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M SPOKE TO M EMPTY CABIN. ?t HAD NOT EVEN sates TO say farewell, this time, before departing.
Jim checked his instruments.
"There's Earth," he said. "Alarms'll be sounding all over the world right now, seeing we've got a Laagi ship beside us. I'll give them a call."
Mary said nothing. Tine, what he had just said, himself, did not particularly ask for comment, but he would have welcomed a word or two, from which perhaps he might have judged how she was feeling. Evidently, she was still angry with him for some reason-if angry was the word for it. Oh, well . . .
"Base," he said through the ship's equipment in broadcast to that location, "this is ship XN413, your lost baby from a far country. I'll leave our location sounder on, so you can send out an escort to bring us in. We've got a prisoner-he's harmless, so don't come loaded for bear-and he'll need an escort. Also I need to talk to Louis One. Repeat. . . "
He ran through the broadcast several times. He had barely finished before the first half-dozen fighter ships began to appear around him and began to englobe AndFriend and her Laagi prisoner.
323


324 I Gordon R. Dickson
"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 cam," answered Jim. "Not, repeat not, slaved to me, but will follow. I slave to younow. 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


THE FOREVER 14 IAN / 325
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 Less One. Ate, 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.


326 I Gordon R. Dickson
"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. 1 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.


THE FOREVER MAN / 327

And it was true what ?I 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 wayit, 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


328 I Gordon R. Dickson

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


THE FOREVER MAN / 329
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 floorto-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."


330 / Gordon R. Dickson
"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."
"You were able to duplicate them?" asked Jim.
"Oh, yes. Chemically, at least. Of course, God knows what our version tastes like to a Laagi; but we knew the two in the ship were watching us outside their hull with their ship's instruments; and, sure enough, after we'd left them alone for a while with the extra room and the two containers of cubes, one of them ventured out, picked up the container of original cubes, plus one of the duplicates we'd made and took it all back inside. Evidently our version went down all right; because they eventually came out, got the rest of our cubes and ate them."
"Not a very happy life, being prisoners," said Jim. He looked over at the back of Mary's head, but it did not move and she did not say a word.
"No. But then you can't expect it to be," answered Mollen. "We're making good progress toward being able to talk with them, using that notion you passed on in your debriefing, by the way, Jim. You know, the idea of one of us with a picture


THE FOREVER MAN / 331

box strapped to his chest showing the image of a Laagi; and whoever it is speaks to a Laagi and the picture box translates his words into the image in the box, making the body movements that translate his words."
"And you're close to this, already?" asked Jim.
"Close, no," answered Mollen. "I said it was a final goal, and it is. But right now we're still working to really grasp that body language of theirs. You've heard of the 'third language' technique?"
"No," said Jim.
"Essentially, it means that if you've got two people, neither of whom can possibly ever speak the other's language, you invent a third language they can both speak. It's an outgrowth of the invented languages we were teaching chimpanzees and other animals as far back as the twentieth century, in order to communicate with them. There was a sign language, and a language of symbols different researchers used with different animals, and so forth .... Well, that's what we're trying to develop to use with our two Laagi, a third language."
"And it can be done?" Jim asked.
"It can be done if both sides have enough elements in common. For example, as I say, it worked with chimpanzees and dogs and elephants and a few others, but they've never been able to make it work with cetaceans like dolphins and killer whales. Too different environmentally. We're just lucky that the Laagi've developed a technological civilization not too different from ours. We may not think the way they do, but we've got enough problems in common-like how to get from one star system to another by spaceship."
"They're already talking about space flight with the Laagi?'
"Nowhere near that, yet, I'm afraid. First we had to build a sort of Laagi-instrument, in line with your idea. The technicians came up with a picture of a Laagi figure that could be made to make body movements the way they do. The movements were made by punching specific keys on a keyboard below the picture. Then we built a transparent section into the wall of the room we'd added around the Laagi port; and set the instrument up outside the window with a human operator seated at it, punching keys and making the figure move. Meanwhile, we were trying to isolate from the pictures you'd


332 / Gordon R. Dickson

brought back of Laagi talking to each other at least a few body-movement words that our prisoners would recognize as attempts by us to talk to them."
"You're using pictures from whatever got stuck to Squonk's tentacle, I suppose," said Jim. He glanced over at Mary. But she still had not moved. Her face was still, hidden from where he sat, and there was no sign she was even listening to the conversation.
"That's right," said Mollen, "we've got pictures of nearly every place you went in that city. The first big step was breaking the arm and body movements down into something roughly equivalent to action-units inside a given three-dimensional space, action-units small enough so that we could be sure each was all, or part of, no more than a single signalyou follow me?"
"No," said Jim.
"The point was to get down to the basic building blocks of their body language. Where there were simultaneous movements of more than one part of the body, that was taken into account, too, but one way or another, all recorded body signals were listed and compared-thank God for thinking machines-then handed back to us in order of frequency, related to the conditions and situations under which they were being used, and so forth."
"I figured something like that would have to be done," said Jim. "It must have been a big job."
"It was," said Mollen. "But, little by little, the technicians began to pile up associations. You know-this movement goes with beginning to speak to someone else, this one with ending a conversation with that person. This one goes with greeting someone; this, with leaving an individual. Et cetera. And from all this we put together what should have meant `we want to talk to you.' We gave the Laagi a screen and keyboard in their outside room hooked to the screen and keyboard they could see through the window of that room, then had a technician sit down at the keyboard and type out 'we want to talk to
YOU. , >,
"Where were the Laagi at this time?" asked Jim.
"In their ship, of course," said Mollen. "Where they'd gone the minute we sent men in space suits in to set up the screen and keyboard for them. But we figured they'd be


THE FOREVER MAN / 333
watching on their inside screens what went on in the outer room we'd made for them. Anyway, the technician kept sending the same message over and over."
"What finally happened, sir?"
"One of the Laagi came out to the keyboard and screen in their outer room, spent several hours learning which keys to punch, and finally sent back a message we couldn't understand."
"And the techs were stuck."
"No, because they figured on that happening. They sent another message. This one said, 'we want to talk to you with these,' and the screen showed some of the symbols for the artificial language they'd set up as the best bet to try to bridge the communication gap between us and the Laagi. The two of them took to the idea like ducks to water; and from there on it's been like teaching an artificial language to an animal-but a very smart one, of course."
"And this worked?" Jim said.
"After a fashion. The artificial language's very limited, of courseyou could guess that much. But now the technicians've been able to begin adding in movements of the Laagi figure where the symbols wouldn't convey precisely what we wanted, or they thought they understood a Laagi movement well enough to use it in something like the way it should be used. The Laagi caught on, as you might expect, and started correcting our errors; and from then on it's been progress."
"How much progress?" asked Jim.
"We're just beginning to learn to talk to them, still, of course," said Mollen. "Nobody knows how long it'll take; but I must say those two Laagi are cooperating. When one leaves the keyboard the other sits down at it."
"Of course," said Jim.
"Why 'of course'?" asked Mollen curiously.
"Because they live to work. I told the debriefer that and Mary must have told hers the same thing. If you'd left them there much longer as simple prisoners with nothing to do, they'd probably have died. Now you've given them some reason to live."
"At any rate," said Mollen, "it's just a matter of time until we can really talk with them. Then the big job starts."
"Getting them to understand that there's no point in both


334 / Gordon R: Dickson

our races exhausting themselves in a war that'll do neither of us any good?" asked Jim.
Mollen looked him over.
"You've been thinking about this," he said.
"I've had months to do it in," said Jim. "Learning to communicate with the Laagi is one thing. Getting them to see things the way we see things is something that may never be done."
"You? Pessimistic?" said Mollen. "That's a change."
"I'm not pessimistic. Just realistic. We had trouble getting humans to agree with humans before this war with the Laagi started and we all had to work together. And the Laagi think a lot more differently from the way we do than any fellow human ever did. Also, they're not likely to change the way they think because of anything we can tell them. The most we can hope to do is sell them something."
"Sell them something?" Mollen stared at him. "Jim, what makes you so sure about all this?"
"?1 and his little friends," said Jim. "With one race of aliens to deal with, it's possible to make a whole lot of false assumptions. With two, it's possible to see from the bad guesses they make about each other where we could be making a bad guess or two about either one of them."
"Those mind-people you ran into?" said Mollen. "Mary told us all about them."
"With all due respect to Mary," said Jim, looking at the unmoving back of her head, "I think she'll agree that while she's the expert with the Laagi, I'm the expert with the mindpeople-in fact she said so once. Didn't you, Mary?"
"He's right," said Mary, without moving. "You should listen to him, Louis."
"I'll listen to anyone; but you'd be high on the list in any case," said Mollen, throwing his heavy body back in his padded chair, so that the chair creaked and tilted slightly away from the desk. "What're you saying?"
"That I think the best we can hope to get out of being able to communicate with the Laagi is to offer them a deal where we help them to find the worlds they need so that they'll temporarily suspend trying to take over our world."
"Oh-that," said Mollen. "The business of giving them


THE FOREVER MAN I 335

worlds in the mind-people's sector that you arranged with the mind-people."
"It's far from arranged," said Jim. "We can easily overlook the fact that the Laagi aren't built to give up on trying to take our world for living room for themselves; and we're just as likely to assume that what the mind-people agree to today they'll still be in agreement with tomorrow. Both those notions about another race can be traps because they're based on the way we think ourselves, not the way the other race thinks."
"I don't think I follow you." Mollen's thick eyebrows came together.
"Remember how we used to wonder why a single Laagi ship would sometimes attack a whole wing of our fighters when it ran into them; while at other times a whole wing of them would turn and run from one ship of ours under practically the same conditions?"
"Yes. What about it?"
"The answer was simple. '11'11 him, Mary."
Mary said nothing.
"All right," said Jim. "I'll tell you, then. In bout cases the drivers of the Laagi vessels were doing what they'd been told to do, not what reason would dictate they do."
"But that's stupidity!" said Mollen. "They're too bright to be that stupid."
"No, it's not stupidity. It's a whole world of difference in thinking. If they'd been told to use their own judgment, they'd have done so. But in the cases I'm talking about they'd simply been given a general order. What they did was no different from a human following orders even when he personally disagrees with them-with one exception. It's only under certain conditions that a Laagi allows himself to disagree on any subject; and one of those conditions isn't when he's at work. And what holds true for a Laagi individual holds true for the whole race. What I'm saying is that the Laagi could very well take a million habitable worlds, if we had that many to give themand still keep on trying to conquer humanity so they could have Earth."
"Why?" demanded Mollen.
"Because getting Earth was something they started out to do. It was a job they started and haven't finished."
"You're telling me," said Mollen, "that even though events


336 / Gordon R. Dickson
proved what they'd been doing wasn't necessary, they'd. keep right on doing it?"
"That's what I'm saying, General. Finishing a job isn't something a Laagi reasons about. It's something that's built into the primitive part of their brains-just like a territorial response is built into us humans. It's so deep in us, we react to it according to the patterns of our various cultures, without even realizing why we stand a certain distance apart when we talk, why we avoid looking or deliberately look into the eyes of people when we talk to them. Built into the Laagi is the fact that there's no reason for his existence unless it involves doing work of one kind or another. And a job's not abandoned until it's finished. Any unlimited number of Laagi may have to be used up finishing it; but whatever the job needs to get it done, it's going to get. They're a race that never quits and never backs up, because they can't."
"Man!" said Mollen, "you're telling me we can never make peace with them."
"That's right," said Jim. "Never."
"All right," said Mollen. "Then you tell me. What're we supposed to do?"
"We can't make peace with them as they are now," said Jim. "But maybe we can arrange an indefinite pause in hostilities that just happens to last until they develop a different attitude-and that'll take generations. We've got to use the fact that the mind-people are there as leverage on the Laagi to keep the indefinite pause going, while at the same time we use the presence of the Laagi to make the mindpeople keep their promises to us and the Laagi."
"And how do you plan to do that?"
"Set ourselves up," said Jim, "to the Laagi as the only force that keeps the mind-people from stopping them from working; and to the mind-people as the only people who can talk to the Laagi and explain how they mustn't get in the way of the art that the mindpeople are spending the lifetime of their race developing-and it actually is one hell of an art, General. It may turn out to be greater than all our arts put together."
-	"All right," said Mollen; and while there was nothing in
the general's tone to give it away, Jim had the uncomfortable
feeling that Mollen was humoring him. "You want to set up a


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sort of triangular, three-race agreement that makes both the Laagi and the mind-people do what we want, out of a combination of benefit and fear. Assuming you could show each of those races reasons to act that way to each other, why would they want humans in on the deal? What do they need us for, anyway?"
"As interpreters," said Jim.