SIGHT OF PROTEUS.

Charles Sheffield.

BOOK 1.

"Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

CHAPTER 1.

The new fall catalog had arrived that morning. Behrooz Wolf, like millions of others, had settled in for an evening of browsing and price comparison. As usual, there were many variations on most of the old forms, plus an intriguing set of new ones that BEC was releasing for the first time. Bey keyed out the catalog displays, studying the images and .the prices and occasionally marking a form for future reference.

After about an hour his interest began to fade and his attention wandered. He yawned, put down the catalog, and went to his desk in the corner of the room.

He picked up and looked through a couple of texts on form-change theory, then, restless as ever, leafed through his casebook. Finally, he picked up the BEC catalog again. When the phone buzzed, he gave an instinctive mutter of annoyance, but the interruption was a welcome one. He pressed the wrist remote.

"Bey? Put me up on visual, would you," said a voice from the wall screen.

Wolf touched his wrist again, and the cheerful, ruddy face of John La.r.s.en appeared on the wall holo. La.r.s.en looked at the catalog that Bey was holding and smiled.

"I didn't know that was out yet, Bey. Tomorrow's the official release date. I haven't had the chance to see if mine has arrived. Sorry to call you at this hour, but I'm still over here at the office."

"No problem. I couldn't get too interested in this, anyway. It's the same old irritation. The forms that appeal the most need a thousand hours of work with the machines, or else they have a lousy life ratio."

"-or they require a whole ma.s.s of computer storage, if they're anything like last spring's releases. How are the prices?"

"Up again, and you're quite right, they need more storage, too. Look at this one, John." He held up the open catalog. "I already have a billion words of primary storage, and I still couldn't begin to handle it. Four billion words, or you shouldn't think of ordering it."

La.r.s.en whistled softly. "That's certainly a new one, though. It's the closest thing I've ever seen to an avian form. What's the life ratio on it? Bad, I'll bet."

Wolf consulted the tables in the catalog and nodded agreement.

"Less than 0.2. You'd be lucky to last ten years with it. You might be all right in low-g, but not otherwise. In fact, there's a footnote that says it can achieve flight in a lunar gravity or less. I suppose they're hoping for USF sales."

He closed the catalog.

"So, what's happening, John? I thought you had a date-why the midnight oil?"

La.r.s.en shrugged. "We've got a mystery on our hands. I'm baffled, and it's the sort of problem you thrive on. Do you feel up to a trip back to the office tonight? You're the boss, but I'd really like to get your opinion."Wolf hesitated. "I wasn't planning to go out again. Can't we handle it over the holo?"

"I don't think so. But maybe I can show you enough to persuade you to come over here." La.r.s.en held out a sheet so that it could be seen on the holoscreen. "Bey, what do you make of this ID code?"

Wolf studied it carefully, then looked back at La.r.s.en questioningly. "It seems normal enough. Is it somebody I'm supposed to know? Let me just check it through my percomp."

La.r.s.en watched in silence as Wolf entered the digits of the chromosome ID code that had replaced fingerprint, voiceprint, and retinal patterns as the absolute identification method. The link from his personal computer to the central data banks was automatic and almost instantaneous. When the response came, Wolf frowned at it for a moment, then looked in annoyance at John La.r.s.en.

"What's the game, John? There's no such ID in the central files. Is it one that you made up?"

"I wish it were, but it's nothing so simple."

La.r.s.en reached behind him and picked up a printed report.

"I told you, Bey, this is a strange one. I had a call about three hours ago from a medical student. This afternoon, he was over in the transplant ward of Central Hospital when a liver transplant case came in. He's been taking a course in chromosome a.n.a.lysis, and he'd missed one of the lab sessions where they were supposed to try the technique out on a real case. So he had the idea of doing an ID check on a sample from the donor liver-just to see if he had the technique correct."

"That's illegal, John. He can't have the licenses to use that equipment."

"He doesn't. He did it anyway. When he got home, he fed the ID code into central files and asked for donor identification and matching. The files couldn't produce a match."

Bey Wolf looked skeptical-but intrigued. "He must have made a measurement error, John."

"That was my first reaction. But he's an unusual young man. For one thing, he was willing to call us, even though he knew he might get in trouble for doing the ID a.n.a.lysis without proper permission. I told him he must have done something wrong, but he said he'd done it three times, twice the usual way and once with a shortcut method that he wanted to try out. It came out the same each time. He's sure that he handled the technique correctly and didn't make any mistakes."

"But there's no way to fake a chromosome ID, and every human being is listed in the central files. Your student is telling us that he tested a liver that came from a person who never existed."

John La.r.s.en looked pleased. "That's what I wanted to hear you say. It was my conclusion exactly. Well, Bey? See you over here in an hour or so?"

The evening shower was over, and the streets were once again a wild, colorful chaos. Bey left his apartment and worked his way over to the fastest slide way, threading through the ma.s.s of people with practiced ease. With the population over fourteen billion, crowding was normal, night or day, even in the most affluent parts of the city. Wolf, preoccupied with La.r.s.en's problem, scarcely noticed the throng that surrounded him.

How could anyone have escaped the chromosome typing? It was performed at three months, right after the humanity tests-and it had been that way for a century.

Could the donor be old, a dying ancient? That was ridiculous. Even if the donor wanted it that way, no one would use a century-old liver for a transplant operation. Bey's thin face was puzzled. Could it be that the donor was an off-worlder? No, that wouldn't explain it either. The IDs for people from the United s.p.a.ce Federation were all separately filed, but they were still in the records at the central data banks. The computer response would have been delayed a little, but that was all.

He was beginning to feel the old mixture, a tingle of excitement modulated by a fear of disappointment. His job in the Office of Form Control was a goodone-he didn't know of a better. But although he had been highly successful in it, somehow it was not completely satisfying. Always, he felt that he was waiting for the big challenge, the problem that would stretch his abilities to their limits. Maybe this could be the one. At thirty-four, he should know what he wanted to do with the rest of his life-it was ridiculous still to be full of the heart searching of adolescence.

In an attempt to suppress his illogical sense of antic.i.p.ation and to prepare his mind for the problem ahead, Bey keyed his communication implant and tuned to the newscast. The familiar beaked nose and sloping brow of Laszlo Dolmetsch appeared, directly stimulated on his optic nerves. The people and the slide ways were still faintly visible as a ghostly superimposed image-the laws forbade total exclusion of the direct sensory feeds. The early slide way deaths had taught that lesson.

Dolmetsch, as always, was holding forth on the latest social indicators and making his usual pessimistic prophecies. If the concentration of industry around the Link access points were not lessened, there would be trouble ...

Bey had heard it all before, and custom had staled the message. Sure, there were instabilities in the social indicators-but that had been the case ever since the indicators were first developed. Bey looked again at Dolmetsch's profile and wondered about the popular rumor. Instead of using form-change to diminish that great beak, the story went, Dolmetsch had increased it-to become an unmistakable figure anywhere on Earth. That he certainly was. Bey could not remember a time when Dolmetsch had not been a prominent prophet of doom. How old was the man now? Eighty, or ninety?

Bey mentally shrugged and switched channels. He had to return to the real world for a moment, to move quickly out of the way of two red-coated medical emergency staff hurtling at top speed along the fastest slide way, then he skipped through the other news channels. Not much there. A mining accident on Horus, so far from most Solar System activities that it would take months for relief to reach it; a promising discovery of kernels out in the Halo, which meant fortune for some lucky prospector and more free energy for the USF; and the perennial rumor of a form-change that would give immortality to the wearer. That one cropped up every couple of years, regular as the seasons. It was a tribute to the continued power of wishful thinking. No one ever had any details-just the vaguest of hearsay. Bey listened scornfully and wondered again how people could pay attention to such a flimsy prospect. He switched back to Dolmetsch-at least the old man's worries were comprehensible and had a solid basis of fact. There was no doubt that the shortages and the violence were barely under control, and the population, despite all efforts, was still creeping upward. Could it ever hit fifteen billion? Bey remembered when fourteen had seemed intolerable.

The crowds surging along the slide ways didn't seem to share Wolfs worries.

They looked happy, handsome, young, and healthy. To people living two hundred years earlier they would have seemed models of perfection. Of course, this was the west side, closer to the Link entry point, and that helped. There was plenty of poverty and ugliness elsewhere. But forget for the moment the high prices and the ma.s.s of computer storage that was needed. BEC-the Biological Equipment Corporation-could fairly claim to have transformed the world, that part of the world, at least, that could afford to pay. Here on the west side, affluence was the norm and use of the BEC systems a sine qua non.

Only the general coordinators shared Laszlo Dolmetsch's view of the problems in keeping the economic balance of the world. Earth was poised on a knife edge of diminishing resources. Constant subtle adjustments, calculated by application of Dolmetsch's theories, were needed to hold it there. Every week there were corrections for the effects of drought, crop failures, forest fires, epidemics, energy shortages, and mineral supplies. Every week the general coordinators watched the indices for violence, disease, and famine and waited grimly for the time when the corrections would fail and the system would run amok into worldwide slump and economic collapse. In a united world, failure of one system means failure of all. Only the off-Earthers, the threemillion citizens of the United s.p.a.ce Federation, could cling to their shaky independence-and the USF watched the economic indicators at least as closely and nervously as any Earth-based coordinator.

As he neared his goal, Bey Wolf kept an automatic eye open for illegal forms.

Makeup and plastflesh could hide a great deal, but with the Office of Form Control he had been specially trained to see past the outward form, through to the shape of the underlying body structure.

Here, on the public slide ways, the chances of running into an outlawed form were small-but Bey still had occasional nightmares about the feline form he had spotted less than a mile from here two years earlier. That had cost him two months out of action, in the accelerated change and recovery room of the Form Control Hospital unit.

As he made the transitions back to the slowest slide way, he noticed again the large number of rounded Elizabethan foreheads on the people he was pa.s.sing.

That had been a minor special of the spring catalog but it had turned out to be a big hit. He wondered what the fall attraction would be-dimples? saber scars? an Egyptian nose?-as he printed into Form Control and went up to La.r.s.en's office on the third floor.

As Bey Wolf was climbing the stairs, a few miles east of him a solitary white-coated figure dialed a vault combination and stepped through into the underground experiment room, four floors below City level. The face and figure would be familiar to any scientist. It was Albert Einstein-Einstein at forty, at the very height of his powers.

The man made his way slowly down the long room, checking the station monitors at each of the great tanks. Most received only a few seconds of attention and the occasional adjustment of a control setting, but at the eleventh station he halted. He examined the outputs closely, grunted, and shook his head. Several minutes pa.s.sed while he stood motionless, deep in thought. At last he continued his patrol and went on into the general control area at the far end of the room.

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, graying 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 second. Continued deterioration in tank eleven. Response intensity is down by a further two percent, and there is a renewed instability in the biofeedback 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 reset the monitors at each station and switched on the telltales. 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 La.r.s.en, 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 outregularly, I get eyestrain. I'll have a full session on the bios-first thing tomorrow."

La.r.s.en raised a skeptical 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 manana 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.

La.r.s.en 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 La.r.s.en 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 reentered 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 REENTER.

"d.a.m.nation. 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 La.r.s.en, 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."

La.r.s.en 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 Dr. Morris in the Transplant Department, he'll probably arrange to do it for us."

"Tonight?"

"No." La.r.s.en 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."

La.r.s.en 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, soonafter entry, so that there's always a backup 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 La.r.s.en. "Do you know, I haven't been outside the office for a minute since I arrived this morning. What's new on the slide ways?"

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 slide walkers. Like most members of Form Control, Wolf and La.r.s.en 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.