Savant (17 page)

“Stupid. Of course,” said Wooh, embarrassed.

“You whip up a decent egg, too,” said Saintout, by way of letting Wooh off the hook.

“Eggpro,” said Metoo.

“Eggpro?” asked Saintout.

“Eggpro,” said Metoo. “It’s a matter of proportions.”

“Bloody good,” said Saintout. “What’s the secret recipe, then?”

“Thank you. It’s two scoops of eggpro powder to one of powdered milk, a pump each of salt and pepper, out of the dispenser, and let the steam do the rest: 45 seconds.”

“That’s how you keep him in your thrall, then?” asked Saintout.

“Sorry?” asked Metoo.

“You and the prof,” said Saintout.

“Sorry?” asked Metoo.

“You and Master Tobe. You’re unusual, the two of you.”

“How so?”

“Nobody expects it.”

“Expects what?”

“Nobody expects a Companion to last for so long. And an Assistant-Companion should be wiped out in months. Most of us gave you a year at most, and it’s been what? Three highs? Four?”

“Eight years,” said Metoo. “Two years as his Student. I had some help from Kit at the beginning, but –”

“You’ve been enabling this guy for six years?” asked Saintout, incredulous.

“How is that even possible?” asked Wooh.

“Oh, not you too,” said Metoo. “How do I keep him out of his office?”

“He can’t go there, today,” said Wooh. “They haven’t finished collecting the information.”

“And, when he goes back, it won’t be the way he left it,” said Metoo. “He’ll know the difference.”

“Of course he’ll know the difference,” said Saintout. “They’re going to strip that room! There’ll be nothing left: no sign that anything ever happened in that room. They’ve taken everything! Okay, maybe they’re in the throes of taking everything, but the next time he goes in his office, it will be like the first time.”

“He can’t cope with that,” said Metoo. “You can’t take his work away from him. It’d be like taking his life.”

“What else do you expect?” asked Wooh.

“Why can’t they leave him in peace?”

“Fear,” said Saintout. “Service lives in fear. They have nothing and no one, and they haven’t got a clue how the Actives make this whole thing work. Wouldn’t you be scared?”

“The only thing that scares me, is the effect of all this on Tobe. He’s only human, you know!”

“Human?” asked Wooh.

“You’re the doctor,” said Metoo. “He’s more human than you or I.

“What is wrong with you people?”

Chapter Twenty-Six

T
HERE WAS, EFFECTIVELY,
no change at Workstation 4. Babbage and Siemens were specialists, brought in, specifically, to monitor the anomalies at station 4, and collate information on the subject. There was nothing to collect or collate. Workstation 4 was inactive. It was as if the station was wired to an inert test subject.

“This can’t be right,” said Siemens, who had expected fireworks from the start, and had seen nothing. It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen anything of any significance; she had, literally, seen nothing: nothing at all.

“It so can be right,” said Babbage. “We’re brought in to monitor these great mystery cases, and, nine times out of ten, they prove to be inert, benign, inconsequential. Getting the call is one thing, getting a reading is quite another.”

P
ITU
3
SAT
in his hospital bed. It was 07:02, and he had eaten the oatpro more than an hour before, but the tray had not been taken away, and, however good it had been at breakfast, the oatpro had congealed around the lip of the dish and in the bowl of the spoon, and was stiff and grey and unpleasant.

Pitu 3 had been doing as he was bidden. He had spent the last hour and a half looking through the file that was delivered to him with his breakfast. He had waded through the material that had been extracted from Tobe’s mini-print slot, but it still did not interest him. He recognised that it was the material that he had seen in Tobe’s office, even in its abbreviated state, but it meant nothing to him.

If the folder had included material on the cotpro and linopro, and the physics of the stuff that Pitu 3 had been working on, he might have found something to take an interest in, but he didn’t understand the other stuff, and he hadn’t been included in it, so, his interest was negligible. He simply didn’t care. Besides, the maths didn’t add up; it was too esoteric, too theoretical, too deranged for his liking.

Pitu 3 had reached the last few pages of the file. Ranked Operator Patel had taken pictures of Tobe’s room, and got them back to Service Global before embarking on the task of dismantling the office. The first was a close-up of a section of the wipe-wall, slightly degraded by an inadequate zoom lens, and didn’t offend Pitu too much. The second was of the floor. Pitu began to feel uncomfortable. He didn’t want to look at the pictures, but had been told that he should scrutinise the entire file, and he was used to doing as he was told.

It was the last picture that really made him shudder. It was a composite, panoramic view of the entire room, showing, not only the maths, but also the dislodged and torn books, and the untidy bookshelves. At the centre of the picture was a chair, which had a book hanging off it, showing a bright blue square of book-cloth. The sight of the splash of colour right in the middle of the picture somehow made Pitu want to wretch. He closed the file, and placed it face down on the breakfast tray.

“I
CAN’T GET
a reading,” said Siemens, at Workstation 4.

“Who can’t get a reading?” asked Babbage.

“Okay,” said Siemens, “you can’t get a reading. What the hell is going on?”

“This guy is inactive or, passive. We’re not getting a reading, because we don’t have a significant intellect.”

“So, what are we doing here?”

“You tell me,” said Babbage.

Station 4 was almost entirely static for more than an hour. There appeared to be no change in the structure, intensity or variability of the cloud of threads on the screen in front of them

“We’ll do another line-check at 07:00,” said Siemens, “but this looks like a negative to me, and we only get two hours with this guy.”

At 07:02, when Babbage was only a couple of minutes into the line-check, he and Siemens both spotted something.

“Where was that?” asked Siemens, “68, 71?”

Babbage checked the grid reference.

“Reset zoom to 68, 71,” he said. The screen refocused, and Babbage and Siemens looked at the result.

Babbage rolled the palm-sized, rubberpro sphere again, and said, “Hover.” A length of thread came into sharp focus. It was a cool grey colour, pale among the stronger blue lengths, and its pulse was barely visible.

“Anomaly at sector 68,” said the Operator, hitting a button. “Tone sent.”

“And there it is,” said Siemens.

“Except that it’s out of the intellectual range in that sector,” said Babbage.

“We’ll need authorisation,” said Siemens.

“Okay, said Babbage,” but it’d better be quick.”

A single grey thread at 68, 71 began to fade, and then another, and another. Within ninety seconds, the threads had become cold, frayed-looking and fragile. This was not an intellectual response. This was an emotional response. Feelings came and went in very different patterns from thoughts, and time was of the essence. They needed to capture this moment, and exploit it quickly. The problem was, circumventing the law on emotional privacy.

“We need to know the stimulus for the subject,” said Siemens, “and we need his psych file.”

G
OODMAN AND
C
HEN
prepared for the switch-out. It was 05:58 and they had two minutes to go. The tension in the air was palpable.

“Subject switch-out at 06:00,” said Bob Goodman.

“06:00,” said Chen.

Bob Goodman looked at Chen, sitting in the dicky seat.

“Are you really going to do that every time I comment?” asked Goodman.

Chen looked at him.

“You might want to look at your screen,” she said.

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“Bob!”

“This is going to get very interesting very quickly.”

“So, you might want to keep an eye on the damned screen.”

“I’ve been here before.”

“Really?”

“Are you crazy?” asked Bob. “Of course not! I need to work here now, woman, so keep your head down. This is my show.”

“Go you,” said Chen, not a little sarcastically.

She had no way to say how much she was enjoying herself. She had never been part of this kind of surveillance, and she knew that she never would be again, and all she had to do was observe. Bob Goodman had the reins and he knew how to hold them. He knew how to give a horse its head. He knew how to assess a situation, moment by moment.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I
N HOUR SEVENTY-FIVE
of the event, Control Operator Branting strode back into the conference room, clutching a bundle of printouts. He had managed a shower and a quick change of clothes, but had otherwise done everything on the run, and had not slept for twenty hours.

“The first data is in,” he said to the men and women sitting around the table with him. Some were the same people who had sat with him the night before, discussing the dangers of a mind-virus that they believed was being spread via the mini-print slot.

“We have data on the Student who caused the ramp-up to Code Yellow. It is inconclusive, and we have some more legal issues,” said Branting.

“What do you need?” asked Schmidt.

“Privacy law...” said Branting.

“Is a minefield,” Schmidt finished.

“Operators on the ground at Master Tobe’s Service Central want permission to extract emotional response data.”

“They’ve found something that doesn’t compute at the intellectual level? And yet it relates to theoretical mathematics? How can that be?” asked Professor Styles, a new member of the team brought in only this morning.

“That’s what we need to find out,” said Branting. “It seems counter-intuitive, but we don’t know what this thing is yet, and this is only the first batch of data from the first subject exposed to Master Tobe’s work. The emotional response data might not relate to the Master’s work at all.

“To clarify?” asked Schmidt. “Do you want clearance for emotional response data beyond the parameters of the intellect sweep? Or, did this show up on the conventional line-check?”

Branting riffled through the data in his hands, crosschecked two pieces of information on different pages, and smiled.

“It’s on the line-check. So, we can go in?” he asked.

“Providing the subject is bound by College law, and providing that the parameters of the intellect sweep are overlaid with the new emotional response data, yes, you can go in,” said Schmidt.

“Let’s do it,” said Branting.

“There is a downside. If the subject suffers any mental health problems as a result of the methods used to extract the data, Service is entirely responsible.”

“Which means?”

“It means that we could end up pensioning, for life, someone who has no function. There could be problems implementing that pension because of Civilian authorisation.”

“So, if he can no longer work as a result of this procedure, we are obliged to pension him, but we have to justify that pension to the Civilian Board?”

“That’s about the size of it,” said Schmidt.

“We’d better hope that we don’t disable him, then,” said Branting. “See to it, would you Qa?”

I
NFIRMARY WARD
I
SIS
was filling up with people waiting for processing. They sat around, talking, exchanging what little information they had and speculating on the rest. They ate and read, and listened to music. People were still trickling in, but the only ones with first degree contact that weren’t in the infirmary were the five people still dismantling Tobe’s room.

Infirmaries in Peru and Canada were also taking in possible contamination victims, beginning with the world class mathematicians, who had been the first to receive the printouts from Tobe’s office.