Dickson, Gordon - Forever Man

VIP免费

2024-12-24 0 0 778.09KB 448 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

THE PHONE WAS RINGING. HE CAME UP OUT OF A SLEEP AS

DARK

as death, fumbled at the glowing button in the phone's base with numb

fingers and punched it. The ringing ceased.

"Wander here," he mumbled. An officer he did not recognize showed on

the screen.

"Major, this is Assignment. Lieutenant Van Lee. Laagi showing upward

of thirty ships facing our sector of the Frontier. Scramble, sir."

"Right," he muttered.

There was no reason for the Laagi to start putting extra ships into that

part of their territory that faced the North American Sector, and necessitate

an all-personnel call-out of the ship-handling crews-including people like

himself who had just come back in off patrol out there six hours ago.

But then, attacking or running, the Laagi made no sense. They never

had.

"You're to show in Conference Room K at four hundred hours. Bring

your personals."

"Understood, Lieutenant," he said.

"Very good, sir. Out."

The phone went dead. For a moment the desire for sleep sucked at Jim

Wander like some great black bog; then with a convulsive jerk he threw it

and the covers off him in one motion and sat up on the edge of his bed in

the darkness, scrubbing at his face with an awkward hand.

After a second, he turned the light on, got up, showered and dressed.

As he shaved, he watched his face in the mirror. It was still made up of the

same roughly squarish, large-boned features he remembered, but the lines

about the mouth and between the eyebrows seemed deepened with the

sleep, under the tousled black hair, coarsely curling up from his forehead. It

could not be drink, he thought. He never drank except on leave, nowadays.

Alcohol at other times did nothing for him anymore. It was just that now he

slept like a log-like a log watersoaked and drowning in some bottomless

lake.

He had not gone stale. Out on the Frontier he was as good as ever. But

he needed something-what, he could not specify. He felt the lack of it, like

the emptiness of a long-empty stomach inside him. But it was not hunger,

because he was fed regularly; and it was not women, as his friends sug-

gested, because he had no trouble finding women on his leaves from duty.

What he wanted was to come to grips with something. That was it, to have

his sidearm, the painkiller kit, the little green thumbnailsquare box holding

the x-capsule. Then he left his room, went down the long, sleeping corridor

of the officers'

THE FOREVER MAN / 3

quarters and out a side door into the darkness of predawn and the rain.

He could have gone around by the interior corridors to the Operations

building, but it was a short cut across the quadrangle and the rain and chill

would wake him, drive the last longing for sleep from his bones. As he

stepped out of the door the invisible rain, driven by a light wind, hit him in

the face. Beyond were the blurred lights of the Operations building across

the quadrangle.

Far off to his left thunder rolled. Tinny thunder-the kind heard at high al-

titudes, in the mountains. Beyond the rain and darkness were the Rockies.

Above the Rockies, the clouds. And beyond the clouds, space, stretching

light-years of distance to the Frontier.

-To where he would doubtless be before the dawn rose, above this

quadrangle, above these buildings, these mountains, and this Earth.

He entered the Operations building, showed his identification to the Offi-

cer of the Day, and took the lift tube up to the fourth floor. The frosted pane

of the door to Conference Room F glowed with a brisk, interior light. He

one of whom was General Louis Mollen, Sub-Chief of Operations, and the

other was a woman Jim did not know.

Mollen, round and hard-bodied as a medicine ball, with a head to match,

sat behind the desk; and in a chair half-facing him was a woman in military

flight clothes, in her midtwenties,lean and highforeheaded, with the fresh

skin and clear eyes of someone who has spent most of her years inside

walls, sheltered from the weather. Under reddish blond hair her eyes were

blue-green, in a face that was rectangular, with the jawlines sloping straight

down to a small, square chin. It was not

4 / Gordon R. Dickson

a remarkable face. Nor was it unremarkable. It was a strong, determined

face.

"Sony, sir. I should have knocked," said Jim.

"Not important," said Mollen. "Come in."

Jim came in and both the other two stood up as he approached the

desk. They watched him closely, and Jim found himself examining the

woman. The flight coveralls she wore had been fitted to her, which meant

she was not just a civilian fitted out by the -supply depot for this occasion.

At the same time something about her did not belong in the Operations

building; and Jim, out of the dullness of the fatigue that was still on him and

She would be, thought Jim sourly, reaching out to shake hands with her.

Mary Gallegher was almost as tall as Jim himself, who at five feet ten was

near the upper limit in height for the cramped quarters of the pilot's com

seat of a fighter ship, and her handshake was not weak. But still . . . here

she was, thought Jim, still resenting her for being someone as young as

Jim himself, full of the juices of living, and with all her attention focused on

the gray and tottering endyears of life. A bodysnatcher-a snatcher of old

bodies from the brink of the grave for a few months or a few years.

"Pleased to meet you, Mary," he said.

"Good to meet you, Jim."

"Sit down," said the general. Jim pulled up a chair and they all sat down

once more around the desk.

"What's up, sir?" asked Jim. "They told me it was a gmeral callout."

"The call-out's a fake. Just an excuse to put extra ships on the Frontier

for something special," answered Mollen. "The something special's why

Mary's here. And you. What do you remember about the Sixty Ships Bat-

tle?"

THE FOREVER MAN / 5

"It was right after we found we had a frontier in common with the Laagi,

wasn't it?" said Jim, slightly puzzled. "Over one hundred years ago or so.

battles. They cut us up and suckered what was left into staying clumped

together while they set off a nova explosion," he said. He looked into her

eyes and spoke deliberately. "The ships on the edge of the explosion were

burned up like paper cutouts. The ones in the center just disappeared."

"Disappeared," said Mary Gallegher. She did not seem disturbed by

Jim's description of the explosion. "That's the right word. How long ago did

you say this was?"

"Over a hundred years ago," said Jim. He turned and looked at General

Mollen, with a glance that said plainlyWhat is this, sir?

"Look here, Jim," said the general. "We've got something to show you."

He pushed aside the few papers on the surface of the table in front of

him and touched some studs on the control console near the edge of the

top. The overhead lights dimmed. The surface of the table became trans-

parent and gave way to a scene of stars. To the three seated around the

desk top it was as if they looked down and out into an area of space a

thousand light-years across. To the civilian, Jim was thinking, the stars

would be only a maze. To Jim himself, the image was long familiar.

Mollen's hands did things with the studs. Two hazy spheres of dim light,

each about a hundred and fifty lightyears in diameter along its longest axis,

sprang into viewbright enough to establish their position and volume, not so

bright as to hide the stars they enclosed. The center of one of

the Frontier area, Mary?"

"Where the two corne together, yes," said Mary.

"Now Jim-" said Mollen. "Jim commands a Wing of our Frontier Guard

ships, and he knows that area well. But nothing but unmanned drones of

ours have ever gotten deep into Laagi territory beyond the Frontier and

come back out again. Agreed, Jim?"

Agreed, sir," said Jim. "More than twenty, thirty lightyears deep is sui-

cide."

"Well, perhaps," said Mollen. "But let me go on. The Sixty Ships Battle

wits fought a hundred and twelve years ago-here." A bright point of light

sprang into existence in the Frontier area. "One of the ships engaged in it

was a oneman vessel with a s-.mianimate automatic control system,

named by its pilot La Chasse Gallerie-you said something, Jim?"

The exclamation had emerged from Jim's lips involuntarily. And at the

same time, foolishly, a slight shiver had run down his back. It had been

years since he had tun across the old tale as a boy.

"It's a French-Canadian ghost legend, sir," he said. "The legend was

that voyageurs who had left their homes in Eastern Canada to go out on

the fur trade routes and who had died out there would be able to come

back home one night of the year. New Year's night. They'd come sailing in

through the storms and snow in ghost canoes, to join the people back

center of the nova explosion, one of the ones that disappeared. At that

time we didn't realize that the nova explosion was merely a destructive

application of the principle used in phase-shift drive. -You've heard of the

statistical chance that a ship caught just right by a nova explosion could be

transported instead of destroyed, Jim?"

"I'd hate to count on it, sir," said Jim. "Anyway, what's the difference?

Modern ships can't be anticipated or held still long enough for any kind of

explosion to be effective. The Laagi haven't used the nova for eighty years.

Neither have we."

"True enough," said Mollen. "But we aren't talking about modern ships.

Look at the desk schema, Jim. Forty-three hours ago, one of our deep,

unmanned probes returned from far into Laagi territory with pictures of a

ship. Look."

Jim heard a stud click. The stars shifted and drew back. Floating against

a backdrop of unknown stars he saw the oldfashioned cone shape of a

one-man space battlecraft, of a type forgotten eighty years before. The

view moved in close and he saw a name, abraded by dust and dimmed, but

readable on the hull.

La Chasse Gallerie-The breath caught in his throat.

"It's been floating around in Laagi territory all this time?" Jim said. "I

can't believe-"

"No," he heard himself saying. "It can't be. It's some sort of Laagi trick.

They've got a Laagi pilot aboard=

"Listen," said Mollen. "The probe heard talking inside the ship. And it re-

corded. Listen-"

Again, there was the faint snap of a stud. A voice, a human

8 I Gordon R. Dickson

voice, singing raggedly, almost absentmindedly to itself, entered the air

of the room and rang on Jim's ears .

. . . en roulant ma boule, roulantroulant ma boule, roulant . . .

The singing broke off and the voice dropped into a mutter of a voice that

switched back and forth between French and English, speaking to itself.

Jim, who had all but forgotten the little French he had picked up as a boy in

Quebec, was barely able to make out that the owner of the voice was car-

rying on a running commentary on the housekeeping duties he was doing

about the ship. Talking to himself after the fashion of hermits and lonely

men.

beam-guns.

`"The ship's already had its first encounter with the Laagi on its way

home. It met three ships of a Laagi patrol-and fought them off."

"Fought them off? That old hulk?" Jim stared into the dimness where

Mollen's face should be. "Three modern Laagi ships?"

"That's right," said Mollen. "It killed two and escaped from the third-and

by rights it ought to be dead itself, but it's still coming, on ordinary drive,

evidently. It's not phaseshifting. Now, a control system might record a voice

and head a ship home, but it can't fight off odds of three to one. That takes

a living mind."

A stud clicked. Dazzling overhead light sprang on again and the desk

top was only a desk top. Blinking in the illumination, Jim saw Mollen looking

across at him.

"Jim," said the general, "this is a volunteer mission. That

THE FOREVER MAN / 9

ship is still well in Laagi territory and it's going to be hit again before it

reaches the Frontier. Next time it'll be cut to ribbons, or captured. We can't

afford to have that happen. Its pilot, this Raoul Penard, has got too much to

tell us, even beginning with the fact of how he happens to be alive in space

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

THEPHONEWASRINGING.HECAMEUPOUTOFASLEEPASDARKasdeath,fumbledattheglowingbuttoninthephone'sbasewithnumbfingersandpunchedit.Theringingceased."Wanderhere,"hemumbled.Anofficerhedidnotrecognizeshowedonthescreen."Major,thisisAssignment.LieutenantVanLee.LaagishowingupwardofthirtyshipsfacingoursectoroftheFro...

展开>> 收起<<

Dickson, Gordon - Forever Man.pdf

共448页,预览90页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Dickson, Gordon - Forever Man

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: