Sight of Proteus (20 page)

The purser, his face red-veined with vacuum blossom, was motioning to him urgently. Wolf cut the connection, swung hastily back to his seat, and strapped in.

"Cutting it fine," said the purser gruffly.

Wolf nodded. "Urgent call," he said. "You know, I just saw a C-form working outside the ship. I thought they were still forbidden for USF work."

The purser's expression became more friendly, and he smiled.

"They are. There's a little game being played there. The C-forms aren't USF men at all. They're part of a student exchange program—Earth gets a few specialists in power kernels, the USF gets a few C-forms."

"What do you think of them?"

"The best thing to hit space since the cheap vacuum still. It's only the unions who are holding things up. Job worries." He looked at the read-out at his wrist. "Hold on now, we're cutting ties."

As the ship began the slow spiral away from parking orbit, Wolf switched on the small news screen set above the couch. Movement about the cabins would be restricted during the high-impulse phase of the next hour. He turned to the news channel.

The media had picked up from somewhere a surmise that John Larsen was missing. It was a small item, far down on the news priorities. More to the public interest were the latest statements on the social indicators. They were still oscillating, with swings of increasing amplitude. Even with the power kernel beaming down to Quito, energy was still desperately short in South America. The famine deaths were rising rapidly in northern Europe. Compared with the mounting crisis that faced the General Coordinators, Bey realized that his own preoccupations were a tiny detail. But he could not rid his mind of Larsen's question. Given all this, why was Capman as much on his mind now as he had been four years before?

From where he was lying, Wolf could see ahead into the pilot's station. The computer could handle most things, but the man preferred to operate in manual mode for the beginning of the trip. It was another C-form, added proof that events were moving faster than the union wished. The pilot, hands and prehensile feet delicate masses of divided digits, was manipulating sixty controls simultaneously. Bey watched in fascination, while his thoughts continued to revolve around the same old issues.

After the first, surprising moonquake, the second construction of Tycho City had placed the living quarters deep underground. Bey, vacuum-suited, rode the high-speed elevator down through the Horstmann Fissure, towards the main city more than three kilometers below. He left it at the optional exit point, halfway down, and walked over to the edge of the ledge. The preserved body of Horstmann, still sealed in his spacesuit, hung from the old pitons fixed in the fissure wall. Wolf looked at the Geiger counter next to the suited figure. The rapid chatter carried clearly to him through the hard rock surface. The half-life of the nucleides was less than ten years, but Horstmann would be too hot to touch for at least another century. The radioactivity could have been lessened more quickly by stimulated nuclear transitions, as was done with the usual reactor wastes, but the Lunar authorities were against that idea. Bey read the commemorative metal plaque again, then continued his descent through the fissure.

Park Green had managed to pull strings with Immigration and Customs. The reception formalities were smooth and very brief. Green's grinning face, towering a good foot above the other waiting USF citizens, greeted Wolf as he emerged from the third and final interlock.

"Bey, you don't know the trouble you caused me," he began, as he engulfed Wolf's hand in his own. "I didn't know how well-known you are. As soon as our people who've been working on regeneration methods found out that you were heading for Tycho City, they started to flood me with calls. They all want to know how long you'll be staying, what you'll be doing, the whole bit. I had a hard time stalling them. They want to meet you and talk about the work that you began a couple of years ago on transitional forms."

Wolf was a little startled. "They know about that work up here? I didn't think it was particularly surprising. All I did was follow up some of the clues that were buried in Capman's work. He had the idea."

"People up here don't seem to agree. If the clues were there, they must have been well hidden. Are you willing to spend some time with them? All they—"

"Look, Park, in other circumstances I'd be glad to," broke in Bey, "but we have no time for that now. Did you get the ship?"

"I think so—it will be a few hours before I know for certain. I've had a problem with that, too. All the forms I've filled out require an actual destination before you can get clearance for any trip longer than a couple of hundred hours. I checked your license, so at least that seemed all right."

"What did you tell them for a destination? Nothing specific, right?"

"I think that should be easy enough. I booked for the Grand Tour, all the way through the Inner, Middle and Outer System, right out to the Halo. Once that's approved, there'll be enough fuel and supplies on her to take her anywhere in the Solar System. One thing you ought to know, I charged it all to you—I don't have the credit for it."

"How much?"

Wolf winced at the figure.

"If all this works out," he said, "I'll get everything back. Otherwise, I'll be a slave to the USF for the rest of my life. Well, let's worry about that later."

As they spoke, Green led the way through the long corridor that led to the final clearing section before the main living quarters. He was sliding along in the fast, economical lope that all USF people acquired in early childhood. Wolf, not too successfully, tried to imitate it. The floor of fused rock felt slippery beneath his feet, and he had the curious feeling that the lunar gravity was a little lower than it had been on his last trip to Tycho City, many years before.

"No," said Green in answer to his question. "I think that physics here may be a little ahead of anywhere else in the System, but we still don't have an efficient generator. Gravity's one thing we haven't tamed so far. McAndrew came up with a method, a long time ago, for using shielded kernels for local gravity adjustments, and that's as far as anyone has been able to go. Nobody's willing to try even that much, down on a planetary surface. What you're feeling is a change in oxygen content. We put it a fraction of a percent higher about three years ago. You'll find that you get used to it in a couple of days."

"A couple of days! Park, I have no intention of being here in a couple of days. I want to be well on the way to the Cluster. When can the ship leave? I hope it's today."

Green stopped and looked at Wolf quizzically. "Bey, you're dreaming. You just don't know the problems. First, there's no way they can get a ship ready in less than seventy-two hours. Damn it, it has to be equipped to support the two of us on a two-year trip—that's how long the Grand Tour can take. I know we're not really going on that, but they're getting her ready for it. Second—"

"What do you mean, support the two of us? Park, I'm not dragging you on this trip. It's a risky game, that far out of the usual System ship routes, and it may all be a complete waste of time. I'm going solo."

Green had listened calmly, towering way above Wolf. He shook his head.

"Bey, you're a real expert on form-change, I'll be the first to admit that. But you're a baby when it comes to space operations. Oh, don't say it—I know very well that you have your license. That's just the beginning. It means you're toilet-trained in space—not that you're ready to hare off around the System on your own. I'm telling you, no matter how confident you feel about your ability to look after yourself, the owners wouldn't agree. There's no way they'd even let you get near that ship unless I go with you—not once around the Moon, never mind the Grand Tour. It's got to be me, or you'll find they push some other USF pilot on to you—somebody you don't even know."

Wolf looked at Green's calm confidence. It was obvious that the big man was telling the truth. He shrugged, and resigned himself to the inevitable.

"It wasn't what I had in mind, Park. I wasn't proposing to drag you into all this when I asked you to help in checking Ling's records up here."

Green smiled slightly, and shook his head. "Bey, you still don't understand it, do you? I'm not going along because I'm a kind-hearted martyr. I'm going along because I want to. Damn it, don't you realize that I've been itching to know what's been going on with John back on Earth, since the minute that I set out to come back to Tycho City? You could almost say that it was my fault that John ever got changed to a Logian form. If I'd been a bit smarter, and known what was happening, I might have been able to talk him out of injecting Logian DNA into himself. Get rid of the idea that I'm going along for your sake."

Wolf was staring up at the other's earnest face. "Sorry, Park," he said in a subdued voice. "I let my own compulsions blind me to everybody else's. You deserve to come along. I still wish we could beat that figure of seventy-two hours. I didn't plan on spending anything near that long here in Tycho City."

Green was smiling again. "You'll need that much time to prepare. And you still owe me some explanations. Your message from the ship set a new high for being cryptic. We're getting ready to go right out of the System and you still haven't told me why. I heard that John has disappeared, and I know the two things are connected."

"We're not going out of the System, Park, just to the Egyptian Cluster."

"Same thing, to a USF-er. Technically, you're right, of course. The System goes all the way out to the long-period comet aphelia. But so far as anybody in the USF is concerned, when you go to an orbit plane that far off the plane of the ecliptic, you might as well be right out of the System. The delta-v you need is so big, and there are so few things of interest up there. We just don't bother to do it very often. Do you know, I've never even met anybody who has been to a member of the Egyptian Cluster. I've been looking up the facts on it ever since you called me from the ship. I still can't imagine why you want to go there."

They were approaching the big, hemispherical chamber that marked the city edge. Beyond it, slideways led to the separate centers for manufacturing, maintenance, utilities and habitation. Agriculture and power were located back up on the surface, thirty-five hundred meters above their heads.

"I'll brief you on all the background as soon as we're settled in here," said Bey. "That won't take me more than a few hours. I don't know what plans you have to spend the rest of the time before we can leave, but I'd like to have another go at the data banks. There may still be things in there that I missed last time, on Capman's activities here as Karl Ling."

"You'll have time for that. There will be other things, too." Green pointed ahead of them, to where a small group of men and women was standing by a wall terminal. "There's your fan club. I'm sorry, Bey, but I couldn't stop it. Those are the Tycho City experts on regeneration methods. They want to hold a reception later in your honor, and nothing I've said has managed to dissuade them. You see the price of fame? Now, are you too tired, or shall we be nice to them while you're here?"

Chapter 19

The Explanatory Supplement to the Ephemeris, 2190 Edition, lists the mean orbital inclination for the asteroids of the Egyptian Cluster as fifty-eight degrees and forty-seven minutes to the plane of the ecliptic. The Cluster's physical data are given at the very end of the reference section, a fair measure of its relative importance in the planetary scheme of things. All Cluster members have perihelion distances of about three hundred million kilometers, strongly supporting the idea of a common origin even though any clustering in a purely spatial sense has long since been dissipated. Pearl, with an almost circular orbit, crosses the ecliptic near the first point of Aries. Unfortunately she was riding high, far south of that, when Wolf and Green finally set out.

"Nearly a hundred and thirty million kilometers, Bey," grumbled Green, hunched over the displays. "It will take more fuel to get us there than it would to take us to Neptune. I hope you're right in all those guesses."

Wolf was prowling restlessly through the ship, savoring the half-gee acceleration and inspecting everything as he went.

"You say it would take just as much fuel, Park, if Pearl were heading through the ecliptic right now. All we would save is a little time. If I'm wrong on the rest of it, we'll have wasted a few weeks each."

He paused by the radiation-shielded enclosure, eyeing it speculatively.

"It's a pity that doesn't have a form-change tank inside it," he went on. "This ship is plenty big enough to carry the equipment, if there were a suitable tank."

Green looked up briefly. "Remember, Bey, C-forms are still illegal here."

"I know. I was just thinking that we could really use one now, to slow down our metabolisms a few times. The Timeset form would do us nicely. How's the fuel supply look? Any problem?"

"No. We could do this twice if we had to. I told the provisioners that we might want to do some unusual out-of-ecliptic maneuvers during the trip. They gave us the biggest reserves the ship can hold."

Green finished his final checking of the trajectory, and straightened up. He looked at Wolf, who was still eyeing the closed compartment.

"Eyes off, Bey. You know the USF is ultra-cautious on the use of C-form experiments. Really, you can't blame us. People are precious out here. We don't have a few billion to spare, the way that you do down on Earth. We'll let you do the wild experiments. It will be a few years before we're ready to play with the form Capman developed in Project Timeset. Meanwhile, we've got our own methods. Did you take a good look yet at the sleeping quarters?"

"A quick look. They're tolerable. I was going there next, to look at a few bits of equipment that I didn't recognize. The place looked very cluttered. Why not use one compartment, and save on space?"

"That's what I mean, Bey." Green switched off the display, and swung the seat around. The legroom at the trajectory monitor had been meant for someone two feet shorter. He stretched his long limbs straight out in front of him.