The Forever Man (37 page)

Happily, he discarded the effortful plans he had thought might be necessary to get back to Squonk long enough to give their companion his final orders. While he was still part of the ship, he took his time, and ran a complete check of the working equipment aboard. Only then did he slip back into Squonk, who had fallen asleep once more as soon as Jim had left him.

That slumber, in fact, suited Jim very well. He had planned to let Squonk sleep until roughly three hours from daylight, but the little alien surprised him by waking after only about a couple of hours' sleep and immediately beginning to try to clean the interior of
AndFriend
.

“No, Squonk. Good Squonk, but there's something that needs to be done first. Come outside with me.”

Hoping that Mary would stay asleep, he led Squonk out into the night and away from the ship until they could stand back and see it all clearly under the moonless, but starbright, sky.

“The ship has to be moved forward about its own length, Squonk,” said Jim. “And to do that we've got to cut loose, temporarily, those arches that hold it down. You'll need other squonks to help you, and tools. Can you do that, Squonk, noble Squonk?”

Jim had no idea what kind of tools or methods would be used to unfasten the base of the hold-down legs from the concrete-like surface underfoot, so he simply envisioned a number of squonks clustered busily around each arch-base for a moment or two, and then the base coming loose and rising upward some two meters above the surface. Squonk turned and started eagerly back toward the city.

Jim shifted his point of view back inside
AndFriend
. He watched the small alien move away until the night made the bobbing backshell too hard to separate from the surrounding dimness. Then, at last, Jim let himself relax into just being
AndFriend
once more, although he was careful to stay awake. Mary, thank God, had never stirred from her sleep even during the shifts he had made from ship to alien and back again. There was relief in knowing that, but right beside it a strong feeling of guilt. The task he had sent Squonk on was one that only Squonk could do; but the doing of it might prove too much for their faithful servant. He might very well, Jim told himself grimly, have sent Squonk to his death.

But… he had not. He kept a watch through the outer surface of
AndFriend
's hull, and less than an hour after he had watched Squonk leave, the other returned, followed by either seven or eight other squonks—it was difficult to count them accurately as they scuttled around in the darkness.

This squonk team, including Squonk himself, went immediately to that base of the front arch that was to the right of
AndFriend
's forward section. What they were doing there, Jim could no more make out than he had been able to imagine definitively how they would go about freeing the connection of each base from the pavement beneath the ship.

But, one by one, the bases came free and floated up, each with a chunk of pavement attached, to what would have been about the height of Jim's head, if he had been out there in the body to use himself as a measuring stick.

Jim shifted momentarily into Squonk.

“Good Squonk. Good squonks!” he projected. “All the others can go now, Squonk. You tell them.”

Squonk scurried around, touching tentacles with the other squonks, who headed off and were swallowed up by the darkness.

“You come back on board with me,” said Jim to Squonk, once the others were gone. “Now you can start cleaning up in there.”

He shifted back into
AndFriend
, opened the port and let Squonk in. Then, using the same ability he had discovered in himself when he had awakened in
AndFriend
back at Base, he lifted the ship lightly in the air and pointed it at a slant upward toward the stars now hidden behind the cloud bank that had since drifted in to further darken the night.

The moment he was back inside the ship with the entry port closed behind him, Squonk had determinedly begun his postponed cleaning of the ship's interior.

“What's going on?” said Mary, waking up. “Jim, you've moved us back into
AndFriend
. You should have checked with me before you did that.”

“Why?” said Jim. “Since I was going to shift us over anyway? That's one of the things you don't control—what body or thing we're in.”

“You're right,” said Mary. “I'm sorry. It's just habit speaking in me.”

Jim was stunned by the mildness of her reaction. Suspicion woke in him. Why, he asked himself, was she suddenly being so reasonable? Was the reasonableness only a cover for some plan she had cooked up to catch him unawares?

He was tempted to tell her that they had left the Laagi world. Her reaction to that news should reveal how she was really feeling about what he had done. They were, in fact, already almost into interstellar space. He had been accelerating at a steadily increasing rate until that rate was well beyond what a human body would have been comfortably able to support. Then he had remembered Squonk and realized that while to him and Mary in their present conditions such acceleration might not make any difference, it was literally life-threatening to their small alien companion. He looked for Squonk now, and saw him painfully trying to continue work in spite of the effect of essentially having his weight almost doubled. A little ashamed of himself, Jim backed off to an acceleration only slightly greater than the gravity Squonk was used to normally. Even at the lesser rate, they were putting distance between themselves and the Laagi world in gratifying fashion.

It was not the distance-eating travel of phaseshifting. But they were rapidly losing themselves in an increasing volume of space that was already large enough to sorely trouble even the large number of ships the Laagi could put into space in pursuit.

“Why exactly did you move us back into the ship from Squonk?” Mary asked. The tone of her question was entirely reasonable. “I'd think we could always have shifted over if the need arose—if some Laagi came out here to
AndFriend
, or something like that.”

Facing the fact of telling her, now, Jim found himself uncomfortable with the need to do so, even though he was still sure inside himself that he had done the right thing.

“I had to be in the ship so I could operate her,” he said. “I got Squonk to round up some of his friends and cut loose the arches that were holding us down. Then I used my own, personal, nonship powers—the same ones Raoul used to drive
La Chasse Gallerie
all the way through Laagi territory to get home—to take us off. We've left the Laagi world.”

She said nothing. He waited.

“I know,” he said, “you're feeling I betrayed you. Well, maybe I did. But you were working yourself to death and you'd already done anything anyone could have expected you to do back there—and more.”

“So we're in space now?”

Aside from an emptiness and a strange impression of distance, as if she had physically withdrawn from him, her voice was calm and he could feel no explosion kindling in her in reaction to what he had just said.

“That's right. On the equivalent of ordinary drive, which is all I can manage on my own, but moving away steadily.”

“I suppose we could go back if we tried?”

“Yes,” said Jim. “But I won't. If you'll just cancel that hypnotic lock you've got on me, so I can work the ship and phase-shift, we'll head out around Laagi territory and go home.”

“No,” she said. “I'll never do that. Not as long as there's a chance of our going back to the Laagi.”

The continuing utter calmness of her voice and emotions held an inflexibility that gave no hope of its being changed.

“Then we'll have to take our chances, this way,” said Jim.

“The Laagi'll catch us long before we can reach the Frontier and any human protection,” said Mary.

“Maybe they could,” said Jim, “maybe not. But I'm not headed up-galaxy toward home. I'm headed down-galaxy toward the fly-swatting territory. I think it'll take the Laagi a little while to figure out
AndFriend
might go in that direction; and any time gained is a plus for us, in this case.”

“I see,” said Mary. “All right. Understand me. I've had a chance to get some rest now. My head's clear. You were right. I'd worked myself to the point where I wasn't thinking straight. But I'm thinking straight now; and there's work back there I've left unfinished. If you'll turn back and let the Laagi catch us again, I'll promise you we'll leave within a quarter of a year, their local time.”

“No,” said Jim.

“Is a quarter of a year going to make that much difference to you after the time we've spent there already?”

“It's not that,” said Jim. “I'm afraid I don't trust you. If you could go back there, a quarter of a year would become half a year, then a year. By the end of a year you'd be back again in a condition where there'd be no point in trying to talk sense to you about leaving, ever.”

There was another extended silence from Mary. In the picture of her he carried always in his mind now, put together from bits and pieces of memory, he imagined her with the right corner of her lower lip caught thoughtfully for a moment between her teeth as she searched for the words most likely to move him from his position. It was a fetching, even in a strange way an endearing, picture; but he could not afford to give in.

“So you're going to try taking us home in spite of the odds against it?” she said at last.

“The odds wouldn't be so much against it if you gave me back the ability to phase-shift
AndFriend
.”

She ignored what he had just said.

“You realize,” she said, “if the Laagi shoot us on sight, instead of simply trying to capture us, you're risking the loss of everything I—we've found out about them. That information will never get back to Earth then; and it means everything to them, back there.”

“Give me phase-shifting ability and there's a good chance the information will get back.”

“Good?” she said. “No. Only a little better. Let the Laagi capture us again, let me work with them awhile longer; and maybe I can get to the point where I can talk to them. You've been repeating every note I've made but you don't seem to have understood what those notes meant. The Laagi are only fighting us because we've triggered off a genetic, territorial response in them. Their reflexive assumption is that the only reason we could be in their territory—and they think of it as their territory, not ours, where our ships first met in space—is that we mean to move in and take their worlds from them. Their inborn reflexes can't imagine any other reason for our being there.”

“So?” he said.

“So, their reflexive system can't—but maybe their upper, civilized minds can—accept the fact we wouldn't want their worlds, even if we could have them. Their atmosphere's unbreathable by us and there's probably a limitless number of other things wrong. But we can't tell them that until we can talk to them; and I have to stay there until I can talk to them.”

“Or maybe we can send a whole expedition back, knowing what we know now,” said Jim, “and they can find out how to talk to them.”

“And meanwhile your friends on the Frontier are being killed daily; and so are something like the same number of Laagi; and both races are going broke building warships and defending their side of the Frontier.”

Jim winced. She had hit him in one of his vulnerable areas. But the fact remained he dared not trust her.

“You want to keep on gambling,” he said. “I want to take the chips we've won so far and run with them, to come back and try to break the bank another day. I'm not going to change my mind.”

“Neither am I,” said Mary. There was sadness in her voice. “So you'll have to do what you're trying to do without phase-shifts.”

They drove on without talking for some time. There was no sign of pursuit yet, as far as Jim could see. But that meant nothing, when a Laagi vessel could phaseshift into existence within a thousand kilometers of them without a moment's warning. More to the point, now that he was back on board, he had access to time-keeping equipment. As best he could figure by estimating the time left until dawn when they had taken off from the Laagi world, the ship's clocks gave him as much as an hour yet before
AndFriend
's absence would be visible to those traveling the green pathways that gave a view of the place where she had been anchored down on display.

How long after that it would take the Laagi to organize a pursuit and get ships into space was something he could not guess. But on Earth, in a parallel situation, it would be a matter of four to six hours at least, and probably it could not be done much more speedily by the Laagi.

After a long time, Mary spoke again.

“Why did you take Squonk along?” she asked. “Wouldn't it have been kinder to leave him back there? Or did you want to try to bring out a living specimen?”

“No,” said Jim. “But without us to give him orders he'd go immediately to the first Laagi he saw who could give him some, and ask to be put to work. Doesn't it seem to you that that Laagi would want to know what a squonk had been doing up until then, and why he was free for other work now? And what's your guess on the possibility of the Laagi being able to find out from Squonk what he's been doing for us—and perhaps learning that
AndFriend
had brought at least two invisible alien intelligences on their world?”

“I see,” said Mary. “It was self-protection you had in mind.”

The words could have been said with her earlier sharpness. But, once again, there was a sadness that seemed to be underlying them; it was as if, thought Jim, in some way he had disappointed her.

“Yes,” he said. “But there's a certain kindness involved in bringing him, too, whether you believe that or not. He's been involved in everything we've done. For months he's been hunting that nonexistent ‘key.' You might say it's become his lifework—like your own determination to make yourself of use to our world.”