The Forever Man Read Online Free

“Identify yourself. This is Formidable , command ship for Picket Nine Sector, requesting identification.”
    â€œWander Section. Five ships.” Jim did not bother to look at his instruments to find the space-floating sphere that was Formidable . It was out there somewhere, with twenty ships scattered around, up to five and a half light-years away, but all zeroed in on this reception point where he and the other four ships had emerged. Had Jim been a Laagi Wing or Picket Commander, he would not have transmitted into this area with twenty ships—no, nor with twice that many. “Confirm transmission notice from Earth, Five ship Section for deep probe Laagi territory. Wander Section Leader, speaking.”
    â€œTransmission notice confirmed, Wander Section leader,” crackled back the voice from Picket Nine. “Mission confirmed. You will not deship. Repeat, not deship. Local Frontier area has been scouted for slipover, and data prepared for flash transmission to you. You will accept data and leave immediately. Please key to receive data.”
    â€œMajor—” began the voice of Mary, behind him.
    â€œShut up,” said Jim. He said it casually, without rancor, as if he was speaking to his regular gunner, Leif Molloy. For a moment he had forgotten that he was carrying a passenger instead of a proper gunman. And there was no time to think about it now. “Acknowledge,” he said to Picket Nine. “Transmit data, please.”
    He pressed the data key and the light above it sprang into being and glowed for nearly a full second before going dark again. That, thought Jim, was a lot of data—at the high-speed transmission at which such information was pumped into his ship’s computing center. That was one of the reasons the new mind-units were evolved out of solid-state physics instead of following up the development of the older, semianimate brains such as the one aboard the ancient La Chasse Gallerie . The semianimate brains—living tissue in a nutrient solution—could not accept the modern need for sudden high-speed packing of sixteen hours’ worth of data into the space of a second or so.
    Also, such living tissue had to be specially protected against high accelerations, needed to be fed and trimmed—and it died on you at the wrong times.
    All the time Jim was turning this over with one part of his mind, the other and larger part of his thinking process was driving the gloved fingers of his right hand. These moved over a bank of one hundred and twenty small black buttons, ten across and twelve down, like the stops on a piano-accordion, and with the unthinking speed and skill of the trained operator, he punched them, requesting information out of the body of data just pumped into his ship’s computing center, building up from this a picture of the situation, and constructing a pattern of action to be taken as a result.
    Evoked by the intricate code set up by combinations of the black buttons under his fingers, the ghost voice of the mind-unit whispered in his ear in a code of words and numbers hardly less intricate.
    â€œâ€¦transmit destination area one-eighty Eli Wye, Laagi Sector L 4 at point 12.5, 13.2, 64.5. Proceeding jumps 10 Eli Wye, R inclination 9 degrees Frontier midpoint. Optimum jumps twelve, 03 error correctable on the first shift…”
    He worked steadily. The picture began to emerge. It would not be hard getting in. It was never hard to do that. They could reach La Chasse Gallerie in twelve phase-shift transmissions or jumps across some hundred and eighty light-years of distance, and locate her in the area where she should then be, within an hour or so. Then they could—theoretically at least—surround her, lock on, and try to improve on the ten light-years of jump it seemed was the practical limit of her pilot’s or her control center’s computing possibilities.
    With modern phase-shift drive, the problem was not