The Forever Man
Authors: Gordon R. Dickson
Gordon R. Dickson
START SCIENCE FICTION
An Imprint of Start Publishing LLC
New York, New York
THE FOREVER MAN
© 1986 by Gordon R. Dickson.
First Start Science Fiction edition 2013.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Science Fiction, 609 Greenwich Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Published by Start Science Fiction,
an imprint of Start Publishing LLC
New York, New York
Please visit us on the web at
www.start-media.com
ISBN: 978-1-62793-463-3
Chapter 1
The phone was ringing. He came up out of a sleep as dark as death, fumbled at the glowing button in the phone's base with numb fingers and punched it. The ringing ceased.
“Wander here,” he mumbled. An officer he did not recognize showed on the screen.
“Major, this is Assignment. Lieutenant Van Lee. Laagi showing upward of thirty ships facing our sector of the Frontier. Scramble, sir.”
“Right,” he muttered.
There was no reason for the Laagi to start putting extra ships into that part of their territory that faced the North American Sector, and necessitate an all-personnel call-out of the ship-handling crewsâincluding people like himself who had just come back in off patrol out there six hours ago.
But then, attacking or running, the Laagi made no sense. They never had.
“You're to show in Conference Room K at four hundred hours. Bring your personals.”
“Right.” Groggily he rolled over on his stomach and squinted at his watch in the glow from the button on the phone. In the pale light, the figures on his wrist-com stood at twelve minutes after threeâthree hundred twelve hours. Enough time.
“Understood, sir?”
“Understood, Lieutenant,” he said.
“Very good, sir. Out.”
The phone went dead. For a moment the desire for sleep sucked at Jim Wander like some great black bog; then with a convulsive jerk he threw it and the covers off him in one motion and sat up on the edge of his bed in the darkness, scrubbing at his face with an awkward hand.
After a second, he turned the light on, got up, showered and dressed. As he shaved, he watched his face in the mirror. It was still made up of the same roughly squarish, large-boned features he remembered, but the lines about the mouth and between the eyebrows seemed deepened with the sleep, under the tousled black hair, coarsely curling up from his forehead. It could not be drink, he thought. He never drank except on leave, nowadays. Alcohol at other times did nothing for him anymore. It was just that now he slept like a log, like a log watersoaked and drowning in some bottomless lake.
He had not gone stale. Out on the Frontier he was as good as ever. But he needed somethingâwhat, he could not specify. He felt the lack of it, like the emptiness of a long-empty stomach inside him. But it was not hunger, because he was fed regularly; and it was not women, as his friends suggested, because he had no trouble finding women on his leaves from duty. What he wanted was to come to grips with something. That was it, to have a wall behind him he could set his back against and a job to do in front of him, where he could see himself getting it done, instead of fighting an endless war and getting nowhere, surrounded by those who found simply being in the war enough to justify their existence.
He needed to accomplish something and find someone who understood what it was like to have that need.
He got up and started getting himself ready for duty.
When he was finally dressed, he strapped on last of all his “personals,” his sidearm, the painkiller kit, the little green thumbnail-square box holding the x-capsule. Then he left his room, went down the long, sleeping corridor of the officers' quarters and out a side door into the darkness of predawn and the rain.
He could have gone around by the interior corridors to the Operations building, but it was a short cut across the quadrangle and the rain and chill would wake him, drive the last longing for sleep from his bones. As he stepped out of the door the invisible rain, driven by a light wind, hit him in the face. Beyond were the blurred lights of the Operations building across the quadrangle.
Far off to his left thunder rolled. Tinny thunder, the kind heard at high altitudes, in the mountains. Beyond the rain and darkness were the Rockies. Above the Rockies, the clouds. And beyond the clouds, space, stretching light-years of distance to the Frontier.
âTo where he would doubtless be before the dawn rose, above this quadrangle, above these buildings, these mountains, and this Earth.
He entered the Operations building, showed his identification to the Officer of the Day, and took the lift tube up to the fourth floor. The frosted pane of the door to Conference Room F glowed with a brisk, interior light. He knocked on the door and went in without waiting for an answer. Inside, the room was half-full of pilots like himself and their gunners.
“Oh, Jim!” said the colonel behind the briefing desk. “Not here. They want you in Conference Room K, this time.”
Jim grunted. He had forgotten. He went out. One floor down and halfway down the corridor to the right was Conference K. Jim went in this time without even knockingâand stopped. Like all conference rooms in Operations, it had one desk and many chairs. This room also had two people, one of whom was General Louis Mollen, Sub-Chief of Operations, and the other was a woman Jim did not know.
Mollen, round and hard-bodied as a medicine ball, with a head to match, sat behind the desk; and in a chair half-facing him was a woman in military flight clothes, in her midtwenties, lean and high-foreheaded, with the fresh skin and clear eyes of someone who has spent most of her years inside walls, sheltered from the weather. Under reddish blond hair her eyes were blue-green, in a face that was rectangular, with the jawlines sloping straight down to a small, square chin. It was not a remarkable face. Nor was it unremarkable. It was a strong, determined face.
“Sorry, sir. I should have knocked,” said Jim.
“Not important,” said Mollen. “Come in.”
Jim came in and both the other two stood up as he approached the desk. They watched him closely, and Jim found himself examining the woman. The flight coveralls she wore had been fitted to her, which meant she was not just a civilian fitted out by the supply depot for this occasion. At the same time something about her did not belong in the Operations building; and Jim, out of the dullness of the fatigue that was still on him and the emptiness in him, found himself twinged by a sudden and reasonless resentment at her presence here, at the moment of a scramble. She looked unnaturally wide-awake and competent for this dark hour of the morning. Of course, so did Mollen; but that was different.
Jim stopped in front of the desk.
“Jim,” said the general, deep-voiced, his round, snub-nosed, pugnacious face unsmiling. “I want you to meet Dr. Mary Gallegher. She's from the Geriatrics Bureau.”
She would be, thought Jim sourly, reaching out to shake hands with her. Mary Gallegher was almost as tall as Jim himself, who at five feet ten was near the upper limit in height for the cramped quarters of the pilot's com seat of a fighter ship, and her handshake was not weak. But still⦠here she was, thought Jim, still resenting her for being someone as young as Jim himself, full of the juices of living, and with all her attention focused on the gray and tottering end-years of life. A bodysnatcherâa snatcher of old bodies from the brink of the grave for a few months or a few years.
“Pleased to meet you, Mary,” he said.
“Good to meet you, Jim.”
“Sit down,” said the general. Jim pulled up a chair and they all sat down once more around the desk.
“What's up, sir?” asked Jim. “They told me it was a general call-out.”
“The call-out's a fake. Just an excuse to put extra ships on the Frontier for something special,” answered Mollen. “The something special's why Mary's here. And you. What do you remember about the Sixty Ships Battle?”
“It was right after we found we had a frontier in common with the Laagi, wasn't it?” said Jim, slightly puzzled. “Over one hundred years ago or so. Back before we found out logistics made mass spaceship battles unworkable. Sixty of ours met forty-some of theirs beyond the Frontier, as it is now, and theirs were better. What about it?”
“Do you remember how the battle came out?” It was the civilian, Mary Gallegher, leaning forward with an intensity that puzzled him.
Jim shrugged.
“They were better, as I say. Our ships were slower then. We hadn't started to design them for guarding a frontier, instead of fighting pitched battles. They cut us up and suckered what was left into staying clumped together while they set off a nova explosion,” he said. He looked into her eyes and spoke deliberately. “The ships on the edge of the explosion were burned up like paper cutouts. The ones in the center just disappeared.”
“Disappeared,” said Mary Gallegher. She did not seem disturbed by Jim's description of the explosion. “That's the right word. How long ago did you say this was?”
“Over a hundred years ago,” said Jim. He turned and looked at General Mollen, with a glance that said plainly, âWhat is this, sir?'
“Look here, Jim,” said the general. “We've got something to show you.”
He pushed aside the few papers on the surface of the table in front of him and touched some studs on the control console near the edge of the top. The overhead lights dimmed. The surface of the table became transparent and gave way to a scene of stars. To the three seated around the desk top it was as if they looked down and out into an area of space a thousand lightyears across. To the civilian, Jim was thinking, the stars would be only a maze. To Jim himself, the image was long familiar.
Mollen's hands did things with the studs. Two hazy spheres of dim light, each about a hundred and fifty lightyears in diameter along its longest axis, sprang into view, bright enough to establish their position and volume, not so bright as to hide the stars they enclosed. The center of one of the spheres was the surf of Earth, and the farthest extent of this sphere in one direction intermixed with an edge of the other.
“Our area of space.” said Mollen's voice, out of the dimness around the table. “âAnd the Laagi's, Mary. They block our expansion in that direction, and we block theirs in this. The distribution of the stars in this view being what it is, it's not practical for either race to go around the other. You see the Frontier area, Mary?”
“Where the two come together, yes,” said Mary.
“Now Jimâ” said Mollen. “Jim commands a Wing of our Frontier Guard ships, and he knows that area well. Nothing but unmanned drones of ours have ever gotten deep into Laagi territory beyond the Frontier and come back out again. Agreed, Jim?”
“Agreed, sir,” said Jim. “More than twenty, thirty lightyears deep is suicide.”
“Well, perhaps,” said Mollen. “But let me go on. The Sixty Ships Battle was fought a hundred and twelve years agoâhere.” A bright point of light sprang into existence in the Frontier area. “One of the ships engaged in it was a one-man vessel with a semianimate automatic control system, named by its pilot
La Chasse Gallerie
, you said something, Jim?”
The exclamation had emerged from Jim's lips involuntarily. And at the same time, foolishly, a slight shiver had run down his back. It had been years since he had run across the old tale as a boy.
“It's a French-Canadian ghost legend, sir,” he said. “The legend was that
voyageurs
who had left their homes in Eastern Canada to go out on the fur trade routes and who had died out there would be able to come back home one night of the year. New Year's night. They'd come sailing in through the storms and snow in ghost canoes, to join the people back home and kiss the girls they now wouldn't ever be seeing again. That's what they called the story, âLa Chasse Gallerie.' It means the hunting of a type of butterfly that invades beehives to steal honey.”
