They went across to the ship that Bey Wolf and Park Green had arrived in. It had remained close to Pearl's surface, with the auxiliary thrusters making the tiny adjustments necessary to hold it at a precise fifty meters from the asteroid. The handlers moved it gently toward the lock, electronically overriding the command sequence that held the ship's position. Once moved inside, the ship was secured firmly by supporting cables that threaded the faintly lit interior.

The currents began to flow through superconducting struts and cables. The interior configuration of Pearl became rigid, constrained by the intense electromagnetic fields within. When the fields had stabilized, the main lock opened again to reveal a power kernel shielded and held in position by the same powerful controls.

The propulsion unit went on. Plasma was injected into the ergosphere of the kernel, picked up energy, and emerged as a highly relativistic particle stream. Little by little, the orbit of Pearl responded to the continuing thrust. It began to change, to shift inclination and semi major axis. Betha Mestel was moving house.

CHAPTER 22.

It had been added to the air of the room. Asfanil, probably, judging from the lack of general side effects. There was no headache or uneasiness in the stomach. And yet ...

Bey Wolf frowned. Something didn't feel quite right. He ran his tongue cautiously over his upper lip. There was a faint taste there. No, not a taste, a feeling, like a slight stickiness. He breathed deeper, and the air felt oddly different, hot in his lungs. At last he ventured to open his eyes.

-and was suddenly completely awake. He was still sitting in the form-change tank, but he knew from long experience that the process had already run its course. The change was complete. The monitors were still, the electrodes inactive against his skin.

Full of a sudden alarming notion, Bey reached out a hand in front of him. He looked at it closely. Normal, except for the color, and that was an effect of the lighting. He breathed again, half relief, half disappointment, and looked up at the odd, blue-tinted lamps above his head.

He was no longer on Pearl. That was obvious as soon as he emerged from the tank. He was on board a ship. It could be the vessel they had seen in Pearl's interior, but the backdrop outside the view ports was of open s.p.a.ce, not the gleaming inner surface of the asteroid.

Not on Pearl, and form-changed. But to what?

Bey inventoried his body and could find no change there. He sat down by the view port to think things through. His body was the same, but his senses felt subtly different. The noise of the ship's engines was wrong, a high-pitched scream of power up at the limit of his hearing. It sounded quite different from the familiar drone of a fusion drive. He looked aft. The equipment was conventional enough, and he could not believe that Capman and Betha Mestel had invented a completely new propulsion system.

Wolf stared out of the port, his face vacant with concentration. Where was he?

Where were Pearl, Betha Mestel, Park Green?

He switched on the other viewing screens and tried to gain an idea of the direction in which he was being carried. The Sun was the first reference point. It lay far astern, much reduced in size and brilliance. Its color was changed to a peculiarly intense violet-blue. He peered at it in perplexity.

Was it the Sun? It seemed more like a strange star, alien and remote.

Bey looked for other information. Through one of the side screens, a brilliant planet was visible, quite close to the ship. Surely that had to be Jupiter-but.i.t too was the wrong color. The ship was swinging past it, using the planet's gravitational field to pick up free momentum, and the planet itself was only a few million kilometers away. Bey turned up the magnification of the screen with strangely uncoordinated hands, focusing on the satellites that orbited the brilliant primary.

It was Jupiter all right. There were the four Galilean satellites, all clearly visible, and there was the red spot, itself changed to a peculiar lime-green color. He watched in silence for a few minutes. lo was close to occultation by the great ma.s.s of the planet. The satellite's angular separation from the main body was steadily decreasing as he looked on. Just before lo vanished, Bey sat up straight in his seat. He looked again at the Sun and at the lamps inside the ship. Suddenly he understood exactly what had happened. He swore to himself. It should have been obvious to him long before. He looked at the plotter set by the display screen. He had a suspicion what he would find as the end point of the calculated trajectory.

Farside watch tended to be quiet. No parties, no people, not even VIP inspections to provide an irritating relief from tedium. Tern Grad and Alfeo Masti had pulled it three times in four months, and they were beginning to suspect that the random duty selector was loaded against them. Once the big antennae had been recalibrated at the beginning of the residence period, there was nothing to do for the next fourteen days except an occasional personal message from a friend in the Outer System when, as now, Nearside was facing the Sun.

They had run through the usual pastimes left by former duty officers the first couple of times they had been a.s.signed to Farside. Those were few enough, and not too enthralling at that. Now they had retired to opposite ends of the main monitor room, Tern to listen to music and Alfeo to play bridge with the computer. Even that wasn't much fun as far as Alfeo was concerned. He was getting very annoyed with the machine. It was supposed to adjust its game so that the three hands that it was playing represented players with roughly Alfeo's level of skill. Instead, he was being slaughtered, and he couldn't even curse his partner with any pleasure. After two hours, he was looking darkly at the screen and wondering if the random hands that the computer was supposed to be generating were as open to suspicion as the selection procedure for Farside watch a.s.signments.

It was a surprise and a positive relief when the communications monitor began its soft call for attention. A ship was approaching Farside, asking for trajectory confirmation as it neared the Moon. At this time of the month, it had to be coming from Mars or beyond. Alfeo hit the b.u.t.ton that canceled his latest losing hand and activated the display screen. The computer uttered a low whir of changing peripherals, like a mutter of protest at Alfeo's poor sportsmanship for quitting when he was behind.

It took a few seconds to get a visual fix on the ship. The computer took range-rate information from the Doppler shift in the communications band signals, used that to compute a relative position, and finally pointed the biggest telescope to line up on the approaching ship.

When the image of a gleaming white sphere finally appeared on the screen in front of him, Alfeo looked at it with interest. It didn't seem to be one of the usual freighters. He glanced automatically at the display beneath the image giving the ship's distance. Then he frowned, gasped, and looked again at the image on the screen.

"Tern," he said urgently. "Get over here. We've got a ship approaching, and according to these readouts she's a real monster. The screen shows her subtending over six seconds of arc at the station, and she's still more than sixty thousand kilometers out. See if you can find her in the register."

Tern Grad unhurriedly uncoiled his long frame from the chair and sauntered over to the screen.

"You're star sick, Alf. Six seconds at sixty kay would mean something a couple of thousand meters across. The biggest ship in Lloyd's Register is only three hundred meters. You must be reading the display wrong."Alfeo did not deign to answer. He merely jerked his thumb at the screen by his side. Grad looked at it, then the numerical displays. He looked again. His expression changed abruptly.

"See if she has a voice channel active, Alf. I think we may have an alien out there."

His voice was excited. Earth, the USF, and the whole Solar System had been pulsing with rumor and talk of aliens ever since the first guarded and cryptic announcements had come from the Office of Form Control on Earth regarding John La.r.s.en's metamorphosis. Speculation had been wild. With so little being said officially, the news media had gone back to the stories of the Mariana Monsters, combing sources in Guam for anything suggestive.

As the voice and video link was completed, Tern hooked in the communicator channel. A chubby, boyish face suddenly appeared on the screen in front of them.

"Hey, I know him," said Alfeo. "I was in school with him, for tertiary vacuum survival. You remember, the courses over in Hipparchus. He's no alien."

Tern gestured him to silence. The voice circuit had corrected for Doppler shut and was now timed correctly to the sending frequency of the ship.

"This is Pearl, requesting approach trajectory approval and parking orbit a.s.signment, Earth equatorial," said Green's holo. "Repeat, this is Pearl Farside, please acknowledge signal and confirm orbit."

Alfeo threw in the second circuit, permitting the computer to provide a message acceptance and a video link of Alfeo and Tem as they worked at the console.

"Acceptance received," said Green after a moment's pause. Then he blinked and leaned forward in his chair, obviously looking at his own screen. "Is that Alf-what was it?-Ma.s.sey? What are you doing on Farside duty?"

"I'm not sure. Penance, maybe," said Alfeo. "And it's Masti, not Ma.s.sey. And you're Park, right? Park Green. A better question is, what are you doing in that ship? She's not listed in Lloyd's, and she's very peculiar-looking."

"Watch those comments, sonny," broke in a new voice on the circuit. "Remember, handsome is as handsome does. Look, you and Park can socialize later. We need the highest-priority circuit you can give us to Laszlo Dolmetsch. Is he on Earth or on the Moon?"

Grad held back his questions, responding to the note of authority and urgency in the unknown voice.

"Last thing I heard, he was on Earth," he replied. "That was a week or so ago.

I'll try and track him. Meanwhile, I'm giving you a slot that will take you to LEO, eight hundred kilometers perigee, zero inclination. I don't know if you'll be able to get landing permission. With the emergency down there, we've got a ban on everything except top-priority traffic down to the surface."

"We've heard that things are getting bad. The newscasts on the way in were full of it." The four-tenths of a second round-trip delay between Pearl and Farside Station was decreasing steadily as the ship flew closer on her lunar flyby. "Anyway, there's no way that Betha could land on Earth. She's not right for it."

"What's the problem?" said Alfeo. "Need a special suit? They can fly one out to you from the Liberation Colonies if you're willing to wait a day for it.

Where is Betha, anyway?" He stared hard at the screen. "All we're picking up is a picture of you, Park."

"I'd need a special suit, all right," said Mestel. "But I'll guarantee they don't have one that would fit me. How are you doing on that circuit to Dolmetsch? Do you have it yet?"

Alfeo glanced across at the computer output. "We know just where he is now.

He's down on Earth meeting with a group from the General Coordinators. I don't have the priority codes that will let me interrupt a session there. I can get a short message to him, that's about all. There's no way that I can give you a two-way unless he wants to initiate it from that end."

"Fine. Send him this message," said the invisible voice. "It's short enough.

Tell him that it's Lungfish Project, Phase Two, calling.""Lungfish Project," said Tern, keying in a second connection. "Right. But what about a message for him?"

"That's all you need. He'll be on the circuit fast, unless the shock knocks him flat."

"But who are you?" persisted Tern. His own curiosity was thoroughly aroused.

"Don't you even want to give him your name? You must be a friend of his."

"I was a friend of his long before you two were cutting teeth. But I haven't seen him for a long time, and I've changed a little since then. If you can send a video with the message, give him a shot of Pearl. There's no point in sending him the video signal that we're sending you."

"You mean give him a picture of the ship?" Alfeo looked dubious. "You don't look like any ship in the register. I thought I knew every type, but there's nothing that's anything like your size and shape. What sort of drive units do you have? They must be something special."

"They're kernels," said Park Green, "with McAndrew plasma feeds. The same as the t.i.tan freighters, but the bracing is all done internally instead of externally. Pearl started out as a natural formation. It was an asteroid in the Egyptian Cl.u.s.ter."

The two men on Farside duty looked again at the image on the screen, then at each other.

"I guess that makes sense," said Tern Grad. "That way, Alf, she'd be in the natural feature listings, not in Lloyd's. Even so, I've never seen an asteroid that looked anything like that." He turned back to the screen. "You know, you should have applied for a recla.s.sification, the way they did when they put drives on Icarus for the solar scoop. You should be cla.s.sified now as interplanetary pa.s.senger."

"Not quite," said Betha Mestel's voice. "For one thing, there's only one pa.s.senger-I count as crew. For another thing, as soon as I can get old Laszlo and be sure he'll act on what we're going to tell him, Pearl's status will change again. She'll be interstellar, not interplanetary."

"What the devil is all this?" broke in an impatient voice on the incoming circuit. "If this is a hoax, you'd better be ready to answer to the General Coordinators. Who sent that message about Project Lungfish?"

Alfeo turned nervously to the screen, where Dolmetsch's angry face glared out at them. "This is Farside Station, sir. We have a direct video link with Pearl, former asteroid of the Egyptian Cl.u.s.ter, now an interplanetary-interstellar-ship." He choked a little at the words and looked at the other screen for moral support. "They requested a priority link to you at GCHQ and asked that that specific message be sent to you."

There was a perceptible pause as the messages went from Farside, through lunar low orbit relay, down to Earth via L-5 relay, then all the way back.

Dolmetsch's face was a study as he saw the gleaming sphere appear on his screen. Confusion, alarm, and finally excitement showed there in turn before he finally spoke again.

"Is that Betha? Where are you? The picture that I'm getting can't be from the Cl.u.s.ter; it's much too clear."

"I moved, Laszlo. You know, we were planning to do it anyway in a year or two.

We felt we had to advance it. You may be able to guess why-the situation down on Earth, with the economic breakdown, and then the Logian changes to John La.r.s.en. I'm flying Pearl around the Moon at this moment, piloting her down to low Earth orbit."

Dolmetsch was nodding his head gloomily. With his great beaked nose, he seemed like some bird of prey ready to dive on its victim. "You're quite right about the situation here," he said. He sighed. "It's getting worse by the hour.

We've even stopped trying to keep it secret.

We are trying every empirical correction I know, but it's like a sand heap against a tidal wave. Is Robert there with you?"

"No. He has already started on the other mission. Look, Laszlo, you know I can't come down to Earth. All the changes are still going well, and I'm ready to begin Phase Two. We've picked out the target star. There's no way I canapproach a planetary surface in this form. But both Robert and I felt that my appearance here might be the only way we could persuade you to act on the information that we want to give you."

"Who's Robert?" said Alfeo to Tern in a low voice. "Weren't you telling me just a few hours ago that nothing interesting ever happens on Farside watch?"

"Come up and match us in orbit," went on Betha Mestel. "Then come over into Pearl. Bring the General Coordinators with you, as many as you can. They have to be persuaded even more than you do. The man who is with me, Park Green, will go back to Earth with you. He has all the materials that Robert left here-and he will have the general theory of stabilization with him."

The pause before the answer came back was much longer than usual. When Dolmetsch spoke, his voice sounded guarded and suspicious.

"Betha, we've known each other too long to lie, but I think you may be very mistaken. You know how long and hard we've looked for a general theory. I've said it before, many times but let me say it again. The work I've done has been useful, no denying it. But at best I've been a Kepler or a Faraday. We're still waiting for our Newton and our Maxwell, to explain all my empirics with a few fundamentals-mathematical laws that underpin everything. Now you're telling me we have it, just when we most need it. I find it hard to accept any coincidence that big. Are you trying to tell me that this fellow, Green, worked out the general theory just like that?"

"No. He's not an economic theorist; he doesn't know even the basics. Laszlo, I've learned something in the past month or two, and you'll have to learn it too. There is now an intellect present in the Solar System that makes you and Robert look like two children. Beginning with what he already knew of your work, he saw how to move to the underlying laws. It took him just a few weeks to do it."

"Weeks!" Dolmetsch sounded even more skeptical. "And we've been working on it for many years. I'd like to meet your superman-and I'll want to see that theory, in detail, before I'll accept or use any of it."

"You've met him already, but you won't be able to meet him now. I'll show you the theory when you get here. It's carried through far enough to define a set of corrective measures that you need to stop the economic oscillations."

"Betha, that's impossible, general theory or no general theory. Don't you see, you have to treat the cause, not the symptoms. We have to know what it was that triggered the new oscillations."

"I know. You'll understand too when you see the formal evidence. We can tell you what started it, and you can check it for yourself. The root cause of the problems began the day of the first rumor that we had been contacted by aliens. In other words, the very day that John La.r.s.en completed his change to a Logian form."

Dolmetsch looked thoughtful. "The timing's right," he said grudgingly. "That's when it began, and since then things have become steadily worse. Go on, Betha."

"You can do it for yourself. What's the most likely cause for the instabilities?"

"Psychological perturbation." Dolmetsch frowned in concentration. "We've always suspected that a basic change in att.i.tudes would be the most likely starting point for widespread instability. You're saying that the rumors about La.r.s.en were the beginning? Maybe. People would change their views of many things if they thought aliens were here. Xenophobia is always a powerful force, and there are rumors about immortality and super intelligence already running wild down here on Earth."

He shook his head. "Betha, I'd love to believe you-but doesn't it just sound too unlikely, for the general theory to come along as a solution exactly when we need it?"

"It would be, if the two events were independent. They're not. They are really one and the same. The Logian form produced the instability and also created the intelligence that could understand it and develop a countermeasure. Not coincidence, consequence. There was one basic cause for both events-the Logianform-change."

As the conversation proceeded, Pearl was swinging further around the Moon on her approach path to Earth orbit. When the geometry permitted it, the comlink to Earth was automatically rerouted through an alternate path by L-5 relay, and the reception of the signals at Far-side began to fade. Tern and Alfeo bent over the screen, straining their ears for the weakening voices.

"I'll be up there by the time you arrive," said Dolmetsch. His voice was firm, and he seemed to have made up his mind. "You don't know how bad it is down here. If I wait longer before we begin new corrections, we may be too late to do any good. Can you begin sending me something here, as you fly in, so that I can get something going even before I get up there to meet you in orbit?"

"No problem. We'll begin sending on a separate data circuit as soon as you can open one for us."

The distortion in the signal received at Farside was growing rapidly. Alfeo had turned the gain to maximum, but the voices were fading in and out as the transmission to the Farside antenna was intercepted by the lunar horizon.

"And where is Robert Capman now?" asked Laszlo Dolmetsch, his voice a faint wisp of sound among the background.

Tern and Alfeo crouched by the console, waiting for Mestel's reply.

"What did she say?" whispered Tern.

Alfeo shook his head. All they could hear was the amplified hiss of interplanetary static, seething and crackling with the noise from suns and planets. Betha Mestel's reply was gone forever, lost in the universal sea of radio emissions.

Farside watch, when it wasn't simply boring, could be most irritating.

CHAPTER 23.

Outside the orbit of Jupiter, the Solar System displays a different tempo, a new breadth of time and s.p.a.ce. The pulse of Saturn, only fifteen million kilometers ahead of the ship but almost one and a half billion from the Sun, beats thirty times as slowly as Earth's in its majestic revolution about the solar primary. The great planet, even at that distance, looked four times as big as the Moon seen from Earth. From the angle of Bey's approach, the rings made the planet seem almost twice its solid width.

Bey looked at the display that marked the time to rendezvous. Just a few ship-days to go, and he wasn't sure of the speed of the reverse-change process. He suspected that it would be fast-the sophistication of all the form-change equipment on the ship was an order of magnitude better than that of most commercial installations, and many of the programs in the change library were unfamiliar. Even so, it would be better to go into the tank a little early rather than a little late.

Capman would wait for him-that wasn't the issue. Bey didn't want to wait any longer than he had to, to hear Capman's explanations and to confirm the ideas that had been fermenting in his mind ever since his departure from Earth.

Longer than that, really. Bey thought back to his own first reaction, years earlier, when John La.r.s.en had told him of the liver without an ID.