The Forever Man (15 page)

“We were working on a different premise, then—” Mary broke off, turning to Aram. “Doctor, I'm afraid we're about to talk about things that—”

“I know, I know,” said Aram. “Secrecy. You don't have to explain. Just don't put any pressure on him.”

He turned and went out through a flap of the tent. They heard his footsteps moving away and the distant slam of a door.

“What different premise?” asked Jim.

“Our samples from
La Chasse Gallerie
showed that part of Raoul's living… there's no proper word for it, call it living fabric, had been absorbed by the inner surfaces of some of his ship's walls. We still don't understand how it could work that way, so I can't explain it to you, even if the words were there. But apparently when you get right down to it, matter is matter; and any kind of matter can, under the right conditions, be sensitized to become a vehicle to carry an already developed personality—or soul, if you want to call it that.”

“Soul,” said Mollen softly. ” ‘Soul' is the word. Mary offered herself as a guinea pig.”

“I also had a… feeling for Raoul Penard. We thought that might help.”

“What did they do, glue you to the inside wall of the pilot's room of
La Chasse Gallerie
?” asked Jim.

The two stared at him.

“Jim,” said Mary, “did you mean that as a joke? Or—”

“I didn't mean it literally,” said Jim. “Why're you so shocked by that?”

“Because it shows how—how good you are. I mean, how well you are!” said Mary.

“She means,” said Mollen bluntly, “how sane. Sane enough to have a sense of humor left.”

“Why shouldn't I?” said Jim. “I'm all here, even if I am wearing a ship instead of a body.”

To his surprise, the other two were unnaturally silent for a moment.

“Oh, I see,” said Jim. “You mean I might have been insane the way Raoul's insane.”

“Not insane.” Mary spoke with an effort. “Not, anyway, the way we think of insane. That's what I found out when I used myself in that experiment with Raoul and
La Chasse Gallerie
.”

Her voice grew more businesslike.

“And to answer you, no, I wasn't glued to one of the inside walls of the ship,” she said. “What we did was take a very small amount of material from the ship and implant it under my skin. I lived with it for several months, hoping that this way I'd become sensitized to
La Chasse Gallerie
, too. Then, with the use of hypnotic medications, I was urged to feel that I'd become the ship, with Raoul.”

“And it worked?” said Jim, wonderingly.

“It worked—oh, not on the first try or even the fifteenth. But we kept trying different drugs and self-hypnosis instead of someone else hypnotizing me, and so forth; and—we don't know specifically why then and not before—but one day it just worked; and I was in the ship with Raoul.”

Mary stopped talking. She looked down at the floor.

“In a sense, then,” said Mollen, when it became clear Mary was not going on, “she got the equivalent of a good look at Penard—”

“Yes,” Mary interrupted. “That was when we—when I found out he wasn't wholly there.”

She paused briefly again, then went on.

“It was just one part of him, the part that remembered his childhood and certain things,” she said. “He didn't remember anything about being a pilot. He didn't have any notion of how he'd made
La Chasse Gallerie
fly after her engines were gone, or how he could talk, or anything like that. He was just a sort of bundle of living memories, from his earliest years.”

Her voice softened.

“But he's happy with that. That's why we decided to give up trying to do anything more with him. He deserves that happiness after a long century of being lost and finally making it home again. He can stay as
La Chasse Gallerie
as long as he wants to, and he'll always be taken care of.”

“But how did I get into this?” Jim said.

“Because Mary found out she couldn't do anything but be there, in
La Chasse Gallerie
,” said Mollen. “And maybe you can't either. Try something for me right now—”

“Aram said not to put any pressure on him,” Mary interrupted swiftly. “Maybe we should wait—”

“I'm all right,” said Jim. “What were you going to say, General?”

“All right, Mary,” said Mollen to her. He turned back to Jim. “Jim, I'll leave it up to you. If you don't want to try this, just say so. I'd like you to try to lift
AndFriend
—lift yourself—just off the floor, if you can.”

“I see,” said Jim. There was a moment in which he considered it, and then he lifted, off the concrete some six inches, the whole length and tons of weight of
AndFriend
, as lightly and effortlessly as a dandelion seed lifted from the ripe blossom by a breath of warm summer breeze. He poised there.

“Fine… ” said Mollen after a moment. His voice sounded slightly strangled. “You can come down now.”

Jim went back to rest on the floor, again gently, silently.

“How did you do that?” demanded Mary.

“I don't know,” Jim said, puzzled. “How does someone bend his right arm at the elbow? You want to, so you do.”

None of them said anything for a moment.

“So,” went on Jim finally, “that was why Mary's way of making herself a part of
La Chasse Gallerie
didn't work for you. It wasn't any good to be part of a ship if you couldn't move it.”

“You really don't know how you do it?” demanded Mollen.

Jim shook his head. Then realized he had only thought of shaking his head and that, of course, nothing about
AndFriend
had moved.

“I don't have the slightest idea,” said Jim. “I see you, I hear you, I can move. I am—right now, I really am—AndFriend. Maybe that's the difference. The only one who could be
La Chasse Gallerie
was Raoul.”

“Yes,” said Mary somberly. “I think you're right. We finally decided it was something like that, ourselves.”

“But it worked with me,” said Jim.

“No—” began Mollen.

“No,” said Mary in the same moment; and Mollen stopped trying to answer. “I decided the process hadn't worked for me because even when I thought I was part of
La Chasse Gallerie
, I really wasn't. I was part of Raoul. The bonding was based on some sort of emotional tie. Do you remember my mentioning the matter of you loving your ship, when I talked to you at the Officers' Club about this project, long ago?”

“I remember,” said Jim.

“I think I also said something about how poltergeist phenomena might be related to Raoul's ability to move a spaceship that no longer had any engines to take off from a planet's surface and move itself through space. I had the idea then that an intolerable situation was the trigger for a parakinetic individual using such abilities. But it wasn't so much the situation as the individual's response to it. A fury at the intolerable situation—which meant some kind of frustrated love as the obverse.”

“Raoul's love for his ship—and his home?” said Jim.

“And my—my bond with Raoul.”

“Why don't you want to say you loved him?” asked Jim, realizing, strangely, the moment he had said it, that this was as unusual a thing for him to say as Mary's avoidance of the word he had mentioned. “Most women don't have any trouble saying the word ‘love'.”

“I'm not ‘most women'—I'm me!” flared Mary. “Besides, how would you know?”

“I guess I wouldn't,” said Jim, out of the strange painless honesty that was part of him in the place where he now lived.

“Then I'll go on,” said Mary. “The point I'm making is that if the joining between the mind of one person and another person or thing requires a powerful love, then simply the mechanical means we'd used to put me in with Raoul wouldn't work to produce a spaceship with only a human mind flying it. A human mind that would not only be in, but be able to control what it was in, had to have three qualifications. It had to know that it was possible for it to be in a ship—and there were only you and me who'd actually experienced Raoul's being in and flying
La Chasse Gallerie
. It also had to be in an intolerable situation; and it had to have the bond of an overpowering love with what it would become part of.”

She stopped.

“Am I making sense to you?” she said.

“Yes,” said Jim, “I understand.”

“If I was right, the hypothesis offered an explanation, not only for poltergeist activity, but for ghosts haunting houses or certain locations, or of human spirits taking over other people, or things, and operating through them.”

Again she paused.

“Go on,” said Jim.

“It was all we had to work with,” she said, almost defensively. “So we set out to try it out on you. We deliberately kept you from
AndFriend
; and we wore you down with frustration. All the time, of course, we were studying you. Under hypnosis, we found what we wanted. It was your dream of
AndFriend
being used as a target drone to study the Laagi responses, and when we thought we had you at the breaking point, we arranged to reenact it for you.”

She stopped once more. Jim did not say anything.

“Well, it worked,” she said at last. “You're perfectly free to hate me all you like for doing it. I thought it was something that had to be done, and I did it.”

“I authorized it,” said Mollen. “I told you, Jim, it was my responsibility.”

“How did Mary get back into her own body?” asked Jim.

“When I faced the fact that there was no Raoul Penard there for me to love,” Mary used the last word emphatically, “I simply woke up in my own body, where it'd been kept and cared for. They'd tried to bring me back by hypnotic signal—I think you know what I mean. I was given an order under hypnosis to come out of that hypnosis when a certain person told me to. It was to be Louis, here, telling me to come back. They tried it. When they found they couldn't communicate with me and Raoul was still going on with his own talking, they had Louis call me back. But I didn't come. Only when I faced the fact there was no real Raoul there—then I came back, of my own accord.”

“What you're telling me,” said Jim, fascinated by his own calmness, “is that you don't know how I'll ever get back into my own body.”

The moment that went by without an answer was long enough so that the truth became obvious.

“It's worse than that, isn't it?” he said. “You don't think I ever will get back?”

“I'm sorry, boy,” said Mollen. “It's my responsibility, as I keep saying. But you're right.”

“AndFriend
isn't like Raoul,” said Mary. “She's exactly what you knew she was. You'd have to want to leave her… enough. And that may—”

“Be impossible,” said Jim.

“Yes.”

This time the silence was very long indeed. Jim was trying to live with the idea of his situation, to gather in the full meaning of it. The other two said nothing, as people say nothing, watching the critical moment of a medical operation through the glass window of an observation booth.

“You did this all for a purpose,” said Jim finally. “You did it because you want me to do something. That reason you had for sending me back into space, General—with the small difference that you didn't tell me you were sending me back this way. No, wait—”

He stopped Mollen as the other was beginning to speak again.

“Don't tell me again it's your responsibility. I've heard that. I know it's your responsibility. And I know you did it because the people who tell you what to do made it your responsibility. It doesn't matter who's responsible. The only thing that matters is why you did it—what's the mission you had for me?”

“Have you looked at yourself? I mean, at
AndFriend
?” asked Mollen. “Can you look at yourself?”

“Yes. You mean the new fusion engines and all the rest of it,” answered Jim. “I know it's there, just as you said it would be. But you know, I don't need it, any of it. I can go wherever I need to go the same way Raoul did, the same way I lifted off the floor, just now. Wait a minute, though—I can't phase-shift without using the ship's equipment. But the regular drive equipment you could have just as well left off.”

“Perhaps,” said Mollen, “but we weren't taking any chances. Also, if you were captured…”

“By the Laagi.”

“Yes,” said the general with a small sigh, “by the Laagi. If they capture you, we want you to look as if you needed a human being in you, to run you; but the human being just happens to be missing.”

“So, you want me to go deep into Laagi territory,” Jim said, “deep enough so I could be captured instead of just shot to pieces?”

“Not exactly,” said Mollen.

“No?” Jim was surprised, and was startled to realize that it was the first time since his waking as part of
AndFriend
that he had felt that emotion.

“We want you to go out around Laagi territory, just as I said in my office.”

“Then why could I be captured?”

“Because we want you to go beyond Laagi territory, around the other side of Laagi territory; and we've no way of knowing how far they've gone on that far side. Since Raoul's already been there, they may be watching for you there. We don't know. But there's that chance. But if you're captured, maybe you'll have a better chance of escaping if they think you need someone to fly you.”

“You want me to find whatever it was Penard found,” said Jim. “Don't you think you better tell me now what you think it was?”

“We don't know. That's a fact, Jim. It seemed to be some sort of paradise, from Raoul's point of view. The point is, there was this paradise and then there was something else there, too. It's that something else that's got us sending you out there.”