The Forever Man (33 page)

“That still doesn't explain why I've never woken up and caught you at it.”

“When you wake up, I wake up,” said Mary. “I set myself to do that, and it works. Also, it always takes you some few minutes to come to when you do wake up, so you don't realize I've just woken up, too. Of course, most of the time, even if I go to sleep after you do, I wake up long before you wake up.”

“Score another one for you,” said Jim.

He had been joking, but the tone of Mary's answer was completely serious.

“If you say so,” she answered absently. Jim was nettled in spite of his earlier good intentions.

“Tell me,” he said, “did it ever occur to you it might be to your benefit to make friends with the people you work with?”

“Why?” said Mary, almost fiercely. “That's right, why? The job's the thing. If the work gets done, who cares how the people doing it get on together?”

Jim took a few seconds to absorb that.

“I think you really mean that,” he said at last.

“I do,” said Mary. Suddenly one of the changes in her that was as astonishing as the sort of attitude Jim had just been questioning her about seemed to take her over. “Sorry, Jim. I don't deliberately set out to be hard to coexist with. It's just that what we're involved in here is one of the most important things any members of the human race have ever tied into; and something like that is so much more important than friendship, or sleep, or anything else, that there's no comparing them.”

“It's also true,” said Jim slowly, “that it's a job as big as the Laagi race itself. It's not the sort of thing that's going to be done by one person, or two persons, alone.”

“Whoever comes after us is going to build on what I do now,” said Mary. “I owe it to give them as much as I can. That's that. If you don't like it, you can lump it!”

Mentally, Jim opened his mouth to answer her, then closed it again. It was no use. He and she seemed to talk different languages.

But it started him on a new line of thought.

There had been something approaching a violence in the emotion he had felt from Mary just now; a violence he had not felt from her before. It was nearly as if she was reacting to him as a competitor, or even an antagonist. He compared that emotion in her with his memory of her, when he had first come out of his trance, to find himself in hypnotic shackles with
AndFriend
, locked down on the surface of this alien world.

She had been entirely different then. She had seemed honestly regretful at what she obviously felt she had had no choice but to do, and apparently honestly concerned at what it had done to him. Now she was all claws and teeth. Why? Unless—wild as it seemed—there was something about studying the Laagi that had triggered off the change in her.

He tried to imagine what that might be. It could hardly be the example set by the Laagi themselves. So far they had seen no sign of anything even approaching violence of emotion in the Laagi, let alone any evidence of brutality or worse; and even if they had, why having observed it should cause Mary to change her attitude toward Jim was a mystery. Like the squonks, all the Laagi did, apparently, was work. Work and keep working.

The only connection between that unceasing activity and either Jim or Mary was the fact that Mary was also a worker. But even she could not work around the clock, seven days a week, for a lifetime; which was what—so far—it looked like the Laagi did. Could she really get by on four hours' sleep a night, indefinitely? Jim himself had occasionally found it necessary as a Frontier pilot to go on five or six hours' sleep out of each twenty-four for spells of up to several weeks; and the lack of sleep had wrung him out. Of course, different people had different requirements as far as sleep went….

More to the point, had she really been able to do her sleeping only when he was sleeping, and wake before or at the moment he woke—

“Jim!” She was calling him now. “What're you doing with Squonk? I don't want him to go back over there to the wall again; I want him to keep on working through the crowd out here in the middle of the floor. Jim!”

“I didn't tell him to do anything,” replied Jim. For Squonk had suddenly turned and was headed as Mary said, toward the wall, the base of which he had searched some hours past. “Squonk! Good Squonk, don't go that way. Come back to where you were.”

But Squonk had reached the wall by this time. He leaned up against it, shortened his legs, fell over on his back and lay rocking gently on his shell, with his two red feet facing upward toward the distant ceiling.

“Well,” said Jim after a moment. “Apparently when it's time for him to sleep, he sleeps.”

“Can't you wake him up?”

“How?” asked Jim.

“I don't know. You're the one who runs him. Think of something. There must be something—some sort of emergency signal that'd bring him to.”

“Maybe there is,” said Jim. “But don't you think you'd better just let him sleep when he's used to sleeping, if you want to keep him in good shape for your own use? How would we go about getting another squonk if something happened to him, or he got so tired he stopped paying attention to what I said to him? The way he didn't listen to me just now, when I told him to stop going toward the wall.”

She did not answer. He thought he again felt a deep anger in her, anger at him as well as at Squonk. But he could not be sure. It was difficult for him to do much more than guess at her emotional state unless she spoke, and then her feelings came through loud and clear as an overriding quality on the words she said. He told himself that he might have been imagining it in this instance; but from then on he watched for a number of things during the time that followed after Squonk came out of his brief period of sleep and responded to Jim's commands in his old obedient manner.

In the weeks and perhaps months of local time that followed—the day here seemed to be somewhat longer than twenty-four of Earth's hours, although without access to the ship's instruments, it was impossible to compare the two until they got back to
AndFriend
—they saw, and Mary dictated, reports on an astonishing amount of information about the Laagi.

They penetrated to the city's outskirts, and discovered that there, it stopped abruptly with the last building and beyond this was a scrub-brush type of open country with hard-packed sandy soil, bushes, or perhaps small trees that seemed capable of pulling up their roots at will, moving slowly to a new location and putting them down again. This open country was also plentifully sprinkled with evidence of more primitive life forms, from conical mounds that resembled large ant hills several meters in height, to communities of smaller mounds no larger than a human fist, from which in the daytime emerged a number of small trotting, flying or hopping creatures, possibly insects, that apparently fed off the vegetation or each other.

They ventured a short distance out into this countryside, until Squonk became too upset to go farther. But once they were well out from the buildings, a kilometer or more, both Mary and Jim had thought they caught glimpses of moving forms as large as Squonk or larger, among the vegetation in the distance.

“…it was impossible to be sure,” Mary dictated after their return to the city, “whether it was fear or a sense of having abandoned his proper place or duty that made Squonk so eager to return to the city. It may have been both…”

Within the city itself, they eventually found the equivalent of a transportation terminal, with both atmosphere and spacegoing craft resting there, taking off, and landing upon it.

“Strange they wouldn't keep
AndFriend
here, instead of someplace else in the city,” commented Jim.

“Questions like that can be speculated on later,” said Mary.

Nonetheless, it was a question that continued to bother Jim. He wished he knew whether Raoul's ship had been kept here at the field for regular space and atmosphere traffic.

They also witnessed the Laagi equivalent of long-distance communications. The Laagi they watched operated a set of controls that consisted of buttons on a vertical rod, which, in addition to being pivotable about its base in the floor, was capable of being pulled out to greater length or pushed down to shorter, as larger sections slid backwards or forwards over adjoining shorter sections. The stubby Laagi fingers meanwhile played with studs set into the rod itself.

While the Laagi they watched was doing this, it watched the screen of a three-dimensional tank in which the image of another Laagi moved and gesticulated. It took only a little thinking to realize that the live Laagi before them was operating the movements of an image seen by the Laagi being communicated with; and that that other Laagi was controlling the movements of the image that the live Laagi was watching.

“Call it phoning,” suggested Jim. “You might as well; and it's less confusing than to talk of it as a form of alien communication the way you are.”

Mary did not answer. But in her reports from then on she did use the word.

But they found no recreational areas and nothing resembling separate homes, dwelling places, or even dormitories—the exception of one place that seemed pretty obviously the equivalent of a hospital.

They did discover a maternity area at the hospital, with evidence that at least some of the Laagi—it was impossible to tell by looking at them—were capable of bearing young. Although whether these were the result of bisexual, asexual, or some other engendering process, they did not find out. Certainly, they saw no Laagi in the act of sexual coupling. In fact, Laagi almost never touched each other, except for the faint touches that went along with the vibrating arm gestures such as Squonk had received from the Laagi he had sought out and been praised by when they had first left the ship. Laagi in conversation with each other sometimes used similar arm vibrations. But this was the closest to touching that Jim and Mary were able to observe.

The young Laagi were evidently carried to term within the adult Laagi, just as a human child is within its mother; and the pregnant adults, apparently, came to the hospital-equivalent for delivery. This took place within minutes of the pregnant Laagi being admitted to a maternity ward, which led to Mary's suspicion that those so admitted had at least some conscious control over when the delivery was to occur.

The baby Laagi, however, which on delivery had all its limbs and head tucked inside its peripheral flesh folds, was immediately taken away by one of the hospital staff; and the formerly pregnant Laagi got up, left the hospital immediately and went back to work.

Apparently, parent and offspring never had anything more to do with each other after that. The young individual was taken to the equivalent of a nursery, where, gradually, during the next week or so, it began to essay small emergences of its limbs and head from their hiding places. Within two or three weeks it was up on its feet and mobile, and was taken out of the nursery to be put into what was apparently a school; where it began to work, or perhaps play at working, almost immediately and almost without instruction.

“…Natural selection on this planet, assuming that this is the only or originating planet of the Laagi race,” dictated Mary in one of her reports, “seems to have specialized in communal life forms. If this turns out to be so, it may well be that the Laagi are a communal life form that evolved into an intelligence equal to humans and built a comparable civilization, one adapted to their own special requirements and so differing from our own.”

“The result seems to be that while in many areas of activity they react according to racial imperatives, in which the needs of the community are all that is considered, in more modern and technological areas they react as individuals. Although I've been unable to find any hard evidence of a government and individuals acting as leaders, both I and James Wander feel strongly that there must be such things somewhere in the social machinery of the Laagi…”

The adult Laagi ate at whatever communal food source was handy and slept at their work when they had reached the point where sleep was necessary. The greatest concession they made to the need to rest was, like Squonk, to get out of a general traffic area before going off to sleep. Also, their sleep was at best a matter of an hour or two and was taken at no set pattern of intervals.

One somewhat unpleasant discovery was that the Laagi also died at their work. Occasionally one of them who had pulled in its limbs and head in what seemed normal sleep simply never woke up again. Death was signaled, apparently, by the fact that head, legs and arms emerged slightly from the skin folds into which they had withdrawn themselves and showed a limpness that was otherwise uncharacteristic.

When this happened, sometimes the dead Laagi's former coworkers would carry it off. Sometimes its former coworkers ignored it and after a while other Laagi came to remove it; and, then or shortly after, a living Laagi took its place.

At Mary's insistence, they followed such a removal team and found that the body was simply dumped onto the equivalent of the garbage pile from the nearest food room, from which a squonk-operated mechanical trash gatherer gathered it up along with the discarded food materials and took it off to be disposed of elsewhere.

All this, Mary meticulously reported via Jim back to the memory banks of
AndFriend
. Meanwhile, Jim himself was occupied in two other activities.

One of these was determining if it was possible, through Squonk, to get access to tools and the assistance of other squonks on a joint project. This particular research on his part came to Mary's attention when Jim deliberately ordered Squonk to lift and move a piece of metal scaffolding that was leaning against a wall in a building half-factory, half-offices that they were in at the time. The scaffolding was far too heavy for Squonk alone to lift. But Jim concentrated strongly on the image he broadcast to Squonk of wanting the scaffolding moved, for its own length down the wall against which it rested.