Chapter
                   15

HE WAS LYING ON A FLAT SURFACE.
He was under gravity. He was landed.
Two great, flat hoops, edge‑down, of metal, or at least of something that shone like polished steel, were anchored in the hard surface on which AndFriend lay and curved over her, at a third of her length in from each end of her. The hoops were five meters wide and narrow, but with their edges that faced down toward AndFriend narrowing to a few microns of thickness, so that they were like enclosing, curved knives ready to slice her open if she should try to lift.
In one wild reflex he flung his orders at the phase‑drive engines, ordering them to phase‑shift immediately, shift a full five light‑years away, at once.
Nothing happened. The control studs that should have depressed themselves on the corn section in front of his empty control chair did not stir. AndFriend did not stir.
He threw all his will, all his longing to escape into a command for the ship to phase‑shift; and, when she continued to stay where she was, kept pushing against nothingness, driving, willing AndFriend to shift to safety.
And still nothing happened.
"No!" his mind cried
162

THE FOREVER MAN / 163

It was a long, drawn‑out cry, like the howl of a trapped animal. Dimly he was aware of Mary trying to speak to him.
"I can't move her!" he shouted voicelessly at Mary. "What's wrong? Where are we? How'd the Laagi do this? How'd they get us here? What happened? What's happened to me?"
` . . . Jim, don't," Mary was saying to him.. "Jim, don't fight like that. Please. It won't help and you'll only hurt yourself more. There's nothing you can do. You can't move AndFriend now. The Laagi think they have us like they had Raoul‑only they didn't try to anchor him down; and we've just got to stay put, for a while at least."
Like a trapped animal crouching in the cage that held him prisoner, he snarled at her.
"What happened? What did they do to me?"
"The Laagi didn't do anything, Jim. Only bring us in and try to lock us down here with those arcs they've set up over AndFriend. I'm so sorry, Jim, but I had to. It wasn't them who stopped you from getting away from them, and it's not them that's keeping you from shifting clear now. It was me."
"You?" He raged at her. "You? Have you gone crazy, letting them make prisoners of us?"
"No, Jim. Please. Listen. This was something I had to do. It was planned this way from the start, if it looked like the Laagi might capture us the way they captured Raoul. It was something more important than anything else, if we could find out more about them and then try to bring the information back..."
"You just gave them AndFriend? You gave them me? Without warning? Without asking? How did you knock me out? What's happened to me that I can't move her?"
It was the third time he had been handled like someone untrustworthy, and it was the limit.
"Oh, Jim!" It was as impossible as the situation they were in now that he could feel from Mary Gallegher an emotion that was the equivalent of tears. But it was so. "It wasn't even Louis who decided to do this; it was the people who give him orders. The only way they agreed to this expedition was if our primary mission was to bring back information about the Laagi."
"What did you do to me?" He hated her now and knew she

164 I Gordon R. Dickson
was feeling that hate. "How could you come between me and AndFriend like this?"
"Jim, try to understand, please . . . . " she said. "I haven't come between you and AndFriend. It was just that, during one of the sessions when we had you under hypnosis near the end, you were implanted with a command that could make you unable to use your ability to do anything with her. It was just as if we'd told you about a command that could make one of your arms paralyzed and useless. We couldn't risk you doing what we knew you'd do if we saw something like those Laagi ships coming at us."
"I was going to save us, that's all!" he said fiercely.
"Yes, and that's what we didn't want happening. We needed to let ourselves be captured so that we'd finally have a chance to see the Laagi and understand their civilization, and how they work and why they fight us so=
"Nevermind that. I don't remember a thing after I said I was going to shift out of danger. Was that command of yours supposed to knock me out, too?"
"Yes," she said. "Oh, yes. Jim, it had to. It was the only safe way. Then I had another command, the one I used just now, once we were safely captured, to bring you back awake again, but still not able to move AndFriend."
"Safely captured!" he said savagely. "That's a little bit of a contradiction, isn't it?"
"But we can get away when we want‑when we've learned what we came here to learn," she said. "Once you're able to move AndFriend again, you can shift right out from under those knives. The Laagi did just what we expected. When they didn't find anybody aboard us, they thought we were a derelict. Just as they thought La Chasse Gallerie was a derelict, except that later on she took off under Raoul's power and escaped from them. But they're only expecting that this ship has something automatic about it that doesn't require it to have a pilot to use ordinary drive, and that's what the arcs over us are there to stop happening. They don't realize that we're here and a part of the ship, and that you can phase‑shift right out from under this kind of restraint once you're able to move."
"Once I'm able to move," he echoed grimly, mockingly. "Once you take my handcuffs off . . . which'll be when

THE FOREVER MAN / 165

you've seen enough of the Laagi, which'll be when you're satisfied. I've got no say in the matter, have I‑for all your saying you're so sorry about doing this? You want to prove you're really song? Turn me loose now and let me have a choice about whether we stay or go!"
"I can't!" she said. "I can't, Jim!"
"You won't‑that's what you mean. You don't trust me not to take off the minute you let me go," he said. "You and the general didn't trust me enough to tell me I'd be going into space as a ship rather than a man, you didn't trust me enough to tell me you bought this trip from the higher‑ups by promising to let the Laagi capture us if the chance came up. Now you won't trust me with control of the phase‑shift equipment aboard my own ship. Let me tell you something, lady. You're either going to have to trust your partner, or you're never going to get back to Earth with anything you learn about the Laagi. And furthermore, I'm going to take back control of myself, the ship, you, and everything else, as soon as I can."
"If we can find out what we need to learn about the Laagi," she said unhappily, "it won't matter, then. But I can't turn you loose, Jim. You just gave the reason yourself."
"That's right. But while you study the Laagi‑and I leave that all to you‑as I say I'm going to be doing my damnedest to find some way around this lock you've got on me. And what do you want to bet I don't find one?"
"Even if you do," she said, "Jim, please, think before you take us away from here. We've got a chance to learn something we've needed to know for nearly two hundred years. It could save no one knows how many lives and ships. It could even possibly save our whole race. There's no way of telling how much it's worth to study the Laagi up close like this."
He said nothing. The anger in him was like something solid and hard‑an anvil upon which he was hammering out thoughts of escape and vengeance.
They were together in silence for a somewhat considerable stretch of time, possibly a few hours, possibly much longer, during which Jim paid attention to nothing beyond AndFriend's interior, and even that he was conscious of only with the periphery of his mind. Events and actions had become largely subjective to his attention as a bodiless mind. Just now he was lost in himself, thinking furiously of everything he had

166 / Gordon R. Dickson

ever read or heard concerning hypnosis, hoping to recall something that would have to do with someone freeing himself or herself from just such a command as Mary had acknowledged putting upon him.
But nothing came out of his memory that was at all helpful. He was still going around and around over what little he knew about the subject when there was an unexpected interruption. The entry port swung outward as the inner door of the airlock between port and door swung open. A breeze of outside atmosphere came into the ship, which, last Jim remembered, had lost its atmosphere with the coming and going of the ship's robot in space. The air was accompanied by a creature a little more than a meter in height and looking like a cross between a small, bent old man wearing a shell bulging outward on his back, and a snail walking‑not on a snail's normal, single footpad, but on two very short, thick legs that ended not in feet, but what looked like pads of heavy skin six or eight millimeters in thickness.
The head was like the head of a turtle, with two very small but very bright, black eyes that were closely side by side and facing forward. They seemed, however, to be able to move about considerably as the skin holding them moved; because the first thing the figure did on entering was to pause and direct one eye forward in the ship, while the other eye moved to look toward the back of AndFriend's interior. At the same time a globe the size of a tennis ball that was floating in the air just above the creature's head came alight with a brilliant, yellow illumination that would have made the interior painfully bright if Jim and Mary had been using human eyes to see it with.
The same light made it clear that the shell of the creature was a light tan mottled with irregular black patches, the visible parts of the soft body were dark brown, and the soles of the feet‑it appeared from their edges‑were a bright red. A second later half a dozen tentacles of the same red color whipped out from under the top edge of the shell, between where the creature's shoulders would be if it had shoulders under there. These tentacles probed the air as if testing the atmosphere.
"Now, what's this?" he said to Mary, startled for the moment into forgetting his anger against her.

THE FOREVER MAN / 167
"One of the local species that seems to coexist with the Laagi," answered Mary. "They're workers. This one comes about once a week to clean us up."
"Clean us up?"
"I know," said Mary. "There's nothing here that really needs cleaning. But it comes anyway."
"What's it called?" asked Jim, observing in fascination as the creature turned and began to explore the surface of the inner wall of the ship to its right with its tentacles.
"I don't know what the Laagi call it," said Mary. "I call it Squonk, after the janitor of an apartment building where I once lived."
"'It'?" echoed Jim. "If your janitor was a he, I'd think=
"We won't guess," said Mary firmly. "There's no indication so far if it's bisexual, unisexual, or what, let alone something else. As I say, I call him Squonk because the janitor in our apartment building was named Skwaconsky‑and‑we all called him Squonk. But it remains to be seen what, if any, sex this creature is."
"Yeah," said Jim. He had remembered his anger toward her and was once more being stirred by it. The tenor of his feelings must have been clear to Mary, for she said nothing more.
For the first time, however, he realized he had not looked beyond the walls of the ship, except for that first view from the center of a flat, empty area of what looked like concrete, except that it was the light brown color of sandy soil on Earth. It was an irregular area, and beyond its borders were dark green strips that seemed to be pathways or roads. Beyond these in turn were beehive‑shaped buildings of sizes varying from something the size of a single‑family house to something that might have covered the largest sports arena on Earth, all the color of honey. These structures seemed to merge together in the distance, either because they were actually connected or because his unaided vision could no longer see the spaces between them. Overhead the sky had a light greenish cast.
Moving about on the dark green strips were more Squonks and other figures that varied amazingly in size and length of limb but went on two legs and were vaguely human‑shaped.
Automatically Jim mentally ordered the main screen in front of his command chair to show the outside scene with telescopic magnification, so that he could get a closer look at

168 I Gordon R. Dickson
the humanlike figures. But nothing happened‑and he was suddenly aware that this, too, must be part of what he was blocked off from in his ability to control the ship.
For a second he was tempted to ask Mary to let him at least have control of the screens, if she could without setting him completely free. But the thought was followed almost immediately by a feeling of revulsion at the thought of asking any favors.
Mentally, he forced himself to put his anger aside.
"Are those Laagi, those critters outside there that don't look like Squonk?" he asked her.
"Yes," she said. "Would you like to watch theta close up?"
"It doesn't make any difference to me," he said.
"It does to me," she said sadly. "I'd give a lot to be able to see them up close, in the tank of the screen. I'd like to examine the whole city around us that way. But I can't without turning you loose."
"That's right," he answered grimly. "What makes you so sure they're Laagi, then?"
"It was some like that who came aboard us out in space, before they locked AndFriend in the midst of them and shifted her here. Only two or thrre of them have come and looked inside the ship since she's been here. I don't know whether the ones who came and looked at her here were high officials or scientists, or specialists of some kind, or just that the general Laagi public's not interested in us. But those were all who came."
"Specialists or people with rank," said Jim. "I'd bet on it. You don't think we'd let the general public swarm over a Laagi ship we'd captured? And our general public'd certainly be eager to do just that."
"There's always the danger of anthroporhorphizing," she answered. "We don't really know them enough even to guess at a reason they'd do anything."
"No reason not to, either," he said.
They went back into silence. Jim because he did not want to talk to her any more than he had to; and she, he presumed, because she knew how he was feeling and did not want to give him any unnecessary chances to tell her what he thought of her‑and the general and the people behind him. But most of all of the general and her, who may have been under pressure

THE FOREVER MAN / 169
to do what they had done to him, but who had certainly agreed to betray him.
Squonk continued to go over the interior of the ship, and Jim found himself becoming fascinated with the creature. He had never in his life seen such a thorough search for whatever should not be there. Within the captive atmosphere of the ship‑even when that captive atmosphere was that of an alien planet‑there was no way for dirt to accumulate. But the almost microscopic search of every surface in the ship by Squonk was as thorough as if it was cleaning an operating theater in a hospital; and, compact as a fighter ship had to be'; there were endless niches and crannies to be searched into.
Apparently, while dirt could not find its way onto the surfaces of the ship's interior, tarnish resulting from contact with the unusual atmosphere was possible. Jim saw Squonk several times fish back in under its shell with the end of one tentacle and come out with a small spongy‑ended blue rod perhaps fifteen millimeters in length; and that spongy end, rubbed over any metallic surface, made it brighter. Then the blue rod was tucked away again.
Interesting as this was, even more interesting was a fact it took Jim a little while to notice‑and that was that Squonk's legs seemed to lengthen or shorten to order, to make it easier for it to get into particular crannies.
"Jim." The voice of Mary interrupted him as he was fasciwatching this happen for perhaps the dozenth time.
"What?" he asked absently, his animosity for the moment forgotten.
"Wouldn't you like to know more about these Squonks, and the Laagi, and everything on this world?"
He did not answer immediately, thinking it over. Of course he wanted to know. But saying so would almost sound as if he regretted his words earlier.
"I know, Jim." Mary's voice was sad, but also it was weary. "You're absolutely right. We treated you terribly from the beginning. You don't even know half of what we did to you. We deliberately put you under mental stress; we held you back from the only thing you loved; all of it done deliberately to break you down. We fogged your mind up with drugs, and we finally sent you out under the illusion you were volunteer

170 / Gordon R. Dickson
ing to do something when actually you were sent to do something entirely different."
He did not answer.
	"If it helps‑and I know it doesn't," she went on after a
while, "I'd never have done it that way, knowing you the way
I do now, knowing how much AndFriend means to you, how
much space means to you. I couldn't do it, if I was asked to
do it over again, to anyone. It was the worst sort of misuse of
a human being. In a good cause‑but misuse all the same‑ ‑‑2'
he said. "All right. I feel the way I feel. But we won't talk about it anymore. You want to study the Laagi and you need my help. I won't fight you on the fact that it's a good thing to do. I won't run away from what we can do here. You'll have to trust me that I mean that, meanwhile. You can believe it or not, but if I'd been told the truth from the beginning I'd probably have thought you all were crazy to suppose we could even get to a Laagi world alive, but I'd have agreed to try. It's not that different from what I signed up to do in the first place. It's just sticking my neck way out in a different way."
He stopped. She did not answer immediately..
"Well?" he said. "Did that convince you? Do you trust me enough now to turn me loose?"
"No," she said. The thought from her was like a sigh. "I do believe you, Jim. But I've got my own duty, and I can't let you go just on your word alone. You've got to do something first to prove it."
It took a few seconds for the import of her words to sink in on him.
"Prove it=" he echoed. "How can I do something like that, hogtied the way you've got me?"
"By wanting enough to be a squonk to make something work."
"Wanting to be a squonk?"
"Yes."
His mind whirled.
"Why, for God's sake‑even if I could be one, what makes you want me to?"
"So we can really study the Laagi, up close. So we can go
into their buildings‑into their homes, if they have homes. So
we can move around here as invisible observers‑ ‑2'
THE FOREVER MAN / 171

"Hold on!" he said. Her words had been rising on a tide of enthusiasm that he mistrusted. "I think I know what you've got in mind. You want me to become part of this critter the same sort of way you made me part of AndFriend, is that it? So I can travel with him when he leaves this place and we can get a look at what's outside?"
"We, not just you," she said. "Where you go, I'll be going, too, of course."
"All right. We. Just how do you figure to make me part of an alien animal like that, even if I agree? It's not a piece of nonliving metal."
"I'm not sure it'll work, but I think it might if you'll do your part," she said patiently. "You see, we still really don't know how Raoul's mind‑what's left of it‑became part of La Chasse Gallerie. All we ever had was our guess that two things, his love for his ship and his physical contact with it over a period of time, caused the two to blend. Even the physical contact may not have been necessary. That, like the scrapings from AndFriend we put under your skin, may be only a sort of black magic, a symbolic sort of thing that helps the mind believe it can migrate to what it's touching. But we do know that the mind has to want to go where it goes‑want it badly enough to make the change. Everything else may be so much mumbo jumbo, but you wanted AndFriend more than you wanted life."
"That's true enough," he said soberly. For a second, he remembered his exhaustion and his desperation just before he had left his human body behind for what he now was.
"Also," Mary went on, "there could be other factors we can't even guess at. The fact you and Raoul had spent time in interstellar space may have something to do with the ability to move your mind. The fact both of you and your ships had fought for your lives together could have something to do with it. For all those reasons, there's not much more than a hope you can shift your mind into this alien animal, as you call it. But I've got a few things I haven't told you about. We knew I'd be helpless, physically, once I inhibited your command of AndFriend. So, the command that took your ability to control away was designed with exceptions‑what you could call holes in it; or perhaps "windows" would be a better word. If I turn you loose to use a particular window‑and I can with the

172 I Gordon R. Dickson

proper hypnotic command‑you can give one, but only one, series of commands through it; and one of those windows lets you use your ship's robot."
"The robot?"
"That's right. But don't get your hopes up," she said. "You'll only be able to tell it to do certain things, none of which are going to help you get back command of the ship as a whole, or do anything to help you to phase‑shift it. As it happens, most of what the robot needs to do to try putting your mind into Squonk has already been done. Before we left Earth it was equipped with scrapings from the interior of AndFriend, and these've been stored in him all this time. What you'll be able to do if I open one of those windows for you is use Fingers to inject some of that scraping under the skin of Squonk."
"Inject? What makes you think, even if Fingers can do it, that Squonk isn't going to feel the scrapings being injected and immediately head to the Laagi equivalent of a veterinarian to have them taken out?"
"We don't, of course," said Mary. "But the scrapings are microscopic, and the process of injection wouldn't be felt by a human. We just have to hope it won't be felt by Squonk, either."
Jim sat thinking about it.
"Craziest thing I ever heard of," he grumbled. "If, if, and if... if right is left and up is down, then maybe we'll all turn into orange trees with the next word I speak."
"That's not the point," said Mary, still patiently. "The point is, will you try it? Will you try, honestly try, to consciously move your mind into Squonk?"
"You'll turn me loose if I do?"
"I didn't say that. I said I'd start to believe that you wanted to stay and find out about the Laagi, if you try‑really try. Remember, if you're not trying, I'll know it. That's the advantage of my mind being in yours, the way it is."
"I'll try, of course," said Jim. "I don't have much choice."
"Jim, of course you've got a choice! If you simply sit here refusing to do anything, and I finally become convinced you never are going to help, and so we'll never learn anything more about the Laagi and Squonk and the rest of it than we do now, then I'll turn you loose and we'll go home with that.

THE FOREVER MAN / 173
Maybe back there there's some other pilot who'll bring me out to be captured again and='
"That's a low blow," he said.
"Well," she answered, "if you're the one that doesn't want to stay, can you complain if someone else does want to?"
"I told you I wanted to stay," said Jim. "It's just that‑forget it. I'm willing to try putting myself into this creature with the maniac housekeeping tendencies. What do I do first?"
"Nothing," she answered. "First, I have to open up the window for you to command Fingers to inject the scrapings. Which I will now do. Go=‑Cane! Now, first you'll find you can give the robot the order to inject the material. But it'll have to wait for a chance to do it when Squonk's close but unsuspecting. Second, once the material's in Squonk you try to make the connection. Ready to try it?"
"Ready," answered Jim.
The robot was standing motionless tucked into his storage niche at the back end of AndFriend's interior, as it had been ever since it had last been put to use. Squonk had started its cleaning down the side of the ship from the entry port and would apparently be cleaning up the other side in due course. Before that he would reach the robot and clean it.
Jim concentrated on the small scrapings from AndFriend that were to be injected into Squonk. He must, he told himself, have been feeling them there in the robot all the time, but paid no attention to them since Fingers himself was part of AndFriend. But now that he knew they were there . . .
With the ability to feel, rather than see the ship around him, he searched the robot for something that was not part of Fingers' normal working equipment. It would be very tiny, but different . . . ah, he had located it. It was in a tiny drawer hidden under the end of one of the multiple arms used by the robot, at the end of the lowest of the extensions at the end of the arm extensions, capable of taking as attachment any number of small tools.
The scrapings were from the control console in front of the pilot's seat; and they were already loaded into a tiny, hollow, diamond‑pointed needle that should be able to penetrate any living substance, even horn or bone, to a depth, if necessary, of fifteen millimeters.
Jim's point of view was now within the scrapings them

174 I Gordon R. Dickson

selves, inside the robot. Once he would have told Mary about this, but now there was a barrier between them. If there were things she had seen fit not to tell him, he thought, there could be things he saw fit not to tell her. From the motionless, silent mechanical, Jim watched the alien cleaner getting closer and closer. Even at the slow, careful, deliberate pace Squonk was maintaining, it was now very near to the robot.
"All right," said the voice of Mary. "Prepare the robot to inject the material. Tell it. Say 'on the words "Go in," inject the ship's material, now in the second finger of your lowest right hand, into the living creature before you. Inject to a depth of nine millimeters into the upper part of one of the folds of living tissue on the creature's left leg, just below the shell on its back. Do this as quickly as you can and if possible without attracting the creature's attention. Then return to "Still" position."'
"I can give the order with a lot less words than that," said Jim, still holding his point of view inside Fingers.
"Just repeat the words I gave you, please," said Mary. "'On the words "Go in," inject. . . "
"I remember. You don't have to go through it again," said Jim.
"Good," said Mary. "Because unless you use the words I just gave you, the window won't work and the robot won't act. So you've been warned. If your memory does fail you, just pause, and I'll prompt you. I'll also tell you when to start giving the command. So wait for my order."
"Yes, ma'am!" said Jim.
Mary ignored the emphasis on Jim's last word. Together they waited. Squonk finally reached the robot and began to search its head for anything needing cleaning.
"Ready now," Mary's voice sounded in Jim's mind. "All right‑say 'Go‑‑One, now!"'
"Gone, now!" repeated Jim.
Even though he was watching for it, Jim barely saw the movement of the hand with the needle. It was out and in, the finger with the material having seemed to barely approach the back of Squonk's leg‑and then the robot continued to stand in perfect stillness for the rest of the grooming being given it by Squonk.
THE FOREVER MAN / 175
Squonk showed no sign of noticing what had been done to it. It continued with its cleaning.
"Jim?" said Mary. "Jim, did it work? I'm blind, all of a sudden."
"It worked. But we're in a strange country," said Jim. "Now we've got to find our way to the capital city."
"What?"
"Come on, now," said Jim. "A scientist and technologist like you ought to be able to figure out that one. We're in Squonk all right, but its body tissue's not human‑it's unfamiliar territory. Now I've got to find my way to wherever its mind lives and in its mind hook up with its vision. You didn't think of this."
"We thought of it, but. . . " Mary's voice was oddly distant, without being any harder to hear for that reason. "We thought it'd either work or not work, since any part of AndFriend acts like eyes and ears for you, like every part of La Chasse Gallerie does for Raoul. So once we got an alien injected, we thought we'd either be able to get the input of its senses right away, or the try'd be a failure."
"Well, it's not a failure. But I can't see, hear, smell or whateveryet," said Jim. "I'd say that's because I haven't got all the parts connected together, the way I had with AndFriend. Here, I've got a little part of myself buried in opaque, surrounding alien material. What I'm seeing is that opaque, surrounding alien material. Anyway, I think that's it. Sit back and let me work on this."
He was like a man imprisoned in darkness and pressure, ‑caught in a cavern, underground. How to start? He knew nothing about the alien body around him. In fact, the truth was, there was no certainty that it was a body and not some mechanical which had been much more cleverly constructed by the Laagi than Fingers had been by human engineers. Or Squonk could be a biological robot grown to order from cultures of alien flesh belonging to the Laagi or some other species under their control
He checked himself suddenly. His mind was running wild. The thing to concentrate on, he told himself, was how similar Squonk's body was to the animal bodies of Earth, not let his imagination run to wild imaginings of difference. Alien or not, if it was a body as he knew bodies, it lived and died, it

176 I Gordon R. Dickson
ingested fuel material and excreted wastes. It would need the equivalent of a brain and a heart to circulate the fuel from the ingested material to the living parts of its body needing that fuel. And a liquid circulatory system would be more efficient than any solid manner of delivery . . . which meant it had the equivalent of a blood system. Which meant that if he could just reach that blood‑call it the circulatory‑system, he could travel it until it led him to the brain. Wherever the brain was, the mind ought to be available.
But first he had to find a conduit of the circulatory system. Like someone lost in a vast continent, he needed to find a river and follow it to the equivalent of the sea, and the sea to a particular place on the shore of the sea. He tried moving the injected material the way he had moved the AndFriend when his mind had been free to do so.
He moved, only a tiny distance, but he moved. However ‑a second later, the material enclosing him moved suddenly, taking him with it; and in panic, he recoiled.
He found himself back in the ship as a whole.
"I can see‑oh," said Mary, her voice going from excitement to the flatness of disappointment. "It didn't work."
"No, that's not what happened," he answered. "I panicked. I moved the injected material and‑look at Squonk. He's scratching himself. When I felt the pressure of that, inside his skin, I automatically ran."
In fact, Squonk was rubbing the tip of one tentacle energetically at the area on his left leg where the material had been injected.
"I think I can go back into him, all right . . . . " he said, reaching out once more with his mind for the AndFriend material lodged in the little alien.
Suddenly it was dark again. He was back.
He tried moving once more, but this time more slowly and carefully. Twice, he was shaken, as a cave‑in victim might be shaken by earthquakes in the earth or rock that held him, but he kept going. After a time that he had no way of measuring, he poked the front end of his material into a less solid space.
He explored it. He was all but certain it must be the equivalent of a blood vessel, but it was very small. Still, his material was small enough to fit even into this narrow passage. He slipped all the way in, and tried to sense, by touching the

THE FOREVER MAN / 177

surrounding walls, whether he was being carried along with the fluid that must surround him now.
He was apparently, he decided, being carried backward. He reversed his own point of view in the scrapings and thought of himself as going forward. It was either a long time or a short‑once more he had no way of knowing‑but he was eventually carried along and into a larger pipeline with a stronger flow.
He had no way of knowing for certain where he was in Squonk's body, but the same sort of feel that had helped him in dead reckoning gave him the general feeling that he was in the body of Squonk, rather than still in the leg where the scrapings had been injected. He oriented his material now to touch the walls of the conduit along which he was being carried by whatever fluid was Squonk's equivalent of a bloodstream. Within the fluid, he was essentially weightless. He could only feel the pressure of its current. If he could just feel the stresses on the solid wall material, however, he ought to be able to tell in what direction gravity was pulling upon them. He blamed himself for not trying to judge, when he was first injected into Squonk's flesh, which way the stress of gravity was pulling on that flesh.
This way would be more difficult .... Again he did not know how long he tried to feel what he wanted to feel, but finally he became sure that the stream he was in was flowing horizontally against the pull of gravity‑
Without warning, he was tumbled and thrown in a dozen different directions in quick succession. He had come to some intersection, or maybe it was even the equivalent of Squonk's central pumping organ for the circulatory system; Squonk's heart, in short . . .
In desperation he began to move his material in what he conceived to be one steady direction. For a while more he was buffeted, not knowing if he was making any progress or not, and then the maelstrom of forces upon him settled down to a single powerful flow that was clearly against gravity.
He was on his way upward. If Squonk's brain was in his equivalent of a head, as the skullcaplike piece of bone cartilage among the body parts left of the long dead Laagi in their derelict ships had indicated the Laagi brain was, then he was finally on the right track.

178 I Gordon R. Dickson

It was, perhaps, his lucky day. The flow took him up to a point where it suddenly dispersed itself into innumerable smaller channels.
He nosed into the material surrounding the small conduit into which he had been carried. Beyond the conduit wall, the solid body material was different, softer.
"It could be brain," he said, speaking to Mary for the first time in a long while.
"Then, if you could find an impulse‑carrying fiber," Mary said, "you might be able to read whatever message that fiber was carrying, and then spread out your awareness from there."
Smart, thought Jim. But he did not say the complimentary word aloud for her to hear.
"I'll see if I can tell the difference in textures," he said.
He probed the material close about himself.
He touched something, solid within solid. What it was,‑he did not know at the time and later on it was too late to go back and reconstruct what it was. But suddenly light flooded in around him. He saw the interior of AndFriend through Squonk's eyes.
The cleaning was just being finished. As he watched, Squonk turned toward the entry port, carrying the perceptions of Jim and Mary. The entry port opened. They and Squonk went out.
"How do you like that?" he shouted mentally at Mary, his grudge toward her for the moment completely drowned in triumph. "Here we go! Five minutes more and we ought to be close enough to touch some of those Laagilike figures we saw from the ship!"
But he was wrong. Having left AndFriend behind it, and once more down upon the concrete of the great stretch surrounding the ship, Squonk was beginning‑slowly, painstakingly and industriously, to clean his way toward Cie distant buildings and the strips of dark green where other, distant figures had been seen moving.