The Forever Man

  “That’s right,” said Jim. “We’ve never been able to bring back a live Laagi prisoner before, so that we could work out any method of communicating with that race. If we can bring one home now, we can get to work right away at solving the communication problem. Will you help?”

  “Certainly. We’ve already established the fact our two races will help each other. This merely executes that decision. Shall we go find what you wish right now?”

  “Give us a few minutes alone with each other and the ship here, first. I’ll call you when we’re ready to go.”

  “Agreed,” said ?1; and suddenly not only was he gone, but there were none of the firefly colors of the mind-people anywhere around. They were alone with AndFriend and the galaxy.

  “I wish we had our bodies,” said Mary dreamily.

  “I know what you mean,” answered Jim. “I do, too.”

  They were both silent for a long moment.

  “But I can see you perfectly well, you know that?” said Jim. “Isn’t it funny? When I had you around in the body I never really looked at you; and then, all this time, with no one to look at, got me started digging out the old memories of you and putting you back together, piece by piece, until I had you all complete in my mind’s eye. So that now I can see you as clearly as if you were standing in space, right here in front of me, beside AndFriend.”

  “You can’t. Not as if I was really here.”

  “Yes, I can. I tell you, I literally couldn’t see you any clearer if you were actually here in the body. I’ve got every part right, all built back together, a bit of nose here, a touch of smile at the corners of your mouth, there and there, all complete.”

  “Oh, Jim!” She laughed.

  “It’s sober fact,” he said. “I don’t know why I didn’t have the sense to take a good look at you when we were on the ground, back at Base. Because you’re beautiful. You’ve probably heard that so often it doesn’t mean anything to you. But you really are; and I just wanted you to know I’ve finally realized it. I don’t know why I didn’t have the sense before. Anyway, you understand, don’t you, Mary?”

  She did not answer.

  “Mary?” he said. “You understand, don’t you?”

  Still, there was no answer.

  “Mary?” he said. “Hey, Mary! Ahoy! Jim, here! Mary, do you read me? Answer me, for anybody’s sake!”

  “Hadn’t we better be getting back into the ship?” she said. Her voice was utterly cold.

  “Certainly. Right. But I was asking you if you could understand why it took me so long to realize—”

  “Why don’t you shut up for once—just for once?” she said. “Everything has to be a joke to you, doesn’t it? A lovely moment like that dance and you have to turn it into a clown act. Let’s drop the subject, shall we, and get back inside? The sooner we get back to Base the better I’m going to like it!”

  Jim felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. His mind whirled, baffled.

  “If you want to,” he said at last.

  “I do.”

  He thought of the inside of AndFriend—and they were within the ship.

  “If we’re going back into Laagi territory to look for one of their ships, you’d better start charting a flight plan—” Mary broke off suddenly. “Oh, no!”

  Jim had already seen what she had seen; and the blow this time was in the same category as the one of a moment before—which was still baffling him.

  Squonk half-lay, half-leaned against the com-seat of the pilot’s position. On the deck just before the seat and under the controls panel, where the pilot’s boots would normally rest, were lined up all of the small objects Jim had caused the ship’s robot to secret about AndFriend’s interior. All except one. That one, Squonk still held.

  His legs were extended by slightly different amounts, but approximately enough to raise him to the height necessary to let him rest his body’s weight on the edge of the seat; his neck was extended, his head rested on its left jaw upon the seat and all of his tentacles but one lay loosely about. He was unmoving and limp, except for that one tentacle. This also rested on the seat by his head; and the end of it was tightly curled, holding a large, shiny metal hex-nut, probably had been the last of the objects he had found; and hopefully, Jim thought, the one that had finally represented to him the long-sought “key,” which he had located at last.

  Mary said nothing; but Jim could feel, as if it was something tangible, the outpouring of emotion from her. The image of her in his mind was crying; and all his upset over her reaction to him just now outside the ship was swept away by the pain in him at her pain.

  “Mary, don’t,” he said. “He didn’t even know you or I existed. It didn’t matter from his point of view whether the ‘key’ was real or not. He probably died happy, thinking he’d found it. In any case, he died the way he wanted to, working.”

  “Leave me alone!” said Mary… and he could get no more from her than that.

  Yielding at last to things as they were, he turned back to the demands of duty. Taking mental control of the ship, he ran an automatic check of AndFriend’s equipment, internal and motive, and laid out a series of phase-shift jumps back into Laagi territory, close to the Laagi galactic centerline, and did the calculations on the first shift.

  Having done that, he put out a call.

  “?1,” he said. “Where are you? We’re ready to travel now. Could you come here, please?”

  A single invisible firefly light showed up before his nose.

  “You didn’t specify where ‘here’ was to be,” said ?1. “If you’ll do so in the future, I’ll be, as Mary says, obliged—and I hope I was right in guessing that it implied gratitude of one kind or another.”

  “It does; and you’re welcome, which is one of our standard answers to that polite phrase,” said Jim. “Now, about what we’re going to do: if you can help me in finding a Laagi ship, it would help a lot. Also, how will you be going about issuing your command to those aboard it to follow this ship? Can you act as a speaker for a large number of your people, or do they have to come with us, or can they just show up once we’ve found a Laagi ship, or what?”

  “Yes,” said ?1, “I believe we can help you find one of those holes you call Laagi ships. I will travel with you; and when needed, I can utter an order with the full voice of my people. It’s not necessary for them all to be there, in person. To ask you a question in turn, how are you planning to take this ship with you when you go?”

  “It takes us,” said Jim.

  There followed a rather confused discussion between the two of them in which Jim tried to explain both phase-shifting and ordinary drive to a mind that was completely unused to thinking in physical terms at all.

  “… Suppose we leave the matter at this,” said ?1 at last. “You tell this hole of yours to move to a certain place and it goes there. Can we agree on that?”

  “Yes, although—”

  “Please!” said ?1 firmly, “no more explanations. Holes, particularly holes without a spark of life or intelligence, are profoundly uninteresting to me. Is my statement essentially correct?”

  “It is,” said Jim. “All right. We’re going to make our first phase-shift to approximately the area of your frontier with the Laagi, the area where you first told them not to come any closer. From there, we can look farther into Laagi territory and see if they’ve set up some kind of watch to catch us, if we cross back more or less where we originally came in.”

  “Very well,” said ?1.

  “Right, then,” said Jim, “here we go. Shift number one—”

  He shifted.

  ?1 disappeared.

  It was a full minute before he reappeared.

  “I apologize!” he almost spluttered. “I most sincerely apologize. We all apologize and confess. When you spoke about moving stars, we had some doubts that you might have been talking of something you could never really achieve. I will be absolutely truthful with you; we only half-believed you’d ever be able to do an
y such thing, no matter how long you tried. Not that the mere possibility alone wasn’t reason enough for us to take action. But when we see now that you’ve already achieved the instantaneous repositioning of smaller holes… Well, we apologize for our doubts, which you must have guessed we had. Believe that you can count on our full cooperation from now on—in every possible way.”

  Jim was suddenly very grateful that he was not in his body at the moment and that in any case ?1 would not have been able to read the expression on his face. Mentally, he pounded his fist against his forehead. Of course! Why couldn’t the same mechanics founded on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which had birthed the phase-shift technique, be used to shift other, larger things—even stars? It would be a huge job to find the proper means and be a tremendous undertaking to actually shift something that large. But when he got back to Base, it would be well worth suggesting just that as a line of research.

  “Well, thank you,” he said to ?1 now. “And think nothing of the fact you were doubtful. We’d expect anyone to be.”

  “The Laagi also use this method to move their smaller holes—ships, I mean?”

  “I’m afraid they do,” said Jim gravely.

  “Let us hurry and find one of their ships to take back to your world so that you can get started immediately discovering how to communicate with them.”

  “Right away. Let’s first see,” said Jim, “if they’ve got any ships out there, watching for us to come back from your side of the frontier.”

  “There are no ships there. None!” said ?1. “1! will let you know if any concentration of their ships seems to be moving in your direction. Just a little way off, there is a single ship of theirs. You can take that one.”

  “Farther off? Where?” asked Jim, for to the limit of the viewing of AndFriend’s instruments, no other vessel was being reported.

  “Why, right there—nevermind!” said ?1.

  Suddenly the space around AndFriend was filled with fireflies once more and her screens, as well as Jim’s view of the firmament from all sides of the hull, showed the galaxy pinwheeling around them once again. Suddenly, everything was stable once more.

  “There!” said ?1.

  And there, indeed, a two-person Laagi fighting ship was, fifty meters away, completely within collision range, but floating as easily alongside as if invisible bonds already bound it to AndFriend.

  Jim’s mind leaped at the controls and he put an instant, safe five kilometers between his ship and the other one.

  “What’s wrong?” demanded ?1, puzzled.

  “We might have collided!” said Jim. “It could have destroyed both ships.”

  “Naturally,” said ?1 stiffly, “we would have seen that no such touching occurred.”

  “No doubt,” said Jim. “Let’s just say that for the comfort of my own personal sensibilities, I, prefer us at least this distance from them. Now will you please tell them to follow us wherever we go?”

  “We already have, naturally,” said ?1. “We also ordered them not to do anything unfriendly to your ship.”

  “Thank you,” said Jim.

  “You are, as you say, entirely welcome. Now, do you intend to make your own way home with this companion ship, or shall we assist you in that action, also?”

  Jim thought. It had not occurred to him before, but getting safely out around Laagi territory and back to Base might be greatly helped by having ?1 and his people along as guardians. On the other hand, sheer luck had given him a considerable prize in the mind-people’s reaction to seeing the phase-shift in action. It might be better to act as if he did not need any help. An idea occurred to him.

  “What we’re going to have to do,” Jim said, “is go at right angles to the direction by which we came here, until we’re clear out of Laagi territory. Then we’ll turn and head straight out from the center of the galaxy again until we get level with our area of space, which is beyond the Laagi territory. If you and your friends would stay with us on the first leg of the trip, at least until we were out of Laagi territory, then if a number of their ships find us, you people could command them to leave us alone.”

  There was a moment’s pause, which Jim had come to understand indicated that ?1’s people were talking the matter over.

  “Why don’t you just reposition yourself directly at your home planet?” ?1 asked.

  “Well,” said Jim, “you see, there’s a drawback to the phaseshifting system, so far. Holes of all kinds have their limitations, as you know—"

  “Oh, yes indeed,” said ?1.

  “Yes. Well, one of the limitations in this instance is that the mathematics required to figure out our destination point, even using the best of hole-type means we can put in these ships to figure it out, has a built-in percentage of error. The farther we have to go to a new position in one shift, the greater that error becomes; until at a repositioning of much over fifteen light-years the possible error becomes as large as the distance to the new position. That means, in practice, that if we shift a distance of fifteen light-years in one jump, we could end up in a position that would be as much as fifteen light-years off from where we want to be. The result is that we move in shifts, normally, of no more than five light-years at a jump.”

  “It seems so clumsy and ridiculous,” said ?1.

  “It’s both,” put in Mary unexpectedly, “but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “I really don’t understand. Why should there be error? If you can see your destination out there, why not go straight to it?”

  “Well, the fact is, we can’t see it,” said Jim. “We find it by using a theoretical line running from our star to the center of the galaxy—”

  Jim tried to explain human methods of navigation and found himself back in the same tangle of misunderstandings and inability to understand on ?1’s part that he had encountered in trying to explain phase-shifting.

  “Nevermind!” said ?1 at last. “Just tell me this. You can’t see your star, you say?”

  “See it? Of course not,” said Jim. “It’s somewhere between a hundred and two hundred light-years from here.”

  “I can’t believe such limitation in a people who can do what you do,” said ?1. “I was simply going to ask you to point it out to me, and then I’d tell you how to follow the pattern of forces that would lead you most directly to it. But how do you intend to get to it if you can’t see it?”

  “That’s what I was trying to explain to you just now,” said Jim. “The direct route would be up the line from our star to the center of the galaxy-and the ship’s instruments, which have kept track of each movement and change of position it’s made, can tell me where that is from here. But if we find that and follow the direct line of it up-galaxy, we’ll have to run right through the center of Laagi space; and they’ll be sure to find us. So we want to go out and around.”

  “Please,” said ?1, “take your ship to this centerline and I’ll accompany you.”

  “That’s back to where we might nun into other Laagi ships,” said Jim.

  “If you do, we will protect you,” said ?1. “Please, just take this hole and your captive one to this line you talk about.”

  “All right,” said Jim.

  He made the calculations and the shift.

  “Now,” he said to ?1, when they had arrived, “we’re on the line. Straight out away from the galactic center, straight through the heart of Laagi territory, brings us eventually to human space and about fifty light-years farther on we come to our sun, a G0-type star.”

  “Can you indicate the line?”

  “I can orient our ship along it.”

  Jim did.

  “All right,” said ?1, “looking out along the line the long axis of your ship now indicates, I can see a G0-type star directly in line with it at a distance of roughly—what is that barbarous form of measurement you use—a hundred and twenty-three times the distance light travels in what you concept as a ‘year’.”

  “A year is the amount of time it tak
es for our planet to orbit its star.”

  “I see. That’s a rather important planet you seem to inhabit if you’re planning on measuring the galaxy in terms of one motion of its local dance—but, forgive me, as holes I mustn’t hold you too accountable.”

  “We have other measurements. A parsec—”

  “Please. One such clumsiness is enough. Moreover, it’s beside the point. Your ship is now pointed at your destination and you know how far away it is. Make one shift to that destination. That will put you past and out of Laagi space.”

  “And we’ll probably,” said Jim, “find ourselves a hundred and twenty-three light-years away from that destination in some other direction—or perhaps a multiple of a hundred and twenty-three light-years—and possibly lost.”

  “If you do, I will direct you back to your star, helping you correct your errors until you finally reach it. Do as I say. Shift a hundred and twenty-three light-years.”

  “Too close,” said Jim. “If by sheer bad luck we happen to end up right on target, we could land in the center of the star itself.”

  “The center of a star has its interesting points. I have examined several at odd times. You might find the center of this one worth looking at—this once, anyway.”

  “No doubt,” said Jim. “But our ship wouldn’t; and the Laagi ship, to say nothing of the Laagi inside her, wouldn’t. I’ll shift one hundred and twenty-two lightyears. Then we’ll only run the random risk of error putting us in the center of some other star.”

  He set the ship’s equipment to calculating the jump.

  “What are we waiting for?” asked ?1.

  “The ship has to…” Jim found himself on the edge of another discussion in which he would not possibly be able to explain mechanics to ?1. “… get itself ready before it shifts. It just takes a matter of minutes.”

  “I see. I am missing out on a considerable amount of dancing, with all these delays. Forgive me. It’s uncharitable of me to mention it.”

  “You’re forgiven.”

  “Never in the history of our people has anything outside our own pursuits been allowed to use up so much of our valuable time and attention.”