The Forever Man (40 page)

“Oh, no. We understand you quite clearly when you say ‘stars.' They are individual holes of somewhat larger size.”

“Also hot—I see what you're driving at, Jim,” said Mary.

“Well, more hot than you are, or this larger hole you have around you. Your holes would be changed on coming into contact with a star.”

“They would indeed,” said Jim. “Luckily, there's no star here. Do you know if there ever will be—here, where we are now?”

“One will pass through this point in the universe in four million, five hundred thousand, eight hundred and twenty-nine point four seven six six two eight years,” said ?1.

“There will, will there?” said Jim. “And that brings us back to what we're driving at. If you don't recognize mathematics, how did you decide exactly when a star would be here? And where did you learn the concept of ‘years'?”

“The concept of what?” said ?1. “1 merely told you when the hole would arrive where we are now.”

“Oh,” said Jim.

“Yes, it's dancing in this direction and therefore it'll be here then. That's the way the dance works out. But of course you'll have moved in four million, five hundred thousand, eight hundred and twenty-nine point four seven six six two eight years, won't you?”

“You can count on it,” said Jim.

“We suspected you would. By the way, we are enjoying talking to you very much.”

“We,” said Jim, “are enjoying talking to you.”

“In that case,” said ?1, “may I suggest one thing? We have nothing against holes, but they really are somewhat uncomfortable compared to the universe itself. Would you be agreeable to moving outside this somewhat larger-than-you hole of yours, so that we can talk under more natural conditions?”

Jim hesitated. Mary evidently was also hesitating, for she said nothing also for a moment.

“I beg your pardon?” said ?1 anxiously. “I haven't offended you by that suggestion?”

“No, no,” said Jim.

“It's just that I don't know if we're able to move outside the ship,” said Mary.

“But I see nothing attaching you to this hole,” said an obviously puzzled ?1.

“That's right,” said Jim. “There isn't anything attaching us to this ship. So, why not?”

“Squonk,” he told the small alien, who had continued to work steadily all this time—they had him searching for the bits and things Jim had caused the ship's robot to hide about the vessel's interior so that Squonk could continue his hunt for the “key” that he had been put on to begin with- “I've got to go away for a little while. But keep searching until I get back.”

Squonk signaled an affirmative with his antennae, and broadcast an eagerness to continue with his mind. Jim returned to the question of how to leave the ship with these invisible mental entities.

He imagined himself—his mind only—stepping outside the hull of
AndFriend
, free to roam the universe as a nonphysical thinking entity, alone. Nothing happened. He got angry and tried again, forcing against whatever held him back.

There was a strange sensation, a sensation that he thought later was what it might have felt like to be a living cork and feel himself be pushed out of the neck of a bottle of champagne, because the bottle had been shaken and too much gas pressure, released from solution in the wine, had built up beneath him. He found himself outside the ship.

“There we are. Nothing to it,” he said. “How do you like it, Mary… Mary? Mary, where are you?”

He had suddenly become conscious of a sense of loss, and that loss was of the identity of Mary, which had been so close to him all this time.

“I'm right here, Jim. Jim, where did you go?” He heard her voice. “Jim, I'm in the ship, but I'm not part of you anymore. Where are you?”

“I'm outside the ship now. Evidently when we travel as free spirits, we travel on our own. Come on out, Mary. Just be determined to come out and join ?1 and me and all the rest. You may have to push a little—I did—but it can be done.”

“Push? How? Jim, I don't know—”

“Ah, well,” said Jim. “I guess it's just something you may not be able to do. I didn't have any trouble, but maybe it just isn't possible for you. Don't get yourself all worked up trying, if—”

“What do you mean?” snapped Mary. “If you can do it, of course I can do it! I can do whatever… there! I'm out.”

And she was, too. He could tell by her voice, somehow, that she now was near to him, rather than apart, or inside him as he had grown so used to her being. He was bothered by an odd sense of abandonment, and he reassured himself by summoning up the picture of her in his mind. It comforted him. There she was, as bright as ever.

“Quite a feeling, isn't it, Mary?” he asked.

“It is.” Her voice was unexpectedly soft. “You're right beside me, aren't you, Jim?”

“Absolutely right beside you,” he said. “Invisible but present and able.”

“That's good,” she said.

“You find it strange not to be in a hole?” inquired the voice of ?1.

“Very strange,” said Mary, still with that unusual softness in her voice. “Very strange, but lovely.”

“Do you, too, find it lovely?” said ?1, and Jim understood without needing to be told that he was the one being addressed.

“You could put it that way, I suppose,” he said.

“It is the natural way to be, of course,” said ?1. “Sometime, when we can understand each other better, you must explain to me why you chose to live in holes in the first place.”

“Where did you people come from?” asked Jim.

There was a strangely long pause before ?1 answered.

“We don't know,” he said. “It never occurred to us to wonder about that before. Do you suppose we started out in holes, too, and found our way out?”

“Can you think of an alternative?” Jim countered.

“We could simply have sprung spontaneously into being… No, that's ridiculous,” said ?1 thoughtfully. “No,” he went on, obviously addressing someone besides Jim and Mary, “and I find it hard to believe we existed before the universe did, let alone created it. Of course, we might have created it—until the facts are known, any hypothesis is possible, but most of us don't believe that.”

“You speak for yourself most of the time, but then you suddenly start speaking for all the rest of your people—all that're here, anyway,” said Jim. “Are you just guessing how they feel or do you actually know?”

“I was not hypothesizing,” said ?l. “Of course. Agreement or disagreement is obvious. Can't you feel those reactions yourself?”

“Feel is not the way we generally communicate agreement or disagreement, particularly when we're wearing our holes,” said Jim.

“That's strange,” said ?1. “This time you said ‘hole,' but it had a larger meaning.”

“I actually said ‘hole,' not one of my own words that you translate into it,” answered Jim. “I'm learning from you.”

“How happy of you!”

“No need to get all excited,” said Jim uncomfortably. “Learning's a natural process for any thinking mind, isn't it?”

“Ah, but the will to learn! To exert that will is a compliment, in addition to all else. I must exert myself to learn from you, in turn!”

“Well…,” said Jim. “Thanks.”

“There is no need to thank me for a pleasure which you make possible to me,” said ?1. “Now that we're all back in the universe again, would you care to dance? Or is there something else you'd prefer to do?”

“Like what?” asked Jim.

“I've no idea,” said ?1, “since I've no experience in what pleases you.”

“Let's just go on talking,” said Mary.

“No,” said Jim. “We can always talk—am I right about that, ?1?”

“How could it be otherwise?”

“Then, for now can we go and visit some of those G0-type stars and land on any planets they may have? I want to see if any of them live up to what Raoul was talking about with those references of his to ‘paradise'.”

“Would this be pleasurable also to you?”

“Of course. I just said—”

“I think he was asking me, Jim,” interrupted Mary. “Yes, thank you. Even though Jim suggested it, I'd be interested to see any planets of those nearby G0 stars.”

“What do you consider nearby?” queried ?l.

“Those we can see,” said Mary.

“I can see six million, two hundred thousand and forty-nine holes of the type you conceive, with planets orbiting them.”

“Oh,” said Jim. “Well, let's just start with the closest one to where we are now and go on from there. All right, Mary?”

“Fine,” she answered.

“Then we go,” said ?1.

They went. It was a magnificent but surprisingly brief trip. Outside the ship as they now were, they were at the head of the comet's tail of invisible yet rainbow-colored fireflies that were those of ?1 ‘s race which had chosen to come along. They went like a comet's tail to the nearest yellow pinpoint in the firmament surrounding them—but not directly.

For aesthetic reasons, Jim found himself understanding through some wordless channel of communication, they approached the star of their destination in a delicate curve. He was a little disappointed that they arrived there almost as quickly as if the star in question had been no farther away than the length of
AndFriend
.

A few minutes later, they were hovering just above the soil of a very Earthlike world. One which looked as if, with no more than relatively simple terraforming, it could be made habitable.

But the portion of it they could see, at least, was disappointingly far from qualifying as a paradise in any human terms. They appeared to have landed—if that word fitted the situation—on a dry, desertlike surface of black sand with some awkward, green-brown growths poking up here and there through the soil to no more than three or four meters in height. Above, the sky was cloudless, bright blue, and a five- to- ten-know wind was blowing, which did not seem to be enough to cause perceptible motion in the stout, rather bulbous trunks or leafless limbs of the growths.

"What do you see?" inquired ?1 anxiously.

Jim described what the place looked like to him.

"I am vastly relieved," said ?1, and a sort of busy murmuring from the host of his fellow creatures that were still with them echoed and appeared to approve his reaction. "It was here that your poor, beloved, special friend saw things that did not exist."

"Oh?" said Mary quickly, before Jim could react.

"Yes. It was here he saw what he called Christmas trees—"

?1 broke off suddenly.

"Yes? Go on," said Mary.

"Did you hear me?" demanded ?1 excitedly. "I used one of the blanks your friend said and because I knew what it looked like to your friend, I could hear myself saying it. 'Christmas tree,' 'Christmas tree...' I'm beginning to speak your blanks! Not only that, but I think I may have some understanding of this one, because of what we saw in your friend's vision. Were these Christmas trees green and pyramidal and with things of bright colors about them that were not part of their natural appearance as a hole?"

"Yes, said Jim.

"And snow, and carols and present..."

Jim could see it, himself, suddenly, as the longing mind of Raoul Penard, already crippled by distance and loneliness and being lost, had seen it. The dry desert flatland with its strange growths transformed into the uplands of Canada. The holiday season, the packed church, the people coming and going, the snow and the plumes of breath in the frosty air..."

Without warning, he found himself ready to weep for Raoul Penard, alone and lonely at that time, wanting so badly to get home—and he could feel Mary sharing the vision and the emotion with him, so that they saw and felt it together inside themselves...and meanwhile, ?1 was chattering on...

"...But it works! Because we all see the same thing, it works. Now we can talk together and fill in the blanks and understand each other. And all because you picture what you speak of. You're giving us wonderful pictures now. Just think—what a marvelous solution, just because we see the same things…”

“No, ?1,” said Jim. “Forgive me for contradicting you"—I'm picking up the way they talk now, he thought a little wildly, not for the first time— “but it's not that we see the same thing, it's that we feel the same thing. Just as, right now, Mary and I were feeling for Raoul, when he was here with you.”

“Feel! Of course, feel! How obvious!” fizzed and crackled ?1. “A solution to all incomprehension—to feel alike. How simple. How easy. How natural! I'll learn to feel as you feel, dear friends—for you are dear friends, obviously—and there'll be no end to the wonderful conversations between you and us—”

“There'll have to be at some time in the future,” said Jim. “Mary and I are going to have to get back to our people, if we can make it safely around the Laagi.”

“The Laagi are your friends—I apologize, your not-quite-the-same friends—the living holes we had to tell to not come any farther this way? Why would they not want you to go to a place that moves you as deeply as you and Raoul were moved? Surely they would be moved as well?”

“Almost certainly not,” said Mary. “They live on a different world and see things differently.”

“But we live on no holes at all and see things very differently from you; and we were all deeply moved just now that you should be so moved by what you and Raoul saw.”

“It's hard to explain,” said Mary. “To begin with, Raoul did see what you felt us reacting to. But we were just imagining what he saw, not really seeing it. Also—”

“But you made us see it all over again, what we saw Raoul see that was not there.”

Mary hesitated and Jim stepped quickly into the moment of nonconversation.