The Forever Man (31 page)

“Very clever,” commented Jim. “Turning a temperature control into the dial of a combination safe. Very clever indeed. Now what?”

“Now have Squonk reach in there and see if he finds anything.”

Squonk, at Jim's orders, explored the aperture with the tip of one of his tentacles. It appeared from what Jim could see to be a recess about as deep as it was high or wide.

The tentacle came out holding nothing.

“Tell him too bad,” said Mary, with satisfaction in her voice. “Apparently the key wasn't there.”

Jim passed the message on.

“But do you mind telling me,” he asked, “just exactly what's going on? Why all that trouble to set up a secret place and then have it empty?”

“It wasn't empty,” said Mary, a little smugly. “Now that tentacle of Squonk's been infiltrated by a microtransmitter that'll broadcast anything seen or heard in his vicinity back to the ship's recorder.”

“What recorder?”

“The same one that's been recording every noise and action aboard this ship since we started.”

“Our mind-to-mind conversations, too?”

“No,” said Mary regretfully. “It couldn't pick up the mind-to-mind talking. It's only recorded when you speak out loud through the ship's internal and external communication system, the way you talked to Louis Mollen and me when we were back at Base and you were first in
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. Now, when we get out in that city, I'm going to start making notes on what I observe. We can't transmit those back to the ship via Squonk's transmitter, so I'll dictate them to you and you do what you'd ordinarily do to repeat them out loud over
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's internal communications system. Actually, you'll be repeating them out loud to the recorder.”

For a moment Jim was silent.

“So,” he said. “This was set up from the start, too, was it?”

“We only hoped, then, that we'd end up captured by the Laagi; but of course every contingency was planned for as far as we could imagine it,” said Mary briskly. “Now, we've got to get going with Squonk. Will you tell him to head for the city buildings?”

Jim did. His mind was too full for words and Mary was evidently busy making plans, because they did not talk again until they were well in among the buildings on one of the green paths.

“Squonk's waiting to be told where to look,” Jim said finally.

“I've been thinking about that,” answered Mary. “We'll simply have to try various buildings until we find what I want; but I've been deciding what to look into first in this alien society. What we want, I think, is some place where Laagi get together to talk. Enough pictures of them signaling to each other ought to give the people back home enough information to break down their gestures into a language we can understand.”

“Maybe,” said Jim. “But if the way they think is completely different from the way we do, their language isn't going to make any sense, anyway.”

“As I've said before, this is a technological civilization. There have to be parallels between its problems and their ways of handling them, and our own problems and solutions. Some sort of understanding has to be possible; and any sort of understanding, Jim, is a world of improvement over what we've had so far where they're concerned.”

“Hmm,” said Jim.

“You don't agree?”

“Oh, I agree,” said Jim. “Yes, any improvement's worth the cost.”

She was right, of course, he told himself. He found himself admiring her single-mindedness. Now that he was completely over his outrage at being drafted into this situation instead of being asked, he had to face the fact that he had had a chip on his shoulder where she was concerned from the first moment he had met her in Mollen's office, before she had ridden out in his gunner's seat in their successful effort to bring back
La Chasse Gallerie
and what was left of the mind of Raoul.

All right, she had her own shoulder chip, too. Hopefully, she would put it aside in time, as he was beginning to put his aside. A little wistfully, he wondered what she would be like if she did. He had never really let himself know her; and she, of course, had never really made herself available to be known. He had got his back up about her from the initial instant of meeting. First, because she was not a space fighter—not what Frontier pilots like him considered a space fighter. Second, because she was arrogant on the basis of her expertise in a field that he knew next to nothing about and thought even less of, and that arrogance rubbed him the wrong way. His own arrogance, he had to admit to himself, now, had been completely invisible to him.

Somewhere in that childhood of hers, she must have been forced into taking a turn toward toughness. He had always taken entirely for granted his own cheerful childhood, with plenty of friends his own age all through the growing-up years, with aunts, uncles, grandparents and likeable cousins—not to mention, now that he stopped to consider them, a remarkably happy set of loving parents. Loving to each other as well as to him. He could see why she might assume he had had a careless and easy ride through life, particularly since she had taken a thorough look at his life's records, which of course she had done as a necessary preliminary to using him as part of her project. About the only thing he had had in common with her was that they had both been only children.

The one element she would not have found in his records would have been his own private idealism, the determination to do at least one worthy and memorable thing in his life… though some to think of it, she must have sensed something of it, since there had been that moment just after they had
La Chasse Gallerie
safely back home and she had told him that his nature was that of a “white knight.”

Which of course it wasn't. He might have white-knight-dreams, but he was thoroughly practical, too. She would find out how practical when he broke loose of this hypnotic control she was using to keep him on a tether. But… even that really didn't matter, except as a principle, now that he understood and liked her better.

He wondered if there were some magic words that would make her open up about what had made her what she was.

From somewhere, he could not say exactly where, he had acquired a firm conviction that if she would just put aside her prickly armor for a moment, she would show him someone very good to know. He had become more and more sure that her combativeness was a shield behind which she hid her true self. Just like one of those people who go around warning the world how stubborn he or she is, while really only setting up a defense against the secret belief that anyone could talk him or her into anything. Mary's toughness, he now firmly believed, was a shield for a natural instinct toward a tenderness which she felt she must hide.

Again, he could not remember exactly how he had reached this decision. A number of small straws in the wind of their mutual adventuring must have pointed him to it.

It dawned on him suddenly then that somewhere along the way, she would need evidence of his own strength and abilities before she could be open with him. For her own reasons, some of which might be buried in that past she evidently disliked, she had a need to cling to the illusion that he was—what was it she had called him once? A featherbrained flyboy. That shielded inner self of her would need positive, undeniable evidence he was no such thing before she would permit herself to deal with him on an equal level. So one of the reasons for his breaking himself loose of her hypnotic reins would be to establish that he was strong enough for her to trust him and be relaxed with him.

On the other hand, of course, he could be dead wrong about all this. But, what the hell, it was worth a try. He woke up suddenly to the fact that Squonk was still coursing eagerly along the green pathway, waiting for instructions. Mary seemed to have gone off into her thoughts just as Jim had gone off into his.

“Squonk's still waiting,” he said.

“I know that,” she said. “I haven't been able to come up with any reason to pick a particular building to try first. Have you?”

“No,” he said.

“I suppose we'll just have to try them at random.”

“Looks like it.”

“Will you tell Squonk to go into the next entrance we come to, then?”

He did.

Squonk carried them only a small distance farther down the path, therefore, before turning in through one of the typical doorways. This time they found themselves in what might have been an office building, if it had not looked so much like a honeycomb. Or perhaps it could be best described as a honeycomb taken over and made into an office building. There seemed to be innumerable floors, none of them higher in the ceiling than would comfortably accommodate an adult Laagi, with each floor having innumerable corridors and each corridor lined on both sides with openings into cubicles. In each cubicle was a Laagi, working a bank of controls, or simply standing motionless, staring at the bank of controls—and that was all there was to it.

“None of them are communicating,” said Mary.

“At least, not unless they're doing it through that console in front of each one,” said Jim. “Maybe it's some sort of information or control center.”

“Anyway,” said Mary decisively, “it doesn't offer me anything I can work with. If you'll just repeat the words after me for the sake of the ship's recorder, I'll make a brief description of it by way of a report, so that we can come back here, if what we learn elsewhere makes it worthwhile.”

She did so, Jim parroting her words faithfully, a phrase at a time.

“On to the next building,” said Mary.

But the next building was exactly like the one they just left. In fact, the next three buildings they tried were exactly like the first.

“They have to be the Laagi equivalent of offices,” said Jim.

“So many of them?”

“Aren't our cities loaded with office buildings? What would an alien say if he could look into them and see people looking at screens and talking into receptors?”

“It's pushing belief past the limit,” Mary said firmly, “to hypothesize that the Laagi have a business structure in their society that much like ours.”

“All right,” said Jim as they left the fourth building. “How about this? Each one of those Laagi you see there is controlling some piece of automatic machinery somewhere else; and the controllers are all gathered together so that their work can be coordinated better.”

“That's… just possible,” said Mary doubtfully. “Anyway, we can't do anything but keep trying other buildings.”

But the next building was different. The upper floors were honeycomb offices, but the ground-level floor was divided into what seemed to be a large number of lofty, dome-ceilinged auditoriums; and the likeness to an auditorium in each case was increased by the fact that in each something resembling an audience of Laagi were working at very small consoles of controls on posts before them, while at the far end of the room an actively gesticulating Laagi seemed to be having an argument, or something like it, with the image of another Laagi blown up to many times life-size in the tank of a screen filling the wall behind the living gesticulator.

The floor was concave, from the entrance to the far end where the screen was, giving all the Laagi in the “audience” a good view of both the living and the screened individual. These two seemed to take turns, one gesticulating for a while while the other stood motionless, then the motionless one would become active and the recent speaker would cease all movement. The stubby fingers of the Laagi in the crowd flew over their consoles as this progressed.

“An instructor and his students?” said Jim. “Or a conductor leading a silent symphony performance?”

“We'd better wait until it's finished, whatever it is,” said Mary. “Tell Squonk to start searching the room. It's big enough so that it ought to take him hours.”

Jim did. Squonk scurried off to the nearby wall and began a careful tentacle search along its base.

“My guess would be—”

“Don't bother me now,” Mary interrupted. “I don't want to miss anything that goes on.”'

Jim fell silent. He watched the crowd and the two Laagi up front, the live and the imaged; but after a while his mind began to give up on any attempt to make sense out of what was happening….

“Jim!” It was Mary calling him. He had lost a chunk of time in what seemed to pass as sleep for him ever since he had become a bodiless entity. He stared at the room. The two Laagi were still up front. The mass of the rest were as busy with their consoles as ever.

“Sorry,” he said. “How long was I out?”

“Nearly four hours,” she said. “Jim, there's a limit. This may go on for weeks, for all we know. The recorder must have a few hundred thousand gesture-bits from those two lecturers or whatever they are. I want to go and take a look at the rest of the city. Tell Squonk we're leaving.”

“Want to look upstairs before we go out?”

“Just more offices. No, I want some place where there's a number of Laagi talking to each other. Something like a… a club or a restaurant in human terms. I don't suppose you can get the idea of a place like that across to Squonk?”

“I can try,” said Jim.

He tried envisioning a room, of unspecified dimensions, but plainly larger than the cubicles they had come to call offices, and in that room a number of Laagi standing or sitting in groups and talking body language to each other. Squonk stopped still on the pathway. Jim read the creature's emotions as interested and willing, but puzzled.

“No go,” said Jim.

“Maybe he knows of a place like that, but doesn't connect it with hunting for the key?”

“I didn't think of that,” said Jim.

He introduced the image of the key to his mental image and added anxiety over finding it to his emotional projection.