The Forever Man (41 page)

“At a guess,” he said, “you either had what you'd seen through Raoul's mind triggered again in your own by our feelings; or you took our feelings and associated them with the picture you remembered picking up from Raoul.”

“Nonetheless, we do have a tool for understanding between us, do we not? Isn't that true?”

“Yes,” said Mary and Jim together.

“Marvelous!” said ?1. “That was very well answered. Are you beginning to learn to talk and listen at the same time, then, as we do?”

“I doubt it,” said Jim drily. “That was an accident. We just happened to answer you at the same time. That sort of thing happens because we can't read each other's mind, instead of the opposite.”

“I'm so sorry.”

“It's not your fault,” said Jim.

“Nonetheless, we're sorry. We're all sorry you should be so crippled and deprived.”

“Thank you,” said Mary. “But as it happens we humans prefer it this way.”

“Prefer to be crippled!”

“We prefer the privacy of not having our fellow humans reading our mind all the time.”

“Another blank,” said ?1 sadly, “just when I thought I was doing so well in understanding you.”

“I've no idea what blank you mean,” said Mary.

“I think he's talking about ‘privacy,'” said Jim.

“What is this concept, ‘privacy'?”

“It's the pleasure of being alone, and the right to be so,” said Mary.

“But you like being together! Just like we do!”

“That's true,” said Jim, “but we also like being alone, sometimes.”

“How can you have pleasure in company when you also have pleasure in isolation? Doesn't one cancel out the other?”

“You see,” said Jim, “we humans are individuals—”

“But so are we—I'm sorry, I interrupted.”

“As a result,” said Jim, “when we're alone we often want to be with others and when we're with others, we can want very much to be alone.”

“You baffle me completely,” said ?1. “Such a mixed-up existence! However, let's let the difficult question of how you enjoy two diametrically opposed states wait until we understand each other better. I think I understand ‘Christmas tree' better now. But what is ‘snow'…?”

So, for some little time Jim and Mary were busy trying to give meaning to the vision ?1 and his people had picked up from the battered mind of Raoul when he had been with them.

“Is the rest of this planet's surface all like this?” Jim asked ?1, once they had done their best with explanations.

“By no means,” said ?1. “Every part of it differs, of course.”

“Why did you bring us here, then?” asked Mary.

“But I thought that was obvious. It was Raoul's favorite place.”

“Did he have other favorite places?” asked Jim.

“Not on this planet. But many on other planets. Do you want to see them?”

“Yes,” said Jim.

So ?1 and his friends took them to the other places Raoul had cherished—the places he had referred to later as Paradise.

They were spots on some twelve different Earthlike worlds—and three of them were indeed so Earthlike that if the atmosphere had been adequate for humans and there were no unknown dangers hiding undiscovered there, it was conceivable that humans might have landed on them the next day and started building. The rest were such as to require terraforming—as much, in some cases, as it might take to clear the cloud cover from Venus, lower that world's temperatures and turn it into a green and fruitful planet. Four of the worlds they visited were almost all ocean.

But each had at least one spot that had triggered off in Raoul a vision of one of the fondly remembered scenes from the Canada of his youth. In most cases his mind had had to play tricks with the local scenery to make it into the place of his memory. But some came so close to being Earthlike that only the imaginative equivalent of a squinting of the eyes was necessary, even for Jim and Mary, to see it as a part of their home world.

A tree-filled valley, a steep, bare cliffside, a riverside, a lake—even one area of desert, filled with wind-sculpted rocks, which Raoul's imagination had transformed into the appearance of the houses and buildings of his own home town. All these were shown to Jim and Mary by ?1 and their innumerable escort of living minds. And as they went, Jim found himself getting more and more able to see in the alien realities of these locations the familiar shapes and outlines Raoul had imagined in them.

In proportion, ?1's understanding of what went on in Jim and Mary's mind improved with remarkable speed. Steadily, the immaterial alien found more and more words with which to talk meaningfully to them and seemed to grasp ever more quickly what they meant by the words they thought at him. Privately, Jim was amazed at ?1's ability to learn. He was strongly tempted to compliment the alien on it, calling on Mary to back him up—except that Mary had grown more and more silent as they went along; and, having had some experience with her now, Jim hesitated to draw her into a conversation unless he knew certainly that she wished to be drawn. On the other hand, he had become more and more convinced that there were things he and she needed to discuss.

He decided to bull ahead.

“The subject of privacy and our human desire for it came up awhile back,” he said to ?1. He was finally getting used to the idea that if he thought of himself as speaking to ?1, that alien immediately realized he was being spoken to. How this understanding was managed, Jim did not have the slightest idea, but since it seemed to work there was no reason not to use it. Accordingly, he had fallen into the habit of doing so, to the extent that occasionally he forgot and thought at Mary, without remembering to specify that it was her he was addressing.

“Yes, I remember, of course,” said ?1.

“Tell me, would there be some way in which I could talk with Mary privately? That is, without at the same time talking to you and your ‘friends'. Maybe I'm not putting it clearly enough. What I'm trying to say is that I want to talk to Mary, now, and not have anyone else hear what we say.”

“If you like, of course,” said ?1, “none of us will listen. If you speak to Mary, alone, it becomes obvious to the rest of us that it would be very unkind—indeed, unthinkable—for one of us to listen.”

“Oh… good,” said Jim. “I'll just keep in mind, then, that I'm talking to Mary alone, and you tell me that none of the rest of you will hear what we say?”

“Naturally,” said ?1.

“What is it, Jim?” asked Mary.

“Well, I… ” Jim, would have liked some reaction, some signal from ?1 and the rest in the comet tail, that they were really not listening to what he was about to say, but evidently that was so unnecessary that none of them, including ?1, thought to make it. It was rather like the finding that it was unnecessary to say “I'm through” when a speaker was finished talking and ready to listen to an answer.

“Well,” he said again. “About these worlds we've been looking at. They aren't the paradise Raoul's mind made them out to be, of course; but they could certainly be settled by humans, a few even without terraforming. But with the same kind of thinking, it's easy to see that the Laagi could settle them just as well with about an equivalent amount of terraforming to make most of them habitable to their race.”

“Yes,” said Mary. “Of course. What of it?”

“Why, it brings up a question of our responsibility toward claiming these worlds as soon as possible for our own race,” said Jim. “I'm sorry—I don't mean to sound pompous; but these are, literally, worlds that both we and the Laagi can use; and we're presently on speaking terms with the race that controls them, even if they don't have any use for them, themselves. The question is what should we do about it?”

“If you want my opinion,” said Mary, “I certainly think we ought to tell our present friends we badly need the worlds and we'd like to settle on them, and find out if our settling on them would disturb them. But that's just my opinion. I'm going to leave all the dealing with ?1 and the rest up to you.”

“Me?”

“That's what I said.”

“Why me?”

“I'll tell you why you. Jim, I've had time to do a lot of resting and a lot of thinking since we ended up in that Laagi hospital—”

“Yes, but what I'm talking about right now—”

“Let me finish. Be patient, it'll all tie together when I've had my say. To begin with you were right. I'd been overworking.”

“Well…”

“More than that,” said Mary determinedly, “I'd lost my perspective. I've learned a lot from you and Squonk—yes, from Squonk, too. You were right when you compared me to him. Part of me was like him, and like the Laagi, in general. That's why I did so much better a job of understanding them from the first than you did.”

Jim thought of saying something, then decided not to.

“You were right. I live to work, and they live to work; and I liked them for that. I admired them for that. And, toward the end, this started to affect my judgment. Unconsciously, I was out to prove that I and they were on the right track and all the rest of the human race was wrong. I began wanting to justify everything they did; and I began to anthropomorphize. I began to find human reasons and emotions in them that weren't there, just to prove how right their way of life was.”

She paused.

“Do you remember that Laagi in the hospital who killed that squonk that was asking to be put back to work, when it wasn't able to work and never would be again?” she asked. “Remember the Laagi made the sort of gestures for praising a squonk and giving it orders, then killed it at the very moment when it was being most happy over being sent back to work after all?”

“I remember,” said Jim.

“Well, when he killed that squonk, part of me was shocked beyond words, because he'd lied to the squonk by essentially promising it what it wanted while all the time he was planning to kill it. But at the same time another part of me was agreeing with him for putting out of the way a worker that wasn't any use anymore. I missed the real meaning of what was going on in his mind. He killed the squonk not because it couldn't work anymore, but because it was in misery for that reason; and he praised it and gave it a work order just before it died so it would be as happy as possible at the moment he ended its life. So that it died happy. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Jim. “Yes, in fact, that part I understood then, when it happened.”

“All right. I didn't until later, when you told me our Squonk couldn't live much longer and he'd be happiest hunting for that nonexistent key as long as he lived. It was then I faced up to the fact that I could approach an understanding of the Laagi and squonk reaction to work, but I'd never really understand it, even if I worked myself to death, trying. It's a different order of things. So I saw my limits.”

“Limits got nothing to do with it,” said Jim. “You did a magnificent job there on the Laagi planet. I used to be amazed watching and listening and seeing how you put things together and understood them.”

“Limits have got everything to do with it. We've got to face the fact that each of us, individuals that we are, can have a particular knack or gift or ability for understanding a particular type of alien that other humans don't have. I had it for the Laagi. You've got it for ?1 and his little friends.”

“Oh, I don't know that I'm any better at it than you are…”

“Let's not play polite games!” said Mary. “You're better here, and you know it. I know it. I was the best one of the two of us to investigate the Laagi and you're the best to investigate the… the mind-people. I don't know why. Maybe the fact you've always been fascinated with space gives you something in common with them I don't have; but I've been listening to you and watching you; and I'm the one who's been amazed at how quickly my partner is picking up information—putting two and two together to get four where I can't.”

“Hell!” said Jim.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means I'm bowled over, if you want to know. I never thought… ” Jim ran out of words.

“You never thought to find me admitting somebody else was better at something than I was, let alone you being that person.”

“Er… yes.”

“Well, now you have. And now, let me tell you something more about talking to the mind-people about humans on these worlds of their territory. What I dictated to notes through you, back on the Laagi planet, were facts. I kept my conclusions to myself, partly because I wanted to sneer at you for not being able to make them for yourself. I've no direct evidence, but my own strong personal opinion is that the Laagi live on only one home world, too—just like we do.”

“You think so?” Jim waited for an explanation and when none was forthcoming, prodded for it. “Why?”

“For a number of reasons. We're overpopulated on Earth to the breaking point. People are cheap. But it takes all our people, working like beavers, to keep enough manned fighting ships on the Frontier to match the Laagi there. All the evidence that I could glean seemed to add up that the Laagi have fewer cities on a much less rich world than Earth—but their population per city is much, much higher than ours. And both they and the squonks have a work ethic we can't match, plus not having the internal dissensions that still go on, even in our present-day United World, where no nation fights nation, or group fights group, anymore because the battle with the Laagi comes first. But in spite of this the battle on the Frontier hasn't resulted in their winning, any more than it has in our winning. In short, the Laagi are only able to produce enough ships and personnel to match our production. One planet's worth. So they need to expand to other planets as badly as we do; and in fact that's why they've been hammering so hard in our direction after finding they couldn't come down-galaxy this way, because of the mind-people.”