The Forever Man (7 page)

“I wasn't wrong, then,” said Jim, looking around him. “No human body could have lived through this. It was the semianimate control center that was running the ship as Penard's alter ego, then, wasn't it? The man isn't really alive?”

“Yes,” said Mary, “and no. You were right about the control center somehow absorbing the living personality of Penard. —But look again. Could a control center like that, centered in living tissue floating and growing in a nutrient solution with no human hands to care for it—could something like that have survived this, either?”

Jim looked around at the slashed and rained interior. A coldness crept into him and he thought once more of the legend of a great ghost cargo canoe sailing through the snow-filled skies with its dead crew, home to the New Year's feast of the living.

“No...” he said slowly, through stiff lips. “Then... where is he?”

“Here!” said Mary, reaching out with her fist to strike the metal bulkhead to which the gray cable was attached. The dull boom of the struck metal reverberated in Jim's ears. Mary looked penetratingly at Jim.

“You were right,” said Mary, “when you said that the control center had become Penard—that it was Penard, after the man died. Not just a record full of memories, but something holding the vital, decision-making spark of the living man himself. —But that was only half the miracle. Because the tissue living in the heart of the control center had to die, too, and just as the original Penard knew he would die, long before he could get home, the tissue Penard knew it, too. But their determination, Penard's determination, to do something, solved the problem.”

She stopped and stood staring at Jim, as if waiting for some sign that she had been understood.

“Go on,” said Jim.

“The control system,” said Mary, “was connected to the controls of the ship itself through an intermediate solid-state element which was the grandfather of the wholly inanimate solid-state computing centers in the ships you drive nowadays. The link was from living tissue through the area of solid-state physics to gross electronic and mechanical controls.”

“I know that,” said Jim. “Part of our training—”

“The living spark of Raoul Penard, driven by his absolute determination to get home, passed from him into the living tissue of the semianimate controls system,” went on Mary, as if Jim had not spoken. “From there it bridged the gap by a sort of neurobiotaxis into the flow of impulse taking place in the solid-state elements. Once there, below all gross levels, there was nothing to stop it infusing every connected solid part of the ship.”

Mary swept her hand around the ruined pilot's compartment.

“This,” she said, “is Raoul Penard. And this!” Once more she struck the bulkhead above the black box. “The human body died. The tissue activating the control center died. But Raoul came home just as he had been determined to do!”

Mary stopped talking. Her voice seemed to echo away into the silence of the compartment.

“And doing it,” said Mary more quietly, “he brought home the key we've been hunting for in the Bureau all this time. We pulled the plug on a dam behind which there's been piling up a flood of theory and research. What we needed to know was that the living human essence could exist independently of the normal human biochemical machinery. Now, we know it. It'll take time, but someday it won't be necessary for the vital element of anyone to admit extinction, unless whoever it is wants to.”

But Jim was only half-listening. Something else had occurred to him, something so poignant it contracted his throat painfully.

“Does he know?” Jim asked. “You said he's insane. But does he know he finally got here? Does he know he made it home?”

“Yes,” said Mary. “We're sure he does. Listen…”

She turned a little away from Jim and spoke out loud, as if Raoul was right around a corner, hiding there in the ship's interior.

“Raoul?” she said.

...And softly the voice of Raoul Penard spoke from the ship's hull all around them, as if the man was talking to himself. But it was a quieter, happier talking to himself than Jim had heard before. Raoul was quoting one of the poems of William Henry Drummond again. But this time it was a poem entirely in English and there was no trace of accent in the words at all...

O, Spirit of the mountain that speaks to us to-night, Your voice is sad, yet still recalls past visions of delight, When ‘mid the grand old Laurentides, old when the Earth was new, With flying feet we followed the moose and caribou. And backward rush sweet memories, like fragments of a dream, We hear the dip of paddles
…

Raoul's voice went on, almost whispering, contentedly to itself. Jim looked up from listening, and saw Mary's eyes fixed on him with a strange, hard look he had not seen before.

“You didn't seem to follow me, just now,” said Mary. “You didn't seem to understand what I meant. You're one of our most valuable lives, the true white knight that all of us dream of being at one time or another, but only one in billions actually succeeds in being born to be.”

Jim stared back at her.

“I told you,” he said, “I can't help it.”

“That's not what I'm talking about,” said Mary. “You wanted to go out and fight the dragons, but life was too short. But what about now?”

“Now?” echoed Jim, staring at her. “You mean—me?”

“Yes,” said Mary. Her face was strange and intense, and her voice seemed to float on the soft river of words flowing from the black box. “I mean you. What are you going to be doing, a thousand years from today?”

Jim had more than a month of accumulated leave time coming and he took it. He wanted to go someplace with the feel of hot sand under his bare feet and the smell of sea in the breeze. He wanted to forget about space and about Raoul Penard and
La Chasse Gallerie
; he wanted to forget about the old Canadian poems and songs, and about Mary Gallegher. Above all, he wanted to forget what she had said the last time they had talked. Instead he wanted to fill his mind with wine, women and song. But he lied to himself.

So he went off, relying on sand, salt-smelling breezes and the touch of women to burn all he wanted to forget out of his mind. He went to a place in Baja California called Barres de Hijo and signed in at a resort there. It had everything he was looking for, including charterboat fishing for sailfish and tarpon. It also—or rather the resort hotel he stayed at—had a swimming pool at which he met a fellow vacationer named Barbie Novak, who did fit his ideas of beauty and liked him even better when she found out he was one of the Frontier Guard pilots, on leave.

The days and nights, consequently, were a pleasant blur with Barbie for a companion, until she had to go home; and following that there was a girl named Joan Takari. But morning after she had left he found himself lying alone on the beach, hoping she had gotten home all right; and he could not remember her face.

So instead of looking around for more women to companion him, he took to sitting and walking by himself, lying on the beach and listening to the waves or seated up on the rocks overlooking a part of the shore that had no beach, watching the surf crash on the blue-black boulders below in white foam.

It was not, he concluded, that he wanted to live forever. But nonetheless Mary's words from their last meeting stuck in his mind. In a way they had taken the place of the emptiness inside him—which was still there, but was now like a dark cavern into which a small aperture had broken, letting in a single ray of light.

He had dreamed of space and wanted it from the first time he had realized it was out there—which was earlier than he could remember. All his life had pointed him at it. It was his arena in which he could do something… something of lasting effect. What he would do and how he would do it, he had no idea. But he was like someone who dreams of a much-wanted place, in a mountain so far off it was like a blue cloud on the horizon of his babyhood, but always there, day after day. And one day he had started to walk toward that mountain.

He had had no idea what roads led to it, what waited for him along the way, or how he would find his path and keep from going astray. But he had been determined to keep heading toward it until he reached it; and then he was determined to find on it the place of which he dreamed. It was a case of just always going forward. That way he could never go wrong because all roads led there eventually. All roads, in fact, were one road as long as he kept searching—the Forever Road, he had named it in his mind.

So, he left the resort one morning and went back to the Base, to his duty station, in the mountains outside Denver. When he checked into the Bachelor Officers' Quarters, he found a phone message waiting for him from General Mollen.

“As soon as you get in, call me,” the message read.

He did so, and, after a certain length of time got put through to the general.

“Well,” said Mollen, “and how was the fishing?”

“Good, sir,” said Jim. “I meant to stay longer, but I found I got filled up sooner than I thought, on time off. I want to get back to work.”

“Glad to hear it,” said Mollen. “And I want to talk to you about that. So why don't we have dinner at the Officers' Club tonight?”

What does a major say when a general invites him to dinner?

“Thank you, sir. I'd appreciate that. When, sir?”

“Nineteen hundred hours. Meet you in the bar.”

“Yes sir. Thank you.”

Jim had bet himself that the general would be at least fifteen minutes, and perhaps as much as an hour, late. But he, himself, was at the Officers' Club fifteen minutes ahead of the time set, just to be on the safe side. It was a busy part of the day for the bar, and the lounge which held it was full. Jim was lucky enough to get a stool on the curve of the horseshoe-shaped bar that was farthest from the lounge entrance, from which he faced not only that entrance, but beyond it the front door of the Club.

“Good to see you again, Major,” said the sergeant on duty behind the bar.

“You, too, Lee,” answered Jim. They knew each other; but that particular verbal exchange was routine between the barman and anyone who flew the Frontier, since none of the pilots who did that ever knew for sure that they would see the Club again.

“Ginger ale,” said Jim. “On the rocks.”

“Coming right up, sir.”

Jim sat, sipping the ginger ale, and watching the entrances to the Club and the lounge, for Mollen. Jeremy Tickler, who also captained a Wing on the Frontier and had gone through final training with Jim, came by. They fell into shoptalk.

But it was at exactly 1900 hours that the entrance door opened and Mollen came through.

“—Excuse me, Tick,” said Jim, interrupting the other. “Here he is now. I'll see you again, soon.”

“We shall wish,” said Tickler, who was a little drunk, but who had been told by Jim about the latter's dinner with the general. Tickler lifted his glass to Jim as Jim departed to intercept Mollen.

He caught the general just outside the door of the lounge.

“Oh, you're already here. Good,” said Mollen, changing direction. “In that case, let's go right into the dining room.”

He led the way to the dining room entrance, where the mess attendant on duty took them to the quiet table in a corner that was of course waiting for the general and his guest.

“I'll have a bourbon. A single-mash bourbon, no ice, no water, no soda, no anything,” said the general.

“Yes sir,” said the mess attendant and went off, to return with the drink himself in a few minutes. A waiter was at his heels.

“We don't want dinner just yet,” Mollen said. He looked over the attendant's shoulder at the waiter. “Come back in about twenty minutes.”

Attendant and waiter departed.

“Well, here's to the hope the fishing was good,” said Mollen, lifting his glass. Jim drank with him, politely.

They talked fishing until they were halfway through the general's second bourbon; and by the time the first one had been finished, Jim was beginning to be pretty sure that for some reason Mollen was stalling. However, there was nothing much he could do about that but wait for his superior to get to the point.

“—There's Mary Gallegher,” the general interrupted himself midway through the second drink. He nodded across the dance floor, which the dining area surrounded.

Jim looked and saw her, just as Mollen had said. She was with some major Jim did not know who was wearing the aiguillette, or dress shoulder cord looped through one epaulet, that marked him as an aide to some high-ranking officer; and the two of them were just sitting down at a table at the dance floor's edge, in plain view.

“She's got a working area of her own on Base here, with
La Chasse Gallerie
and a staff of her own,” said Mollen.

“Yes sir,” said Jim. They looked away from Mary and her companion and back across the table at each other.

“There's a lot of politics involved in it,” said Mollen. He drank from his glass. “Ever have much to do with politicians, Jim?”

“Happily, sir, they're above my range,” said Jim.

“Don't be so sure,” said Mollen. Below the still-dark hair on his round head, his bulldog face was somber. “Dealing with them's supposed to be above my range, too. But the fact is every one of us is affected by what they do to the Service, generally. In this case, the fact we've got Mary and her lab, as it's called, here on Base is all a matter of politics.”

“Is that so, sir?” He had not known anything about Mary and a lab. He was being more polite than anything. It seemed to him the general was still just making conversation.

“Yes, that's so. And it's something that concerns you and me, particularly,” said Mollen. “They raised hell with me when they discovered I'd let you go off on leave. Luckily, they were ready to listen when I said that it might attract more attention to call you back, suddenly, than it would be to let you come back in your own time. I didn't think you'd stay much longer than you did, anyway, knowing you.”