Sight of Proteus (11 page)

"Not quite." Larsen pointed at the final words of the message. "I wonder what it cost them to get that tagged onto the end of the news release."

"BEC," continued the display, "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 assist in this investigation is voluntary 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 assigned 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 sea-bed?"

"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. Nobody 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 all correct as far as it goes," agreed Green, "but you are missing a few facts that make a big difference. First off, you said they were Belters, and technically you are right—they worked the Belt. But in USF terms, they were really Grabbers. They had been out combing on the Jason for more than two years when they struck it . . ."

* * *

Caperta Laferte, spotter for the USF Class B cargo ship Jason, watched the scope of the deep radar with mounting excitement. By his left hand, the computer print-out was chattering at increasing speed as it performed the final orbit match and confirmed its tracking of the find.

Laferte wriggled his bare toes, and picked up a dirty cloth in his free hand. He wiped at the perspiration that covered his face.

"It matches," he said to the other two. "Matches exactly, and it looks like a good one—a four percenter, or even more. I'll be able to get a radioactivity reading from it in a couple more minutes. No doubt about it, we've found us a real piece of old Loge."

The other two hovered about in impotent excitement. Until they had matched and docked it was a one-man job and they could do nothing more useful than speculate on their trophy. Grimy and worn, all three looked like men who had endured more than two years of solar flares and radiation storms, celibacy and grinding boredom. Soon, it would all be worth it. If this one held up, if it were the big one, all the pain would have been nothing. Wine, women and song would be soon on the way.

"I've got a radioactivity count coming in now," announced Laferte suddenly. "I'm tuning for the 15 MeV dipole transition from Asfanium. Keep your eye on the counter. If it hits forty or better, it's the jackpot."

The digital read-out was climbing steadily. At twenty the lock-on failed and they lost it for a second. Laferte swore, bent again over the control panel, and re-calibrated frantically. It homed in again, began to record, and climbed steadily. Past twenty, to thirty, to forty, and it was still moving upwards. The three men shouted together, and Manaur and Prek joined hands and began a curious Walrus-and-Carpenter dance. It was about all that could be managed in the tight combination of free-fall and confined space. The future was a rosy glow, full of wealth, high living and excitement. Old Loge may have been gone for a long time, but there was enough of him left to come back home and gladden a few hearts.

* * *

". . . looking for transuranics," said Green. "Maybe you don't realize it, but the only natural source in the Solar System is still the fragments of Loge that come back in as long-period comets. The Grabbers just sit out there and monitor using deep radar. One decent find and they are made for life."

"And the Jason hit a good one, I assume," 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 fleshpots 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 space, 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 bio-feedback 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 inter-office communicator and asked Larsen to join them.

"I'm going to ask you this cold, John," he said when Larsen entered the room. "Is Robert Capman dead?"

"I thought he was four years ago," replied Larsen. 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 set-up, 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 space. 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 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 assistance."

Green nodded understandingly. "I can't give you an instant answer," he replied. "You're asking for a healthy chunk of communication assist, 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 Ambassador 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, explained Wolf as they hurried out, and it would never be. The Mattin Link system offers direct and instantaneous transmission between any adjacent pair of entry points, but the number and placing of those access stations is very rigid. With perfect symmetry required for any entry point with respect to all others, the configuration of the system must 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, is the biggest single system that can ever be made. The Lunar system is the simplest, with just four entry points set at the vertices of a regular tetrahedron. The intermediate arrangements, with cubic, octahedral and icosahedral symmetry, have never been used, but could be made without difficulty. Mattin Links away from planetary surfaces would be immensely attractive for transportation, but they are impractical because of constantly changing distances.

Gerald Mattin, the embittered genius who had dreamed of a system for instantaneous energy-free transfer between any two points, anywhere, died during the first successful tests of the concept. The system that came from his work is far from energy-free—because the Earth is not a homogeneous sphere, and because space-time is slightly curved near its surface. Mattin had derived an energy-free solution defined for an exact geometry in a flat space-time, and no one had ever succeeded in generalizing his analysis to other useful cases.

Mattin'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 Ambassador. I don't want to waste all that work. Where do we go from here?"