G H A P T E R

20








"JIM. PM!"
"All right, all right," said Jim, "I heard you the first time. What is it?"
"You were sleeping again."
"I was not. I was thinking. Nevermind . . . what do you want now?"
"I want you to stop Squonk," said Mary. "Make him stand still-or better yet make him back up about two meters. There's a pair of Laagi I particularly want to keep observing."
"I don't know if I can," said Jim.
"Why not?"
"Well, I mean, I probably can tell him to stop searching, but I'm trying to think of a reason for it that'll make sense. The way we had to work out a way of sending him hunting for something, that made sense to him. Also, have you thought that if he suddenly just stops doing anything out here where he is, he may attract attention to himself?"
"What if he does?"
"If he attracts the attention of the Laagi, one or more of them might just come over to find out what he's doing here."
"We haven't seen any evidence that squonks can talk to Laagi," said Mary.

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224 I Gordon R. Dickson

"No, but maybe there're other ways a Laagi could find out what Squonk's doing here. The Laagi might be able to identify Squonk as the one of his kind who's supposed to be cleaning AndFriend periodically and has a part-carrying job elsewhere; and so might wonder what he's doing here, instead. Even if the Laagi doesn't do any more than wonder, he might end up ordering Squonk back to his parts-carrying and Squonk might well listen to that Laagi and obey it, in spite of whatever I could say to him. Do you want that?"
"No. No, of course not." Mary paused. "But I've absolutely got to keep observing these two Laagi awhile longer. They're acting different from any others we've seen so far."
"These two right next to us?"
"That's right."
"All right," said Jim. He pulled the now familiar trick of imagining himself as a Laagi giving gesticulated orders to Squonk.
"Good Squonk," he thought. "Stop. Wait just where you are for the moment. I may have new orders for you in just a little bit."
Agreeably, Squonk froze in position, which at the moment was the one best adapted to minutely searching the open floor of the room along a line that was carrying him away from the two Laagi Mary had indicated.
"There. See?" said Mary. "There's no problem in stopping him."
"Stopping him wasn't what I was worried about," Jim said. "What I was worried about-"
"Will you please not talk for a few minutes?" said Mary. "These two are definitely unusual. I want to be able to concentrate on them and I can't do that with you jabbering."
On the verge of arguing, Jim suddenly realized what had really bothered him about the peremptory order had been Mary making sure she had the last word-as usual. He kept his silence accordingly and took a closer look at the two Laagi himself. They were both seated and they were by themselves -a group of two. Not only that, but the space around them was larger than around any of the other groups, as if the other Laagi were politely avoiding any intrusion on them.
The two also gave the impression of being very punctilious in their communication. When one gesticulated, the other did


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not-of course that was the way it was also more or less, but only more or less, among the other Laagi. But what was unlike anything Jim had seen between these aliens before was that each time one of the two stopped talking, there was a moment of complete motionlessness on the part of both individuals before the one who had not been gesticulating started to reply.
"Did you notice how they pause?" Jim asked Mary.
"Of course," said Mary. "But there's more than that going on here, different from ordinary Laagi conversation. If you notice, the gestures of these two are slower and more deliberate than those we've been seeing."
"Maybe they're a couple of old Laagi," said Jim.
"Perhaps," murmured Mary quite seriously. "Also, their gestures are more emphatic-look there!"
The one of the two who was currently gesticulating had suddenly pulled his head down completely out of sight into the top skin-folds of his body and ceased movement entirely. After a long moment his head slowly came out once more.
Unexpectedly, Mary laughed; and Jim found himself with the sort of feeling that in the flesh would have signaled a grin. At the same time he was not exactly sure why what they had seen had struck them both as so funny. He finally decided it was the jack-in-the-box effect of the head pulling in that had triggered off the sense of ridiculousness in both Mary and himself. It was as if two human heads of state had been discussing a serious political matter with all the normal solemnity of rhetoric; and one of them had suddenly stood on his head to underline the point he had just made.
In any case, the one who had just pulled in his head-
"Call him 'A,"' said Jim thoughtfully.
"Call who `A'?" demanded Mary.
"The one who just pulled his head in," said Jim, "and call the other one 'B.' Now, it looks as if A's made his point and is through arguing for the moment."
"How do we know they're arguing?" said Mary. "You're right, though. Now, B's starting to talk."
B was indeed beginning to gesticulate. But its movement were both slow and large, involving much lengthening and shortening of its limbs and body. After a relatively small number of gestures, B also swiftly and definitely pulled his


226 I Cordon R. Dickson
head down out of sight, kept it there for perhaps a full minute, and then stuck it out again. Both Laagi rose from their seats and went off in different directions.
"Some sort of conclusion achieved," said Mary.
"Or the breakup of a lifelong friendship over some matter of principle= began Jim. But he was interrupted.
A squonk had come up to Squonk and was running the tips of its tentacles over Squonk's motionless body. Around them, it seemed that every other squonk in view who was not burdened with a chair or otherwise obviously occupied, was also headed in Squonk's direction.
"Squonk, go back to what you were doing!" said Jim hastily.
Squonk started to move. He lifted his head, exchanged a brief tentacle-touch with the other squonk who had been feeling him over, and went back to his careful search of the floor before him. The squonk who had been examining him went away. Those others in the distance who had been headed toward them also turned off in other directions.
"You see?" demanded Jim. "The minute a squonk-or a Laagistops doing anything, it attracts attention."
"You're right," said Mary briskly. "However, it's all fixed. Now, I've got a report to dictate. Are you ready?"
"Ready as I ever will be," said Jim.
Mary began dictating. There was some general data on the other Laagi she had observed in communication, in the room they were now in; but the bulk of her report, once she got into it, was to all effects almost a gesture-by-gesture recounting of the exchange between the two Laagi they had just been watching.
Mary's reports, Jim had noted, came out in short, declarative sentences. The words she chose were simple and the meaning unmistakably clear. She did not ramble. She must, thought Jim as he carefully repeated after her, have had considerable experience dictating such reports. The thought, for some unknown reason, reminded him of a question that had occurred to him from time to time lately. He waited until Mary was done to ask it.
"Tell me," he said then, "when do you sleep?"
"When you do," answered Mary.


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"Oh?" Jim thought this over. "And why don't I ever catch you doing it?"
"Because I don't sleep as much as you do," said Mary. "I never did sleep much. I could get by on four or five hours a night indefinitely when I was in my body; and I think I can do a lot better now, if I want to. So I just wait until you're asleep before dropping off myself-and only then if there's nothing going on I want to observe."
"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


228 / Gordon R. Dickson

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-


THE FOREVER MAN / 229

"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


230 I Gordon R. Dickson they got back to AndFriend-they saw, and Mary dictated, reports on an astonishing amount of information about the

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


THE FOREVER MAN / 231
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


232 / Gordon R. Dickson

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 feet 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 La* 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.


THE FOREVER MAN / 233

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.
The results were an unqualified success. Squonk, ever-obliging, trotted off and rounded up three other squonks who were either passing by or for other reasons did not have their tentacles engaged at the moment. The four of them returned to the piece of scaffolding, lifted it with the strength of their combined tentacles and shifted it as Jim had envisioned.
They made no objection at all to an order to immediately move it back again, once the original move had been made. Then they dispersed.
"What's happening? What's Squonk doing now?" Mary's voice woke Jim out of a self-congratulatory mood. "I wanted him to stand still so I could watch the Laagi on this assembly line."
"Sorry," said Jim. "Just an experiment to see if I could get him to make use of other squonks for us, if necessary. I'm trying out a few things in the way of controlling him."
"Well, let me know beforehand, after this," said Mary. "It


234 I Gordon R. Dickson

may not always be the best time for you to pull him away from what I'm studying. Did you think of that?"
"I didn't. Sorry," said Jim. "Back to the assembly line, Squonk."
	And that was that. The other activity with which Jim was
concerned was studying Mary herself. 	_
In the time since he had first met her he had gone from being irritated with her to an active dislike, and from there to a tolerance during the long period of getting him ready to become a part of AndFriend. From that point he had developed into a cautious partnership that was beginning to approach a genuine liking. But this had been swept away by his outright fury on discovering how he had been tricked into his situation here on the Laagi world. Now, however, he had made a step beyond that.
The fury in him had faded and with it, curiously, all the negative feelings he had had at one time or another toward her. Somehow, working deep within him and underneath the surface changes in his emotions, something like a fondness and a genuine concern for her had developed. She no longer had the power to make him seriously angry. He liked her and he was worried about her; and, as the weeks grew into months on this alien planet, that worry about her grew.
The Laagi, he and she had now pretty well established, lived to work-as did the squonks and probably most of the other communal species of life forms on this planet. They worked until they could work no longer, then they died. It was a world in which work was everything. Nothing else had any meaning.
And Mary, herself, was a worker. She lived to work, and as far as he had learned, nothing else for her had any meaning. But what was natural for the Laagi was not natural for her, a human. Still, she was now caught up in an environment in which her ability to work no longer set her apart from anyone else-anyone but Jim himself, whom she had long since dismissed from any possible use as a yardstick. With most people such an environment would not pose such a threat. But Mary, Jim had concluded, had grown a protective shell about herself.
He had checked up on her claims regarding the small amounts of sleep she needed. It was true to a certain extent that she was phenomenal at keeping going on what would


THE FOREVER MAN / 235

normally be a very few hours out of Earth's twenty-four. But beyond that there were a few holes in what she had told him about herself.
For one thing, she did not sleep only when he was sleeping. He had watched the same things she had watched and later repeated for recording the reports she made on them. There had been things done by the Laagi that Jim had seenthings that he now knew her well enough to be sure she would have made part of her report if she had seen, that she had not reported.
If she could not tell the difference between the periods when he was silent because he was asleep and those when he was silent because he was thinking, neither could he tell that difference in her-except by this sort of omission from her reports. The interesting question was whether she could herself. He had not realized at first, after becoming part of AndFriend, when he had been asleep. It might be Mary could not either. She might quite honestly believe that she slept only when he did. Out of the body as they both were, the physical signals customarily felt on waking were mostly missing.
He concentrated on training himself to be aware of what small signs there were in himself that would tell him he had just woken after a period of sleep. Slowly, he began to identify them. There was a faint lassitude-not the physical heaviness that the body normally reported after being slowed down by the process of slumber, but a short space in which the mind had to rouse itself to the different process of thinking consciously again, after having abandoned the conscious for the unconsciousness of dreamland.
There was also, as he came to recognize the existence of his sleep periods, as sleep periods, an awareness that he had not realized he possessed. It was an awareness of a period of inactivity, in the conscious area of his mind, a blank stretch in the memory record. And with his recognition of this, he began to remember the dreams he had had-just as someone who makes a point of writing down his memory of dreams on awakening becomes conscious of them.
Remembering the dreams, he became able, after a fashion, to measure the length of his sleep period by the amount of his remembered dreams. It was very imprecise, but it gave him something on which to estimate the length of his sleep.


236 I Cordon R. Dickson

In the process of doing this, for the first time, he came to realize that there had been a refreshment for him in having slept. His mental machinery had gotten some relief that it needed from its constant activity in the conscious state. This much realized, he made a final step forward and began to be aware of the mental fatigue signs that signaled him sleep was needed. It was a strange awareness, a feeling that was in no way a bodily feeling-something like the tension of a stretched rubber band and like that of the jittery nerves that in some people preceded a headache. It was very faint, but it was there, when needed; and he found that all that was necessary once he became aware of it was to look away-remove his conscious attention from the scene he was watching or any particular concern that had been occupying his mind-and he would fall asleep immediately.
Finally, now that he had discovered this much about himself, he had a rough system for measuring time under these abnormal conditions. He set himself to seeing if he could further train himself to become aware of signs in Mary's behavior that also signaled tiredness and the lassitude of just awakening. If what he had begun to suspect was true, she was killing herself.