The Forever Man (47 page)

“Welcome home, XN413.” A voice on the ship-to-ship circuit filled the interior space of
AndFriend
. “Since we're being formal, this is XY1668, Wing Cee for the pack you see around you. You want to slave to me and we'll carry you in? How about your prisoner, is he slave to you—and is he alive?”

“Very much alive. Handle with care,” answered Jim. “Not, repeat not, slaved to me, but will follow. I slave to you—now. Give prisoner in particular lots of room and drive regular. He'll follow. Land him, but do not disturb further. Also do not disturb me after landing. You'll probably get added orders on both of us from Base—but everything clear for now?”

“Clear. Here we go.”

The escort moved off, with
AndFriend
and the Laagi ship traveling as if held in invisible bonds in the center of their formation.

“Mary?” said Jim softly, speaking mind to mind.

She did not answer.

“Mary?” he asked again, still softly.

“What is it?” Her voice was no longer cold, but neither was it warm. It spoke to him with the remoteness of disinterest.

“We're home,” said Jim. “This is your territory, again. How do we go about getting back into our own bodies?”

“We'd better wait and see if they're ready to have us reenter, first. Louis will be calling us, shortly, won't he?”

“I'd expect so,” said Jim, knowing that short of death, nothing was going to keep General Louis Mollen from being on the phone to them as soon as he heard they were back.

“We'll have to ask him to check with wherever they've been maintaining the bodies, and make sure the technicians there are ready for us to reanimate them. When he gives us word they are, we can go ahead.”

“How do we do it? I mean, how do we go about moving back into our bodies?” Jim asked.

“When I was in Raoul's mind in
La Chasse Gallerie
”—her voice still sounded remote, disinterested—“after I found I couldn't move the ship by myself and also I couldn't communicate with him any better, I finally felt I was wasting my time there. Then I wanted to be back in my own body—and as soon as I wanted to, I was. Evidence is that where you most want to be, your identity is—remember how you got into
AndFriend
in the first place? How you wanted to be with her, and so, you were.”

“If you and I could just stay here in the ship, together, I'd want that,” said Jim.

“Suit yourself,” she said lightly. “As soon as we get word the bodies are ready, I'll be leaving.”

He did not try to say any more and she did not say anything. The formation of ships proceeded Earthward at one gravity of acceleration, reached midpoint, flipped end for end and decelerated, still at one gravity. Time passed; and Earth became visible as a blue globe, though still small, on
AndFriend
's close screen.

“—XN413, this is Louis One. XN413, This is Louis One. Are you hearing me all right—”

“Hearing,” said Jim. “Both of us.”

“It's wonderful to hear you. Mary?”

“She's here, too,” Jim said, since Mary could not talk aloud except through him.

“Terrific! We'll save the talking until you're down. Anything you need right away?”

“We've got some live Laagi in the other ship we brought in and the body of a dead alien subspecies on board here. Be sure to note that the atmosphere in both ships at landing will be that of the Laagi world.”

“Right,” said the general. “Anything else?”

“Tell Louis to have our bodies checked,” said Mary. “Have the technicians standing by for reentry.”

Jim repeated her words aloud.

“Reentry when?”

“Tell him as soon as he can tell us they're ready for us, down there,” said Mary clearly. “We don't have to wait until our transportation gets there.”

Jim repeated.

“Oh! I understand,” Mollen said. “Hang on, then. I'll check on that and be back to you as soon as I can. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes. Hang on.”

The voice of General Louis Mollen ceased.

“Mary?” said Jim.

She did not answer.

He dwelt in silence until Mollen's voice came back into
AndFriend
.

“Ready at any time over in the body shop,” said Mollen's voice.

“Thanks,” said Mary.

“Thanks,” said Jim.

“Mary,” said Jim, on their private mind-to-mind level, “let me just tell you something before you go. I just want to say I'll always remember this crazy business of being just a couple of minds together all these months. I learned a lot—”

He broke off. His words were sounding emptily to his own mind in the hollowness of
AndFriend
's interior. Mary was already gone. Gone, he realized now, from the moment she had answered Mollen's message that their bodies were ready for reoccupancy. He had been talking to someone who was no longer there.

Mentally, he shook his head. There was no reason for him to stay any longer, either. He stepped out of
AndFriend
as he had stepped out of her with ?1 and started toward the surface of Earth, and Base.

That face of Earth holding the North American continent was toward him and the sensible thing was to go there in a direct line. But for some reason, for old time's sake with the ?1 and his kind, Jim found himself choosing to come in on his destination in a soft, looping curve. There was no hurry in any case.

I must look like an invisible firefly myself, he thought, or would, if there was another loose mind around to see me. It was a definite pleasure to swoop along the curve he had chosen rather than go directly. He was enjoying a last time of being out without a ship, without a body, without anything but himself, alone with the stars.

He felt the pleasure of it… and, it came to him suddenly, after a fashion he could actually feel the pattern of forces ?1 had talked so much about. Certainly, he could feel the strong bar that was the pull from the Sun; and, now that he was this close, the even stronger one from Earth, like two threads of the celestial tapestry. It was strange, although he could feel the one from the Earth to be stronger because he was close to it, something in him recognized it as one of the most minor of minor threads in the galactic warp; and he thought he could faintly see some of the skeins from the other planets and even some from the nearer stars.

And it was true what ?1 had said. It would be impossible to lose one's way because even a piece of the warp implied the pattern of the whole. Down-galaxy, the direction toward the mass of the galaxy's center was as plain as if a street sign stood in the void, pointing to the midpoint of all the great whirl of stars and dust and cosmic debris.

But, he was entering Earth's atmosphere now; and he said farewell—as ?1 had said it at least once—to the stars. Below was the continent he aimed for, below were the mountains surrounding Base. Below was Base itself.

And then he was there. And the building, the room, the bed that held his body, drew him to it, for—in another way—it, too, was part of a pattern.

It looked rather uncomfortable, his body, with all those tubes stuck into it. But he would do something about that, just as soon as he was back inside.

He slipped into it, and then he had moved the muscles that opened his eyes and was looking up into the faces of people in white medical clothes who stood staring down at him, as if he was some kind of Egyptian mummy returned to life…

What followed turned out to be a long period of getting him and his body back into operation together.

To begin with, although they had kept the body very carefully, and cleaned it and fed it and turned it and even exercised it, it was out of the habit of operating under its own power and it had lost not only muscle strength, but the habit of use.

Added to that was the fact that, after having been a free mind with no physical weight to clog his senses and weigh him down under gravity, he had to learn to love his body all over again. That was not easy. His first feeling, on finding himself in it, had been almost like that of a child shut up in a closet.

He had felt trapped.

Grimly, he had fought that feeling down. A body was a great thing, he told himself. Not only that, but it was a necessary thing. Stop. Think. There were things possible to a body, smells and sights and touchings and a whole host of others, of which the mind alone could not even conceive.

Also, although there might not be much importance to it now, somewhere Mary was also back in her body; and only as another body could he ever have anything to do with her again, however transiently.

So he told himself that his return to flesh was just what he wanted. He did what the technicians told him, let himself be weaned from intravenous feeding back through liquids to solid food, let himself be exercised until he was able to take over the business of making his body exercise by his own will. He worked his way up the long slope of effort against the drag of gravity to being an ordinary human being again.

Just another hole—in top hole shape.

Mollen had been in to see him a number of times as he recovered; and of course Jim had been debriefed by a large number of interviewers. These had come, one at a time, of course, to stand at his bedside, or beside his exercise bike, or walk and finally run beside him. They had emptied him of every memory and thought he had had while he was gone, except those he had kept private to himself; and he gathered, from Mollen as well as from what reached him through the gossip channel of his attendant technicians, that work was going busily forward with both the Laagi ship and the two Laagi he and Mary had brought in. Squonk's body was never mentioned, but he was sure that it, too, had been thoroughly investigated with scalpel and microscope, by the time he was ready to walk out of the building where they had kept his body.

By that time he was ready to accept Mollen's invitation to a full scale wrap-up of the trip, in the general's office. It was to be a private session with just Mollen—and, he hoped, Mary. He had not seen her since he had reentered his own body, though when he asked about her he had been told she had readjusted well. In fact, she had been up and around, evidently, before he had been able to stand on his own feet. She was someplace other than the rooms that they had him in. Naturally, they did not tell him where.

The day finally came on which he left for good the building in which he had regained his body, and headed for Mollen's office. It was one of those sparkling clear mountain days in summer that he had used to love, and now for the first time again he found himself appreciating the body with which he responded to it. The major acting as receptionist in Mollen's outer office was a trim, fortyish woman with light gray hair whom he did not know.

“Colonel Jim Wander,” he said. “The general's expecting me.”

“Yes, Colonel. If you'll sit down for a moment…”

It turned out to be indeed only a moment. Which was just as well. The receptionist's office, in a building that had not existed when Jim and Mary had left the Base, was high-ceilinged but entirely within the building and therefore without windows. Jim had become sensitive to being enclosed since his return to his body. He got to his feet and put down the magazine he had been holding open without really reading the print before his eyes. He went into Mollen's private office.

Mollen's room had the same high ceiling but was easily four times as large as the reception room. There was a floor-to-ceiling vision screen on the wall to Jim's right. The other wall had a large painting which made no sense to Jim but was probably something expensive for important visitors to notice. Happily, however, the wall at the far end of the room, opposite the door by which Jim had entered, was all one large window with heavy floor-to-ceiling curtains drawn and tied back as far as they would go on either side, taking away all of Jim's mild new claustrophobia. In between him and the window was a lot of thick carpeting, overstuffed chairs, bookcases, a bar, and a large desk a couple of meters before the window and facing the room's entrance, a desk behind which Mollen sat in another overstuffed chair.

Mary was there, too, but she was in one of the chairs that was to the side of, but beyond Mollen's desk, closer to the window. She was in civilian clothes, wearing a gray-green dress, and her chair was so angled that she looked out of the window. Her face was turned away so that Jim, after all these days, could not see it. Mollen had swiveled his own chair around and was talking to her as Jim entered. He swiveled back to face Jim; but Mary did not turn.

“Sit down, sit down, Jim!” said Mollen. He waved Jim to a chair in front of and facing the desk. Jim sat, frustrated to be forced into a position where Mary's face was still hidden from him.

“Well,” said Mollen, “you're looking well. I hope you're feeling as good.”

“As holes go, I can't complain,” said Jim.

Mollen laughed.

“Yes,” he said, “I've read the results of your debriefings on the mind-people. Sobers me up to realize all I am to them is a hole in the continuum. Still, the human race has got on that way for millions of years, so I suppose we'll continue to struggle along in the same fashion. You two did a marvelous job out there. Better by a long shot than anything we expected. You come back not only with new worlds for us and the means to a way of dealing with the Laagi, but with news of another race yet, and a couple of Laagi prisoners to work with.”

“How're they doing?”

“Just fine,” said Mollen. “We've got them in a separate building in pretty much the same kind of set-up we had your ship and
La Chasse Gallerie
in Mary's lab. We sweated a little over how to keep them fed. But we made a guess they might be able to subsist on the same thing your little friend Squonk was fed in that hospital. We built a special room around the entry port of their ship, flooded it with the same sort of atmosphere that was in your ship, and left a container with some of the original cubes you'd brought along for Squonk, plus some we'd made up after analyzing one of the cubes.”