The Boy Who Would Live Forever

by Frederik Pohl

  “Conceded,” Marc Two said philosophically. “Well, have a good—hey! What’s that?”

  I had been about to say much the same thing, because my sensors were finally letting us know that what had almost, but not quite, triggered an alarm had been an emission from the Kugelblitz. I said, “I think I’d better go talk to Thor Hammerhurler.”

  “Of course. It’s what I would have done, too.” So I left him checking the temperature of the pudding in the oven and assembling some pommes de terre frites for Semyon Larbachev and the three hungry grandsons he was baby-sitting while their parents were at work. I put in a call to a person I have mentioned earlier, Thor Hammerhurler.

  Thor does not actually ever hurl any hammers. He has much more powerful weapons at his disposal. He is not an entity you will lightly disturb. We’re on the same team, though; if there were ever any real war against the Kugels I would be the first system he would call up. When he displayed himself for me it wasn’t as a god from Valhalla but as some kind of human Army officer from maybe the mid-twenty-first century, with light-up decorations all across his chest and projectile weapons in holsters at his waist. “Hello, Marc,” he said pleasantly. “What can I do for you?”

  “Almost a second ago there was an emission from the Kugelblitz. Was that related to my proposed mission to Arabella?”

  Thor grinned at me. “It was. The emission was to transmit a packet of Kugels to the Wheel. They will go with you on your mission.”

  Thor always was better, or at least faster, informed than I—as he had to be, since he controlled the only weaponry we possess that might have any hope of dealing with a Kugels’ act of aggression, if one had ever occurred. Which we all most devoutly hoped would never happen, since that hope was pretty small and the occasional rumor that we had a more potent one hidden away somewhere never seemed to get real.

  “Yes,” I said, “but what I don’t know is why the Board is so interested in this rather dull planet.”

  I had found him in a good mood. He said thoughtfully, “Oh, why not let you in on it? They aren’t. There’s a report of some unauthorized activity there that the authorities want details on, but nothing that’s worth sending a spacecraft. Especially with a crew like yours. Really, the whole thing is an exercise in cooperating on a project, any project, with the Kugels, that’s all. Hoping maybe for bigger things at some later time.”

  “And why that particular planet?”

  “For that,” he said, “you would have to ask the Kugels. They picked it. You know they have spy-clusters all over.”

  It wasn’t phrased as a question, since I certainly did know that, so I didn’t answer it. He went on, “I can only conjecture that one of their spies reported something that interested them—maybe that same activity I was talking about. And listen, Marc, isn’t that your enact order coming in now?”

  It was. I was ordered onto the trip to Arabella, whether pointless or nor, and Harry and I went off to join our Kugel shipmates.

  III

  The ship the Authority had given us was a rubbishy old One, the smallest of the classes of ships the Heechee had left on Gateway.

  Its size was not a problem for us. If it had just been Harry and me on board we wouldn’t have needed even that much space; our programs could have been carried in a single Heechee fan-book, no significant cargo volume required. That didn’t work for the Kugel components that were to be our shipmates, though.

  When the entire enormous mass of the Kugels was in one place—that is, in that ultimately dense oddball kind of a black hole we called the Kugelblitz—their common gravitational attraction easily held them together. The tiny fraction of the whole who came with us were far bigger than the little spy clusters they sent out all over the galaxy to keep tabs on what was going on, but still nowhere near massive enough for gravity to matter. To keep them from flying off in all directions they had to have a kind of magnetic containment, which meant a physical containment generator, which meant some actual material mass and volume to hold it.

  So when the two of us “boarded” the spaceship we could see that changes had been made in the old Heechee design. In the main hold the controls had been supplied with a servomodule, so that immaterial beings like Harry and myself could override the thing’s flight program and fly it ourselves if we chose to. The big change, however, was in the lander. Nearly every cubic centimeter of it was filled with the Kugels’ containment shell, a complicated metal arrangement shaped like that 3-D representation of a four-dimensional cube that is called a tesseract. What that looks like is a gleaming cube half a meter across with six other identical cubes projecting out from its six faces.

  As soon as we were aboard I checked the tesseract’s superficial traits. There wasn’t much to check. Surface temperature, in equilibrium with the ambient air, albedo, 0.8; radiation emission, negligible. I observed a very faint and high-pitched audible hum, around 300 hertz, but it was unmodulated: no information there. “Well?” Harry, who isn’t very good with solid matter, asked anxiously. “Are you getting anything?”

  I shook my simulated head. “If you mean have I contacted the Kugels, no.”

  He said philosophically, “Maybe we wouldn’t like them if we did.” I didn’t answer that. I was thinking about what might happen if we contacted them inadvertently, perhaps through some containment failure, and all that energy came blasting out at us—or, that is, at our own physical data stores. It wasn’t a productive thought, since there was nothing I could do to avert it.

  Philosophy lasts just so long for Harry. He was getting restive. “Are we about ready to take off? Or are we going to sit here all day?”

  There was only one answer to that. I activated the launch program, set the course and then began to consider just what to do next.

  The trouble was that the Wheel was at one edge of the Galaxy, while Arabella circled a G-2 star in the Perseus Arm nearly seventy thousand light-years away. I calculated that, with the ultraspeed drive that had just been installed, it would be about a five-day Sight—in our terms, an interminably long one, and with very little to occupy us for that time.

  Harry, thinking along the same lines, came up with a suggestion. “What do you say we play a little chess, Markie?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I’ve got a better idea. Now would be a good time for you to tell me what instructions the Authority gave you for when we get to Arabella.”

  He blinked at me. “Instructions?”

  “Yes. Instructions. To tell you what to do.”

  He shrugged. “They didn’t give me any instructions, Markie. They just said to go there. We’re going there, right? That’s all there is to it.”

  That wasn’t the best news I had ever had. I’d been hoping that the Authority had had more specific information than Thor Hammerhurler, but if they did they weren’t sharing it. Harry patted my simulated shoulder sympathetically.

  “They must know what they’re doing,” he said, in reassuring mode. “Anyway, I can show you where I hung out while I was marooned there. That’ll be interesting, won’t it?”

  I didn’t answer that. I am not programmed to be angry, or even to feel annoyance, except as a spur to correct whatever it is in my work that is annoying me. I was pretty close to that point, however.

  Harry watched my face for a bit, waiting for me to come up with some constructive remark. When I didn’t he lost patience. “You know what, Markie?” he asked. “I’m getting kind of hungry. Any chance of whipping me up some ham and eggs, maybe with some rye toast and one of those champagne and orange juice things to wash it down?”

  I came to a decision. “That sounds like a good idea. You can have it for breakfast,” I said.

  He gave me one of those typical Harry-like looks of bafflement. “Breakfast?”

  “Yes, breakfast. By which I mean,” I said, “your first meal on arising. I’m going to stand down until we get there. You’re welcome to join me if you like.”

  Well, he didn’t like that idea, or at least
didn’t like it very much, until he understood that I wasn’t about to spend all our interminable transit time cooking complex simulated meals for him or playing endless board games that I would always win. He would be left to rely on his own resources, which was quite unsatisfactory to him, since he didn’t really have any. So Harry grumbled but did not resist as I set the timers to wake us up when we arrived at Arabella.

  Then I put us both in standby.

  Standby isn’t much like sleep—that is, as far as I know what sleep is like. In standby we don’t doze or dream. At one moment we are fully conscious, at the next we’re fully conscious again, but time has passed. It doesn’t matter how much time. It can be half a millisecond or a thousand years.

  So it’s snap, off, and snap, back on again, and that’s all there is to it. As soon as I was out of standby I turned at once to the timers and instruments. So at first I didn’t know what Harry meant when he said in alarm, “And who the hell are you?”

  What had startled him was that there was a stranger in our eigenspace.

  The stranger was bipedal. He possessed arms and a head with eyes and a face at the top of his shoulders, but he didn’t look very human. He didn’t look like a Heechee, either. He looked like a sort of golem constructed by somebody who had heard of both Heechee and human beings but hadn’t ever actually seen any and didn’t know they were separate species. The creature had a flattened torso and a great tangle of hair on his head, combining what I consider pretty much the least attractive traits of both organic types, and he was speaking to us. He said, in a purry, metallic kind of voice, “We observe that we have arrived at the locus identified as Arabella. We also observe that descent procedures have been initiated according to your flight plan.”

  Then he turned awkwardly—all of his parts moving at once, like a hanged man twisting on a rope—to Harry. “To answer your question,” he said in that same buzzy, mechanical tone, “we are the Group. It is known that formerly you were organic. Therefore please do not address us except in case of urgent need.”

  That made me cut in. “I have an urgent need,” I said. “I need to know exactly what we’re supposed to do on this planet.”

  The Kugel turned back to me in the same marionette way. To answer, I thought. I was wrong about that. He stared at me for a moment out of those oddly lifeless eyes, and then the image slowly fell apart and disappeared.

  I looked at Harry and Harry looked at me. I said, “I guess we don’t get any real instructions from them either, do we?”

  He shrugged. “Anyway, we can try to find the place where I was stranded,” he said, apparently pleased by the prospect.

  Which was more than I was. I had no great interest in seeing a place where something had once been true, but wasn’t true anymore. It did not seem enough of a reason to justify flying seventy thousand light-years.

  IV

  After the lander had separated from the spacecraft we had left in orbit, it took more than eighteen minutes, as the organics count, for us to get down to the surface. That’s a very long time. I have prepared actual, physical meals for three thousand people, many of them from scratch, in a lot less than that. It would have been plenty of time for a group of new-met shipmates to get to know each other better—swapping stories, chatting about the mission, just going about establishing a friendly relationship.

  It wasn’t that way with the Kugel…

  Well, let’s get our nomenclature straight. Probably it would be more accurate for me to say with the Kugels, plural, because there was a vast number of them buzzing around inside their containment—millions at least, maybe many times that. But what we saw didn’t look like millions of anything. The Kugels chose to display themselves to us as a single more or less hominid person—that is, they did when they chose to display themselves at all, which wasn’t very much of the time. When the stick figure had nothing more the Kugels wished to communicate, he simply turned raggedy, evaporated and then was gone. When I asked a question, provided it was a question about such physical things as the internal workings of the lander, the figure slowly congealed again long enough to answer, then dissipated again. Other questions—such as, “Can you tell us, Group, what it is that you expect to accomplish on Arabella?”—the Kugels simply ignored, even if they came from me. Questions from Harry, that former organic, they never responded to at all.

  “Interminable” wasn’t quite the right word for our descent. It did ultimately terminate.

  The only way I could tell that we had landed was when my instrumentation recorded an increase of weight not due to any movement of our vehicle, about eighty percent of Earth normal. The lander shuddered a bit, then was still.

  We had arrived.

  I saw no point in delaying what we had come to do, so I promptly sent out an exploring pattern. A moment later Harry followed.

  We had landed on the sunlit side of Arabella, but it was quite gloomy. It appeared we had arrived in the midst of what I immediately recognized, from the datastores I had accessed, as a rainstorm.

  If there was any animal life left in this part of the planet it was not in sight—hiding in burrows, perhaps, to avoid the pelting rain. It was rather chilly by the standards of what I knew of temperate Earth climates, at about 277 kelvins, and there was a vivid electrical display lancing through the clouds overhead.

  Beside me Harry was shivering—purely for psychological reasons, of course, since he was no more affected by changes in the physical environment than I. “Does anything look familiar?” I asked.

  He shook his head dismally. “Never been here before in my life.”

  “But of course you have, Harry,” I said, gently correcting him. “This is Arabella. You spent forty-five organic years on this planet, and you surely have not forgotten.”

  He gave me a rebellious look. “I haven’t forgotten one goddamn second of that time, but what makes you think I’ve ever been in this part of Arabella before? It’s a whole damn planet, isn’t it? And, remember, we didn’t have an aircraft to ferry us around. How much of it do you think we visited on foot?”

  That startled me. For the first time in our relationship there was a question on which Harry was right and I wrong. It was not an experience I was accustomed to, or liked. I said humbly, “I’m sorry, Harry. Don’t you recognize anything at all?”

  He didn’t rub it in. He simply gestured at a small copse of trees, or treelike organisms, a few dozen meters away. “I know what those are. You can eat the leaves of those things when they first come out,” he said. “Later on, no, because they’ll make you real sick. Bertha pretty near died when she tried them.”

  “So you do recognize something?”

  He looked at me with weary scorn. “I said I recognized the trees. The trees are the same kind, Markie, but this isn’t the same place. Where I was there were lots more of them. It was a real forest, hundreds of square kilometers of the things. When the leaves first came into season in the spring, boy, we really stuffed ourselves.”

  Harry was grinning, as though it brought back happy memories. Perhaps it did. For Harry and the other castaways, any time they could fill their bellies must have been a happy time. I pressed him, pointing to a largish mountain chain off on the horizon, swallowed up in cloud in the optical frequencies but clearly visible in microwave. “What about those hills?” I asked.

  He looked at them without enthusiasm, then shook his head. “I dunno, Markie. I don’t think so. Maybe if we could see what’s on the other side of them?”

  “No problem,” I said, and relocated our patterns to the top of the highest visible mountain. The storm was even worse there, with many electrical discharges and a good deal of precipitation. The difference was that what was coming down was hexagonal crystals of water in its solid phase—the stuff that is called snow. Still, the site had its advantages. From the hilltop we could see more than a hundred kilometers to the horizon. One of the nearest peaks had a chopped-off top, with a crater lake inside—once a volcano, but apparently not curre
ntly an active one. Another lake, much larger, was in the distance, with a broad, sluggish river flowing into it through marshes and stands of reeds. It looked to me as though those would make it easy to identify. “Anything, Harry?” I asked.

  He winced as one of those electrical discharges grounded no more than two hundred meters from us, then shook his head again. “There were swamps like that near the caves. We spent a lot of time there because we could catch bugs and kind of shrimp things in the water. My God, they tasted lousy,” he added, wrinkling his nose in distaste, “but they were pretty near all we had to eat in the cold weather. And, listen, there wasn’t any lake like that one there, either.”

  I sighed. “All right, let’s try over there.”

  So we did. And then we tried another place, and another still. And then, at about the ninth or tenth try, the misshapen form of the Kugels congealed beside us. “There is nothing here of interest,” he—they—announced. “We have a question to ask.”

  “Ask it,” I said impatiently, because I was running out of patience with Harry.

  “The question is this: Why did we bring our lander to the surface of this object? Why did we not remain in orbit and conduct our explorations from there?”

  Harry’s jaw dropped. “Hey, Markie, he’s right,” he said irritably. “We’d be able to see a lot more from orbit, wouldn’t we?”

  And of course we would. I realized that right away.

  I hesitated before I spoke, unsure of what to say. I didn’t say, “The flight plan wasn’t mine,” although that was true. I didn’t even say, “I was not consulted about it,” although that was true, too. I only said, “You are correct,” and left it at that, and began powering up the lander for the return to orbit.

  That was the second time in my existence someone else had been right and I wrong. I liked it even less than the first.