Sight of Proteus

by Charles Sheffield

  Larsen noticed that Morris was looking across at him. "It's not far from chaos now, in the office we're in. We still see the wildest forms you can imagine. I suppose the policy now is to get the chaos off the streets, and into the Office of Form Control."

  Wolf waved him to silence before he could go into details with office anecdotes. Capman, still on screen, was again building his edifice of logic and persuasion. He had tremendous presence and conviction. Bey was beginning to understand the basis for the respect and reverence that showed through when Morris and others at the Hospital spoke about their Director.

  "All these things I remember, personally—not by second-hand reporting. Perhaps you, as members of this committee, wonder what all this has to do with the proposal to tear down Central Hospital and build a new facility outside the city. It has a great deal to do with it. In every one of the events that I have referred to, this hospital—Central Hospital, this unique structure—has played a key and crucial role. To most people, this building is a tangible monument to the past of form-change development. Much of that past has been disturbing and frightening, but we must remember it. If we forget history, we may be obliged to repeat it. What better reminder of our difficult past could there be than the continued presence of this building, as an active, working center? What better assurance can we have that form-change is under control, and is being handled with real care?"

  Capman paused for a long moment, and looked around the committee, meeting each man or woman eye to eye as though willing their support.

  "I should finish by saying one more thing to you," he said. "To me, the idea of removing such a monument to human progress is unthinkable. I do not relish the idea of working, myself, in any other facility. Thank you."

  Capman had swept up his papers, nodded to the committee, and was already on his way out of the room before the applause could begin.

  "That was the clincher," said Morris. He looked ready to applaud, himself. "I wondered if he'd say that last point. The committee is terrified of the idea that he might resign if they go too far. They'd get so much grief from everybody else, they won't press the point."

  He had clearly lost all signs of his earlier irritation with Wolf and Larsen. As they prepared to leave the hospital, he even assured Wolf of his continued cooperation, should anything new be discovered. They said polite farewells inside the hospital, but once outside they felt free to let their own feelings show.

  "Tokhmir! Where do we go from here, John? That got us absolutely nowhere."

  "I know. I guess we'll have to give it up. Rad-Kato made a mistake, and we've chased it into the ground. Isn't that the way it seems to you?"

  "Almost. The one thing I still can't swallow is the loss of those data records last night. The timing on that was just too bad to be true. I'll admit that coincidences are inevitable, but I want to look at each one good and hard before I'll accept that there's only chance at work. Let's give it one more try. Let's call Rad-Kato again when we get back to the office."

  Chapter 5

  "I am quite sure, Mr. Larsen." The medical student was young, and obviously a little uncomfortable, but his holo-image showed a firm jaw and a positive look in his eyes. "Despite what you heard from Doctor Morris, and I think I can guess his views, I assure you that I did not make a mistake. The ID that I gave to you yesterday was correctly determined. More than that, I can prove it."

  Larsen pursed his lips and looked across at Wolf, standing beside him. "I'm sorry, Luis, but we went through all that already, in detail. The liver for the patient who received the transplant was given a micro-biopsy for us today. We were there, and we watched every stage of the process. We found a different ID, one that's in the central data bank files."

  Rad-Kato was clearly surprised, but he looked stubborn.

  "Then perhaps they got the wrong patient, or perhaps they made a mistake in their testing."

  "Impossible, Luis." Larsen shook his head. "I tell you, we watched the whole thing."

  "Even so, I can prove my point. You see, I didn't mention this last night, because I didn't think it was relevant, but I wanted to run a full enzyme analysis on the sample that I took, as well as doing the chromosome ID. I didn't have time to do all the work last night. So I stored a part of the sample in the deep freeze over at the hospital. I was going to do the rest of the work tonight."

  Wolf clapped his hands together exultantly. "That's it, John! It's time we had a break. We've had nothing but bad luck so far on this. Look"—to Rad Kato—"can you stay right where you are until we get over there? We need part of that sample."

  "Sure. I'm in Fertility. I'll ask the receptionist to send you to this Department when you arrive."

  "No—that's just what you don't do. Don't tell anybody, not even your own mother, that you have that sample. Don't even do anything to suggest that Form Control are interested in it. We'll have someone over in twenty minutes."

  Wolf cut the connection and turned to Larsen. "John, can you get over there at once and pick up the tissue sample? Bring Rad-Kato with you, and do the test with him in our own ID matching facilities. I would go with you, but I'm beginning to get ideas on what may be going on in this business. I need to get to a terminal and work with the computers. If I'm right, we've seen some very fast footwork in the past twenty-four hours. I want to find out who's doing it."

  Before Larsen had even left the room, Wolf had turned to the terminal and begun to call out data files. It was going to be a long, tedious business, even if he were right—especially if he were right. He was still feeling his way through the intricacies of the software that protected files from outside interference when Larsen returned with the results of their own test of the liver sample. Rad-Kato had been right. He had made no mistake on his previous analysis; the liver ID corresponded to nothing in the central data bank files. Wolf nodded his satisfaction at the results, waved Larsen away, and carried on with his slow, painstaking search.

  In the eighteen hours that followed Wolf moved only once from his chair, to find the bathroom drug cabinet and swallow enough cortamine to keep him awake and alert through the long night. It wasn't going to be too bad. The old tingle of excitement and anticipation was back. That would help more than drugs.

  * * *

  In the hidden underground lab three miles from Wolf's office, two red tell-tales in the central control section began to blink and a soft, intermittent buzzer was sounding. When the solitary man at the console called out the monitor messages, the inference was easy. Certain strings of interrogators were being used to question the central medical data files. His software that looked for such queries was more than five years old, and had never before been called upon. He thanked his foresight.

  One more tactic was available, but it would probably be only a delayer, and not much of that. The white-coated figure sighed and cancelled the monitor messages. It was the time he had planned for, the point where the phase-out had to begin and the next phase be initiated. He needed to place a call to Tycho City and accelerate the transition. Fortunately, the man he wanted was back on the Moon.

  * * *

  "Sit down, John. When you hear this you'll need some support."

  Wolf was unshaven, fidgety, and black under the eyes. His shoes were off and he was surrounded by untidy heaps of output listings. Larsen squeezed himself into one of the few clear spots next to the terminal.

  "You look as though you need some support yourself. My God, Bey, what have you been doing here? You look as though you haven't had any sleep for a week. Did you work right through?"

  "Not quite that bad. A day." Wolf leaned back, exhausted but satisfied. "John, what did you think when you found out that Rad-Kato was right?"

  "I was off on another case all yesterday and this morning, so I haven't been worrying too much about it. I thought for a while that Morris must have done something like palming the sample and substituting another one for it. The more I thought about that, the more ridiculous it seemed."

  Wolf nodded
. "Don't be too hard on yourself. That was the sort of thing that was going through my head, too. We were both watching him, so it was difficult to see how he could have done it—or why he would want to. That's when I began trying to think of some other way that it could have happened. I began worrying again about the computer failure and the loss of the records that we wanted, the first night on the case. Two days ago, was it?"

  Wolf leaned back again in his chair. "It feels more like two weeks. Anyway, I used the terminal here to ask for the statistics on the loss of medical records due to hardware failure, similar to the one that happened to us. That was my first surprise. There were eighty examples. It meant that the loss of medical data was averaging ten times higher than other data types."

  "You mean that the medical data bank hardware is less reliable than average, Bey? That doesn't sound plausible."

  "I agree, but that's what the statistics seemed to be telling me. I couldn't believe it, either. So I asked for the medical statistics, year by year, working backwards. There was high data loss every year in the medical records, until I got back to a time twenty-seven years ago. Then, suddenly, the rate of data loss for medical information dropped to about the same level as everything else."

  Wolf had risen from his chair and begun to pace the cluttered office.

  "So where did that leave me? It looked as though some medical records were being destroyed intentionally. I went back to the terminal, to ask for a listing of the specific data areas that had been lost in the medical records, year by year. The problem was, by definition, the information about the missing areas had to be incomplete. Anyway, I got all I could, then I tried to deduce what it was that the lost data files must have contained."

  Larsen was shaking his head doubtfully. "Bey it doesn't sound like a method that we can place much reliance on. There's no way that you could check what you deduce. That would need a copy of the missing files, and they are gone for ever."

  "I know. Take my advice, John, and don't ever try it. It's like trying to tell what a man is thinking from the shape of his hat. It's damned near hopeless and I could only get generalities. I squeezed out four key references with twenty-two hours of effort."

  He stopped and took a deep breath. "Well, here's something for you to chew on, John. Did you ever hear—or can you suggest any possible meaning—of research projects with these names: Proteus, Lungfish, Janus and Timeset?"

  Larsen grimaced and shook his head. "I don't know about the possible meanings, but I can tell you right now that I've never heard of any of them."

  "Well, that's no surprise, I'm in the same position. I got those names by going to the index files that define the contents of data areas, then querying for the missing files. Apart from the names I came up with, I found out only one other thing. All the four have one common feature—the same key medical investigator."

  "Morris?"

  "I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been that, John. But it goes higher: Capman. I think that Robert Capman has been purging the data files of certain records, and faking it to make it look as though the loss is the result of a hardware failure. I told you you'd need a seat."

  Larsen was shaking his head firmly. "No way, Bey. No way. You're out of your mind. Look, Capman's the director of the hospital—you'd expect his name to show up all over the medical references."

  "Sure I would. But he isn't just the overall administrator of those projects, John, he's the single, key investigator."

  "Even so, Bey, I can't buy it. Capman's supposed to be one of the best minds of the century—of any century. Right? He's a consultant to the General Coordinators. He's a technical advisor to the USF. You'll have to offer a motive. Why would he want to destroy data, even if he could? Can you give me one reason?"

  Wolf sighed. "That's the real hell of it. I can't give you a single, unarguable reason. All I can do is give you a whole series of things that seem to tie in to Capman. If you believe in the idea of convergence of evidence, it makes a pretty persuasive picture.

  "One." He began to check off the points on his fingers. "Capman is a computer expert—most medical people are not. He knows the hardware and the software that's used in Central Hospital better than anyone else. I asked you how we could get the wrong liver ID when Morris did the test. I can think of only one way. Morris put the sample in correctly—we saw him do it—but the data search procedures that handle the ID matching had been tampered with. Somebody put in a software patch that reported back to us with the wrong ID. Morris had nothing to do with it. Now, I'll admit that doesn't really do one thing to link us to Capman—it's wild conjecture.

  "Two. Capman has been at the hospital, in a high position, for a long time. Whatever is going on there began at least twenty-seven years ago."

  "Bey," broke in Larsen impatiently, "you can't accuse a man just because he's been in a job for a long time. I'm telling you, if you tried to present this to anyone else, they'd laugh you out of their offices. You don't have one scrap of evidence."

  "Not that I could offer in a court of law, John. But let me keep going for a while. It builds up."

  Wolf had on his face a look that John Larsen had learned to respect, an inward conviction that only followed a long period of hard, analytical thought.

  "Three. Capman has full access to the transplant organ banks. He would have no trouble in placing organs into them, or in getting them out if he wanted to. He could have disposed of unwanted organs there, and the chance that he would be found out would be very small. It would need a freakish accident—such as the test that Luis Rad-Kato did the other night, by sheer chance.

  "A couple more points, then I'll let you have your say. According to the records, Robert Capman personally does the final review of the humanity-test results that are carried out at Central Hospital. If those results were being tampered with, Capman is the one person who could get away with it safely—anybody else would run the risk of discovery by Capman himself. Last point: look at the hospital organization chart. All the activities I've mentioned lead to Capman."

  Wolf flashed a chart onto the display screen, with added red lines to show the links to Capman. Larsen looked at it with stony scepticism.

  "So what, Bey? Of course they all lead to him. Damn it, he's the director, they have to lead to him. He's ultimately responsible for everything that's done there."

  Wolf shook his head wearily. "We're going round in circles. Those lines I added end with Capman, sure—but not in his capacity as Director. They end far below that, at a project level. It looks as though he chose to take a direct and personal interest in those selected activities. Why just those?

  "There are a couple more things that I haven't had the time to explore yet. One of them would need a trip back to the hospital. Capman apparently has a private lab on the first floor of the place, next to his living quarters. No one knows what he does there, and the lab is unattended except for the robo-cleaners. Capman's an insomniac who gets by on two or three hours sleep a night, so he usually works in the lab, alone, to three or four in the morning. What does he do there?"

  Wolf looked at his notes. "That's about it, except for a couple of points that are less tangible."

  "Less tangible!" Larsen snorted in disgust, but Wolf was not about to stop.

  "Didn't you find it peculiar, John, the way that Capman 'dropped in' on our meeting with Morris? He had no reason to—unless he wanted to get his own feel for what we were doing on the investigation. I don't know how aware of it you were, but he looked at the two of us as though he had us under a microscope. I've never had such a feeling before of being weighed and measured by someone.

  "One final point, then I'm done. Capman has had absolute control of that hospital for forty years. Everybody there knows he's a genius and they do whatever he wants without questioning it much. If I know anything at all about human psychology, he probably thinks by this time that he's above the ordinary laws."

  Larsen was looking at him quizzically. "That's all very nice, Bey. Now giv
e me some real evidence. You have a lot of circumstantial points. With one piece of solid fact about the case, I'd even be convinced. But everything you've said is still guesswork and intuition. I'll be the first to admit that you're rarely wrong on this sort of hunch, but—"

  He was interrupted by the soft buzz of the intercom. Wolf keyed his wrist remote and fell silent for a few seconds, listening to the private line accessing his phone implant. Then he cut the connection and turned to Larsen.

  "Real evidence, John? Here's your solid fact, as hard a one as you could ask for. That was Steuben himself on the phone, and he was relaying a message from two levels higher up yet. There is a request for our services—the two of us, specifically, by name—to help investigate a form-change problem for the USF on Tycho Base."

  "When?"

  "At once. We have orders to drop any other cases that we're working on—Steuben didn't say what they were, and I doubt if he even knows—and leave tomorrow for the Moon. Apparently the request came direct from the office of the General Coordinators. When does coincidence get to be past believing?"

  "I don't know anybody at all in the General Coordinators' office, Bey, and I'm pretty sure they don't know me. Do you know people there?"

  "Not a soul. But somebody there—or one of their special consultants, such as you-know-who—seems to want us off the case we're on now. So somebody knows us and what we're doing. Like to take a bet?"

  Larsen's face had begun to flush red. He looked again at the display of the Central Hospital organization, with its glowing lines leading to Capman, and swore softly.

  "Bey, I won't take that twice. The business with Pleasure Dome was the last time I'll let them call me off. But they've got us trapped on this. We can't refuse a valid assignment—and for all we know the Tycho Base job is a real one. If only we had more time here. What can we do in one day?"

  Wolf looked pale, but he was ready for a fight. He rose to his feet. "We can do at least one thing, John, before they can stop us. We can take a look at Capman's private lab."