THE LAAGI SHIP MADE A PHASE-SHIFT JUST AS JIM SAM THIS,
and suddenly it was big enough to be pictured as something more than a dot on their longest-looking screen.
"I'm wrong," said Jim. "It's not us he's aimed at. 6n this angle he'll pass us but only at better than instrument midrange. Either he's got a destination off to one side of the centerline, or. . ."
He fell silent.
"You mean we could be in among the star systems having Laagi-occupied planets?" Mary asked.
"Your guess on that's as good as mine," said Jim slowly. "But it looks like he's going to pass us by at a distance which could mean his instruments don't see us."
"Don't Laagi instruments see as far as ours?"
"We don't know for sure-just the way we don't know so much about them," said Jim. "But it's a good angle. I mean, like I said, we've noticed that when we're at an angle to them, they don't seem to see us as well as from more head-on angles-or up close; distance helps, too. It's all guesswork because on most things their ships can do as well, or better, and our own ships are under orders to act on that premise. Actually, fighting them, I get the impression there're weak
137
C H A P T E R
13


138 / Gordon R. Dickson
spots in their observation. And that's the way most combat pilots feel. If we're right, it could explain why sometimes they turn and run-if you want to call it running-when .you're sure they're ready to joust."
"You're thinking of just letting him go by?" Mary said. "But aren't we a sitting duck here, if he suddenly starts turning toward us?"
"If we move we might attract his attention, as I mentioned," said Jim. "Remember, we're where no Laagi ship is going to expect to run into something like us-particularly just a ship alone, the way we are. If he's really not seen us, and if he's really headed by us, we can sit still and he'll never know we were here. Or if he does, maybe he'll take us for an experimental new design of Laagi ship. Or-oh, I don't know . . . ."
"I've never known you to hesitate like this," Mary said. "Why're you willing to take such a chance he'll go by without seeing us, or even seeing us without attacking us?"
"Because," said Jim slowly, "I don't think he's armed:"
There was a second or two of pause.
"Why? What makes you think that?" she said. "More to the point, what makes you think it so strongly you're ready to gamble our whole mission on it?"
"I can't tell you exactly why. It's the way he's acting. Look at him. He's three-quarters on to us-his whole side's a target. Just a little more on that same course and I could cut him wide open with a beam. Then it'd take less than a minute to stand in beside him close enough to drop a mine that'd blow him apart a second after we were out of range of it, ourselves. Why's he taking a chance like that, unless he's unarmed and doesn't see us?"
"You're still gambling," said Mary flatly.
"But with something at stake," muttered Jim. "Suppose he's expected somewhere and they come out looking for him when he doesn't show up . . . and scoop up some dust they can identify as part of his ship? Wouldn't that mean killing him would be like a flag planted to tell them we've been here?"
There was another pause.
"It could be. All right," Mary said. "You're the expert on alien ships. It's up to you."
"We'll sit," said Jim.


THE FOREVER MAN / 139

They sat.
The Laagi ship went by in one phase-shift and vanished from their instruments with a second.
"Of course," said Mary when it was gone, "you know it might just have pretended to go innocently by because it was unarmed; and it's right now reporting us to the nearest equivalent of military authorities the Laagi have."
"In which case," said Jim, "the sooner we get out of here, the better."
He was setting up a phase-shift for AndFriend as he spoke.
"Down-galaxy, I think," he said, "now that we've found Laagi space traffic this far up. As far as his reporting us goes, if you were a Laagi military commander and you heard of a human ship where we just were-just which way do you think that ship might have jumped after it was last seen? And how far away from that point where it was seen could it be, by the time you can get your own fighting ships out after it?"
• Mary said nothing.
"So if you were such a military commander," said Jim as they shifted, "wouldn't you find it a lot easier and safer just to file a report and let it get tangled up in the bureaucratic wheels, rather than take a chance on something that might possibly be the figment of a civilian pilot's imagination?"
"You're really assuming they're like humanity," said Mary.
"Well, we've got nothing else to base assumptions on," said Jim. "And a lot of what we've seen of them does parallel what we've got and what we do. We use a theoretical centerline. They seem to, too. Our ships are shaped differently from theirs, but they phase-shift to cover large distances just as we do. They use cutting weapons that seem developed from lasers, like we do. Their fighter ships are only big enough for a crew of two individuals. They seem to think in terms of a Frontier in space, just like we do . . . ."
He got tired of thinking up comparisons and ran down.
"Et cetera," he said.
"All very fine," said Mary. "But you could be wrong because there're things you don't know. And there've got to be things you don't know-that we don't know."
"Right enough," said Jim. "How about it? Drop the subject?"
"Subject dropped."


140 / Gordon R. Dickson

"I like you, Mary."
There was a long pause.
"If you don't mind," said Mary in a distant voice, "I've got a few things to mull over. Call me if you need me for anything. Otherwise, I'll be in conference with myself, if you don't mind."
"I don't mind," said Jim.
There was no further word from Mary.
They crept down-galaxy, in shift-jumps no farther than their instruments could safely read ahead. Twenty-four hours went by, and no more Laagi ships were encountered. Then another twenty-four hours with the same result. And another twenty-four.
"We must be beyond Laagi space, down-line, by this time, mustn't we?" asked Mary. They had been back in conversation since about an hour following Mary's withdrawal.
"Should be," said Jim. "There's some interesting star systems ahead. I count at least eight GO-type stars within a ten light-year box no more than twenty or thirty light-years down the line. If any of those have got livable worlds, maybe we've found Raoul's Paradise. Maybe we should go all the way in to the line and follow it down."
They had been slowly angling back in toward the centerline as time went by and no more sign of Laagi ships was encountered.
"Any comment?" asked Jim.
"No," said Mary. "I think that's a good idea, Jim."
They had been on considerably warmer terms, lately, for no particular reason Jim could understand. Following Mary's agreement, he made the necessary adjustments in the ship's controls, and took them in a single shift most of the lightyear-and-a-half distance that still separated them from the centerline.
"We'll keep a watch, still, though," said Jim. "You watch up-galaxy, I'll watch ahead, down-galaxy. Before I forget to mention it, by the way, I still don't feel the least bit sleepy. How about you?"
They had made an agreement earlier that each of them would let the other know if he or she noticed any sign of tiredness.


THE FOREVER MAN / 141

"I don't," said Mary. "But I spoke to you twice and caught you sleeping. You had to ask me again what I wanted."
"I did?" said Jim. "I don't remember that. Are you sure?"
"I learned too much about your sleeping patterns in the lab to be mistaken," said Mary.
"Well, that checks out with what I noticed when I first became part of AndFriend, back at Base," said Jim. "It also explains how Penard could keep coming steadily that way if he was consciously using his mind to drive La Chasse Gallerie. Maybe we don't have to worry about needing sleep for the rest of the trip if we can do it without knowing we do it, and wake up at the first word from the other one of us-at any rate, back to what I was saying. If there're any Laagi moving this far down the line, we're much more likely to run into them from here on, this close to the line."
"Where did you grow up?" Mary asked him unexpectedly.
"Actually, in country a lot like the Base is in," said Jim. "I was born in a hospital in Denver; but my folks lived in Edmonton and that's where I grew up. Every kid's a Frontier pilot when he's five years old. In my case it stuck. I was able to pass the tests-and here I am."
"Have you got any brothers or sisters?"
"Not one," said Jim solemnly.
The solemnity was a fake, but he had forgotten his ability, now that he was only a mind in a ship, of recall. He was suddenly young again, suddenly back among the mountains. Suddenly wondering what it would be like to have a brother or sister to play with. Somehow he always imagined the brother or sister as younger than he was. He remembered now, with painful clarity, being extremely young and telling his mother what very good care he would take of a brother or sister if she would only get him one-or two. It was not until years later that he came to understand that medically what he wanted was not possible; that the circumstances of his own birth had ended his mother's capability to have any more children. All he recognized at the time of his asking was that by doing so, he had made her unhappy.
"We lived outside of Edmonton, a way," he said to Mary now. "My father was a metallurgist with a speciality in metal extraction from water. He was a consultant and gone off somewhere around the world, most of the time."


142 / Gordon R. Dickson

"Do they still live there?" asked Mary.
"They're both dead," he said. "My father had an accident on an underwater inspection. The oxygen exchanger on his diving mask failed. My mother died a year or two after that in a car accident. She went off the road one night when she was driving home from Edmonton to our place by herself. The officers thought there might have been a hit-and-tin accident, some other driver might have nudged her car off the road into a fall down a slope; but they were never able to find anyone who might be responsible. My uncle got me into the Cadet Corps."
"I had no idea," murmured Mary. "It must have been awfully hard for you. Both my parents are still alive."
"Where do you come from?" he asked.
"Los Angeles Complex," she said. "We were actually in San Diego. My folks still live there."
"Good," he said. "You can see them whenever you want."
"I don't, though," she said. "We were always pretty separate in my family. In fact, I couldn't wait to win the scholarship that took me away to Boston to college. One good thing-they let me go."
"Why shouldn't they have?" he said, surprised.
"Why? Oh, I was young," Mary said absently. "I was fifteen when I graduated from high school. I was big for my age, though, and old for my age. I don't just mean I acted old. I'd grown up with a pair of independent adults; and I was an independent adult from the time I could walk. Also, I was good at things. Show me something you can do and I'll bet I can learn to do it better."
"Fly AndFriend without the engines, then," said Jim.
"Oh," she said, and laughed. "Of course. You're right and I'm being ridiculous. I know I'm hard to live with. I'm just used to challenging anyone and everything."
"You're not that hard to live with," said Jim-and almost added, "now," but stopped himself in time.
She said nothing for a second. Then she spoke.
"Thank you."
"For what?" said Jim. "I was only stating a fact. Hold it-the instruments are showing something up ahead."
"I don't see . . . oh, there it is. Another Laagi ship?"


THE FOREVER MAN / 143

"Could be. Let's just sit tight at this range and see whether it moves. We've got all the time we want to take."
They waited, but the pinprick of light with the faint halo around it did not appear to move. Jim took sights on it with the instruments and set up an instrument watch to alert them if it shifted in any direction.
When six hours had gone by with no report of movement by the instruments, Jim took AndFriend outward from the centerline on a curve keeping the object they watched just within sight of their instruments; then took a second set of sights and set up a second watch.
When after another six hours, this, also, showed no movement, Jim metaphorically scratched his nonexistent head.
"I don't understand this," he told Mary.
"Could whoever it is be simply planning to outwait us, and just sit there until curiosity brings us close enough to shoot?"
"I've never known of, or heard of, the Laagi showing this kind of patience-or reacting in this way at all. The only ways they've ever shown us are either attack or run, with no hesitation about doing either one."
"Well, then," said Mary, "what's the chance that the instruments are making a mistake and that isn't a Laagi ship at all, but something that looks to them like it?"
"After nearly a hundred and fifty years of our having seen what Laagi ships look like? That doesn't make sense, either."
"So I guess we go in and look," said Mary.
"I guess you guess right," said Jim. "Whatever it is, we'll take a closer look at it."
They began by going even farther away from the centerline, clear out of instrument sight of the object. Then Jim navigated their way back toward it from what should have been the equivalent of a ninety-degree angle to their original approach.
It came on the screen and stayed there. As far as their instruments could tell them, it did not move as they approached. Finally, they were close enough to get a recognizable picture of it on their screen; and it was a typical two-individual Laagi fighter craft, for some unknown reason simply hanging still in space-or hanging still in the sense that it was holding a steady position with regard to the center-


144 I Gordon R. Dickson
line, which-like the galaxy it transversed-was in rotation about the galaxy's theoretical center.
Jim checked AndFriend and held her still at that distance from the other vessel.
"I do not-repeat, not-get this at all," he sue. "That ship's facing down-galaxy. Unless it's expecting some kind of attack from farther down the line, why should it be here at all? And if it's expecting an attack, why isn't it patrolling whatever segment of whatever Frontier line this is? Just sitting there, it can't watch anything beyond the viewing limit of its instruments. If you wanted to hold a Frontier that way, you'd have to have so many ships. . . "
His mind shook his missing head over the enormity of the thought.
"You'd need thousands of fighter ships like that-no, you'd need several thousand times the total number we estimate they've got facing us on our Frontier; and there can't be that many Laagi worlds, to handle that kind of expense. If there is, they could just run right over our forces on our Frontier without hardly noticing we were there; while actually they've never hit us with more than a hundred or so ships at once-and that was the biggest of the battles we ever had with them."
"It could be abandoned, for some reason," said Mary.
"What reason?"
"I don't know," said Mary. "But, again, we're dealing with nonhuman minds. They may have a lot of things like we have, and act a lot like us, but there could just as easily be a reason for them to abandon one of their ships in space that we humans'd never think of. For example-a religious reason. Or a superstitious reason. Maybe that ship is just a mock-up of a ship, put there to mark the limits of their territory down-galaxy, for example."
"Mary," said Jim, "you'd convince a stone lion. We'll go in and see."
He sent AndFriend toward the motionless Laagi vessel.
"Why a stone lion?" said Mary.
"Why? I don't know," answered Jim. "It was just the fast thing I could think of-now, don't say anything for just a few minutes, while we get in close . . . ."


THE FOREVER MAN / 145

"Why any animal, for that matter?"
Jim did not answer. He was concentrating on only two things. First, getting as close as he could safely calculate-or that AndFriend's calculators could safely calculate-to the Laagi ship in one jump, and then taking them on a close pass by it on ordinary drive.
He did so, zipped past it and immediately phase-shifted out of shooting range, then started studying the pictorial record of the other ship that had been made as they passed it.
"No sign of a reaction," he said finally. "Just no sign at all. And that's all wrong."
"Mock-up," said Mary.
"Can you see a technologically advanced society-one as advanced as ours-setting up a mock-up way out here in space for religious or scarecrow reasons?" demanded Jim. "I don't know what we should do now."
"Let's go right up to it, stop, and examine it at arm's length," said Mary.
"Taking one hell of a chance."
"If you were alone, with no one to argue with, what would you do?" asked Mary.
Jim said nothing for a moment.
"I'd go in, of course," he answered finally. "I'd have to."
"Then, may I ask--2'
"What we're waiting for?" said Jim. "You may not, because I'm already going in."
In fact, he was.
Fifteen minutes later they were hanging in space, side by side with the Laagi ship and barely fifty kilometers from it.
"Hello! Hey! Do you hear me? Respond if you do. This is AndFriend calling Laagi ship. . . " Jim sent his voice out up and down the normal human ship-to-ship communications band.
"Have your people ever contacted Laagi, or overheard them contacting each other, ship-to-ship?" Mary asked.
"Never," said Jim. "As far as we can tell they don't talk to each other. But if this one can hear my voice he may take the fact I'm talking as a sign I'm not about to begin shooting. It's worth a try, anyway. They must have some kind of communi-


146 / ' Gordon R. Dickson
cation system. When there's several of them they all either attack or run at the same time."
"But you probably aren't going to get anywhere trying to talk to this ship, are you."
"No. But I had to check out the possibility."
"Now what, then?"
"Now what?" Jim echoed. "I don't know. If I was simply piloting AndFriend normally, with me in my body and you in yours, as a last resort, we'd put on our space suits and then I'd open the lock and power myself across to that other ship's hull. Then, if necessary, I'd cut my way in through the hull or the entry port. There's the entry port right there, but how does a spaceship like I am now=
"Like we are now."
"-like we are now, get through it?"
Mary said nothing.
"If you actually touched its hull," she suggested finally, "do you suppose you could see inside it, the way you can see everything inside of AndFriend?"
"I don't know. It sounds crazy . . . you're more the expert on this business of mind being in matter. What do you think?"
"I think we need to try it just to check out the possibility."
"You do, do you?" grumbled Jim. "Do you realize what it means to try to move a mass this size up close enough to touch a mass the size of that Laagi ship, without having them do serious damage to each other when they do touch?"
"Of course I know. But what other way is there? Can you think of one?"
"Offhand, no-hang on!" Jim interrupted himself. "There's just a chance I can make some kind of sensory connection across a line connected to that other ship. Now, what do we have in the way of a line or cable to make connection with?"
He fell into a self-examination of everything aboard And- There was, of course, no such article as a line or cable simply aboard waiting to be put to use. It would be a matter of his making one out of material already belonging to the ship.
Theoretically, he thought, any connecting material that was part of the ship would do. The difficulty was that nowhere about a vessel like AndFriend was anything resembling such


THE FOREVER MAN / 147
material. After puzzling over the matter for some time, he had an inspiration. What he did have was a repair robot that was independently mobile and could be sent anywhere to do anything.
"What I'm going to do is make a connector out of the hull material," he explained to Mary. "I'll have the repair robot go out the entry port and literally peel off a sliver down the length of the hull. That should give us a good twenty meters of sliver, like a long, very thin nod. The robot can stand in the open entry port-or even on the outside of the hull with the entry port closed, come to think of it, holding out the rod toward the Laagi ship. Then I'll try to move, carefully, as close to the other ship as I can. You watch the screen, in case I don't feel contact when the rod touches the Laagi ship, or the robot fails to report the touching-because I want to stop AndFriend moving the moment we touch. At the worst, it'll give us some twenty meters of buffer zone."
So, that was what the robot did and Jim did. Jim found he was conscious of the sliver being peeled off-not as something painful, but as something happening to the general feel of the ship that was unordinary and vaguely discomforting. But there turned out to be a problem when the robot tried to hold the sliver out. It was long enough and thin enough to be extremely flexible; and instead of projecting stiffly toward the other ship, its far end whipped back and forth in extreme arcs, which had begun with the fact that the sliver's farther end had originally lagged behind as the end held by the robot was held out from AndFriend's hull; and once the farther end started moving to catch up, its mass carried it beyond the point of straightness into an arc, bent it the other way until it reached a limit, and then began to oscillate back past the midpoint once more.
Gradually, however, the oscillating slowed. Eventually, when it was down to the point where it was oscillating in an arc of only three or four meters, Jim began to creep And- toward the other vessel with both of them lying side by side.
Eventually, the arcing tip of the sliver began to brush the side of the Laagi ship. Jim felt the contact even before Mary announced it.


148 / Gordon R. Dickson

"It's all right!" he said. "I can feel it-I can feel the other ship. It feels . . . it feels very, very strange . . . ."
He thought he heard Mary saying something, but her voice was at once very far away and muffled; and in any case he had already moved his point of view inside the alien ship and was lost in fascination with what he saw.