Proteus in the Underworld Page 19
"How long ago was that?"
"Since early yesterday. But she has access to ample food, and to a sanitation and rest area suitable for her needs. Small-form visitors to the colony regularly use the same facilities. If we had heard nothing from her in another day or so, Maria and I would probably have checked back here."
They had floated through a succession of huge rooms, each scaled to match the size of the Fugates, and were approaching yet another one. The doors between the other rooms had all been wide open. Aybee noted that this one was sealed.
"Again, this was at Sondra Dearborn's request." Mario Amari sounded patient and even a little amused as he replied to Aybee's question. If Aybee was unfortunate enough to be a terminal worrier, his voice said, then maybe he was more to be pitied than blamed. "She wanted to work without a suit, in that setting of lower temperature and pressure where she would feel most comfortable. Naturally, that required that this room be sealed off temporarily from the rest of the colony."
Aybee found himself nodding agreement, even as they approached the room's great sliding door and he glanced at the monitors showing the chamber's interior conditions. That first look brought him instantly to full attention. What he saw bristled the sparse hair on the back of his head.
Air pressure: 40 millibars. Temperature: -68 Celsius.
No human without a suit could survive more than a couple of minutes inside such a room.
"This has been changed!" Mario Amari was staring at the gauges as though he could not believe what they said. "This is nothing like the control values that we employed—and the door has been sealed from outside. We left it set for internal control. Sondra Dearborn must have come out, and re-set the interior parameters. She cannot be inside."
But his actions suggested that he did not believe his own words. He had released Aybee. Now he grasped the door in one huge hand and began jerking at it wildly.
"No, man! Don't even try that." Aybee decided he was not the only half-wit in the Fugate colony. "You got a two-atmosphere difference between the sides of that door. You have to equalize before you open it, or we get a big implosion."
Fortunately the room's own safeguards agreed with him. It took another half-minute to flood the interior with air—compression effects would be the least of Sondra's problems if she were inside—and equalize pressure enough for the door to slide open.
Aybee floated inside, ahead of Mario Amari. His suit protected him from temperature shock, but he heard Amari gasp. The air pumped into the room was warm enough, but the walls and floor were still cold enough to burn anything that touched them.
But maybe it was only a gasp of relief—because the room was empty. There was no sign of Sondra, dead or alive.
"She's not here. Thank Heaven, she got out." Amari, like Aybee, was scanning the interior, with its array of form-change tanks. "She must have."
"Must have. But didn't." Aybee's instincts had taken over as soon as he saw the tanks. "She's still here, and she's all right. Come on, man. I may need a little bit of local assistance for this."
* * *
Every trainee in the Office of Form Control was required to take practical tests. One of them called for form-change program modification with re-calibration of a form-change tank. But no trainee, ever, had been asked to do that in six hours or less, nervous, wearing a suit, and filled with the awful knowledge that you would soon be evaluating the quality of your work using your own body as test subject.
Sondra had to make some working assumptions. The chamber's ambient temperature might drop close to absolute zero, and the air pressure to vacuum. A human, suitably changed, might survive in that situation for a couple of days. It called for total hibernation and a severe alteration to body chemistry. Re-vivication probability was down around ten percent.
But that was the worst case. The tank itself would provide some thermal protection, maybe hold a little air. The chance of survival increased rapidly with every trace of oxygen and every degree of higher temperature.
Sondra did all the calculations that she had time for. She knew they were not enough, but she would have to act based on what she had. She recalled Bey's words: Intuition is what remains after all the facts have been forgotten. Fine. But pray that intuition was also something that guided you when there was no more time for calculation.
She reviewed the program changes one more time; entered them into the tank's controller; climbed slowly into the tank; adjusted the sensors, electrodes, and catheters as best she could, to interact with an adult form a fraction of the size of a Fugate newborn; and then faced the final, most difficult judgment call.
She could not make the form-change tank attachments to her own body while she remained inside her suit. When that suit was removed, she would have no more than a few minutes before anoxia robbed her of consciousness. And the longer she waited, and the lower the chamber air pressure became, the quicker anoxia would set in.
Sondra lowered her internal suit pressure and switched to pure oxygen. She hyperventilated for a couple of minutes, until she felt her head swimming.
Now. Before she had a chance to change her mind or think more about the implications of what she was doing. Suit off.
Forty seconds.
Into the tank harness.
One minute twenty seconds.
Connections—fourteen of them. Can't afford to rush. Can't afford to make a mistake. Two minutes twenty seconds.
Sondra's lungs were empty. She felt them collapsing within her rib cage. Five more connections, just five. Not much to ask. Her head was swimming again.
Three minutes and thirty seconds.
Two more attachments. Tank turning dark, have to work by feel.
Four minutes something.
Last one. Was that right? Can't tell. No more feeling in fingertips. Spears of ice, down throat and into chest. Five . . .
Total darkness. Personal darkness. Strange way to go. But when it came to the final moment, maybe every way seemed like a strange way to go. And go where?
No one had ever managed to answer that question. Maybe she would do it, be the first.
Sondra turned to solid ice, wondering if her personal darkness would ever end.
* * *
When you plunged into a form-change that was both unplanned and desperately hurried, you gave little thought as to what you were likely to find waiting for you when you emerged. You were far more likely to be wondering if you would emerge.
But if you did think about it, there were certain things you would not expect to see as you struggled back to consciousness. One of them was the smug face of Aybee, whom Sondra had left a few days earlier back on Rini Base at the other side of the Kuiper Belt. But there he was. He was lolling before the open form-change tank and chomping on some sort of sugary cake.
He nodded to her in a self-satisfied way as soon as he noticed that her eyes were open. "Right on schedule. How you feeling?"
Only a moron would ask a question like that. Sondra doubled over in agony as a first breath burned into her lungs. She could not speak, but her glare was intended to crisp Aybee's skin.
"The old Wolfman was right, you know." Aybee went on as though he had not noticed her reaction. "I was sure he was talking through his hat when he asked me to fly out here, but he wasn't. 'Course, you might say he was only half-right. No real reason to worry. Even if I hadn't come along, the Fugates would have took a look for you eventually. They'd have dragged you out. But you wouldn't feel as good as you do now."
Good? She had to speak, even if it killed her.
"I could have died here," she rasped. "If I hadn't known how to—" She ran out of air.
"If you hadn't." Aybee finished the cake and licked his fingers. "But you did. Way I see it, it's pretty straightforward. If you're smart, you figure out you gotta do the form-change bit and crawl into the tank if you want to survive. If you're not smart enough to do that, then you die and no big loss. Plenty of dummies in the system already, one more won't be missed."
"Who did it, Aybee? Who sealed this room and changed the air and temperature settings so it would kill me?"
"Dunno. The Fugates are working on that—they don't like what happened any better than you do. No clues so far."
"And why would anybody try to kill me?"
"That's easier. You came here to find out why the Fugate form-change equipment said something was human that wasn't. I'd guess somebody didn't want you passing that information on." Aybee showed real interest for the first time since Sondra had awakened. "Except that don't make logical sense, either. Someone wants to kill you, why do a half-assed job of it? Shoot you, or chop your head off, something final—don't fool around with air and temperature. By the way, what did you find out?"
"Nothing." The feeling of failure that swept through Sondra was worse than her physical woes. "That's why none of this makes sense. I have no information to pass on to anybody, because I didn't find one thing wrong with the form-change system here in the Fugate Colony. The hardware is just as it came from the BEC factory, with its seals unbroken. The controller software passed every test I could give it."
"That so? Now you got me a little bit interested. You telling me there was no secret to hide?"
"Nothing that I could discover. When this chamber locked up on me I should have been ready to give up. Except that I wouldn't have. If I hung around, it was only because I couldn't stand the idea of crawling back to Bey Wolf and admitting that whatever was going wrong here, I couldn't find it."
"You telling me you're ready to get out of here?"
"No! I want to know who tried to kill me."
"I'm sure you do. But I'll tell you right now, the chances of finding out here are just about zero. You don't know this place. You don't know the Fugates, you don't know the colony's geography, you don't who's been coming and going."
"What are you saying? That we shouldn't even try?"
"No. I'm saying that if someone on the colony had a go at you, the Fugates themselves will try to find out who it was. You already admit they don't seem to have any form-change secrets. So how do you think they feel, when a visitor comes here to their turf and nearly gets knocked off? I'll tell you. They're as pissed as you would be if someone was murdered in your own house. They'll try and find out who done it. It don't matter if you're here or not."
"That's what I said. You're telling me we're useless—that there's nothing we can do." Sondra was beginning to feel better. She was also beginning to feel very peculiar inside, in a way that she found hard to analyze.
"Didn't say that." Aybee scowled horribly at her. "You gotta listen better. I said there's nothing useful to be done here. See, chances are whoever tried to do you in isn't a Fugate at all. It's somebody from outside. And if that's true, you an' me got lots to do. We zip outa here, lock into one of the big government data bases for the Kuiper Belt, and see who's been coming and going."
"The Fugates could do that, too, working from here."
"They could. But for this the balance tilts the other way. They know this colony inside-out, but they don't know the Belt. I do. An' I'm smarter than a hundred Fugates. So let's go do it. All right?"
"I agree. But one other thing first." Sondra had finally identified the odd feeling inside her. It was starvation. The form-change tank had kept her alive and hydrated, but in doing so it had not provided any form of nutrients. After more than two days without food, her body was short about ten thousand calories. She stood up and stepped forward out of the tank. "No arguments on this one, Aybee. Before we go anywhere, or meet with anyone, or talk with anyone, or do anything—I get to eat."
* * *
Way to go!
Sondra watched drowsily as Aybee skipped through the transportation data bases of the Kuiper Belt. He did it effortlessly (and illegally, though that obviously did not worry him), without seeming to think, the way that sea-gulls flew or Bey Wolf evaluated the results of a form-change program. It was a thing of beauty, a joy to watch. At least it was a joy at the moment, for a person who had escaped death just a few hours ago, and who had even more recently stuffed herself with high-calorie food until her stomach rebelled and vetoed another bite.
Maybe when her brain was fully engaged it would be time for feelings of her own inferiority. But for the moment, and for the next half-hour or so until she fell asleep . . .
She jerked upright. She was doing it already. "Are you finding anything?"
Aybee nodded at her question. He didn't seem to mind that he was doing all the work. Actually, Sondra had the feeling he would be annoyed if she tried to help—and at the rate he worked, the most that she would do was slow him down. The Rini ship, through some method that Aybee did not attempt to explain, permitted real-time access to the entire Belt transportation manifest, both cargo and people. Aybee was wandering now through a listing of ships and destinations, grunting to himself in disgust.
"Too much." He tapped a key, and a long list began to race through the display area. "You want to know how many people from BEC traveled to the colonies in the past month? Take a peek. There they are, all seven thousand of 'em. At least a hundred of those could have done a quick slap over to the Fugate Colony on 'official' business."
"I don't think the Fugate trouble had anything to do with BEC."
"Makes things worse. If it's not just BEC you can multiply my number by a thousand. Let me try something else, see who came out here hi-speed from the inner system." Aybee began to enter another query string. "And while I'm doing that, maybe you can tell me something. The Wolfman says you listened in on his chit-chat with Robert Capman, when Capman said to look at the history of elliptic functions. What did you make of it?"
That took thought—far more thought than Sondra was capable of at the moment. She shook her head. "I didn't make anything of it. Not a thing. Did you say Bey talked to you about it?"
"Well, more like he asked me about it."
"What did you tell him?"
That question was a mistake. Sondra realized it within twenty seconds, as Aybee started to talk about people and times and concepts that she had never heard of. ". . . Abel, Jacobi, and Gauss . . . invert the problem . . . doubly periodic and analytic . . . theta function . . ." She lolled back in her seat, listened to the babble of words, watched Aybee's agile fingers rippling across the control panel, and knew that she was going under. It was peaceful and pleasant and satisfying, nothing like the black descent into unconsciousness of the previous day, but it was just as certain.
Aybee's sudden exclamation forced her closing eyes to blink open again.
"Hey! Look at that." He froze the display. "There's one to think about, from just a couple of weeks ago. Ultra-high transit, Mars orbit to the Belt. Destination, Samarkand."
"Mmm? S'markan." That meant, don't talk to me any more, I'm too far gone. But Aybee didn't interpret it right.
"Yeah, Samarkand. Old-fashioned Belt colony, one of the originals. But that's not the weird bit. Take a peek at the ship logo. GZM. Know what that stands for? GZM is Gertrude Zenobia Melford—it's the flagship of the whole Melford fleet. So what's old Trudy been doing, zipping out to Samarkand and back? Isn't that the last place in the Belt you'd expect to find her? Isn't it? Hey, you!"
He moved in front of Sondra and pushed his face close to hers. She did not move. Aybee glowered down at her.
"That's really great. Stuff yourself like a pig, then pass out on me. Wait 'til I talk to the Wolfman. For this one he owes me bigtime."
He pushed Sondra's seat away from the vertical, and her limp body rolled back with it like a rag doll. Aybee gave her a final glare, then turned back to the console.
He was not really annoyed that Sondra had passed out on him. Rather the opposite. All real work was done solo, everybody knew that, and given his choice he didn't even like to be watched.
Cross you
r fingers. With any luck she would sleep for a long time; that way, by the time she woke up he should have a decent mapping of those make-no-sense travel patterns through the Kuiper Belt.
CHAPTER 16
Every inch of space on the desk was occupied. A jumble of diagrams and flow charts and scribbled notes had been produced and discarded, until they covered the desk top and overflowed onto the floor. Around the walls of the room, every display held its own nested set of schematics.
Bey felt totally at home. The setting possessed the totally organized chaos of his own office. It was the shocking intrusive voice in his ear that felt alien: "Six hours remaining air supply at moderate activity level. Replenishment recommended."
He heard the warning of the suit's internal monitor with astonishment. It insisted that he had been on the surface of Mars for fifteen hours. To him, it was no time at all since he had followed that trail of flattened vegetation toward the overhanging rock.
Georgia Kruskal noticed his change of posture. She paused in her explanation of a flow-chart detail and looked up at him questioningly. Bey was learning to read the expressions in those thick-lashed, liquid eyes.
"My suit." He tapped on the helmet with a thin-gloved hand. "Telling me I ought to go. I've been here longer than I thought."
The broad camel's mouth stretched wide into a smile. "Time flies when you're having fun."
Bey nodded. It was more than a joke. There was nothing in the world—in any world—more satisfying than digging into the heart of a new form, grasping it as a whole, turning it around in your mind, and sensing its shape. Not its physical shape, which anyone could see; its logical shape, with its envelope of possibilities and future potential.
Bey himself had that gift. So did Georgia Kruskal. He knew it, and so did she. Within a quarter of an hour of first meeting they had moved to a shared concentration so deep that Bey had no other memories of their time together. Had he eaten, or drunk anything? Had she?