Sight of Proteus

by Charles Sheffield

  Green frowned. "It's a nice idea, but where could you get a test animal? I thought the whole point of form-change was that only humans could do it. After all, that's the basis for the humanity-tests."

  Larsen laughed confidently. "Exactly right. You want to see the test animal? Here it is." He tapped his chest. "Now, don't get the wrong idea," he added, as he saw Park Green beginning a horrified protest. "One of the things that we get in Form Control is many years of training in form-control methods. If anything starts to happen, I'll have no trouble at all in stopping and reversing it. That's the difference between me and the three Grabbers—experience."

  He stood up. "Don't forget, it's a purposive process. It only changes you because there is a desire to change. Come on, let's get a thymus extract made here and then go back to the form-change tanks at Form Control headquarters. We'll really have something to show Bey Wolf and your boss when they get back from their jaunt to Pleasure Dome."

  Chapter 14

  The "jaunt" to Pleasure Dome was becoming a grind. The staff employees looked on in amazement as Wolf and Ling worked their way through the monitor records at express speed, reading raw data, swapping comments and shared analyses as they went. They had to deal with a mixture of body physical parameters such as temperature, pulse rate and skin conductivity, and system variables such as nutrient rates, ambient temperatures, and electrical stimuli. Programs in use as they were swapped in and out of the computer, plus chemical readings and brain activity indices, were all recorded in parallel in the same files. Reading the outputs required many years of experience, plus a full understanding of the processes—mental and physical—of the human body. Ling was tireless, and Bey was determined not to be outdone.

  "Who is he?" whispered the Pleasure Dome form-change supervisor to Bey, during one of their brief halts to await more data. "I know who you are, you're Head of Form Control; but where did he learn all this?"

  Bey looked across at Ling, who was deep in thought and oblivious to comments, whispered or otherwise.

  "Maybe you should ask him yourself. I've already had that conversation once."

  The arrival of more data pushed the question aside.

  After thirty-six hours of intense work, the basic analysis was complete. They had an incredible array of facts available to them, but one dominated all others: the crew of the Jason had died long, long before their form-change was complete. They had died because the forms they were adopting were unable to live and breathe in normal air. The final forms remained unknown. There were other mysteries. Why were they changing to those forms, under the control of a simple reconditioning program that had been used a thousand times before, with never a hint of trouble?

  Karl Ling sat motionless, as he had for the past two hours. From time to time he would ask Bey a question, or look again at a piece of data. Rather than disturb him with general questions, Bey decided that he would go into another room and try to reach Form Control headquarters. He wanted to check with John Larsen on the general situation. Ling was voyaging on strange seas of thought, alone, and Bey Wolf had developed a profound respect for that man's mind.

  It was Park Green who answered the communicator instead of Larsen. He looked very uneasy.

  "Where's John?"

  "He's in a form-change tank, Mr. Wolf. He went in yesterday morning."

  "Well, that's one way to keep the bureaucracy off your back."

  To Green's great relief, Bey Wolf didn't seem at all concerned. Even when he explained the whole thing to him, Bey just laughed.

  "John's been around form-change equipment almost as much as I have. He knows how to handle it as well as anyone on Earth. But honestly, Park, I'm sceptical about your theory. Those Belters have probably all had use of form-change equipment before. When they use it for injury repairs, it's called regeneration equipment, but it's just the same principle. The only thing the USF is down on is form-change for cosmetics or inessentials."

  Park Green looked as though a big weight had been lifted off him.

  "Thank heaven for that. I've been worried ever since he gave himself that thymus injection. I thought he might have talked me into letting him do something where he had a big risk. I didn't know enough about all this stuff to argue with him."

  Bey smiled at the big man's obvious concern. "Go over to the tank and keep an eye on him, if you're at all worried," he said, and signed off the connection. He strolled back to join Karl Ling, who had now come out of his trance and accepted a cup of syncaff, 'compliments of Pleasure Dome.' Having broken their standard policy by letting them in free of charge, the staff of Pleasure Dome had apparently decided to adopt them. Ling had just politely refused a Snow Queen's offer of an age-old technique to relax him after all his hard work. He looked rather pleased at her suggestion, and quite annoyed when she made the same offer to Bey.

  "I think I have the answers, Mr. Wolf, and they are fascinating ones. More than I dreamed. If I am right, this is a special day in our history." Ling sat back, relishing the moment.

  "Well, Park Green and John Larsen think they have the answers, too," said Bey. "I've just been in video contact with them."

  "They do? Without the evidence that we have available to us here?" Ling's eyebrows were raised. "I can't believe it. What do they think we are dealing with?"

  Bey sketched out Larsen and Green's theory. It sounded much thinner than it had when he had first heard it. He summarized the situation back in Headquarters, and finally mentioned that Larsen was now putting the idea to a practical test.

  "He injected an extract from one of the dead men, and put himself into a form-change tank?" Ling's self-possession failed him. He turned white as one of the Snow Queens. "He's a dead man. My God, why didn't they consult us before they began?"

  He sprang to his feet, hurled the records aside and grabbed for his loose jacket.

  "Come on, Mr. Wolf. We must get back as fast as we possibly can. If there is any chance to save John Larsen's life, it depends on our efforts."

  He ran out of the room. Bey, bewildered and alarmed, followed him at top speed. When Karl Ling lost his dignity so completely, it was time to worry.

  * * *

  In the elevator, on the Mattin Link transfers, and through the ground transit system, Ling rapidly explained the basics of his discoveries to Bey Wolf. By the time they reached the Office of Form Control it was hard to say which man was the more frantic. They went at once to the form-change tanks.

  Park Green, alerted as they travelled, was waiting for them there. He looked at Ling as though expecting an outburst of insult and accusation. It did not come. Ling went at once to the tank containing John Larsen and began to read the telltales. After a few minutes he relaxed a little and gave a grunt of satisfaction.

  "Everything's still stable. That's good. If he follows the same pattern as the other three, we have about twenty-four hours to do something for him. The one thing I daren't do is stop this process in the middle. We'll have to let it run its course, try and keep him alive while it happens, and worry afterwards about reversing it. Bring me the tank schematics. I need to know exactly how the circuits work that control the nutrients and the air supply."

  Wolf went for them and was back within less than a minute. Park Green was still standing by the tank, looking totally bewildered. When Ling had the schematics, Green took Bey to one side.

  "Mr. Wolf, does he know what he's doing? He's an expert on the Belt, I realize that. But he doesn't know about this stuff, does he? Are we risking John's life by letting him do this?"

  Wolf put his hand up to Green's massive shoulder. "Believe me, Park, he knows what he's doing. If anyone can help John now, he can do it. We have to give all the help we can, and save the questions until later. I'll tell you my views on this when it's all over."

  Ling interrupted their conversation. His voice had a reassuring ring of certainty and authority.

  "One of you come over here and make a note of the equipment changes that will have to be made. I'll read off
the settings as I find them on the charts. The other one of you, call BEC. I want their top specialist on interactive form-change programs. Maria Sun, if she's available, the best they can offer if she isn't. Tell them it's codeword circuits, if that will move them faster."

  Wolf nodded. "I can get Maria." He hurried out.

  The equipment modifications began. At every stage, Ling rechecked the tell-tales. Maria Sun arrived, took one look at the monitors, and settled in by Ling's side. She swore continuously, but it did nothing to lessen her effectiveness as they sweated over the tank. Larsen's condition inside remained stable, but there were big changes occurring. His pulse rate was way down, and there was heavy demand on calcium, nitrogen and sodium in the nutrient feeds. Skin properties were changing drastically.

  "They could have noticed all this in Pleasure Dome if they'd only bothered to look," grunted Ling. "Give them their due, they had no reason to expect anything peculiar. But take a look at that body mass indicator."

  Maria Sun swore a string of oaths. "It's up to a hundred and twenty kilos. What's his usual weight?"

  "Eighty," said Bey, absorbed in watching the indicators. He longed to see inside the tank, but there was no provision for that in the system.

  The work went on. After many hours of equipment change and work on program modification with Maria Sun, Ling finally declared that he had done all that he could. The real test would come in a few hours time. That was when the records from the crew of the Jason had begun to go wild. It remained to be seen if the equipment changes could keep Larsen's condition stable as the change proceeded further. The time of watching and waiting began.

  As Ling made his final checks on the tell-tales, Bey realized the mental anguish that Park Green must be going through. He looked at the big man's unhappy face.

  "Mr. Ling, have we done all that can be done here?" Bey asked.

  "For the moment. The rest is waiting."

  "Then, if you will, would you explain all this to us, from the beginning. I got a quick overview on the way here, but Park Green is still in the dark completely; and I'm sure Maria is just as curious."

  Ling looked at the three of them as though seeing them for the first time. Finally, he nodded sympathetically.

  "You deserve that, even if I'm wrong. From the beginning, eh? That's a long story. I'll have to tell it to you the way that I imagine it. Whether or not it's true is another matter."

  He sat down, leaned back, and put his hands behind his head.

  "I have to begin it sixteen million years ago, and not on Earth. On the planet Loge. Loge was a giant, about ninety Earth masses, and it was going to explode. Now for something speculative, something you may find hard to believe. Loge was inhabited. It had living on it a race of intelligent beings. Maybe they were too intelligent. We know that their planet blew up, and we don't know why. Maybe they were to blame for that. I doubt if we'll ever know. The race had nuclear energy, but not spaceflight."

  "Come on now." Maria Sun was looking at Ling sceptically. "You can't possibly know that. I'll buy your Logians, maybe, but you just said we'll never know much about them."

  "I know that much, all the same. How do I know it?" Ling was almost pleased by the questioning. "Well, I know that they had nuclear energy because they made transuranic elements. Any natural source of transuranics would have decayed by natural processes since the formation of the planet. The only possible way we could find a source of transuranics on Loge—and only on Loge—would be if they were created there, by nuclear synthesis. We don't know how to do that efficiently ourselves, so there's a good reason to think that the Logians had a more advanced nuclear technology than we do."

  "All right." Maria nodded her dark head. She had changed her appearance since Bey had last seen her, and was now wearing the form of an exquisite Oriental. The terrible streams of swearing that came out of that petal mouth when she was hard at work made a strange effect that she was probably quite unaware of. "So, they had nuclear energy. But how could you possibly know they didn't have spaceflight?"

  "Elementary, my dear Maria." Ling was too engrossed in his explanation to note Bey's quiet reaction to that evidence of prior acquaintance. "They couldn't escape from Loge, not any of them, even when they found that it was going to disintegrate. They must have had some years of warning, some time to plan—but no one got away, not one of them."

  Ling rose from his seat. "Wait one moment, I must check the status." He went to the tank, nodded as he inspected the tell-tales, and returned. "It is still all stable, and the change is accelerating. The next hour or two are crucial."

  "We'll stay here," said Bey. "So they could not get off Loge," he prompted.

  "That is correct." Ling resumed his relaxed posture, eyes far away. "They had time to plan, so I imagine it was not a nuclear war. Perhaps they had found a way of making large-scale interior adjustments to the planet, and lost control. That would be relatively slow.

  "What could they do? They looked around them in the Solar System. They knew they were going to die, but was there any way that their race might survive? To a Logian, the natural place for that survival would be Jupiter, or best of all Saturn. They probably never even considered Earth—a tiny planet, by their standards, too hot, oxygen atmosphere, a metal ball crouched close to the Sun. No, it would have been Jupiter or Saturn, that was their hope. That's where they turned those big, luminous eyes—adapted for seeing well in a murky, methane-heavy atmosphere."

  Bey suddenly thought of the great, glowing eyes of the Mariana monsters, as they stood guarding the deeps off Guam. The Grabbers could never have imagined such a fate, as they touched down in triumph on the grey surface of Tycho.

  "The crew of the Jason," he said.

  "You are running ahead of me, Mr. Wolf," said Ling, smiling. "Let me keep the story going, true or false—as I said, all this is pure conjecture. Their scientists calculated the force of the explosion for Loge, and they gave a grim report. No life form, even single celled ones, could survive it. Parts of Loge would be thrown in all directions. Some would leave the Solar System forever. Some would land in the Sun. And some would undoubtedly hit Jupiter, Saturn, and the other planets—including Earth. Was it possible that anything could survive that explosion and long transit?"

  Park Green spoke for the first time. "If single-celled creatures couldn't survive, it would have to be something very primitive. How about a virus? That's just a chunk of DNA, without any wrapping."

  Ling was looking at Green with an expression of surprise. "That's it exactly. A virus has no 'life-support system' of its own. To grow and multiply, it must have a host cell. The Logians took a chance and packed their genetic material as a viral form."

  "And it worked?" asked Maria Sun.

  "Not as they expected it to," said Ling. "Or maybe it did. We've never had a ship down to the surface of Jupiter or Saturn and we don't know what's there. Maybe there are Logians down there, with viral growth of their genetic materials in host bodies.

  "Some of their viral material was on fragments of Loge that were blown way out of the Solar System and became part of the long-period comets. That didn't matter. A virus lasts indefinitely. Sixteen million years later, some of the fragments that fell back into the Solar System under the Sun's gravitational pull were mined by men—not for their Loge DNA, not at all. For their transuranic elements."

  "And the Loge DNA began to grow in them?" said Green, his face puzzled. "Wait a minute, that wouldn't work. If that were possible, every Grabber would be . . ."

  Ling nodded approvingly. "Very good, Mr. Green. You are quite right. Humans are very poor hosts for Logian development. The Loge virus could get into the human body easily enough, and it could even take up residence in the central nervous system. But it couldn't thrive in those unfamiliar surroundings. Wrong atmosphere, wrong chemical balance, wrong shape."

  Ling paused and looked at the other three. His manner had changed. He had become the great scientist, lecturing on his own field to an interested audience
.

  "You know, I knew there was a Logian civilization before I ever came to Earth for this investigation. The transuranics proved it, beyond doubt. Otherwise I would never have been led so quickly to this train of thought.

  "I think you can now complete the story yourselves. The crew of the Jason picked up Logian DNA in viral form from the fragment that they were crunching for its Asfanium and Polkium. It got into their bodies, and nothing at all happened. They went and had their great celebration in Tycho City, and still nothing happened. But finally they came to Earth—and they got into the form-change machines. At last, the virus could begin to act. It stimulated their central nervous systems, and the purposive form-change process began. It was creating a form that was optimal for Logians, not for Earthmen. When that change had proceeded to the point where the changed form could not survive in the atmosphere of Earth, the creatures died. Asphyxiated, in normal air."

  Park was looking at the tank containing John Larsen. He had at last realized the full implications of Ling's words.

  "You mean that is happening to John, too?"

  "It would have happened, and it would have killed him," replied Ling. "He injected himself with Logian DNA, along with the Asfanium he took from the bodies. The work we've been doing this past day has been to modify the life-support system of the tank, so that it follows the needs of the organism inside it. If you go and look at the tell-tales now, you'll find that the nutrients and the atmosphere would be lethal to a human being."

  Park Green hurried over to the tank. He looked at the monitors and came quickly back.

  "Body mass, two hundred kilos. Oxygen down below eight percent, and ammonia way up. Mr. Ling, will John live?"

  Ling stood up and went over to the tank. He looked carefully at each of the read-outs. "I believe he will," he said at last. "The rates of change are down, and everything is very stable. I don't know if we will be able to return him to his former shape. If we can do it, I think it will not be for some time."