The Forever Man

  Within the city itself, they eventually found the equivalent of a transportation terminal, with both atmosphere and spacegoing craft resting there, taking off, and landing upon it.

  “Strange they wouldn’t keep AndFriend here, instead of someplace else in the city,” commented Jim.

  “Questions like that can be speculated on later,” said Mary.

  Nonetheless, it was a question that continued to bother Jim. He wished he knew whether Raoul’s ship had been kept here at the field for regular space and atmosphere traffic.

  They also witnessed the Laagi equivalent of long-distance communications. The Laagi they watched operated a set of controls that consisted of buttons on a vertical rod, which, in addition to being pivotable about its base in the floor, was capable of being pulled out to greater length or pushed down to shorter, as larger sections slid backwards or forwards over adjoining shorter sections. The stubby Laagi fingers meanwhile played with studs set into the rod itself.

  While the Laagi they watched was doing this, it watched the screen of a three-dimensional tank in which the image of another Laagi moved and gesticulated. It took only a little thinking to realize that the live Laagi before them was operating the movements of an image seen by the Laagi being communicated with; and that that other Laagi was controlling the movements of the image that the live Laagi was watching.

  “Call it phoning,” suggested Jim. “You might as well; and it’s less confusing than to talk of it as a form of alien communication the way you are.”

  Mary did not answer. But in her reports from then on she did use the word.

  But they found no recreational areas and nothing resembling separate homes, dwelling places, or even dormitories—the exception of one place that seemed pretty obviously the equivalent of a hospital.

  They did discover a maternity area at the hospital, with evidence that at least some of the Laagi—it was impossible to tell by looking at them—were capable of bearing young. Although whether these were the result of bisexual, asexual, or some other engendering process, they did not find out. Certainly, they saw no Laagi in the act of sexual coupling. In fact, Laagi almost never touched each other, except for the faint touches that went along with the vibrating arm gestures such as Squonk had received from the Laagi he had sought out and been praised by when they had first left the ship. Laagi in conversation with each other sometimes used similar arm vibrations. But this was the closest to touching that Jim and Mary were able to observe.

  The young Laagi were evidently carried to term within the adult Laagi, just as a human child is within its mother; and the pregnant adults, apparently, came to the hospital-equivalent for delivery. This took place within minutes of the pregnant Laagi being admitted to a maternity ward, which led to Mary’s suspicion that those so admitted had at least some conscious control over when the delivery was to occur.

  The baby Laagi, however, which on delivery had all its limbs and head tucked inside its peripheral flesh folds, was immediately taken away by one of the hospital staff; and the formerly pregnant Laagi got up, left the hospital immediately and went back to work.

  Apparently, parent and offspring never had anything more to do with each other after that. The young individual was taken to the equivalent of a nursery, where, gradually, during the next week or so, it began to essay small emergences of its limbs and head from their hiding places. Within two or three weeks it was up on its feet and mobile, and was taken out of the nursery to be put into what was apparently a school; where it began to work, or perhaps play at working, almost immediately and almost without instruction.

  “…Natural selection on this planet, assuming that this is the only or originating planet of the Laagi race,” dictated Mary in one of her reports, “seems to have specialized in communal life forms. If this turns out to be so, it may well be that the Laagi are a communal life form that evolved into an intelligence equal to humans and built a comparable civilization, one adapted to their own special requirements and so differing from our own.”

  “The result seems to be that while in many areas of activity they react according to racial imperatives, in which the needs of the community are all that is considered, in more modern and technological areas they react as individuals. Although I’ve been unable to find any hard evidence of a government and individuals acting as leaders, both I and James Wander feel strongly that there must be such things somewhere in the social machinery of the Laagi…”

  The adult Laagi ate at whatever communal food source was handy and slept at their work when they had reached the point where sleep was necessary. The greatest concession they made to the need to rest was, like Squonk, to get out of a general traffic area before going off to sleep. Also, their sleep was at best a matter of an hour or two and was taken at no set pattern of intervals.

  One somewhat unpleasant discovery was that the Laagi also died at their work. Occasionally one of them who had pulled in its limbs and head in what seemed normal sleep simply never woke up again. Death was signaled, apparently, by the fact that head, legs and arms emerged slightly from the skin folds into which they had withdrawn themselves and showed a limpness that was otherwise uncharacteristic.

  When this happened, sometimes the dead Laagi’s former coworkers would carry it off. Sometimes its former coworkers ignored it and after a while other Laagi came to remove it; and, then or shortly after, a living Laagi took its place.

  At Mary’s insistence, they followed such a removal team and found that the body was simply dumped onto the equivalent of the garbage pile from the nearest food room, from which a squonk-operated mechanical trash gatherer gathered it up along with the discarded food materials and took it off to be disposed of elsewhere.

  All this, Mary meticulously reported via Jim back to the memory banks of AndFriend. Meanwhile, Jim himself was occupied in two other activities.

  One of these was determining if it was possible, through Squonk, to get access to tools and the assistance of other squonks on a joint project. This particular research on his part came to Mary’s attention when Jim deliberately ordered Squonk to lift and move a piece of metal scaffolding that was leaning against a wall in a building half-factory, half-offices that they were in at the time. The scaffolding was far too heavy for Squonk alone to lift. But Jim concentrated strongly on the image he broadcast to Squonk of wanting the scaffolding moved, for its own length down the wall against which it rested.

  The results were an unqualified success. Squonk, ever-obliging, trotted off and rounded up three other squonks who were either passing by or for other reasons did not have their tentacles engaged at the moment. The four of them returned to the piece of scaffolding, lifted it with the strength of their combined tentacles and shifted it as Jim had envisioned.

  They made no objection at all to an order to immediately move it back again, once the original move had been made. Then they dispersed.

  “What’s happening? What’s Squonk doing now?” Mary’s voice woke Jim out of a self-congratulatory mood. “I wanted him to stand still so I could watch the Laagi on this assembly line.”

  “Sorry,” said Jim. “Just an experiment to see if I could get him to make use of other squonks for us, if necessary. I’m trying out a few things in the way of controlling him.”

  “Well, let me know beforehand, after this,” said Mary. “It may not always be the best time for you to pull him away from what I’m studying. Did you think of that?”

  “I didn’t. Sorry,” said Jim. “Back to the assembly line, Squonk.”

  And that was that. The other activity with which Jim was concerned was studying Mary herself.

  In the time since he had first met her he had gone from being irritated with her to an active dislike, and from there to a tolerance during the long period of getting him ready to become a part of AndFriend. From that point he had developed into a cautious partnership that was beginning to approach a genuine liking. But this had been swept away by his outright fury on discovering how he had been trick
ed into his situation here on the Laagi world. Now, however, he had made a step beyond that.

  The fury in him had faded and with it, curiously, all the negative feelings he had had at one time or another toward her. Somehow, working deep within him and underneath the surface changes in his emotions, something like a fondness and a genuine concern for her had developed. She no longer had the power to make him seriously angry. He liked her and he was worried about her; and, as the weeks grew into months on this alien planet, that worry about her grew.

  The Laagi, he and she had now pretty well established, lived to work—as did the squonks and probably most of the other communal species of life forms on this planet. They worked until they could work no longer, then they died. It was a world in which work was everything. Nothing else had any meaning.

  And Mary, herself, was a worker. She lived to work, and as far as he had learned, nothing else for her had any meaning. But what was natural for the Laagi was not natural for her, a human. Still, she was now caught up in an environment in which her ability to work no longer set her apart from anyone else—anyone but Jim himself, whom she had long since dismissed from any possible use as a yardstick. With most people such an environment would not pose such a threat. But Mary, Jim had concluded, had grown a protective shell about herself.

  He had checked up on her claims regarding the small amounts of sleep she needed. It was true to a certain extent that she was phenomenal at keeping going on what would normally be a very few hours out of Earth’s twenty-four. But beyond that there were a few holes in what she had told him about herself.

  For one thing, she did not sleep only when he was sleeping. He had watched the same things she had watched and later repeated for recording the reports she made on them. There had been things done by the Laagi that Jim had seen—things that he now knew her well enough to be sure she would have made part of her report if she had seen, that she had not reported.

  If she could not tell the difference between the periods when he was silent because he was asleep and those when he was silent because he was thinking, neither could he tell that difference in her—except by this sort of omission from her reports. The interesting question was whether she could herself. He had not realized at first, after becoming part of AndFriend, when he had been asleep. It might be Mary could not either. She might quite honestly believe that she slept only when he did. Out of the body as they both were, the physical signals customarily felt on waking were mostly missing.

  He concentrated on training himself to be aware of what small signs there were in himself that would tell him he had just woken after a period of sleep. Slowly, he began to identify them. There was a faint lassitude—not the physical heaviness that the body normally reported after being slowed down by the process of slumber, but a short space in which the mind had to rouse itself to the different process of thinking consciously again, after having abandoned the conscious for the unconsciousness of dreamland.

  There was also, as he came to recognize the existence of his sleep periods, as sleep periods, an awareness that he had not realized he possessed. It was an awareness of a period of inactivity, in the conscious area of his mind, a blank stretch in the memory record. And with his recognition of this, he began to remember the dreams he had had—just as someone who makes a point of writing down his memory of dreams on awakening becomes conscious of them.

  Remembering the dreams, he became able, after a fashion, to measure the length of his sleep period by the amount of his remembered dreams. It was very imprecise, but it gave him something on which to estimate the length of his sleep.

  In the process of doing this, for the first time, he came to realize that there had been a refreshment for him in having slept. His mental machinery had gotten some relief that it needed from its constant activity in the conscious state. This much realized, he made a final step forward and began to be aware of the mental fatigue signs that signaled him sleep was needed. It was a strange awareness, a feeling that was in no way a bodily feeling—something like the tension of a stretched rubber band and like that of the jittery nerves that in some people preceded a headache. It was very faint, but it was there, when needed; and he found that all that was necessary once he became aware of it was to look away—remove his conscious attention from the scene he was watching or any particular concern that had been occupying his mind—and he would fall asleep immediately.

  Finally, now that he had discovered this much about himself, he had a rough system for measuring time under these abnormal conditions. He set himself to seeing if he could further train himself to become aware of signs in Mary’s behavior that also signaled tiredness and the lassitude of just awakening. If what he had begun to suspect was true, she was killing herself.

  Chapter 21

  "…Although nothing much more than guesses are possible on the basis of the small amount of observation we have been able to make of the Laagi in this short time,” dictated Mary, “some possibilities might be considered as reasons for elements of Laagi behavior that have been unexplainable until now.

  “Such Laagi actions as those by some of their fighter spaceships on the spatial Frontier they share with us. For example, the occasional but not too infrequent situation of a large number of their space fighter craft turning and retreating from a much smaller number of human ones; or—conversely—a mere handful of their ships attacking a much larger number of human ones they have just encountered, even when such attack seems suicidal and therefore reasonless.”

  She stopped dictating, and there was a long moment in which Jim began to wonder if she would begin again.

  “Therefore… therefore,” she went on again abruptly, “we may consider as a possibility that the apparently unreasonable actions of the Laagi in the fighter ships just referred to were examples of reactions governed by a system of racial imperatives we humans do not have, and so do not realize exists. In other words, what seems unreasonable to us humans is reasonable to the Laagi, under certain special conditions.

  “From what I’ve seen, and from what Jim Wander, who is with me on this observational incursion into Laagi territory, has seen, the Laagi may be more strongly influenced than we are by the inherited reactions that promoted survival in their prehistoric forebears.”

  “The Laagi, as I’ve pointed out a number of times before this, seem to be at base a communal race, in the sense that a hive of bees or a hill of ants is a communal race. But for a communal race to develop a technology comparable to our own requires that at some point it must have allowed the development of a certain amount of individuality in its members. Technology requires invention. Invention demands originality. Originality is a faculty of the unique individual who is different from all his fellow individuals. The Laagi, as I have mentioned before, have no recreational areas or recreational activities. This is because their work is their recreation. Even our host member, whom we have named Squonk and who belongs to a local alien species of lesser intelligence than the Laagi, is actively unhappy unless he is constantly working during the hours he is awake. So with the Laagi themselves. They are born to work; and they do work until they die at their job—just as the worker bee literally works itself to death. I…”

  Her words trailed off once more. After a few seconds, she went on.

  “…I have made a number of attempts to determine whether at this time the Laagi’s occupation is still determined genetically, as that of the worker bee is. But so far, I’ve been unable to gain any solid evidence, one way or another. However, the impression both Jim Wander and I get is that the present-day, civilized Laagi does not have his occupation genetically selected for him at birth.”

  Squonk stumbled suddenly, backed up several steps and then began again searching the same area of floor he had just gone over, in the room where Mary and Jim were currently observing. The small alien was still single-mindedly in search of the missing object that the invisible Laagi within him would recognize when he, Squonk, found it. This was not the first time Squonk had
so stumbled and backed up to search again over an area he had already examined. He had done it for the first time three days before. Jim was concerned. Mary had not seemed to notice.

  “…if we use as a model for a typical human being one who has a base of instincts and reflexes based on those instincts, this overlaid by a pattern of cultural reactions and behaviors acquired from the community of humans surrounding the youngster as he grows up, and this in turn overlaid by a set of habitual actions and decisions, plus current decisions engendered by the conscious processing of previous experience plus the influence of the two lower layers of reaction, we have a three-layered structure for human action and response to a given situation.

  “By contrast, the Laagi appears to respond according to a two-layer structure of which the older, instinctive one is dominant under some conditions, but under others the newer, conscious layer can control. To create a hypothetical example, suppose that if a Laagi encountered another Laagi that showed a particular form of sickness, his older instinct would force him to destroy the sick one, even if consciously he did not wish to do so. But if the other Laagi showed some slight difference in that form of sickness, then his newer, individual consciousness would be allowed to use its discretion about killing the other Laagi or taking him to one of their hospitals.”

  Mary stopped abruptly. It was marvelous, thought Jim admiringly, what she had been able to deduce from observations alone of a totally alien race. Sherlock Holmes would have been proud of her. When she went on, though, her voice was ragged with fatigue.

  “Note again that what I have just suggested is a purely imaginary model, by way of example. We have not witnessed one Laagi killing another for any reason at all. We have not seen a fight or even what we could be absolutely sure was a serious disagreement between two or more Laagi…”