"No. They sound it, but they all tie together through the right mathematics. The mathematics of ensembles, it's called. As for deciding which one we ought to be thinking about . . . don't ask me. Spin a coin. Thermodynamic entropy, statistical mechanics entropy, information theory entropy, kernel horizon entropy—which one is Wolfman's buddy talking about? We don't know. But there's more. Before you spin that coin, let me give you the other half of it. You see, the universe moves to higher values of thermodynamic entropy—that's Clausius, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But life—any life, from us to bacteria and single-celled plants—is different—"
Aybee was interrupted as Sylvia Fernald hurried into the room, grabbed his arm, and began to pull him at once toward the door. "They'll meet with us," she said. "But we have to do it right this minute, before they change their minds. Come on."
She led the way for Aybee and Leo, leaving Bey floundering along behind. The others were expert at moving in low gravity. He still rolled and yawed and missed handholds. He reached the chamber half a minute after the others and looked around for the elusive farmers.
The room was dark and divided in two by a wall of ribbed black glass. As Bey stepped forward, dim ceiling lights came on and the glass wall lightened to full transparency. On the other side of the partition, shrouded in white garments that left only dark pairs of eyes, two human figures became visible.
"Five minutes," a deep, whispering voice said. Cowls were pushed back to reveal smooth skulls and nervous skeletal faces. "We promised at most five minutes."
"Did you see your people in the form-change tanks?" Bey asked at once.
"I did," the taller figure said. The deep voice was expressionless. "I found them."
"Were they alive?"
"Already dead. According to the temperature monitors, already cold. They must have been dead for at least a day."
"And no emergency signal was sent from the tanks?"
"Nothing. All indicators showed normal."
"Has anything like this happened before? Something maybe less extreme?"
There was a pause while the two farmers turned to look at each other. "Tell them," the second figure said. It was a woman.
"I think we must." The man turned back to Bey. "We had noticed some peculiarities. Nothing serious, nothing that was not corrected on a second attempt with the form-change equipment. We considered calling for help, but after a vote we decided against the intrusion. Our colleagues who died took part in and approved of the decision."
"You know when the problem began," Bey said rapidly. The two farmers were beginning to move about uneasily. "Can you relate it to anything else that happened here on the farm? Any visitor? Any change in procedures?"
There was another pause—precious seconds of interview time slipping away. "The problems began six months ago," the woman said. "There have been no visitors to the farm in more than a year. New form-change equipment was delivered to us at that time, but it performed perfectly for many months."
"How about unusual events? Did anything odd happen six months ago?"
"Nothing," the man answered. "There were automated deliveries to us, but that is usual. There were cargo shipments from here to the harvester, as always."
"And there were—" the woman began.
"No," the man interrupted. He reached out a hand, shielding the woman's eyes from the four visitors but being careful not to touch her.
"I must tell. Two of us are dead because we valued privacy above their lives. It must not happen again." The woman moved so that she could see Bey. Her voice was shaking. "Six months ago, some of us began to see things when we were out on the farm. Apparitions. Things that could not be real."
The glass partition was beginning to darken, the lights to fade. "What were they?" Bey asked.
"Many things. Five days ago I saw a woman, many kilometers high and dressed all in red. She had long brown hair. Her clothes were the clothes of Old Earth, and she carried a basket. She was striding across the collection layer in ten-kilometers paces. She wore a white peaked bonnet, and beneath it her face was the face of a madwoman."
"A white bonnet and scarlet dress?" Wolf jerked upright and reached out a hand. The partition was almost black. The ceiling lights were dim glows of red.
"No more," the white-garbed man said. His voice had risen in pitch and volume. "Our records will be available to you. You can see what came to the farm during the last year, what was sent from it. You can read what our people saw. But there can be no more direct contact. Good luck."
"One more question," Bey said. He was moving urgently toward the black glass. "It's terribly important."
But the room was dark again. There was no sound from the other side of the wall.
* * *
When the deadly strike came, each visitor to the Sagdeyev farm was in a different part of the habitation bubble. Officially, it was to allow them to eat alone. In practice, each had deliberately sought privacy.
Bey had been dumbstruck by the farmer's last words, to the point where he was hardly thinking at all. A brown-haired female, dressed in scarlet, carrying a basket and with a white bonnet on her head—that was his Mary, Mary Walton, exactly as she had looked in The Duchess of Malfi. Bey had seen it in live performance five times and in recording another dozen.
A coincidence of dress? If so, it was too improbable a coincidence for him to accept. But if anyone were to see such visions of Mary, it surely ought to have been Bey himself—not some reclusive farmer, someone who had no idea what she was looking at. Bey sat with his head buzzing, too perplexed to feel hungry or thirsty. Somewhere on the periphery of his mind he knew that one of Aybee's comments on entropy was vitally important. Those ideas had to be integrated with the appearance of the Negentropic Man and with elements of Bey's own knowledge of form-change theory. But that synthesis had to wait until thoughts of Mary no longer obsessed him. The temptation to seek her was growing, even though his idea that she was tied to events on the farm was probably self-deluding.
Aybee Smith had not noticed that Bey was off in his own world, but it did not take him long to realize that talking to Bey at the moment was a waste of time. Aybee went off to a terminal and tested the farmer's offer. The final promise had been genuine; all the farm records had been made available to the visitors. Aybee set out to make a chronology of every external interaction recorded in the previous year and then to correlate that with the hallucinations and the anomalies in form-change performance. There were many hundreds of entries, but Aybee had lots of time. He never slept much, and if necessary he would plug along at the job for the next twenty-four hours. Like Bey, he relished intellectual challenge more than anything else in the world. He felt alert, fresh, excited, and confident.
Leo Manx felt none of those things. He had been awake for two full days. He had hoped to sleep on the trip to the farm, but Aybee had insisted on coming along, and then had hardly stopped talking through the whole journey. The hi-probe quarters were too cramped to hide away in, and Aybee had been too loud to ignore. He had gone on and on about signal processing and signal encoding until Leo was mentally numb. Bey's hallucinations, according to Aybee, must have been single-frame inserts, patched into a general signal but coded specifically to Wolf's personal psychological profile and comlink. No one else would notice the signal, even if he or she was watching the same channel as Bey. And it would be simple to make the single-frame inserts self-erasing, so even if Wolf tried to play them back on a recording, there would be no sign of them.
Now, at a time when Leo would have welcomed a nap, he could not get Aybee's latest comments out of his head. He rubbed at his aching temples and stared at the notes he had made.
"The entropy of the whole universe is increasing," Aybee had said. "But that doesn't mean that the entropy of everything in it must be increasing. In fact, life has the opposite effect. It increases regular structure—nonrandom phenomena—at the expense of disorder. Life is always negentropic. It reduces the entropy of everythin
g that it comes into contact with. So everybody, and everything living, is negentropic in that sense."
"But the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the one you were quoting earlier—"
"Says that entropy tends to a maximum in a closed, isolated system. It tells you nothing about open systems, ones that exchange energy with others. That's us. We don't live in isolation. The Sun and the stars are constant sources of energy, and every living thing in the Solar System uses energy to create order at the expense of disorder. In the thermodynamic sense, you and me and the Wolfman and Fern are all negentropic."
"How about the other meanings of entropy? Do they make more sense for a Negentropic Man?"
"Considered in terms of information theory, the information in a message decreases when the entropy of the signal becomes less. A noisy communications channel is negentropic so far as the signal is concerned. If that's what the Negentropic Man does, we're not seeing signs of it. The reported random error rate for signals received in the Inner and Outer Systems doesn't seem to have changed at all. If it did, people would be getting jumbled, gibberish messages all the time. And if that had happened, I would have heard about it."
"And your fourth form of entropy?"
"That's associated with the power kernels. Any black hole has a temperature, an entropy, a mass, and maybe an electrical charge. If it's a kernel, a Kerr-Newman black hole, it also has rotational energy and a magnetic moment. And that's all it can have—no other physical variables are permitted. A kernel sends out random particles and radiation according to a process and a formula discovered a couple of centuries ago. What it emits only depends on the kernel's mass, charge, and spin. For a small black hole—billion-ton, say—the emitted energy is up in the gigawatt range. That's what the kernel shields are for, to stop that radiation. The entropy depends on the mass of the black hole, but I think we can rule out this one. If Wolf's Negentropic Man were dealing with kernels, he'd have to be a superman. Nobody could live for a second inside the shields. All you find in there are sensors, data links, and spin-up/spin-down equipment for energy storage and generation. Here." He had thrust a data cube into Manx's hand. "What I've been saying is all basic stuff. You'll find it explained here."
Leo had taken the cube. Sitting alone in an outer chamber of the habitation bubble, he had played it through twice. It was beginning to make some sense, considered as a set of abstract statements. But it had little to do with the capering man who had haunted Behrooz Wolf. Manx peered at the cube, closed his eyes for a moment or two, and was asleep before he knew he was near to it. All thoughts of entropy vanished. He dreamed that he was far from here, again on Earth, again roaming the old Chehel-sotun temple in Isfahan. But this time he was in free-fall, unhampered by that crushing gravity. He could not have chosen a more welcome dream.
Sylvia Fernald had the greatest need for total privacy. She was talking to Cinnabar Baker through a hyperbeam link. It was voice-only, hugely expensive to operate, and there was still an annoying thirty-second line delay before a reply could be received.
"You must return to the harvester," Baker was saying. "All of you, and at once. There are developments here that dwarf the space farm's problems. How soon can you leave?"
"I'll have to go and tell the others." Sylvia replied immediately, but she could imagine Baker at the other end, chafing at the transmission delay. "So far as Leo and I are concerned, we can leave at once. But Aybee and Wolf are reviewing the farm's data bases. That may take a while."
There was a pause that felt more like half an hour than half a minute. "You can't wait for that." It was the voice of command. "When you get back here, you'll understand why. Leave now, as soon as you can. I'll explain when you get here. One more thing. Have you been able to get closer to Wolf?"
"Not in the way you mean." But somehow I got turned on watching him eating, Sylvia recalled. Would you call that progress? Fortunately it was a voice-only link. Sylvia was sure her face would have betrayed her—if her voice was not already doing that. "I'll see what happens on the way back," she said. "But I'm not optimistic. I'm sure he finds me as revolting to look at as I find him. And Leo told me Wolf is still infatuated with a woman he left on Earth."
There was a final annoying delay. "He didn't leave her on Earth," Cinnabar Baker said at last. "She left him, to run off with somebody from the Halo. Big difference. Keep trying. Link ends."
New problems on the harvester, Sylvia thought. What's happening to the Solar System? It's one damned thing after another.
She hurried out of the room. She was heading for Bey's quarters in the higher-gravity region of the habitation bubble when the impact occurred.
CHAPTER 13
No recording instruments on the Sagdeyev space farm survived the impact. The whole encounter had to be deduced from other evidence.
The object hit the southern hemisphere of the habitation bubble, close to the pole. It was a jagged brown chunk of the primitive solar nebula, mostly ammonia and water ice, and it massed about eighty million tons. With a relative velocity of a kilometer a second, it smashed clear through the bubble and emerged from the side of the northern hemisphere. It also missed by thirty meters a collision with the shields of the power kernel and so failed to assure the immediate death of all humans on the farm.
The momentum that the impact transferred to the habitation bubble did three things. It broke the bubble loose from the farm's billion-kilometer collection layer. It left the bubble with a new velocity vector and a new orbit, sharply inclined to its old one. And it set the bubble spinning around the central power kernel as it caromed away into space.
Two thousand machines were left behind on the detached collection layer. After the first confusion they managed very well. The smarter ones herded the others into tight little groups, then settled down to wait for instructions or rescue. Whether that took place in one day or in one century made little difference. The smart machines knew enough to keep things under control for a long time. Not one of the two thousand was damaged.
The humans on the farm were less lucky. Four of the farmers were in chambers on the direct path of the intruding body. They died at once. Two others were left in airless rooms and could not reach suits. The rest of the farmers followed the standard emergency procedure and were into the lifeboats and clear of the bubble in less than a minute.
The visitors from the harvester were both more and less fortunate. Their chambers were not on the main line of the collision, and the impact was felt at first as no more than a short-lived and violent jerk of acceleration. Leo Manx, Sylvia Fernald, and Aybee Smith did not know the emergency routines specific to the farm, but they had been trained to react defensively. High acceleration of a habitation unit equaled disaster. They did not wait to see if the integrity of the bubble's outer hulls had been breached. As soon as they picked themselves up after the first shock of collision, they headed for the survival suits. They could live in them for at least twenty-four hours. Aybee had a mild concussion. Leo had five cracked ribs and a broken leg, but his deep-space training allowed him to override the pain until he was safe in his suit.
Bey Wolf was in much deeper trouble. His room was closest to the line of destruction. Worse than that, he lacked the right reflexes. He knew there had been a major accident, but he had to attempt by thought what the others did by instinct.
He had been thrown headfirst and hard against the communications terminal. Drops of blood from deep cuts on his cheek and forehead were already drifting across the room when he came to full consciousness. His head was ringing, and he was nauseated. He wiped at his face with his shirt and staggered to the door. It was closed. Beyond it he heard a hiss of air, and he could feel the draft at the door's edge.
The sliding partition was tight-fitting but not airtight. He had maybe a couple of minutes before the pressure dropped too low to be breathable. Just as bad, a faint plume of green gas was seeping into the room, and the slightest trace was enough to start him coughing. Wall refrigeration pipes must have rup
tured. He might choke before he died of lack of air.
Suits. Where the devil were they kept? Bey hauled himself across to the storage units on the other side of the room. He jerked them open, one after another. Everything from chess boards to toothbrushes spilled out. No suit.
He caught another whiff of gas, coughed horribly, and mopped again at his bleeding face. What now? Where else might a suit be kept? Don't panic. Think!
He realized that if the data terminal were still working, it could tell him what he needed to know in a couple of seconds. He was moving across to it when the knock came on the door.
The sound was so unexpected that for a moment he did not react at all. Then he had a terrible thought. If someone out there in a suit were to try to come in . . .
"Don't touch the door!" he shouted, but already his voice sounded fainter in the thinning air. Asphyxiation, not poison gas, would get him. He was aware of pain in his ears and the cramping agony of trapped gas being forced out of his intestines.
"Bey?" The cry from outside was muffled. It was Sylvia. "Bey, can you hear me?"
"Yes. Don't open the door."
"I know. Do you have a suit?"
"Can't find it."
"By the data terminal. In the footlocker."
He did not waste air replying. The suit was there, but he had to fight his way into it. He was growing dizzy, panting uselessly. He got his legs and arms in and pulled the suit up around his shoulders. But the helmet was too much. He concentrated all his attention on the smooth head unit and managed to place it roughly in position. But he could not seal it. Anoxia was winning. The room was turning dark. At the edge of unconsciousness, Bey realized how much he wanted to live.
He was fighting the seals—and losing—when there was a crash behind him and a rush of escaping air. His lungs collapsed as the pressure dropped to zero. When Sylvia arrived at his side he was almost unconscious, still groping single-mindedly at the helmet. She slapped it into position and turned the valve. The rush of air inside the suit began.
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