The Forever Man (14 page)

This vision screen displayed a number of “windows.” The full left half of it was a single window that looked across the Frontier into the Sector guarded by the fighter ships under this ship's command. The right half of the screen was displaying a number of windows showing close-ups of the fighter ships in the Wings under command here, some of them, Jim knew, more than five light-years distant from where he stood.

A command officer of the ship stood before the large left segment of the screen, watching. A hand-control in his right palm blinked with code lights from the various instruments at the compositions, and his hand-control was now emitting a steady buzzing that warned of Laagi ships coming out toward this sector, though they were evidently still too far off to be shown in the screen.

The buzzing ground away irritatingly on Jim's eardrums, and the red coveralls uniform of the command officer seemed unnaturally garish against the green of the walls and the black of the screen with its thick sprinkling of starlights. In fact, everything in the command room, seen with his present distortion of vision, seemed to stand out in ugly fashion from everything else there, as if an emphasized three-dimensional space was in effect. There was an unnaturalness about all of it; and the buzzing of the hand-control, irritatingly, sounded far louder than it should have in Jim's ears.

He turned toward Mary and Mollen, on his right. They were both, it seemed to his unnatural vision, looking at him oddly; but everything was so distorted he could not trust himself to interpret fine details like the expressions on faces. He started toward them.

He had barely taken his first step, however, when he saw their eyes leave him and go to the left half of the screen in front of the command officer. Jim stopped and turned back to look in that direction himself. A new window had just been displayed in part of the left half of the screen, directly in front of the officer; and something, he was not at first sure what, drew Jim's gaze to the single ship displayed there on close view.

He squinted at the ship, then stared.

Forgetting all about Mary and Mollen he tacked across the slanting floor of the bridge at the closest approach to a nun that his unsteady balance would permit, until he was beside the command officer and joining him in staring at the ship shown in the new window—staring at it in utter disbelief.

“That's my ship!” he said.

The command officer appeared not to hear him. The buzzing that warned of the oncoming Laagi vessels seemed to roar in Jim's eats.

“I said—that's my ship!” he shouted over the buzzing in the officer's ear.

A second, smaller window suddenly sprang into existence alongside the one that showed
AndFriend
. The squat, dark shapes of oncoming Laagi ships were now displayed in it, like potbellied, heavy salmon ready to spawn.

“It's just some old hulk they want to get rid of,” the officer said without taking his eyes off the screen. He seemed to have only half-heard what Jim had said. “Don't worry. There's no one aboard her.”

“No one aboard her!” cried Jim.

“No, they're just using her as a drone target. They want to find out what parts of a ship the Laagi direct their fire on when it simply comes straight on and doesn't defend itself—”

Even as he spoke, there was something—no more than a flicker on the screen showing
AndFriend
. It was the strike of a weapon from one of the Laagi ships, which were still too far away to be seen in the same screen as
AndFriend
. A slantingly vertical gash opened the side of
AndFriend
. She rolled a quarter-turn to port, like a wounded animal, then righted her self and continued onward into the fire of the oncoming aliens.

“Turn her back! Bring her back here!” Jim grabbed the arm of the officer. “Don't you understand? That's
AndFriend
, my ship—the one they've been studying for a year now, the one that escorted back Raoul Penard's ship. She's too valuable to lose, don't you understand me? Get her back!”

“No, no,” said the officer soothingly, pulling away from him. “You're right about what ship it is, but they've got all they want from her. She's just an old hulk good for this kind of target practice, now. Say, will you look at the way they're cutting her up?"

"I'm dreaming this!" said Jim frantically. "It isn't true. It's my dream!"

But it was not a dream. In his dream it had not been like this, with Mary and Mollen, who had now drawn close and were also watching. There was nothing dreamlike about the solidity of the crazily tilted deck under his feet, the details of the images in the windows.
AndFriend
was slashed again and again by the power weapons of the Laagi, but she continued on toward them, not trying to evade, not fighting back, just continuing to her destruction.

"Baby, baby, cut and run. Shift clear. Shift and fire back. Baby—" Jim heard his own voice like the voice of some other man at prayer. In his mind he saw the empty command chair in
AndFriend
. His fingers twitched, reaching to touch firing and control buttons that were hundreds of thousands of miles distant in the dying fighter.

Again and again,
AndFriend
shuddered to the direct lashing of the Laagi power weapons that opened her metal sides like tissue paper under red-hot knives. In his mind Jim could see her empty pilot room, with the empty pilot com-chair, the lights winking unseen on her board, signaling the oncoming of the Laagi ships, signaling her own weapons were on target, waiting for the orders to fire and to evade fire; but there was no one there to order her to respond.

He grabbed desperately at the hand-control in the officer's grasp, but the drug-clumsiness in him betrayed him. The other pulled away. Jim's hands grasped spasmodically at empty air and he lost his balance on the treacherously angled deck beneath his feet.

He feel and struggled to get back on his feet. But the apparent slope of the deck, a great wave of nausea and an increased loss of balance, as if his space-shift sickness was suddenly running wild within him, frustrated him. He made it to his knees and then fell sprawling again.

"Baby, baby..." he prayed, rolling on his back on the sloping floor. His eyes saw a corner of green ceiling and a corner of black space and stars that was the screen—as they would be showing on
AndFriend
's screen, right now. He reached upward with both arms as if he could reach out across the thousands of miles to the buttons before that empty comchair. He saw only the pilot room…

He was in the com-chair. He was invisible but he was there. His invisible body was taking charge. His invisible fingers were finding the drive buttons and the firing buttons. He saw them depressing before him and felt
AndFriend
responding with movement and weapons. A strike by a Laagi weapon came through and destroyed half the pilot room beside his chair. He felt the fraction-of-a-moment's heat-blow through the invisible suit protecting his nonexistent right shoulder. It was too late for him and
AndFriend
to get away now; but at least they could fight. The Laagi would not simply have her for nothing. He and she together would fight back. They would fight. They would fight…

He woke surrounded by silence and darkness. Unbroken silence and unrelieved darkness, as if all the stars had been taken from the universe, and it stretched away forever around him, limitless, lightless, and at peace…

“Where am I?” he asked—and heard his own voice hollowly echoing.

“It's all right,” said the voice of Mary. There was an anxious tone to it. “You're back at Base. You and
AndFriend
. It's all right.”

“Can you fix her?”

“She's not touched,” said the voice of Mollen, “and never was. She never left here—it was a mock-up, an imitation of her, you saw out on the Frontier.”

Jim pondered this.

“Sir, I don't believe you,” he said at last. “I'd know her. It was
AndFriend
.”

“No,” said the voice of Mollen. “That's why you were drugged.”

The older man's voice grew harsh.

“Do you think we didn't think of that? That's why we had you higher'n a kite. Anyone could imitate your ship, but nobody but you could give it a soul.”

Jim remembered that Mollen had been a fighter pilot once, himself. The time had to have come for him, too, when he had had to leave his ship. Jim said nothing, considering this and what the other man had just said. He felt clearheaded and natural now, except for the darkness all about him. His slowness in answering was simply because now, for some reason, there seemed all the time in the world to think.

“I'm in
AndFriend
now, like Raoul Penard's in
La Chasse Gallerie
, aren't I?” he said at last.

“Yes,” said the voice of Mary. “When you couldn't stand to watch what you thought was
AndFriend
getting killed, you went to her—but you went to the real ship, which was here all the time.”

“Yes,” said Jim.

“Can you see us?” said a new voice. For a second Jim could not place it; and then he recognized it as the voice of the Base doc he had gone to almost daily before he had finally broken and staged the sit-in at Mollen's office.

“No,” said Jim. “I think I'm going to sleep now. I'm very tired.”

He must have slept for some time. When he woke the darkness was still there. He stayed where he was in it, replaying in his mind the conversation he had had just before going to sleep.

“Can you see us?” the doc had said. But he had not seen them, or anything else. Could he see if he wanted to? If
AndFriend
was where she had been all this time he must be under the plastic tent in Mary's lab. Surely he could see that.

He could. There was no sudden awareness of light. In fact, he was not really sure how he was seeing, what he was using for eyes or where they might be on
AndFriend
's hull. He seemed simply to be able to see anything he wanted in any direction, until his gaze was stopped by the dark plastic of the enclosing tent. He told himself that the tent was not there, and abruptly he was able to see the whole inside of the large lab section that housed it, up to the cranes and slings, four stories overhead.

Neither Mary nor Mollen were in sight, let alone the doc. But a thin young man he recognized as one of Neiss's team sat in the tent itself, reading in a folding chair to the right of the nose of his hull.

“I'm awake,” said Jim.

The young man lost his book and nearly fell out of his chair.

“Wait, wait… ” he said, scrambling to his feet. “I'll get them. Just a minute. Wait. I'll be right back…”

He was talking and running backwards at the same time. He turned and kept going, through a flap of the tent that Jim was now holding as invisible in his mind, toward the bottom story of the laboratory tower at the far end of the large open space. Jim followed his movements as he might have followed them on a ship's screen, followed the man to an office and an inner door, on which he pounded with his fist.

“He's awake!”

Jim withdrew his attention and considered himself. He had no idea how he was hearing, speaking or seeing. He simply did these things. It was, he thought, as if each smallest particle of
AndFriend
had ears, eyes, and a voice. His thoughts wandered off into a feeling of happiness over the fact that she had really not been hurt; and that he and she were together again…

“Jim?” It was Mary's voice. He turned his attention to his immediate vicinity again, and saw Mary—in that strange way of seeing he now had—standing close, with Mollen and the doc.

“I could never remember your name,” he said to the physician. “I just called you doc. There's been another medical man looking after me lately, but I never felt like calling him doc.”

“And I'm sorry about that, Jim,” said Mary—and, surprise of surprises, there was a catch in her voice. “Neiss has two doctorates, one in inorganic chemistry, the other in biology, but he's not a medical doctor. We just wanted you to think he was. This is Aram Snyder, who really is a physician and a psychiatrist.”

“They sounded me out about working with you, here,” said Aram, the doc. “I didn't know what they had in mind then, but from a theoretical point of view, what they were talking about sounded unethical to me, lacking the subject's consent. So they didn't go any farther with me.”

“I'm sorry, Jim. I'm sorry, son,” said Mollen harshly. “Mary and I, both of us, we didn't like doing this to you, blind. But we didn't have any choice. If there'd been more than one of you, maybe we could have asked for a volunteer. But there was only you; and we couldn't take a chance on your saying no. It's my responsibility, not Mary's.”

In the strange calmness in which he now resided, Jim thought about this, turning it over in his mind, examining the words in an effort to understand everything they represented. It occurred to him that if it were not for the calmness—the feeling of being detached from much of what they said, he would be feeling very outraged right now that they should doubt his willingness to volunteer for what had been done to him. He was so long at thinking this over that when his attention came back to the others, he found they had fallen to talking among themselves in the meantime.

“…But how is he, Doc?” Mollen was saying.

“How can I tell?” responded Aram, irritably. “He's had a major emotional shock—how major I've no way of measuring. How do I know what it means to find yourself out of your body and into a machine?”

“When Mary did it, she wasn't damaged by it,” said Mollen.

“But I knew what I was getting into. I wanted to do it,” said Mary. “So I was prepared.”

“Mary did this before?” asked Jim.

“She was in
La Chasse Gallerie
,” said Mollen. “But she got there by a different route than the one you took.”