The Forever Man (9 page)

“I'll do what I can, of course.”

“Well, you're due to have dinner; and we haven't had ours yet, either,” said Mary. “What about if when you finish, you come over and get me and I'll take you through the lab we've set up?”

“Fine,” said Jim.

“Very fine,” said Mollen, “because if no one else is, I'm starving to death. We'll be ordering right away, Mary. Why don't you come over when you're through with your own meal, because my hunch is we'll be finished first.”

“All right, if you think that'd be better.”

She rose, and they got up with her. She went back across the dance floor and they sat down. The waiter, who seemed to be hovering in the wings, was with them almost as soon as they were reseated.

After Jim and Mollen had eaten, they talked for about half an hour, while Mary and her escort finished their own meal across the dance floor. Happily, it was a weekday night and no band was playing, so that the floor stayed empty and the view clear—though Jim suspected that something would have been organized to let them know how dinner was going at the other table if the dance floor had been full of dancers.

At any rate, after a hit. Mary sat back from her plate, said a few words to the major across from her and got up. She came across and got Jim, and together they walked down the lit streets of the Base and over a few blocks into its older section.

She stopped at one of the older office buildings, a four-story structure of wood, rowed with tall windows, with only a few of them lighted, and one equally tall wooden door, which Mary now unlocked.

Here, they were away from most of the street lights, and it was possible for Jim, when he looked up for a moment before going in, to see the stars over the mountain peaks on this cloudless night. For a second the thought of space tugged at him with a poignancy that was a stabbing pain. Then he followed Mary into the lighted interior, and the door closed behind them.

The room they stepped into was tiny and brilliantly lit. No, it was two rooms; for even its small space was divided, front to back, from beside the entrance to beside a door in the back wall by a floor-to-ceiling transparency behind which was a single desk, a single chair and a single sergeant with holstered sidearm. The feeling of closeness was increased by the bright light, the lowness of the ceiling and a faint smell of varnish.

“Credentials, ma'am? Sir?”

The voice of the sergeant came at them through some speaker system in the roof overhead. Mary fished in the large tan handbag slung by a strap from her left shoulder and produced two silver-colored identification-type cards complete with pictures.

“Thank you, ma'am. Sir.”

The door in the farther wall swung open. Mary handed one of the cards to Jim before leading the way farther into the building.

“Here, you'd probably better keep that with you from now on.”

Jim took it. The picture on it was the same as that on his regular Base ID. He tucked it in his wallet as he went after her through the door, which closed behind them.

They stepped into an area which to Jim, at first glance, seemed enormous. To his surprise, the wooden front wall of the building, and presumably the side walls also, had been backed by a four-feet thickness of concrete blocks solidly cemented together, so that the effect was like being in some enormous cavern. Lights at some distance from each other were burning thee stories overhead, reinforcing the illusion of vast, empty space.

To Jim's left was a chunk of the building still divided into rooms and offices, so that it looked like a tower built inside the cave and going up the full four stories of the original structure. Inside here, all of these enclosed spaces had lights on within them but no sign of people. Mary reached out to the wall beside her and touched it. The existing illumination was suddenly reinforced by a blaze of lights in the open cavern area, not only at the third story level of those now burning, but also now at ceiling level, a story higher up.

The increase in brightness was so intense that for a moment Jim's eyes were dazzled and he saw nothing. Then, looking up, he became aware that in the fourth story of space of the open area hung all sorts of cranes and heavy slings; and the reason for reinforcing the walls became obvious. Support would be needed if instruments like these were going to lift the sort of loads they had been designed to lift.

But it was when he looked down again, at the vast open space of the floor, that he reacted. Because there sat not only
La Chasse Gallerie
, the ship that literally now was Raoul Penard, but beside it another ship that he recognized at first glance.

“You've got
AndFriend
here!”

It came out of him as an exclamation that was magnified by the echoes of the large open space into a shout.

“Of course,” said Mary. “Your ship's also part of everything that's concerned with our rescue of Raoul. In a situation where we don't know anything, we work with anything that could possibly help give us a key.”

Jim went unthinkingly toward
AndFriend
and laid a hand flat on the polished curve of her nose.

“Is she taking good care of you, baby?” he whispered, too low for even the echoes here to make it audible to Mary Gallegher's ears. He thought he felt reassurance from the metal he touched.

He turned to look at
La Chasse Gallerie
. In contrast with her interior, nothing had been done to repair or even clean her up, outside.

“I suppose,” he said over his shoulder to Mary, his voice sounding loud in the stillness in spite of his conversational tones, “you didn't want to risk touching Penard's ship any more than you had to. It looks the way it looked when we first saw it, out beyond the Frontier.”

“Yes,” said Mary. She had drawn close until she stood only a step from him and his ship and only half a dozen steps from Raoul's. “We had to take some very small lab samples so we'd have something to work on. Otherwise it hasn't been touched.”

An intense longing suddenly gripped him to sit once more in
AndFriend
's command chair. He had not seen his ship from the moment of landing with Penard's vessel alongside here at Base. He had tried to get to her half a dozen times, and been turned back with the excuse that
AndFriend
, like
La Chasse Gallerie
, was off-limits until it had been thoroughly checked out by all those departments from Intelligence on down who felt they might have something there to check.

In the same moment he thought he caught a glimpse of something, there and almost instantly gone again, in Mary's eyes as she watched him. What it could have been, if in fact it had not been something he had imagined, he could not tell. It might almost have been a look of pity, except that there was no reason for Mary to look at him that way, and in fact he was not sure she was capable of feeling that particular emotion.

But the longing to sit in the pilot's comchair again had put him in movement even as he was noticing this. He swung about, walked three steps down
AndFriend
's side and laid his hand on the operating button of her entry port.

“I'll have a look inside while I'm here—”

“No!” said Mary, so sharply that he stopped in spite of himself.

He swung around to face her.

“It's my ship.”

“I'm sorry,” said Mary. “But it's part of the red tape—you know how these things are. It hasn't been released for entry by anyone but me and my staff.”

She smiled a little sadly at him.

“I'm sorry,” she said—and she really sounded as if she meant it. “You know. Orders.”

But the Frontier pilots were not book people. if they had been, most of those who had lived would have died before this.

“Orders may be orders,” he said lightly, turning back to the button, “still—”

“Still, you'll obey them!” said the voice of Mollen harshly, and Jim swung around again to see that not only the general, but also either the sergeant at the entrance or his double, had together come around the nose of
La Chasse Gallerie
.

Jim's hand fell helplessly at his side.

“I came by to see if you could use a ride back to the BOQ,” Mollen went on to him. “You'll be moving into the resident wing in this building tomorrow, but tonight you might as well be in a bed you're used to.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Jim. He looked at Mary. “If Mary's finished showing me around…? We'd just got in here...”

“I'm afraid there's not much more I can show you, anyway,” Mary said. “All the labs are locked and most of the people out of them at this hour. I just thought you'd like to see where your own ship and Raoul's are being kept.”

“I appreciate it,” said Jim to her. He turned to the general.

“Thank you again, sir. I'll come right along.”

“Good,” said Mollen.

He turned and led the way to the entrance and into the street outside. It was so dark by contrast that for a moment Jim could hardly make out Mollen's limousine, floating just above the pavement, a step from the door. Mary had not followed them out. Mollen gestured and Jim followed him into the back seat.

“Bachelor Officers' Quarters, Building Kl47,” Mollen told his driver. They moved off.

“For God's sake,” the general said after a bit, breaking the silence as they drove toward the part of the Bane where the unmarried officers were quartered, “don't look like you're going to be shot. I promise, I'll get you back into space, eventually.”

Jim looked up, hope waking in him after all.

“It actually is a promise, sir?” he said, and held his breath: “It's a promise,” grunted Mollen. “The only one who'll stop you from getting hack into space will be you. But you'll have to stick it out, meanwhile.”

“I'll stick,” said Jim.

So began waiting it out.

They gave him a first lieutenant and a sergeant who knew everything that was needed to know to keep his office running. There were about fifteen minutes' worth of decisions he had to make daily; after that there was nothing for him to do. He was in Procurement and Supplies, and very junior in that, as far as he decisions went, anyway. The paperwork he put his signature to was either for things that obviously had to be ordered, or for things that, if they represented a bad decision, it was a bad decision that would not prove itself to be so for months or even years. He listened to the advice of his lieutenant and his sergeant, especially that of the sergeant, and in consequence he could have done the job in his sleep.

Like all Frontier pilots, he was used to playing hard, fast and furious during his time off. But now, for all practical purposes, almost all his time was time off. He could run, swim, play tennis or golf, go to the gym and work out, or go and camp in the Officers' Club night and day, if that was what he wanted.

He did it all. The Officers' Club was not empty in the daylight hours of the ordinary work week, because there were always people working night and off-shifts of various kinds, and people coming and going from the Base. But by comparison to the S.P.M. to closing hours, it was deserted. Of course, there were likely to be Frontier pilots in there at almost any time of the night or day; and when he ran into those he had instant companionship.

But his pleasure in even this grew thin. As the weeks went by, and he became more and more removed from his own time of being out on the Frontier, he became less and less one of them. Also, they were out for the same reasons he had been out, to play, to find women and raise hell generally, as a relief from a tension he no longer shared; and he found that what once had been rare and precious, became dull and tasteless when it was available all the time.

He could not go off Base with the other pilots, which cancelled him out of most of their adventures and the chance of finding female playmates, anyway. He learned that Mollen had been only too correct in forecasting that only a need to report to someone in Washington or an equal occasion of duty was considered sufficiently important a reason to allow him past the gates of the Base. And he also found, gradually, that he did not really enjoy being with half-drunk friends before noon, even with his Frontier sidekicks, that he did not enjoy being with them before dinner time, that, indeed, he no longer enjoyed being in the usual sort of Earthside celebration of survival at any time at all. He, at least, had nothing to celebrate.

He became more and more solitary. The physical activities remained open to him, and he found himself retreating more and more into them. He had set himself a solid program of activity to make sure he stayed in physical shape to be let back into space. But with time on his hands, this program expanded. He ran fifteen miles instead of five. Swam five miles instead of one. Worked out on the exercise equipment for two hours instead of half an hour.

At the same time he began to discover an indifference in him to food. He was active enough to want to eat, but from being the satisfaction of a keen appetite, his eating became simply another duty that had to be performed. On paper he stayed in excellent physical shape, but visibly, he began to grow lean and stringy, solitary and withdrawn.

His fellow pilots, led by those who had been in his Wing, worried about him and tried to come up with ways to lighten his mood. They diagnosed his trouble as being primarily due to a lack of women. Being what they were, with a Frontier pilot's attitude toward rules and regulations, they concocted elaborate schemes to circumvent regulations; and, first, to get him off Base so they could get him to bed with some attractive female; and, second—when he proved to be too tightly under observation for that—to smuggle some likely lady on Base for him and provide the proper quarters and privacy for them.

His lack of enthusiasm for this and their other schemes for him worried them even more. In any case, they were unsuccessful, for he was truly guarded like a national treasure—to which, perhaps, in some minds he was. He had been made lieutenant colonel, as Mollen had promised, shortly after his return with
La Chasse Gallerie
. After a little more than half a year he was promoted to full bird colonel—interestingly, Mollen had become a two-star general just a few months before—and his pilot friends seized the opportunity to put on an elaborate celebration for him at the Officers' Club and in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters.