Sight of Proteus (2 page)

Seated at the console, he called out the detailed records for the eleventh station and displayed them on the screen. Then he was again silent for many minutes, twisting around his forefinger a lock of his long, greying hair, as he bent over the displays of feed rates, nutrient mixes and other vital indicators. The program-swapping records occupied him for more long minutes, but finally he was finished. He emerged from his concentration, cleared the screen, and switched to voice recording mode.

"November 2nd. Continued deterioration in tank eleven. Response intensity is down by a further two percent and there is a renewed instability in the bio-feedback loops. Change parameters were recalibrated tonight."

He paused, reluctant to take the next step. At last he went on.

"Prognosis: poor. Unless there is improvement in the next two days, it will be necessary to terminate the experiment."

He sat for a moment longer, visibly shaken. At last he stood up. Moving quickly now through the dimly-lit room he re-set the monitors at each station and switched on the tell-tales. He took a final look around the room, locked the vault, and entered the elevator that would take him back to ground level. More than ever now, the face was that of Einstein. Over the warmth, intellect and humanity was etched the pain and torment of a man who worried and suffered for the whole world.

Chapter 2

John Larsen, still fresh-faced and cheerful despite the late hour, looked at Bey closely when he came in.

"Late nights don't seem to agree with you," he said. "You look tired. Been neglecting your conditioning program again?"

Wolf shrugged and involuntarily blinked his eyes several times.

"It shows, does it? I was born a bit myopic, you know. If I don't work out regularly, I get eyestrain. I'll have a full session on the bio's—first thing tomorrow."

Larsen raised a sceptical eyebrow. Bey was famous for his 'tomorrow' statements. He claimed he had inherited subtlety and shrewdness from his Persian mother, along with tenacity and attention to detail from his German father. But from his Persian side had also apparently come a gift for extreme procrastination. Bey swore that there was no word just like mañana in the Persian language—there were a dozen related words, but none of them had that degree of urgency. His tendency to delay didn't seem to extend to his work. He was highly effective there. Dark-haired, dark-complexioned, of medium height and build, he had an uncanny ability to efface himself totally and disappear into any crowd—a useful talent for an investigating agent in the Office of Form Control.

Larsen picked up a typed sheet from his desk and offered it to Wolf.

"There it is. The signed, sworn statement of Luis Rad-Kato—that's the medical student. It has the whole story. Gives the time, tells just what he did, quotes the liver ID, and shows where he filed his results in the data banks."

Wolf took the paper and glanced over it. "I suppose you already pulled the records on this out of Central Data, to make sure he filed it the way he said he did?"

"Sure. I did that as soon as I received his report. It was still held in the scratch file. I'll read it out again for you."

He dialed the entry code and the two men waited as the data search was performed. The wait lengthened. After a minute or so Larsen frowned in perplexity.

"There shouldn't be this much delay. The response last time I checked was almost instantaneous. Maybe I goofed on the access code."

He hit the priority interrupt key and re-entered the code. This time the message light blinked on, and the display screen filled. 'Entry code does not correspond to any record in files. Check reference and re-enter.'

"Damnation. That can't be right, Bey. I used that same code less than an hour ago."

"Let me have a go. I know the supervisor entry codes for that area of central storage."

Wolf, much more at home with computers than Larsen, took over the console. He entered the control language statements that allowed him access to the operating system and began to screen the storage files. After a few minutes' work he froze the display.

"This is the area, John. Look at it—talk about bad luck! The data dump shows a hardware malfunction in the medical records section, less than an hour ago. A whole group of records has been lost—including the area where the file we want was stored. They were all erased when the system went down."

Larsen looked miserable. He shook his head in disgust.

"It was a lousy time for it to happen, Bey. Now the whole thing will be a pain to follow up. We'll have to call Central Hospital and ask for a new check on the liver transplant ID. They won't like that, but if we reach Doctor Morris in the Transplant Department he'll probably arrange to do it for us."

"Tonight?"

"No." Larsen looked apologetic. "It can't be done. It's almost eleven now, and Morris works the day shift. We won't get any action until tomorrow. The best I can do is call and leave a stored request for the morning."

He sat down at the video link and prepared to call the hospital, then paused. "Unless you want to go over in the morning and check it in person? We'd actually get faster action that way."

Wolf shrugged. "Might as well. Tonight's shot anyway. Let's leave it all until tomorrow."

Larsen was still apologetic. "It must have been a million to one chance, losing the record we wanted like that."

"More than that, John. The scratch record is copied into a master file, soon after entry, so that there's always a back-up copy. The accident must have happened before they could get the copy for permanent storage. I've never even heard of such a thing before—it must be a one in a billion rarity, maybe one in a trillion."

He wore a thoughtful and dissatisfied expression as they went together into the still-crowded streets.

"I've had no dinner, and I broke a date to follow through on this thing," said Larsen. "Do you know, I haven't been outside the office for a minute since I arrived this morning. What's new on the slideways?"

Wolf looked amused. "If you mean women, as you usually do, I wasn't looking too much on the way over. I saw a couple of new ones this afternoon, though—styles straight from old Persia. Fantastic eyes. It would be nice if they caught on and came into fashion."

They merged into the slidewalkers. Like most members of Form Control, Wolf and Larsen were wearing simple forms, close to those given by Nature. Years of form-change training, reinforced by the chilling exposure to the outlawed forms, made form-change for pleasure or entertainment a doubtful attraction to them. It took an intriguing form indeed to tempt them to experiment. The biofeedback machines in the Office of Form Control were used for work and for health, almost never for cosmetics. Before Bey went to bed he took a short program on his own equipment for his myopia, and resolved to take a more complete physical overhaul—tomorrow.

Chapter 3

The meeting was running well over its scheduled one hour. That happened often. Every year the list of petitioners grew longer, and every year the committee had to weigh more factors in deciding the new legal forms.

Robert Capman, committee chairman, looked at his watch and called the meeting again to order.

"We're late, ladies and gentlemen. This must be our final decision for today. Turn, if you please, to the description of the twentieth petition. Perhaps I can summarize it for you in the interests of speed.

"The basic form is mammalian aquatic. You will see that fourteen variations are also being applied for in simultaneous petition. The developer of the forms points out that one of these variations has a life-ratio a little better than one—about 1.02, to be more precise. This could translate to an extension of a couple of years on a user's life span. BEC has already stated that they would be willing to handle this form and all its variations as Type I Programs, fully certified and supported by BEC warranties. Could I now have your comments, please."

Capman paused. He had the gift—part instinct, part experience—that allowed him to control the pace of the meeting completely. There was a stir at the far end of the long table.

"Yes, Professor Richter. You have a comment?"

Richter cleared his throat. He was a lean, fastidious man with a neat black beard. "A question, really. I notice that the basic form can supposedly be reached with less than two hundred hours of machine interaction. I know that the main external change, apart from the skin and eyes, is just the addition of gills to the human form, but that interaction time seems to me to be too little. I question its accuracy."

Capman smiled and nodded. "An excellent point, Jacob. I had the same thought myself when I re-read this petition."

Richter warmed to the praise in Capman's voice.

"However," continued Capman, "I now believe that the statement is accurate. This petitioner seems to have achieved a real break-through. As you know, a form is usually reached with less effort when it corresponds to one somewhere in our own genetic history."

Richter nodded vigorously. "Indeed, yes. I have always thought that to be the reason why the avian forms have proved so difficult to realize. Are you suggesting that the petitioner has developed a form that relates to our own descent?"

"I believe so. He has contributed to the present science of metamorphosis and also given us a new insight into our own evolutionary background."

There was a stir of excitement around the table. Capman rarely offered personal comment on a petition. He left it to the committee to make their own evaluation and recommendation. His praise carried weight. The approval for the use of the new form was swiftly given and the ecstatic petitioner received the formal congratulations of the committee.

He left in a blissful daze—with good reason. Adoption of his forms by BEC as Type I Programs made him an instant millionaire, in either Earth riyals or in USF new dollars.

As soon as he had gone, Capman called the meeting once more to order.

"That concludes the consideration of petitions for today. There is, however, still one extraordinary item of business that I want to bring to your attention before we leave. We cannot resolve it now, but I urge you to think about it in the weeks until our next meeting."

He motioned to one of the Minutes Secretaries, who handed him a pile of thin folders, which he distributed to the committee members.

"These contain some details of an unusual petition request that we received last week. It has not been through the conventional screening process, because after a quick look at it I judged that we should consider it directly in this committee. It has a life-ratio close to 1.3."

There was a sudden hush. Committee members who had been straightening their papers before leaving stopped, and gave Capman their full attention.

"The petitioner does not emphasize this," went on Capman, "but the extensive use of this form could increase the average life expectancy to almost one and a half centuries. The appearance of the form is outwardly normal. The changes are mainly in the medulla oblongata and the endocrine glands."

At the far end of the table, Richter had again raised his hand.

"Mister Chairman, I urge great caution in discussing this form anywhere outside this committee. We all can guess the public reaction if people see a chance to increase their life spans by thirty percent. It would be chaos."

Capman nodded. "That was going to be my next point. There is still another reason why this form must be handled with special care. As many of you may know, I also serve as consultant and technical advisor to the General Coordinators. It is in that role that I am most worried by this petition. The widespread use of any form with a life-ratio this high could eventually push the population of Earth up above twenty billion. We could not support such a level. If Dolmetsch is correct, we are already crowding close to the absolute limit of population stability."

He closed his notebook.

"On the other hand, I'm not sure that we have the right to suppress any petition for such arguments. The petitioner presumably knows his legal rights. I would like to get your opinion on this next month, after you have all had time to think about it.

"The meeting is now adjourned."

He smiled his thanks at the participants, gathered his papers, and hurried from the room. After the other committee members had also left, the Minutes Secretaries remained to clear up and compare notes. The junior of the two skipped through his recording, then compared it with the written transcript.

"I show one clean acceptance," he said, "two conditional acceptances subject to further tests, two more to be continued with sponsored research grants. If my count is right, that leaves us fifteen outright rejections."

"Check. Funny, isn't it, how the percentages seem to run about the same each time, no matter what the petitions are?" The blonde girl tried an experimental flutter of her eyelashes and a pout of the lips. Getting the form of the Marilyn variations was fairly easy, as far as the outward shape was concerned, but the mannerisms took lots of practice. "There, how was that?"

"Not too bad. You're improving, but you're not there yet. I'll let you know when you have it perfect. Look, do you think we should make any special notes on the rejected forms? There's at least one that might be worth a comment."

"I know. The petitioner who tried to develop the wheeled form? I don't know what we could put in the transcripts. 'Widespread and ill-concealed laughter from the Committee Members'? They had a hard time controlling themselves, the way he was hopping and rolling all over the room. It's probably better to say nothing. I wonder why somebody would go to all that trouble to make a complete fool of himself."

"Come on, Gina, we both know why."

"Oh, I guess you're right. Money will always do it."

Of course.

. . . would you like to be rich, really rich? Then why not develop a new form to catch the public fancy? You will get a royalty from every single user . . .

Sounds easy? Not really—all the simple forms were explored long ago. The change specialists are driven all the time to more exotic and difficult variations. Whatever you come up with will have to pass the stringent requirements of the petition board. One in a million hits the jackpot.