The Forever Man (24 page)

“Safely captured!” he said savagely. “That's a little bit of a contradiction, isn't it?”

“But we can get away when we want—when we've learned what we came here to learn,” she said. “Once you're able to move
AndFriend
again, you can shift right out from under those knives. The Laagi did just what we expected. When they didn't find anybody aboard us, they thought we were a derelict. Just as they thought
La Chasse Gallerie
was a derelict, except that later on she took off under Raoul's power and escaped from them. But they're only expecting that this ship has something automatic about it that doesn't require it to have a pilot to use ordinary drive, and that's what the arcs over us are there to stop happening. They don't realize that we're here and a part of the ship, and that you can phase-shift right out from under this kind of restraint once you're able to move.”

“Once I'm able to move,” he echoed grimly, mockingly. “Once you take my handcuffs off… which'll be when you've seen enough of the Laagi, which'll be when you're satisfied. I've got no say in the matter, have I—for all your saying you're so sorry about doing this? You want to prove you're really sorry? Turn me loose now and let me have a choice about whether we stay or go!”

“I can't!” she said. “I can't, Jim!”

“You won't—that's what you mean. You don't trust me not to take off the minute you let me go,” he said. “You and the general didn't trust me enough to tell me I'd be going into space as a ship rather than a man, you didn't trust me enough to tell me you bought this trip from the higher-ups by promising to let the Laagi capture us if the chance came up. Now you won't trust me with control of the phase-shift equipment aboard my own ship. Let me tell you something, lady. You're either going to have to trust your partner, or you're never going to get back to Earth with anything you learn about the Laagi. And furthermore, I'm going to take back control of myself, the ship, you, and everything else, as soon as I can.”

“If we can find out what we need to learn about the Laagi,” she said unhappily, “it won't matter, then. But I can't turn you loose, Jim. You just gave the reason yourself.”

“That's right. But while you study the Laagi—and I leave that all to you—as I say I'm going to be doing my damnedest to find some way around this lock you've got on me. And what do you want to bet I don't find one?”

“Even if you do,” she said, “Jim, please, think before you take us away from here. We've got a chance to learn something we've needed to know for nearly two hundred years. It could save no one knows how many lives and ships. It could even possibly save our whole race. There's no way of telling how much it's worth to study the Laagi up close like this.”

He said nothing. The anger in him was like something solid and hard—an anvil upon which he was hammering out thoughts of escape and vengeance.

They were together in silence for a somewhat considerable stretch of time, possibly a few hours, possibly much longer, during which Jim paid attention to nothing beyond
AndFriend
's interior, and even that he was conscious of only with the periphery of his mind. Events and actions had become largely subjective to his attention as a bodiless mind. Just now he was lost in himself, thinking furiously of everything he had ever read or heard concerning hypnosis, hoping to recall something that would have to do with someone freeing himself or herself from just such a command as Mary had acknowledged putting upon him.

But nothing came out of his memory that was at all helpful. He was still going around and around over what little he knew about the subject when there was an unexpected interruption. The entry port swung outward as the inner door of the airlock between port and door swung open. A breeze of outside atmosphere came into the ship, which, last Jim remembered, had lost its atmosphere with the coming and going of the ship's robot in space. The air was accompanied by a creature a little more than a meter in height and looking like a cross between a small, bent old man wearing a shell bulging outward on his back, and a snail walking—not on a snail's normal, single footpad, but on two very short, thick legs that ended not in feet, but what looked like pads of heavy skin six or eight millimeters in thickness.

The head was like the head of a turtle, with two very small but very bright, black eyes that were closely side by side and facing forward. They seemed, however, to be able to move about considerably as the skin holding them moved; because the first thing the figure did on entering was to pause and direct one eye forward in the ship, while the other eye moved to look toward the back of
AndFriend
's interior. At the same time a globe the size of a tennis ball that was floating in the air just above the creature's head came alight with a brilliant, yellow illumination that would have made the interior painfully bright if Jim and Mary had been using human eyes to see it with.

The same light made it clear that the shell of the creature was a light tan mottled with irregular black patches, the visible parts of the soft body were dark brown, and the soles of the feet—it appeared from their edges—were a bright red. A second later half a dozen tentacles of the same red color whipped out from under the top edge of the shell, between where the creature's shoulders would be if it had shoulders under there. These tentacles probed the air as if testing the atmosphere.

“Now, what's this?” he said to Mary, startled for the moment into forgetting his anger against her.

“One of the local species that seems to coexist with the Laagi,” answered Mary. “They're workers. This one comes about once a week to clean us up.”

“Clean us up?”

“I know,” said Mary. “There's nothing here that really needs cleaning. But it comes anyway.”

“What's it called?” asked Jim, observing in fascination as the creature turned and began to explore the surface of the inner wall of the ship to its right with its tentacles.

“I don't know what the Laagi call it,” said Mary. “I call it Squonk, after the janitor of an apartment building where I once lived.”

“‘It'?” echoed Jim. “If your janitor was a he, I'd think—”

“We won't guess,” said Mary firmly. “There's no indication so far if it's bisexual, unisexual, or what, let alone something else. As I say, I call him Squonk because the janitor in our apartment building was named Skwaconsky—and—we all called him Squonk. But it remains to be seen what, if any, sex this creature is.”

“Yeah,” said Jim. He had remembered his anger toward her and was once more being stirred by it. The tenor of his feelings must have been clear to Mary, for she said nothing more.

For the first time, however, he realized he had not looked beyond the walls of the ship, except for that first view from the center of a flat, empty area of what looked like concrete, except that it was the light brown color of sandy soil on Earth. It was an irregular area, and beyond its borders were dark green strips that seemed to be pathways or roads. Beyond these in turn were beehive-shaped buildings of sizes varying from something the size of a single-family house to something that might have covered the largest sports arena on Earth, all the color of honey. These structures seemed to merge together in the distance, either because they were actually connected or because his unaided vision could no longer see the spaces between them. Overhead the sky had a light greenish cast.

Moving about on the dark green strips were more Squonks and other figures that varied amazingly in size and length of limb but went on two legs and were vaguely human-shaped.

Automatically Jim mentally ordered the main screen in front of his command chair to show the outside scene with telescopic magnification, so that he could get a closer look at the humanlike figures. But nothing happened—and he was suddenly aware that this, too, must be part of what he was blocked off from in his ability to control the ship.

For a second he was tempted to ask Mary to let him at least have control of the screens, if she could without setting him completely free. But the thought was followed almost immediately by a feeling of revulsion at the thought of asking any favors.

Mentally, he forced himself to put his anger aside.

“Are those Laagi, those critters outside there that don't look like Squonk?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “Would you like to watch them close up?”

“It doesn't make any difference to me,” he said.

“It does to me,” she said sadly. “I'd give a lot to be able to see them up close, in the tank of the screen. I'd like to examine the whole city around us that way. But I can't without turning you loose.”

“That's right,” he answered grimly. “What makes you so sure they're Laagi, then?”

“It was some like that who came aboard us out in space, before they locked
AndFriend
in the midst of them and shifted her here. Only two or three of them have come and looked inside the ship since she's been here. I don't know whether the ones who came and looked at her here were high officials or scientists, or specialists of some kind, or just that the general Laagi public's not interested in us. But those were all who came.”

“Specialists or people with rank,” said Jim. “I'd bet on it. You don't think we'd let the general public swarm over a Laagi ship we'd captured? And our general public'd certainly be eager to do just that.”

“There's always the danger of anthromorphosizing,” she answered. “We don't really know them enough even to guess at a reason they'd do anything.”

“No reason not to, either,” he said.

They went back into silence. Jim because he did not want to talk to her any more than he had to; and she, he presumed, because she knew how he was feeling and did not want to give him any unnecessary chances to tell her what he thought of her—and the general and the people behind him. But most of all of the general and her, who may have been under pressure to do what they had done to him, but who had certainly agreed to betray him.

Squonk continued to go over the interior of the ship, and Jim found himself becoming fascinated with the creature. He had never in his life seen such a thorough search for whatever should not be there. Within the captive atmosphere of the ship—even when that captive atmosphere was that of an alien planet—there was no way for dirt to accumulate. But the almost microscopic search of every surface in the ship by Squonk was as thorough as if it was cleaning an operating theater in a hospital; and, compact as a fighter ship had to be, there were endless niches and crannies to be searched into.

Apparently, while dirt could not find its way onto the surfaces of the ship's interior, tarnish resulting from contact with the unusual atmosphere was possible. Jim saw Squonk several times fish back in under its shell with the end of one tentacle and come out with a small spongy-ended blue rod perhaps fifteen millimeters in length; and that spongy end, rubbed over any metallic surface, made it brighter. Then the blue rod was tucked away again.

Interesting as this was, even more interesting was a fact it took Jim a little while to notice—and that was that Squonk's legs seemed to lengthen or shorten to order, to make it easier for it to get into particular crannies.

“Jim.” The voice of Mary interrupted him as he was fascinatedly watching this happen for perhaps the dozenth time.

“What?” he asked absently, his animosity for the moment forgotten.

“Wouldn't you like to know more about these Squonks, and the Laagi, and everything on this world?”

He did not answer immediately, thinking it over. Of course he wanted to know. But saying so would almost sound as if he regretted his words earlier.

“I know, Jim.” Mary's voice was sad, but also it was weary. “You're absolutely right. We treated you terribly from the beginning. You don't even know half of what we did to you. We deliberately put you under mental stress; we held you back from the only thing you loved; all of it done deliberately to break you down. We fogged your mind up with drugs, and we finally sent you out under the illusion you were volunteering to do something when actually you were sent to do something entirely different.”

He did not answer.

“If it helps—and I know it doesn't,” she went on after a while, “I'd never have done it that way, knowing you the way I do now, knowing how much
AndFriend
means to you, how much space means to you. I couldn't do it, if I was asked to do it over again, to anyone. It was the worst sort of misuse of a human being. In a good cause—but misuse all the same—”

"Nevermind," he said. “All right. I feel the way I feel. But we won't talk about it anymore. You want to study the Laagi and you need my help. I won't fight you on the fact that it's a good thing to do. I won't run away from what we can do here. You'll have to trust me that I mean that, meanwhile. You can believe it or not, but if I'd been told the truth from the beginning I'd probably have thought you all were crazy to suppose we could even get to a Laagi world alive, but I'd have agreed to try. It's not that different from what I signed up to do in the first place. It's just sticking my neck way out in a different way.”

He stopped. She did not answer immediately.

“Well?” he said. “Did that convince you? Do you trust me enough now to turn me loose?”

“No,” she said. The thought from her was like a sigh. “I do believe you, Jim. But I've got my own duty, and I can't let you go just on your word alone. You've got to do something first to prove it.”

It took a few seconds for the import of her words to sink in on him.

“Prove it—” he echoed. “How can I do something like that, hogtied the way you've got me?”

“By wanting enough to be a squonk to make something work.”

“Wanting to be a squonk?”