Sight of Proteus

by Charles Sheffield

  * * *

  Park Green, seated in the Permanent Records Center six kilometers beneath the surface, completed the listing he wanted. He looked at his watch, whistled, stored the output he had generated into his percomp, and signed off the computer terminal. He sat in silence for a few minutes, reviewing everything that he had found, then looked again at his watch. Bey would still be up, even though he was on Central Time instead of U.T., but if he didn't call him now he would have to wait another ten hours. Park decided to delay his return to the living sections, and put in a request for a comlink to Earth.

  The connection was almost instantaneous—at this hour, traffic was light. When Wolf's image appeared on the holoscreen, sleepy-looking and irritated, Park decided he must have made a slight error in his time calculation. He concluded that it was no time for the conventional greetings.

  "It's a mystery, Bey," he began. "A complete mystery. The records here look as though they are intact, with full data on Ling—personal data— going back for fifty years. I agree with you that Ling is Capman, but how can he be, if he has full records like this?"

  Bey rubbed his eyes and came more fully awake. "Full records, eh? For most people, that couldn't be faked. But we had evidence a few years ago that proved Capman is a master at manipulating computer software. Stored data isn't safe when he's around. There's a good chance that most of Ling's 'history' is a constructed background, made up and inserted into the records by Capman. He must have had some cooperation to do that, though. There must be some leaders in the USF who are helping him—an ordinary Earth citizen would have no way to get started. Somebody up there with you helped Capman get access to your data banks."

  "I don't see how they'd do that." Green looked at the computer terminal next to him. "Most of the files here are read-only memory. How could he affect those?"

  "Most read-only memory is software protected—it's not special-purpose hardware."

  "But how would he know which type he had to deal with? Well, I'll leave that one to you. I've been trying to trace Ling, and all I can really find out is that he isn't on the Moon, right now. According to the records, he's supposed to be down there on Earth. Are you sure he's not there?"

  Wolf nodded. "Medium sure—you can't be all that certain with Capman, about anything. According to me, though, he's off-Earth. I checked every manifest, coming and going, and every mass record for lift-off. Unless he's found a new wrinkle, we've lost him again from the Earth-Moon system. Did you check the Libration Colonies?"

  "Yes. They're easy, because they have no hiding places. He's not there."

  "Well, keep looking on the Moon. I won't even guess what form he's wearing now—probably not either Ling or Capman."

  Green stood up and leaned against the console. He looked depressed. "Well, Bey, what do you want me to do now? I'm dead-ended here, and you seem to be getting nowhere there. Any ideas?"

  Wolf was silent for a minute, recalling his own experiences four years earlier, when he was first hunting for Capman's hidden tracks.

  "I can only suggest one thing, Park," he said. "Capman gives this impression that he's infallible, but he's not. Last time I tangled with him I found there are limits to what he can do to change the data banks."

  "He seems to have done pretty well here."

  "Maybe not. He can change his own records, if he can get access to the protected files, but he couldn't change all the cross-reference files that might mention his name or his actions. That was the way we got a trace on him before, when I went through the medical records from Central Hospital. For some reason, Capman won't destroy other people's records. That's his weakness."

  "So what are you suggesting, Bey?"

  "We have to try the same method here. We have to track him from the indirect references—other people's records, that somehow refer to him."

  Green had a very dubious look on his face. "I know what you're telling me, Bey. But honestly, I wouldn't know how to begin a thing like that. I'm no computer hot-shot. How would I know who would be likely to have a reference to Capman or Ling in his file? There are three million people here in the USF. I can't go through three million personnel records, but that's what you seem to be suggesting."

  "There are other ways, if you know how to handle sorts and merges." Wolf hesitated. "Park, is there any way that you could get me a direct hookup to interface with the USF Permanent Data Bank? From here, in my office? It would be enough if you get me a read-only link—I don't propose to try and change any of the files, only to analyze their contents."

  "I don't see why not. After all, we have a full cooperative exchange program between the USF and Earth computer banks. Doesn't work too well sometimes, but this shouldn't be hard to do."

  "If you can arrange it, I'll take a shot at the analysis myself, from here. If I find anything, I probably won't be able to follow up from here—but you could help on that, if you're willing."

  "I'd be glad to. My trouble has been finding any lead to follow up. Bey, let me check this out and call you back. Tomorrow," he added hastily, noticing again Wolf's rumpled hair and appearance of broken sleep.

  "No. Call me tonight if you get approval."

  "All right. One other thing I need from you, though—a charge code. The comlink hook-up will be expensive. Do you have a budget that will cover it?"

  Wolf nodded. "No problem." He keyed a fourteen digit code for transmission to the Tycho City accounting bank. "One thing about the Office of Form Control, it may run out of toilet paper but they never stint you on comlink costs. One other thing, if you can get access for me but not remote access, take that. I'll make a trip up there if I have to, and work from your terminal. It would be better from here, though, so I can keep my eye on John."

  Green nodded. "I saw him yesterday, being interviewed on holovision. Do you know, I think he's enjoying himself. He looks strange, but that doesn't seem to bother him. He was there in his tank, and they had a couple of Indian philosophers on the program with him. They started to debate whether or not John is human. He tied them in logical knots. By the end of the program he used their own arguments and had them deciding that they weren't human."

  "I didn't see it, but I can imagine it. I wouldn't like to get into an argument with him now—he's smarter than he ever was. If all the Logians had that caliber of mental equipment, it's lucky for us they aren't still around. They'd have us all doing whatever they want, and convinced that it was all for our own benefit."

  Wolf yawned, and stretched luxuriously. "But you're right, Park. John is enjoying himself—he was a good deal less happy before we were sure that a reverse-change would be possible."

  "I'll believe that." Green nodded, and reached out his hand to cut off the connection. "As a matter of fact, I wouldn't mind total recall and increased brain power myself. I never seem to really know what's going on here these days. With Dolmetsch in Tycho City, there are council meetings going on around the clock. The news takes a while to filter down to my level, but there must be trouble somewhere. I'll call you back as soon as I have an answer on your question—that shouldn't take more than an hour or two."

  Chapter 17

  Four years earlier, Bey Wolf had sworn that once was enough; he would never attempt it again. Now he was in much the same situation, but he was faced with something even harder. Instead of sorting through the structure of Central Hospital's medical records, he was working with the data of the whole of USF. The planetary information file was a maze, and he was in the middle of it, looking for signs of Karl Ling's early work. The path he was following in the records crossed and re-crossed itself. First it appeared to be leading to something promising, then it petered out or led him to a restricted record area that only the USF leaders could access. It was a labyrinth without an Ariadne.

  Bey ploughed doggedly on from his office in Form Control, fourteen and sixteen hours a day. It was almost a week before he had the smell of a lead, another week before he had enough to make it worth discussing with anyone. When he finall
y dumped his output and cut the connection to Tycho City, he was ready to talk it over with John Larsen. He went again to the viewing panel that connected to the Logian living quarters.

  Larsen was not alone. Maria Sun was standing by the viewing panel, along with three other engineers from BEC. Maria, after the help she had given in modifying Larsen's form-change tank when the Logian change had first begun, felt a proprietary interest in the progress of her delivery. Now, however, she was not pleased. She turned to Wolf in exasperation as he approached them.

  "Bey, give us your opinion, will you? Who will own the rights to the form-change programs that were involved when John changed? I want to get all the details, but nobody will even tell me who I ought to be talking to. All we get at BEC are hearsay and wild stories about Karl Ling, and the monster here won't tell me a thing."

  Bey looked in through the viewing panel to the big living area, where Larsen was sitting comfortably on his specially-built chair with its accommodation for the double knee. He gave Bey a nodding of the head that no doubt was the Logian version of an irritating smile.

  Wolf could not resist a quick wink at Larsen, which he hoped went unobserved by the BEC group.

  "It's only my opinion, Maria," he said, "but I'd say John owns the rights himself, by default. He and Karl Ling are the only ones who know the whole story on the programs that they used, and if you're going to track down Ling I wish you luck. I've been trying that myself for the past month. It's not easy. I want to talk to John about it."

  Maria Sun stepped away from the panel and shook her head in disgust. "I'll come back later, when you've finished." She looked again at Larsen. "According to the outputs I've seen, the life-ratio for that form is more than three. I'm really interested in his body."

  "—you shou'd have taken me when you had the chance," said Larsen.

  She glared at him. "I don't know how much fun it would be to wear a Logian form, but he"—she gestured with her thumb at the inside of the tank—"seems in no hurry to get out of it. If it's comfortable, and if it really lets you live that long, a lot of people will be interested in it even if you have to live in a tank to get the benefit. The fellows back at BEC are talking already of building more big tanks. It could be the hottest thing in next year's research budget."

  She gave Larsen another scowl. He lifted his great arm and waved at her without speaking. Accompanied by her three companions, Maria swept out.

  "She wi' be back," said Larsen as soon as she had gone. "Maria never gives up on a new form."

  "I know," replied Bey, pulling a chair close to the observation panel. "Be nice to your girl friend, John. She did more than anybody else to pull you through when the changes first began—more than I ever could. Well, let's get down to business. This may feel like old times to both of us—tracking Robert Capman through the data banks."

  "Except that this time, Bey, I intend to understand what you are doing, 'ast time it was a mystery to me. I've had the opportunity to 'ook at the computer system in the past few weeks, and I suspect that I grasp the concepts proper'y for the first time in my 'ife." Larsen rubbed at the ropy hair on his rounded skull with a bony protuberance that projected from the second joint of his left upper limb. "I hope, though, that this time you do not want to drag me through O'd City—I wou'd have some prob'ems carrying my 'ife-support packages with me."

  "If I'm right, we'll have to go a lot further than that," said Wolf calmly. He settled his percomp on his knee and began to call out displays. "Let's start at the very beginning. That means going back more than ten years."

  "Wait a minute, 'ing was sti' Capman ten years ago," protested Larsen.

  "He was both. I thought that if Ling were an expert on the Solar System, he'd have had to write papers on it—real papers—and that meant that others would have referred in their papers to his work. I began by scanning the citation index in the Tycho City reference files. It wasn't easy. I suspect that a lot of references to Ling's work have been deleted, but I managed to trace him. I even obtained a display of an actual paper, published nearly ten years ago. So his interest in Loge—that was discussed in the paper—is real, and it goes back long before Capman was forced to disappear. Any deduction that you'd care to make based on that, John?"

  Larsen made a gesture like a shrug, a rippling upward movement of his upper body. "I can make the obvious one. Capman had known for a 'ong time that he might get caught one day. He knew he'd have to prepare his retreat in advance. Somehow, he estab'ished the character of 'ing, and his interest in 'oge was something that he had to deve'op for his own convenience, probab'y because it was important to his continued experiments."

  "That's my conclusion exactly." Wolf entered a confirming note to his file. "So then I took a closer look at Ling's publications. That's when I found something a little different from the way that Park Green had described it to us. Ling was an expert on Loge, that's true—but if you look at his publications, the ones that he tried to cover up in the literature, you find that Loge is the minor part of it."

  Larsen nodded. "That is no surprise. It is hard to re'ate his interest in form-change to any simp'e interest in 'oge."

  "He's interested in the Asteriod Belt. He wrote a series of papers about its formation—and he did a really big series of papers on some specific asteroids. If you catalog all his work, only a few deal with Loge, and most of them concern one group of asteroids. Did you ever hear of the Egyptian Cluster?"

  Larsen nodded. "Yes. If you had asked me that a month ago, I'd have had to say no, but I can absorb information faster now, and I have had a 'ot of time to spend with the termina' here. Most of the free hours when you were not giving me tests, I have been catching up on my reading."

  He leaned back and closed his lustrous eyes. "The Egyptian Custer. I think I can quote the re'evant texts verbatim for you. 'A group of about one hundred asteroids, with orbits that are different from a' others in the Be't. They 'ie in an orbit p'ane a'most sixty degrees from the ec'iptic' 'et me see, what e'se?"

  Larsen opened his eyes again for a moment. "Excuse me, whi'e I scan my interna' fi'es." He was silent for a few seconds, then nodded. "Here we are. What are you interested in? Members of the Custer, masses, orbits?"

  "How about history."

  "No." Larsen grimaced, new wrinkles appearing in the grey skin. "That is an area of the fi'es that I have not read yet."

  "That's a relief. I was beginning to think that you knew everything." Wolf consulted his output displays. "Store this away. The Cluster was discovered by accident, in 2086, during a deep radar search program. They were surveying the Halo, looking for power kernels. First visited during the Outer System search. According to the Ling paper that I found, all the asteroids in the Cluster were formed out of one piece of Loge, after the main explosion of the planet. Most of them are small, five kilometers or less, but there are a few bigger ones."

  "That much I know. The data bank 'ists a' the main members. Five of them are bigger than eight ki'ometers in mean diameter—Thoth, Osiris, Bast, Set and Anubis. No transuranics on any of them. They must have been formed from a piece of 'oge's core. There is a mining sett'ement on Isis, and another on Horus, main'y for the rare earths. No permanent sett'ements on any of them. They seem 'ike a very du' group. Why the big interest in them?"

  "I'm getting to that," said Wolf. "You're right, they are a remote lot. It's not the distance, but they're so far out of the ecliptic that it takes a fair amount of fuel to match orbits with them. That's why they aren't a good commercial prospect, even though the lodes of minerals are rich, especially on Horus. The one I'm interested in isn't one you've mentioned. What do you know about Pearl? Anything in your head on that one?"

  "Hm. I think I need to go back to my references and dig deeper. I have a 'itt'e information, but there must be more. Pear' used to be ca'ed Atmu. That fits in with the idea that it is part of the Egyptian Custer, but I don't know why it was renamed."

  "That's because you've never seen a picture of it. You're quit
e right, it was named Atmu when it was first discovered. A good name for one of the Cluster; oldest of the Egyptian gods. But the first expedition there, forty years ago, changed the name. Other factors seemed more important than the mythology. Pearl is quite small, less than two kilometers across—but it's an odd shape; a perfect sphere of white, fused glass."

  "Wait a moment, Bey." Larsen was shaking his great head. "That sounds wrong to me. If it is made of g'ass, it must have been part of the outer crust of 'oge, near enough to the surface to be fu' of si'icates."

  Wolf looked up from his records, and shook his head admiringly. "It took me a while to come to that conclusion, John. You're getting too smart for your own good. I finally decided it was part of the outer core, deep enough to be very hot, and near enough the surface to have the silicates. It's a very small piece of Loge. The diameter is listed as 1.83 kilometers. Now, do your records include a mass figure for it?"

  Larsen's broad skull and upper torso dipped forward in a nod. "I show a mass of about one bi'ion tons. That means—" He paused, looked up at the ceiling of the tank. "That can't possib'y be right. Un'ess . . ."

  Wolf was nodding. "Go on, John, let the calculator run free for a moment. You're heading in the right direction."

  Larsen shrugged his heavy shoulders, again the upward rippling movement of the body. "With that diameter, it must have a density of 'ess than thirty-five ki'os per cubic meter. Fused si'ica g'asses mass at 'east two tons per cubic meter. So . . . it must be ho'ow."

  "Quite right." Bey was nodding his agreement. "It's as thin as an eggshell. The references give the inner diameter as about 1.7 kilometers. Pearl is nothing more than a big, delicate glass bubble, blown by trapped gases inside the fragment when Loge exploded. It's classified now as one of the protected asteroids. The USF declared it one of the natural wonders of the System. No one is allowed to land on it—but I think that rule is being broken."