Sight Of Proteus Part 7

"I'll put a request in," said La.r.s.en. "The less we can get away with telling them at this point, the better. I'll shove the bare facts at them and let them decide who they want to send down from Tycho City. I hope they send somebody who at least knows how to spell 'form change.'"

While they talked, the communicator continued to pump out the information in display and hard copy form. It had reached the point where the requested correlation between Link entry points and form-change labs was being presented-Bey had almost forgotten that he had asked for it. The day promised to be a long and confusing one.

Not surprisingly, BEC was getting into the act as well. An incoming news release set out their official position: Biological Equipment Corporation (BEC) today released a formal statement denying all knowledge of the human bodies discovered recently in the Pacific.

A BEC representative informed us that the bodies had clearly been subjected to form-change, but that no BEC program developments, past or present, could lead to forms anything like those which have been found. In an unusual procedure, BEC has agreed to release records showing forms now under development in the company. They have also invited government inspection of their facilities.

"That's a new one," said Bey. "They must really be running scared. I've been waiting for them to plead innocent or guilty. I've never known BEC to release their new form secrets before. They must be losing their old commercial instinct."

"Not quite." La.r.s.en pointed at the final words of the message. "I wonder what it cost them to get that tagged on to the end of the news release."

The display continued.

BEC is the pioneer in and world's largest manufacturer of purposive form-change equipment utilizing biological feedback control methods. The release of BEC proprietary information to a.s.sist in this investigation isvoluntary and purely in the public interest.

"There we go," said Bey. "That's more like the old BEC. Old Melford died a long time ago, but I'll bet his skeleton is grinning in the grave."

CHAPTER 11.

Third-generation USF men, like top kanu players, are usually on the small skinny side, built for mobility rather than strength. It was a surprise to greet a giant, more than two meters tall and muscled like a wrestler, and find that he was the USF man a.s.signed to work with the Office of Form Control on the Guam form-change case. Bey Wolf looked up at the tall figure and bit back the question on the tip of his tongue.

It made no difference. Park Green was regarding him knowingly, a sly smile on his big baby face.

"Go on, Mr. Wolf," he said. "Ask me. You'll do it eventually anyway."

Bey smiled back. "All right. Do you use form-change equipment? I thought it was banned for everything but repair work in the USF."

"It is, and I don't. I came this way, and it's all natural. You can guess how hard it is, acting as a USF representative and looking just as though you've been dabbling with the machines."

Wolf nodded appreciatively. "I'm not used to being read so easily."

"On that question, I've had lots of practice. I thought we ought to get rid of that distraction before we get down to work. What's new on the Guam case? I've had orders to send a report back to Tycho City tonight, and at the moment I have no idea what I'm going to say. Did you get a time and cause of death yet from the path lab?"

"Three days ago, and they all died within a few hours of each other. They were asphyxiated, but here's the strange part. Their lungs were full of normal air-no gaseous poisons, no contaminants. They choked to death on the same stuff that you and I are breathing right now."

Park Green sniffed and looked perplexed. "They changed to something that found air poisonous. I don't like that one. How about the way they got to the seabed?"

"They were dropped off twenty-four hours or less after they died. It must have been done at night, or we'd have had reports of sightings. That part of the coast is full of fishing herdsmen during the day. My guess is that they died a long way from there."

"Excuse my ignorance, but I don't follow your logic."

"Well, I'm conjecturing, but I think they were intended for the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Five miles down, they'd never have been found. So they were accidentally dropped a few miles too far west, and that suggests it was done by somebody who didn't know the local geography too well. Whoever did it was in a hurry, too, or they would have been more careful. That suggests it was an accident, with no time for detailed advance planning. Somebody was keen to hide the evidence, as far away and as fast as they could. You don't look very surprised at any of that," added Wolf as Green slowly nodded agreement. "Do you know something they haven't bothered to tell me?"

The big man had squeezed himself into a chair and was slowly rubbing his chin with an eleven-inch hand.

"It fits with some of the things I know about the dead men," he replied. "What else have you been able to find out about them?"

"Not much," said Wolf. "Just what I got from the data bank biographies. They were Belters, the three of them, all off the same ship-the Jason. They arrived here on Earth three weeks ago, rolling in money, and went out of sight. n.o.body has any records of them again until they were found dead off Guam. We had no reason to follow them once they had cleared quarantine. They had no trouble there, by the way, which seems to rule out anything like the Purcell spores or any other known disease. They were in the middle of a form-change when they died.""That's right, as far as it goes," agreed Green, "but you're missing a few facts that make a big difference. First off, you said they were Belters, and technically you're right. They worked the Belt. But in USF terms, they were really Grabbers-prospectors, out combing the Belt for transuranics. They'd been looking for over two years when their monitors finally sniffed Old Loge.

Maybe you don't realize it back here on Earth, but the only natural source of transuranics in the Inner System is fragments of Loge that drift back in as long-period comets. The Grabbers sit out there and monitor using the deep radar. One good find and they're made for life."

"And the Jason hit a good one, I a.s.sume," said Wolf. "I couldn't believe their credit when I saw the records."

"A real big one," agreed Green. "They hit about three months ago, and it was packed with Asfanium and Polkium, elements 112 and 114. They crunched the fragment for the transuranics and came in to Tycho City a month ago, all as rich as Karkov and Melford. They started to celebrate, and three weeks ago they came down to Earth to keep up the fun. We lost touch with them then and don't know what they did. We didn't worry. No Belter would live on Earth, and we knew they'd be back when the flesh-pots palled. You can probably guess what they did next."

Wolf nodded. "I think I can, but I'd like to see where you are heading. Keep going."

"They came to Earth," continued Green. "Now, I saw them in Gippo's bar a couple of days before they left the Moon. They looked terrible. You can imagine it, a couple of years of hardship in s.p.a.ce, then a celebration you wouldn't believe when they reached Tycho City. If you came to Earth in that condition, wouldn't you find it tempting to hook up for a super fast conditioning session with a biofeedback machine? It's not very illegal, and it would get you back to tip-top physical condition faster than anything else.

Costs a bit, but they were rolling in money."

"And easy to arrange," said Wolf. "I know a thousand places where you could do it. They don't have fancy form-change equipment there, but you're talking about something rather trivial. It makes good sense-but it wouldn't explain the forms they were in when they were found off Guam. You couldn't get to those without a fully equipped change center. Now let me tie in our side of it, and see what you think."

He pressed the interoffice communicator and asked La.r.s.en to join them.

"I'm going to ask you this cold, John," he said when La.r.s.en entered the room.

"Is Robert Capman dead?"

"I thought he was four years ago," replied La.r.s.en. He sighed and shrugged his shoulders. "Now, I'm not so sure." He turned to the USF man. "Bey has always been convinced that it was a setup, and he has me halfway persuaded. I must admit it had the makings of one, but he hasn't been heard of for four years, ever since he disappeared. I agree with Bey on one thing, though; the Guam forms have just the right look to be a Capman product."

"They certainly do," said Bey. He turned to Park Green, who was looking very puzzled. "How much do you know about Capman and what he did?"

Green thought for a moment before he replied, his high forehead wrinkling in thought.

"All I can really tell you is what we hear in Tycho City," he said at last.

"Capman was a great man here on Earth, a genius who invented the C-forms, the ones that are adapted for life in s.p.a.ce. According to the stories, though, he did it by using human children in his experiments. A bunch of them died, and finally Capman was found out. He tried to escape and died himself as he was trying to get away. Are you telling me there's more to it than that?"

"I think there is," said Bey. "For one thing, it was John and I who handled that case and found out what Capman was doing. Do you have strong personal feelings against him?"

"How could I? I never knew him, and all the things I've heard are not things I know about personally. If he was really using children, of course I have to be against that. Look, what's it got to do with me?""That's a fair question." Wolf paced about in front of Park Green's seated figure, his head scarcely higher than Green's despite their different postures. "You have to see how my thoughts have been running. Earth's greatest-ever expert on form-change, maybe still alive, maybe in hiding. Along comes a set of changes that seem to defy all logic, that don't conform to any known models. It could be Capman, up to his old tricks again. But even if it isn't, Capman would be the ideal man to work with on this. I should have added one other thing; neither John nor I ever met a man, before or since, who impressed us as much with his sheer brainpower."

Green wriggled uneasily in his seat, still uncomfortable in the higher gravity. "I know you're selling me something, but I haven't figured out what it is. What are you leading up to?"

"Just this." Wolf halted directly in front of Park Green. "I want to find Robert Capman-for several reasons. We think he's not down here on Earth-hasn't been for the past four years. Will you help me to reach him? I don't know if he's on the Moon, out in the Belt, or somewhere further out. I do know that I can't get messages broadcast to the rest of the Solar System unless I have USF a.s.sistance."

Green nodded understandingly. "I can't give you an instant answer," he replied. "You're asking for a healthy chunk of communication a.s.sist, and that costs money."

"Charge it to this office. My budget can stand it."

"And I'll have to check it out on a policy level with Amba.s.sador Brodin. He's down in Paraguay, and you know Brodin, he won't agree to anything unless you ask favors in person." He stood up, stretched, and inflated his sixty-inch chest with a deep, yawning breath. "I'd better get to it before I fall asleep-we're on a different clock in Tycho City. What's the best way to travel to Paraguay?"

"Through the Mattin Link. There's an exit point in Argentina, then you'll go the rest of the way by local flier. We can be at the Madrid Link in ten minutes, and you'll be to Argentina in two jumps. Come on, John and I will get you to the entry point."

"I'd appreciate that. I've really had trouble getting used to the complexity of your system down here. We only have four entry points for the whole Moon, and you have twenty. Is it true that you'll have more in a few years?"

It was not true, and it never would be. The Mattin Link system offered direct and instantaneous transmission between any adjacent pair of entry points, but the number and placing of them was very rigid. With perfect symmetry required for any entry point with respect to all others, the configuration of the system had to correspond to the vertices of one of the five regular solids.

Plato would have loved it.

The dodecahedral arrangement, with its twenty vertices on the surface of the Earth, was the biggest single system that could ever be made. The Lunar system was the simplest, with just four entry points set at the vertices of a regular tetrahedron. The intermediate arrangements, with cubic, octahedral, and icosahedra symmetry, had never been used. Mattin Links away from the planetary surfaces were immensely attractive for transportation, but they were impractical close to a star or planet because of constantly changing orbital distances.

Gerald Mattin, the embittered genius who had dreamed of a system for instantaneous energy-free transfer between any two points anywhere, had died during the first successful tests of the concept. The system that came from his work was far from energy-free-because Earth was not a h.o.m.ogeneous sphere and because s.p.a.ce-time was slightly curved near its surface. Mattin had derived an energy-free solution defined for an exact geometry in a flat s.p.a.ce-time, and no one had yet succeeded in generalizing his a.n.a.lysis to other useful cases.

Martin's death came twenty years before the decision to build the first Mattin Link system on the surface of a planet twenty-five years before the first university was named after him, thirty years before the first statue.

CHAPTER 12.

"We have a go-ahead now, but I had to bargain my soul away to squeeze it out of the amba.s.sador. I don't want to waste all that work. Where do we go from here?"

Park Green was back in Wolf's office, shoes off, long legs stretched out. The general confusion of the place had worsened. Computer listings, empty food trays, and maps were scattered on every flat surface. Wolf and La.r.s.en were again standing by the wall display, plotting the Martin Link access from both the Mariana Trench entry point and the s.p.a.ceport entry point in Australia.

Wolf read off the results before he replied to Green's question.

"North Australia direct to the Marianas-so they could have gone there direct from the s.p.a.ceport, except that we know they didn't. The Mariana entry point connects direct to North China, Hawaii, and back of course to North Australia.

None of those are promising. There's no big form-change lab anywhere near any of them. What do you think, John?"

La.r.s.en scratched his head thoughtfully. "Two possibilities. Either your hunch about the use of the Link system is all wrong, or the people who moved the Mariana Monsters to Guam did more than one jump in the system. Where do we get with two jumps?"

Wolf read out the connections and shook his head.

"That takes us a lot further a field. With two jumps you can get almost anywhere from a Marianas starting point. Up to the North Pole, down to Cap City at the South Pole, into India, up to North America-it's a mess."

Wolf put down the display control and came over to where Park Green was sitting.

"I'm more convinced than ever that we need Robert Capman's help," he said. "We still don't know what was happening when they died. They started on some form-change program, and somewhere along the line it went wrong. I wish I could ask Capman how."

"You never answered my question, you know," said Green. "What do we do next?

Where do we go from here? Advertising for Capman won't solve your problem-he'll be regarded as a ma.s.s murderer if he ever does show up on Earth."

"I think I can produce a message that he will recognize and be intrigued by, but other people won't understand," answered Wolf. "As for protecting him if he does show up, I'm not worried about that. I feel sure that he'll have found ways to cover himself in the past four years. I've got another worry of my own. I have no way of knowing how urgent this thing is. It could be a once-in-a-lifetime accident that will never happen again, or it could be the beginning of some kind of general plague. We think it isn't contagious, but we have no proof of it. Until we know what we're dealing with, I have to a.s.sume the worst. Let me take a crack at that message."

The final announcement was short and simple. It went out on a general broadcast over all media to the fourteen billion on Earth and by boosted transmission to the scattered citizens of the United s.p.a.ce Federation. The signal would be picked up all the way out past Neptune, and a repeater station would even make it accessible to parts of the outer system Halo.

To R.S.C. I badly need the talents that caused me to pursue you four years ago through the byways of Old City. I promise you a problem worthy of your powers.

Behrooz Wolf.

Troubles were mounting. Bey spent many hours with a representative of BEC, who insisted on presenting more confidential records to prove that the company had no connection with the monster forms. The central coordinators' office sent him a terse message, asking if there would be other deaths of the same type, and if so, when, where, and how many. Park Green was getting the same sort of pressure from the USF. Unlike Bey Wolf, he had little experience of that kindof needling. He spent a good part of his time sitting in Bey's office, gloomily biting his nails and trying to construct positively worded replies with no information content.

Two days of vagueness brought a stronger response from Tycho City. Bey arrived in his office early and found a small, neatly dressed man standing by the communicator. His clothes were USF style, and he was calling out personnel records for the three crew members of the Jason. He turned around quickly as Bey entered, but there was no sign of embarra.s.sment at being discovered using Bey's office without invitation.

He looked at Bey closely before he spoke.

"Mr. Green?" The voice was like the person, small and precise, and offered more of a statement than a question.

"No, he'll be in later. I'm Behrooz Wolf, and I'm head of the Office of Form Control. What can I do for you?" Bey was suddenly conscious of his own casual appearance and uncombed hair.

The little man drew himself up to his full height.

"I am Karl Ling, special a.s.sistant to the USF Cabinet." The tone of voice was peppery and irascible. "I have been sent here to get some real answers about the deaths of three of our citizens here on Earth. I must say at the outset that we regard the explanations offered so far by your office and by Mr. Green as profoundly unsatisfactory."

Arrogant b.a.s.t.a.r.d, thought Bey. He looked at his visitor closely while he sought a suitably conciliatory answer, and felt a sudden sense of recognition.

"We have been doing our best to provide you with all the facts, Mr. Ling," he said at last. "We all thought it was unwise to present theories until we have some definite way of verifying them. I'm sure you realize that this case is a complex one and has a number of factors that we haven't encountered before."

"Apparently it does." Ling had taken a seat by the communicator and was tapping his thigh irritably with a well-manicured left hand. "For example, I see that the cause of death is stated as asphyxiation. But the postmortem shows that the dead men had only normal air in their lungs, with no poisonous const.i.tuents. Perhaps you would be willing to present your theory on that to me-there is no need to wait for a full verification."

Ling's tone was skeptical and definitely insulting. Bey felt a sudden doubt about his own intuitive reaction to Ling's presence. In the past, dealing with officious government representatives, Bey had found an effective method of removing their fangs. He thought of it as his saturation technique. The trick was to flood the nuisance with so many facts, figures, reports, graphs, tables, and a.n.a.lyses that he was inundated and never seen again. The average bureaucrat was unwilling to admit he had not read what he was given. Bey went over to his desk and took out a black record tablet.

"This is a private interlock for the terminal in this office. It has in it the data entry codes that will allow you to pull all the records on this case.

They are rather voluminous, so a.n.a.lysis will take time. I suggest that you use my office here and feel free to use my communicator as the output display device for Central Files. Nothing will be hidden from you. This machine has a full access code."

Bey felt rather self-conscious about his own pompous manner, but it was the right action, whether or not his first intuitive response to Ling had been correct.

The little man stood up, his eyes gleaming. They were a curious brownish yellow in color, with flecks of gold. He rubbed his hands together.

"Excellent. Please arrange it so that I am not disturbed. However, I do wish to see Mr. Green immediately when he arrives."

Far from being subdued, Karl Ling was clearly delighted at the prospect of a flood of information. Bey left him to it and went to give the news to Park Green.

"Karl Ling?" Green looked impressed. "Sure I know him-or know of him. I've never met him myself, but I know his reputation. He's supposed to be one of the inner circle at top levels of the USF. He's also something of an expert onLoge and the Belt. He did a whole series of holovision programs a few years ago, and he used part of one of them in tracing the history of the discovery of Loge. It was a popular program, and he did a good job. He began way back, hundreds of years ago ... "

(Cameras move from the illuminated model and back to Ling, standing.) "School capsules give the 1970s as the first date in Loge's history. Actually, we can find traces of him much further back than that. The best starting point is probably 1766. A few years before the French and American revolutions, a German astronomer came up with a formula that seemed to give the relative distances of the planets from the Sun. His name was Johann t.i.tius. His work didn't become famous until it was picked up a few years later by another German, Johann Bode, and the relation he discovered is usually called the t.i.tius-Bode law, or just Bode's law."

(Cut to framed lithograph of Bode, then to the table of planetary distances.

Zoom in on blank spot in the table showing question mark.) "Bode pointed out that there was a curious gap in the distance formula.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn fitted it-and that is all the planets they knew of at the time-but there seemed to be one missing. There ought to be a planet between Mars and Jupiter, to make the formula really fit the Solar System. Then William Herschel, in 1781, discovered another planet, farther from the Sun than Saturn."

(Cut to high-resolution color image of Ura.n.u.s, rings in close-up, image of Herschel as insert on the upper left. Cut back to Ling.) "It fitted Bode's law, all right, but it wasn't in the right place to fill the spot between Mars and Jupiter. The search for a missing planet began, and finally in 1800 the asteroid Ceres was discovered at the correct distance from the Sun. Soon after, other asteroids were found at about the same distance as Ceres. The first pieces of Loge had appeared."