“Doing what?” Bey glanced along the double line of intent faces. “I know of nothing I could do that would be useful to you.”
“We will gladly give you whatever Trudy Melford is paying you, to do nothing.” Rafael Fermiel sounded desperate.
“You have no idea how much she is paying me.” Bey was on sure ground with that—he didn’t know himself, and he didn’t really care.
“Mr. Wolf, money is not an issue.” Beulah Cresz spoke up from the far end of the table. “Whatever she is giving you, we can more than match it.”
“More than match Trudy Melford? She’s the richest woman in the solar system.”
But the others were all nodding assent. “Take our word, Mr. Wolf,” Fermiel said. “Our available resources at least equal those available to BEC.”
“I am flattered that you place so high a value on my services.” Bey leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “But I can’t give you an immediate answer. I need time to think about all this.”
That was the understatement of the century. Trudy and BEC, suggested as the developers of the surface forms? Although Trudy denied it, and insisted that the forms were nothing to do with her, it made both technical and economic sense. She had access to the right equipment. She had more than enough money to fund experiments indefinitely. And BEC would benefit most if Mars were not terraformed to look like a new Earth.
But if that were true, why bring someone all the way to Mars, to investigate those same forms? Bey’s mind was on fire with paradoxes and conjectures.
“Of course you need time,” Rafael Fermiel was repeating. “We have no intention of rushing you to a decision. Like the original framers of the Declaration, we have learned to operate on a time-scale of centuries rather than days or weeks. Take as much time as you need. And if you want to discuss this further, with us or even with Ms. Melford, we understand. From everything that we have heard about you, you are an honorable man.”
Bey nodded. He was hardly listening. A few weeks ago he had been happily unemployed, a retired man pottering about on his own private business. Now everyone seemed to want him.
He hadn’t changed. So what had?
And he knew one other thing, from half a century of experience. When a whole lot of people wanted you, it was almost never for your benefit.
Rafael Fermiel offered to drive with Bey to Melford Castle. Bey refused. He needed an opportunity for private thought.
He promised to be in touch with Fermiel “soon,” without specifying what that meant. And as the autocar snaked its way up from the deep Underworld he leaned back, closed his eyes to the endless succession of caverns and tunnels that rolled past him, and turned the pieces of the puzzle over in his mind.
The trick, as always, was to ask the right questions. Do that, and clarification would usually follow.
So. Question One: Why did Trudy Melford suddenly want him to come to Mars, when she had not contacted him in the three years since he left the Office of Form Control?
Answer: To explore the surface forms. It was the obvious reply, but it did not feel like the right one. Particularly if, as the Old Mars council insisted, Trudy and EEC were themselves the agents behind the development of the new forms. Accept, then, that Bey lacked the information to answer the question.
Try Question Two: Were the new surface forms on Mars indeed a BEC/Melford product?
Answer: Trudy had suggested that they were not, but her statements were suspect. There was no way for Bey to determine the truth without more data. In particular, he had to examine the forms directly. From such an examination he was pretty confident that his own knowledge of BEC’s work would tell him at once if their labs had been involved.
Note, then, an action item: he needed to meet the surface forms as soon as was feasible.
Question Three: Was the Old Mars policy council/or real? Bey struggled to phrase that vague thought more precisely. He had been exposed to some of the real power centers of the solar system. Movers and shakers all had a certain ineluctable feel to them, an unpleasant electric force that ran through their meetings like an underground current. Robert Capman had it. Laszlo Dolmetsch had it. Cinnabar Baker had it. On the other hand, they also had the ability to turn it off when it suited their purposes. Did the current Old Mars group possess that hidden engine?
If they did, it was amazingly well-disguised. Bey had received rather the opposite impression, of a rather old-fashioned and ineffectual historical society, obsessed by a nostalgia for distant ancestors and an old vision of Mars as Bey suspected it would never be.
The original framers of the Mars Declaration could not be blamed for that. In their time the science of form-change had been in its infancy, so the only way they could imagine the human habitation of Mars was through the planet’s transformation to suit human needs. However, from what Bey had read of that tough-minded early group, if form-change had been available they would have grabbed it with both hands and run with it as a perfect tool for colonization.
Over the generations, the bloodline had been diluted. That early drive and vision had been lost.
Question Four, then: Did the policy council really control such huge resources that they could outbid Trudy Melford and BEC for Bey’s services, no matter how much those services might cost?
They certainly believed that they could. At that point of the meeting Bey had seen nothing but total certainty on every face.
So. Question Five: Where was the funding coming from to support the Old Mars council?
Bey sighed to himself as he phrased the question. It was one he had been forced to ask again and again in his career. When in doubt, follow the money trail. People could He, motives could be disguised, even acts could be misunderstood. Money was as constant as human nature.
The auto-car had moved up and up. At last the road was leveling off, with the towering bulk of Melford Castle coming into view ahead.
Bey reviewed his list of questions one more time. Was he satisfied that it was complete? He had just about convinced himself that it was when he found another question poking its way unbidden into his mind.
Question Six: Is Sondra at risk, out in the Kuiper Belt Colonies?
Bey shook his head. What was going wrong with his—brain? The new question was totally ludicrous and irrelevant. Sondra’s assignment had nothing to do with the Mars surface forms, nothing to do with the warring factions of New Mars or Old Mars. It was unrelated to every thought that had gone before.
So ignore it.
The car pulled up in the deserted courtyard of Melford Castle. Bey prepared to dismount. Then he paused and leaned back on the car’s soft cushions. He had defined intuition for Sondra: it was what remained after all the facts had been forgotten. But intuition could also be something else. Sometimes it was the subconscious mind, establishing deep connections long before the thinking part of the brain could explain them.
Bey descended from the car and entered Melford Castle. The castle’s security system recognized him and allowed him in without hesitation, but no one was there to greet him. At the moment that was a relief.
Sneaking along in silence and feeling like a thief, Bey headed for the elevators. He did not, however, go to the suite prepared for him or to Trudy Melford’s floor. Instead he headed at once for the fifth floor-and the castle’s communication center.
CHAPTER 12
Real-time conversation with the Kuiper Belt colonies was out of the question. The round- trip delay from the Carcon Colony, for example, was more than a day and a half even if the party at the other end responded at once. Bey didn’t have that much time, and anyway he didn’t know who to call. His best bet was a kernel-to-kernel connection with Aybee, working through the Rini net.
The only trouble with that was the unpredictable nature of the linkages. Despite Aybees best efforts to pin down the sources of uncertainty, response time still varied between seconds and weeks.
Bey set up a top priority six-node routing, Melford Castle to M
ars link to Earth link to Earth-orbit, then kernel to kernel on Rini Base and into Aybee’s personal line. He initiated the message transmission. Then there was nothing to do but stare at the clock and wonder how long he would sit there before he gave up.
It felt like hours. It was actually less than six minutes before Aybee’s glowering face appeared in the display volume in front of Bey.
“Hey, Wolfman. What’s all this stuff about a high-priority chatline? You’re too cheap to pay for that level of service.”
Bey glanced at the monitor. The message had zipped through every node in a few seconds. Almost all the delay had been waiting for Aybee’s reply. “Assume I’m not paying for this call myself. What kept you?”
This time the reply came in a couple of seconds.
“I’m a busy man. The fate of the whole Outer System depends on my unceasing labors.” Aybee grinned. “Actually, I was on the pot. Got to keep the priorities in order. Anyway, what you want? Keep it short, because I really do have lots of work.”
“Did you brief Sondra Dearborn?”
“Better believe it. If she took it all in, she knows as much about the colonies as I do.”
“Have you heard from her since she left?”
“Not a thing. Was I supposed to?”
“I’m wondering if she got to the Carcon Colony all right, and what she found there.”
“I can check that for you easy enough. The transportation data bank for the Kuiper Belt will tell me who’s where.” Aybee paused, studying Bey’s image on his display. “Look, if there’s something funny going on here you might as well tell me now an’ get it over with.”
“I don’t know of anything going on that you don’t know already. But I don’t feel good about this. I was the one who told Sondra that she had to go to the colonies. I said she had to be there to find out why things are passing the humanity test that should be failing it. As for why I don’t feel good … ” Bey shrugged.
It was a weak and unpersuasive answer, but Aybee was nodding sympathetically. “It’s the wee, wee witch. The one who sits on your shoulder when you have a really tough problem to solve, and whispers in your ear, why not try this? I don’t know about you, but I never ignore her.”
“Well, she’s telling me that I should never have let Sondra to go out to the colonies alone.”
“It wasn’t just you, Wolfman. Sondra told me that her boss said the same thing to her.”
“If you knew Denzel Morrone, you wouldn’t take much comfort from that.” Bey studied Aybee’s intent face, and finally realized why he had called. “Would you do a favor for me—a big favor?”
“Probably. I’m known through the whole Outer System as a gullible idiot. What do you want this time?”
“I’d like you to take the fastest Rini ship in the fleet and zip on out to the Fugate Colony. Get there, if you can, as soon as Sondra.”
“Probably can’t do it that fast. She might be there already. What am I supposed to do when I get to Fugate Central? Protect her? I mean, the average Fugate citizen probably masses two hundred times as much as me, and I’m a theoretical physicist, not a professional bodyguard. Obviously I could beat ’em all up easy enough”—Aybee flexed a long, skeletally thin arm, and a tiny knot of muscle appeared at his biceps—“but then they’d complain formally, and I know you don’t want that.”
“If anything does happen, it won’t be official. I don’t expect you’ll need to do a thing. Just the fact that you are there, watching, should be enough to protect her.”
“Yeah. Or else I’m a witness, so Sondra and I both get killed.” Aybee shrugged wide, bony shoulders. “All right, Wolfman. I got a million things to do here, but I’m a sucker. I’ll do it. But can I ask you something personal?”
“Nothing ever stopped you before.”
“Are you having it off with Sondra?”
“Certainly not! What the devil put that into your head? She’s related to me, and anyway she’s fifty years younger than I am. I’m too old for that sort of thing.”
“Yeah. Sure. But to coin a phrase, nothing ever stopped you before. What am I supposed to tell her when I get there? She won’t be expecting me, and if she’s nothing special to you it’s weird for you to be trying to protect her. Come to that, why aren’t you on your way to the Fugate Colony, yourself?”
It was typical Aybee, asking a question so simple and obvious that anyone could ask it—yet no one did. And asking the right question usually clarified everything.
“I think Sondra might run into trouble out in the colonies, but I feel absolutely sure that the problem didn’t start there. I need to focus on the real cause. That’s somewhere here, in the Inner System.”
“I’ll believe that. The closer you get to Sol, the more trouble you run into. But what about my other question. What do I tell Sondra?”
“Tell her—” Bey swore internally. “Tell her I am worried about her, but say you don’t know why.”
“You are worried about her. Fine. Very persuasive. Are you sure you’re not having it off with her? All right, all right.” Aybee pushed his hands, palm outward, toward Bey. “I’ll tell her. Is that it?”
“Yes,” Bey paused. Aybee’s finger was on the disconnect “No, wait a minute. One other question on the same subject What do you know about elliptic functions?”
“The same subject!” Aybee’s eyebrowless forehead wrinkled. “Wolfman, you could sure have fooled me.”
“I know. I felt the same way when I heard it. But if I understand anything at all about Robert Capman, it has to be relevant. Listen.”
As Bey summarized his conversation, Aybee sat totally still and silent. At the end he shook his head. “If Capman says it, you hafta take it seriously. He’s still wearing a Logian form?”
“He was when he talked to me.”
“Then you have to assume he’s a lot smarter than you. Hell, he’s even a lot smarter than me. Maybe he’s so smart, he thinks he’s helping you when he isn’t. Elliptic functions!”
“What do you know about them?”
“I know so much that I don’t know where to start. Wolfman, we’re talking here about a whole major branch of mathematics. There are scores of books and treatises and thousands of papers, all about elliptic functions. I can name a dozen great mathematicians who worked on the subject—Legendre, Abel, Jacobi, Weierstrass, Cayley, Riemann, Hermite, Poincarй—and that’s just the pure theory, without even getting into applications. Did I mention Kronecker—and Gauss, too, of course, though he didn’t publish what he had discovered—”
“Capman didn’t just say ‘elliptic functions.’ ”
Aybee had been in full stride. At Bey’s interruption he stopped and stared. “Then what did he say?”
“What he actually asked me was if I had ever looked at the early history of the theory of elliptic functions. Does that make a difference?”
“All the difference in the world. It means we don’t need to worry about work done after about 1830. And it means something else, too.” Aybee paused, and sat frowning at nothing. “You sure that Capman said elliptic functions, and not elliptic integrals’?”
“Quite sure. Though I hardly know the difference.”
“Well, shame on you. Let’s get you educated. The whole business started out by people trying to find the length of an arc of an ellipse. That gives you a certain sort of integral, and naturally it’s called an elliptic integral. A mathematician called Legendre spent a good chunk of his life writing down bunches of related sorts of integrals, and reduced them to three basic forms. He had done all that pretty much by about 1810.
“But he never saw to the bottom of the problem, or realized that he was studying it the wrong way round. Nor did anyone else at the time—except maybe Gauss, he had this horrible habit of discovering major stuff and putting it in his notebooks, then keeping quiet about it until somebody else came up with the same results. Then he’d say, look here, boys.”
“That sounds a bit like Apollo Belvedere Smith.�
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“Could be. Easy to hate a guy like that, eh? Anyway, about 1820 along comes a younger mathematician called Abel. He dies of starvation and tuberculosis when he’s twenty-six years old—which isn’t as bad as it sounds, ’cause mathematicians usually do the good stuff in their early twenties and geeze along for the next century. Anyway, before Abel kicks it he finds the right way to handle elliptic integrals. He inverts the problem. Switches the roles of independent and dependent variables, if you want to get technical. That inversion of outlook starts the whole theory of elliptic functions off and running.”
Aybee paused to frown at Bey. “I may be wrong, but I get the feeling that you’re not overjoyed to hear all this. There’s lots more.”
“I’m sure there is. And I know you’re going to be disappointed and disgusted to hear that it all makes about as much sense to me as if you were singing folk songs in Cloudland Chinese. Let’s keep the rest of the inversion story until I’m feeling smarter.”
“I won’t hold my breath for that. Don’t you at least want to hear about elliptic modular functions, and how Hermite used them to solve the general quintic equation?”
“Naturally. There’s nothing in the whole universe I’d like better—after you get back from the Fugate Colony, and we know that Sondra is all right.”
“Some people got a one-track mind. Okay, I’ll go check her out. One more thing, Wolfman, then I’m on my way.” Aybee waited, his finger once more on the disconnect, until he had Bey’s full attention. Then: “Are you really hanging out close to home because you’re having it on with Trudy Melford?”
He grinned horribly. His finger stabbed down and he was gone, before Bey had time for even one cuss word.
Bey decided that he ought to talk with Aybee more often. The Cloudlander was rude and uppity, but a conversation with him was as good as a tonic. Also, it always clarified Bey’s own thoughts. Aybee had put his finger on a basic question: Why was Bey here, and not out in the Carcon and Fugate Colonies?
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