HE WOKE SURROUNDED BY SILENCE AND DARKNESS. UNBROKEN
silence and unrelieved darkness, as if all the stars had been taken from the universe, and it stretched away forever around him, limitless, lightless, and at peace ....
"Where am I?" he asked-and heard his own voice hollowly echoing.
"It's all right," said the voice of Mary. There was an anxious tone to it. "You're back at Base. You and AndFriend. It's all right."
"Can you fix her?"
"She's not touched," said the voice of Mollen, "and never was. She never left here-it was a mock-up, an imitation of her, you saw out on the Frontier."
Jim pondered this.
"Sir, I don't believe you," he said at last. "I'd know her. It was AndFriend."
"No," said the voice of Mollen. "That's why you were egged,„
The older man's voice grew harsh.
"Do you think we didn't think of that? That's why we had you higher'n a kite. Anyone could imitate your ship, but nobody but you could give it a soul.",

96


THE FOREVER MAN / 97

Jim remembered that Mollen had been a fighter pilot once, himself. The time had to have come for him, too, when he had had to leave his ship. Jim said nothing, considering this and what the other man had just said. He felt clearheaded and natural now-except for the darkness all about him. His slowness in answering was simply because now, for some reason, there seemed all the time in the world to think.
"I'm in AndFriend now, like Raoul Penard's in La Chasse Gallerie, aren't I?" he said at last.
"Yes," said the voice of Mary. "When you couldn't stand to watch what you thought was AndFriend getting killed, you went to her-but you went to the real ship, which was here all the time."
"Yes," said Jim.
"Can you see us?" said a new voice. For a second Jim could not place it; and then he recognized it as the voice of the Base doc he had gone to almost daily before he had finally broken and staged the sit-in at Mollen's office.
"No," said Jim. "I think I'm going to sleep now. I'm very tired."
He must have slept for some time. When he woke the darkness was still there. He stayed where he was in it, replaying in his mind the conversation he had had just before going to sleep.
"Can you see us?" the doc had said. But he had not seen them, or anything else. Could he see if he wanted to? If AndFriend was where she had been all this time he must be under the plastic tent in Mary's lab. Surely he could see that.
He could. There was no sudden awareness of light. In fact, he was not really sure how he was seeing, what he was using for eyes or where they might be on AndFriend's hull. He seemed simply to be able to see anything he wanted in any direction, until his gaze was stopped by the dark plastic of the enclosing tent. He told himself that the tent was not there, and abruptly he was able to see the whole inside of the large lab section that housed it, up to the cranes and slings, four stories overhead.
Neither Mary nor Mollen were in sight, let alone the doc. But a thin young man he recognized as one of Neiss's team sat in the tent itself, reading in a folding chair to the right of the nose of his hull.


98 I Gordon R. Dickson

"I'm awake," said Jim.
The young man lost his book and nearly M out of his chair.
"Wait, wait. . . " he said, scrambling to his feet. "I'll get them. Just a minute. Wait. I'll be right back . . . ."
He was talking and running backwards at the same time. He turned and kept going, through a flap of the tent that Jim was now holding as invisible in his mind, toward the bottom story of the laboratory tower at the far end of the large open space. Jim followed his movements as he might have followed them on a ship's screen, followed the man to an office and an inner door, on which he pounded with his fist.
"He's awake!"
Jim withdrew his attention and considered himself. He had no idea how he was hearing, speaking or seeing. He simply did these things. It was, he thought, as if each smallest particle of AndFriend had ears, eyes, and a voice. His thoughts wandered off into a feeling of happiness over the fact that she had really not been hurt; and that he and she were together again ....
"Jim?" It was Mary's voice. He turned his attention to his immediate vicinity again, and saw Mary-in that strange way of seeing he now had-standing close, with Mollen and the doc.
"I could never remember your name," he said to the physician. "I just called you doc. There's been another medical man looking after me lately, but I never felt like calling him doc."
"And I'm sorry about that, Jim," said Mary-and, surprise of surprises, there was a catch in her voice. "Neiss has two doctorates, one in inorganic chemistry, the other in biology, but he's not a medical doctor. We just wanted you to think he was. This is Aram Snyder, who really is a physician and a psychiatrist."
"They sounded me out about working with you, here," said Aram, the doc. "I didn't know what they had in mind then, but from a theoretical point of view, what they were talking about sounded unethical to me, lacking the subject's consent. So they didn't go any farther with me."
"I'm sorry, Jim. I'm sorry, son," said Mollen harshly. "Mary and I, both of us, we didn't like doing this to you, blind. But we didn't have any choice. If there'd been more


THE FOREVER MAN / 99
than one of you, maybe we could have asked for a volunteer. But there was only you; and we couldn't take a chance on your saying no. It's my responsibility, not Mary's."
In the strange calmness in which he now resided, Jim thought about this, turning it over in his mind, examining the words in an effort to understand everything they represented. It occurred to him that if it were not for the calmness-the feeling of being detached from much of what they said, he would be feeling very outraged right now that they should doubt his willingness to volunteer for what had been done to him. He was so long at thinking this over that when his attention came back to the others, he found they had fallen to talking among themselves in the meantime.
` . . . But how is he, Doc?" Mollen was saying.
"How can I tell?" responded Aram, irritably. "He's had a major emotional shock-how major I've no way of measuring. How do I know what it means to find yourself out of your body and into a machine?"
"When Mary did it, she wasn't damaged by it," said Mol-
"But I knew what I was getting into. I wanted to do it," said Mary. "So I was prepared."
"Mary did this before?" asked Jim.
"She was in La Chasse Gallerie," said Mollen. "But she got there by a different route than the one you took."
"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


100 I Gordon R. Dickson
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.


THE FOREVER MAN / 101
"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."



102 ! Gordon R. Dickson
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."'


THE FOREVER MAN / 103

"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


1(14 ! Gordon R. Dickson
there for me to love," Mary used the last word emphatically, "I simply woke up in my own body, where it'd been kept 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?"
"1'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


THE FOREVER MAN / 105
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


106 / Gordon R. Dickson
there, too. It's that something else that's got us sending you out there."
"What was it? Animal, vegetable or mineral?"
"T'hat's what we don't know."
"I don't understand," said Jim. "Granted that Raoul thinks it's in a paradise. If nothing more's known about it=
"Sorry. Back up and start again," said Mollen. "I'm doing a bad job of explaining. It's whatever else it is, and whether or not that's connected with the paradise part, that really interests us. Because we think it might also have something to do with how Raoul got to be part of La Chasse Gallerie-and because he claims the Laagi don't know it's there."
"They don't?" said Jim. "Raoul claims they don't?"
"That's what we gather from what he says," replied Mollen.
"How can the Laagi not know it's there if it's right on their back doorstep, if we're on their front doorstep, speaking in interstellar space terms. They ought to be able to see it, tooor at least, I assume the assumption is Raoul saw it."
"I don't know. The best people we've put on it can't guess," said Mollen. "But can you imagine what it'd mean if there was someone or something we could work with, that the Laagi couldn't even imagine, let alone see? It might mean the end of this long war with them after all. It might mean we could open the way we want to the inner parts of the galaxy."