Sight of Proteus

by Charles Sheffield

  Chapter 7

  Take the toughest and seediest of the twentieth century urban ghettos. Age it for two hundred years, and season it with a random hodge-podge of over- and under-ground structures. Populate it with the poorest of the poor, and throw in for good measure the worst failures of the form-change experiments. You have Old City, where the law walked cautiously by day, and seldom by night. Bey Wolf and John Larsen, armed with cold lights, stun-guns and trace sensor, emerged from the long underground corridor just as first dusk was falling. They looked around them cautiously, then began to follow the steady arrow of the tracer, deeper into Old City.

  The evidence of poverty was all around, in the cracked, garbage-strewn pavements, the neglected buildings, and the complete absence of slideways. Travel was on foot, or in ancient wheeled vehicles, without automatic controls or safety mechanisms.

  "Let's agree on one thing, John," said Wolf, peering about him with great interest. "While we're hunting Capman, we'll not be worrying too much about the usual forbidden forms. For one thing, I expect we'll see more of them here than we've ever seen before. Look there, for example."

  He pointed down the side alley they were passing. Larsen saw a hulking ursine form, standing next to a tiny, rounded man, not more than two feet tall. They had a reel of monofilament thread, which they were carefully unwinding and attaching to a frame of metal bars. Wolf kept walking.

  "Run into that", he said, "and it would shear you in two, before you knew you'd been cut. They're obviously setting a trap. It's not for us, but we'd better watch how we go in here."

  Larsen needed no reminding of that fact. His eyes tried to move in all directions at once, and he kept his hand close to his stun-gun.

  "They don't look much like failed attempts at the usual commercial forms, Bey," he said. "I suppose that's what happens when some poor devil who's really twisted in the head gets hold of a form-change machine."

  Wolf nodded. "They probably try and fight against taking those forms with their conscious minds, but something underneath dictates their shapes. Maybe in another hundred years we'll understand what makes them do it."

  As he spoke, Wolf was coolly assessing all that he saw, and storing it away for future reference. Old City was off-limits for all but real emergencies, and he was making the most of a rare opportunity. They hurried on through the darkening streets, becoming aware for the first time of the absence of streetlights. Soon, it was necessary to use the cold lights to show their path. The tracer arrow held its steady direction. As night fell, the inhabitants of Old City who shunned the day began to appear. Larsen held tighter to the handle of his gun as the sights and sounds around them became more alien.

  They finally reached a long, inclined ramp, leading them again below ground level. Larsen checked the tracer, and they continued slowly downward. Their lights lit up the tunnel for ten yards or so, and beyond that was total blackness. A grey reptilian form with a musty odor slid away from them down a side passage, and ahead of them they heard a chitinous scratching and scuttling as something hurried away into the deeper shadows. Wolf stopped, startled.

  "That's one to tell them about back at the office. Unless I'm going mad, we've just seen someone who has developed an exoskeleton. I wonder if he has kept a vertebrate structure with it?"

  Larsen did not reply. He lacked Wolf's clinical attitude, and he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with their quest. They moved on, and the surroundings became damp and glistening as the ramp narrowed to an earth-walled tunnel with a dirt floor. Ahead of them, a slender figure mewled faintly and slithered away with a serpentine motion down another side passage.

  Wolf suddenly stopped, and fingered the metal shaft of the tracer he was holding. "Damn it, John, is it my imagination, or is this thing getting hot?"

  "Could be. I think the same thing is happening to the gun and the flashlight. I noticed it a few yards back."

  "We must have run into an induction field. If it gets any stronger, we won't be able to carry metal with us. Let's keep going for a few more meters."

  They moved on slowly, but it was soon apparent that the field was strengthening. They backed up again for a counsel of war.

  "The tracer signal is really strong now, John," said Wolf. "Capman can't be far ahead of us. Let's leave all the metal objects here and scout ahead for another fifty meters. If we don't spot him after that, we'll have to give up."

  Both men were feeling the strain. In good light, Wolf would have seen the reaction that his suggestion had produced in Larsen. As it was, he heard a very faint assent, and leaving guns, lights and trace sensor behind they went on into the darkness, yard by cautious yard.

  Suddenly, Larsen stopped. "Bey." His voice was a faint whisper. "Can you hear something up ahead?"

  Wolf strained his ears. He could hear nothing.

  "It sounded like a groan, Bey. There, again. Now do you hear it?"

  "I think so. Quietly now, and carefully. It's only a few yards in front of us."

  They crept on through the musty darkness. They heard another low groan, then heavy and painful breathing. Suddenly, a weak voice reached them through the gloom.

  "Who's there? Stay where you are and for God's sake don't come any closer."

  "Capman? This is Wolf and Larsen. Where are you?"

  "Down here, in the pit. Be careful where you tread. Wait a second. I'll show you where it's safe to go."

  A thin beam of light appeared, coming from the floor in front of them. They moved hesitantly forward and found themselves standing at the edge of a twelve-foot drop. At the base of it they could see Capman lying helpless, limbs contorted. He was holding a small flashlight and shining it towards them.

  "This pit wasn't here a couple of days ago," he said faintly. "It must have been dug by one of the modified forms that live in these tunnels. A big one, I think. It came this way a few minutes ago, then went away again. That way."

  He shone the flashlight along the bottom of the pit. They could see a large tunnel running away from the base of it. Capman seemed weak and obviously in pain, but he was still perfectly rational and composed.

  "If it survives down here it's probably carnivorous," he said. "I wonder what the basic form is?"

  Wolf was astonished to hear a note of genuine intellectual curiosity in Capman's tone. He advanced closer to the edge and tried to see further along the tunnel in the pit.

  "I don't know what you can do to help me," went on Capman calmly. "If you can't get me out, it's vital that I give my records to you. I should have left them at the hospital. They are a crucial part of the description of the work I've been doing. Make sure they get into the right hands."

  He broke off suddenly and swung the light back along the wall of the pit. "I think it's coming back. Here, I'm going to try and throw this spool up to you. Step nearer to the edge. I'm not sure how well I can throw from this position."

  Capman shone the flashlight on the wall of the pit, to give a diffuse light above, and threw a small spool awkwardly upward. Reaching far out, almost to the point of over-balancing, Larsen managed to make a snatching, one-handed catch. Capman sighed with relief and pain, and sank back to the dirt floor. They could hear a deep grunting, and a scrambling noise was approaching along the pit tunnel. While they watched in horror, Capman remained astonishingly cool.

  "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 reflec
tive 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?"