Proteus Unbound (12 page)

Now, at a time when Leo would have welcomed a nap, he could not get Aybee's latest comments out of his head. He rubbed at his aching temples and stared at the notes he had made.

"The entropy of the whole universe is increasing," Aybee had said. "But that doesn't mean that the entropy of everything in it must be increasing. In fact, life has the opposite effect. It increases regular structure—nonrandom phenomena—at the expense of disorder. Life is
always
negentropic. It reduces the entropy of everything that it comes into contact with. So
everybody
, and everything living, is negentropic in that sense."

"But the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the one you were quoting earlier—"

"Says that entropy tends to a maximum in a
closed, isolated
system. It tells you nothing about open systems, ones that exchange energy with others. That's us. We don't live in isolation. The Sun and the stars are constant sources of energy, and every living thing in the Solar System uses energy to create order at the expense of disorder. In the thermodynamic sense, you and me and the Wolfman and Fern are all negentropic."

"How about the other meanings of entropy? Do they make more sense for a Negentropic Man?"

"Considered in terms of information theory, the information in a message decreases when the entropy of the signal becomes less. A noisy communications channel is negentropic so far as the signal is concerned. If that's what the Negentropic Man does, we're not seeing signs of it. The reported random error rate for signals received in the Inner and Outer Systems doesn't seem to have changed at all. If it did, people would be getting jumbled, gibberish messages all the time. And if that had happened, I would have heard about it."

"And your fourth form of entropy?"

"That's associated with the power kernels. Any black hole has a temperature, an entropy, a mass, and maybe an electrical charge. If it's a kernel, a Kerr-Newman black hole, it also has rotational energy and a magnetic moment. And that's all it
can
have—no other physical variables are permitted. A kernel sends out random particles and radiation according to a process and a formula discovered a couple of centuries ago. What it emits only depends on the kernel's mass, charge, and spin. For a small black hole—billion-ton, say—the emitted energy is up in the gigawatt range. That's what the kernel shields are for, to stop that radiation. The entropy depends on the mass of the black hole, but I think we can rule out this one. If Wolf's Negentropic Man were dealing with kernels, he'd have to be a superman. Nobody could live for a second inside the shields. All you find in there are sensors, data links, and spin-up/spin-down equipment for energy storage and generation. Here." He had thrust a data cube into Manx's hand. "What I've been saying is all basic stuff. You'll find it explained here."

Leo had taken the cube. Sitting alone in an outer chamber of the habitation bubble, he had played it through twice. It was beginning to make some sense, considered as a set of abstract statements. But it had little to do with the capering man who had haunted Behrooz Wolf. Manx peered at the cube, closed his eyes for a moment or two, and was asleep before he knew he was near to it. All thoughts of entropy vanished. He dreamed that he was far from here, again on Earth, again roaming the old Chehel-sotun temple in Isfahan. But this time he was in free-fall, unhampered by that crushing gravity. He could not have chosen a more welcome dream.

Sylvia Fernald had the greatest need for total privacy. She was talking to Cinnabar Baker through a hyperbeam link. It was voice-only, hugely expensive to operate, and there was still an annoying thirty-second line delay before a reply could be received.

"You must return to the harvester," Baker was saying. "All of you, and at once. There are developments here that dwarf the space farm's problems. How soon can you leave?"

"I'll have to go and tell the others." Sylvia replied immediately, but she could imagine Baker at the other end, chafing at the transmission delay. "So far as Leo and I are concerned, we can leave at once. But Aybee and Wolf are reviewing the farm's data bases. That may take a while."

There was a pause that felt more like half an hour than half a minute. "You can't wait for that." It was the voice of command. "When you get back here, you'll understand why. Leave now, as soon as you can. I'll explain when you get here. One more thing. Have you been able to get closer to Wolf?"

"Not in the way you mean." But somehow I got turned on watching him eating, Sylvia recalled. Would you call that progress? Fortunately it was a voice-only link. Sylvia was sure her face would have betrayed her—if her voice was not already doing that. "I'll see what happens on the way back," she said. "But I'm not optimistic. I'm sure he finds me as revolting to look at as I find him. And Leo told me Wolf is still infatuated with a woman he left on Earth."

There was a final annoying delay. "He didn't leave her on Earth," Cinnabar Baker said at last. "She left him, to run off with somebody from the Halo. Big difference. Keep trying. Link ends."

New problems on the harvester, Sylvia thought. What's happening to the Solar System? It's one damned thing after another.

She hurried out of the room. She was heading for Bey's quarters in the higher-gravity region of the habitation bubble when the impact occurred.

CHAPTER 13

No recording instruments on the Sagdeyev space farm survived the impact. The whole encounter had to be deduced from other evidence.

The object hit the southern hemisphere of the habitation bubble, close to the pole. It was a jagged brown chunk of the primitive solar nebula, mostly ammonia and water ice, and it massed about eighty million tons. With a relative velocity of a kilometer a second, it smashed clear through the bubble and emerged from the side of the northern hemisphere. It also missed by thirty meters a collision with the shields of the power kernel and so failed to assure the immediate death of all humans on the farm.

The momentum that the impact transferred to the habitation bubble did three things. It broke the bubble loose from the farm's billion-kilometer collection layer. It left the bubble with a new velocity vector and a new orbit, sharply inclined to its old one. And it set the bubble spinning around the central power kernel as it caromed away into space.

Two thousand machines were left behind on the detached collection layer. After the first confusion they managed very well. The smarter ones herded the others into tight little groups, then settled down to wait for instructions or rescue. Whether that took place in one day or in one century made little difference. The smart machines knew enough to keep things under control for a long time. Not one of the two thousand was damaged.

The humans on the farm were less lucky. Four of the farmers were in chambers on the direct path of the intruding body. They died at once. Two others were left in airless rooms and could not reach suits. The rest of the farmers followed the standard emergency procedure and were into the lifeboats and clear of the bubble in less than a minute.

The visitors from the harvester were both more and less fortunate. Their chambers were not on the main line of the collision, and the impact was felt at first as no more than a short-lived and violent jerk of acceleration. Leo Manx, Sylvia Fernald, and Aybee Smith did not know the emergency routines specific to the farm, but they had been trained to react defensively. High acceleration of a habitation unit equaled disaster. They did not wait to see if the integrity of the bubble's outer hulls had been breached. As soon as they picked themselves up after the first shock of collision, they headed for the survival suits. They could live in them for at least twenty-four hours. Aybee had a mild concussion. Leo had five cracked ribs and a broken leg, but his deep-space training allowed him to override the pain until he was safe in his suit.

Bey Wolf was in much deeper trouble. His room was closest to the line of destruction. Worse than that, he lacked the right reflexes. He knew there had been a major accident, but he had to attempt by thought what the others did by instinct.

He had been thrown headfirst and hard against the communications terminal. Drops of blood from deep cuts on his cheek and forehead were already drifting across the room when he came to full consciousness. His head was ringing, and he was nauseated. He wiped at his face with his shirt and staggered to the door. It was closed. Beyond it he heard a hiss of air, and he could feel the draft at the door's edge.

The sliding partition was tight-fitting but not airtight. He had maybe a couple of minutes before the pressure dropped too low to be breathable. Just as bad, a faint plume of green gas was seeping
into
the room, and the slightest trace was enough to start him coughing. Wall refrigeration pipes must have ruptured. He might choke before he died of lack of air.

Suits.
Where the devil were they kept? Bey hauled himself across to the storage units on the other side of the room. He jerked them open, one after another. Everything from chess boards to toothbrushes spilled out. No suit.

He caught another whiff of gas, coughed horribly, and mopped again at his bleeding face. What now? Where else might a suit be kept? Don't panic.
Think!

He realized that if the data terminal were still working, it could tell him what he needed to know in a couple of seconds. He was moving across to it when the knock came on the door.

The sound was so unexpected that for a moment he did not react at all. Then he had a terrible thought. If someone out there in a suit were to try to come in . . .

"Don't touch the door!" he shouted, but already his voice sounded fainter in the thinning air. Asphyxiation, not poison gas, would get him. He was aware of pain in his ears and the cramping agony of trapped gas being forced out of his intestines.

"Bey?" The cry from outside was muffled. It was Sylvia. "Bey, can you hear me?"

"Yes. Don't open the door."

"I know. Do you have a suit?"

"Can't find it."

"By the data terminal. In the footlocker."

He did not waste air replying. The suit was there, but he had to fight his way into it. He was growing dizzy, panting uselessly. He got his legs and arms in and pulled the suit up around his shoulders. But the helmet was too much. He concentrated all his attention on the smooth head unit and managed to place it roughly in position. But he could not seal it. Anoxia was winning. The room was turning dark. At the edge of unconsciousness, Bey realized how much he wanted to live.

He was fighting the seals—and losing—when there was a crash behind him and a rush of escaping air. His lungs collapsed as the pressure dropped to zero. When Sylvia arrived at his side he was almost unconscious, still groping single-mindedly at the helmet. She slapped it into position and turned the valve. The rush of air inside the suit began.

She bent to look into the faceplate. Bey's face was a mottled nightmare of fresh red blood and cyanotic blue skin. As she watched, the oxygen-starved look faded. The chest of the suit gave a series of shuddering heaves. Alive. Sylvia grabbed Bey's suited arm and began to drag him. She had come at once, as soon as her suit was on, and she did not know the cause of the problem. Another crash or explosion might happen at any moment. Like any Cloudlander, she fled for the safety of open space.

The exit wound of the colliding chunk provided the widest and easiest way out. Sylvia and Bey accompanied a mass of flotsam, flying out into space with the last puff of internal air from the bubble.

Bey was unconscious. Sylvia, shaking with exhaustion, held him tightly and looked around them. The collection layer of the farm had been left far behind. The surviving farmers had moved their lifeboat close to the shattered bubble, and half a dozen of them were preparing to reenter through an air lock. They had a clear duty toward their missing fellows: rescue or space burial.

Sylvia could see the ship that she and Bey had arrived on. It floated a few kilometers clear of the bubble, apparently undamaged, its warning beacons a red glow against the stars. She was not sure that she had the strength to get there. She set out, dragging Bey along with her. When she was nearly there she saw a suited figure jetting across to help her. It was Aybee.

"Leo?" she asked.

"Inside. Banged up, but not too bad." Aybee took over and hauled Bey along behind him. "How's with the Wolfman here?"

"Hurt some." She was shivering. "He should be all right. Where's our other ship?"

Aybee waved his arm through a wide circle. "You tell me. The beacon's not working. I don't know how we'll ever find it."

As he passed Bey through the lock, Sylvia took a last look around. There was no sign of the ship Aybee had arrived in. It was lost somewhere in the darkness, indistinguishable from a million other pieces of stellar flotsam.

She collapsed as she stepped out of the air lock. In the past twenty minutes she had forced her body all the way to its physical limits. Any more help for Bey Wolf would have to come from someone else.

* * *

Bey woke up three times.

Pain was the first stimulus. Someone was hurting his face, stabbing again and again at his cheek and forehead. "A bit crude," a voice said. "But it'll do. Couple more stitches, I'll be all done. You're a mess. You hearing me, Wolfman? No beauty prizes for you." The sharp pain came again, followed by a wash of icy fluid across his face. Bey grunted in protest and drifted back to unconsciousness.

The second time was more alarming. And more painful. He woke and tried to touch his throbbing left cheek. He could not do it. Something had him firmly held, unable to move. He began to struggle, to pull randomly against his restraints. He was too confused and dizzy to analyze what was happening or why, but he fought like an animal, straining as hard as he could. It was futile. He was working against straps designed to hold a human body secure under a ten-g acceleration. Exhausted after just a few seconds, he lapsed again into unquiet sleep.

Pain and consciousness came faster the third time, and with them—at last—vision. He was lying with his eyes open, staring at a woman's face. It was only inches away from him, pale and still. There was a tracery of blue veins on the temples and the violet-black smudge of deadly fatigue below the closed eyes. He studied it, puzzled by its familiarity. Who was she? That rounded brow was well known to him. He tried to lift his arm to touch the delicate skull and the fine red hair. He could not do it. They were strapped side by side, lying on a single narrow bunk and securely held in position.