The Forever Man (17 page)

That these were the Laagi worlds themselves seemed improbable, since Raoul had evidently not found the Laagi home place or places attractive. Also, since it was unmistakably clear that
La Chasse Gallerie
had been in Laagi hands, it was a reasonable assumption that this had been after Raoul had become a part of his ship. Otherwise the Laagi, it was natural to assume, would have made the human pilot, rather than the vessel, their main interest; particularly since their own ships were pretty much on a par with the human ones, judging by how these were able to do in combat.

So, it was at least a reasonable assumption that Raoul had been captured by the Laagi on his way back from wherever this paradise was.

That was all they knew or could guess at with reasonable certainty. The tapes Jim heard now suggested nothing more to him than Mary, Mollen, or anyone else who had been allowed to hear them had concluded and already passed on to him.

Jim said as much, once the playing of the excerpts was over.

“I'll just have to go out there and see,” he said.

“Yes,” said the general.

“Are there any other reasons why I shouldn't start right away?” asked Jim.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” said Mollen. “You may not need to pack a suitcase, or its equivalent. But Mary will; and Mary's going with you.”

For the second time since he had found himself wearing a ship for a body, emotion flooded Jim.

“Mary!” he echoed.

“Yes,” Mary said. “There's a lot to be learned about the human mind when it's in another vehicle, like this one. My work here's gone as far as I can take it. It can only go on if I go on with you as my subject instead of Raoul, and in space, where it all happened to him.”

“But you couldn't come, even if you wanted to…” Jim's mind had already been playing with the highly interesting possibility, particularly with a fusion engine, once he got off by himself in space, of trying some maneuvers of which fighter ships were mechanically capable but which normally, if tried, would reduce their pilots to thin organic smears on the inside of the hull. With no such frail human body to consider, there would be things a fighter ship could do that any fighter pilot would long to try doing. Put a passenger aboard, and such experimentation became open to criticism—from the passenger at least.

“I mean,” Jim said, “it's going to be a longer, more dangerous trip into far space than anything that's ever been tried. I may have to try to evade Laagi ships; and with a person on board, I'll be limited in what I can do to get away—”

“You won't have a human on board,” said Mary. “I'll be with you the same way I was with Raoul. When we had you under sedation, we used the same technique of implanting a specimen of your living body tissue in mine, of course using immune-reaction suppressants to keep your body from killing it off. It lived; and I'm ready to be with you at any time.”

“We'll see about that—” began Jim, getting ready for a shift directly from the floor of the lab to space.

“You couldn't leave me behind if you wanted to,” interrupted Mary.

But now she spoke inside his mind. It was as if her words were a thought that had popped spontaneously into his mind. A second later her voice was sounding outside him, normally, once more.

“You see,” said Mary, “I'm already with you. I've been with you for weeks now. Or rather, I've had the capability to be with you for weeks now. I can come whether you want me to or not. I know you don't want me; but it'd make things easier if you reconciled yourself to my coming.”

Jim said nothing. But his mind was adding one more point on which they had taken no chances on his objecting, but set things up without asking. Honesty forced him to face the fact that in this case he might very well have objected. But he would not have sustained his objections if they had told him Mary's going along was necessary; and they should have known it.

“I know you don't like me,” said Mary a little bitterly. “But this is more important than likes or dislikes. There's too much to be learned not to send someone along to learn it.”

“I don't dislike you,” said Jim. He thought he growled the words as well as Mollen could have done, but that may have been the self-flattery of his imagination. “I didn't fall in love with you at first sight, that's true. But I don't dislike you now. I like you.”

“Oh?” Mary's voice was utterly disbelieving.

“I do. I don't say you're the person I'd pick as the one I'd most like to share a desert island—or a fighter ship—with; because that wouldn't be true. But there's plenty of people I'd put in line behind you as a sidekick, nowadays.”

Mary said nothing, but her expression did not change.

“It's the truth,” said Jim. He had an inspiration. “Did you ever know a spaceship to tell a lie?”

For a moment the expression on Mary's face held. Then she smiled. Mollen's hoarse chortle joined her.

“All right,” said Mary at last. “I'll take your word I'm welcome aboard. Now, we've been preparing for my leaving for weeks now, as soon as we thought you were getting to the point where you'd be able to make the shift into
AndFriend
. But even with all that, there're things still to be done before I go. Figure a couple of days, anyway.”

“Which brings up a point,” said Mollen. He looked at
AndFriend
. “Jim, what can we do for you to fill in that time? All the physical information you'll need—or as much as we've got to give you up to and around Laagi territory—is in the ship's memory units already, as well as everything else we could think of that might be useful. Is there anything else you can think of you might want?”

“Nothing offhand,” said Jim. “I take it, as I sit here now, I can make air connections with the Base and other, outside phone systems—correction, I don't need to ask that. I see I can. No, General, I'm fine. I don't even need a couple of good books to read.”

“What'll you do with yourself?” Mary asked, watching him curiously.

“The same thing Raoul does all the time. Daydream,” said Jim.

But he did not spend all that time daydreaming—to his own very great surprise. He found himself caught up in other mental exercises.

He had expected no such thing to happen. If anything he was looking forward to a couple of days exploring his more pleasant memories. There was an active pleasure in calling up happy scenes out of his past, and he had been amazed at the detail with which his unconscious recalled them—far beyond what he was used to. Where his ordinary memory would have given him the time, the place, the action and the emotion, this new memory gave him far more. He could study a particular moment he had once lived and simply by looking more closely at it, see the pattern of the fabric on the upholstering of the furniture, the small items scattered about the room, the quality of sunlight coming in the windows. Bit by bit, he had become fascinated, not so much with remembering, as with the capabilities of his memory; and, beyond this, the capabilities and liabilities of his new self.

He had always considered himself in excellent physical shape; and as a result he had simply taken his body so much for granted that most of the time he had been used to forgetting that it had demands of its own. Now that he was out of it, he was astonished to find what a busy and signal-sending creature his body had been. It was not that his mind had not always been getting a multitude of messages from it, from “I'm all in order and working” signals to alarms ranging from fatigue to outright pain. It was that his mind had accepted these as so much a part of the normal process of living that it had, most of the time, handled but ignored them.

Now he could feel what he had been missing, now that he no longer had the static of the body's responses to interfere with his thinking. Now he was not merely capable of daydreaming with unusual clarity, he was capable of thinking with unusual clarity.

He could switch from one topic of thought to another instantly, and, having switched, devote all his attention to the new topic as if the earlier one had not existed. At the same time he was not obsessed by his current topic to the point where he lost awareness of his surroundings or himself.

The liability was that there was now no more of that purely physical pleasure that the body had been capable of giving him in small to large measures as a reward for paying attention to it. Moreover he felt strangely light—not like someone in a lesser gravity, but more like someone with helium-filled balloons attached to his shoes, so that he was being lifted, but from the soles of his feet only; and it required an effort to balance himself when he took a step forward. It was a mental feeling, not a physical one, but “lightness” was the only way he could find of making some description of it.

One of the more curious effects he discovered with his new vision was that he could change the attitudes with which he was normally used to looking at an object, and see it in an entirely new and novel way. Usually, the switch was from a habitual way of seeing something, one which reflected his body's past responses to whatever it was; and the new attitude was one that ignored any connection between it and his body's use for it.

The best example of this turned out to be a reclining chair he had bought for his two-room suite in the Bachelor Officers' Quarter. He had always been very fond of that chair; but now, considering it carefully in memory from a bodiless point of view, he found it one of the most ridiculously engineered objects he had ever seen, and ended up laughing at it.

It was all knobs and angles. It was hard to imagine, just looking at it, what odd-shaped sort of creature would have designed such a monstrosity for its comfort. The seat, leg-support and back planes made sense after a fashion as partial containers for whatever or whoever it was planned to support. But those two strange, horizontal members projecting forward, which had their bases attached halfway up the back portion at its outward edges…

“You seem to be in a good humor,” said Mollen's voice.

Jim realized suddenly that he had been laughing aloud. He looked outside himself to see that the general was in the process of entering through a flap in the tent. Behind him entered half a dozen men and women in workmen's white coveralls, two of which at least Jim recognized as maintenance workers from the Fighter Ships Unit.

“What's everybody here for?” Jim asked Mollen.

“To check you over before you leave, of course,” the general said.

“Oh, no!” said Jim.

“No?” Mollen looked surprised and the maintenance people who were already headed toward Jim's entry port came to a halt. “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean I don't need to be checked over, sir,” Jim said. “I can tell you right now that everything about me's all right.”

“I see. When did you learn all about fusion engines?” Mollen's scraggly brows pulled together.

“I don't need to learn about them,” said Jim. “I can feel that everything's all right inside me.”

“So the pilots always say to the doc when they show up for their monthly physical,” said Mollen. “I think we better have the experts take a look at you anyway.”

He turned to the maintenance people and nodded.

“Go ahead,” he said.

They went ahead. Jim made no more protests, although his human experience intruded on his experience as a spaceship, so that—although there was no pain, of course—he had an uncomfortable feeling that he was being operated upon internally without the courtesy of a general anesthetic.

He found that with a little practice he could be aware of where in him every one of the maintenance workers were, and what they were doing. This was a relief, in a way, for it meant that he could be sure nothing could be done to him in the future without his knowledge.

Mollen was still standing outside his hull, hands behind his back, watching the movement of people in and out of Jim's entry port which at the moment was standing wide. Jim became conscious that some of the small cases they had brought aboard were evidently not merely devices for the purpose of checking him out, since they were being stowed in places where they would be prevented from sliding about and left behind when those who brought them in left.

He tried to see inside them, but they were not an integral part of himself and their cases were opaque to his perceptions.

“What're these things they're bringing aboard, sir?” he asked the general.

“Supplemental information units and instruments for Mary,” answered Mollen. “She won't be able to read from them directly; but she can direct you on how to go about finding what she wants in them, and once you see what's there, she will, too. Also, there's provision for storage of new information she may be able to collect on the trip.”

“How much storage does she think she'll need?” said Jim. For the smallest of the cases could have stored the contents of most public branch libraries.

“I've no idea,” said Mollen cheerfully. “That's her department.”

And as if summoned like a genie by Mollen's invisible rubbing of a magic lamp, Mary's voice spoke inside Jim's head.

“Are my things aboard?”

“Unless there's more to come,” said Jim. “When are you going to be ready to leave?”

“I'm ready now. Can't you tell? I'm in here with you,” said Mary.

“I didn't know you were here to stay,” he said.

He checked the ship's chronometer record. Sure enough, it had been two days—well, a little over forty hours—since he had last spoken to her. He had marked the time when she and Mollen had left him before just to make sure that they were not pulling any tricks on him about the apparent speed with which time sometimes seemed to pass when he was alone.

“Well, tell Louis I'm here, would you, please?” asked Mary. “You're the only one who can hear me now.”