The Forever Man (23 page)

“It couldn't very well be otherwise. There's twice as much of it, at an estimate, as there was body to cover. But the alignment of those skeletal elements almost has to mean those Laagi were placed in the position we found them in. Or set themselves up. And if they set themselves up, why?”

“I don't know. But that brings me to an important question,” said Jim. “Does anything you found out give you any clue as to what killed them—or why they died?”

“No,” she said emphatically. “Nothing, whatsoever.”

“That's what I was afraid of,” said Jim.

At his command, the image they had been watching vanished from the screen and a series of conical, three-dimensional diagrams began to appear. “What're you doing?” asked Mary.

“My turn to say shut up and don't bother me for the moment,” answered Jim. “I'm running a number of possibilities.”

“Possibilities? Of what?” asked Mary.

He did not answer. His mind was too busy trying to remember and cover all the variations of the problem he had begun to try out on the screen. Mary did not speak to him again. After a while he blanked the screen.

“Ready to explain?” asked Mary.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Though actually there's not much to tell you. I've been plotting possible approach routes to put that Laagi ship where we found it, and nothing much makes sense except the fact that in that ship these Laagi were traveling directly along the centerline, the way we've been, headed for whatever's down-galaxy from here. If that's what they were doing, why did they stop at just that point? Why did they die here? Or were they killed and their ship stopped?”

“I don't follow you,” said Mary. “Killed? By who?”

“That's the question,” said Jim. “And you know the only answer I can come up with? If they were killed, it was by somebody from down-galaxy doing the equivalent of coming up the centerline—or firing whatever they fired to stop the Laagi, up the centerline. If that's so, that paradise Raoul kept talking about may have some real snakes in it. Because I don't know of anything, and I can't imagine anything, that would stop a Laagi fighter ship dead, kill its movement, kill its crew, and leave them all looking as if nothing had touched them.”

“The same situation could also be an argument that nobody from down-galaxy killed the Laagi.”

“Then why are they dead? Why is their ship still here—why didn't other Laagi come and get it and the dead bodies of their own people? What it all adds up to is a very uneasy feeling in me that somewhere beyond where that dead ship floats there may be a civilization that could swat us the way we'd get rid of a fly, and who don't like visitors. Accordingly, I've been looking at ways we could explore around such a civilization's territory without making the mistake of moving too far in on it; just so we, too, don't end up as neat piles of skin and bones.”

“We can't,” said Mary. “Remember? Our skins and bones are back on Earth, being kept alive as part of live bodies waiting for us to come back to them.”

“It was a figure of speech,” said Jim. “In any case,
AndFriend
can be killed, the way that Laagi ship was. I mean she can be reduced at least to a gas cloud of her component atoms; and if she is, what happens to you and me, the essential you and me? Do we disperse with the gas or do we simply float forever in the interstellar void?”

“All right,” said Mary, “what you're saying is, it may be dangerous down-galaxy; and you want to go out from the centerline and probe for the dimensions of any danger that might be there.”

“Right. And we start by finding another derelict Laagi ship, if there are any. In other words, we'll lay back from a position level with that dead ship in relation to the centerline while moving outwards from the centerline and carefully probing ahead with the instruments, to see what we find.”

“Great,” said Mary.

“I'm serious!” he retorted.

“So am I,” said Mary; and he realized there was indeed nothing sarcastic or sardonic about the tone of voice he felt from her. “I think it's a fine idea, Jim.”

“Well… good then,” he said, touched with embarrassment. “Here we go.”

He began to shift
AndFriend
out from the centerline, once more in phase-jumps that were just within the limits of the distance at which her instruments could recognize the presence of another ship. Time went by.

“Damn! Look!” he said suddenly. “Right out there at the instrument limit! It looks like another ship.”

It was another ship, exactly like the one they had examined before, headed down-galaxy, and showing no sign of life aboard as they approached it. When they came within a hundred meters, Jim sent the robot across.

The pictures it brought back showed no important difference from what they had both seen in the pictorial record of the first derelict.

“It tells us one thing, though,” commented Mary as they were looking at the scene displayed in the tank of
AndFriend
's main screen. “What happened to this one must have been close in time to what happened on the other ship. The two Laagi aboard here are also decomposed to skin and skeletons.”

“Maybe they decompose faster than humans,” said Jim. “How long does it take the human body to turn into nothing but skin and bones?”

“I don't know. It'd depend on conditions, I suppose,” answered Mary. “But these bodies have been dead long enough for all internal soft material—flesh, muscles, tendons, organs, to decay and end up as either dust, or part of the captive atmosphere of the ship. That's got to be a very long time, unless you're right and the Laagi decompose a lot faster than we do. And I don't think that's so.”

“Why?”

“Because the samples your robot brought back showed evidence of oxidation, not only in the material left from the soft parts of the bodies, but in the scrapings of metals and other materials from parts of the ship. That means that their atmosphere, like ours, has to have some oxygen in it—though how much is a question. Let's look farther out and see if we can find a ship with bodies that haven't decayed so much.”

Jim felt the emotional equivalent of a shudder.

“It's a ghoulish business,” he said. Part of his mind was equating these long-dead Laagi with human pilots he had known who had never come back.

They searched outward, and in the next hundred hours of ship's time, they found seven more Laagi ships, all pointed down-galaxy, all with nothing left of their crews but skin and rigid interior body parts.

“And they're all on a line,” said Jim, “all level with each other, pointing down-galaxy. What gets me is why they were all killed at this distance from Center and why we can go up alongside them, this way—theoretically as far into the unknown enemy's territory as they did—and not even feel or see anything dangerous.”

“Maybe the enemy was here once, but now it's gone,” said Mary.

He had found that little by little he had been building a mental image of her from his memory of what she looked like. In the process his imagination had made her look a good deal less severe. It also made their mental conversations more pleasant. It was much easier, he found, not to take offense from the image in his imagination than it had been from the real Mary. Consequently, he answered this last suggestion more tolerantly than he might have if the two of them had been inhabiting
AndFriend
in their proper bodies.

“Then we're back against the question of why their own people haven't come and collected them,” he said.

“There could be good reasons from their point of view, that humans wouldn't understand,” Mary answered. “There could even be reasons we might. Maybe they left them here to commemorate something? A battle—”

“It was no battle these ships died in, or their crews,” Jim said.

The sudden hoot of a proximity alarm came hard on the heels of his words. He shifted the view in the screen suddenly to show the space up-galaxy behind them.

“Oops,” he said. But the lightness of the word did not match the emotion coloring it.

The instruments showed five bright dots with halos, coming at
AndFriend
from five different directions, marking out a half-globe of space up-galaxy at the limit of the instruments' views. A half-globe with flat and open side down-galaxy only.

“Laagi?” asked Mary.

“Who else could they be?” Jim considered the screen bleakly. “It crossed my mind they might pick us up on instruments, when we started examining these dead ships of theirs. If there's another, enemy civilization down-galaxy, they'd not let their frontier with it go unmonitored. But, idiot that I was, I didn't worry enough about Laagi observers. I actually forgot about that danger—and that's what being all by yourself with a lot of empty space around can do for your sense of alertness.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Shift out of here—a long jump. A long, long jump; so far they'll need ten years to look through all the space I could have gone into.”

The Laagi vessels were closing fast, in ordinary drive at accelerations that must be close to what their pilots could stand. They could reach
AndFriend
in minutes now of her interior ship's time. Unexpectedly, he heard words from Mary that made no sense at all.

“I'm sorry, Jim,” he heard her saying. “I'm really very, very sorry…”

He was lying on a flat surface.

He was under gravity. He was landed.

Two great, flat hoops, edge-down, of metal, or at least of something that shone like polished steel, were anchored in the hard surface on which
AndFriend
lay and curved over her, at a third of her length in from each end of her. The hoops were five meters wide and narrow, but with their edges that faced down toward
AndFriend
narrowing to a few microns of thickness, so that they were like enclosing, curved knives ready to slice her open if she should try to lift.

In one wild reflex he flung his orders at the phase-drive engines, ordering them to phase-shift immediately, shift a full five light-years away, at once.

Nothing happened. The control studs that should have depressed themselves on the com-section in front of his empty control chair did not stir.
AndFriend
did not stir.

He threw all his will, all his longing to escape into a command for the ship to phase-shift; and, when she continued to stay where she was, kept pushing against nothingness, driving, willing
AndFriend
to shift to safety.

And still nothing happened.

“No!” his mind cried

It was a long, drawn-out cry, like the howl of a trapped animal. Dimly he was aware of Mary trying to speak to him.

“I can't move her!” he shouted voicelessly at Mary. “What's wrong? Where are we? How'd the Laagi do this? How'd they get us here? What happened? What's happened to me?”

“… Jim, don't,” Mary was saying to him.. “Jim, don't fight like that. Please. It won't help and you'll only hurt yourself more. There's nothing you can do. You can't move
AndFriend
now. The Laagi think they have us like they had Raoul—only they didn't try to anchor him down; and we've just got to stay put, for a while at least.”

Like a trapped animal crouching in the cage that held him prisoner, he snarled at her.

“What happened? What did they do to me?”

“The Laagi didn't do anything, Jim. Only bring us in and try to lock us down here with those arcs they've set up over
AndFriend
. I'm so sorry, Jim, but I had to. It wasn't them who stopped you from getting away from them, and it's not them that's keeping you from shifting clear now. It was me.”

“You?” He raged at her. “You? Have you gone crazy, letting them make prisoners of us?”

“No, Jim. Please. Listen. This was something I had to do. It was planned this way from the start, if it looked like the Laagi might capture us the way they captured Raoul. It was something more important than anything else, if we could find out more about them and then try to bring the information back…”

“You just gave them
AndFriend
? You gave them me? Without warning? Without asking? How did you knock me out? What's happened to me that I can't move her?”

It was the third time he had been handled like someone untrustworthy, and it was the limit.

“Oh, Jim!” It was as impossible as the situation they were in now that he could feel from Mary Gallegher an emotion that was the equivalent of tears. But it was so. “It wasn't even Louis who decided to do this; it was the people who give him orders. The only way they agreed to this expedition was if our primary mission was to bring back information about the Laagi.”

“What did you do to me?” He hated her now and knew she was feeling that hate. “How could you come between me and
AndFriend
like this?”

“Jim, try to understand, please… ” she said. “I haven't come between you and
AndFriend
. It was just that, during one of the sessions when we had you under hypnosis near the end, you were implanted with a command that could make you unable to use your ability to do anything with her. It was just as if we'd told you about a command that could make one of your arms paralyzed and useless. We couldn't risk you doing what we knew you'd do if we saw something like those Laagi ships coming at us.”

“I was going to save us, that's all!” he said fiercely.

“Yes, and that's what we didn't want happening. We needed to let ourselves be captured so that we'd finally have a chance to see the Laagi and understand their civilization, and how they work and why they fight us so—”

“Nevermind that. I don't remember a thing after I said I was going to shift out of danger. Was that command of yours supposed to knock me out, too?”

“Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes. Jim, it had to. It was the only safe way. Then I had another command, the one I used just now, once we were safely captured, to bring you back awake again, but still not able to move
AndFriend
.”