Proteus in the Underworld Page 22

  Capman sounded uncomfortably like Bey himself—she was sure that last bit was some sort of quotation—but Sondra could not allow herself to become distracted. "So he's the best. Now suppose that one day you talked him into changing his mind, and coming to Saturn to be a Logian form and live with you. And suppose that later on a problem arose that Bey could have solved, and no one else. But now he's a Logian, so he follows the Logian rule, and says he can't become involved. Isn't that interfering in human affairs, by taking Bey out of circulation?"

  "Indeed it is." Capman was nodding approvingly. "Please do not think for a moment that such an argument is new to us. Every Logian form removes a person from the human pool. In addition, our very existence—particularly the knowledge of our existence—has an inevitable effect on a great deal of human thought and behavior. What would you have us do? Cease to exist?"

  "No. I want you to do just the opposite." Sondra leaned forward, wishing she could reach out and grab Capman by the arm. "Become more involved in what we do. Give advice."

  "That avenue is not open. Not at the moment."

  "Then at the very least, listen to what I have to say. If after that you choose to offer no comment, that is your option."

  White membranes slid down and hooded the luminous eyes. Capman's head sank to his chest. After a few seconds he looked again at Sondra and nodded slowly. "Speak. Tell your story."

  The moment of truth. She had one shot, and she had to get it just right. She had rehearsed what she wanted to say over and over on the flight to the inner system. According to Aybee it was a miracle that she was getting even this chance with Robert Capman.

  The good news was that one shot with the Logian form was apparently all it ever took. Capman was super-bright even by Aybee's snooty standards, and he would catch on to everything instantly.

  Aybee had offered one other piece of advice: "Provide more data and raw facts than you think anyone could possibly need or want or be able to take in. You can't flood a Logian."

  Sondra started at the very beginning, when the news had first been given to her that she had a new assignment, and ground on through every event with what she felt to be stupefying detail. She showed all the data she had on the Carcon and Fugate forms. She spoke of her meetings with Bey, and of her unsuccessful attempt to enlist his direct assistance. She mentioned Bey's conversation with Capman, and was ready to skip over its content—after all, Capman had heard it for himself—until her audience interrupted: "Your recollection, please. Exactly as you remember it."

  Sondra did her best, most uncomfortable when she spoke of Bey's evaluation of her brains—or lack of them. Capman clearly did not care. He sat impassive and focused. She plowed on, and finally came to her trip to the Kuiper Belt, then her close call on the Fugate Colony and her "rescue," though he would not admit it as that, by Aybee.

  Capman neither moved nor spoke until the very end, when Sondra was summarizing Aybee's careful but inconclusive analysis of ship movements in and around the Kuiper Belt, with emphasis on trips to and from the colonies. She had been tempted to omit this information as irrelevant, but suddenly Capman was sitting up a little straighter. Did she imagine it, or was there also a gleam of speculation in those hard-to-read eyes?

  "The record indicating trips by Gertrude Zenobia Melford's flagship to Samarkand." Capman's thick-fingered paw lifted in the murky, methane-rich air on the other side of the glass panel. "In full detail, if you please."

  Sondra backed up, considerably puzzled, and presented the mass of data. With Aybee as a grumpy observer she had run through those records a dozen times. They had both agreed that the trips were odd and apparently meaningless. They seemed just as meaningless now, as she plowed through the thousands of entries for Capman's benefit.

  "Curious." Was it imagination, or was Capman truly interested for the first time? One hand was touching his fringed mouth. "Curious, and anomalous."

  He was silent for maybe ten seconds; according to what Sondra had heard about Logians, that was a long, long time. Difficult problems a Logian solved at once. Impossible ones took a little longer.

  Finally Capman nodded. "I now have a question. Most of the calls made to and by Behrooz Wolf since your first visit to him form part of the general data records for the inner system. Have you reviewed those calls?"

  "No. I didn't see how they could have anything to do with this."

  "They are data. 'It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.' "

  "That's exactly what Bey Wolf said to me!"

  "No doubt. We both cite a higher authority. But now, if you will, continue."

  "There's nothing to continue with. That was the end."

  "I thought as much. Very interesting. And in its way quite entertaining." Capman bowed, the thick body tilting forward a fraction. "Perhaps we will meet again. I cannot say that I approve of Behrooz Wolf's interest in you, but I do understand it."

  He was turning, moving toward the chamber door.

  "Wait. You can't leave." Sondra banged her fist on the glass, realizing too late that could be a dangerous act. "You haven't let me ask you anything."

  The broad head turned and bobbed. Capman was laughing—laughing at her.

  "Did I not inform you at the outset that our rules do not permit Logians to become involved in human affairs? However, Sondra Dearborn, I am going to bend that rule."

  "You are? Then do it!"

  "I do so when I make this statement: Based upon what you have told me and what I have told you, you have enough information to complete without assistance from anyone the task assigned to you by the Office of Form Control."

  He bowed again and turned. The door in the adjoining chamber slid open and the great Logian body drifted out through it. One minute later, Sondra felt the slight jolt as the two ships separated and the Logian vessel headed for Saturn re-entry.

  Sondra was alone again in space; not sure what she was supposed to have learned, but convinced, deep inside, that whatever she had learned would not be enough.

  CHAPTER 18

  The scene was much as Sondra had imagined it in conversation with Aybee: Bey on Mars, lying waiting in the ornate bed. Trudy Melford, scantily-clad and breathless, hovering over him.

  But there were certain major differences. Trudy's arms and legs were bare, because that was her standard Martian day outfit. She was panting hard because she had run up eight flights of stairs rather than wait a few seconds for an elevator. And although Bey was waiting, it was not for anything that Trudy might do.

  He was trussed and wrapped like a mummy, with swathes of bandages on his left arm, leg, head, and chest; a pair of annoying tubes ran into his nostrils, a line of electrodes nestled along the back of his neck, I/V's dripped into his good arm, and catheters had been inserted into body locations that he preferred not to think about.

  It was depressing to feel like this, and be told that he was doing well. He was waiting impatiently for the medical equipment, clucking and chuntering at his bedside, to take a closer look and refute that optimistic assessment.

  "I down-loaded from your message center." Trudy sat on the other side of the bed from the robodoc, her breasts still heaving disturbingly. "Nothing important. You should certainly stay at the castle until you are fully recovered. I can bring the best medical services in the solar system to you right here."

  Bey reached out his right hand and picked up the little message transfer unit that Trudy had dropped carelessly onto the bed. Her definition of important might not coincide with his.

  "Did you find out what happened?"

  "We're not sure." Trudy's blue-green eyes met Bey's for a moment, then darted away. "It looks like an accident—the whole bottom section of the escalator had been removed for routine service. There should have been a notice that warned of scheduled maintenance."

  "There was. I ought to have been more careful."

  "Not really. There's no way that the escalator should ever have been running. The machines always stop it during re
pairs. Someone had to start it again, deliberately. I said, it looked like an accident; but I don't believe it was."

  "Then what was it?"

  "Sabotage." Trudy's gaze came back to meet Bey's. "A deliberate attempt to kill you."

  "I'm not worth killing. In any case, no one knew that I was up there on the surface. Not even you, until the machines hauled me back to the castle."

  "That's not true. At least one person did." Trudy gestured to the message unit. "You'll hear it on that. There's a call from Rafael Fermiel, asking you to contact him, in his words, 'as soon as you return from your trip to the surface.' How did he know you were going there?"

  "I don't think he did. He assumed it, because he and his policy council think that I designed those surface forms myself. You know Fermiel?"

  "Everyone on Mars knows him. He is the leader of the Old Mars faction—the Old Mars fanatics. If they had their way there would be no form-change in the Underworld except for necessary medical repairs. They believe that the surest way to make sure that the Mars surface environment will become a close copy of Earth is to forbid radical form-change here. If Fermiel thinks you are the designer of the surface forms, then he has a motive to kill you. We also know that he expected you to visit the surface."

  No form-change in the Underworld. Bey's aching head spun with that thought. It had implications. And more fanatics. It occurred to Bey that Mars was full of them, Georgia Kruskal and Trudy Melford and now Rafael Fermiel. Might Bey be one himself, and not even know it?

  "Fermiel tried to recruit me. He doesn't have a reason to kill me, at least until I say no to his offer."

  As a deliberate attempt to force a strong reaction from Trudy, it was a failure. She smiled. "He tried to recruit you? How strange. What does he have to offer you that I don't?"

  "Safety, maybe. You haven't told me how someone could have entered Melford Castle and rigged the escalator."

  "I don't know that yet. But I will." The blue-green eyes hardened. "Believe me, I will. You'll be safe here."

  She knows who did it. Or at least she suspects. "If Rafael Fermiel is so against what you want to do, why not oppose him and the Underworld openly?"

  "I can't do that. Neither I—nor BEC—is in the business of planetary politics."

  Wrong answer. With Trudy's interest in the surface forms she ought to be a fervent New Mars supporter and a strong opponent of Old Mars. Why wasn't she? She said the Old Mars group were fanatics, but she did nothing to oppose their efforts. As for the suggestion that BEC did not play politics, when BEC had done it so cleverly and consistently for two centuries . . .

  Bey was getting ideas, swimming vaguely around the base of his brain; he had a lot of thinking to do and he could not do it. The pain-inhibitor electrodes running along his neck from the fourth to the sixth cervical vertebrae did not interfere with the thinking process; BEC's best engineers had certified that fact. But how did they know? Who had ever been able to measure the quality of thought, to say how the processes that went on in the brain of a Darwin or a Newton was different from the normal?

  Bey struggled to sit up. "You tell me you are not in the business of politics. Well, neither am I. And I don't want to find myself in the middle, when I choose not to be. I've made up my mind. I want to head back to Earth."

  "You can't! You're too sick."

  "Let me be the judge of that. What I need is a form-change machine and repair programs tuned to my own body. The best place for those is Wolf Island. That's where I'm going."

  Bey had been testing again, and this time it worked. For just a second he saw the other side of the Empress. Trudy's face filled with an iron determination, the fixed stare of a woman who was operating under total compulsion. Then it was just as quickly gone. She was smiling at him, sweetiy and sympathetically.

  "I know how you must feel. You've had a terrible experience here at the castle, and you don't trust my word that it won't happen again. So go home to where you are comfortable. Go to Wolf Island, use your own form-change machine, and recuperate."

  She didn't quite tell Bey there was no place like home, but he would not have been surprised if she had. In spite of that brief moment of a different look, she radiated warmth and concern.

  And then he felt vulnerable, more like a sacrificial lamb than the wolf of his name. Trudy could buy or sell him a thousand times over, he had known that before ever he met her. Now he realized that she could also sweet talk and cajole and beguile him—and he liked it. He could resist money, but could he resist the rest? Flattery never failed. If a woman would re-make her whole body into a form attractive to you, that ploy worked even if you saw through it. Even if you were convinced that she was doing it for her own motives, part of you still responded. Trudy was more dangerous than he had realized, smart enough to know when she should hold on and when she should let go.

  "But promise me one thing." She leaned closer and ran gentle fingers around Bey's jawline. Her soft, concerned voice was like another physical caress— probably all the excitement that he could stand in his present condition. "As soon as you feel well enough to receive a visitor, let me know. I've been planning a surprise for you for a while, but this certainly isn't the time for it. I want you at your best. Just tell me when."

  * * *

  Bey had been gone from Wolf Island for only five days, but when he returned it felt like an alien place.

  Part of that was surely the change in him. He had left in good physical condition, except for the slight natural myopia that a routine form-change session would have fixed. He returned a wreck, wearing a mechanical exoskeleton provided by the Martian robodoc. It allowed him to walk and carry things while keeping his own broken arm and leg completely still, but at the price of turning him into a clanking metal-and-plastic automaton that had Janus and Siegfried growling and snarling until the hounds were close enough to the jetty to catch his scent. And even with the pain-inhibitors still on his neck he ached all over and had trouble thinking. He couldn't wait to get to the basement lab and into a form-change machine.

  There were other changes, though, that were not in him and which he could not ignore. Jumping Jack Flash had the run of the island when Bey was away from it, but usually he stayed inside the house. It was clear when Bey got there that the chimp had been feeding himself and the two dogs regularly, but there was no other sign of him.

  Bey hobbled out into the fierce afternoon sunlight. He called "Flash! Flash!" as loudly as he could, but it was another five minutes before the pygmy chimp came wandering along, walking almost upright on the paved path from the island's rocky center. Instead of the usual greeting, jumping up to Bey and perching on his shoulder, Jumping Jack Flash stood and surveyed him with brown, sad eyes.

  "Is it this?" Bey gestured with his right arm at the exoskeleton. "I don't like it any better than you do. Come on. Let's see how quickly I can get myself back to normal."

  The three animals trailed quietly along behind as he went back into the house and descended to the basement level. He went into the lab and inspected the control panel for his preferred form-change tank. He knew what he wanted—the fastest repair program that he could stand. He also knew the risk of that. Once before he had used a form change that went far outside the envelope of accepted programs. It had almost killed him, and would have done so if someone else had not found his unconscious body. This time there was no one around to perform that favor.

  He turned, and found the three animals still there, watching closely. He shook his head.

  "Not you in the tank this time, my friends. Me."

  They understood his body language if not his words. The two dogs flopped to their bellies on the smooth tiled floor, while Jumping Jack Flash approached and lifted his hand to run a rough knuckle under the exoskeleton and along Bey's jawline.

  Bey reached up and gripped the chimps hand. "First Trudy, and now you. But at least I know that you don't have a hidden agenda." Bey studied the glowing brown eyes and serious face. "Or I think you don't. It'
s a shame you can't speak, Flash. And you're so close. Maybe if we humans hadn't come along and taken over, in a few million years . . ."

  Bey went back to his programming of the form-change machine. So close, so very close. It was far more than the ninety-nine percent of common DNA. Four hundred years ago, long before DNA had been dreamed of, almost a hundred years before Darwin, the great Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus had made up his mind. He didn't dare to say that humans and chimps belonged in the same genus, because that would have created a religious firestorm. Humans were supposed to be special, God-created, unique. But Linnaeus had confided his own true feelings in a letter to a friend:

  "I demand of you and of the whole world that you show me a generic character to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none, and I wish somebody would indicate one to me. But if I had called man an ape or vice versa I would have fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics."

  You couldn't work with chimps for more than a week or two without sharing Linnaeus's opinion. The line was hard to draw. But somehow, the form-change equipment could do it. No chimp had ever managed a form-change.

  Bey began to set up the final parameters for his own program. Maybe it was the purposive element that the chimp could not manage. The thoughts of a chimp—there was no doubt that Jumping Jack Flash had thoughts—were probably foggy and imprecise, a more extreme version of Bey's own muddled thinking when the electronic pain-inhibitors were doing their job. Successful form-change implied a basic capability for precision of thought.

  That insight pulled Bey himself to a higher state of alertness. If his brain was operating at half-power, he had to be extra careful in setting up form-change sequences. He went over everything again, slowly and carefully. Only when he had made every check that he could think of did he turn again to the animals.

  "Six days, and I'll be out of the tank again. All right? You have plenty of food and plenty of water. Flash, save a few of the papayas for me. I noticed there were lots of almost-ripe ones when I was coming up from the beach, and I know what a glutton you are."