Proteus in the Underworld Read online

  Maybe it was—if you were ready to go.

  Bey lifted his head and deliberately flexed the muscles of his left arm and leg. The pain was quite intolerable and it brought him up to full alertness. He waited a few seconds, then did the same thing again. Isometric exercises with broken bones. A new form of calisthenics, guaranteed to keep the subject awake. Again. And again. Every thirty seconds.

  Bey squeezed his eyes shut, gritted his teeth, and counted out the interval. Thirty seconds. Again. And again.

  He was still doing it half an hour later, when a hiss sounded just a few feet away. He opened his eyes. A wheeled, multi-armed machine stood there facing him. The arms were reaching out, reaching down. They were strong enough to move two-ton rocks, but they were not used to dealing with delicate human tissue.

  "Hey! You can't just pick me up like that—I have broken bones. I need careful handling. I need—"

  What Bey needed was lost in a scream of pain. It made no difference at all to the machine, which could not hear him. It was a simple rock-clearer. What it had just picked up was not what it had been sent to pick up, namely, a fall of rocks. This object was in the way and it certainly had to be moved; however, its final disposition must be referred to a different and more sophisticated machine.

  Decisions like that went far beyond rock-clearer grade level.

  CHAPTER 17

  The full extent of Sondra's failure didn't hit her until she was fed, rested, and back inside Rini Base.

  She had traveled all the way from Earth to the Carcon and Fugate Colonies, seen everything there was to see, examined form-change hardware and software in enormous detail—and learned nothing. Nothing about the anomaly of the feral forms, that is. Someone had tried to kill her, but what had she learned from that?

  She needed to talk it over with somebody but Aybee was useless. He was retreating again into his own world of physics, unpersuaded that there had really been a murder attempt.

  "Be logical." He was frowning over an equation, a single line of squiggles that went right across the screen. "I told you, if somebody wanted to zap you they'd choose a better way. For one thing, it didn't work."

  "It would have, if you hadn't come along when you did."

  "Nah. You could have survived in that tank for weeks. The Fugates would have found you and hauled you out."

  "Whoever did it hadn't realized I could change the tank so it would keep me alive."

  "So what? If I want to off somebody, I don't fiddle with air pressure and temperature. I do it more direct. A nice big explosion, or a hundred thousand volts in a terminal keyboard or toilet seat, or nerve poison in the food."

  "Not if you want people to think it might have been an accident."

  "Hey, I think it was an accident. One of the Fugates screwed up and changed that chamber to open space conditions, but they didn't want to admit it."

  This, from someone who had actually been present. How would it sound to Denzel Morrone and the Office of Form Control, tucked away safe back on Earth? They'd all say she was just being paranoid.

  "I wish I could talk to Bey Wolf about this, Aybee. I bet he'd know what's going on. He was the one who told me my answer would be out here in the Kuiper Belt."

  "Yeah. But your answer to what?" Aybee swiveled impatiently around in his chair. "Did he tell you that? See, everybody looks at the world from his own point of view. I call it the ground state of the resting mind. It's like an excited electron, left to itself it drops back to its ground state. And your brain does the same thing, left alone it returns to and thinks about what it's really interested in. With me, the ground state is physics. With the Wolfman, it's form-change methods. Question is, what is it for you?" And, when Sondra showed no sign of answering, "Look, if you want to talk to Wolf be my guest."

  "I don't just mean sending him a message. I mean talk to him on Wolf Island, in real-time."

  "I know you do. But this here is Liberty Hall." Aybee gestured around him. "You're on Rini Base, where the fancy stuff is standard. I'll patch you direct to the inner system through the kernels."

  "You can really do that?"

  "Would I lie to you? It's how I talked to Bey before I took off for the Fugates. Takes a few minutes to set up the links, but then you only have just a short chat lag when either one of you speaks. I'll fix you up with your own line, too, so you can talk private."

  Aybee was already busy, setting up the pathway. Sondra started to thank him, but as he waved her away she realized the truth. He would set her up with her own line to the inner system so that he had privacy. He had suffered through the past few days as a favor to Bey Wolf; now he couldn't wait to get back to physics, the "ground state of his resting mind."

  The trouble was, the connection was not going to Aybee's liking. He was grunting and muttering, trying different combinations.

  "Not on Wolf Island." He glanced up at Sondra. "In fact, not anywhere on Earth, unless he switched his personal code right out of the system. What do you think?"

  "Mars?" I'll bet Trudy Melford has her claws in him again.

  Sondra had a sudden faint memory of something else. Something about Trudy, something that Aybee had mentioned just after they left the Fugate Colony. She had to ask him about that, and all the stuff about the history of elliptic functions that she had not been able to take in at the time.

  But not right now. "Try him on Mars."

  "Sure. He called me from there last time." Aybee tinkered again with the path settings. After a couple of minutes he shook his head. "No good."

  "He's not there?"

  "He is. His ID shows a definite location. See that code, Melford Castle. Melford Castle! I didn't realize the Wolfman was in so deep with the high and mighty." Aybee was too intent on the displays to notice Sondra's reaction to his phrasing. "But he's not answering. He's busy, or he's in bed."

  Or both. "It doesn't matter. I don't want to talk to him any more."

  She couldn't leave it at that. Aybee had turned to stare. Her anger—a totally irrational irritation that she could not explain to herself—was showing through. "I really shouldn't be talking to Bey anyway, I ought to be in touch with the people who sent me out here. Can you reach Earth's Office of Form Control?"

  "Anything that turns you on. You want me to leave a 'call waiting' for the Wolfman?"

  "No. I mean, yes. Tell him I'd like to talk to him. But tell him I wouldn't want it to interfere with his other activities—whatever they are."

  God, she was at it again. It was a great relief—probably to both of them—when Aybee finally nodded and said, "We got a call going in to the Office of Form Control. You can pick it up a couple of rooms down."

  Sondra fled along the corridor to the room that Aybee had described. In front of the terminal she paused, marvelling at her own stupidity. The link to the Office of Form Control was ready and waiting. In trying to turn aside Aybee's curiosity she had forced herself to communicate with her own office. And she had nothing to offer them but an admission of failure. After pushing for permission to fly all the way out to the Kuiper Belt, she had learned nothing new about the feral forms.

  Maybe she could get away with a check of her own answering service, and escape.

  She sat down and signaled the interaction to begin. She expected the standard response, which would ask where she wanted the call routed. Instead she found the smooth, well-groomed face of Denzel Morrone staring out at her.

  He seemed as surprised as Sondra. As well he should be. He was three levels up from her, head of the whole show. He would normally speak to her only when he decided he wanted to, or she made a special and formal request.

  "Excuse me." At the moment Sondra would have made a special request not to speak to him. "I didn't expect my call to go—"

  "All Rini-transmitted calls from the Kuiper Belt and beyond are screened by my office." Morrone's surprised expression was gone, replaced by the usual bland facade. "I trust that what you have to report is significant enough to justify the use of su
ch a high-priority channel."

  I can't blame Aybee. He was just trying to help.

  "I believe that an attempt was made to kill me while I was on the Fugate Colony."

  "Indeed?" One eyebrow lifted perhaps a millimeter. Sondra immediately regretted her words. She should have thought everything through before she spoke.

  "That is an extraordinary accusation," Morrone continued. "I hope you are able to justify it. It is a far cry from the investigation of a couple of humanity test failures, which is the reason that your journey to the Kuiper Belt was approved by this office, to a claim of attempted murder. Tell me, please, exactly what happened on the Fugate Colony, from the moment of your arrival there."

  She was in the trap, just as she had feared, and there was no way out. Sondra described everything in detail, from her reception by the two Amaris and on through her painstaking examination of the form-change equipment. She began to talk about her modification of the tank controller, with the tricky and delicate modifications she had been forced to make.

  "But what did you discover?" Denzel Morrone interrupted her as she was telling how the air pressure and temperature had continued to plummet. "I mean, what do you know now that you did not know when you left Earth? I am referring, of course, to the reason that the feral form passed the humanity test."

  Sondra swallowed hard. Here came the worst part.

  "Nothing. I could determine no way that the test might have failed. I still see no way."

  "Indeed." Denzel Morrone studied his well-buffed fingernails, refusing to meet Sondra's eye. "Maybe we can both agree that something certainly failed. Go on."

  It was obvious what he was implying. Sondra bit back her anger. She described the sealed chamber, the deadly temperature, the thinning air.

  "Certainly, certainly." Morrone flourished a large, fleshy hand to cut her off. "All the form-change tanks in that chamber were empty, you already told me that. There was no reason to keep the place warm and pressurized."

  "But I was inside—"

  "Of the two hundred thousand and more people who five and work on the Fugate Colony, a small handful knew that you were a visitor; and just two of those realized that you were inside that form-change room. No doubt some member of the maintenance staff, engaged in routine duties of cleaning and sterilizing an area—"

  "The room was an interior chamber, not near to the outside. It couldn't have happened that way." Except that as she spoke, Sondra realized that it surely could. The very fact that the Fugates had been able to provide the chamber with her preferred working environment implied that it had its own controls for temperature and pressure.

  "I would appreciate it if you will refrain from interrupting me when I am speaking." Morrone's tone was as polite and easy as ever. His face told a different story. "As I said, this sounds to me like an accident, and a simple and natural one. It is not attempted murder. It is merely a case where one personnel unit on the colony was unaware of the actions of another. When you attain the management level where a large number of people work for you—assuming that such an unlikely event ever occurs—you will realize that in spite of the best possible safeguards and written regulations, occasional misunderstandings are inevitable."

  The unforgiving mouth pursed. "I feel sure that is what happened on the colony. As for the rest of your report, I need to consider it in some detail. It would not be fair to you if I failed to mention, here and now, that I am greatly disappointed by your total failure to achieve progress on the project assigned to you. That, too, I must consider in detail." The carefully groomed head nodded. "In great detail."

  Sondra opened her mouth to reply, although just what she would say she did not know. And then it became totally irrelevant. Before she could offer a word in her defense the connection was terminated at the other end. Denzel Morrone nodded and vanished from the screen.

  The interaction had been a disaster. When two individuals as different as Aybee and Denzel Morrone listened to the evidence and arrived at the same conclusion, what chance was there that anyone would think as she did? It would need someone with superhuman intelligence and intuition to define a different answer that took into account all the facts. No matter what Sondra might have thought in her early student days, she did not claim superhuman intelligence. Anyway, too many people had recently told her otherwise.

  It was time to run back to the inner system with her tail between her legs, and hope for Denzel Morrone's good will. It was not something for which he was famous. Sondra sat down at the terminal and asked for a preliminary transit ship schedule to Earth.

  And then she changed her mind; she would ask for something quite different.

  * * *

  The message was short, but only because she had slaved on it for hours to reduce her original rambling request.

  In its final form she was pretty happy with it. If it failed, nothing was lost. And if it were successful. . .

  To: Robert Capman

  From: Sondra Dearborn

  In a recent conversation with Behrooz Wolf, you stated "on some future occasion I would like to meet her." I am the "her" in question, and I would very much like to talk with you. I could do so over a link, although my preference would be to meet with you in person, and as soon as possible.

  Aybee wandered in while the message was still on the screen. He whistled and shook his head. "Dream on, girl. Did Capman really say that he wanted to meet you?"

  "He did. But I don't know why. Did you ever meet him?"

  Aybee shook his head. "Not yet. But I've had messages from him, 'cause he reads a lot of my stuff. Field theory, mostly. You don't ask for a meeting with Capman, by the way. He grants you an audience—if he feels like it"

  "Bey Wolf has no trouble getting through to him. Capman even tried to recruit Bey, to change to a Logian form and go to work on Saturn."

  "That's different. Him and Bey have what you might call a special relationship. Bey was the only one who realized what Capman was, way back when everybody else in the system was convinced that the man was a multiple murderer of small children."

  "I know all about that." It was another legend of the Office of Form Control. "Nothing wicked was going on."

  "Sure, you know it now, we all do. Pretty easy with hindsight. But it took real insight to sniff out what Capman was doing back then, and Capman himself was the first to realize that. Like I say, the Wolfman's a special case. The chances of you or me or anyone else asking for a meeting with Capman and getting one right off the bat is like a snowball's chance—"

  Aybee paused. A message was creeping onto the display, its data points filling in from random noise like a pointillist painting.

  "—a snowball's chance on the Ganymede ice cap," Aybee finished. "What do you say to that, then? Guess you're on your way to downtown Saturn. Leave your rings in the hotel safe."

  * * *

  To meet in person. Except that of course you couldn't, not really, when one of you needed an oxygen atmosphere and the other lived in mostly methane. No matter what type of air was provided one of you would choke and die. The best you could manage was a talk with a glass wall between you.

  So why had she asked for a face-to-face meeting? Maybe it showed a suspicion that any long-distance link could be tapped. Bey Wolf's paranoia was infectious. There was no such thing as safe conversation unless it was a direct one between two isolated individuals—and perhaps not even then.

  Sondra sat waiting, more nervous than she had ever been. The ship she had ridden to Saturn had parked itself in equatorial orbit not far below the innermost ring. Less than two minutes after her arrival she had seen another little ship rising up to meet her from the brown and crimson thunderclouds of the Saturn upper atmosphere. The new ship lacked any sign of the usual tongue of flame or laser boost needed for flight out of a deep gravity well. It simply rose and rose, until it was clearly homing in on the vessel waiting in orbit.

  Sondra felt the slight vibration of a smooth docking. She waited, staring expectan
tly at the transparent wall. Not many people in their whole lifetime got to see a Logian form. Still fewer were privileged to meet with Robert Capman.

  The door of the room at the other side of the partition slid open. A bulky grey form appeared, moving easily on massive triple-jointed legs to stand close to the glass. It raised a hand in greeting.

  Sondra had to tell herself that, regardless of appearances, a human being was waving to her. Or rather, he had started his life, like all Logian forms, as a human. Sondra herself, or any man or woman given an injection of Logian DNA and access to a form-change tank, could become as Robert Capman. And if she really wanted to (though few Logian forms ever did) she could then change back to human form.

  Capman was studying her, his pearly, luminous eyes drinking in every aspect of face and body. If they ever met again he would recognize her instantly. It was the least of the Logian talents.

  "Sondra Dearborn." Capman's voice was soft, its sibilants slightly emphasized. "Sondra Wolf Dearborn. Tell me why you are here."

  "I have a problem. I am unable to solve it. I seek your help."

  "Ah." Capman sounded totally non-committal. "I thought you would know our strict rule: No Logian form will interfere in human affairs."

  "I've heard it often enough, but I don't believe it." Sondra had decided even before she left the Rini Base that she had nothing to lose. She might as well stick her neck out and go for broke. "In fact, I can prove to you that your statement is not true."

  "I would like to hear that argument."

  "Do you admit that you have offered the Logian form to Behrooz Wolf?"

  "That is true."

  "And he refused."

  "That is unfortunately the case. However, I have not abandoned hope."

  "And when it comes to form-change, Wolf is one of the best humans in the solar system. Would you agree with that?"

  "No." The head bobbed forward in the Logian laugh, but Capman went on before Sondra could express her surprise. "I would not quite agree. Behrooz Wolf is not 'one of the best humans' in the solar system. When it comes to form change he is the best. Others abide the question, he is free."