The Forever Man (28 page)

The fact of the matter was, he admitted to himself, it was no longer anger that was driving him, but something like a spirit of competition. In essence he had been challenged by being put under hypnotic control and there was something ancient and stubborn in him that had always risen to a challenge. In fact, as he had discovered one day when he had managed to get a surreptitious look at the results of some tests they had given him while he was being trained to be a Frontier pilot, that response was something that made him good at that particular job. In truth, he operated best, the examiner had noted on them, when under challenge.

The months of mental and other misery Mary, Mollen and others had put him through in the process of getting him to become one with
AndFriend
, he dismissed without another thought. He had deliberately chosen a life that involved hardship and pain, even on the training level. No, what had sparked off the sudden fury in him was something entirely different. It was his own conviction—in fact, he was proud of the fact—that he would have freely volunteered to let himself be captured and held on a Laagi world, so that the aliens could be observed; if all of them, from Mary on up, had only given him the option. The fact that they had not, he read as a fear that he might refuse. They had not trusted him to accept the duty—and that was an insult.

And it was the insult that had made him angry.

But he had always been one of those people who take fire swiftly, only to have trouble nursing the coals of an anger for any great length of time. He simply got tired of being angry with anyone or anything after a while, and forgot what had put a torch to his emotions in the first place. He even had always been a little puzzled by people who could nurse a grievance for years or a lifetime.

So, he was actually no longer angry with any of them—least of all with Mary, who was plainly the kind of person who became obsessed with whatever they put their hands and mind to. But he was acutely conscious now of being in a contest with Mary for control of himself; and he was not in the habit of losing such contests.

He concentrated on the fact that Mary was blind to all of Squonk's emotions and some of his. A part of his mind was insisting that in that fact there was something he could use to set himself free.

What he wanted, he had already told himself, was some way he could control Squonk without Mary knowing he was doing it. How that was to come out of the fact that she could not sense the squonk's feelings, or his under certain conditions, was still obscure. But if there was anything there, it ought to give up its juices if he chewed it over in his head enough.

He wondered if Squonk could be made to feel his own, human, feelings—

These thoughts were unexpectedly interrupted as they suddenly went into motion at high speed. Squonk had almost leaped forward and was, judging from what they had seen so far from it, doing its kind's equivalent of running headlong toward the solid, vertical panel supporting the long worktable just in front of them. Jim braced himself for an impact against the support, which looked decidedly solid, but something very like a trap door swung up out of Squonk's way a fraction of a second before its nose touched it and Squonk hurtled through the aperture.

At the same pace, it went through trap doors in the supports of the next four tables in order across the room; but after passing through the fourth, it spun left and went down the aisle to a Laagi, who handed it an assemblage of small parts about the size and shape of a loaf of bread.

Squonk's tentacles enclosed it tenderly and lovingly. This Laagi did not touch Squonk in the way that the alien on the path had done, but Jim felt a somewhat lower level of pleasure and pride warming the emotions of the creature he and Mary now inhabited. Squonk turned and, in squonk terms, ran for the back of the building.

The rear of the building turned out not to have tables taking up all possible available space. A section had been reserved there at the very back for two rooms, one being apparently an eating room and one a waste-disposal room. Jim had only a glimpse of these through the portals leading into them, however, for there was something else in the area to which Squonk galloped at full speed, carefully carrying its burden.

It was a large screw-type elevator. An apparently endless, turning spiral of something that might be metal that wound its way vertically up through a hole in the floor to and through the ceiling overhead. Squonk ran up onto this and stopped, letting himself be carried upward. Considering the creature's energy during the last few seconds, Jim had half-expected it to keep running up the turning and climbing platform of the elevator to add its speed to the mechanical lift. But Squonk was evidently satisfied to wait in this instance.

In fact, it let itself be carried through two upper levels of the building before stepping off on the third. Here the available circular expanse of floor held no tables, but groups of Laagi clustered around larger assemblies of whatever it was they built here and of which what Squonk carried was evidently a part, for the creature carried his burden up to one of the groups and waited to have it taken, then turned to head back downstairs once more.

“There ought to be some way we could stop it!” Mary's voice, sharp with frustration, sounded in Jim's head. “I want to see what they're building here, and maybe we could figure out the ultimate use of whatever it is. If we could only get Squonk to stay, somehow!”

Oddly enough, Jim was thinking the same thing, for the same reasons, plus a few of his own. He had long since been caught up in an eagerness like Mary's to find out about the Laagi and everything to do with them. He also would have liked time to examine more closely what was being built on this floor. In addition, however, he was still concerned with the problem of how to communicate with Squonk, with a view to controlling the small alien.

“Did you hear me, Jim?” Mary was asking as Squonk boarded the screw-elevator for the down ride. “If Squonk spends all its time doing nothing but working here and cleaning
AndFriend
every so often, how are we going to get a look at the Laagi civilization as a whole? Is there any chance, do you think, that we could transfer to another Squonk, or even to one of the Laagi?”

“I wouldn't think trying to transfer to one of the Laagi might be very smart,” said Jim slowly. “Squonk might not be aware of us being here in its mind, but a Laagi might—particularly if we started talking to each other. Come to think of it, he might even understand what we're saying.”

“I don't see how,” said Mary doubtfully. “Our mental concepts have got to be so different from any alien's that they wouldn't make sense to him—or it.”

“Are you so certain about that?” asked Jim. “Remember, there's lots of parallels between our civilization and this one. We've got ships, they have ships. We've got buildings, they've got buildings. Just like us, they go places, build things, and so forth. Wasn't it you who said they were probably using something like a body language to communicate? So, we communicate, they communicate. We may translate our thoughts into noises and they translate them into arm jerks, but if the thought's the same—we think of what's underfoot, and what's underfoot to them is what's underfoot to us—wouldn't our thought about it, which we think of as a sound, be seen in the mind we were occupying as an arm jerk that meant ‘underfoot'?”

Mary did not answer immediately. Jim found himself feeling a little smug about the success of his argument.

“You're still anthropomorphizing,” she said though, when she did answer, “still thinking of them in human terms. The thoughts behind our respective symbols may compare, but we and the Laagi may look at things so differently that our thoughts would be gibberish to them. For example, suppose for the Laagi, there's no specific term for ‘underfoot.' The whole concept of something beneath the feet, upholding you, is thought of in terms of who it upholds, or of why it was built, or what color it is… or anything.”

“Hmm,” said Jim. He did not know what else to say. It was disconcerting to make a masterful argument and immediately have someone find a hole in it. Then inspiration came.

“But the point is,” he said, “that we don't want to draw the Laagi's attention to the fact we're in its mind at all. Talking gibberish could sound that alarm just as loudly as saying something the Laagi could understand.”

“Unless they thought he was crazy.”

“Do you want to take the chance?” demanded Jim.

“No,” said Mary reluctantly. “I guess not. What's the chance we might be able to transfer to another squonk?”

“I'm still trying to learn about this one,” said Jim. “Maybe—but give me some time yet. I understand from our point of view we've got lots of time, so we might as well use it.”

Mary did not dignify that final statement with a reply.

Squonk took them back to the waiting line. It was, Jim noticed, glowing all over with satisfaction at what it had just done. Why it should be so pleased with such a simple errand when it had not radiated any unusual happiness over the very careful job it had done of cleaning
AndFriend
, puzzled Jim. Tentatively, he concluded that the pleasure of a squonk might have something to do with whether one or more of the Laagi was involved in what the squonk did.

They were something like faithful dogs, these squonks. He considered that idea. It was a farfetched comparison, based only on the pleasure plainly felt by their Squonk on only two instances. Perhaps he should try to go about this more logically.

Item: he could feel strong emotion from Squonk.

Item: he did not know if Squonk could feel any emotion from him or Mary. In fact—

Item: he did not know if the Squonk knew they were in its mind. It could be that it did not feel or hear their presence at all; or it could be feeling or hearing them, but simply ignoring what seemed to have no relation to its ordinary existence.

What he needed was some way of testing out whether Squonk could hear them or not; and preferably it should be a test he could make without Mary knowing he was trying it.

That brought up the question of what Mary could overhear from his mind. He could hear her only when she thought directly at him. Plainly, she could hear him when he thought directly to her. But she had not seemed to hear him when he was simply working out some kind of mental problem, as when he got together with
AndFriend
's calculating equipment to plot the most promising search pattern to find the second Laagi derelict.

On second thought, it had been plain enough all along that Mary could not hear his thoughts, or he hers, unless they deliberately broadcast them to one another.

Back to squonks, which were a legitimate subject for investigation. Why not try using the image-making part of his mind, imagine himself speaking directly to Squonk as he would to Mary, and see how it would react?

He pictured himself as a Laagi, praising this particular squonk.

He was vibrating his right arm up and down with feather touches on Squonk's outstretched neck. “Good squonk,” he was transmitting to it with his feather taps. “Good, good squonk! Hard-working, noble squonk. Fine, industrious squonk…”

To his delighted surprise, he was beginning to feel a wave of answering emotion from Squonk. It was responding exactly as if an actual Laagi was praising it with the arm signals. Jim found himself getting into his role as a Laagi, expanding his praise. Working off the feedback of Squonk's emotions he thought he could almost feel, in muscles and tendons he did not have and had never had, the effort behind the touchings that were causing such pleasure in Squonk. He became aware, suddenly, that Squonk was now attracting the attention of its fellow squonks in the waiting line.

Squonk had already begun to extend its neck in delight at being so praised. In a moment it would roll over on its back with both of its red feet stiffly pointing upwards in the air. Hastily, Jim cancelled the image and the thought.

Think about something else, he told himself hastily. But he did not have to work very hard at doing so, because at that moment Mary herself unknowingly lent a helping hand.

“Isn't our Squonk acting rather peculiarly?” she asked.

“Is it?” he said, for the Squonk, praise withdrawn, had already retracted its neck, although its emotions still radiated a joyous feeling. “I didn't notice.”

“It was acting the same way it acted when that Laagi petted it, on our way here. It stuck its neck out just the way it was sticking it out before.”

“Oh? I'm sorry I didn't notice that,” said Jim. “I was thinking.'

“I wish you wouldn't go off into these thinking trances,” said Mary. “Or at least, tell me how I can rouse you, when you do. Something critical might happen and you wouldn't notice; and I wouldn't be able to get your attention in time—just the way it was now.”

“Did you think it was critical? Squonk sticking his neck out?”

“I don't know. But he had the other squonks on both sides of us looking at him as if he was doing something extraordinary.”

“Maybe squonks do what he was doing just for exercise—or practice, sometimes even when no Laagi's around. Or he could just be remembering it to the point where he acted it out. The other squonks could be staring at him because they were jealous.”

It sounded like a thin explanation, even to Jim.

“Perhaps… ” said Mary doubtfully.

“You, yourself, said there could be any number of reasons for the things they do that we'd never guess because their alien minds give them a different understanding of the universe they perceive—or something like that.”

“I know,” said Mary. “But all the same I'd like to know why Squonk did it. The information might help us to understand the Laagi. Any information could help.”

“You're right, of course,” said Jim. He hesitated for a second, but then decided it would not be unadvisable to tell her of the possibility.