Sight of Proteus (8 page)

"Whatever happens here," he said. "Remember that your first duty is to get those records back to the hospital. Don't waste any time."

He turned the flashlight again into the pit. In the uncertain light, Wolf and Larsen had an impression of an enormous simian shape, moving towards Capman. Before they could gain a clear view of it, the light fell to the floor and was suddenly extinguished. There was a grinding noise and a bubbling cough from the pit, then silence.

Wolf and Larsen were seized suddenly with an understanding of their own defenseless position. Without another word or a wasted moment, both men turned and sped back through the tunnel. They picked up guns, lights and tracer and continued at full speed through the dark ways of Old City. Not until they were once more in the elevator, rising through Central Hospital to Capman's laboratory, did Larsen finally break the silence.

"I don't know what Capman did in that vault, but whatever it was he paid for it tonight."

Wolf, unusually subdued, could do no more than nod agreement and add, "Requiescat In Pace."

They went at once to the Transplant Department, where Morris received the precious spool of microfilm. At Wolf's urging, he agreed to have a team assigned to an immediate analysis of it, while they told him of the strange circumstance of its passage to them.

Chapter 8

An hour before sunrise, Wolf and Larsen were breakfasting in the visitor's section on the highest floor of Central Hospital. At Morris' insistence they had taken three hours of deep-sleep and spent another hour in programmed stress release. Both men were feeling rested and fit and had accepted a substantial meal from the robo-servers. Before they had finished, Morris came bustling in again. It was clear from his appearance that he had not slept, but his eyes were bright with excitement. He waved a handful of listings, and sat down opposite them.

"Fantastic," he said. "There's no other word for it. It will take us years to get all the details on this. Capman has gone further in form-change than we dreamed. Every form in that underground lab explores new ground in form-change experiment."

He began to leaf through the listings. "Here's an anaerobic form," he said. "It can breathe air, as usual, but if necessary it can also break down a variety of other chemicals for life support. It could operate under the sea, or in a vacuum, or almost anywhere. Here's another one, with a thick and insensitive epidermis—it should be very tolerant of extreme conditions of heat and radiation.

"Then there's this one." Morris waved the listing excitedly. He was unable to remain seated, and began to pace up and down in front of the window, where a pale gleam of false dawn was appearing. "Look, he has a complete photosynthetic system, with chlorophyll pouches on his chest, arms and back. He could survive quite happily in a semi-dormant state on traces of minerals, water and carbon-dioxide. Or he can live quite well as a normal human form, eating normal food.

"Here we have miniaturized forms, only ten inches high when fully adult. They have a normal life expectancy and a normal chromosome and gene structure. They can breed back to full-sized children in a couple of generations."

Wolf was struck by a sudden memory. "Do these forms have any special project names with them?" he asked.

"They do. They are all shown in Capman's general work notes under the heading of Project Proteus, except for one form—and that one has us baffled at the moment. It's the one we were talking about in the lab last night."

He riffled through the listings and came up with one that seemed much more voluminous than the others. "It's the one with the delay loop that occurs all over the program. We have made several efforts to revive the subject, but we can't do it. He seems to be in some kind of catatonic trance, and when we try and calculate the life-ratio on the computer, we get over-flow."

Wolf looked at Morris, and thought of Capman's note to him in the underground vault. Perhaps Capman was right, and Wolf did think in the same way. There was no doubt that he found the intention of the new form obvious, while it had Morris and Larsen baffled.

"Doctor," he said. "Did Capman ever talk to you about the future of the human race—where we will be in a hundred years, for instance?"

"Not to me personally. But his views were well-known. He leaned very much towards Laszlo Dolmetsch's views—society is unstable, and without new frontiers we will stagnate and revert to a lower civilization. The United Space Federation can't prevent that; they are too thinly spread and have too fragile a hold on the environment."

Wolf leaned back and looked at the ceiling. "So doesn't it seem clear what Capman's plan was? We need new frontiers. The U.S.F. can't provide them unless it has assistance. Capman has been working towards a single, well-defined objective—to provide forms that are adapted to space exploration. The forms you've been describing are ideal for working out in space, or on the Moon or Mars—or for terraforming work on Venus."

Morris looked blank. "You're right. But what about the small ones, or this catatonic one?"

"He's not catatonic. He's asleep. All his vital processes have been slowed down, by some pre-set amount. I don't know how much, but you should be able to find out if you look at the delay factor in the bio-feedback program. Capman set up that delay loop so the software could interact with the form-change experiment in its own 'real-time.' "

Morris looked again at the listings in his hand. "Twelve hundred," he said at last. "My God, it's set now for twelve hundred. That means that. . . ."

His voice trailed off.

"It means that he will sleep for one of his 'nights'," said Wolf. "That will be equal to twelve hundred of ours. I expect his life expectancy will be in proportion—twelve hundred times as long. That makes it about a hundred and twenty thousand years. Of course, that's not his subjective life expectancy—that will probably be about the same as ours."

"But how do we communicate with him?"

"The same way as Capman did in his form-change programs. You'll have to slow all the stimuli down by a factor of twelve hundred. Feed him information at the same rate as he's programmed to receive it."

"But what's the point of it?" asked Morris. "He can't work in space if he's incapable of communicating with the rest of us."

"New frontiers," said Wolf. "We want new frontiers, right? Don't you see, you've got an ideal form there for interstellar exploration? A trip of a century would only seem about a month to him. He'll live for more than a hundred thousand Earth-years. If you put a form-change machine on the ship with him, he could be brought back to a normal pace when he got there, for the observation work. Combine him with the miniaturized forms you found, and you've got people who can explore the stars, with the present ships and technology."

"The delay factor is set in the program," said Morris. "There's no reason to think twelve hundred is a limit. I'll have to check, and see how high it could go. Do you think it's possible that the programs would allow him to run faster than normal?"

"That's much harder. I don't see how you could speed up nerve signals. But I'm no expert on that, you need to look at it yourself. You can see now why your computer hit an over-flow situation when you tried to compute a life-ratio. In subjective terms it's still unity, but in terms of an outside observer it's twelve hundred. We need a new definition of life-ratio."

Morris was still pacing the room excitedly, listings crumpled in his hands. "There's so much that's new. We'll be years evaluating it without Capman. You have no idea, what we lost with his death. I'll have to get back and help the others in the analysis, but none of us has his grasp of fundamentals. It's a gap that can't be filled."

He seemed to have recovered from his earlier shock at discovering that Capman was using human subjects. The potential of the new forms drove all else from his mind. As he turned to leave, Wolf asked him a final question.

"Did the catatonic experiment have any special project name?"

Morris nodded. "Project Timeset—of course, that makes perfect sense now. I must check out how big the delay factor can become. I see no reason why it couldn't be ten thousand or more. Can you imagine a man who could live for a million years?"

He hurried out, and his departure took the energy and excitement from the room. After a few seconds, Wolf stood up and went over to the window. It faced out across Old City, towards the coming dawn. He looked at the dark, sprawling bulk of the city beneath him in silence.

"Cheer up, Bey," said Larsen after a couple of minutes. "Capman's death is still eating you up, isn't it? We couldn't have done a thing to help him. And I don't think we should judge him. That's for the future. He did a terrible thing, but now he's paid for it with his life. It's no good you brooding on it, too."

Bey turned slowly from the window, his eyes reflective and introspective. "That's not what's worrying me, John," he replied. "I'm troubled by something a lot less abstract. It's hard for me to believe that a man could be as smart as Capman, and yet die so stupidly."

Larsen shrugged. "Everybody has their blind spots, Bey. Nobody's all smart."

"But Capman told us that he knew he might be discovered, all along. He didn't know when it might be, but he had to allow for it. He set up elaborate checks, to see if anyone was about to discover what he was doing, and when he found we were onto him, he got ready to disappear."

"That's just what he did," agreed Larsen. "He was all set to disappear, but he didn't allow for that monster's trap, over in Old City."

Wolf was shaking his head. "John, Robert Capman allowed for everything. I don't believe he'd fall into a trap like that. We are the ones who fell into the trap. Don't you see, everything that happened was designed to draw us to pursue him? He knew we would try and follow him—we had to. All that talk about disappearance and a quiet life was nonsense. He expected to be followed."

"Maybe he did, Bey. But he didn't expect that illegal form in the tunnel."

"Didn't he, John? He wanted the trail followed while it was hot—just the two of us, without a lot of special equipment, and with no preparation. So like a pair of dumb heroes, we rushed in."

Wolf looked down at the streets of Old City, where a phosphorescent green trail of light was slowly spreading; the street scavengers were off on their last pre-dawn search for pickings.

"We should have been suspicious," he continued, "as soon as we ran into that induction field. Who would have set up such a thing—and why? Somebody wanted us to get to Capman without lights or guns. So, sure enough, Larsen and Wolf arrive on the scene without lights and guns."

"But we saw the monster form, Bey, and we saw Capman killed. Are you saying that was all part of the plan?"

Wolf looked at Larsen sceptically. "Did we see it? Did we really? What did we actually see? A big, vague form, then Capman dropped the flashlight and the place went dark. We ran. We didn't really see one thing that proved that Capman died down there. When was the last time that you ran away from something, in a blind panic?"

Larsen nodded. "I'm not proud of that, Bey. I haven't run from anything for a long time. I don't know what got hold of us."

"I think I do. We ran away, but we had a little assistance. I'll bet there was a subsonic projector and a few other items near that pit—all set up to scare the hell out of us as soon as we had the spool of microfilm. Capman even told us, twice, that we had to get the film back to the hospital—so we could justify it to ourselves that we were right to run away. Capman says he 'forgot' to leave it at the hospital, but it would have needed a separate conscious act for him to have taken it from the hospital in the first place—and all the people here say that he never forgot anything, no matter how small a detail."

Wolf sighed and peered out through the window. "John, it was a set-up. We were moved around down there like a couple of puppets. Capman is no more dead than we are."

Larsen was silent for a couple of minutes, digesting what Wolf had told him. Finally he too came to the window and looked out.

"So you think he is alive somewhere down there. How can we prove it?"

Wolf looked at his own reflection in the smooth glass. He saw a man with a worried frown and a thin, unsmiling mouth. Morris' satisfaction and enthusiasm at Capman's discoveries had not proved infectious.

"That's the hellish part of it, John," he said. "We can't prove it. No one would believe the bits and pieces that I've told you. If we report the facts, and we have to, then Capman will be declared dead. There will be no more pursuit. He will be free in a way that he could never have been, if we hadn't followed him."

Larsen too was frowning. "Part of what you say is still hard to accept, Bey. Capman lived for his work, we've heard that from many people here. Now that's gone from him. What would he do with his life?"

Bey Wolf looked back at him questioningly. "Has it gone from him, John? Remember, there are twenty tanks in that vault, and only fourteen of them were occupied. What happened to the experiments that were in the other six? We know now what the code words in the index file, Proteus and Timeset, were referring to. But I found two others there, too. What about Project Janus, and Project Lungfish? We don't know what they were, and we don't know what happened to them.

"I think that Robert Capman has another laboratory somewhere. He has those other six experiments with him, and he's still working on them. You can bet that those are the six most interesting forms, too."

"You mean he has a lab out there in Old City, Bey?"

"Maybe, but I think not. If we wanted to, we could follow him to Old City. He told the Building Committee that he hoped to have twenty more working years. I think that he would look for a place where he can work quietly, without danger of interruption. Would you like to speculate on the forms that he might create in twenty years? I don't think Old City could hold them."

"Even if he's not there, Bey, we ought to check it out and make sure." Larsen turned away from the window. "Let me go and file a report on this—I assume that we won't be going to the Moon today, the way Steuben is expecting us to. I'll request that we send a search party back along the way that we went last night. Maybe we can pick up some clues there."