Sight of Proteus

by Charles Sheffield

  The other two hovered about in impotent excitement. Until they had matched and docked it was a one-man job and they could do nothing more useful than speculate on their trophy. Grimy and worn, all three looked like men who had endured more than two years of solar flares and radiation storms, celibacy and grinding boredom. Soon, it would all be worth it. If this one held up, if it were the big one, all the pain would have been nothing. Wine, women and song would be soon on the way.

  "I've got a radioactivity count coming in now," announced Laferte suddenly. "I'm tuning for the 15 MeV dipole transition from Asfanium. Keep your eye on the counter. If it hits forty or better, it's the jackpot."

  The digital read-out was climbing steadily. At twenty the lock-on failed and they lost it for a second. Laferte swore, bent again over the control panel, and re-calibrated frantically. It homed in again, began to record, and climbed steadily. Past twenty, to thirty, to forty, and it was still moving upwards. The three men shouted together, and Manaur and Prek joined hands and began a curious Walrus-and-Carpenter dance. It was about all that could be managed in the tight combination of free-fall and confined space. The future was a rosy glow, full of wealth, high living and excitement. Old Loge may have been gone for a long time, but there was enough of him left to come back home and gladden a few hearts.

  * * *

  ". . . looking for transuranics," said Green. "Maybe you don't realize it, but the only natural source in the Solar System is still the fragments of Loge that come back in as long-period comets. The Grabbers just sit out there and monitor using deep radar. One decent find and they are made for life."

  "And the Jason hit a good one, I assume," said Wolf. "I couldn't believe their credit when I saw the records."

  "A real big one," agreed Green. "They hit about three months ago, and it was packed with Asfanium and Polkium, elements 112 and 114. They crunched the fragment for the transuranics and came in to Tycho City a month ago, all as rich as Karkov and Melford. They started to celebrate, and three weeks ago they came down to Earth to keep up the fun. We lost touch with them then, and don't know what they did. We didn't worry. No Belter would live on Earth, and we knew they'd be back when the fleshpots palled. You can probably guess what they did next."

  Wolf nodded. "I think I can, but I'd like to see where you are heading. Keep going."

  "They came to Earth," continued Green. "Now, I saw them in Gippo's bar a couple of days before they left the Moon. They looked terrible. You can imagine it, a couple of years of hardship in space, then a celebration you wouldn't believe when they reached Tycho City. If you came to Earth in that condition, wouldn't you find it tempting to hook-up for a super-fast conditioning session with a bio-feedback machine? It's not very illegal, and it would get you back to tip-top physical condition faster than anything else. Costs a bit, but they were rolling in money."

  "And easy to arrange," said Wolf. "I know a thousand places where you could do it. They don't have fancy form-change equipment there, but you're talking about something rather trivial. It makes good sense—but it wouldn't explain the forms they were in when they were found off Guam. You couldn't get to those without a fully-equipped change center. Now let me tie in our side of it, and see what you think."

  He pressed the inter-office communicator and asked Larsen to join them.

  "I'm going to ask you this cold, John," he said when Larsen entered the room. "Is Robert Capman dead?"

  "I thought he was four years ago," replied Larsen. He sighed and shrugged his shoulders. "Now, I'm not so sure." He turned to the USF man. "Bey has always been convinced that it was a set-up, and he has me halfway persuaded. I must admit it had the makings of one, but he hasn't been heard of for four years, ever since he disappeared. I agree with Bey on one thing, though, the Guam forms have just the right look to be a Capman product."

  "They certainly do," said Bey. He turned to Park Green, who was looking very puzzled. "How much do you know about Capman, and what he did?"

  Green thought for a moment before he replied, his high forehead wrinkling in thought.

  "All I can really tell you is what we hear in Tycho City," he said at last. "Capman was a great man here on Earth, a genius who invented the C-forms, the ones that are adapted for life in space. According to the stories, though, he did it by using human children in his experiments. A bunch of them died, and finally Capman was found out. He tried to escape, and died himself as he was trying to get away. Are you telling me there's more to it than that?"

  "I think there is," said Bey. "For one thing, it was John and I who handled that case and found out what Capman was doing. Do you have strong personal feelings against him?"

  "How could I? I never knew him and all the things I've heard are not things I know about personally. If he was really using children, of course I have to be against that. Look, what's it got to do with me?"

  "That's a fair question." Wolf paced about in front of Park Green's seated figure, his head scarcely higher than Green's despite their different postures. "You have to see how my thoughts have been running. Earth's greatest-ever expert on form-change, maybe still alive, maybe in hiding. Along comes a set of changes that seem to defy all logic, that don't conform to any known models. It could be Capman, up to his old tricks again. But even if it isn't, Capman would be the ideal man to work with on this. I should have added one other thing; neither John nor I ever met a man, before or since, who impressed us as much with his sheer brainpower."

  Green wriggled uneasily in his seat, still uncomfortable in the higher gravity. "I know you're selling me something, but I haven't figured out what it is. What are you leading up to?"

  "Just this." Wolf halted directly in front of Park Green. "I want to find Robert Capman—for several reasons. We think he's not down here on Earth—hasn't been for the past four years. Will you help me reach him? I don't know if he's on the Moon, out in the Belt, or somewhere further out. I do know that I can't get messages broadcast to the rest of the Solar System unless I have USF assistance."

  Green nodded understandingly. "I can't give you an instant answer," he replied. "You're asking for a healthy chunk of communication assist, and that costs money."

  "Charge it to this office. My budget can stand it."

  "And I'll have to check it out on a policy level with Ambassador Brodin. He's down in Paraguay, and you know Brodin, he won't agree to anything unless you ask favors in person." He stood up, stretched, and inflated his sixty-inch chest with a deep, yawning breath. "I'd better get to it before I fall asleep—we're on a different clock in Tycho City. What's the best way to travel to Paraguay?"

  "Through the Mattin Link. There's an exit point in Argentina, then you'll go the rest of the way by local flier. We can be at the Madrid link in ten minutes, and you'll be to Argentina in two jumps. Come on, John and I will get you to the entry point."

  "I'd appreciate that. I've really had trouble getting used to the complexity of your system down here. We only have four entry points for the whole Moon, and you have twenty. Is it true that you'll have more in a few years?"

  It was not true, explained Wolf as they hurried out, and it would never be. The Mattin Link system offers direct and instantaneous transmission between any adjacent pair of entry points, but the number and placing of those access stations is very rigid. With perfect symmetry required for any entry point with respect to all others, the configuration of the system must correspond to the vertices of one of the five regular solids. Plato would have loved it.

  The dodecahedral arrangement, with its twenty vertices on the surface of the Earth, is the biggest single system that can ever be made. The Lunar system is the simplest, with just four entry points set at the vertices of a regular tetrahedron. The intermediate arrangements, with cubic, octahedral and icosahedral symmetry, have never been used, but could be made without difficulty. Mattin Links away from planetary surfaces would be immensely attractive for transportation, but they are impractical because of constantly changing distances.

 
; Gerald Mattin, the embittered genius who had dreamed of a system for instantaneous energy-free transfer between any two points, anywhere, died during the first successful tests of the concept. The system that came from his work is far from energy-free—because the Earth is not a homogeneous sphere, and because space-time is slightly curved near its surface. Mattin had derived an energy-free solution defined for an exact geometry in a flat space-time, and no one had ever succeeded in generalizing his analysis to other useful cases.

  Mattin's death came twenty years before the decision to build the first Mattin Link system on the surface of a planet, twenty-five years before the first university was named after him, thirty years before the first statue.

  Chapter 12

  "We have a go-ahead now, but I had to bargain my soul away to squeeze it out of the Ambassador. I don't want to waste all that work. Where do we go from here?"

  Park Green was back in Wolf's office, shoes off, long legs stretched out. The general confusion of the place had worsened. Computer listings, empty food trays, and maps were scattered on every flat surface. Wolf and Larsen were again standing by the wall display, plotting the Mattin Link access from both the Mariana Trench entry point and the spaceport entry point in Australia. Wolf read off the results before he replied to Green's question.

  "North Australia direct to the Marianas—so they could have gone there direct from the spaceport, except that we know they didn't. The Mariana entry point connects direct to North China, Hawaii, and back of course to North Australia. None of those are promising. There's no big form-change lab anywhere near any of them. What do you think, John?"

  Larsen scratched his head thoughtfully. "Two possibilities. Either your hunch about the use of the Link system is all wrong, or the people who moved the Mariana Monsters to Guam did more than one jump in the system. Where do we get with two jumps?"

  Wolf read out the connections, and shook his head.

  "That takes us a lot further afield. With two jumps you can get almost anywhere from a Marianas starting point. Up to the North Pole, down to Cap City at the South Pole, into India, up to North America—it's a mess."

  Wolf put down the display control and came over to where Park Green was sitting.

  "I'm more convinced than ever that we need Robert Capman's help," he said. "We still don't know what was happening when they died. They started on some form-change program and somewhere along the line it went wrong. I wish I could ask Capman how."

  "You never answered my question, you know," said Green. "What do we do next? Where do we go from here? Advertising for Capman won't solve your problem—he'll be regarded as a mass murderer if he ever does show up on Earth."

  "I think I can produce a message that he will recognize and be intrigued by, but other people won't understand," answered Wolf. "As for protecting him if he does show up, I'm not worried about that. I feel sure that he'll have found ways to cover himself in the past four years. I've got another worry of my own. I have no way of knowing how urgent this thing is. It could be a once-in-a-lifetime accident that will never happen again, or it could be the beginning of some kind of general plague. We think it isn't contagious, but we have no proof of it. Until we know what we're dealing with, I have to assume the worst. Let me take a crack at that message."

  The final announcement was short and simple. It went out on a general broadcast over all media to the fourteen billion on Earth, and by boosted transmission to the scattered citizens of the United Space Federation. The signal would be picked up all the way out past Neptune, and a repeater station would even make it accessible to parts of the outer system Halo.

  "To R.S.C. I badly need the talents that caused me to pursue you four years ago through the byways of Old City. I promise you a problem worthy of your powers. Behrooz Wolf."

  * * *

  Troubles were mounting. Bey spent many hours with a representative of BEC, who insisted on presenting more confidential records to prove that the company had no connection with the monster forms. The Central Coordinators' office sent him a terse message, asking if there would be other deaths of the same type, and if so, when, where and how many? Park Green was getting the same sort of pressure from the USF. Unlike Bey Wolf, he had little experience of that kind of needling. He spent a good part of his time sitting in Bey's office, gloomily biting his nails and trying to construct positively worded replies with no information content.

  Two days of vagueness brought a stronger response from Tycho City. Bey arrived in his office early and found a small, neatly dressed man standing by the communicator. His clothes were USF style, and he was calling out personnel records for the three crew members of the Jason. He turned around quickly as Bey entered, but there was no sign of embarrassment at being discovered using Bey's office without invitation.

  He looked at Bey closely before he spoke.

  "Mr. Green?" The voice was like the person, small and precise, and offered more of a statement than a question.

  "No, he'll be in later. I'm Behrooz Wolf, and I'm head of the Office of Form Control. What can I do for you?" Bey was suddenly conscious of his own casual appearance and uncombed hair.

  The little man drew himself up to his full height.

  "I am Karl Ling, special assistant to the USF Cabinet." The tone of voice was peppery and irascible. "I have been sent here to get some real answers about the deaths of three of our citizens here on Earth. I must say at the outset that we regard the explanations offered so far by your office and by Mr. Green as profoundly unsatisfactory."

  "Arrogant bastard," thought Bey. He looked at his visitor closely while he sought a suitably conciliatory answer, and felt a sudden sense of recognition.

  "We have been doing our best to provide you with all the facts, Mr. Ling," he said at last. "We all thought it was unwise to present theories until we have some definite way of verifying them. I'm sure you realize that this case is a complex one, and has a number of factors that we haven't encountered before."

  "Apparently it does." Ling had taken a seat by the communicator and was tapping his thigh irritably with a well-manicured left hand. "For example, I see that the cause of death is stated as asphyxiation. But the post mortem shows that the dead men had only normal air in their lungs, with no poisonous constituents. Perhaps you would be willing to present your theory on that to me—there is no need to wait for a full verification."

  Ling's tone was sceptical, and definitely insulting. Bey felt a sudden doubt about his own intuitive reaction to Ling's presence. In the past, dealing with officious government representatives, Bey had found an effective method of removing their fangs. He thought of it as his saturation technique. The trick was to flood the nuisance with so many facts, figures, reports, graphs, tables and analyses that he was inundated and never seen again. The average bureaucrat was unwilling to admit he had not read what he was given. Bey went over to his desk and took out a black record tablet.

  "This is a private interlock for the terminal in this office. It has in it the data entry codes that will allow you to pull all the records on this case. They are rather voluminous, so analysis will take time. I suggest that you use my office here and feel free to use my communicator as the output display device for Central Files. Nothing will be hidden from you. This machine has a full access code."

  Bey felt rather self-conscious about his own pompous manner, but it was the right action, whether or not his first intuitive response to Ling had been correct.

  The little man stood up, his eyes gleaming. They were a curious brownish-yellow in color, with flecks of gold. He rubbed his hands together.

  "Excellent. Please arrange it so that I am not disturbed. However, I do wish to see Mr. Green immediately when he arrives."

  Far from being subdued, Karl Ling was clearly delighted at the prospect of a flood of information. Bey left him to it, and went to give the news to Park Green.

  "Karl Ling?" Green looked impressed. "Sure I know him—or know of him. I've never met him myself, but I know his reputat
ion. He's supposed to be one of the Inner Circle at top levels of the USF. He's also something of an expert on Loge and the Belt. He did a whole series of holovision programs a few years ago, and he used part of one of them in tracing the history of the discovery of Loge. It was a popular program, and he did a good job. He began way back, hundreds of years ago. . ."

  * * *

  (Cameras move from the illuminated model and back to Ling, standing)

  "School-capsules give the 1970's as the first date in Loge's history. Actually, we can find traces of him much further back than that. The best starting-point is probably 1766. A few years before the French and American Revolutions, a German astronomer came up with a formula that seemed to give the relative distances of the planets from the Sun. His name was Johann Titius. His work didn't become famous until it was picked up a few years later by another German, Johann Bode, and the relation he discovered is usually called the Titius-Bode Law, or just Bode's Law."

  (Cut to a framed lithograph of Bode, then to the table of planetary distances. Zoom in on blank spot in the table showing question mark)

  "Bode pointed out that there was a curious gap in the distance formula. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn fitted it—and that is all the planets they knew of at the time—but there seemed to be one missing. There ought to be a planet between Mars and Jupiter, to make the formula really fit the Solar System. Then William Herschel, in 1781, discovered another planet, further from the Sun than Saturn."

  (Cut to high resolution color image of Uranus, rings in close-up, image of Herschel as insert on the upper left. Cut back to Ling)

  "It fitted Bode's Law all right, but it wasn't in the right place to fill the spot between Mars and Jupiter. The search for a missing planet began, and finally in 1800 the asteroid Ceres was discovered at the correct distance from the Sun. Soon after, other asteroids were found at about the same distance as Ceres. The first pieces of Loge had appeared."