The Forever Man (10 page)

At this celebration he presided like a ghost at a banquet. In vain they kept trying to spike his ginger ale with vodka and trick him into empty rooms with attractive females who had been given the mission of seducing him.

After that, they pretty well gave up and left him alone. On his part, he increased his solitary exercising and became stringier and more somber than ever.

In fact, they had been using the wrong bait.

His first month after he had moved into the building that held the residence quarters that were part of Mary Gallegher's lab—but completely apart from the lab and served by an entirely separate entrance from outside—he had heard nothing more from her in spite of her suggestion that she might need him from time to time for experimental purposes. At the end of the first month he had felt relieved rather than otherwise. He did not relish the role of laboratory rat.

But when the second month began to trickle away without a summons from her, he began to wait and watch for one. It was not, he told himself, that he had a particular interest in her using him, but that his being called into the laboratory proper where she worked might give him a chance to get to
AndFriend
once again. Finally, toward the end of the second month, a call came, and he reported happily, only to find himself hustled directly up into one of the lab rooms in the inner tower of the building.

He had only a glimpse from a second-story balcony walk way, down into the main open area of the building where he had seen the two ships on his previous visit. To his disappointment, what seemed to be a large tent of opaque plastic fabric had been erected over the section of the floor where they lay, so that he could see nothing of either one of them.

It turned out he had only been wanted to wear his space suit while a couple of Mary's staff made some tests of either him or it—the two women doing it were not informative and he had no idea what they were up to. Being once more enclosed in the suit with its familiar, ancient smells brought on him a nostalgia almost too strong to bear.

After that he was called in about once a week for different tests, but the plastic tent was always in place and he was unable to learn for certain even whether the two ships were let alone in the same positions and conditions in which he had last seen them.

The back of his head began to evolve wild dreams in which he somehow got into the lab, stole
AndFriend
and took off into space. Eventually he literally began to dream such dreams, when sleeping. Meanwhile, he was working himself physically to the bone, to pass the days and bring about sleep of any kind—which had been harder and harder to come by, in the same measure as his disinterest in food grew.

He could and did hide from his friends that it was not wine, women and song he needed, but
AndFriend
and space. He was certain he had also hidden it successfully from Mollen, and from Mary—whom, in any case, he had not seen in person since that first night in the lab. What concerned him more was whether he was being successful in keeping the depth of his need hidden from the physician to whom he had to report almost daily.

It was evidently part of the whole package of surveillance, control and so forth set up around him, that his state of health be monitored and recorded on what was effectively a twenty-four hour a day basis. The Medical Officer, also a full colonel, who examined him three times a week or more, was probably the one person to whom Jim talked at all openly.

Part of this was because there was no one else Jim felt safe talking to about himself. The other part was that whatever the physician's actual specialty was—and he had told Jim once, when the visits had first started, but Jim had since forgotten—Jim gradually came to feel that there was something about the other that hinted at a touch of the psychiatrist in him. Not that Jim had any experience with psychiatrists; but there was a way the other man had of listening to him that seemed different from the listening of other doctors to whom Jim had gone.

He told himself he had an unduly suspicious mind. Nonetheless, he found himself saying more than he had intended, so that he was surprised to hear the words coming from his own mouth.

The procedures daring Jim's visits were ordinarily route. Unless there were lab samples to be taken from him, it was merely a matter of Jim's being scanned by a number of esoteric instruments, after which he sat down for a few words with the physician before being turned loose once more.

“You're losing weight again,” said the physician, checking through the papers that were the hard copy of Jim's file and lay on the desk before him. He was a tall, gangling man in his early fifties with a high forehead, a straight nose and a surprisingly gentle, small smile that came at unexpected moments.

“All right, Doc,” said Jim. “I'll eat more.”

The doctor glanced up at him from the papers.

“You could try exercising less,” he said.

“And then what'd I do with my time?”

“There's always your job,” said the doctor.

“What job?”

The doctor smiled his small smile.

“I don't know what to do with you,” he said, sitting back with a sigh. “The first person I've ever treated who tried to kill himself with good health. But, you know, I'm serious about your cutting back on the physical activity.”

“For God's sake, Doc,” said Jim. “Don't ask me to do that. The only time I can forget about things is when I'm running or swimming or sweating it out to the point where I haven't got any energy left over to think with. I'll get more food down me. I don't mind eating; it's just that it's kind of a chore these days.”

The doctor scribbled on a prescription pad, tore off the sheet he had written on and handed it to Jim.

“Take these, two a day, when you get up and when you go to bed,” he said. “They ought to increase your appetite.”

Jim looked at the piece of paper in his hand, dubiously. He was not a pill-taker by preference.

“It won't make me dopey, will it, Doc?” he asked. “I mean, it isn't some sort of tranquilizer?”

“I guarantee it won't make you dopey. Let's just hope it makes you more interested in food,” said the physician. “Well, that's it, then. See you Thursday.”

“Right,” said Jim, getting up.

He left.

At first it did seem that the pills gave him a little more appetite. At any rate, he made a point of getting more food inside him whether his body craved it or not, and his weight came back up a few pounds. But then he leveled off and stayed where he was on the scale in the doctor's office each time he came in. He suggested once to the doc—since the pills had given him no feeling from taking them at all—that he was willing to up the dosage, if that would do any good.

“I think not,” said the physician. “You're taking about what you should of that, right now.”

So, he kept forcing the food. It was a problem, because he did not sleep better. Sometime about this period, also, his hours of slumber began to be occupied not so much by dreams of his stealing
AndFriend
and escaping into space, as with nightmares in which the lab suddenly burnt down and people would not let him go in and help keep the fire away from
AndFriend
—which bothered him even though he knew an ordinary fire would not harm the ship. Or he would dream that there had been a sudden earthquake that opened a fissure right under Mary's lab. All that was needed was someone to go in and hook a cable around
AndFriend
to keep her from being dropped into the lava-hot interior of the earth, but they held him back from doing so because it was “too dangerous.”

Meanwhile, Mary's staff—he still had not seen her in person since that first visit to the lab—began to call him in more and more frequently. They were on a new kick now, as he entered the ninth month of his captivity on the Base. This one had him still wearing his space suit while listening, over and over again, to the voice recordings of himself, Mary and Raoul Penard when they had taken his Wing out to meet
La Chasse Gallerie
in Laagi territory, and convoy her home here to the Base. When he had listened to it all the way through, they would ask him questions about who had said what to who. It was like being on the witness stand in an endless court trial.

When they got him to the point where he knew the recordings by heart, they switched to having him work with recordings in which one of the voices was edited out, and he spoke the words of that speaker; and it finally ended with him playing, over and over again, the part of Raoul.

They kept it up until, among his other dreams, he began to dream that he actually was Raoul; or rather what was left of Raoul as a mind, locked in the sliced and broken metal that was
La Chasse Gallerie
. Curiously, these dreams were not unpleasant. But finally his appetite gave up for good. He would get to sleep, sleep for about two or three hours, dreaming nightmares, and then wake. Only getting out under the night sky in his running gear and covering four or five miles would rub out the memories of those dreams and let him get to solid sleep for a few hours. He even tried the desperate measure of getting drunk to make himself sleep, but that did not work either.

“Alcohol may help put you out,” his doctor told him, “but after a few hours, it turns around and makes you wakeful again.”

“I've got to do something. Can't you just give me a sleeping pill, Doc?”

“That's only a temporary solution and this is a continuing problem,” said the doctor. “Maybe that medication I gave you for your appetite is working against you now, instead of for you. Let's try taking you off it.”

So Jim went off the pills. The first night he slept marvelously, the next night not so well. By the end of a week he was back with the dreams and the starlit runs again. He could feel himself beginning to lose his grip; and he found himself taking it out on the physician in a way he would never have considered doing, a year previously.

“It's this goddamned bird-in-a-gilded-cage life they've got me living!” he said. “I could take it if I could only get a taste, just a taste of space, once in a while. If they'd only let me take
AndFriend
out once a week—once a month, even! If they'd only let me see her!”

“You might be right,” said the doctor. “But I don't have any say about that. Have you tried putting in a formal request to visit your former ship?”

“Ever since this thing started. Ten months now!” said Jim. “I put in a written request through channels two and three times a week. All they do is come back disapproved.”

“Bring the next one to me. I'll add a letter and sign it,” said the doctor.

Jim did.

It came back disapproved.

He called Mollen and was told that the general could not be reached right now, but that his request to talk to the general would be passed on to the general.

Mollen did not call back that day or the next.

Jim called again.

That day Mollen did not call back, either.

Jim called again. Still, there was no call-back from Mollen's office, and Mollen had made no other effort to contact him.

That night, after one more of the innumerable sessions in Mary's lab in which Jim was made again to play through the conversation of Raoul's rescue, saying what Raoul had been heard to say while this was going on, he had a new nightmare.

This time when he was Raoul, however, on becoming aware of
AndFriend
and the rest of the Wander Wing that was convoying him back to Base, he broke off his litany of poetry and recitation.

“No, you don't!” he howled out the earphones of all their suits, swung
La Chasse Gallerie
in a hundred and eighty degree turn and headed away from Earth, back into enemy territory.

The dream changed, without reason but without surprising Jim, as dreams have a habit of doing. He found himself still in his space suit, standing on the observation platform of one of the big command ships on the Frontier, watching in a screen as
AndFriend
drove across into Laagi territory.

“What're you doing?” Jim shouted at the gunnery command officer, standing next to him and also watching. “There's a whole flight of Laagi ships coming up on her!”

“Oh, I thought they told you,” the gunnery command officer answered cheerfully. “They were through with her in the lab, so they decided to get some use out of her as an unmanned drone to draw Laagi fire, so we can make a study of how the aliens attack. Look at them now, will you? They're moving in, now. Now they're really starting to slice her up.”

“Unmanned? No!” cried Jim. His gaze was back on the screen, which now showed
AndFriend
being killed and destroyed. “Baby, don't just run straight like that. Cut! Cut and run! Fire back...”

In his mind's eye he saw his own empty command chair, with the buttons he could have touched if he was there, the controls he could have used, if he was in the seat. Sweat sprang out all over him; and meanwhile, beside him, the gunnery command officer continued his cheerful chatter about how badly
AndFriend
was being destroyed, as if it was a game, an entertainment…

Jim woke, throwing off the bedcovers in one wild movement. The underwear which years of ship's duty had conditioned him to use as nightwear was glued to him by the perspiration that soaked it. Still caught up in the emotions of seeing
AndFriend
destroyed while he ached to save her, he stripped off the sodden T shirt and shorts and stumbled into the shower to pour gallons of water on his shaking body. After which he dressed in his running clothes and went out under the unchanging stars to run the streets through the Base until he was limp with exhaustion.

The next day he went in person to Mollen's offices.

The general was out, he was told.

He said he would wait.

He was told politely that he was not allowed to wait.

“Then send for the Military Police,” he told them, taking a chair, “because I'm waiting!”