The Forever Man (34 page)

The results were an unqualified success. Squonk, ever-obliging, trotted off and rounded up three other squonks who were either passing by or for other reasons did not have their tentacles engaged at the moment. The four of them returned to the piece of scaffolding, lifted it with the strength of their combined tentacles and shifted it as Jim had envisioned.

They made no objection at all to an order to immediately move it back again, once the original move had been made. Then they dispersed.

“What's happening? What's Squonk doing now?” Mary's voice woke Jim out of a self-congratulatory mood. “I wanted him to stand still so I could watch the Laagi on this assembly line.”

“Sorry,” said Jim. “Just an experiment to see if I could get him to make use of other squonks for us, if necessary. I'm trying out a few things in the way of controlling him.”

“Well, let me know beforehand, after this,” said Mary. “It may not always be the best time for you to pull him away from what I'm studying. Did you think of that?”

“I didn't. Sorry,” said Jim. “Back to the assembly line, Squonk.”

And that was that. The other activity with which Jim was concerned was studying Mary herself.

In the time since he had first met her he had gone from being irritated with her to an active dislike, and from there to a tolerance during the long period of getting him ready to become a part of
AndFriend
. From that point he had developed into a cautious partnership that was beginning to approach a genuine liking. But this had been swept away by his outright fury on discovering how he had been tricked into his situation here on the Laagi world. Now, however, he had made a step beyond that.

The fury in him had faded and with it, curiously, all the negative feelings he had had at one time or another toward her. Somehow, working deep within him and underneath the surface changes in his emotions, something like a fondness and a genuine concern for her had developed. She no longer had the power to make him seriously angry. He liked her and he was worried about her; and, as the weeks grew into months on this alien planet, that worry about her grew.

The Laagi, he and she had now pretty well established, lived to work—as did the squonks and probably most of the other communal species of life forms on this planet. They worked until they could work no longer, then they died. It was a world in which work was everything. Nothing else had any meaning.

And Mary, herself, was a worker. She lived to work, and as far as he had learned, nothing else for her had any meaning. But what was natural for the Laagi was not natural for her, a human. Still, she was now caught up in an environment in which her ability to work no longer set her apart from anyone else—anyone but Jim himself, whom she had long since dismissed from any possible use as a yardstick. With most people such an environment would not pose such a threat. But Mary, Jim had concluded, had grown a protective shell about herself.

He had checked up on her claims regarding the small amounts of sleep she needed. It was true to a certain extent that she was phenomenal at keeping going on what would normally be a very few hours out of Earth's twenty-four. But beyond that there were a few holes in what she had told him about herself.

For one thing, she did not sleep only when he was sleeping. He had watched the same things she had watched and later repeated for recording the reports she made on them. There had been things done by the Laagi that Jim had seen—things that he now knew her well enough to be sure she would have made part of her report if she had seen, that she had not reported.

If she could not tell the difference between the periods when he was silent because he was asleep and those when he was silent because he was thinking, neither could he tell that difference in her—except by this sort of omission from her reports. The interesting question was whether she could herself. He had not realized at first, after becoming part of
AndFriend
, when he had been asleep. It might be Mary could not either. She might quite honestly believe that she slept only when he did. Out of the body as they both were, the physical signals customarily felt on waking were mostly missing.

He concentrated on training himself to be aware of what small signs there were in himself that would tell him he had just woken after a period of sleep. Slowly, he began to identify them. There was a faint lassitude—not the physical heaviness that the body normally reported after being slowed down by the process of slumber, but a short space in which the mind had to rouse itself to the different process of thinking consciously again, after having abandoned the conscious for the unconsciousness of dreamland.

There was also, as he came to recognize the existence of his sleep periods, as sleep periods, an awareness that he had not realized he possessed. It was an awareness of a period of inactivity, in the conscious area of his mind, a blank stretch in the memory record. And with his recognition of this, he began to remember the dreams he had had—just as someone who makes a point of writing down his memory of dreams on awakening becomes conscious of them.

Remembering the dreams, he became able, after a fashion, to measure the length of his sleep period by the amount of his remembered dreams. It was very imprecise, but it gave him something on which to estimate the length of his sleep.

In the process of doing this, for the first time, he came to realize that there had been a refreshment for him in having slept. His mental machinery had gotten some relief that it needed from its constant activity in the conscious state. This much realized, he made a final step forward and began to be aware of the mental fatigue signs that signaled him sleep was needed. It was a strange awareness, a feeling that was in no way a bodily feeling—something like the tension of a stretched rubber band and like that of the jittery nerves that in some people preceded a headache. It was very faint, but it was there, when needed; and he found that all that was necessary once he became aware of it was to look away—remove his conscious attention from the scene he was watching or any particular concern that had been occupying his mind—and he would fall asleep immediately.

Finally, now that he had discovered this much about himself, he had a rough system for measuring time under these abnormal conditions. He set himself to seeing if he could further train himself to become aware of signs in Mary's behavior that also signaled tiredness and the lassitude of just awakening. If what he had begun to suspect was true, she was killing herself.

"…Although nothing much more than guesses are possible on the basis of the small amount of observation we have been able to make of the Laagi in this short time,” dictated Mary, “some possibilities might be considered as reasons for elements of Laagi behavior that have been unexplainable until now.

“Such Laagi actions as those by some of their fighter spaceships on the spatial Frontier they share with us. For example, the occasional but not too infrequent situation of a large number of their space fighter craft turning and retreating from a much smaller number of human ones; or—conversely—a mere handful of their ships attacking a much larger number of human ones they have just encountered, even when such attack seems suicidal and therefore reasonless.”

She stopped dictating, and there was a long moment in which Jim began to wonder if she would begin again.

“Therefore… therefore,” she went on again abruptly, “we may consider as a possibility that the apparently unreasonable actions of the Laagi in the fighter ships just referred to were examples of reactions governed by a system of racial imperatives we humans do not have, and so do not realize exists. In other words, what seems unreasonable to us humans is reasonable to the Laagi, under certain special conditions.

“From what I've seen, and from what Jim Wander, who is with me on this observational incursion into Laagi territory, has seen, the Laagi may be more strongly influenced than we are by the inherited reactions that promoted survival in their prehistoric forebears.”

“The Laagi, as I've pointed out a number of times before this, seem to be at base a communal race, in the sense that a hive of bees or a hill of ants is a communal race. But for a communal race to develop a technology comparable to our own requires that at some point it must have allowed the development of a certain amount of individuality in its members. Technology requires invention. Invention demands originality. Originality is a faculty of the unique individual who is different from all his fellow individuals. The Laagi, as I have mentioned before, have no recreational areas or recreational activities. This is because their work is their recreation. Even our host member, whom we have named Squonk and who belongs to a local alien species of lesser intelligence than the Laagi, is actively unhappy unless he is constantly working during the hours he is awake. So with the Laagi themselves. They are born to work; and they do work until they die at their job—just as the worker bee literally works itself to death. I…”

Her words trailed off once more. After a few seconds, she went on.

“…I have made a number of attempts to determine whether at this time the Laagi's occupation is still determined genetically, as that of the worker bee is. But so far, I've been unable to gain any solid evidence, one way or another. However, the impression both Jim Wander and I get is that the present-day, civilized Laagi does not have his occupation genetically selected for him at birth.”

Squonk stumbled suddenly, backed up several steps and then began again searching the same area of floor he had just gone over, in the room where Mary and Jim were currently observing. The small alien was still single-mindedly in search of the missing object that the invisible Laagi within him would recognize when he, Squonk, found it. This was not the first time Squonk had so stumbled and backed up to search again over an area he had already examined. He had done it for the first time three days before. Jim was concerned. Mary had not seemed to notice.

“…if we use as a model for a typical human being one who has a base of instincts and reflexes based on those instincts, this overlaid by a pattern of cultural reactions and behaviors acquired from the community of humans surrounding the youngster as he grows up, and this in turn overlaid by a set of habitual actions and decisions, plus current decisions engendered by the conscious processing of previous experience plus the influence of the two lower layers of reaction, we have a three-layered structure for human action and response to a given situation.

“By contrast, the Laagi appears to respond according to a two-layer structure of which the older, instinctive one is dominant under some conditions, but under others the newer, conscious layer can control. To create a hypothetical example, suppose that if a Laagi encountered another Laagi that showed a particular form of sickness, his older instinct would force him to destroy the sick one, even if consciously he did not wish to do so. But if the other Laagi showed some slight difference in that form of sickness, then his newer, individual consciousness would be allowed to use its discretion about killing the other Laagi or taking him to one of their hospitals.”

Mary stopped abruptly. It was marvelous, thought Jim admiringly, what she had been able to deduce from observations alone of a totally alien race. Sherlock Holmes would have been proud of her. When she went on, though, her voice was ragged with fatigue.

“Note again that what I have just suggested is a purely imaginary model, by way of example. We have not witnessed one Laagi killing another for any reason at all. We have not seen a fight or even what we could be absolutely sure was a serious disagreement between two or more Laagi…”

She ran down and this time did not resume talking, although her usual pattern with reports was to wind them up with a clear statement that the report was ended.

“Mary,” said Jim, after she had been still for a long moment, “you're worn out.”

“I'm fine,” she said.

“No, you aren't. I've been watching you get more and more exhausted. No matter how much you think you can work steadily at something and just get by with an occasional snatch of sleep, you're running downhill, and you ought to recognize that yourself.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Mary. “We've got no bodies to run downhill. That's a purely physical phenomenon. I can work as long as I like. The mind doesn't get tired.”

“Sorry. Yes, it does—evidently,” said Jim.

“What would you know about it, anyway? You haven't had to do anything but ride along and redictate my reports.”

“And watch everything that goes on,” said Jim, “with the result I see some things you seem to be missing, lately. About Squonk, for one.”

“What about Squonk?”

“You've been overworking yourself, so consequently you've been overworking him; because he isn't built to know when to stop for his own health and safety.”

“You're insane!” But there was a note of concern for the first time in Mary's voice. Concern—but disbelief as well. “He can take a nap anytime he wants to, and we always let him.”

“He doesn't want to nap,” said Jim. “He wants to find that nonexistent key we've had him hunting for for months. He's begrudging himself sleep more and more because you're begrudging yourself sleep. He'll stop and find a place to roll over and snooze, but only when we don't seem to be in the middle of something—such as when we've just given him a new order to search somewhere he hasn't searched before. Or when we're talking like this.”

“You think he can hear us?”

“He can hear me,” said Jim. “At least the part of me that gives orders to him; and for all I know he can feel my emotions as much as I can feel his. If he can do that, too, he's been picking up the backwash of the urgency I echo whenever you order a change in place or direction, or anything like that.”

“I don't believe he's being overworked. That's what you're saying, isn't it, that I'm overworking him?”