Sight Of Proteus Part 16

The data bank on the ship, primed by Betha Mestel, had informed him of Pearl's mission, bearing back to Earth the precious stabilization equations. It had told him nothing about his own mission. Bey sighed. He would know soon enough.

He took a last look at the ringed planet, growing steadily ahead of him, and at the Sun-still the wrong color-shrunk to a fiery pinpoint, far behind. With a little reluctance, knowing that a boring time was ahead in the tank, Bey set all the ship controls to automatic. He climbed slowly into the form-change tank in the central part of the ship, called out the necessary program, and began the change.

By luck or skill, his timing had been good. When he emerged from the tank, the vast bulk of Saturn was filling the sky ahead like a mottled and striated balloon. The trajectory maintenance system was already operating. The ship waspast the outer satellites, moving from Enceladus to Mimas, then beyond, heading for a bound orbit inside the innermost ring of the planet.

Bey looked back at the Sun. It was only a hundredth of its familiar area, but now it was the usual yellow orb, with all traces of blue-violet gone. The tackiness had gone from his lips. When he reached out to touch the control panel, his coordination already felt better. On the panel, the attention light was blinking steadily like an insistent emerald lightning bug.

Bey had no nerves at all-or so he claimed. The tremor in his hand as he reached out to press the connect b.u.t.ton had to be, he told himself, a lingering aftereffect of the form-change procedure. He hesitated, swallowed, and finally pressed.

The display gave him an immediate estimate of the direction and range of the signal being beamed to him. The other ship was less than ten thousand kilometers ahead of him, in a decaying orbit that would spiral it slowly and steadily down toward the upper atmosphere of Saturn. When the video signal appeared on the screen, Bey could examine the fittings of the other ship's interior. They were unfamiliar, neither form-change tank nor conventional living quarters. But the figure who crouched over the computer console was very familiar. There could be no mistaking that ma.s.sive torso and wrinkled gray hide. Bey watched in silence for a few seconds and finally realized that the other was unaware of his surveillance. The monitor must be on a different part of the console.

"Well, John," said Bey at last. "Last time I saw you, I certainly didn't expect we would ever meet here. We've come a long way from the Form Control office, haven't we?"

The Logian figure swung around to face the video camera and looked at Bey quietly through huge, luminous eyes.

"Come on, John," said Bey as the silence lengthened. "At least you might say h.e.l.lo to me."

The broad face was inscrutable, but finally the head and upper body nodded and the fringed mouth opened.

"A natural mistake on your part, but my fault. Not John La.r.s.en, Mr. Wolf.

Robert Capman. Welcome to our company."

While Bey was still struggling to grasp the implications of what he had heard, the other spoke again.

"I am pleased to see that you are none the worse for the form-change that you went through on the way here. May I ask, how long did it take you to realize what had been done to you?"

"How long?" Bey thought for a few moments. "Well, I knew I'd been changed as soon as I became conscious in the tank, and I knew it had to be something that affected the senses the moment I saw the Sun. It looked as though it had been Doppler-shifted toward the blue, by a big factor-and I knew that couldn't be real. The ship was heading away from the Sun, not toward it, and in any case it wasn't going that fast. I didn't catch on then, though, and I still didn't catch on when I noticed that the sound of the ship's engines seemed to be at the wrong frequency. Not too smart. But when I saw Jupiter as we swung by, lo was going into occultation. As I was watching it, I realized that it looked to be happening much faster than it ought to. Physical laws are pretty inflexible. So, it had to be me. It was a subjective change in speed. I had been slowed down."

The Logian form of Capman was nodding slowly. "So just when did you understand what had happened?"

"Oh, I suppose it was about ten minutes after I came out of the tank. I should have caught it sooner-after all, I already knew all about Project Timeset.

Ever since we found your underground lab, I've been expecting to meet forms that have been rate-changed the way that I was. I can't have been thinking too well when I first came through the form-change."

The Logian was nodding his head now in a different rhythm, one that Bey had learned was the alien smile. "You may be interested to know, Mr. Wolf, that I made a small wager with Betha Mestel before I left Pearl. She a.s.serted thatyou would take a long time to realize what had been done to you. She thought you would understand it only when you read it out of the data banks that had been loaded on the ship. I disagreed. I said that you would achieve that realization for yourself, and I bet her that it would happen within two hours of your leaving the form-change tank."

Capman rubbed at the swollen boss below his chest with a tri-digit paw. "The only thing we did not resolve, now that I look back on it, is any mechanism by which I might collect the results of the wager. It is three months now since Betha Mestel pa.s.sed on to Dolmetsch the stabilization equations. She is well on her way out of the system and should not be back for several centuries. She could afford to make her bet with impunity."

The appearance and structural changes were irrelevant. It was still the same Robert Capman. Bey was convinced of it and realized again the insight of Capman's remark soon after their first meeting: the two of them would recognize each other through any external changes.

Before Bey could speak again, a vivid flash of color lit up the screen in front of the console on the other ship.

"One moment," said Capman. He faced the transmission screen and held his body quite still. For a brief second, the panel on his chest became a bewildering pointillism of colored light. It ended as suddenly as it had begun, returning to a uniform gray. Capman turned back to face Bey.

"Sorry to cut off like that. I had to give John La.r.s.en an update on what has been happening here. He wanted to know if you had arrived yet. He's very busy there, getting ready for atmospheric entry, but he wants to set up a standard voice and video link and talk to you."

"What sort of link do you have with him? I saw John change the color of his chest panel, but always one color at a time. You did it with a whole lot of different color elements."

Capman nodded, head and trunk together. "That was for rapid transfer of information. I didn't want to take much time to explain to John what we are doing. Burst mode, we've been calling it. We found out about it soon after John changed, but I wanted to use it as a special method of communicating with him, so we kept quiet about it. It handles information thousands of times faster than conventional methods."

"Are you being literal or exaggerating the rate?" asked Bey, unable to imagine an information transfer rate of hundreds of thousands of words a minute.

"I'm not exaggerating. If anything, I'm understating. I suspect that this is the usual way that Logians communicated-they only used speech when they were in a situation where they could not see each other's chest panels. It's a question of simple efficiency of data transfer. The Logian chest panel can produce an individual, well-defined spot of color about three millimeters on a side, like this."

On Capman's chest panel, an orange point of light suddenly appeared, then next to it a green one.

"I can make that any color, from ultraviolet through infrared. The Logian eye can easily resolve that single spot from a distance of a couple of meters.

That was probably the natural distance apart for typical Logian conversation.

Each spot can modulate its color independently, so."

The pair of points changed color, then for a moment the whole panel swirled with a shifting, iridescent pattern of colors. It returned quickly to the uniform gray tone.

"I ran the color changes near to top speed there. It's very tiring to do that for more than a few seconds, though John has held it for several minutes when he had a real ma.s.s of information to get to me quickly. Now, you can do the arithmetic. The panel on my chest is about forty-five centimeters by thirty-five. That lets me use roughly sixteen thousand spots there as independent message transmitters. If he were here, John could read all those in directly. His eyes and central nervous system can handle that data load. If we were in a real hurry, he'd come closer, and I could decrease the spot size to about a millimeter on a side-just about the limit. The number of channelsgoes up to over a hundred thousand, and each one can handle about the same load as a voice circuit. That would be hard work for both of us, but we've tried it to see what the limits are."

Bey was shaking his head sadly. "I knew there had to be something strange about the com system that you put in the tank back on Earth-there was no reason for it to have such a big capacity. But I never thought of anything like this."

"You would have if we had used it much. It was one of the things that worried me when John was using that mode to send me information when I was on Pearl: Would somebody notice the comlink load and start to investigate it? I don't think anyone did, but as you well know there is really no such thing as a completely secret operation. You always need to send and store data, and sometime that will give you away. John tried to be careful, but it was still a danger."

Bey sat down on the bench next to the communicator screen. "I don't know who could have discovered you. I tried to guess what was happening, and I think I know a part of it-but it's only a part. I a.s.sume that John knows the whole story."

"He deduced it for himself within a couple of days after a.s.suming the Logian form. His powers of logic had increased so much that I couldn't believe it at first. Now, I have observed it in myself also."

There was another flicker of light from the screen in front of Capman.

"John will be in voice communication in a couple of minutes," he said. "He's very busy making the last minute checks on the ship."

"I heard you say he would be making atmospheric entry. Surely he can't survive on Saturn. The form he is in was designed for Loge, and I a.s.sume that he's still in that."

"He is-but don't worry. The ship he's in has some special features, as does this one. You can see his ship from here if you look ahead of you. He's already in the upper atmosphere, and the fusion drive is on."

Bey looked at the forward screen. A streak of phosph.o.r.escence was moving steadily across the upper atmosphere of the planet. As he watched, it brightened appreciably. The ship was moving deeper into the tenuous gases high above Saturn's surface. In a few minutes more, ionization would begin to interfere with radio communications. Bey felt a sense of relief when the second channel light went on and a second image screen became active.

The two Logian forms were very similar, too similar for Bey to distinguish by a rapid inspection. However, there were other factors that made identification easy. The second figure was festooned with intravenous injectors and electronic condition monitors. It raised one arm in greeting.

"Sorry I couldn't stay up there to greet you, Bey," said John La.r.s.en. "We're working on a very tight entry window. I want to descend as near as possible to one place on the planet. We've calculated the optimum location for low winds and turbulence."

"John. You can't survive down there."

"I think I can. We have no intention of committing suicide. This ship has been modified past anything you've ever seen before. It will monitor the outside conditions and keep the form-change programs going that will let me adapt to them. The rate of descent can be controlled, so that I can go down very slowly if necessary." John La.r.s.en's Logian form sounded confident and cheerful.

"Well, Bey, you've had a while to think on the way out here. How much of it have you been able to deduce?"

Bey looked at the two forms, each on then- separate screens. "The basic facts about what's been going on for the past forty years. Those are fairly clear to me now. But I don't have any real idea of motives. I a.s.sume you know those too, John."

"I do. But if it's any consolation to you, I had to be told them. I don't think they are amenable to pure logic."

"I agree," cut in Capman. "You would have to know some of Earth's hidden history before you can understand why I would rather be thought of as amurderer than have the truth known about the experiments. I am curious to see how far your own logic has taken you. What do you know about my work?"

"I know you're not a murderer-but it took me lone enough to realize it. I understand all four of your projects now. Proteus was the basic s.p.a.ce going forms, and Timeset was the form that allows a change of rate for the life process. I knew about them four years ago. I a.s.sume that Lungfish is Betha Mestel, She's about to go out into a new living environment-interstellar s.p.a.ce. How long will she be away?"

Capman shrugged. "We are not sure. Perhaps two or three hundred years. She was always an independent spirit. She will return when she feels that it is useful for her to do so. Pearl was arranged to be completely self-contained.

Fusion-powered internal lighting takes care of the illumination for the algal tanks when sunlight is too weak for growth-and Betha has a supply of the Logian virus in case she becomes bored with the potential of her present form and wants to try a change."

"I hope I'm around to see her come back," said Bey. "I now think that's a real possibility. You know, John, I didn't follow my first instincts when you told me about that liver in Central Hospital. My first thought was that it must have come from a very old person, one so old that he had not been given the chromosome ID. That would have made him over a hundred, and I decided that no one would use a hundred-year-old liver for a transplant. Then we got an age estimate from Morris in the Transplant Department, and that showed a young liver. That seemed to be the end of the original thought. But it wasn't.

Correct?"

"It was not." Capman nodded. "As usual, your instincts were good."

"The only project we haven't accounted for was Project Ja.n.u.s," went on Bey. "I should have realized that you gave your projects names that told something about the work you were doing. And Ja.n.u.s was the two-faced G.o.d, the one who could look both ways. You had developed a form-change program that could 'look both ways' in time. It could advance or reverse the aging process. The liver we found was from a very old person who had undergone age reversal as a result of your work. Right?"

Capman's big eyes were hooded by their heavy lids. He was reliving another period of his life, rocking slowly backward and forward in his seat. He nodded. "It was from an old person. Worse than that, it was from an old friend. I could not prevent some of those experiments ending in failure."

Bey was looking on sympathetically. "You can't blame yourself for the failures. Not everything can succeed. I a.s.sume that all the people who were used in those experiments were your old friends? But they knew the risks, and they had nothing at all to lose."

Capman nodded again. "They had all reached a point where the feedback machines could not maintain a healthy condition. They had a choice. A conventional and rapid death or the chance to risk what remained of their lives in the experiments. As you know, the compulsions we used to achieve form-change were extreme, but even so they did not always work. Let me a.s.sure you, the knowledge that their deaths were inevitable did not lessen the loss. When someone died in the experiments, I had killed an old friend. There was no escape from that feeling."

"I can understand that. What I can't follow is your reluctance to share the burden. No one who understood your work would have blamed you for what you were doing. Your friends were volunteers. This is the piece I can't follow.

Why did you choose to keep everything a secret-even after your first discovery? Why was it necessary to have a hidden lab, away from the Earth?"

Capman was still nodding slowly and thoughtfully. He sighed. "As you say, Mr.

Wolf, that is the key question. In a real sense, I did not make that decision.

I am known to the system as a ma.s.s murderer, the monster of the century. It is not a role I sought; it was forced upon me. I could even argue that the real villains are Laszlo Dolmetsch and Betha Melford. But I don't believe it."

"Betha Melford? You mean Betha Mestel?"

"The same person. I tend to call her by the name she had before her bond withMestel."

"What did you think of her, Bey?" broke in La.r.s.en. "You must have met her on Pearl."

"I did. I think she's marvelous, and I can't help wondering what she looked like before the form-changes. Betha Melford. Is she related to the Melfords?"

"She is Ergan Melford's only surviving heir. Every form-change royalty that BEC collects contributes two percent to Betha." Capman paused again, briefly carried into the past. "The merger with the Mestel fortunes made her the single most influential person on Earth, but she always knew the importance of keeping that hidden."

"And now she has given all that up?" asked Bey.

"She did that a number of years ago. Betha is almost a hundred and thirty years old, and when we embarked on the age-reversal experiments she had no way of knowing if she would survive them. Her financial interests are managed by a small group of people on Earth and in the USF."

"Including you?"

Capman nodded. "Including me-and also including Dolmetsch. I told you there are pieces of history that you need before you can hope to know what has been going on. None of this has ever been written down.

"My own involvement began when I was still a student, soon after I came back from studies in Europe. I went to work at the Melford Foundation and met Betha. Bey Wolf, if you thought she was marvelous on Pearl, you should have seen her in her prime. She was tall, and elegantly dressed, and sophisticated enough to put a c.o.c.ky young man who thought he knew everything in his place with one nod of her coiffured gray head."

"She did that to you?" exclaimed Bey.

"Actually, I was thinking more of Laszlo Dolmetsch." The head nodded in that smiling gesture. "But I suppose it applied equally well to me. She made a special point of bringing the two of us together at one of her parties. She insisted that I take a drink-as a defense mechanism, she said, until I learned what to do with my hands-and introduced me to half the wealth on the planet.

Then, when I was softened up, she took me outside onto the terrace. Laszlo Dolmetsch was sitting there, alone.

" 'Laszlo,' Betha said to him. 'This is Robert Capman. You two will hate each other at first, but you have to get to know each other.'

"Dolmetsch looked no different then than he does now-same big, jutting nose, same sunken eyes. I don't know how I looked at him, but he lifted his head in the air and scowled superciliously at me along his nose.

"Betha Melford shook her head. 'You two deserve each other,' she said.

'Neither of you has the faintest idea of the social graces. Oh well, you'll learn. I'm going back inside now. Come and look for me when you can't stand each other's company any longer. And not before.'

"It took a while before we could talk to each other. We couldn't get started, but I think we were both scared to go back in and face Betha. She had that effect on you. So Dolmetsch asked me if I knew anything about econometric models. I didn't. And I asked him what he knew about form-change theory. Not a thing, he said. It wasn't until we somehow stumbled on to talking about catastrophe theory that we hit common ground. I had been using it for form-change bifurcations; he had built it into his theory of the effects of technology on social systems. After that we couldn't stop. We went on to representation theory, and stability, and the final limits of technology. It was long after dawn when Betha came back to us. She listened for maybe two minutes-we didn't really take much notice of her-then she said, 'All right, you two, I'm going to bed. Everyone else left hours ago. There's a hot breakfast in the west wing dining room, when you can tear yourselves away.

Tomorrow, remind me to tell you about the Lunar Club.'

"That was the beginning." The broad, alien face somehow carried the message that Robert Capman was still staring far back across the years. "We realized after that first night that we had to work together. What we were doing was going to change history, one way or another. Betha made sure that we never hadany problem with money. And as soon as I had the form-change ideas into a suitable form, we began to feed them into Dolmetsch's programs that modeled the Earth and USF economies. The results were depressing. Most of the changes that I wanted to explore were destabilizing, and some of them were completely catastrophic. The worst one of all was the age-reversal change. A few people might get to live a lot longer, but as soon as the news got out, the economy would blow up."

"But you did the experiments anyway," said Bey.

Capman nodded. "We both believed that there were two conflicting needs. Earth had to be stabilized, if we could do it. But we also had to have a new frontier, off Earth-more than the USF could offer. You know what we did. With Betha's help, we went underground. She financed the operations, and we had help from the rest of the Lunar Club. They were a small group of influential people who shared a common worry about the future. They were modeled on the Lunar Club that flourished in England in the second half of the eighteenth century. Most of them are dead now. Many of them died in the experiments. They were all willing volunteers for the work, as soon as they knew that a natural death was close."

He fell silent for a while. La.r.s.en spoke softly to Bey, switching in a voice circuit that would not include Capman's ship.

"He's lived with this for eighty years, Bey, one way or another, and yet it still gets to him, the death of the people who'd been age-reversed in the form-change tanks. I'll be in atmospheric entry in a few minutes, and out of contact. He needs to get all this off his chest."

"I don't understand how it could be eighty years, John," said Bey. "We only saw evidence that it went back thirty."

"That's when they moved the main base of operations to Pearl. Capman moved what was left into the facility under Central Hospital. Dolmetsch thought that was an acceptable danger, even if it was discovered. He calculated a limited social effect, one that he thought he could compensate for."

"John, how much of all this do you understand now? Will the general theory of stabilization really work?"

"Within limits. We still can't let people know that age reversal is possible.

I understand most of this-I helped Capman when he was working out the theory, in the past few months. Make no mistake, Bey. You know how I've changed mentally since I became a Logian form-but Capman has changed just as much, and you know where he started from. I still can't follow his thinking. I can't describe the way this form feels. You should take the change yourself and know it firsthand."

La.r.s.en stopped speaking and looked across at the display screen in his control cabin. "I'm close to entry. We'll lose radio contact very soon. I should be able to reestablish it in a few hours." He switched back to a circuit that connected him also with Capman's ship. "Sixty seconds to signal blackout."

"John," said Bey rapidly. "I still don't know why you're going down there.

There must be a big risk."

"Some. Less than you think, as we have calculated it. Why are we going down there? Come on, Bey, use your imagination. We think there's life down there, and we think humans in Logian form can live there. It's our second beachhead, an area ninety times as big as Earth. If the collapse comes-and we hope it won't-we need some other options, off-Earth."

The quality of the voice transmission was rapidly deteriorating as La.r.s.en's ship dug deeper into Saturn's atmosphere. La.r.s.en obviously knew it too. He raised one heavy arm and spoke his last words rapidly. "See you soon, Bey.