The Forever Man (11 page)

He waited. There was a good deal of excitement with officers of various ranks up to and including a one-star general who came and told him he could not stay. He did not answer, merely sat.

Eventually they left him as he was.

The day wore on. No one came out or went in through the door to Mollen's inner, private office. Clearly he was not there. He did not come in from the corridor door, either. The afternoon passed. Jim was not conscious of the hours passing either slowly or fast. It was simply time to be put in. He did not read. He did not think. He simply sat and waited. At last, with the afternoon far advanced, the captain on at the desk in the outer office got up and went out briefly.

When he returned, he was accompanied by two tall MPs with holstered sidearms and the flaps buttoned down. No nightsticks. The captain cleaned up his desk. He went out and the door closed behind him. The two MPs took positions, standing one on each side of the closed door. Jim hardly paid them any attention.

Together the three of them spent the night. On the rare occasions when Jim got up to go to the men's room down the corridor, one of the MPs went with him and came back with him. Toward morning, Jim may have dozed in his chair. But he was not conscious of having slept, and if he had, he had not dreamed while he was asleep.

At dawn two other MPs replaced the Military Police who had been there all night. One of them brought a plastic cup of coffee and put it on the chair next to Jim's. Jim looked at it and realized he was thirsty. He drank it; but he could not have said, a second after finishing it, whether it had been black, or whether it had had cream and sugar in it.

A little before 7 A.M., the corridor outside began to sound with the feet of incoming workers. At a little after seven, the corridor door opened between the two MPs and Mollen strode in, followed by the same captain who had sat at the outer desk yesterday.

Mollen jerked his head at Jim.

Jim got to his feet, awkwardly. He was dully surprised to find how stiff his body was after his long sitting. He followed the general into the private office.

This office had padded armchairs before its one large desk. Mollen took the chair behind the desk and gestured Jim to one of the facing, padded ones.

They looked at each other.

“Well?” said Mollen. “You ready to go back into space again?”

Jim stared at him dumbly and the silence lengthened out between them, until Jim realized that the question had been for the record. And for the record, which was undoubtedly a voice and picture recording going on at the moment, he would have to give an answer.

“Yes sir,” he croaked.

Mollen opened the he croaked. wide drawer in the middle of his desk, fished around and came up with a document that seemed to consist of half a dozen or so sheets of paper, heat-stapled together. He passed it across to Jim.

“Sign this.”

Jim took it and blinked at it. He tried to read through it, but his brain was almost as numb as his body. It read something like the document he had been required to sign upon getting his commission, about the Official Secrets Act and penalties for his disregarding it. Essentially these papers before him, once signed, put him completely at his government's disposal—which seemed like doing the thing twice-over, since as a Frontier pilot he was already the government's, to use or throw away.

In any case, it did not matter.
AndFriend
and space were all that mattered. He signed it with a pen the general handed him and passed both pen and document back. Mollen waved it for a second in the air.

“You can have another look at the file storing this any time you want to,” the general said, “unless you ever become a civilian again or you're put on a different status. Then that file'll be closed to you. Understand?”

“I understand, sir.”

“Good.” Mollen's voice became more genial “From now on you report every morning to the lab proper—Mary's work area. For now, for God's sake get back to your quarters and get some sleep.”

Jim did go back to his quarters and he did sleep—for about seven hours. At the end of which time he woke up feeling terrible generally, but very happy for reasons he could not, in the first minute or two, remember. Then he recalled the long wait in Mollen's office and what had happened after the general had showed up; and his sensations of feeling terrible settled down to the recognition that he was merely very hungry, ready to eat anything digestible—in large quantities.

He checked his wrist-com. It was midafternoon. He got up, showered, dressed and went to the Officers' Club, where he found the menu available at that hour to consist only of sandwiches. He proceeded to eat perhaps a dozen of these and wash them down with several bottles of ginger ale, no great amount, but the food and drink together in his stomach acted on him like knockout pills. He made his way heavily back to his quarters, undressed and fell asleep again… and this time he slept until after five-thirty the following morning.

His body had become used to running. It wanted to get out and move, but he was once again as hungry as a bear in spring. He had breakfast, put aside the desire to run and went directly to Mary's lab.

“Credentials, sir?”

It was a different face beyond the transparency, but the uniform and the routine were as usual. Except that this time, for the first time in months, there were no lab workers waiting to take him off for their eternal tests. He showed his credentials.

“You'll have to wait for the Head of Lab, sir. If you'll take a seat, she ought to be here in the next ten or fifteen minutes,” said the guard.

He found a hard seat on a bench built into the wall across from the transparency. He grinned. From cooling his heels in Mollen's outer office to cooling his heels in Mary's surveillance entrance. That was progress.

It was, however, nearly three-quarters of an hour before Mary showed up. Jim did not care. He was this far and he did not intend to move unless they carried him out. When at last Mary did come in from the street, she had Mollen with her.

“Told you he'd be here at the crack of dawn!” said Mollen. If Jim had not been feeling so happy, he might have allowed himself a small sense of injury. Dawn had been a good three hours earlier.

“I'm sorry I haven't had more time to talk to you myself all these past months,” Mary said directly to Jim. She looked at him, he thought, sympathetically. “You've lost weight.”

“Nonsense!” said Mollen. “He's in top shape. Aren't you, Jim?”

“Yes sir. Top shape,” said Jim. He grinned at Mary. Today he even loved her.

“Come along.” Mary and Mollen showed their credentials to the guard in movements that betrayed an infinity of repetitions.

“Please go on in, ma'am, sirs.”

Mary led them through the inner door, and for the second time Jim stepped into the enormous room that he had looked down into only from galleries for nearly twelve months. It was the same as it had been, the last time he had seen it. The plastic tent was still in place. But Mary led them to it, pulled back a flap of the plastic and let them into the enclosed interior which was lit by its own lamps hanging just under the fabric of its roof.

By that light, the two ships Jim had seen on his first trip here still lay, side by side.
La Chasse Gallerie
was still a slashed and broken wreck.
AndFriend
was also exactly as she had been when he had last seen her. Or was she? She looked the same but there was an air about her as if she had just been washed or, at least, dusted.

All Jim's emotions called on him to head for her closed entry port at a run. But he was almost superstitiously afraid of something going wrong with his new right of access to her if he even showed his eagerness to be back inside her.

“She looks good,” he commented, stopping because Mary and Mollen had both stopped, a good ten paces from either ship.

“She's been updated,” said Mollen. “You're going to have to learn a lot of new things about her. And no, you can't go aboard her now.”

Jim had half-expected it, but the disappointment nonetheless was like a fist, hard, in the face.

“Oh?” he said, “When can I, then, sir?”

He looked at Mollen and then at Mary.

“You'll need some retraining first. We've got a special job for you to do,” Mary answered. “That's one of the reasons
AndFriend
's been improved the way she has. I'm afraid it could be a few weeks or more yet—”

“A few weeks!” In spite of his good intentions, the words, in just the tone he had told himself he would avoid, popped out of Jim's mouth.

“I'm afraid so.” Mary turned. “Come along to my office, where we can talk.”

They went out through a flap in another side of the tent and crossed the open floor to the bottom level of offices in the tower. Mary entered one of these, which had a trim, white-haired lady behind a desk, and chairs set up plainly for visitors, chairs which were presently empty.

“There've been a number of phone calls,” said the lady.

“No calls for a little while yet,” said Mary. “Tell anyone with urgencies it'll be an hour or so before I can start making calls back. Come on, Jim, General.”

She led them to an inner office which was spacious, with a desk even larger than Mollen's and padded chairs even more comfortable and spacious than those in the general's office But every available surface in the office except the floor itself was stacked with papers, and the chairs did not face the desk as they had in Mollen's private office, but were in a rough circle facing each other.

Mary took one of these, the general slipped into the one next to her, and Jim took one across from the two of them.

“Do you want to talk to him first, Louis?” said Mary to the general. “Or shall I?”

“I'll say a few words first,” Mollen answered. He looked hard at Jim. “Jim, we've got plans to send you into space farther, faster, and for a longer time than anyone human—except Raoul—ever went. But it's not going to be easy.”

“I didn't sign up for the Frontier thinking any part of it'd be easy, sir,” said Jim. “Where's this you want me to go?”

“That, you won't be told until just before you're ready to leave,” said Mollen. “But I'll tell you this much. You're going out around Laagi territory, and your ship's been adapted accordingly. For one thing we've gone back to fusion engines for her.”

“Fusion?” said Jim.

Fusion engines had been discarded newly forty years before when an improved fission engine design made them no longer necessary. The drawback to fusion engines was that there was no possible way to shield them completely in something as small as a fighter ship; they had caused some bad physical effects in the pilots that flew ships with them, the least of which had been guaranteed sterility after a relatively few number of missions.

“You're going to make a Raoul Penard out of me, then, are you, sir?” said Jim, grinning.

“I wish we could,” answered Mollen somberly. “Believe me, if it was possible for me to snap my fingers and turn you into something like Raoul, I'd do it. But we still don't know how his mind got into the actual nonliving body of that ship of his, and maybe we'll never know.”

Jim himself sobered. He had automatically assumed that they would not be sending him out in a fusion ship unless they could do so safely, without the harmful effects the older ships of that type had had on their pilots. For the first time it occurred to him that the mission might be important enough so that they would expect him to put up with the effects. He thought of the paper he had signed in Mollen's office.

“It's not as bad as you may be thinking, Jim,” said Mary. “We haven't found out how Raoul Penard became part of a ship, and I don't know when we will. I'm sure some people will someday—that is, provided Raoul stays around long enough. But while we haven't answered that question, we've found out a number of valuable things we didn't know before. Things that'll make your mission possible.”

“What things?”

“I'm sorry,” Mary answered. “I'm going to have to answer you pretty much the way Louis just did, when you asked where you'd be going. You'll get answers to most questions like that only when you've reached the point of needing to know. Everything about this is as secret as it's possible to make it. Specifically, in answer to what you just asked, you'll be finding out about these things as we work with you to get you ready for the mission.”

“I can tell you a little more,” said Mollen. “Most of the past year's been spent trying to find out what happened to Raoul from the last time the other pilots in his Wing saw him to the time we picked up his signals coming back through Laagi territory. But we know now he found something, in that time. Wherever he went, he ended up by finding something very interesting there; and our guesses about what it is are secret as hell. But we're pretty sure it's beyond the far side of Laagi space territory—in the other direction. Down-galaxy.”

“And I'm to go see what it was and come back to tell you?” Jim said.

“That's about the size of it,” said Mollen. “Something else. We can't be sure, but we think he was—that is,
La Chasse Gallerie
, with him being part of it, was—actually in Laagi hands for a while.”

“They had him?” Jim stared. “What makes you think that?”

Mollen looked at Mary, who nodded. A procedure that jarred on Jim, slightly, since it seemed to him it should be the other way around.

“We've found a route of communication, so to speak, with him, with Raoul,” Mollen said. “Or rather, with what there is of him, which is mainly memories. The problem's been that he suppressed the bad memories and remembered only the good ones. But Mary's people did finally find a way to stimulate him to remember some of the things he'd rather forget—and one of those was of being on the surface of a planet, and examined by Laagi.”