Proteus in the Underworld (11 page)

He left his suite and headed for the nearest elevator. Up, or down? Would Trudy choose to be high up on the fourteenth floor among the glittering spires, like a princess in a fairy-tale, or would she prefer the greater convenience of the lower floors?

The second, if Bey was any judge. She might be the Empress, but she was a highly practical one. Wasted time was no more to her taste than wasted words; which again raised the question as to why she was willing to devote so much of the former to him.

He was no nearer to answering that than he had been before their first meeting on Wolf Island. The Martian surface forms were fascinating, but Trudy Melford had many others working for her who would jump at the chance to come to Mars and investigate them.

Bey arrived at the elevators, changed his mind, and headed for the stairs. He would still go down, but he wanted to see every floor.

It was impossible to do a thorough job in half an hour, or even half a day. Melford Castle was reputed to have a hundred and fifty rooms. Bey soon learned that this number did not include ante-chambers and bathrooms and interconnecting corridors. There seemed to be subsidiary staircases on every floor, walk-in closets the size of Bey's Wolf Island study in every bedroom, little nooks and crannies everywhere that housed treasure troves of priceless curios of old Earth.

After the first few minutes he gave up the idea of a systematic tour and headed down from floor to floor by the most convenient staircases. By the time he reached the fifth story he had decided that the big surprise about Melford Castle was not its size, or its opulence, or even its odd setting in a Martian grotto. Its principal oddity was its
emptiness.
He had encountered plenty of cleaners and polishers, smart enough to roll out of his way and delicate enough to handle fine silver and eggshell porcelain. But he had met not a single human being, in eight floors of random wandering.

Just who lived here? Not Jarvis Dommer, who spent most of his time back on Earth. Not the BEC research staff, who remained in their superbly-equipped labs.

Bey was beginning to suspect the answer, and to add it to his growing list of mental queries, when he descended a little crooked staircase carpeted with a thick-piled green rug and found himself where he was not supposed to be.

The stairs were not intended for general use. They brought Bey down right into a little changing-room that formed part of Trudy Melford's private wing. He saw the dress that she had been wearing when she met him at the link terminal, dumped unceremoniously on the floor together with underwear and shoes. The launderers would take care of those—they had stood waiting for Bey's clothes until he shooed them away—but logic said that Trudy must be here, probably beyond the inner door of white enamel.

Bey was clearly in private territory. He should go no farther. He peered at the panties, which he was delighted to see bore a repeating printed pattern
Empress of BEC.
Trudy had a sense of humor. How many people got to appreciate this particular demonstration of it? He went to the white door.

It was still another ante-chamber, or maybe a study. A great wooden desk stood in one corner and the walls were lined with old paper books. Bey started for them—books were one of his own addictions—but he paused halfway. On the wall by the desk hung a series of framed pictures. One showed a baby, fat-faced and frowning at the camera. The next was the same child with a httle more dark hair. This time it was smiling. In the final image it was clear from the clothing that the baby was a boy-child. But the same picture was black-edged, and bore along its lower boundary the grim legend:
Errol Ergon Melford. In Memoriam, sweet baby. Sleep in peace.

Bey knew that he had intruded on a very private place. It was almost a relief when the inner door opened and Trudy Melford emerged. She saw Bey, gasped, shivered, and looked around her before she spoke.

"My God, you startled me. Where did you spring from?"

"I didn't feel tired. I thought I'd look round the castle."

"But this is my private suite. I mean, I had no idea you were even on this floor. This is my dressing-room. I might have wandered out here stark naked. That's why I was so shocked."

Nice try; but not persuasive.
"I'm sorry."

It was the conventional reply. Bey wasn't sorry, not in the least. Trudy had been shocked, no doubt about it, but not at the prospect of being caught nude. She was not far from it now, when she presumably considered herself appropriately dressed for lunch and all she had on was a short and tight-fitting sleeveless blue tunic that left her arms, midriff, and most of her legs and breasts bare.

"I guess you're not used to having people around here."

Now Bey was fishing, but Trudy had recovered her composure. "Not usually. I'm like you. Company is fine, but unless it's with just the
right
person"—those startling eyes stared into his— "it's usually too much of a good thing."

A deliberate distraction, intended to set his mind running along other tracks. Bey decided to play along and see how far it would go. He stared hard at Trudy's body before he offered her his arm.

"I didn't meet anyone on the way down," he said. "Just how private is this place?"

"I'm like you." Trudy slipped her arm through Bey's and snuggled close. "I prefer to live alone. The castle is as private as you want it to be."

So there you have it.
Bey allowed Trudy to lead him down one more floor, to a small and intimate dining-room where a sumptuous meal stood ready for two people. The whole fairy-tale. Come and work for BEC on Mars. You will be given more money than you know what to do with. You will face the intriguing challenge of the Martian surface forms. You will live in a legendary castle, in a suite adapted to fit your personal tastes and convenience. And you will if you desire it enjoy the company, bed and gorgeous body of Trudy Zenobia Melford, Empress of BEC.

No one in all of history had ever been offered such a package.

Now for the big question: why was it being offered to Bey Wolf?

* * *

Although his day was no more than half over, Bey would have bet that there could be no more surprises. He had been given enough of them since breakfast to last a month or two.

He would have lost the bet.

First it was Trudy Melford. She had deliberately dressed to show off her body to Bey, and used words in her private quarters to suggest that it was available to him. But as soon as the meal began she backed off. Although her voice remained warm, everything else about her said that her mind had moved somewhere else. She sounded thoughtful and abstracted, even melancholy.

Bey knew of nothing that he had said to cause the change. There had to be another reason—and he had an idea what it might be. He couldn't wait to get to his data center and begin his own investigations. He ate and chatted about nothing, but as soon as he could politely do so he nodded at Trudy and pushed his chair away from the table.

"That was delicious." (Not really a lie. He had hardly noticed the food, but he was sure that Melford Castle served only the system's finest.) "Now I have to be getting back to Earth."

Trudy came really alive for the first time since they had sat down at the table. "You'll consider my offer?" She was staring at him anxiously.

"I am already considering it."

"If there is anything else that you need to know, or want to add to make it more attractive . . ."

"Nothing. I would like one small favor before I leave. I'd like to place a call to Wolf Island."

"But you said no one is there."

"True. I want to check my message center."

"No problem." Trudy stood up. "You can use my personal communication system." She led the way out of the dining-room and back up to the fifth floor, this time taking the other direction when they came to the top of the stairs. Bey realized that her living quarters must consist of the whole fourth floor. Only blind luck had led him earlier straight into her private dressing-room.

They walked along a hallway filled with Melford family portraits, most of them dark and brooding, until Trudy stopped and opened a paneled door of polished oak. She smiled and ushered him in. "This is it. Make yourself at home. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised."

She stayed outside, closing the door.

Surprised? Bey walked over and examined the console. It was a conventional enough communication system, no better than the one installed on Wolf Island. He sat down and queried for Earth-Mars response time. He expected to see a number around thirteen minutes, the round-trip travel time for bodies that were currency about a hundred and twenty million kilometers apart.

What he got was nonsense. The Earth-Mars response time was cited as 1.5 seconds.

Bey shrugged. If this element of the system was not working, there was a good chance that the rest might be no better. He entered his personal code and sat down to wait for an indication that the query was being relayed through to Earth. Before he knew it, the system was responding. His own ID appeared on the screen and his message center's voice was saying, "There are three messages for you. Do you want to hear them, or do you need some other service?"

"I'll hear my messages. Oh Lord. I get it!"

Sondra Dearborn's face appeared on the screen, but Bey hardly noticed her. He had realized what must be happening. Trudy was making use of her Earth-Mars link to provide signal communications. His outgoing message would be sent to a recorder on Mars, right next to the link; then the recorder shuttled through the link and down-loaded to an Earth-based planetary communication system for transmission to Wolf Island. The response would be stored on the same recorder, shuttled back through the link, and placed into the Mars system. Finally it would be sent on to him.

The process could be done almost instantaneously, since the main reason for delay in shipping humans was the simple need to equalize ambient air pressure. Message units didn't require that. They would operate happily at any pressure, even in vacuum.

Why had no one used the same sort of system for communications on Earth? Simple. Even using satellite relays, the signal delay was only a fraction of a second, and satellite transmission was a lot cheaper than a Mattin link. But there would be a real market when the natural signal travel time was minutes or hours—as Bey knew from experience, there were few things in the world more frustrating than waiting ten minutes for the answer to an urgent question. Trudy Melford had again showed the Midas touch. In opening an Earth-Mars Mattin link for her own convenience, she had tapped a whole new potential market. The United Space Federation would certainly want to use it for urgent USF business.

Bey realized that Sondra was still talking. He had not been listening. He sent his own signal, telling the processor at his house to start over.

It didn't work. She went on talking, and she looked ghastly. He swore, hit the command sequence again, and finally noticed that he was receiving a real-time transmission. It was not a recording. Sondra had somehow managed to over-ride his house system and replace its signal with her own—even though Bey's earlier experience with Jarvis Dommer had led him to make a specific change to rule out that form of interruption.

"Sondra? How did you manage to
do
that?"

There was a delay, of perhaps two seconds. In that interval Bey had another revelation. In the background, behind Sondra's framed head and shoulders, he could see a wall-chart.

He recognized it: it was a taxonomy of form-change routes. He had made the chart himself. And hung it on his own study wall.

"What the devil are you doing inside my house?" he burst out. "You're supposed to be on your way to the Carcon and Fugate colonies."

This time even the two second delay was intolerable, until Sondra finally answered. "Weren't you listening to me at all?" There was horror on her face but no hint of embarrassment. "There's been
another
one—in the same region of the Kuiper Belt." Her voice rose to an anguished squeak. "Bey, I just have to talk with you about this—as soon as you can possibly get back to Wolf Island."

CHAPTER 8

Sondra's mood had changed on her way back to the Office of Form Control. Her meeting with Bey Wolf—or maybe it was her spat with Trudy Melford—had been the final straw. She steadily became more and more angry. She was going to prove she was as good as anyone, in BEC or out of it, when it came to solving form-change mysteries. As for Denzel Morrone, with or without his permission she would head for the Kuiper Belt just as soon as she could arrange a flight. She would do it with her own savings, and on her own time, and to hell with the office.

She did not go to headquarters as she had originally intended, but hurried instead to the apartment that she shared with two other Form Control employees. The place was supremely disorganized—as usual—and locating the must-have items for her trip took a little time. She was still hunting and cursing when her partners in messiness walked in.

"Well?" Gipsy and Dill came into the bedroom and perched on the high stool by the dressing table. They were testing an experimental multiform and had finally reached the stable commensal stage that preceded body cross-over. The combined form watched Sondra as she pawed through a big pile of freshly-laundered clothing, heaped randomly on the floor. "So tell us. How was he?"

"What do you mean?" Sondra knew from the question that Gipsy was speaking, even though the commensal was in Dill's body. Dill herself must be in dormant mode. "How was who?"

"That's what me and Dill are waiting for you to tell us. Who?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Oh, come off it, Sondra. All of a sudden you get secretive with your friends about what you're doing. You disappear for days at a time without telling anybody, then you come back all wild and woolly like you just spent a weekend with Tarzan. Go look at yourself in a mirror. You're flushed and straggled and wiped out. If that doesn't spell s-e-x, I don't know what does."

"You've got it all wrong." Sondra thought for a moment. She had not told anyone where she was going, but they had known it anyway. Denzel Morrone had reached her easily enough. Secrecy was a waste of time. "I've been to visit Behrooz Wolf. Twice."