The Forever Man (21 page)

“Fly
AndFriend
without the engines, then,” said Jim.

“Oh,” she said, and laughed. “Of course. You're right and I'm being ridiculous. I know I'm hard to live with. I'm just used to challenging anyone and everything.”

“You're not that hard to live with,” said Jim—and almost added, “now,” but stopped himself in time.

She said nothing for a second. Then she spoke.

“Thank you.”

“For what?” said Jim. “I was only stating a fact. Hold it—the instruments are showing something up ahead.”

“I don't see… oh, there it is. Another Laagi ship?”

“Could be. Let's just sit tight at this range and see whether it moves. We've got all the time we want to take.”

They waited, but the pinprick of light with the faint halo around it did not appear to move. Jim took sights on it with the instruments and set up an instrument watch to alert them if it shifted in any direction.

When six hours had gone by with no report of movement by the instruments, Jim took
AndFriend
outward from the centerline on a curve keeping the object they watched just within sight of their instruments; then took a second set of sights and set up a second watch.

When after another six hours, this, also, showed no movement, Jim metaphorically scratched his nonexistent head.

“I don't understand this,” he told Mary.

“Could whoever it is be simply planning to outwait us, and just sit there until curiosity brings us close enough to shoot?”

“I've never known of, or heard of, the Laagi showing this kind of patience—or reacting in this way at all. The only ways they've ever shown us are either attack or run, with no hesitation about doing either one.”

“Well, then,” said Mary, “what's the chance that the instruments are making a mistake and that isn't a Laagi ship at all, but something that looks to them like it?”

“After nearly a hundred and fifty years of our having seen what Laagi ships look like? That doesn't make sense, either.”

“So I guess we go in and look,” said Mary.

“I guess you guess right,” said Jim. “Whatever it is, we'll take a closer look at it.”

They began by going even farther away from the centerline, clear out of instrument sight of the object. Then Jim navigated their way back toward it from what should have been the equivalent of a ninety-degree angle to their original approach.

It came on the screen and stayed there. As far as their instruments could tell them, it did not move as they approached. Finally, they were close enough to get a recognizable picture of it on their screen; and it was a typical two-individual Laagi fighter craft, for some unknown reason simply hanging still in space—or hanging still in the sense that it was holding a steady position with regard to the centerline, which—like the galaxy it transversed—was in rotation about the galaxy's theoretical center.

Jim checked
AndFriend
and held her still at that distance from the other vessel.

“I do not—repeat, not—get this at all,” he sue. “That ship's facing down-galaxy. Unless it's expecting some kind of attack from farther down the line, why should it be here at all? And if it's expecting an attack, why isn't it patrolling whatever segment of whatever Frontier line this is? Just sitting there, it can't watch anything beyond the viewing limit of its instruments. If you wanted to hold a Frontier that way, you'd have to have so many ships… “

His mind shook his missing head over the enormity of the thought.

“You'd need thousands of fighter ships like that—no, you'd need several thousand times the total number we estimate they've got facing us on our Frontier; and there can't be that many Laagi worlds, to handle that kind of expense. If there is, they could just run right over our forces on our Frontier without hardly noticing we were there; while actually they've never hit us with more than a hundred or so ships at once—and that was the biggest of the battles we ever had with them.”

“It could be abandoned, for some reason,” said Mary.

“What reason?”

“I don't know,” said Mary. “But, again, we're dealing with nonhuman minds. They may have a lot of things like we have, and act a lot like us, but there could just as easily be a reason for them to abandon one of their ships in space that we humans'd never think of. For example—a religious reason. Or a superstitious reason. Maybe that ship is just a mock-up of a ship, put there to mark the limits of their territory down-galaxy, for example.”

“Mary,” said Jim, “you'd convince a stone lion. We'll go in and see.”

He sent
AndFriend
toward the motionless Laagi vessel.

“Why a stone lion?” said Mary.

“Why? I don't know,” answered Jim. “It was just the first thing I could think of—now, don't say anything for just a few minutes, while we get in close…”

“Why any animal, for that matter?”

Jim did not answer. He was concentrating on only two things. First, getting as close as he could safely calculate—or that
AndFriend
's calculators could safely calculate—to the Laagi ship in one jump, and then taking them on a close pass by it on ordinary drive.

He did so, zipped past it and immediately phase-shifted out of shooting range, then started studying the pictorial record of the other ship that had been made as they passed it.

“No sign of a reaction,” he said finally. “Just no sign at all. And that's all wrong.”

“Mock-up,” said Mary.

“Can you see a technologically advanced society—one as advanced as ours—setting up a mock-up way out here in space for religious or scarecrow reasons?” demanded Jim. “I don't know what we should do now.”

“Let's go right up to it, stop, and examine it at arm's length,” said Mary.

“Taking one hell of a chance.”

“If you were alone, with no one to argue with, what would you do?” asked Mary.

Jim said nothing for a moment.

“I'd go in, of course,” he answered finally. “I'd have to.”

“Then, may I ask—?”

“What we're waiting for?” said Jim. “You may not, because I'm already going in.”

In fact, he was.

Fifteen minutes later they were hanging in space, side by side with the Laagi ship and barely fifty kilometers from it.

“Hello! Hey! Do you hear me? Respond if you do. This is
AndFriend
calling Laagi ship… ” Jim sent his voice out up and down the normal human ship-to-ship communications band.

“Have your people ever contacted Laagi, or overheard them contacting each other, ship-to-ship?” Mary asked.

“Never,” said Jim. “As far as we can tell they don't talk to each other. But if this one can hear my voice he may take the fact I'm talking as a sign I'm not about to begin shooting. It's worth a try, anyway. They must have some kind of communication system. When there's several of them they all either attack or run at the same time.”

“But you probably aren't going to get anywhere trying to talk to this ship, are you.”

“No. But I had to check out the possibility.”

“Now what, then?”

“Now what?” Jim echoed. “I don't know. If I was simply piloting
AndFriend
normally, with me in my body and you in yours, as a last resort, we'd put on our space suits and then I'd open the lock and power myself across to that other ship's hull. Then, if necessary, I'd cut my way in through the hull or the entry port. There's the entry port right there, but how does a spaceship like I am now—”

“Like we are now.”

“—like we are now, get through it?”

Mary said nothing.

“If you actually touched its hull,” she suggested finally, “do you suppose you could see inside it, the way you can see everything inside of
AndFriend
?”

“I don't know. It sounds crazy… you're more the expert on this business of mind being in matter. What do you think?”

“I think we need to try it just to check out the possibility.”

“You do, do you?” grumbled Jim. “Do you realize what it means to try to move a mass this size up close enough to touch a mass the size of that Laagi ship, without having them do serious damage to each other when they do touch?”

“Of course I know. But what other way is there? Can you think of one?”

“Offhand, no—hang on!” Jim interrupted himself. “There's just a chance I can make some kind of sensory connection across a line connected to that other ship. Now, what do we have in the way of a line or cable to make connection with?”

He fell into a self-examination of everything aboard
AndFriend
. There was, of course, no such article as a line or cable simply aboard waiting to be put to use. It would be a matter of his making one out of material already belonging to the ship.

Theoretically, he thought, any connecting material that was part of the ship would do. The difficulty was that nowhere about a vessel like
AndFriend
was anything resembling such material. After puzzling over the matter for some time, he had an inspiration. What he did have was a repair robot that was independently mobile and could be sent anywhere to do anything.

“What I'm going to do is make a connector out of the hull material,” he explained to Mary. “I'll have the repair robot go out the entry port and literally peel off a sliver down the length of the hull. That should give us a good twenty meters of sliver, like a long, very thin rod. The robot can stand in the open entry port—or even on the outside of the hull with the entry port closed, come to think of it, holding out the rod toward the Laagi ship. Then I'll try to move, carefully, as close to the other ship as I can. You watch the screen, in case I don't feel contact when the rod touches the Laagi ship, or the robot fails to report the touching—because I want to stop
AndFriend
moving the moment we touch. At the worst, it'll give us some twenty meters of buffer zone.”

So, that was what the robot did and Jim did. Jim found he was conscious of the sliver being peeled off—not as something painful, but as something happening to the general feel of the ship that was unordinary and vaguely discomforting. But there turned out to be a problem when the robot tried to hold the sliver out. It was long enough and thin enough to be extremely flexible; and instead of projecting stiffly toward the other ship, its far end whipped back and forth in extreme arcs, which had begun with the fact that the sliver's farther end had originally lagged behind as the end held by the robot was held out from
AndFriend
's hull; and once the farther end started moving to catch up, its mass carried it beyond the point of straightness into an arc, bent it the other way until it reached a limit, and then began to oscillate back past the midpoint once more.

Gradually, however, the oscillating slowed. Eventually, when it was down to the point where it was oscillating in an arc of only three or four meters, Jim began to creep
AndFriend
toward the other vessel with both of them lying side by side.

Eventually, the arcing tip of the sliver began to brush the side of the Laagi ship. Jim felt the contact even before Mary announced it.

“It's all right!” he said. “I can feel it—I can feel the other ship. It feels… it feels very, very strange…”

He thought he heard Mary saying something, but her voice was at once very far away and muffled; and in any case he had already moved his point of view inside the alien ship and was lost in fascination with what he saw.

There was absolutely no light within the sealed interior of the alien vessel, so Jim did not see, in the sense of using his eyes. Rather, he felt everything within it so clearly that his mind was able to form a picture of what was there as well as if the interior had been lighted.

It was immediately apparent why the Laagi ships had the pregnant look that was so characteristic of them. The second member of the ship's crew did not sit behind the first as in the human ships, but directly underneath the first. There was nothing between the two positions and they were close enough that even humans could have reached down, or up, as the case might be, and clasped hands with a shipmate.

But whoever had been the pilot and gunner of this ship—if indeed that was the way the Laagi divided up the duties of the two who operated the vessel—they were now long dead, even though Jim felt that the interior of the ship still held an oxygen-bearing but unearthlike atmosphere that his body would have tolerated only with difficulty. It was a somewhat sulphurous atmosphere, as far as his sensing of it could tell him, but what less odorous gases it held beyond that he had no way of telling.

The two operating positions in the ship were up front before an open space that was divided into open compartments which could have been bunks or storage spaces. The operating positions consisted essentially of two metallic-looking vertical rings encircling what looked like oversize golf tees. These had their base on flooring behind the rings and angled forward so that the cup of the tee-structure sat in the center of the ring, the cup itself tilted so that it sat horizontally—that is, parallel to the floor below.

The inside of the ring was studded with what were easily recognizable as controls, buttons and small levers. On the cup itself sat something almost indescribable; what looked like a pile of hooplike rings of bone or cartilage from a quarter to a half-meter in diameter, enclosed with what might have been a dark, thin, leatherlike skin that was, however, now dried and cracked open under its own weight to show hooplike bones beneath. It was hardly possible to relate the remains of skin that rested on and hung down from the two cup-ends with any imaginable shape of living creature.

The instruments and controls also seemed nonfunctioning. Experimentally, Jim willed some of the buttons and switches into movement, as he was used to doing with those in
AndFriend
, but nothing happened. The ship was dead—powerless. He was left with the enigma of what he had found, plus something else he could not identify and which he was not entirely sure he would have noticed if he had been there in the flesh.