Sight of Proteus (25 page)

"No. He's not an economic theorist, he doesn't know even the basics. Laszlo, I've learned something in the past month or two, and you'll have to learn it too. There is now an intellect present in the Solar System that makes you and Robert look like two children. Beginning with what he already knew of your work, he saw how to move to the underlying laws. It took him just a few weeks to do it."

"Weeks!" Dolmetsch sounded even more sceptical. "And we've been working on it for many years. I'd like to meet your superman—and I'll want to see that theory, in detail, before I'll accept or use any of it."

"You've met him already, but you won't be able to meet him now. I'll show you the theory when you get here. It's carried through far enough to define a set of corrective measures that you need to stop the economic oscillations."

"Betha, that's impossible, general theory or no general theory. Don't you see, you have to treat the cause, not the symptoms. We have to know what it was that triggered the new oscillations."

"I know. You'll understand too, when you see the formal evidence. We can tell you what started it, and you can check it for yourself. The root cause of the problems began the day of the first rumor that we had been contacted by aliens. In other words, the very day that John Larsen completed his change to a Logian form."

Dolmetsch looked thoughtful. "The timing's right," he said grudgingly. "That's when it began, and since then things have gotten steadily worse. Go on, Betha."

"You can do it for yourself. What's the most likely cause for the instabilities?"

"Psychological perturbation." Dolmetsch frowned in concentration. "We've always suspected that a basic change in attitudes would be the most likely starting point for widespread instability. You're saying that the rumors about Larsen were the beginning? Maybe. People would change their views of many things if they thought aliens were here. Xenophobia is always a powerful force, and there are rumors about immortality and super-intelligence already running wild down here on Earth."

He shook his head. "Betha, I'd love to believe you—but doesn't it just sound too unlikely, for the general theory to come along as a solution exactly when we need it?"

"It would be, if the two events were independent. They're not. They are really one and the same. The Logian form produced the instability, and also created the intelligence that could understand it and develop a countermeasure. Not coincidence, consequence. There was one basic cause for both events—the Logian form-change."

As the conversation proceeded, Pearl was swinging further around the Moon on her approach path to Earth orbit. When the geometry permitted it, the comlink to Earth was automatically re-routed through an alternate path by L-5 relay, and the reception of the signals at Farside began to fade. Tem and Alfeo bent over the screen, straining their ears for the weakening voices.

"I'll be up there by the time that you arrive," said Dolmetsch. His voice was firm, and he seemed to have made up his mind. "You don't know how bad it is down here. If I wait longer before we begin new corrections, we may be too late to do any good. Can you begin sending me something here, as you fly in, so that I can get something going even before I get up there to meet you in orbit?"

"No problem. We'll begin sending on a separate data circuit as soon as you can open one for us."

The distortion in the signal received at Farside was growing rapidly. Alfeo had turned the gain to maximum, but the voices were fading in and out as the transmission to the Farside antenna was intercepted by the Lunar horizon.

"And where is Robert Capman now?" asked Laszlo Dolmetsch, his voice a faint wisp of sound among the background.

Tem and Alfeo crouched by the console, waiting for Mestel's reply.

"What did she say?" whispered Tem.

Alfeo shook his head. All they could hear was the amplified hiss of interplanetary static, seething and crackling with the noise from suns and planets. Betha Mestel's reply was gone forever, lost in the universal sea of radio emissions.

Farside watch, when it wasn't simply boring, could be most irritating.

Chapter 23

Outside the orbit of Jupiter, the Solar System displays a different tempo, a new breadth of time and space. The pulse of Saturn, only fifteen million kilometers ahead of the ship but almost one and a half billion from the Sun, beats thirty times as slowly as Earth's, in its majestic revolution about the solar primary. The great planet, even at that distance, looked four times as big as the Moon seen from Earth. From the angle of Bey's approach, the rings made the planet seem almost twice its solid width.

Bey looked at the display that marked the time to rendezvous. Just a few ship-days to go, and he wasn't sure of the speed of the reverse-change process. He suspected that it would be fast—the sophistication of all the form-change equipment on the ship was an order of magnitude better than most commercial installations, and many of the programs in the change library were unfamiliar. Even so, it would be better to go into the tank a little early, rather than a little late.

Capman would wait for him—that wasn't the issue. Bey didn't want to wait any longer than he had to, to hear Capman's explanations, and to confirm the ideas that had been fermenting in his mind ever since his departure from Earth. Longer than that, really. Bey thought back to his own first reaction, years earlier, when John Larsen had told him of the liver without an ID.

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 was past 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 button had to be, he told himself, a lingering after-effect 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 towards 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 massive torso and wrinkled grey 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 hello 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 Larsen, 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 towards the blue, by a big factor—and I knew that couldn't be real. The ship was heading away from the Sun, not towards 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, Io was going into occultation. As I was watching it, I realized that it looked to be happening fast, 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 as 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 asserted that you 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 passed 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 grey. Capman turned back to face Bey.

"Sorry to cut off like that. I had to give John Larsen 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 ultra-violet through infra-red. 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 grey 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 mass 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 channels goes 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."