Sight Of Proteus Part 2

"So far, I do. I'm still learning to handle the male form properly, but if it doesn't pay off in my writing, I'll be very pleased to change back."

He paused and looked at the panel in front of him, where a cl.u.s.ter of yellow and violet lights had suddenly started a mad blinking.

"I'd like to talk to you about your job sometime, but right now I have to get back to the board. There's a stuck conveyor on the eighth level, and no mechanics there. I'll have to try and borrow a couple of machines from Parthenogenetics two floors down." He began to key in to his controller. "Just go where the location director tells you," he said vaguely, already preoccupied completely with his problem.

"We're on our way. Good luck with the writing," said Wolf.

They went over to the elevators. As they continued up to the fifth floor, La.r.s.en could see a trace of a smile on Wolf's thin face.

"All right, Bey, what is it? You only get that expression when there's a secret joke."

"Oh, it's nothing much," said Wolf, though he continued to look very pleased with himself. "At least, for the sake of our friend back there I hope that it's nothing much. I wonder if he knows that for quite a while there have been theories-strong ones-that although the face he is wearing may have belonged to Shakespeare, all the plays were written by somebody else. Maybe he'd be better off trying to form-change to look like Bacon."

Bey Wolf was a pleasant enough fellow, but to appeal to him a joke had to have a definite twist to it. He was still looking pleased with himself when they reached the office of the director of transplants. One thing he hadn't mentioned to John La.r.s.en was the fact that a number of the theories he had referred to claimed that Shakespeare's works had been written by a woman.

"The liver came from a twenty-year-old female hydroponics worker who had her skull crushed in an industrial accident."

Dr. Morris, lean, intense, and disheveled, removed the reply slip that he had just read from the machine and handed it to John La.r.s.en, who stared at it in disbelief.

"But that's impossible! Only yesterday, the ID tests gave a completely different result for that liver. You must have made a mistake, Doctor."

Morris shook his head firmly. "You saw the whole process yourself. You were there when we did the microbiopsy on the transplanted liver. You saw me prepare the specimen and enter the sample for chromosome a.n.a.lysis. You saw the computer matching I just gave you. Mr. La.r.s.en, there are no other steps or possible sources of error. I think you are right, there has been a mistake all right-but it was made by the medical student who gave you the report.""But he told me that he did it three separate times."

"Then he probably did it wrong three times. It is no new thing to repeat a mistake. I trust that you are not about to do that yourself."

La.r.s.en was flushed with anger and embarra.s.sment, and Morris, pale and overworked, was clearly resentful at what he thought was a careless waste of his precious time. Wolf stepped in to try to create a less heated atmosphere.

"One thing puzzles me a bit," he said. "Why did you use a transplant, Dr.

Morris? Wouldn't it have been easier to redevelop a healthy liver, using the biofeedback machines and a suitable program?"

Morris cooled a little. He did not appear to find it strange that a specialist in form-change work should ask such a naive question.

"Normally you would be quite right, Mr. Wolf. We use transplants for two reasons. Sometimes the original organ has been so suddenly and severely damaged that we do not have time to use the regrowth programs. More often, it is a question of speed and convenience."

"You mean in convalescence time?"

"Certainly. If I were to give you a new liver from a transplant, you would spend maybe a hundred hours, maximum, working with the biofeedback machines.

You would need to adjust immune responses and body chemistry balance, and that would be all. With luck, you might be able to get away with as little as fifty hours in interaction. If you wanted to regrow a whole liver, though, and you weren't willing to wait for natural regeneration-which would happen eventually, in the case of the liver-well, you'd probably be faced with at least a thousand hours of work with the machines."

Wolf nodded. "That all makes sense. But didn't you check the ID of this particular liver before you even began the operation?"

"That's not the way the system works." Morris went over to a wall screen and called out a display of the hospital operational flow. "You can see it easiest if you follow it here. When the organs are first taken from their donors, they are logged in at this point by a human. Then, as you can see, the computer takes over. It sets up the tests to determine the ID, checks the main physical features of the donor and the organ, fixes the place where it will be stored, and so on. All that information goes to the permanent data banks. Then, when we need a donor organ, such as a liver, the computer matches the information about the physical type and condition of the patient with the data on all the available livers in the organ bank. It picks out the most suitable one for the operation. Everything after the original logging in is automatic, so the question of checking the ID never arises."

He came back from the wall displays and looked questioningly at Wolf, whose face was still thoughtful.

"So what you're telling us, Doctor," said Bey, "is that you never have any organs in the banks which didn't have an ID check made when they first entered it?"

"Not for adults. Of course, there are many infant organs that don't have their IDs filed. Anything that fails the humanity tests is never given an ID-the computer creates a separate file in the data bank for the information about those organs."

"So it is possible for a liver to be in the organ banks and yet have no ID."

"An infant's liver, from a humanity-test failure. Look, Mr. Wolf, I see where you're heading, and I can a.s.sure you that it won't work." Morris came to the long table and sat down facing Wolf and La.r.s.en. He ran his hand over his long jaw, then looked at his watch. "I have things that I must do, very soon, but let me point out the realities of this case. The patient who received the liver, as you saw for yourself, was a young adult. The liver we used on her was fully grown, or close to it. I saw it myself at the time of the operation.

It certainly didn't come from any infant, and we would never use infant organs except for children's operations."

Wolf shrugged his shoulders resignedly. "That's it, then. We won't take up any more of your time. I'm sorry that we've been a nuisance on this, but we have to do our job."They rose from the table and turned to leave. Before they reached the doorway, a gray-haired man entered and waved casually to Morris.

"Hi, Ernst," he said. "Don't let me interrupt you. I noticed from the visitors log that you have people in from Form Control, so I thought I'd stop by and see what's happening."

"They were just about to leave," said Morris. "Mr. Wolf and Mr. La.r.s.en, I'd like to introduce you to Robert Capman, the director of Central Hospital. This is an unexpected visit. According to the hospital daily scheduler, you have a meeting this morning with the Building and Construction Committee."

"I do. I'm on my way there now." Capman gave Wolf and La.r.s.en a rapid and penetrating look. "I hope that you gentlemen were able to get the information that you wanted."

Wolf smiled and shrugged. "Not quite what we hoped we'd get. I'm afraid that we ran into a dead end."

"I'm sorry to hear that." Capman smiled also. "If it's any consolation to you, that happens to us all the time in our work here."

Again, he gave Wolf and La.r.s.en that cool and curiously purposeful look. Bey felt a sudden heightening of his own level of attention. He returned Capman's measured scrutiny for several seconds, until the latter abruptly nodded at the wall display and waved his hand in farewell.

"I'll have to go. I'm supposed to be making a statement to the committee in four minutes time."

"Problems?" asked Morris.

"Same old issue. A new proposal to raze Central Hospital and put us all out in the green belt, away from the tough part of the city. They'll be broadcasting the hearings on closed circuit, if you're interested, Channel Twenty-three."

He turned and hurried out. Wolf raised his eyebrows. "Is he always in that much of a hurry?"

Morris nodded. "Always. He's amazing, the work load he tackles. The best combination of theorist and experimenter that I've ever met." He seemed to have calmed down completely from his earlier irritation. "Not only that, but you should see him handle a difficult committee."

"I'd like to." Wolf chose to take him literally. "Provided that you don't mind us staying here to watch the display. One more thing about the liver." His tone was carefully casual. "What about the children who pa.s.s the humanity tests but have some sort of physical deformity? You did mention that you use infant organs in children's operations. Are they taken from the ones who fail the tests?"

"Usually. But what of it?"

"Well, don't you sometimes grow the organs you need, in an artificial environment, until they're the size you want for the child?"

"We try to complete any repair work before the children can walk or speak; in fact, we begin work right after the humanity tests are over. But you are quite correct; we do sometimes grow an organ that we need from infant to older size, and we do that from humanity-test reject stock. However, it's all done over in Children's Hospital, out on the west side. They have special child-size feedback machines there. We also prefer to do it there for control reasons. As you very well know, there are heavy penalties for allowing anyone to use a biofeedback machine if they are between two and eighteen years old-except for medical repair work, of course, and that is done under very close scrutiny. We like to get the children away from here completely, to prevent any accidental access here to form-change equipment."

Morris turned to the display screen and lifted the channel selector. "I suppose that I should admire your persistence, Mr. Wolf, but I a.s.sure you that it doesn't lead anywhere. Why, may I ask, do you lay all this emphasis on children?"

"There was one other thing in the report from Luis Rad-Kato-the medical student. He says that he not only did an ID check on the liver, he did an age test, too. The age he determined was twelve years."

"Then that proves he doesn't know what he's doing. There are no organs usedhere from child donors. That work would be done over at Children's Hospital.

Your comment to Capman was a good one-you are trying to pursue this whole thing through a dead end. Spend your time on something else, that's my advice."

While he was speaking, the display screen from Channel Twenty-three came alive. The three men turned to it and fell silent.

"From choice, I wear the form of early middle age."

Capman, in the few minutes since he had left the Transplant Department, had found the time to remove his hospital uniform and don a business suit. The committee members who listened to him were wearing the same colorful apparel and appeared to be composed largely of businessmen.

"However," went on Capman, "I am in fact quite old-older than any of you here.

Fortunately, I am of long-lived stock, and I hope that I have at least twenty more productive years ahead of me. I am also fortunate enough to be blessed with a retentive memory, which has made my experiences still vivid. It is the benefit of that experience that I wish to offer to you today."

"On his high horse," said Morris quietly. "He never goes in for that sort of pomposity when he's working in the hospital. He knows his audience."

"My exact age is perhaps irrelevant," continued Capman, "but I can remember the days before 'Lucy's in the Water' was one of the children's nursery songs."

He paused for the predictable stir of surprise from the committee. La.r.s.en turned to Wolf.

"How long ago was that, Bey?"

Wolfs expression mirrored his surprise. "If my memory is correct, it is very close to a century. I know it was well over ninety years ago."

Wolf looked with increased interest at the man on the screen. Capman was old.

"Lucy's in the Water," like "Ring-a-Ring-a-Rosy" long before it, told of a real event. Not the Black Death, as in the older children's song, but the Lucy ma.s.sacre, when the Hallucinogenic Freedom League-the Lucies-had dumped drugs into the water supply lines of major cities. Nearly a billion people had died in the chaos that followed as starvation, exposure, epidemic, and mindless combat walked the cities and exacted their tribute. It was the only occasion in four hundred years when the population had, however briefly, ceased its upward surge.

"I remember the time," went on Capman, "when cosmetic form-change was unknown and medical form-change was still difficult, dangerous, and expensive; when it would take months of hard work to achieve a change that we can manage now in weeks or days; when fingerprint and voiceprint patterns were still in use as a legal form of identification, because the law had yet to accept the elementary fact that a man who can grow a new arm can easily change his larynx or his fingertips."

Wolf frowned. The audience that Capman was addressing seemed to be lapping it up, but he was almost certain that the speaker was indulging in a little artistic license. The first developments Capman was referring to had begun even further in the past than the Lucies. In a sense, they had begun way back in the nineteenth century, with the first experiments on limb regeneration of amphibians. Many lower animals could regrow a lost limb. A man could not. Why?

No one could answer that question until two fields, both mature and well explored in themselves, had come together in a surprising way in the 1990s: biological feedback and real-time computer control.

It was already known in the 1960s that a human could use display feedback devices to influence his own involuntary nervous system, even to the point where the basic electrical wave rhythms of the brain could be modified. At the same time, computer-controlled instrumentation had been developing, permitting electronic feedback of computed signals continuously and in real time. Ergan Melford had taken those two basic tools and put them to work together.

Success in minor things had come first, with the replacement of lost hair and teeth. From those primitive beginnings, advances had come slowly but steadily.

Replacement of lost fingertips was soon followed by programs for thecorrection of congenital malfunctions, for the treatment of disease, and for the control of the degenerative aspects of aging. That might have been enough for most people, but Ergan Melford had seen far beyond that. At the time that he had founded the Biological Equipment Corporation, he already had his long-term goal defined.

The dam broke on the day Melford released his first general catalog. Programs were listed for sale that would allow a user to apply the biological feedback equipment to modify his appearance-and all the world, as Melford well knew, wanted to be taller, shorter, more beautiful, better proportioned. Suddenly, form-change programs could be purchased to allow men and women to be what they chose to be-and BEC, seventy-five percent owned by Ergan Melford, had a monopoly on the main equipment and programs and held all the patents.

On the screen, Capman continued to build his case. "I remember, even though most of you do not, the strange results of the early days of form-change experiments. That was before the illegal forms had been defined, still less understood. We saw s.e.xual monsters, physical freaks, all the repressions of a generation, released in one great flood.

"You do not remember what it was like before we had an Office of Form Control.

I remember it well. It was chaos."

La.r.s.en noticed that Morris was looking across at him. "It's not far from chaos now in the office we're in. We still see the wildest forms you can imagine. I suppose the policy now is to get the chaos off the streets and into the Office of Form Control."

Wolf waved him to silence before he could go into details with office anecdotes. Capman, still on screen, was again building his edifice of logic and persuasion. He had tremendous presence and conviction. Bey was beginning to understand the basis for the respect and reverence that showed through when Morris and others at the hospital spoke about their director.

"All these things I remember, personally-not by secondhand reporting. Perhaps you, as members of this committee, wonder what all this has to do with the proposal to tear down Central Hospital and build a new facility outside the city. It has a great deal to do with it. In every one of the events that I have referred to, this hospital-Central Hospital, this unique structure-has played a key and crucial role. To most people, this building is a tangible monument to the past of form-change development. Much of that past has been disturbing and frightening, but we must remember it. If we forget history, we may be obliged to repeat it. What better reminder of our difficult past could there be than the continued presence of this building as an active, working center? What better a.s.surance can we have that form-change is under control and is being handled with real care?"

Capman paused for a long moment and looked around the committee, meeting each man or woman eye to eye as though willing their support.

"I should finish by saying one more thing to you," he said. "To me, the idea of removing such a monument to human progress is unthinkable. I do not relish the idea of working, myself, in any other facility. Thank you."

Capman had swept up his papers, nodded to the committee, and was already on his way out of the room before the applause could begin.

"That was the clincher," said Morris. He looked ready to applaud, himself. "I wondered if he'd say that last point. The committee is terrified of the idea that he might resign if they go too far. They'd get so much grief from everybody else, they won't press the point."

He had clearly lost all signs of his earlier irritation with Wolf and La.r.s.en.

As they prepared to leave the hospital, he even a.s.sured Wolf of his continued cooperation, should anything new be discovered. They said polite farewells inside the hospital, but once outside they felt free to let their own feelings show.

"Tokhmir! Where do we go from here, John? That got us absolutely nowhere."

"I know. I guess we'll have to give it up. Rad-Kato made a mistake, and we've chased it into the ground. Isn't that the way it seems to you?"

"Almost. The one thing I still can't swallow is the loss of those data recordslast night. The timing on that was just too bad to be true. I'll admit that coincidences are inevitable, but I want to look at each one good and hard before I'll accept that there's only chance at work. Let's give it one more try. Let's call Rad-Kato again when we get back to the office."

CHAPTER 5.

"I am quite sure, Mr. La.r.s.en." The medical student was young and obviously a little uncomfortable, but his holo-image showed a firm jaw and a positive look in his eyes. "Despite what you heard from Dr. Morris, and I think I can guess his views, I a.s.sure you that I did not make a mistake. The ID that I gave to you yesterday was correctly determined. More than that, I can prove it."

La.r.s.en pursed his lips and looked across at Wolf, standing beside him. "I'm sorry, Luis, but we went through all that already, in detail. The liver for the patient who received the transplant was given a microbiopsy for us today.

We were there, and we watched every stage of the process. We found a different ID, one that's in the central data bank files."

Rad-Kato was clearly surprised, but he looked stubborn.

"Then perhaps they got the wrong patient, or perhaps they made a mistake in their testing."

"Impossible, Luis." La.r.s.en shook his head. "I tell you, we watched the whole thing."

"Even so, I can prove my point. You see, I didn't mention this last night, because I didn't think it was relevant, but I wanted to run a full enzyme a.n.a.lysis on the sample that I took as well as doing the chromosome ID. I didn't have time to do all the work last night. So I stored a part of the sample in the deep freeze over at the hospital. I was going to do the rest of the work tonight."

Wolf clapped his hands together exultantly. "That's it, John! It's time we had a break. We've had nothing but bad luck so far on this. Look"-to Rad-Kato-"can you stay right where you are until we get over there? We need part of that sample."

"Sure. I'm in Fertility. I'll ask the receptionist to send you to this department when you arrive."

"No-that's just what you don't do. Don't tell anybody, not even your own mother, that you have that sample. Don't do anything to suggest that Form Control is interested in it. We'll have someone over in twenty minutes."

Wolf cut the connection and turned to La.r.s.en. "John, can you get over there at once and pick up the tissue sample? Bring Rad-Kato with you and do the test with him in our own ID matching facilities. I would go with you, but I'm beginning to get ideas on what may be going on in this business. I need to get to a terminal and work with the computers. If I'm right, we've seen some very fast footwork in the past twenty-four hours. I want to find out who's doing it."

Before La.r.s.en had even left the room, Wolf had turned to the terminal and begun to call out data files. It was going to be a long, tedious business, even if he was right-especially if he was right. He was still feeling his way through the intricacies of the software that protected files from outside interference when La.r.s.en returned with the results of their own test of the liver sample. Rad-Kato had been right. He had made no mistake in his previous a.n.a.lysis; the liver ID corresponded to nothing in the central data bank files.

Wolf nodded his satisfaction at the results, waved La.r.s.en away, and carried on with his slow, painstaking search.