they were well out from the buildings, a kilometer or more, both Mary and Jim had thought they caught glimpses of moving forms as large as Squonk or larger, among the vegetation in the distance.
“…it was impossible to be sure,” Mary dictated after their return to the city, “whether it was fear or a sense of having abandoned his proper place or duty that made Squonk so eager to return to the city. It may have been both…”
The Forever Man Page 25