The Forever Man

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “I had to be in the ship so I could operate her,” he said. “I got Squonk to round up some of his friends and cut loose the arches that were holding us down. Then I used my own, personal, nonship powers—the same ones Raoul used to drive La Chasse Gallerie all the way through Laagi territory to get home—to take us off. We’ve left the Laagi world.”

  She said nothing. He waited.

  “I know,” he said, “you’re feeling I betrayed you. Well, maybe I did. But you were working yourself to death and you’d already done anything anyone could have expected you to do back there—and more.”

  “So we’re in space now?”

  Aside from an emptiness and a strange impression of distance, as if she had physically withdrawn from him, her voice was calm and he could feel no explosion kindling in her in reaction to what he had just said.

  “That’s right. On the equivalent of ordinary drive, which is all I can manage on my own, but moving away steadily.”

  “I suppose we could go back if we tried?”

  “Yes,” said Jim. “But I won’t. If you’ll just cancel that hypnotic lock you’ve got on me, so I can work the ship and phase-shift, we’ll head out around Laagi territory and go home.”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll never do that. Not as long as there’s a chance of our going back to the Laagi.”

  The continuing utter calmness of her voice and emotions held an inflexibility that gave no hope of its being changed.

  “Then we’ll have to take our chances, this way,” said Jim.

  “The Laagi’ll catch us long before we can reach the Frontier and any human protection,” said Mary.

  “Maybe they could,” said Jim, “maybe not. But I’m not headed up-galaxy toward home. I’m headed down-galaxy toward the fly-swatting territory. I think it’ll take the Laagi a little while to figure out AndFriend might go in that direction; and any time gained is a plus for us, in this case.”

  “I see,” said Mary. “All right. Understand me. I’ve had a chance to get some rest now. My head’s clear. You were right. I’d worked myself to the point where I wasn’t thinking straight. But I’m thinking straight now; and there’s work back there I’ve left unfinished. If you’ll turn back and let the Laagi catch us again, I’ll promise you we’ll leave within a quarter of a year, their local time.”

  “No,” said Jim.

  “Is a quarter of a year going to make that much difference to you after the time we’ve spent there already?”

  “It’s not that,” said Jim. “I’m afraid I don’t trust you. If you could go back there, a quarter of a year would become half a year, then a year. By the end of a year you’d be back again in a condition where there’d be no point in trying to talk sense to you about leaving, ever.”

  There was another extended silence from Mary. In the picture of her he carried always in his mind now, put together from bits and pieces of memory, he imagined her with the right corner of her lower lip caught thoughtfully for a moment between her teeth as she searched for the words most likely to move him from his position. It was a fetching, even in a strange way an endearing, picture; but he could not afford to give in.

  “So you’re going to try taking us home in spite of the odds against it?” she said at last.

  “The odds wouldn’t be so much against it if you gave me back the ability to phase-shift AndFriend.”

  She ignored what he had just said.

  “You realize,” she said, “if the Laagi shoot us on sight, instead of simply trying to capture us, you’re risking the loss of everything I—we’ve found out about them. That information will never get back to Earth then; and it means everything to them, back there.”

  “Give me phase-shifting ability and there’s a good chance the information will get back.”

  “Good?” she said. “No. Only a little better. Let the Laagi capture us again, let me work with them awhile longer; and maybe I can get to the point where I can talk to them. You’ve been repeating every note I’ve made but you don’t seem to have understood what those notes meant. The Laagi are only fighting us because we’ve triggered off a genetic, territorial response in them. Their reflexive assumption is that the only reason we could be in their territory—and they think of it as their territory, not ours, where our ships first met in space—is that we mean to move in and take their worlds from them. Their inborn reflexes can’t imagine any other reason for our being there.”

  “So?” he said.

  “So, their reflexive system can’t—but maybe their upper, civilized minds can—accept the fact we wouldn’t want their worlds, even if we could have them. Their atmosphere’s unbreathable by us and there’s probably a limitless number of other things wrong. But we can’t tell them that until we can talk to them; and I have to stay there until I can talk to them.”

  “Or maybe we can send a whole expedition back, knowing what we know now,” said Jim, “and they can find out how to talk to them.”

  “And meanwhile your friends on the Frontier are being killed daily; and so are something like the same number of Laagi; and both races are going broke building warships and defending their side of the Frontier.”

  Jim winced. She had hit him in one of his vulnerable areas. But the fact remained he dared not trust her.

  “You want to keep on gambling,” he said. “I want to take the chips we’ve won so far and run with them, to come back and try to break the bank another day. I’m not going to change my mind.”

  “Neither am I,” said Mary. There was sadness in her voice. “So you’ll have to do what you’re trying to do without phase-shifts.”

  They drove on without talking for some time. There was no sign of pursuit yet, as far as Jim could see. But that meant nothing, when a Laagi vessel could phaseshift into existence within a thousand kilometers of them without a moment’s warning. More to the point, now that he was back on board, he had access to time-keeping equipment. As best he could figure by estimating the time left until dawn when they had taken off from the Laagi world, the ship’s clocks gave him as much as an hour yet before AndFriend’s absence would be visible to those traveling the green pathways that gave a view of the place where she had been anchored down on display.

  How long after that it would take the Laagi to organize a pursuit and get ships into space was something he could not guess. But on Earth, in a parallel situation, it would be a matter of four to six hours at least, and probably it could not be done much more speedily by the Laagi.

  After a long time, Mary spoke again.

  “Why did you take Squonk along?” she asked. “Wouldn’t it have been kinder to leave him back there? Or did you want to try to bring out a living specimen?”

  “No,” said Jim. “But without us to give him orders he’d go immediately to the first Laagi he saw who could give him some, and ask to be put to work. Doesn’t it seem to you that that Laagi would want to know what a squonk had been doing up until then, and why he was free for other work now? And what’s your guess on the possibility of the Laagi being able to find out from Squonk what he’s been doing for us—and perhaps learning that AndFriend had brought at least two invisible alien intelligences on their world?”

  “I see,” said Mary. “It was self-protection you had in mind.”

  The words could have been said with her earlier sharpness. But, once again, there was a sadness that seemed to be underlying them; it was as if, thought Jim, in some way he had disappointed her.

  “Yes,” he said. “But there’s a certain kindness involved in bringing him, too, whether you believe that or not. He’s been involved in everything we’ve done. For months he’s been hunting that nonexistent ‘key.’ You might say it’s become his lifework—like your own determination to make yourself of use to our world.”

  The pause before Mary answered this time was shorter than the others had been, but long enough for Jim to hear his own words echoing in his mind.

  “That was a rather brutal thing to say,” said Mary.

 
“Maybe it was,” said Jim. “But Squonk’s given us everything he had to give; and what he’d tell you he wanted most, if he could tell you anything, would be that his wish would be to die working. As soon as he finishes cleaning the ship, which was the excuse I had to use to bring us here, I’ll let him go back to searching the ship for the key. I’ve even had the ship’s robot tuck a couple of dozen small objects in corners about the ship for Squonk to find. Of course, when he does find them, we’ll tell him they aren’t what we’re looking for, but it’ll keep the hunt alive in his mind.”

  “Until we reach Earth. And if we don’t, which is most likely, he won’t either.”

  “He won’t reach Earth in any case,” said Jim.

  “Why not?” asked Mary, and then answered herself. “Are you planning on putting him out the entry port while we’re still in space—”

  She broke off.

  “You mean you don’t think he’ll live until then?”

  “That’s right,” said Jim. “I don’t think he will.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jim. He searched for the words to describe what had given him the impression. “It’s just something I feel from him. He’s been very close to dying for some time, I think. He can’t last much longer.”

  Neither one of them said anything more for a minute.

  “Look at him,” Mary said then; and Jim realized she must have been spending the small interval watching Squonk. “He’s working away just as he always does. What makes you so sure of this feeling?”

  “Only the fact I’ve got it,” said Jim.

  They drove steadily down-galaxy, not saying very much to each other. A couple of days, Laagi-time, went by. Squonk finished cleaning the interior of AndFriend and was set to work hunting for the nonexistent key, ignoring the fact—which did not seem to bother Squonk either—that he would be searching the very areas he had just finished going over so meticulously in the process of cleaning them.

  The third day two Laagi fighter ships appeared off AndFriend’s right bow at a distance of about eight hundred kilometers. They moved in to within less than a kilometer and one of them disappeared, phase-shifted off to someplace else. The one that remained kept station beside AndFriend, following her toward the Laagi down-galaxy frontier, simply paralleling her course and waiting.

  “I wonder why the other one left?” said Mary

  “Why do you think?” Jim answered. “His friend here was left to keep an eye on us while he went to get more ships. They’ll be planning to do exactly what we did with La Chasse Gallerie when we brought her home. Lock on to AndFriend and phase-shift with her attached, so that she has to come along with them.”

  “Take us back,” said Mary.

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “That depends on you,” he answered. “I can let them take us, or if you give me back the ability to run the ship, I can make a phase-shift jump—one long enough and at an angle that’ll confuse them until I can make a few more and get beyond their frontier in this direction—into fly-swatting territory. As much as they might want AndFriend back, I don’t think they’ll follow her there.”

  “You know I won’t give you back anything.”

  “Think about it,” he said. “Think it through—what’ll happen if they take us back?”

  “I have,” she said. “I’ll study them for another year, that’s all. Then I’ll set you free and you can take us home. But I’ve got to have that year back on the surface of that Laagi planet.”

  “You’ll never get it,” he said.

  “Why? Because you’ll start fighting with them some way using what mind control you have over this ship; and they’ll destroy AndFriend completely when they find they can’t stop her just by cutting her up?”

  “No, there’s no way I can fight with AndFriend unless you turn me loose. But suppose we just do let them lock on and cart us away. Stop and think of it. They’ll never let you down on the surface of that world of theirs again.”

  She did not speak for a second.

  “You’re crazy,” she said finally. “You’re so determined to get away, you’re imagining things.”

  “No,” he said. “Think. Think it through.”

  “I have,” she said. In his imaginary mental image of her, he watched her eyes narrowing. “Why wouldn’t they take AndFriend back down on the surface of their world?”

  “They’ve had two human ships,” Jim said. “They’ve picked up and taken home two human-made ships with no humans aboard them. The first one just up and left on its own and made its way back to the human Frontier and beyond. So they tied down the second one when they got it home, so that it physically couldn’t take off. But it’s not only taken off, anyway, but got some of their own squonks to cut it loose so that it could. And in each case, as far as they could tell, there was no human on board. In the case of AndFriend, at least, they’d even had the entry port open at one time, so that there was no atmosphere inside to support Earth life.”

  “All right,” she said. “I can see where they’d be puzzled.”

  “Puzzled isn’t the word. Frightened, I think, would suit the way they feel, better. Somehow, either human ships can operate without any living thing aboard—and Laagi ships aren’t able to do that. Or else humans have some way of being invisible and undetectable inside their own ships. In which case, who knows what’s been done by whatever humans might have been aboard La Chasse Gallerie and AndFriend?”

  “Hmm,” said Mary. “I see.”

  “In any case,” went on Jim, “whatever harm’s been done has been done. But they’re certainly not going to take the chance of any more human intrusions on their home world, or one of their home worlds—whichever the one we were on is. Once they lock onto us, they’re going to take us out into interstellar space, well inside their territory, but far, far away from any of their worlds, and effectively nail us down out there. They’ll post guards on us to see we stay where we’ve been put, and kept that way until they’ve figured out the answer to how we did what we did—which may take them a few thousand years or more. Meanwhile, what you’ve learned so far isn’t going to be getting back to do any good on Earth.”

  “It might be like that,” said Mary thoughtfully. “All right, we’ll just see. We’ll let them come and take us away; and if they put us out in space somewhere the way you think they will, I’ll set you free, and you can take us home.”

  “Then’ll be too late,” said Jim.

  He imagined her staring at him, the brown eyes wide now.

  “Are you talking absolute nonsense?” she demanded. “Even if they’ve got guards watching, once you’re free you can phase-shift AndFriend up to ten or fifteen light-years at least, in any direction, can’t you?”

  “I suppose,” said Jim, “it’s not your fault you don’t think in terms of a military action in space. You didn’t think I meant they’d just put a couple of ships beside us wherever they left us, and then the rest of them would all go home? We wouldn’t do anything as stupid as that if the situation was reversed; and nothing on the Frontier’s indicated the Laagi are any more stupid than we are. There’d not only be guard ships beside us, but we’d be boxed in for as far as we could jump in any direction by sentinel ships with instruments tuned to track us if we suddenly went off by phase-shift. And there’d be other space-forces on call near enough to keep us tracked, and close in on us within a day at the outside, no matter which way we went or dodged about.” He snorted. “For that matter, they might just come on board and remove our phase-shift engines.”

  “Of course,” said Mary slowly, “this is all just a theory of yours.”

  A two-person Laagi warship phased in not a hundred meters from AndFriend’s right side.

  “Woops,” said Jim. “That was close. A fortieth of a decimal point farther, and he’d have been in AndFriend’s space when he came out of phase—and that’d be all there was! Bet you a snap of the fingers that whoever co
mmands his flight is jumping down his throat, right now.”

  “These are aliens. We can’t be sure of how they think,” said Mary.

  The Laagi ship which had just appeared rolled over on its side, revealing what appeared to be two long bars, like skis, attached to its hull by struts several meters in length. Both struts and runners were thick and heavy, firmly bonded to the body of the craft. As they watched, the bottom surface of the runners that was facing toward AndFriend began to turn pink, and the pink color darkened until it became obvious that the surfaces were warming up toward a white-hot heat, at which temperature they would weld themselves firmly to AndFriend’s hull at a touch.

  Another ship appeared on the other side of AndFriend, but in this case it popped into existence a much safer four or five kilometers off. But it, too, had attachment runners and the face of these, also, began to heat up as they watched.

  “Maybe two more ships yet to come, to cover us completely,” said Jim. “Time’s getting short, honey.”

  “Clear all, Jim Wander! Clear all—go! Go!”

  As the words erupted from Mary’s mind, Jim felt control of AndFriend return to him. Two other Laagi vessels with runners had appeared and the first two were drifting in close. He had programmed the shift down-galaxy in his mind long before. It was an automatic thing to feed it to the phase-shift mechanism.

  They shifted.

  All at once they were alone in empty space with strange stars burning all about them.

  “How far did we come?” Mary asked.

  “At least three light-years,” said Jim grimly. “I think we’ve taken them by surprise, and maybe we’ll be able to make it to fly-swatter territory.”

  He calculated and shifted; shifted again…

  He was scanning space in all directions around them, gratefully once again using the powerful distance vision of the ship’s equipment. “Look at that, I think we’re beyond the flyswatter range—there are those G0-type stars we saw before. Maybe that’s what Raoul meant by Paradise—”

  He broke off. The interior of the ship was suddenly aswarm with invisible life.