Pawn’s Gambit

by Timothy Zahn

  “Okay. Well, first and foremost, he is not in any way dangerous, either to himself or other people. He has no tendencies even remotely suicidal or homicidal. He’s simply … permanently disoriented, I suppose, is one way to think of it. His personality seems to slide around in strange ways, generating odd fluctuations in behavior and perception.”

  Explaining psychiatric concepts in layman’s terms obviously wasn’t Lanton’s forte. “You mean he’s schizophrenic? Or paranoid?” I added, remembering our launch-field conversation.

  “Yes and no. He shows some of the symptoms of both—along with those of five or six other maladies—but he doesn’t demonstrate the proper biochemical syndrome for any known mental disease. He’s a fascinating, scientifically annoying anomaly. I’ve got whole bubble-packs of data on him, taken over the past five years, and I’m convinced I’m teetering on the edge of a breakthrough. But I’ve already exhausted all the standard ways of probing a patient’s subconscious, and I had to come up with something new.” He gestured around him. “This is it.”

  “This is what? A new form of shock therapy?”

  “No, no—you’re missing the point. I’m studying Rik’s cascade images.”

  I stared at him for a long moment. Then, getting to my feet, I went to the autobar and drew myself a lager. “With all due respect,” I said as I sat down again, “I think you’re out of your mind. First of all, the images aren’t a product of the deep subconscious or whatever; they’re reflections of universes that might have been.”

  “Perhaps. There is some argument about that.” He held up a hand as I started to object. “But either way, you have to admit that your conscious or unconscious mind must have an influence on them. Invariably, the images that appear show the results of major decisions or events in one’s life; never the plethora of insignificant choices we all make. Whether the subconscious is choosing among actual images or generating them by itself, it is involved with them and therefore can be studied through them.”

  He seemed to settle slightly in his chair, and I got the feeling this wasn’t the first time he’d made that speech. “Even if I grant you all that,” I said, “which I’m not sure I do, I think you’re running an incredibly stupid risk that the cascade point effects will give Bradley a shove right over the edge. They’re hard enough on those of us who haven’t got psychological problems—what am I telling you this for? You saw what it was like, damn it. The last thing I want on my ship is someone who’s going to need either complete sedation or a restraint couch all the way to Taimyr!”

  I stopped short, suddenly aware that my volume had been steadily increasing. “Sorry,” I muttered, draining half of my lager. “Like I said, cascade points are hard on all of us.”

  He frowned. “What do you mean? You were asleep with everyone else, weren’t you?”

  “Somebody’s got to be awake to handle the maneuver,” I said.

  “But … I thought there were autopilots for cascade points now.”

  “Sure—the Aker-Ming Autotorque. But they cost nearly twenty-two thousand apiece and have to be replaced every hundred cascade points or so. The big liners and freighters can afford luxuries like that; tramp starmers can’t.”

  “I’m sorry—I didn’t know.” His expression suggested he was also sorry he hadn’t investigated the matter more thoroughly before booking aboard the Dancer.

  I’d seen that look on people before, and I always hated it. “Don’t worry; you’re perfectly safe. The manual method’s been used for nearly two centuries, and my crew and I know what we’re doing.”

  His mind was obviously still a half kilometer back. “But how can it be that expensive? I mean, Ming metal’s an exotic alloy, sure, but it’s only selenium with a little bit of rhenium, after all. You can buy psy-test equipment with Ming-metal parts for a fraction of the cost you quoted.”

  “And we’ve got an entire box made of the stuff in our number one cargo hold,” I countered. “But making a consistent-property rotation gauge is a good deal harder than rolling sheets or whatever. Anyway, you’re evading my question. What are you going to do if Bradley can’t take the strain?”

  He shrugged, but I could see he didn’t take the possibility seriously. “If worst comes to worst, I suppose I could let him sleep while I stayed awake to observe his images. They do show up even in your sleep, don’t they?”

  “So I’ve heard.” I didn’t add that I’d feel like a voyeur doing something like that. Psychiatrists, accustomed to poking into other people’s minds, clearly had different standards than I did.

  “Good. Though that would add another variable,” he added thoughtfully. “Well … I think Rik can handle it. We’ll do it conscious as long as we can.”

  “And what’s going to be your clue that he’s not handling it? The first time he tries to strangle one of his images? Or maybe when he goes catatonic?”

  He gave me an irritated look. “Captain, I am a psychiatrist. I’m perfectly capable of reading my patient and picking up any signs of trouble before they become serious. Rik is going to be all right; let’s just leave it at that.”

  I had no intention of leaving it at that; but just then two more of the passengers wandered into the lounge, so I nodded to Lanton and left. We had five days before the next cascade point, and there would be other opportunities in that time to discuss the issue. If necessary, I would manufacture them.

  Alana had only negatives for me when I got back to the bridge. “The astrogate’s clean,” she told me. “I’ve pulled a hard copy of the program to check, but the odds that a glitch developed that just happened to look reasonable enough to fool the diagnostic are essentially nil.” She waved at the long gyroscope needle above us. “Computer further says the vacuum in the gyro chamber stayed hard throughout the maneuver and that there was no malfunction of the mag-bearing fields.”

  So the gyroscope hadn’t been jinxed by friction into giving a false reading. Combined with the results on the astrogate program, that left damn few places to look. “Has Wilkinson checked in?”

  “Yes, and I’ve got him testing the shield for breaks.”

  “Good. I’ll go down and give him a hand. Have you had time to check out our current course?”

  “Not in detail, but the settings look all right to me.”

  “They did to me, too, but if there’s any chance the computer’s developed problems we can’t take anything for granted. I don’t want to be in the wrong position when it’s time for the next point.”

  “Yeah. Well, Pascal’s due up here in ten minutes. I guess the astrogate deep-check can wait until then. What did you find out from Lanton?”

  With an effort I switched gears. “According to him, Bradley’s not going to be any trouble. He sounds more neurotic than psychotic, from Lanton’s description, at least at the moment. Unfortunately, Lanton’s got this great plan to use cascade images as a research tool, and intends to keep Bradley awake through every point between here and Taimyr.”

  “He what? I don’t suppose he’s bothered to consider what that might do to Bradley’s problems?”

  “That’s what I wanted to know. I never did get an acceptable answer.” I moved to the bridge door, poked the release. “Don’t worry, we’ll pound some sense into him before the next point. See you later.”

  Wilkinson and Sarojis were both in the number one hold when I arrived, Sarojis offering minor assistance and lots of suggestions as Wilkinson crawled over the shimmery metal box that took up the forward third of the narrow space. Looking down at me as I threaded my way between the other boxes cramming the hold, he shook his head. “Nothing wrong here, Cap’n,” he said. “The shield’s structurally sound; there’s no way the Ming metal inside could affect our configuration.”

  “No chance of hairline cracks?” I asked.

  He held up the detector he’d been using. “I’m checking, but nothing that small would do anything.�
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  I nodded acknowledgement and spent a moment frowning at the box. Ming metal had a number of unique properties inside cascade points, properties that made it both a blessing and a curse to those of us who had to fly with it. Its unique blessing, of course, was that its electrical, magnetic, and thermodynamic properties were affected only by the absolute angle the ship rotated through, and not by any of the hundred or so other variables in a given cascade maneuver. It was this predictability that finally had made it possible for a cascade point autodrive mechanism to be developed. Of more concern to smaller ships like mine, though, was that Ming metal drastically changed a ship’s “configuration”—the size, shape, velocity profile, and so on from which the relation between rotation angle and distance traveled on a given maneuver could be computed. Fortunately, the effect was somewhat analogous to air resistance, in that if one piece of Ming metal were completely enclosed in another, only the outer container’s shape, size, and mass would affect the configuration. Hence, the shield. But if it hadn’t been breached, then the cargo inside it couldn’t have fouled us up. . . . “What are the chances,” I asked Wilkinson, “that one of these other boxes contains Ming metal?”

  “Without listing it on the manifest?” Sarojis piped up indignantly. He was a dark, intense little man who always seemed loudly astonished whenever anyone did anything either unjust or stupid. Most everyone on the Dancer OD’d periodically on his chatter and spent every third day or so avoiding him. Alana and Wilkinson were the only exceptions I knew of, and even Alana got tired of him every so often. “They couldn’t do that,” Sarojis continued before I could respond. “We could sue them into bankruptcy.”

  “Only if we make it to Taimyr,” I said briefly, my eyes on Wilkinson.

  “One way to find out,” he returned. Dropping lightly off the shield, he replaced his detector in the open tool box lying on the deck and withdrew a wandlike gadget.

  It took two hours to run the wand over every crate in the Dancer’s three holds, and we came up with precisely nothing. “Maybe one of the passengers brought some aboard,” Sarojis suggested.

  “You’ve got to be richer than any of our customers to buy cases with Ming-metal buckles.” Wilkinson shook his head. “Cap’n, it’s got to be a computer fault, or else something in the gyro.”

  “Um,” I said noncommittally. I hadn’t yet told them that I’d checked with Alana midway through all the cargo testing and that she and Pascal had found nothing wrong in their deep-checks of both systems. There was no point in worrying them more than necessary.

  I returned to the bridge to find Pascal there alone, slouching in the helm chair and gazing at the displays with a dreamy sort of expression on his face. “Where’s Alana?” I asked him, dropping into the other chair and eyeing the pile of diagnostic printouts they’d thoughtfully left for me. “Finally gone to bed?”

  “She said she was going to stop by the dining room first and have some dinner,” Pascal said, the dreamy expression fading somewhat. “Something about meeting the passengers.”

  I glanced at my watch, realizing with a start that it was indeed dinnertime. “Maybe I’ll go on down, too. Any problems here, first?”

  He shook his head. “I have a theory about the cascade point error,” he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “I’d rather not say what it is, though, until I’ve had more time to think about it.”

  “Sure,” I said, and left. Pascal fancied himself a great scientific detective and was always coming up with complex and wholly unrealistic theories in areas far outside his field, with predictable results. Still, nothing he’d ever come up with had been actually dangerous, and there was always the chance he would someday hit on something useful. I hoped this would be the day.

  The Dancer’s compact dining room was surprisingly crowded for so soon after the first cascade point, but a quick scan of the faces showed me why. Only nine of our twelve passengers had made it out of bed after their first experience with sleepers, but their absence was more than made up for by the six crewers who had opted to eat here tonight instead of in the duty mess. The entire off-duty contingent … and it wasn’t hard to figure out why.

  Bradley, seated between Lanton and Tobbar at one of the two tables, was speaking earnestly as I slipped through the door. “… less symbolic than it was an attempt to portray the world from a truly alien viewpoint, a viewpoint he would change every few years. Thus A Midsummer Wedding has both the slight fish-eye distortion and the color shifts you might get from a water-dwelling creature; also the subtleties of posture and expression that such an alien wouldn’t understand and might therefore not get right.”

  “But isn’t strange sensory expression one of the basic foundations of art?” That was Tobbar—so glib on any topic that you were never quite sure whether he actually knew anything about it or not. “Drawing both eyes on one side of the head, putting nudes at otherwise normal picnics—that sort of thing.”

  “True, but you mustn’t confuse weirdness for its own sake with the consistent, scientifically accurate variations Meyerhäus used.”

  There was more, but just then Alana caught my eye from her place at the other table and indicated the empty seat next to her. I went over and sat down, losing the train of Bradley’s monologue in the process. “Anything?” she whispered to me.

  “A very flat zero,” I told her.

  She nodded once but didn’t say anything, and I noticed her gaze drift back to Bradley. “Knows a lot about art, I see,” I commented, oddly irritated by her shift in attention.

  “You missed his talk on history,” she said. “He got quite a discussion going over there—that mathematician, Dr. Chileogu, also seems to be a history buff. First time I’ve ever seen Tobbar completely frozen out of a discussion. He certainly seems normal enough.”

  “Tobbar?”

  “Bradley.”

  “Oh.” I looked over at Bradley, who was now listening intently to someone holding forth from the other end of his table. Permanently disoriented, Lanton had described him. Was he envisioning himself a professor of art or something right now? Or were his delusions that complete? I didn’t know; and at the moment I didn’t care. “Well, good for him. Now if you’d care to bring your mind back to ship’s business, we still have a problem on our hands.”

  Alana turned back to me, a slight furrow across her forehead. “I’m open to suggestions,” she said. “I was under the impression that we were stuck for the moment.”

  I clenched my jaw tightly over the retort that wanted to come out. We were stuck; and until someone else came up with an idea there really wasn’t any reason why Alana shouldn’t be down here relaxing. “Yeah,” I growled, getting to my feet. “Well, keep thinking about it.”

  “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  “I’ll get something later in the duty mess,” I said.

  I paused at the door and glanced back. Already her attention was back on Bradley. Heading back upstairs to the duty mess, I programmed myself an unimaginative meal that went down like so much wet cardboard. Afterwards, I went back to my cabin and pulled a tape on cascade point theory.

  I was still paging through it two hours later when I fell asleep.

  I tried several times in the next five days to run into Lanton on his own, but it seemed that every time I saw him Bradley was tagging along like a well-behaved cocker spaniel. Eventually, I was forced to accept Alana’s suggestion that she and Tobbar offer Bradley a tour of the ship, giving me a chance to waylay Lanton in the corridor outside his cabin. The psychiatrist seemed preoccupied and a little annoyed at being so accosted, but I didn’t let it bother me.

  “No, of course there’s no progress yet,” he said in response to my question. “I also didn’t expect any. The first cascade point observations were my baseline. I’ll be asking questions during the next one, and after that I’ll start introducing various treatment techniques and observing Rik’s reac
tions to them.”

  He started to slide past me, but I moved to block him. “Treatment? You never said anything about treatment.”

  “I didn’t think I had to. I am legally authorized to administer drugs and such, after all.”

  “Maybe on the ground,” I told him stiffly. “But out here the ship’s doctor is the final medical authority. You will not give Bradley any drugs or electronic treatment without first clearing it with Dr. Epstein.” Something tugged at my mind, but I couldn’t be bothered with tracking it down. “As a matter of fact, I want you to give her a complete list of all the drugs you’ve brought aboard before the next cascade point. Anything addictive or potentially dangerous is to be turned over to her for storage in the sleeper cabinet. Understand?”

  Lanton’s expression stuck somewhere between irritated and stunned. “Oh, come on, Captain, be reasonable—practically every medicine in the book can be dangerous if taken in excessive doses.” His face seemed to recover, settling into a bland sort of neutral as his voice similarly adjusted to match it. “Why do you object so strongly to what I’m trying to do for Rik?”

  “I’d hurry with that list, Doctor—the next point’s scheduled for tomorrow. Good day.” Spinning on my heel, I turned and stalked away.

  I called back Kate Epstein as soon as I reached my cabin and told her about the list Lanton would be delivering to her. I got the impression that she, too, thought I was overreacting, but she nevertheless agreed to cooperate. I extracted a promise to keep me informed on what Lanton’s work involved, then signed off and returned once more to the Colloton theory tapes that had occupied the bulk of my time the past four days.

  But despite the urgency I was feeling—we had less than twenty hours to the next cascade point—the words on my reader screen refused to coalesce into anything that made sense. I gritted my teeth and kept at it until I discovered myself reading the same paragraph for the fourth time and still not getting a word of it. Snapping off my reader in disgust, I stretched out on my bed and tried to track down the source of my distraction.