The Forever Man by Gordon R. Dickson Page A

just hope it makes you more interested in food,” said the physician. “Well, that’s it, then. See you Thursday.”
    â€œRight,” said Jim, getting up.
    He left.
    At first it did seem that the pills gave him a little more appetite. At any rate, he made a point of getting more food inside him whether his body craved it or not, and his weight came back up a few pounds. But then he leveled off and stayed where he was on the scale in the doctor’s office each time he came in. He suggested once to the doc—since the pills had given him no feeling from taking them at all—that he was willing to up the dosage, if that would do any good.
    â€œI think not,” said the physician. “You’re taking about what you should of that, right now.”
    So, he kept forcing the food. It was a problem, because he did not sleep better. Sometime about this period, also, his hours of slumber began to be occupied not so much by dreams of his stealing AndFriend and escaping into space, as with nightmares in which the lab suddenly burnt down and people would not let him go in and help keep the fire away from AndFriend —which bothered him even though he knew an ordinary fire would not harm the ship. Or he would dream that there had been a sudden earthquake that opened a fissure right under Mary’s lab. All that was needed was someone to go in and hook a cable around AndFriend to keep her from being dropped into the lava-hot interior of the earth, but they held him back from doing so because it was “too dangerous.”
    Meanwhile, Mary’s staff—he still had not seen her in person since that first visit to the lab—began to call him in more and more frequently. They were on a new kick now, as he entered the ninth month of his captivity on the Base. This one had him still wearing his space suit while listening, over and over again, to the voice recordings of himself, Mary and Raoul Penard when they had taken his Wing out to meet La Chasse Gallerie in Laagi territory, and convoy her home here to the Base. When he had listened to it all the way through, they would ask him questions about who had said what to who. It was like being on the witness stand in an endless court trial.
    When they got him to the point where he knew the recordings by heart, they switched to having him work with recordings in which one of the voices was edited out, and he spoke the words of that speaker; and it finally ended with him playing, over and over again, the part of Raoul.
    They kept it up until, among his other dreams, he began to dream that he actually was Raoul; or rather what was left of Raoul as a mind, locked in the sliced and broken metal that was La Chasse Gallerie . Curiously, these dreams were not unpleasant. But finally his appetite gave up for good. He would get to sleep, sleep for about two or three hours, dreaming nightmares, and then wake. Only getting out under the night sky in his running gear and covering four or five miles would rub out the memories of those dreams and let him get to solid sleep for a few hours. He even tried the desperate measure of getting drunk to make himself sleep, but that did not work either.
    â€œAlcohol may help put you out,” his doctor told him, “but after a few hours, it turns around and makes you wakeful again.”
    â€œI’ve got to do something. Can’t you just give me a sleeping pill, Doc?”
    â€œThat’s only a temporary solution and this is a continuing problem,” said the doctor. “Maybe that medication I gave you for your appetite is working against you now, instead of for you. Let’s try taking you off it.”
    So Jim went off the pills. The first night he slept marvelously, the next night not so well. By the end of a week he was back with the dreams and the starlit runs again. He could feel himself beginning to lose his grip; and he found himself taking it out on the physician in a way he would never