"Chapter 10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gordon Dickson - Forever Man)

JIM 1 ANDFRIEND LAY. THINKING. THE HUMAN RACE HAD BEEN at war with the Laagi so long, over five generations, that the contest had become something that was almost as taken for granted as the physical facts of the universe itself. It seemed they had always been at war with the Laagi. They would always be at war with them. . . these aliens, these people no human had ever seen, whose worlds no human had ever seen; but only the hulls of their heavy-bellied space warships. It was almost as if Mollen had suggested altering all the continents of Earth into unfamiliar shapes.
It was not just what he wanted, of course. It was what everyone wanted. No more of this war which had drained Earth's resources and brought her nothing in return-unless it was the feeling of being safely entrenched behind a line of fighting spaceships. But with no more Laagi to fight, what was next?
Hopefully, they could then go out to colonize livable worlds, wherever these could be found, which had been what they had been engaged in when they found that there were no ready-to-live-on planets within practical phase-shifting distances, unless they were the worlds already occupied by the
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Laagi or in that area of space to which the Laagi barred the way.
No one even knew why the Laagi fought. They had attacked, on contact, the first unarmed human spaceships that had encountered them. Clearly, they would have followed this up by carrying their attacks against Earth, itself, if the aroused world had not hastily combined to arm and man the defensive line in space that was the Frontier. Clearly, the Laagi wanted colonizable planet-space, too; and in spite of the fact no human had ever seen one, Earth must be enough like their world or worlds to be usable.
In the early years after human and Laagi ships had first encountered each other, their ships had come close enough to be observed just outside Earth's atmosphere. But meanwhile Earth had been frantically building ships fitted for space combat; and by the time the first of these went up in effective numbers, hunting for the Laagi, they had to travel almost as far as the present Frontier before encountering any of them.
But beyond the Frontier all the military strength of Earth had not been able to push, in well over a hundred years. The larger a fleet of fighter ships with which they tried to penetrate, the greater the number of Laagi ships that came to oppose them. Were the Laagi from one world or many? Were they paranoid or reasonable? What were they, physically and mentally?
No Laagi ship ever surrendered. They fought or ran, but once engaged in combat they kept fighting until they were destroyed, or destroyed themselves. Continual efforts to find a way of capturing a Laagi ship had been without success. There seemed to be the equivalent of a dead-man's switch in each of their ships that triggered its destruction if it became too badly crippled either to run or fight any more.
Now Mollen was suggesting that if Jim was lucky in finding what Mollen and Mary seemed to hope was out there, the years of fighting the Laagi might be over. The mountain was far off still on his horizon, but now a road had appeared that might lead him to it.
"Jim?"
It was Mary's voice, speaking to him.
"Yes?" he answered.
"You haven't said a word for nearly an hour," said Mary.


THE FOREVER MAN f 109

"We thought we'd give you time to think over what Louis just said. But it's been nearly an hour, as I say."
"Has it? I'm sorry," said Jim. "Time feels a little different to me now. Did you say something to me that I didn't answer? What was it?"
"We didn't," said Mollen. "But we were just about to. Do you think you'd have any trouble phase-shifting wide of the Frontier, whether you use your fusion engines or not; and then coming in again, say, fifty light-years farther on, to see if you're beyond Laagi territory?"
"I don't think so," said Jim. "It may take some time, but if time's not important-by the way, where's my body? What's happening to it?"
"It's being cared for," said Mollen. "As long as you come back within an ordinary lifetime, it'll be waiting for you. Actually a straight out, down, in and out again and back shouldn't take you more than a matter of weeks at the outside."
"Then I'm ready to go anytime," said Jim. "It's not as if I need to pack a suitcase, is it? You're talking to a ship, General, not a pilot."
"Louis means, are you mentally ready to go?" Mary asked. "We've been putting you under considerable strain for the last year. No one expects you to just bounce lack from that and take off."
"You know," said Jim, "it's strange, but there's nothing to bounce back from. Even if it'd turned out you didn't have a good reason for putting me here, there'd be nothing to bounce back from. I'm different now, that's all, in some way I can't explain. You know, come to think of it, it's almost as if I was thinking like a ship, instead of a man."
"Maybe we should have the doc give him some tests," said Mollen, very nearly under his breath.
"To see if my mind's all here?" Jim said. "It's all here, I promise you. It's just that-it's different, now."
"I don't know..." grumbled Mollen.
"Maybe I ought to say it's something like being perfectly free to think without all the body-feelings that used to interfere with thoughts, like static," said Jim. "Anyway, if you want me to leave this minute, I can."


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And he once more lifted AndFriend a hand's breadth from the floor.
"No. Wait. Come down!" said Mollen.
Jim rested the weight of his ship-body back on the floor.
"There's more to it than you know just yet," Mollen said. "We've got tapes of parts of what Raoul said that we've never let you hear before-tapes about whatever it was he ran into that gave him that idea of a paradise, and that the Laagi didn't know it was there. Are you ready to hear those now?"
"Certainly," said Jim. "Now or anytime. You know, it's funny. Time doesn't seem to mean the same thing to me now. Maybe I don't sleep anymore, like this. No, wait a minute; I did sleep for a while, didn't I? How long was I asleep?"
"Asleep?" said Mollen. "Maybe forty minutes. We thought you'd be out for hours."
"Forty minutes!"
For the first time Jim paid close attention to the faces of Mary and Mollen. They both looked strained and tired. Mollen, perhaps because of his age, looked very tired indeed.
"Just a second," said Jim. "What time is it now?"
"Now? Early morning=" Mollen looked at his wrist-com. "Four hundred thirty-seven."
"Four A.M.! You're the ones who're not up to tapes," said Jim. "Why don't you both go and rest? You can show me the tapes after you've had some sleep."