The Forever Man (25 page)

“Yes.”

His mind whirled.

“Why, for God's sake—even if I could be one, what makes you want me to?”

“So we can really study the Laagi, up close. So we can go into their buildings—into their homes, if they have homes. So we can move around here as invisible observers—”

“Hold on!” he said. Her words had been rising on a tide of enthusiasm that he mistrusted. “I think I know what you've got in mind. You want me to become part of this critter the same sort of way you made me part of
AndFriend
, is that it? So I can travel with him when he leaves this place and we can get a look at what's outside?”

“We, not just you,” she said. “Where you go, I'll be going, too, of course.”

“All right. We. Just how do you figure to make me part of an alien animal like that, even if I agree? It's not a piece of nonliving metal.”

“I'm not sure it'll work, but I think it might if you'll do your part,” she said patiently. “You see, we still really don't know how Raoul's mind—what's left of it—became part of
La Chasse Gallerie
. All we ever had was our guess that two things, his love for his ship and his physical contact with it over a period of time, caused the two to blend. Even the physical contact may not have been necessary. That, like the scrapings from
AndFriend
we put under your skin, may be only a sort of black magic, a symbolic sort of thing that helps the mind believe it can migrate to what it's touching. But we do know that the mind has to want to go where it goes—want it badly enough to make the change. Everything else may be so much mumbo jumbo, but you wanted
AndFriend
more than you wanted life.”

“That's true enough,” he said soberly. For a second, he remembered his exhaustion and his desperation just before he had left his human body behind for what he now was.

“Also,” Mary went on, “there could be other factors we can't even guess at. The fact you and Raoul had spent time in interstellar space may have something to do with the ability to move your mind. The fact both of you and your ships had fought for your lives together could have something to do with it. For all those reasons, there's not much more than a hope you can shift your mind into this alien animal, as you call it. But I've got a few things I haven't told you about. We knew I'd be helpless, physically, once I inhibited your command of
AndFriend
. So, the command that took your ability to control away was designed with exceptions—what you could call holes in it; or perhaps “windows” would be a better word. If I turn you loose to use a particular window—and I can with the proper hypnotic command—you can give one, but only one, series of commands through it; and one of those windows lets you use your ship's robot.”

“The robot?”

“That's right. But don't get your hopes up,” she said. “You'll only be able to tell it to do certain things, none of which are going to help you get back command of the ship as a whole, or do anything to help you to phaseshift it. As it happens, most of what the robot needs to do to try putting your mind into Squonk has already been done. Before we left Earth it was equipped with scrapings from the interior of
AndFriend
, and these've been stored in him all this time. What you'll be able to do if I open one of those windows for you is use Fingers to inject some of that scraping under the skin of Squonk.”

“Inject? What makes you think, even if Fingers can do it, that Squonk isn't going to feel the scrapings being injected and immediately head to the Laagi equivalent of a veterinarian to have them taken out?”

“We don't, of course,” said Mary. “But the scrapings are microscopic, and the process of injection wouldn't be felt by a human. We just have to hope it won't be felt by Squonk, either.”

Jim sat thinking about it.

“Craziest thing I ever heard of,” he grumbled. “If, if, and if… if right is left and up is down, then maybe we'll all turn into orange trees with the next word I speak.”

“That's not the point,” said Mary, still patiently. “The point is, will you try it? Will you try, honestly try, to consciously move your mind into Squonk?”

“You'll turn me loose if I do?”

“I didn't say that. I said I'd start to believe that you wanted to stay and find out about the Laagi, if you try—really try. Remember, if you're not trying, I'll know it. That's the advantage of my mind being in yours, the way it is.”

“I'll try, of course,” said Jim. “I don't have much choice.”

“Jim, of course you've got a choice! If you simply sit here refusing to do anything, and I finally become convinced you never are going to help, and so we'll never learn anything more about the Laagi and Squonk and the rest of it than we do now, then I'll turn you loose and we'll go home with that. Maybe back there there's some other pilot who'll bring me out to be captured again and—”

“That's a low blow,” he said.

“Well,” she answered, “if you're the one that doesn't want to stay, can you complain if someone else does want to?”

“I told you I wanted to stay,” said Jim. “It's just that—forget it. I'm willing to try putting myself into this creature with the maniac housekeeping tendencies. What do I do first?”

“Nothing,” she answered. “First, I have to open up the window for you to command Fingers to inject the scrapings. Which I will now do. Go-Cane! Now, first you'll find you can give the robot the order to inject the material. But it'll have to wait for a chance to do it when Squonk's close but unsuspecting. Second, once the material's in Squonk you try to make the connection. Ready to try it?”

“Ready,” answered Jim.

The robot was standing motionless tucked into his storage niche at the back end of
AndFriend
's interior, as it had been ever since it had last been put to use. Squonk had started its cleaning down the side of the ship from the entry port and would apparently be cleaning up the other side in due course. Before that he would reach the robot and clean it.

Jim concentrated on the small scrapings from
AndFriend
that were to be injected into Squonk. He must, he told himself, have been feeling them there in the robot all the time, but paid no attention to them since Fingers himself was part of
AndFriend
. But now that he knew they were there…

With the ability to feel, rather than see the ship around him, he searched the robot for something that was not part of Fingers' normal working equipment. It would be very tiny, but different… ah, he had located it. It was in a tiny drawer hidden under the end of one of the multiple arms used by the robot, at the end of the lowest of the extensions at the end of the arm extensions, capable of taking as attachment any number of small tools.

The scrapings were from the control console in front of the pilot's seat; and they were already loaded into a tiny, hollow, diamond-pointed needle that should be able to penetrate any living substance, even horn or bone, to a depth, if necessary, of fifteen millimeters.

Jim's point of view was now within the scrapings them selves, inside the robot. Once he would have told Mary about this, but now there was a barrier between them. If there were things she had seen fit not to tell him, he thought, there could be things he saw fit not to tell her. From the motionless, silent mechanical, Jim watched the alien cleaner getting closer and closer. Even at the slow, careful, deliberate pace Squonk was maintaining, it was now very near to the robot.

“All right,” said the voice of Mary. “Prepare the robot to inject the material. Tell it. Say ‘on the words “Go in,” inject the ship's material, now in the second finger of your lowest right hand, into the living creature before you. Inject to a depth of nine millimeters into the upper part of one of the folds of living tissue on the creature's left leg, just below the shell on its back. Do this as quickly as you can and if possible without attracting the creature's attention. Then return to “Still” position.' “

“I can give the order with a lot less words than that,” said Jim, still holding his point of view inside Fingers.

“Just repeat the words I gave you, please,” said Mary. “On the words ‘Go in,' inject…“

“I remember. You don't have to go through it again,” said Jim.

“Good,” said Mary. “Because unless you use the words I just gave you, the window won't work and the robot won't act. So you've been warned. If your memory does fail you, just pause, and I'll prompt you. I'll also tell you when to start giving the command. So wait for my order.”

“Yes, ma'am!” said Jim.

Mary ignored the emphasis on Jim's last word. Together they waited. Squonk finally reached the robot and began to search its head for anything needing cleaning.

“Ready now,” Mary's voice sounded in Jim's mind. “All right—say ‘Go—One, now!' “

“Go—One, now!” repeated Jim.

Even though he was watching for it, Jim barely saw the movement of the hand with the needle. It was out and in, the finger with the material having seemed to barely approach the back of Squonk's leg—and then the robot continued to stand in perfect stillness for the rest of the grooming being given it by Squonk.

Squonk showed no sign of noticing what had been done to it. It continued with its cleaning.

“Jim?” said Mary. “Jim, did it work? I'm blind, all of a sudden.”

“It worked. But we're in a strange country,” said Jim. “Now we've got to find our way to the capital city.”

“What?”

“Come on, now,” said Jim. “A scientist and technologist like you ought to be able to figure out that one. We're in Squonk all right, but its body tissue's not human—it's unfamiliar territory. Now I've got to find my way to wherever its mind lives and in its mind hook up with its vision. You didn't think of this.”

“We thought of it, but… ” Mary's voice was oddly distant, without being any harder to hear for that reason. “We thought it'd either work or not work, since any part of
AndFriend
acts like eyes and ears for you, like every part of
La Chasse Gallerie
does for Raoul. So once we got an alien injected, we thought we'd either be able to get the input of its senses right away, or the try'd be a failure.”

“Well, it's not a failure. But I can't see, hear, smell or whatever—yet,” said Jim. “I'd say that's because I haven't got all the parts connected together, the way I had with
AndFriend
. Here, I've got a little part of myself buried in opaque, surrounding alien material. What I'm seeing is that opaque, surrounding alien material. Anyway, I think that's it. Sit back and let me work on this.”

He was like a man imprisoned in darkness and pressure, caught in a cavern, underground. How to start? He knew nothing about the alien body around him. In fact, the truth was, there was no certainty that it was a body and not some mechanical which had been much more cleverly constructed by the Laagi than Fingers had been by human engineers. Or Squonk could be a biological robot grown to order from cultures of alien flesh belonging to the Laagi or some other species under their control—

He checked himself suddenly. His mind was running wild. The thing to concentrate on, he told himself, was how similar Squonk's body was to the animal bodies of Earth, not let his imagination run to wild imaginings of difference. Alien or not, if it was a body as he knew bodies, it lived and died, it ingested fuel material and excreted wastes. It would need the equivalent of a brain and a heart to circulate the fuel from the ingested material to the living parts of its body needing that fuel. And a liquid circulatory system would be more efficient than any solid manner of delivery… which meant it had the equivalent of a blood system. Which meant that if he could just reach that blood—call it the circulatory—system, he could travel it until it led him to the brain. Wherever the brain was, the mind ought to be available.

But first he had to find a conduit of the circulatory system. Like someone lost in a vast continent, he needed to find a river and follow it to the equivalent of the sea, and the sea to a particular place on the shore of the sea. He tried moving the injected material the way he had moved the
AndFriend
when his mind had been free to do so.

He moved, only a tiny distance, but he moved. However—a second later, the material enclosing him moved suddenly, taking him with it; and in panic, he recoiled.

He found himself back in the ship as a whole.

“I can see—oh,” said Mary, her voice going from excitement to the flatness of disappointment. “It didn't work.”

“No, that's not what happened,” he answered. “I panicked. I moved the injected material and—look at Squonk. He's scratching himself. When I felt the pressure of that, inside his skin, I automatically ran.”

In fact, Squonk was rubbing the tip of one tentacle energetically at the area on his left leg where the material had been injected.

“I think I can go back into him, all right… ” he said, reaching out once more with his mind for the
AndFriend
material lodged in the little alien.

Suddenly it was dark again. He was back.

He tried moving once more, but this time more slowly and carefully. Twice, he was shaken, as a cave-in victim might be shaken by earthquakes in the earth or rock that held him, but he kept going. After a time that he had no way of measuring, he poked the front end of his material into a less solid space.

He explored it. He was all but certain it must be the equivalent of a blood vessel, but it was very small. Still, his material was small enough to fit even into this narrow passage. He slipped all the way in, and tried to sense, by touching the surrounding walls, whether he was being carried along with the fluid that must surround him now.

He was apparently, he decided, being carried backward. He reversed his own point of view in the scrapings and thought of himself as going forward. It was either a long time or a short—once more he had no way of knowing—but he was eventually carried along and into a larger pipeline with a stronger flow.