The Forever Man (29 page)

“I've been playing with our Squonk, with the back of my mind,” he told her. “I'm trying to find some way to get through to it so that I can order it the way a Laagi would, to go places and do things. If it works, we can direct him to take us around the city—maybe.”

“Good!” said Mary. “That's very good.”

“Glad to hear you agree.”

“Jim, you do just marvelously, with or without my ideas,” she said. “I've been hard to live with, like this. I know it. I always am. I get the bit in my teeth and I'm ready to trample anyone who gets in the way. I'm a louse.”

“What of it?” said Jim. “I'm a louse, myself.”

You certainly are, said the back of his mind. Jim winced. Happily, winces were one of the things Mary was not able to see.

“Not like me. I tell you, you don't know me,” said Mary. “Anyway, I'm ready to dance over the fact you think you might be able to direct Squonk around the city. Will you let me know how it goes—your trying to do that, I mean? Otherwise I'll only keep guessing but not wanting to keep asking you for progress reports.”

“I'll keep you up to date.”

The conversation broke off, leaving Jim feeling a guilty sensation. He tried to get rid of this by reminding himself of how Mary, General Mollen and the rest had gotten him into this situation, but found little or no help now in that fact. The insult had lost its force. What's wrong with me, wondered Jim? One kind word from her and I roll over on my back like a squonk.

However, it was a lot more pleasant being on friendly terms with her, like this.

At this point Squonk suddenly retracted its legs until they were barely showing above its red feet, pulled in its neck until its head had disappeared, with the exception of its nose and mouth, closed its eyes and once again rolled over on its back. This time, however, it rocked back and forth a few times gently as its shell lost its momentum from the movement, and was still.

“It's not dead, is it?” asked Mary.

“No,” said Jim, “just sleeping. These squonks must go to sleep wherever the mood strikes them. Come to think of it, I'll bet the Laagi do, too—sometimes anyway. Remember the ones we saw near the entrance that had their legs, arms and heads all pulled in and were just sitting there like a cylinder on the floor?”

“But what makes you so certain it's sleep and not something else?”

“Because it's dreaming.”

“Dreaming?” Mary hesitated. “You mean literally dreaming, the way you and I dream?”

“That's right. I can catch parts of it. It's like looking at a crazy recording made up of snippets from half a hundred different records.”

“I wish I could reach the creature with my mind the way you do!” Mary said. “What's it dreaming about? Can you see what its dreams are?”

“If I try,” said Jim. “Look, why don't you not say anything for a while, so I can concentrate on this? What it's dreaming about is clear enough; it's just that I have to concentrate all my mind to really see it. Not that any of it's so remarkable. All the dreams are about work.”

“Work?”

“Work. Now, if you'll let me—”

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

Mary fell silent.

Jim had been telling almost the complete truth. It was true that he had to concentrate in order to experience at second hand what Squonk was dreaming. But a deeper reason for his wanting Mary not to disturb him was that he wanted time to evaluate anything to be learned from the dreams, so that he could decide whether it might pay him to keep the knowledge to himself or not. The insult might have lost its force, but he was still determined to get away from the hold Mary had on him, if only to prove he could.

Squonk's dreams had a quality as alien as the creature itself. It occurred to Jim after some minutes that they might not be dreams in the human sense so much as some sort of sorting or memorizing process. But there was no doubt that they were, to say the least, pleasant to the dreamer. There was an emotion of strong satisfaction emanating from Squonk.

But the dreams were hardly more than flashes of episodes. Squonk cleaning
AndFriend
. Squonk cleaning the outer walls of a building. Squonk cleaning the pavement outside
AndFriend
, then carrying assemblages of parts from this floor to upper floors of this building. Squonk running a machine which cut segments from a living, green, flat creature; segments which Squonk and other squonks took out and laid down between newly built buildings to grow into pathways of the sort that it had traversed in coming to this building. Squonk hunting for something a Laagi had misplaced, a small part which was needed to fit in with other parts…

Interestingly, Squonk did not dream about being praised, either by the Laagi he had encountered on his way to this job or Jim's praising. In the dreams, however, there appeared at least three other Laagis who had put it to work at various things at various times. Jim got the impression Squonk would take orders from any Laagi. In fact, the relationship between Squonk and Laagi might be a lot less like the canine-human relationship Jim had been comparing it to.

But it was undeniable that Squonk existed here for the purpose of taking orders from Laagi. In fact, it was eager to do so. The kind of work did not seem to matter. It was the fact that there was work available that was the attractive thing from Squonk's point of view.

“By God!” said Jim suddenly.

“What?” Mary's voice seemed to pounce upon him.

Out of nowhere, Jim had been struck by a startling suspicion; this was that it was not the Laagi as individuals to which Squonk was attached, but to those aliens as suppliers of work. Work, it seemed, was Squonk's pleasure. Work that had been publicly acknowledged as having been done was the greatest pleasure of all. But Jim hesitated to pass this hypothesis on to Mary right now. For one thing, it might not be true. For another, it might contain the germ of something useful to him, privately, in making his escape from the hypnotic control. He chose instead something he had noticed about Squonk's dreams and which should be more interesting to her, anyway.

“You know,” he told Mary now, “nothing in any of these dreams of Squonk's shows either Laagi or squonks doing anything but working. I mean, there haven't been any glimpses of homes or sleeping places or recreation areas.”

Mary apparently thought about this for a minute.

“You mean that squonks may not be allowed into such areas?”

“That,” said Jim slowly, “or maybe even the Laagi don't have them. They might sleep on the job, too, and do nothing but work.”

“That's unthinkable,” said Mary. “Unless all the Laagi we've seen so far are slaves, or something like that, tied to their work like galley slaves used to be chained to their oar. A technological civilization at all comparable to ours would have to have some reward for working that constantly. Otherwise there'd be no reason to develop a technology. To assume they do nothing but work doesn't make sense. The most primitive humans had more work than they could handle. It was the need to get in out of the rain and get free from having to be always gathering more wood for the fire that gave rise to technology.”

“In our case,” said Jim.

“Any technological civilization has to have been built in response to a need. All right, you imagine a reason for being built at all, otherwise.”

Jim tried, and found he could not, at least on short notice like this.

“All right, a technological civilization has to have rewards,” he said. “Squonk sleeps, therefore the Laagi and other species here sleep. So there should be sleeping places—unless they do sleep on the job, as I said—and as our Squonk seems to be doing right now. And so there ought to be recreation areas… or at least nonwork areas, reward areas. For the moment, I'll agree.”

“I don't know why we have to argue over everything,” said Mary.

“Everyone's unique,” said Jim. “I'm not you and you're not me. That means you're not going to see and do things the way I'd see and do them, at least part of the time. So there's always a difference of opinion.”

“This much?” said Mary.

“… Maybe.”

“I really don't deliberately start out to argue with everything you say,” said Mary. “It's just that… “

“I'm wrong.”

“Well, yes. Frequently you're wrong, particularly when you're in an area I know something about. When you were driving
AndFriend
, I didn't argue with you, because that was something you knew something about. But in the areas of sociology and psychology, I know a lot more than you.”

“Human psychology and sociology.”

“The point is you don't know anything at all in those areas.”

“The point is we're dealing with an alien culture where neither one of us is an expert. Correct? Where your human knowledge applies, you could be in a better position to make guesses than I am—maybe. But since we're both in unknown territory, the only thing that's certain is the fact neither one of us knows anything for sure. You could be right on the basis of what you've learned. But unlearned as I am, I could be right on the basis that I see things a little differently than you, being a different person, and I might just see something you don't see. So am I or am I not entitled to an opinion, in your opinion?”

It was a moment before she answered.

“You're entitled to your opinion,” she said. “I'm entitled to tell you when you're wrong.”

“When you think I'm wrong.”

“All right, when I think you're wrong.”

There was another pause.

“Now we're arguing about arguing,” said Mary.

Squonk opened its eyes, rolled over on its feet, elongated them and stuck its head out once more. “Hello, world,” it seemed to be saying.

“I'm sorry,” said Jim. “I'll try to do better.”

“Me too,” said Mary. “Squonk's awake.”

“It didn't sleep very long,” said Jim. “Now what?”

For Squonk had just left the line of its fellows and was ambling back toward the rear of the building. It entered the eating room there, which was clearly divided into two areas, one for Laagi and one for squonks. In both the squonk and Laagi areas there were what seemed to be buffets, each against a wall at an opposite end of the room. In the Laagi area, groups of two to eight or ten were standing around pedestals on which sat what looked like large silver basins, eating to the accompaniment of a large amount of arm waving and alterations in leg and body size. Every so often one of the Laagi eating in a group would turn and leave and eventually a new Laagi would join a group, evidently bringing with him, her or it a double handful of materials from the buffet.

These, it dumped into the silver bowl and began, with the others, to eat the new mixture. It was plainly the mixture of everything in the bowl they were all eating, for occasionally a Laagi would reach in and stir the contents of the bowl.

Squonk had meanwhile approached the buffet at the squonk end of the room and was browsing along it, stopping to briefly intertwine tentacles as it encountered other squonks engaged in the same activity. This touching seemed more in the way of a perfunctory, if friendly, greeting or self-identification than anything else, since it was very brief and the two squonks, having touched tentacles, thereafter paid no attention to each other.

The buffet on the squonk side was considerably longer and contained more dishes—in this case, actually shallow pans about half a meter long and half a meter wide. The reason for the difference became apparent immediately, for instead of picking food from their buffet and carrying it off to eat it at pedestals, of which there were none at their end of the room, the squonks simply ate as they went along the line of the buffet. There was not as much variety as Jim had assumed at first glance. A number of trays of each item were set out in rotation. So that if Squonk was browsing at one and another squonk came along and found the contents of that pan interesting, it could simply move on to find one from which the contents were not currently being taken.

Jim's reaction to Squonk's eating was a touch of nausea. For the first pan the small, shelled alien approached had what appeared to be a mass of wriggling worms sticking their heads up out of a layer of moist earth; and Squonk immediately began to gather in tentacle-loads of worms and earth indiscriminately and start stuffing them into its mouth. Jim felt an echo of his nausea also through his mental contact with Mary.

“Watch the Laagi, ignore this,” Jim said.

“Nonsense,” said Mary. “I'll get used to it. I'm trying to watch both, to tell you the truth.”

Jim, challenged, felt bound to get used to Squonk's eating habits himself. In addition, he reminded himself, he was at the moment more interested in squonks than in the master race that directed them. Watching Squonk feed through a variety of trays holding food, invariably live, but existing sometimes in what appeared to be earth and in others what appeared to be water or other liquids—unless the opaque ones were just water clouded with suspended material—Jim came to the conclusion that squonks were basically carnivores.

Unless what he was seeing were plant forms that had an animal-like mobility. Bit by bit, he became used to both Squonk's diet and its methods of feeding. Privately, he bet himself that what was in the silver bowls of the Laagi was equally live, or live-looking.

A strange contrast, if he was right. Here was a ruling race that looked like adult, human-sized toys—almost as if they could be rather silly-looking pets, themselves—who nourished themselves on small animals that still had life in them when they were introduced to the mouths that devoured them. Shouldn't throw the first stone, Jim reminded himself. It was almost a foregone conclusion that a Laagi would be horrified by some … some? By
many
of the things done by humans, if that Laagi should ever find itself on Earth and watching humans act as they normally did.