Sight of Proteus

by Charles Sheffield

  "Ten to the tenth directly-addressable. About a hundred times that as low-speed back-up."

  "That's ample. Even if we don't find what I'm looking for, maybe we can take something back with us that will interest the USF."

  Green looked at Bey warily, and shook his head. "Experiment as much as you like. There's a spare set of helmets and a spare hibernator. But I don't like that mad-scientist look in your eye. I'm telling you now, you don't have a volunteer as a test subject, if you think you have it working. When I hear you talk, I sometimes think you're as bad as Capman must be—form-change is the most important thing in the world to both of you." He was silent for a moment, then he sighed. "I only hope I still have a job when I get back. The USF Government doesn't take kindly to sudden extended absences, without a real explanation. But I'll tell you one thing, Bey, your obsession with Robert Capman seems to be infectious. I just can't wait to get to Pearl."

  Chapter 20

  More than ninety-nine percent of all the mass in the Solar System lies close to the plane of the ecliptic. Of the remainder, the Halo of kernels accounts for all but the tiniest fraction; and that Halo is at the very outer edge of the System, never visible from Earth or Moon with even the most powerful optical devices. For all practical purposes, Pearl and her sisters of the Egyptian Cluster swim in a totally empty void, deserted even by comparison with the sparse population of the Outer System.

  The ship climbed steadily and laboriously up, away from the plane of the ecliptic. Finally, the parallax was sufficient to move the planets from their usual apparent positions. Mars, Earth, Venus and Jupiter all sat in constellations that were no part of the familiar Zodiac. Mercury was cowering close to the Sun. Saturn alone, swinging out at the far end of her orbit, seemed right as seen from the ship. Bey Wolf, picking out their positions through a viewport, wondered idly how the astrologers would cope with such a situation. Mars seemed to be in the House of Andromeda, and Venus in the House of Cygnus. It would take an unusually talented practitioner to interpret those relationships, and cast a horoscope for the success of this enterprise.

  Bey turned the telescope again to scan the sky ahead of them, seeking any point of light that could be separated from the unmoving star field. It was no good. Even though the computer told him exactly where to look, and assured him that rendezvous would be in less than an hour, he could see nothing. He was tempted to turn on the electronic magnifiers, but that was cheating as he had been playing the game.

  "Any sign of her yet?" said Green, emerging from the sleeping area.

  "No. We should be pretty close, but I can't see anything. Did you pick up your newscast?"

  "Just finished watching it. It was a terrible picture, though, the signal-to-noise ratio was so bad. I don't understand how they can pick up those broadcasts all the way out to Uranus, with a receiving antenna no bigger than the one we have. We're only a tenth of that distance, but the signals seem to be right at the limit of reception."

  "We're just picking up one of the power side lobes, Park. Nearly all the real power in the signal is beamed out along the main lobe, in the ecliptic. It's surprising in a way that we can pick up anything at all here. Anyway, what's in the news?"

  "What I heard didn't sound good." Green's voice was worried, and he didn't want to meet Bey's eye. "It's Earth again. All the social indicators are still pointing down. I know old Dolmetsch is a prize pessimist, but I've never heard him sound so bleak before. He was being interviewed in Lisbon, and he's projecting everything going to hell before the General Coordinators can damp out the swings in the social parameters. He looked as though he was going to say more, and tell us the swings couldn't be damped at all, but the interview was cut off short at that point."

  Wolf looked out of the viewing port, back to the brilliant blue-white point of light that was Earth. "It's hard to make yourself accept that there are fourteen billion people back there on that little speck. Did you catch any hard facts?"

  "Some—but I'm sure they are censoring heavily. Tremendous riots in South America, with the biggest death rate in Argentina. Power black-outs all over. Hints at something really bad in China. It sounded like widespread cannibalism. The General Coordinators are even talking of putting a kernel down onto Earth's surface; that gives us a good idea how bad the energy shortage must be."

  "It does." Bey looked back at Earth, as though expecting to see it wink out of existence like a snuffed candle. "If they lost the shields on a kernel, it would be worse than any bomb in the stockpile. All the Kerr-Newman holes they're using in kernels radiate at better than fifty gigawatts. They'd be mad to take one down to the surface."

  "Mad, or desperate. Maybe Dolmetsch has a right to be a pessimist—after all, he invented the whole business. The famine in South Africa is getting worse, too. They are talking now about cutting off all supplies there, and using them where people may be salvageable."

  Green had joined Bey Wolf at the port, and they were gazing together at the star patterns, each seeing his own personal specter. They stood in silence for several minutes, until Green frowned, and looked about him.

  "Bey, we're turning. It's not enough to feel yet, but look, part of the star field seems to be rotating. The computer must be tuning us for final rendezvous. Do you remember the setting?"

  Bey nodded. "One kilometer surface distance, exact velocity match. I thought we ought to take a look from close in before we get any ideas about a landing on Pearl." He swung the viewer into position and switched on the screen.

  "Well, there she is, Park. We've come a long way to see that."

  The asteroid appeared on the screen as a small, perfect circle. It glowed softly, but not with the highlights of a reflection from a polished glass surface. Instead, there was a diffuse, uniform glow, a pearly gleam with a hint of green in the white. Green frowned, and turned the gain up higher. The image seemed to swell on the screen.

  "Bey, that's not the way I expected it to look. It's scattering and absorbing a lot more light than it should. It really looks like a pearl, not like a hollow glass ball. Why isn't it just reflecting the sunlight?"

  "I don't know, Park. Look at the left hand side, there. See it? There's something different there, a dark spot."

  The image on the screen was still growing steadily larger and clearer as the ship neared rendezvous. It was difficult for Wolf and Green to suppress their impatience as the asteroid's milky surface slowly became more visible. Soon it was obvious that the dark spot was more than a patch of different reflectance, and there were other faint mottlings and markings on the smooth surface, tinged with a cloudy green.

  "It's some kind of a pit, Bey." Green hunched closer to the screen. "Maybe a tunnel. See where it angles down into the surface? I don't remember anything like that in any of the descriptions of Pearl."

  Bey was nodding his head in satisfaction.

  "It's not a natural formation. Somebody's been doing heavy engineering there. See how sharp those edges are? I'll bet that was cut with a big materials laser. Park, there's no way that Capman—or anybody else—could have done all that without a lot of assistance and equipment. You know what that means? Somebody in the USF has been helping him—and whoever it was has lots of resources to play with."

  The computer interrupted his final words with a soft whistle. The orbit match was complete. They stared hard at the nearby asteroid. From a distance of one kilometer, Pearl filled a quarter of the sky. The whole surface shone with a pale, satiny gleam. It was smooth and unbroken, without any irregularity except for the exact, circular hole, thirty meters in diameter, that showed its black disk near the left side of the image.

  They studied it in silence for a few minutes. Finally Bey moved over to the computer console.

  "It's no good, Park," he said. "We can't learn much from here. There's nothing to see on the surface. We have to get a look at the inside. I'll bet that tunnel runs right through to the interior. We'll need suits."

  "Both of us?"

  "Unless you're willing
to stay behind here. I know I didn't come all this way to watch. The computer has everything under control on the ship. I think it's safe enough to go in close and jump the gap wearing our suits. Take us in to fifty meters, and let's go."

  The two men, fully suited, drifted across from ship to surface. The gravity of Pearl was too small to be noticed. They hovered a few feet from the planetoid and looked at it more closely. It was clear why Pearl shone so softly. Through the many millenia since Loge's explosion, the impact of micrometeorites had pitted the surface, to develop a matte, frosted coating that caught and diffused the light from the distant Sun. Pure white alternated with greenish clouds, in a patchwork over the sphere. The two men drifted slowly towards the tunnel. Near the edge, Wolf shone a hand torch downwards. Deep channels had been scored in the smooth glass by heavy equipment. The hole narrowed as it descended, ending about fifteen meters down in a smooth plate of black metal.

  Wolf whistled to himself, the sound thin and eerie over the suit radios. "That disposes of the idea that nobody's allowed to land on Pearl. Why would anybody put in an air-lock down there, if it's just an empty shell?" He looked down the steep-sided hole. "Ready to go down, Park? All we need now is the White Rabbit."

  They floated together downwards to the big portal, untagged the outer door and went inside. Green took hold of the port, then hesitated for a moment.

  "Should I close it, Bey? We don't know what we may be getting into. There could be anything inside."

  "I don't see that we have much choice. Either we go in, or we go back. I'm expecting to find Capman behind that door, and John Larsen with him. If you want to stand guard outside, that's fine—but I'm going in."

  Green did not answer, but he pulled the outer door firmly shut and dogged it with the clamps. There was at once a hissing of air.

  "Don't assume that it will be breathable," warned Wolf, as the inner door swung open. "John should be here, and the atmosphere may be his idea of nice fresh air."

  Green snorted. "Bey, give a USF man some credit. Anybody who grew up off-Earth would no more try and breathe untested air than want to live back down on Earth and breathe your soup. Look at the second display panel in the helmet inset. It's registering 6-S. That means it's safe to breathe, and a little less than half Earth-normal for pressure. All the same, I'm going to keep my suit closed. I suggest you should do the same."

  The inner door was slowly irising open. A pale green light filtered into the lock from the interior of the planetoid. With the port open to its full thirty meter diameter, the whole of the inside of Pearl became visible. In complete silence, the two men drifted forward together, looking about them.

  The inner wall of Pearl had a smooth, shiny finish that had been missing on the exterior. No meteorites had marred its perfection. The inner surface was a perfect globe, a little more than a mile in diameter. In the center of the vast, arching chamber, tethered to the wall by long, glittering struts and cables, hung two great metal structures. The nearer was itself another bright sphere of steel or aluminum. Bey, eyeing it thoughtfully, wondered at the source of the materials that had been used in its construction. Certainly they had not come from Pearl itself. Considering the energy needed to transport materials from the main System, it seemed certain that the ball must have been built from metals mined on one of the sister asteroids of the Egyptian Cluster. Bey estimated that the sphere was a hundred meters across. A long tubular cable led from the port where they had entered to another lock on the sphere's smooth face.

  The second structure could only be a ship. That made no sense. Bey looked around him again. There appeared to be no way that the vessel, forty meters across at the widest point, could have reached the interior of Pearl—or, once there, could ever leave it. His eyes followed the guide cables that led from the ship to a slightly darker section of the inner wall, directly opposite to the point where they had entered. It had to be a concealed exit. Other cables, running to empty areas in the interior, hinted at the sometime presence of other ships, moored to the inner surface in the same way.

  The surface of Pearl, with its wall of translucent glass, provided an efficient conversion of incident solar radiation. The suit thermometers indicated an ambient temperature quite comfortable for human habitation. The inside was lit with the faint sunlight that had been transmitted through the outer walls and suffused about the interior. There were no shadows, except those thrown by the torches that Wolf and Green were carrying.

  At first, Pearl seemed completely silent, a dead world. As their ears adjusted, Wolf and Green became aware of a deep, muffled pulsing, felt more than heard, filling the interior. It came from the metal sphere at the center of the asteroid, regular and slow, like the working of air or nutrient circulators, or the beating of a vast heart. Nowhere, through the great space of the central bubble, was there any other sound or sign of life.

  Park Green finally broke the spell. "I'm beginning to think I don't know anything at all about the USF. There's no way this place can exist. That ship up there must be unregistered, and if Capman came here in it I can't even guess where he could have started out from. Not Tycho, that's for sure."

  Wolf grunted his agreement. His instincts told him that something was very wrong. He had come to Pearl, convinced that he would find Capman and Larsen there. If that were true, surely there should be some sign of their presence? He looked again at the metal sphere ahead of them. Without speaking, both men moved to the great hollow cable that led there from the entry port.

  As they started along it, the sheer size of Pearl came home to Bey. The far wall looked close at hand, but the vaulted interior of the asteroid could easily contain tens of millions of Earth dwelling-units. They progressed along the cable until their entry lock behind them had shrunk to a small black dot. They both felt more comfortable when they had finally reached the sphere and entered the lock on its shining face.

  The first rooms were clearly living quarters. The furnishings were simple, but there was expensive automated equipment to handle all routine chores. Bey, seeing the food delivery system, realized how long it had been since they had eaten. He looked at Green.

  "What do you think, Park? Assuming that's in good working order, are you ready to risk the air in here?"

  Green was looking hungrily at the dials of the robochef. He nodded. "I think we're safe enough, as long as we don't go through any air locks. This area is a standard USF automat life-support, with a few VIP luxuries thrown in. Take a good look at that menu. I'll bet you don't eat like that back on poor old Earth."

  Unsuited, they felt a good deal of the tension evaporate. There was still no sign of life, and by the time that they were ready to continue their exploration, Bey had become convinced that the whole sphere was uninhabited. After the living quarters came three rooms crammed with monitors and control consoles, exactly like the general control room for a form-change lab—similar, and yet dissimilar. It was bigger than anything that Bey had ever seen, bigger even than the research center facility at BEC.

  "The tanks should be behind that wall," he said, explaining to Park Green what they had found. "But I don't think we'll find John there. Somewhere, I missed the point. I was sure I was right, then—"

  He shrugged, and looked about him. Four years earlier, he had thought he knew what Capman was doing—only to find that he had been out-thought every step of the way. It could happen twice. Capmain expected him to unravel the skein that led to Pearl. If necessary, John Larsen could provide a little prompting, since it was clear that he had been in constant communication with Capman ever since the change to a Logian form. Once he knew that Bey was on the way, Larsen had promptly disappeared.

  It all sounded so logical—but so unlikely. Bey wasn't sure that he could explain to Park Green just how they had been guided here like a couple of puppets.

  While Wolf stood there in silence, Green had been looking closely at the control panel.

  "Bey, I know I'm no expert on this stuff, but look at the read-outs. They all s
eem to be from one tank. Could all these be from one form-change station?"

  Wolf came forward also. He studied the panels for a few seconds, his face puzzled. "It looks like it, I admit. But there are far too many monitors for one subject. There have to be three hundred of them. I've never seen anything nearly as complicated for one experiment. I wonder if it could be . . ."

  He stood, unwilling to state his own belief.

  "You and your companion are quite correct, Mr. Wolf," said the speaker grille above the console. "This is indeed all one experiment."

  Chapter 21

  "Capman?" Wolf swung around swiftly to face the grille.

  "No, I am not Robert Capman. I am an old friend of his. In fact"—there was a hint of amusement in the light, musical tone—"I could fairly say that I'm a very old friend. Welcome to Pearl. I have heard a great deal about you, from both Robert Capman and John Larsen."

  Green was looking around him in confusion. "Where are you? The only way out of here looks as though it leads to the tanks."

  "Correct. I am in the tank area. It is quite safe for you to proceed through at the moment. I am maintaining the atmosphere at the same level as in the rest of Pearl."

  "Should we come through?" asked Wolf.

  "Come through by all means, but be ready for a shock. You perhaps consider that you are past surprise, Mr. Wolf, but I am not sure that the same is true for Mr. Green."

  "But where are Capman and Larsen?"

  "Far from here. Mr. Wolf, the conversion of John Larsen to an alien form was completely unexpected. It added a new dimension to an activity that was already vastly complex. But it also provided great benefits. Part of the explanation of our activities is not mine to give, and you must hear it from Capman. Part, however, I can tell you. Come through into the tank."

  Wolf and Green looked at each other, and finally Bey shrugged. "I'll go first. I don't think there will be any danger. I don't know what we're going to see, but I've had a close look at most things in the years with Form Control."