Read Online The Forever Man by Gordon R. Dickson - Free Book Online

wasn’t it? The man isn’t really alive?”
    â€œYes,” said Mary, “and no. You were right about the control center somehow absorbing the living personality of Penard. —But look again. Could a control center like that, centered in living tissue floating and growing in a nutrient solution with no human hands to care for it—could something like that have survived this, either?”
    Jim looked around at the slashed and rained interior. A coldness crept into him and he thought once more of the legend of a great ghost cargo canoe sailing through the snow-filled skies with its dead crew, home to the New Year’s feast of the living.
    â€œNo...” he said slowly, through stiff lips. “Then... where is he?”
    â€œHere!” said Mary, reaching out with her fist to strike the metal bulkhead to which the gray cable was attached. The dull boom of the struck metal reverberated in Jim’s ears. Mary looked penetratingly at Jim.
    â€œYou were right,” said Mary, “when you said that the control center had become Penard—that it was Penard, after the man died. Not just a record full of memories, but something holding the vital, decision-making spark of the living man himself. —But that was only half the miracle. Because the tissue living in the heart of the control center had to die, too, and just as the original Penard knew he would die, long before he could get home, the tissue Penard knew it, too. But their determination, Penard’s determination, to do something, solved the problem.”
    She stopped and stood staring at Jim, as if waiting for some sign that she had been understood.
    â€œGo on,” said Jim.
    â€œThe control system,” said Mary, “was connected to the controls of the ship itself through an intermediate solid-state element which was the grandfather of the wholly inanimate solid-state computing centers in the ships you drive nowadays. The link was from living tissue through the area of solid-state physics to gross electronic and mechanical controls.”
    â€œI know that,” said Jim. “Part of our training—”
    â€œThe living spark of Raoul Penard, driven by his absolute determination to get home, passed from him into the living tissue of the semianimate controls system,” went on Mary, as if Jim had not spoken. “From there it bridged the gap by a sort of neurobiotaxis into the flow of impulse taking place in the solid-state elements. Once there, below all gross levels, there was nothing to stop it infusing every connected solid part of the ship.”
    Mary swept her hand around the ruined pilot’s compartment.
    â€œThis,” she said, “is Raoul Penard. And this!” Once more she struck the bulkhead above the black box. “The human body died. The tissue activating the control center died. But Raoul came home just as he had been determined to do!”
    Mary stopped talking. Her voice seemed to echo away into the silence of the compartment.
    â€œAnd doing it,” said Mary more quietly, “he brought home the key we’ve been hunting for in the Bureau all this time. We pulled the plug on a dam behind which there’s been piling up a flood of theory and research. What we needed to know was that the living human essence could exist independently of the normal human biochemical machinery. Now, we know it. It’ll take time, but someday it won’t be necessary for the vital element of anyone to admit extinction, unless whoever it is wants to.”
    But Jim was only half-listening. Something else had occurred to him, something so poignant it contracted his throat painfully.
    â€œDoes he know?” Jim asked. “You said he’s insane. But does he know he finally got here? Does he know he made it home?”
    â€œYes,” said Mary. “We’re sure he does. Listen…”
    She turned a little away from Jim and spoke out loud, as if Raoul was