C H A P T E R
                    8







SHE LIKED WALNUTS, SLEEPING LATE IN TM MORNING, ALMOST
any chicken dish, horseback riding poetry, candlelight, Mo
zart and Prokcfiev among classical composers, Degas and	
Chagall among classical painters-also the pointillist painters
in general. She did not like green peppers, steak (much), most
abstract art, music playing while she worked-or any distrac
tion, however slight, from the task at hand-and any failure
to get things correct.
                She also, Jim thought, was in love with Raoul but recog
            nized the emotion as a hopeless one. If she was in love, it was
            with the image of a man she had largely fashioned for herself
            from the sound of his voice and the choice of the poetry he
            quoted.All these understandings came to Jim little by little as 
            he and Mary worked together, or were worked together under
            the direction and treatments of the staff of Amos. They came
            not as something directly sought for by Mary, Amos, or even
            by himself, but as inevitable bits of knowledge unavoidably
            attached to information about her understanding of Penard and
            her own field of work-all of which it was necessary that he
            come to know.
               The result was that somewhere along in the process he
            found he had completely ceased to dislike her. He still felt no
86
	



THE FOREVER MAN l 87
great kinship for her, but there was a sympathy for her in him that he would not have thought possible before he staged the sit-in in Mollen's outer office.
What she had deduced about him he had no idea and felt that he would rather not know. At least, he felt he could trust her to keep the information to herself, as he would keep the information he had gained about her to himself.
It was a silent pact that both recognized and which drew them closer together. Another cause for a bond between them grew from their habit of having lunch together-just the two of them. The announced reason for this, by Mary, was so she could continue briefing Jim on some of the matters that were secret even from Amos and his staff. The unofficial reason, clearly understood by Jim, was to give them both a break from the company of Neiss, who, though he probably could not help it seemed to have an irritating effect on anyone with whom he came in contact.
This personality quirk in Neiss was one of the topics they talked about, one day in the third week of their lunching together in Mary's quarters, which were spacious enough, and evidently designed to be able to, hold official entertainment functions.
" . . . All he has to do," said Mary, "is stop pushing people around for five minutes. Give them a chance to relax."
"He doesn't dare, I think," said Jim. "I'll bet he'd scare himself to death if he didn't keep the pressure on himself, as well as on everybody else, all the time. My guess is he doesn't feel safe unless he's being aggressive."
"A little aggressiveness is all to the good in just about everyone," said Mary. "A little more than a little, you can put up with. But he'll wear you down, just defending yourself."
"Unless he wears himself down first," said Jim. "You're the one who gets the brunt of it."
"Because I'm a woman," said Mary moodily.
"Because you're his superior," said Jim. "I think it's more than that, than your being a woman."
"Because I'm a woman and his superior," said Mary. "One compounds the other as far as he's concerned. But you seem to be able to disarm him, almost. He picks on you, but only as if from a sense of duty."
"I let a lot of what he does bounce off. That robs him of the


88 / Gordon R. Dickson

emotional reward, and tires him out," said Jim. "You can exhaust yourself a lot faster punching hard at thin air than you can punching something solid."
"And it doesn't take it out of you?" She looked keenly across the, small table between them.
	"A little," said Jim. They were getting uncomfortably close
to the fact that he would put up with anything to get back into
space, even if the anything consisted of a platoon of Amos
Neisses taking turns working him over. He suspected Mary
knew this, just as he had come to know things about her.
"When can I see AndFriend again?" he asked.
"Taking a page from Amos's book, are you?" Mary deliberately helped herself from a dish on the table, offered it to him, then pulled it back. "That's right, you don't like broccoli."
"When can I-•.
"You can't, not now or for some time to come," said Mary flatly. "There're reasons. I can't tell you why you can't. I'm song. If there weren't reasons, you could see her this minute."
"What do you want from me?" Jim heard the weariness in his own voice. "I know everything Raoul said forward and backward. I know everything you said, and I said, after we picked up the Chasse Gallerie. I know as much about what you'd want done with anything I might find as you do, yourself. When does this stupid business of drug, drug, drug and question, question, question, stop?"
"You love that ship," said Mary.
"You know that already," Jim answered.
"Would you die for her?"
The question caught Jim unprepared. He floundered in silence for a moment.
"Die for her?" he echoed finally. "If you mean if some idiot was trying to blow her up or some such thing, would I take a risk to try to stop him? Sure, I would!-But how do you die for a ship? There isn't any way to do anything like that."
Mary nodded. Which, Jim thought, was no kind of answer
	at all.
"Well, tell me!" he said. "Is there some sort of danger to AndFriend? What're you talking about?"
"No. And I won't talk about it anymore, either," she said. a


THE FOREVER MAN / 89
I've got your answer, and for any more information, you're going to have to wait."
And, true to her word, she refused to say any more on the subject.
That one question of hers, however, had the effect of unlocking the door to the closet of Jim's anxieties all over again. For some time he had been conscious of a growing, nagging discomfort. He had assumed when Mollen had told him that he was to be given a chance to get back into space that it would be only a matter of time before he was there. And he had assumed after being let in to see AndFriend that first morning with Mollen and Mary that from this point on he would no longer be refused access to the ship.
But he had been. He had not been let inside-ft tent that hid her, since. Gradually, in consequence, he had begun to slip back into the state of mind he had been in before he sat down in Mollen's outer office and refused to budge; only now the state was worse because the effects of the drugs they were always pumping into him made him imagine and dream more vividly than ever.
His nightmares began to return. His appetite went, then his sleep began to suffer; and this time all his running, swimming and other activity brought him no relief. A worry about AndFriend grew in the back of his mind and stayed with him, awake and asleep.
He began to fumble his answers and forget things during the sessions with Mary and Neiss's crew. A new fear awoke in him and grew. It was a fear that somehow he had become unfit, or was in the process of becoming unfit to take a ship like AndFriend into space-let alone beyond the Frontier.
He got into a blazing argument one lunchtime with Mary in her quarters, as a result.
"Of course I'm not doing well!" he shouted at her. "I had about three hours of real sleep last night. That was all. If you'd let me at AndFriend, or at least give me some idea of what all this is about, maybe I could sleep nights. You and Neiss-yes, and Mollen, too-are deliberately wrecking me in the name of trying to build me into something. What? And why? Goddamn it, tell me why! Tell me!"
He heard himself repeating the words like a time-year-old


90 I Gordon R. Dickson
in a tantrum and with a great effort made himself stop. Mary was sitting across the table looking at him.
"And don't look at me like that!" he broke out all over again. "What's the use of looking at me as if you feel sorry for me, when you're the one who's putting me through it? I went a year-almost a year-before you even got me into this present crazy program. We've been at it three months, and I'm worse off than ever, and I can't see where you've got a thing from me to pay for it."
He was shaking, shaking all over.
"Either let me in on what's up or turn me loose," he said. "One way or another."
"And what would you do if we turned you lame?' asked Mary softly.
Probably blow my brains out!" He slumped in his chair. "How do I know what I'd do? I don't know anything anymore. I hardly know who I am; and in a couple more weeks or months I won't even know that!"
He stopped talking. Mary said nothing; they eat in silence, while the fury gradually drained out of him and the shaking slowed into stillness.
"I know what we're putting you through," said Mary at last, gently. "I know it. Louis Mollen knows it-and we both hate it. Amos doesn't hate it, of course. He's not capable of seeing you as anything but a lab animal. But Louis and I-you may not believe this, but it's the truth-have been suffering right along with you from the start. Believe me, we're doing this because we've got no choice. Can you be- that?"
"Not really," . he said Dully. "It's gone on too long."
"See if you believe this, then," she said, "and in telling it to you, I'm breaking security, because I'm telling you more than you realize. It's been necessary to bring you right up to the breaking point-and you haven't broken easily. But the human mind can only take so much . . . and now I think you've had it."
He stared at her. It was more nonsense.
"What I'm saying is, hang on a little longer. H=g on to your sanity. It won't be long, now."
He did not know whether to believe her or not; but in fact, there was no place else for him to go, nothing else for him to


 THE FOREVER MAN / 91
do but keep on with her, with Neiss and the whole business. But it not only continued as if she had never given him any promise of the fact they were nearing an end, at all; it got worse.
The drugs they were using in the lab sessions now seemed to leave him foggy-minded and at least a little disoriented all the time. So that the very days themselves ceased to exist separately, but strung themselves together in a long chain of links, each link exactly like and part of, the link preceding and the one following.
As a result, he hardly reacted when the whole process transferred location. He, Mary, Neiss and his staff were all loaded aboard one of the big command ships scheduled to go on post and phase-shifted out to the Frontier.
The last week's lack of sleep and drug-disorientation had been particularly hard on him-or perhaps he was beginning to be weakened, Jim thought, to the point where what would ordinarily not bother him, bothered him noticeably. Whatever the reason, he who had never had shift-sickness during all his time in space, was thrown into a paroxysm of nausea by the shift out to the Frontier. The attack was bad enough so that they had been on station at the Frontier for at least a couple of hours before he was able to get up out of his bed and leave the cabin. And Mary had told him to come to the bridge as soon as they were on station.
He still felt a steady, low-level sickness in the pit of his stomach; and both his vision and his balance were not normal. As a result, even under the ship's artificial gravity that was less than nine-tenths of Earth's, it took effort on his part to make the trip up five levels and along half the length of the vessel to get to the bridge. His legs gave at the knees with weakness and all his senses were distorted, so that even though he knew it was not physically so, he felt as if the deck slanted to either the right or left under his feet as he walked. Any attempt to adjust to a slant to the right found him feeling as if the floor now tilted left; and the ship-green walls on either side of him seemed to lean with their tops either inward or outward from him.
But he made it, and the shipman on guard duty at the port giving entrance to the bridge examined his credentials and then let him through. He stepped unsteadily into a room less



				
		92 I Gordan R. Dickson	
				
than five paces from back to front but running the full width of the ship. Two multi-instrumented control positions, both of
	them empty as the ship was now holding station and on autodirection, were to his right and left, perhaps four full meters
	apart and right up against the vision screen that ran the full length of the forward wall.
This vision screen displayed a number of "windows." The
	full left half of it was a single window that looked across the Frontier into the Sector guarded by the fighter ships under this ship's command. The right half of the screen was displaying a number of windows showing close-ups of the fighter ships in the Wings under command here, some of them, Jim knew, more than five light-years distant from where he stood.
A command officer of the ship stood before the large left
	segment of the screen, watching. A hand-control in his right palm blinked with code lights from the various instruments at the corn positions. and this hand-control was now emitting a
	steady buzzing that warned of Laagi ships coming out toward this Sector, though they were evidently still too far off to be shown in the screen.
The buzzing ground away irritatingly on Jim's eardrums, and the red coveralls uniform of the command officer seemed unnaturally garish against the green of the walls and the black of the screen with its thick sprinkling of starlights. In fact, everything in the command room, seen with his present distortion of vision, seemed to stand out in ugly fashion from everything else there, as if an emphasized three-dimensional space was in effect. There was an unnaturalness about all of it; and the buzzing of the hand-control, irritatingly, sounded far louder than it should have in Jim's ears.
              He turned toward Mary and Mollen, on his right. They were both, it seemed to his unnatural vision, looking at him oddly; but everything was so distorted he could trot trust himself to interpret fine details like the expressions on faces. He started toward them.
He had barely taken his first step, however, when he saw their eyes leave him and go to the left half of the screen in front of the command officer. Jim stopped and turned back to look in that direction himself. A new window had just been displayed in part of the left half of the screen, directly in front of the officer; and something, he was not at first sure what,


THE FOREVER MAN l 93

drew Jim's gaze to the single ship displayed there on close view.
He squinted at the ship, then stared.
Forgetting all about Mary and Mollen he tacked across the slanting floor of the bridge at the closest approach to a nun that his unsteady balance would permit, until he was beside the command officer and joining him in staring at the ship shown
.	in the new window-staring at it in utter disbelief.
"Mat's my ship!" he said.
The command officer appeared not to hear him. The buzz-
.	ing that warned of the oncoming Laagi vessels seemed to roar
			in Jim's eats.
			"I said-that's my ship!" he shouted ova the buzzing in
			the officer's ear.
			A second, smaller window suddenly sprang into existence
			alongside the one that showed AndFriend. The squat, dark
			shapes of oncoming Laagi ships were now displayed in it, like
			potbellied, heavy salmon ready to spawn.
			"It's just some old hulk they want to get rid of," the officer
			said without taking his eyes off the screen. He seemed to have
			only half-heard what Jim had said. "Don't worry. There's no
			one aboard her."
			"No one aboard her!" cried Jim.
			"No, they're just using her as a drone target. They want to
			find out what parts of a ship the Laagi direct their fire on when
			it simply comes straight on and doesn't defend itself=
			Even as he spoke, there was something-no more than a
			flicker on the screen showing AndFriend. It was the strike of a
			weapon from one of the Laagi ships, which were still too far
			away to be seen in the same screen as AndFriend. A slantingly
			vertical gash opened the side of AndFriend. She rolled a
			quarter-turn to port, like a wounded animal, then righted her
	..	:~t"'"' s~	self and continued onward into the fire of the oncoming
			aliens.
			"Ihrn her back! Bring her back here!" Jim grabbed the arm	`'i
			of the officer. "Don't you understand? That's AndFriend, my
		A	ship-the one they've been studying for a year now, the one
			that escorted back Raoul Penard s ship. She's too valuable to
			lose, don't you understand me? Get her back!"
			"No, no," said the officer soothingly, pulling away from
		f	him. "You're right about what ship it is, but they've got all


THE FOREVER MAN / 95
reached upward with both arms as if he could reach out across the thousands of miles to the buttons before that empty comchair. He saw only the pilot room ....
He was in the com-chair. He was invisible but he was there. His invisible body was taking charge. His invisible fingers were finding the drive buttons and the firing buttons. He saw them depressing before him and felt AndFriend responding with movement and weapons. A strike by a Laagi weapon came through and destroyed half the pilot room beside his chair. He felt the fraction-of-a-moment's heat-blow through the invisible suit protecting his nonexistent right shoulder. It was too late for him and AndFriend to get away now; but at least they could fight. The Laagi would not simply have her for nothing. He and she together would fight back. They would fight. They would fight ....