Sight of Proteus (26 page)

Bey was shaking his head sadly. "I knew there had to be something strange about the com system that you put in the tank back on Earth—there was no reason for it to have such a big capacity. But I never thought of anything like this."

"You would have, if we had used it much. It was one of the things that worried me when John was using that mode to send me information when I was on Pearl: would somebody notice the comlink load and start to investigate it? I don't think anyone did, but as you well know there is really no such thing as a completely secret operation. You always need to send and store data, and sometime that will give you away. John tried to be careful, but it was still a danger."

Bey sat down on the bench next to the communicator screen. "I don't know who could have discovered you. I tried to guess what was happening, and I think I know a part of it—but it's only a part. I assume that John knows the whole story?"

"He deduced it for himself, within a couple of days after assuming the Logian form. His powers of logic had increased so much that I couldn't believe it at first. Now, I have observed it in myself also."

There was another flicker of light from the screen in front of Capman.

"John will be in voice communication in a couple of minutes," he said. "He's very busy making the last minute checks on the ship."

"I heard you say he would be making atmospheric entry. Surely he can't survive on Saturn? The form he is in was designed for Loge, and I assume that he's still in that."

"He is—but don't worry. The ship he's in has some special features, as does this one. You can see his ship from here, if you look ahead of you. He's already in the upper atmosphere, and the fusion drive is on."

Bey looked at the forward screen. A streak of phosphorescence was moving steadily across the upper atmosphere of the planet. As he watched, it brightened appreciably. The ship was moving deeper into the tenuous gases high above Saturn's surface. In a few minutes more, ionization would begin to interfere with radio communications. Bey felt a sense of relief when the second channel light went on, and a second image screen became active.

The two Logian forms were very similar, too similar for Bey to distinguish by a rapid inspection. However, there were other factors that made identification easy. The second figure was festooned with intravenous injectors and electronic condition monitors. It raised one arm in greeting.

"Sorry I couldn't stay up there to greet you, Bey," said John Larsen. "We're working on a very tight entry window. I want to descend as near as possible to one place on the planet. We've calculated the optimum location for low winds and turbulence."

"John. You can't survive down there."

"I think I can. We have no intention of committing suicide. This ship has been modified past anything you've ever seen before. It will monitor the outside conditions, and keep the form-change programs going that will let me adapt to them. The rate of descent can be controlled, so that I can go down very slowly if necessary," John Larsen's Logian form sounded confident and cheerful. "Well, Bey, you've had a while to think on the way out here. How much of it have you been able to deduce?"

Bey looked at the two forms, each on their separate screens. "The basic facts about what's been going on for the past forty years. Those are fairly clear to me now. But I don't have any real idea of motives. I assume you know those too, John?"

"I do. But if it's any consolation to you, I had to be told them. I don't think they are amenable to pure logic."

"I agree," cut in Capman. "You would have to know some of Earth's hidden history, before you can understand why I would rather be thought of as a murderer than have the truth known about the experiments. I am curious to see how far your own logic has taken you. What do you know about my work?"

"I know you're not a murderer—but it took me long enough to realize it. I understand all four of your projects now. Proteus was the basic space-going forms, and Timeset was the form that allows a change of rate for the life process. I knew about them four years ago. I assume that Lungfish is Betha Mestel. She's about to go out into a new living environment—interstellar space. How long will she be away?"

Capman shrugged. "We are not sure. Perhaps two or three hundred years. She was always an independent spirit. She will return when she feels that it is useful for her to do so. Pearl was arranged to be completely self-contained. Fusion powered internal lighting takes care of the illumination for the algal tanks when sunlight is too weak for growth—and Betha has a supply of the Logian virus, in case she becomes bored with the potential of her present form and wants to try a change."

"I hope I'm around to see her come back," said Bey. "I now think that's a real possibility. You know, John, I didn't follow my first instincts when you told me about that liver in Central Hospital. My first thought was that it must have come from a very old person, one so old that he had not been given the chromosome ID. That would have made him over a hundred, and I decided that no one would use a hundred-year-old liver for a transplant. Then we got an age estimate from Morris in the Transplant Department, and that showed a young liver. That seemed to be the end of the original thought. But it wasn't. Correct?"

"It was not." Capman nodded. "As usual, your instincts were good."

"The only project we haven't accounted for was Project Janus," went on Bey. "I should have realized that you gave your projects names that told something about the work you were doing. And Janus was the two-faced god, the one who could look both ways. You had developed a form-change program that could 'look both ways' in time. It could advance or reverse the aging process. The liver we found was from a very old person, who had undergone age reversal as a result of your work. Right?"

Capman's big eyes were hooded by their heavy lids. He was reliving another period of his life, rocking slowly back and forwards in his seat. He nodded. "It was from an old person. Worse than that, it was from an old friend. I could not prevent some of those experiments ending in failure."

Bey was looking on sympathetically. "You can't blame yourself for the failures. Not everything can succeed. I assume that all the people who were used in those experiments were your old friends? But they knew the risks, and they had nothing at all to lose."

Capman nodded again. "They had all reached a point where the feedback machines could not maintain a healthy condition. They had a choice. A conventional and rapid death, or the chance to risk what remained of their lives in the experiments. As you know, the compulsions we used to achieve form-change were extreme, but even so they did not always work. Let me assure you, the knowledge that their deaths were inevitable did not lessen the loss. When someone died in the experiments, I had killed an old friend. There was no escape from that feeling."

"I can understand that. What I can't follow is your reluctance to share the burden. No one who understood your work would have blamed you for what you were doing. Your friends were volunteers. This is the piece I can't follow. Why did you choose to keep everything a secret—even after your first discovery? Why was it necessary to have a hidden lab, away from the Earth?"

Capman was still nodding, slowly and thoughtfully. He sighed. "As you say, Mr. Wolf, that is the key question. In a real sense, I did not make that decision. I am known to the System as a mass murderer, the monster of the century. It is not a role I sought; it was forced upon me. I could even argue that the real villains are Laszlo Dolmetsch, or Betha Melford. But I don't believe it."

"Betha Melford? You mean Betha Mestel?"

"The same person. I tend to call her by the name she had before her bond with Mestel."

"What did you think of her, Bey?" broke in Larsen. "You must have met her on Pearl."

"I did. I think she's marvellous, and I can't help wondering what she looked like before the form-changes. Betha Melford. Is she related to the Melfords?"

"She is Ergan Melford's only surviving heir. Every form-change royalty that BEC collects contributes two percent to Betha." Capman paused again, briefly carried into the past. "The merger with the Mestel fortunes made her the single most influential person on Earth, but she always knew the importance of keeping that hidden."

"And now, she has given all that up?" asked Bey.

"She did that a number of years ago. Betha is almost a hundred and thirty years old, and when we embarked on the age reversal experiments she had no way of knowing if she would survive them. Her financial interests are managed by a small group of people, on Earth and in the USF."

"Including you?"

Capman nodded. "Including me—and also including Dolmetsch. I told you that there are pieces of history that you need before you could hope to really know what has been going on. None of that has ever been written down. My own involvement began soon after I came back from studies in Europe, when I was still a student. I had just begun work at the Melford Foundation . . ."

Chapter 24

"There you are Robert. I wondered where you were hiding away."

The woman was tall and elegantly dressed, with grey-streaked dark hair piled high on her head. She emerged from the tightly-packed crowd of people and came over to the young man standing uncertainly in the corner of the room.

"I'm sorry," she went on. "I talked you into coming here, then I walked out on you before I'd had the chance to introduce you to the one person I really wanted you to meet."

"I've been all right, Betha."

"Yes, standing on your own here in the corner. You don't even have a drink."

"I don't drink."

"I know that, Robert. You need one as a defense mechanism, until you learn what to do with your hands. Come on. I'm going to get you with someone you can actually talk to. I know you think all the rest of them here are just parasites. They are, too—but I'm old enough not to let it show."

She led the way back through the noisy crowd of people, out through the double doors that opened onto a wide terrace. Beyond that lay the calm, rolling lawns of the Melford estate. Sitting on the terrace wall, and staring out across the grounds, was another young man, scarcely as old as Robert Capman.

"Robert," said Betha. "This is Laszlo Dolmetsch. You two will hate each other at first, but you have to get to know one another."

The other had swung around at the sound of her voice. He scowled, a deep frown on the sloping forehead that rose above the deep eye sockets and big, beaky nose.

Betha Melford shook her head. "You two deserve each other. Neither one of you has the faintest idea of the social graces. Ah well, you'll learn. I'm going back inside now. Come and look for me when you can't stand each other's company any longer."

Robert Capman looked at her uncertainly, as she turned in a swirl of natural silk and headed back in through the heavy doors. The other youth was looking just as uncomfortable. Capman advanced to the edge of the terrace, and sat down on the low wall.

"Any idea what all this is about?" he said guardedly.

Dolmetsch shook his head. "Not unless you're in econometric models. My father has known Betha for years, but she was the one who talked me into coming here tonight. She said it would be interesting." His tone was bitter. "So far, she's been dead wrong. That lot in there don't have the brain of a sponge, between them."

"I know. Look, have you ever worked in form-change theory? I thought that's what Betha meant when she said we should talk to each other."

"Never." The other's voice showed a quickening of interest. "It does have some relevance to what I'm doing, though. I'm developing a method of estimating the effect of technological changes on social systems. You know, usually a technological change happens, and it produces a social change that no one ever expected. Like the printing press, or the automobile—they led to social change, even though they were introduced as just technical inventions."

"Like the telephone, or the computer."

"Right." Laszlo Dolmetsch nodded vigorously. "Or like form-change. You see, if I'm right, that's a technological instrument that will produce the biggest social changes ever—and that means it has to be handled really carefully. Look, do you understand catastrophe theory?"

"Sure. I've had to re-parameterize it for the biological work I've been doing, but the theory is all the same."

"All right. Now, how far can form-change go? If you can tell me that, I'll tell you how to estimate the sociological impacts."

"You mean you have a general theory?"

"I wish I did. No, there's still a lot of empirical fitting in there. But I can tell you pretty well what the stabilizing and the de-stabilizing effects of changes will be. So, what are the limits for form-change? I can't get a clear idea from the literature."

Robert Capman took a deep breath. "I'm sure you can't. If I'm correct, nobody knows—and they are all ultra-conservative in their thinking. Did you ever get into representation theory?"

"A fair amount." Dolmetsch moved a little closer along the terrace wall. "Go ahead, I'll tell you if you start to lose me."

"All right. First, let me tell you where the current thinking stops, then let me show you how it all generalizes. I'm going to take off from Ergan Melford's original experimental results on biological feedback . . ."

* * *

It was well past dawn when Betha Melford came back onto the low terrace. She stood in silence for a few minutes, listening to the conversation. Capman and Dolmetsch had looked across at her briefly when she came through from the house, then immediately returned to their discussions.

"I'm going to bed," she announced. "Everyone else has left, and there is a hot breakfast in the west wing dining-room. When you two finally get done, remind me to tell you about the Lunar Club."

She sighed. It was no use. Neither was listening to her. It was nice to have her instincts confirmed so well, she thought, as she went back into the house.

* * *

"That was the beginning," said Capman, looking far back across the years. "We realized after that first night that we had to work together. As soon as I had the form-change ideas into a suitable form, we began to feed them into Dolmetsch's programs that modelled the Earth and USF economies. The results were depressing. Most of the changes that I wanted to explore were destabilizing, and some of them were completely catastrophic. The worst one of all was the age-reversal change. A few people might get to live a lot longer, but as soon as the news got out, the economy would blow up."