Proteus in the Underworld (21 page)

"All right. Lets go back to the other room. I'd like you to put me down at the tank which produced the feral form, if you know which one that is."

"We do indeed." The woman's thin voice sounded mildly reproachful. "Naturally, that tank was marked as off-limits as soon as we realized that a problem had occurred in it. We will not use it again until we are sure that there is no danger of another malfunction."

Sondra felt another moment of uneasiness, a touch of cold doubt at the base of her brain. The Fugates were doing everything
right
, behaving exactly as she would have behaved herself in the same situation. Her glib assumption, that this was just a question of using flawed equipment and then lying about it, felt less and less plausible. But if it
wasn't
that . . .

The Fugate woman had placed her down gently by the side of one of the great tanks, next to its controller. Sondra saw, to her relief, that it had the size and shape she was most familiar with from her training back on Earth. She knew exactly how to operate it, how to open it, how to take it apart.

She moved to examine the controller's settings, then realized that the two Fugates showed no signs of leaving. They stood motionless and were watching her attentively.

Maybe it was simple curiosity. Maybe they had been told to stay close to Sondra and watch everything that she did. Maybe they had been told to stay close to her, and make sure that she
didn't
do some particular thing. Maybe . . .

"If I have to take the tank controller apart I'm going to be faced with some very delicate operations. I might be able to do the work in my suit, but it would be much quicker and easier to work without it. Is there any way that this room can be taken to Earth-ambient conditions?" Part of what Sondra said was simple truth. Things
would
go quicker and easier if she didn't have to keep her suit on. More than that, though, there was at least a little personal insecurity. If she screwed up and had to repeat some step three or four times, did she really like the idea of an audience?

And there was a final reason. The Fugates would surely find Earth conditions hard to take. If they stayed, it would have to be for some compelling cause—such as, they had something to hide from Sondra.

The man and woman were looking at each other. Sondra thought she read uncertainty on those great faces, huge and distorted as the floating balloons of an Earth parade.

"We can certainly make this chamber self-contained," said Mario Amari at last. "We can also change the general environment here to match any conditions that you desire."

"Except that we do not know," the Fugate woman continued, "we do not know
what
changes to make for you. According to everything that we have heard, Earth is not a single environment. We understand that temperature and humidity and atmosphere vary widely from place to place, and from time to time."

Naturally there was uncertainty. Sondra realized that no Fugate had been to Earth—or would ever go there. The gravity of Earth would crush those soft bodies. Even lying down, the weight of the torsos would compress their lungs and make them unable to breathe. The Fugate colonists might survive in water, buoyed like Earth's own largest fishes and sea mammals, but the land surface of Earth was forever closed to them.

"I can specify a set of standard physical parameters in which I can operate most efficiently. However"—time for Sondra to learn where she really stood— "I suspect that you would not find those conditions well suited to your own comfort."

"That is of secondary importance." Mario Amari's reply came without hesitation. "Our presence is in no way essential. We are here only to be of service to you, in any way that we can, and if you do not need us we will leave. Tell us when you would like us to return."

"I don't know. It may take me a long time and I would rather work alone. Is there food and drink close by?"

"Certainly." Maria Amari waved a huge arm. "We passed a supply area two rooms back, small enough for use by someone in your form."

It was more evidence of frequent visitors to the colony. More possibilities that someone from outside had tampered with form-change hardware or software. Sondra could hardly wait to get her hands on the equipment.

"But we need to know your environmental preference," Maria went on. "We will arrange that it be created within this chamber as soon as possible."

Which would guarantee privacy. No Fugate colonist was likely to relish an Earth-normal environment. Sondra listed the standard operating temperature, pressure, and humidity for the Office of Form Control, and watched Maria and Mario Amari as they drifted out of the room. There was nothing in their actions to suggest that they were reluctant to leave. The woman even seemed rather relieved. Once she had released Sondra from the safe confines of her hand she had never seemed quite at ease. They said they had both volunteered, but it must be a bit hard to serve as tour guide and general factotum for a being small and fragile enough to be destroyed with a single accidental move of hand or foot.

The chamber door sealed with a hiss of hydraulics. Within seconds, Sondra's suit monitors showed that the external temperature and pressure were falling. She waited, spending the next few minutes examining the exteriors of all the form-change tanks in the room. Every one was the same model. Every one was outsized by Earth standards, but it bore the BEC logo. That didn't mean too much. If a pirate manufacturing company was willing to steal the BEC patents, it would not hesitate to steal the company's trademark, too.

The real test came
inside
the controller, in the details of hardware and software. To Sondra's knowledge, no one had ever managed to duplicate those exactly.

Conditions within the chamber were still changing, but they were close enough to their final values for Sondra to dispense with her suit. She eased out of it, picked up her portable test kit, and went across to the tank identified by the Fugates as the one where the feral form had passed its humanity test.

She took a deep breath. This was it. Somewhere within this tank's controller lay the exact evidence as to why humanity had been affirmed where none existed. Either she would understand the problem, and return vindicated to Earth; or she would fail to find an answer, and everyone—Bey Wolf, Denzel Morrone, Trudy Melford, Robert Capman—would be provided with the confirmation of her inadequacy.

Sondra ran the standard diagnostics for the tank's computer. It was no surprise to find that the unit passed every one; the Fugate engineers would certainly have done that test as soon as they realized that something had gone wrong. Sondra went to the next level. She removed the cover of the controller and exposed the hardware.

Again, there was the BEC logo. There, too, was the BEC serial number, indicating that the unit had been fabricated on Earth. The date of BEC final inspection was imprinted, together with the identifier of the machine which had performed the inspection. Sondra checked that ID with her test kit. It was a valid one, still operating in the inner system. Either this was genuine BEC hardware, or some pirate had achieved a level of forgery new to the Office of Form Control.

Sondra moved to the next and more difficult step. If there had been later tampering with the original BEC hardware, traces of that would certainly remain. Subtle traces, but the Office of Form Control had developed a whole suite of delicate tests for just such manipulation.

There were forty-two diagnostics, of steadily increasing complexity and difficulty of associated analysis. Sondra began to work through the tests, patiently recording every result in the test kit log.

The first one showed normal unit operation. Second test: normal; third test . . .

After seven hours of continuous work she was finished. She paused, moved across to her suit, and took a stimulant pill and a drink of water. She sat on the floor, to stare at the tank and its controller.

Nothing. No sign of malfunction, no abnormalities. The BEC hardware appeared to be performing exactly as it had been designed to perform. She had found no sign of tampering. The original seals, applied when the unit left BEC, seemed unbroken. This was genuine BEC equipment, exactly as it had been provided from the BEC factory.

Sondra sighed. All that was left were the software functions. Compared with the tests for those, she knew from experience that the hardware tests she had just completed were child's play. Hardware solutions were standardized. Software, by its nature, was as flexible as thought itself. It admitted an infinite number of valid variations. Just because something was
different
did not at all imply that it was
wrong.

Give up, go home, and say the assignment was beyond her?

Never. Before she did that, she would stay here until she starved or died of exhaustion.

Sondra's stomach gave a sympathetic grumble. How long since she had eaten? Too long, that was for sure. When she had examined the software routines she would treat herself to the best meal that the Fugate Colony could provide.

Until then? Well, she had heard stories in the Office of Form Control, about Bey Wolf in his younger days. When he got his teeth into a problem he would work forty-eight hour stretches, without stopping for anyone or anything.

Anything that he could do, she could do. Properly regarded, hunger was nothing more than a driving force for work.

Sondra returned to her seat at the tank's controller and went at it.

The stories told in the Office of Form Control about Bey Wolf were true; they were also incomplete. He did have an ability to immerse himself in a problem, with a concentration that ignored irrelevant internal signals like fatigue or hunger. He also had a habit of emerging from that profound introspection every half hour or so. Then his consciousness would sweep over the external world like a radar beam, examining it for danger signals.

It was a habit—not instinct, but learned from hard experience—that Sondra had not yet acquired.

Sondra's task was both easier and harder than any that she had faced in her time at the Office of Form Control. Easier, because the software that she was working with involved the humanity test, and only the humanity test. The bewildering set of metamorphoses offered by purposive form-control, everything from cosmetics to long-term encystment for free-space survival, was not an issue.

But harder, too, because the property under examination in the humanity test, namely, the ability to interact with purposive form-change equipment, was itself so variable. One could not say that every individual was the same in this respect; one could say, with far more accuracy, that everyone was
different
, carrying a unique form-change profile as characteristic of that person as a chromosomal ID.

The programs that Sondra was now examining contained millions of branch points and options. It was conceivable that some of those branches had never before been exercised during the humanity tests. Logical errors could occur with even the best techniques of structured programming.

Fortunately, finding every error was not her job. She could follow the
specific
path that the form-change programs had employed when they interacted with the feral form and declared it to be human. Since every interaction and every executed instruction was on file, there was no particular skill in tracking that path. It was actually rather easy to do using the special ferret routines that Bey had provided. They would detect and flag any invalid piece of logic.

What was far more tricky was spotting a program patch—a place where someone had, for his or her own purposes, taken the original logic and substituted a modified version. That was her own best bet as to the source of the trouble.

Sondra slaved on, totally absorbed in her work. At first it was exciting, with the prospect of a surprise at any point. That lift slowly faded, as more and more of the program was examined and found to be logically perfect. There came a point when she felt sure that she was more than halfway through.

She had no thought of stopping.

If it's not hardware, it has to be software. There's nothing else. Keep going. Don't lose concentration.

But at last Sondra realized that she was coming to the final section, a mere few thousand instructions. She ground her way on to the bitter end, reluctant to admit that the chance of finding anything wrong in the final tenth of a percent of the code was close to zero.

At last she found herself staring at stark truth, in the form of a simple final message. It read PROGRAM COMPLETE; in Sondra's own mind it spelled FAILURE.

There had been no hardware tampering. The machine was just as BEC had delivered it, with the original seal intact. And it was not software tampering, nor syntax error, nor more complex logic error.

It was
nothing.
There was nothing left to look at.

Sondra stood up and began to meander hopelessly around the room, pausing to stare blindly at each empty form-change tank. She felt sick. She was hyperventilating, her head spun giddily, and she was chilled to the bone.

How long had she been here, slaving away to no purpose? She glanced at her watch. More than eighteen hours—eighteen wasted hours, with nothing to show but exhaustion.

And finally, as though faculties that she had held in suspension were suddenly clicking back into use, a horde of questions raced through her mind.

Was it as cold in here as it felt? Was the air as thin as it seemed when it entered her straining lungs? And
where were the Fugates?

They had left her to work, but surely they must wonder why she had not asked for food, not called them, not said how she was doing or when she was likely to come out. They did not know of her determination to keep at it non-stop until she was finished.

She went over to her suit and checked its monitors. Temperature in the room, close to freezing. Air pressure, less than half a standard Earth atmosphere. At some time while she was working it had dropped, so slowly that she had not been aware of the change. It was still dropping.