Could that be the point of Capman's message?

Project Ja.n.u.s. Project Lungfish. Something there was just beyond reach. Wolf felt like a man who had been given a glimpse of the promised land, then seenit s.n.a.t.c.hed away. He had to go back to the Office of Form Control now, when what he'd like to be doing was working with Capman, wherever he was. He sensed a new world out there, a whole unknown world of changes.

Wolf's thoughts ran on, drifting, speculating on when he would next meet with Robert Capman. The first rays of the coming dawn were striking through the window, high in the hospital. Below, still hidden in darkness, lay the forbidding ma.s.s of Old City. Behrooz Wolf watched in silence until the new day had advanced into the streets below, then he turned and left the room. Capman had disappeared, but the data banks still had some questions to answer. Wolf was ready to ask them.

CHAPTER 9.

Sunshine Setting, Mail Code 127/128/009 Free Colony.

Dear Mr. Wolf, First off, let me say how sorry I am that I took so long to reply to you. I had your inquiry, then I mislaid it among some of my other things, and I only found it again two days ago. I was going to send you back a spoken answer, but these days they tell me that I tend to ramble on and repeat myself, so I thought that this way would be better. Say what you like about the feedback programs, when you get older they don't let you keep the memory you once had.

Just last week, I couldn't find my implant plug for a long time, and then finally one of my friends here reminded me that I had sent it off for service.

So I thought it would be better if I sent you a written answer.

Well, one thing is certain. I certainly remember Robert Capman all right, maybe because I met him so long ago. Most of the things that you mentioned in your letter are true, and I was a little surprised that you couldn't rely on what the public records said for the facts on his life. Maybe you are like me, though, and have trouble with the computer call-up sequences.

I'll never forget Capman, and I even remember quite clearly the first time we ever met. We went to study at Hopkins the same year, and we arrived there on the same day-in the fall of '05. It was before they had introduced all that chromosome ID nonsense, and we had to sign in the book together when we arrived. He signed before me, and I looked at his name as he was picking up his case, and I said, joking, "Well, we ought to get on well together, we cover the whole range between us."

What I meant was, with his name being Capman and my name being Sole, we had the whole body, from head to toe, between us. Then I said, "Better let me help you with that case," because he was just a little shrimp compared to me. I mean, he was nearly ten years younger than I was. I was twenty-five, and he hadn't quite reached sixteen and was small for his age. I didn't know it at first, but I should have guessed that he was something special-that was the year they put the year for college entrance up to twenty-six, and I was squeaking in myself under the legal limit. He had taken the entrance tests and left his age mark blank, so they didn't find out how old he was until after they had already read his exam papers. By then, they were ready to do something outside the rule book to let him into the college.

You know how it is when you are in a strange place; any friendship seems bigger than usual. After that first introduction, we hung around together for the first week or so, and when it came to the time to a.s.sign quarters we agreed that we would share, at least for the first few months. As it turned out, we eventually shared for over two years, until he went off for an advanced study program.

In a way, I suppose that we might have seen even more of each other than we did if we hadn't shared quarters. As it was, one of us had to be on the night shift for using the bed (Hopkins was even tighter for accommodation in those days than they are now) and the other had to take a daytime sleep period.

Robert took the day sleep period-not that he ever did much sleeping. He neverseemed to need it. Many times I've seen him, when I'd be coming home from one of my cla.s.ses. He'd be still sitting at the desk after working all day on some problem that interested him, and he didn't seem to be in the least bit worried that he'd had no sleep. "I'll just nap for half an hour," he'd say, and he'd do that and then be ready to go off to his cla.s.ses, perfectly awake again.

You ask what he studied. Well, he was doing biochemistry, same as I was, but he was the very devil for theory. Things that n.o.body else would worry about-that weren't ever on any examination-he'd tear away at. I used to hear the teachers talking to each other, and they weren't sure whether they were very pleased to have him as a student or just plain nervous about it. You see, with him they could never get away with a glib answer, and they found that out pretty quickly. He'd be back the next day with chapter and verse on the most obscure points if they didn't give him good answers.

I'm not sure how much more description you want. Certainly, the basic facts that you quoted are correct. He was at Hopkins from 'OS to '09, to my personal knowledge, and then he went off to one of the European colleges-I think it was Cambridge-for two years, and then he came back again to serve as a research a.s.sistant to the Melford Foundation. That's where he became famous, a few years later, when he published the taxonomy of permissible forms. It didn't start then, of course. He was developing the theory long before, in his first years at Hopkins. He would come over to the rest of us with these long lists of symbols on big sheets and try and explain them to me and the other bio students. I don't know about the rest of them, but I didn't have any idea what he was talking about.

As for close relationships, he didn't have many at Hopkins, and I suppose of all the people he knew I must have been the closest to him. He didn't show much s.e.xual interest in men or women, and I don't think he ever formed any sort of bond in the time that I knew him. The nearest he ever got to a contract bond was with Betha Melford, when he was working for the Melford Foundation. She was quite a few years older than he was, but they were very close. The two of them, along with a group of others, who lived in different places around the world, formed a sort of society. They called it the Lunar Society, but I guess that was some sort of joke, because it had nothing at all to do with the . Moon. There were some pretty important people in that group, either important then or important later, but I don't think any of them had a close physical relationship that lasted more than a few weeks. We thought they were a bunch of cold characters.

I wouldn't want that last comment to be misunderstood. Robert Capman was a fine man, a man that I would trust with my life. I say that, although we haven't seen each other in the flesh for about forty years. I heard all that talk up from Earth, about his killing people in experiments, but I don't believe it. It's the usual sensation mongering; the news services will say anything for an effect. As I always say, they are not just holo-people, they are hollow people. I don't think that you can believe what they say now, any more than you could believe what they said about Yifter's disappearance, back in '90. I remember that well, too.

Of course, all these things are a long time ago, but I remember them all very clearly, the way you do remember things that happen when you are very young.

Nowadays, I don't find things so memorable, but I'll be having my hundred and ninth birthday next week, and I'm enjoying good health, so I mustn't grumble.

I'm sorry to have taken so long to get this off to you, but I thought it would probably be better to give you a written answer. You said that you were asking a number of Robert's friends about him, and I wanted to mention that if any of them want to get in touch with me I hope that you will give them my address.

It would be nice to see some of them again, and talk about old times with people who lived through them. Of course, I can't go to any place that has a high-gravity environment, but maybe some of them could visit me up here.

I hope this letter will be useful to you, and I hope that the rumors about Robert Capman can be stopped.

Ludwig Plato Sole, D.P.S.Bey read the letter through to the end, then placed it on top of the stack. It was the last reply to his inquiries, and he'd been lucky to get it. Attached to it was a brief note from the chief physician at Free Colony, pointing out that Ludwig Sole was rapidly losing the ability to use the biofeedback machines, and thus the information in the letter came from a man of failing faculties. No further information was likely to come from Sunshine Setting.

Fortunately, thought Bey, no more was needed. Sole's letter covered much the same ground as some of the others, though he had been closer than anyone during the Hopkins years.

In the eight months since the disappearance, Wolf had painstakingly located forty-seven surviving acquaintances and close contemporaries of Capman. The oldest was one hundred and ten, the youngest almost ninety.

The summary before him, culled from all the replies to his inquiries, was complete but baffling. Nowhere could Bey read any signs of cruelty or megalomania in their descriptions of Capman. Oddness, yes, but oddness that hinted at the solitary mental voyaging of a Newton or an Archimedes, at the lonely life of a genius. Had some chance event, twenty-seven years ago, tipped the balance? "Great wits are sure to madness near allied," no denying it-but Robert Capman wouldn't fit the pattern.

Bey turned to the yellowed sheet that was pinned to the back of Sole's letter.

It was faded and almost unreadable, a relic of an earlier age, and it would need special treatment before it could be fully deciphered. It seemed to be an old transcript of Capman's academic records, and it was curious that Sole had made no reference to it in his letter. Bey increased the strength of the illumination on the sheet and varied the frequency composition of the light sources until he had the best conditions for reading the thin blue print.

Robert Samuel Capman. Born: June 26th, 2090.

Date of entry: September 5th, 2105. Category: BIO/CH/PHY/MAT.

Bey bent closer to the page. Below the general biographical data a long list of numbers was faintly visible. He hadn't seen anything quite like it, but it looked like a psych profile output, one in a different format. He linked through to the Form Control central computer and added an optical character reader as a peripheral. The scanner had trouble with the page that Bey placed beneath it, but after a few iterations, with help and corrections from Bey for doubtful characters, it flashed a confirming message and performed the final scan.

Bey called for character enhancement. He waited impatiently while the computer performed its whirl of silent introspection. The months since Capman's discovery and flight had not lessened the eagerness to trace him; in fact, if anything Bey's determination had strengthened. He was resigned to the fact that it would probably take years. All the evidence suggested that Capman was nowhere on Earth, and it was not practical to pursue him across the Solar System-even if the USF were to cooperate, which they showed little wish to do.

Meanwhile, there was form-change theory. It was more evident every day how appropriate Capman's advice had been. New vistas were opening to Bey as he advanced, and there was evidence that he was still in the foothills. At least he had begun to learn how-and how well-Capman's mind worked.

The computer was finally satisfied with its work on character recognition.

While Bey looked on impatiently, the screen slowly filled with the final interpretation of the transcript. It was all there, in a slightly different format from the modern displays but quite recognizable. Intelligence, apt.i.tudes, mechanical skills, a.s.sociative ability, subconscious/ conscious ratios, paralogic, nonlinear linkages-they were all listed, with numerical measures for each one.

Bey looked through them quickly at first, puzzled by the low scores in some areas. About halfway through, he began to see a familiar pattern. He stopped, suddenly dizzy with the implications. He knew the overall profile very well.

It was different in detail, as any two people were different, but there were points of resemblance to a psych profile that Bey Wolf knew by heart, as well as he knew his own face in the mirror.Wolf was still sitting motionless in front of the screen when La.r.s.en returned from the central troubleshooting area upstairs. He ignored Bey's pensive att.i.tude and broke out at once into excited speech.

"It's happened, we've had a break on the salamander form. The Victoria office uncovered a group of them, still coupled. If we leave at once we can get the Link entry that Transport is holding for us. Come on, don't just sit there, let's go."

Bey roused himself and stood up. As always, work demanded first priority. He looked unhappily at the display that still filled the screen and then followed John La.r.s.en from the room.

BOOK II.

"Beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair."

CHAPTER 10.

The monsters first came to public attention off the coast of Guam. They stood quietly on the seabed, three of them abreast, facing west toward the Guam sh.o.r.e. Behind them, plunging away rapidly to the abyssal depths, lay the Mariana Trench. Faintest sunlight fled about their shadowy sides as they stirred slowly in the cold, steady upwelling.

To the startled eyes of Lin Maro as he cruised along in his new gilled form, they seemed to be moving forward, slowly and purposively breasting the lip of the coastal shelf and gliding steadily from the black deeps to the distant sh.o.r.e. Forgetting his long months of training and feedback control, Lin gasped and pulled a pint of warm seawater into his surprised lungs. Coughing and spluttering, gills working overtime, he surged 150 feet to the surface and struck out wildly for the sh.o.r.e and safety. A quick look back convinced him that they were pursuing him. His glance caught the large, luminous eyes and the ropy tendrils of thick floating hair that framed the broad faces. He was in too much of a hurry to notice the steel weights that held them firmly and remorselessly on the seabed.

The reaction onsh.o.r.e was somewhere between amus.e.m.e.nt and apathy. It had been Lin's first time out in a real environment with his new gilled form. Everybody knew there was a big difference between the simulations and the real thing. A little temporary hallucination, a minor tromp from the central nervous system, that wasn't hard to believe on the first time out with a new BEC form. After all, the guarantees were on physical malfunction, not on sensory oddities. It look long, hard arguing before Maro could get anyone to show even polite interest. The local newsman who finally agreed to go out and take a look did so as much from boredom as from belief. The next day they swam out, Maro in his gills, the reporter in a rented scuba outfit.

The monsters were still there, all right. When the two men swam cautiously down to take a look at them, it became clear that Lin had been fleeing from three corpses. They swam around them in the clear water, marveling at the wrinkled gray skin, ma.s.sive torsos, and great dark eyes.

When the story went out over the comlink connections, it was still a long way down the news lists. For three hundred years, writers had imagined monsters of the deep emerging from the Mariana Trench and tackling human civilization in a variety of nasty ways. Silly season reports helped to provide some light relief from the social indicators, the famines and the real crises, but they received scant interest from the professionals. n.o.body reported panic along the coast or fled to the high ground.

The three monsters got the most interest from the Guam aquarium and vivarium.

A party of marine biologists took a day off from plankton culture and went for a party offsh.o.r.e. They inspected the bodies on the seabed, then liftedthem-shackles and all-to the surface, quick-froze them, and whipped them back to sh.o.r.e on the inst.i.tute's hovercraft for a real inspection. The first lab examination showed immediate anomalies. They were land animals, not marine forms. Lung breathers with tough outer skins and ma.s.sive bone structure. As a matter of routine, the usual tissue microtome samples were taken and the chromosome ID run for matches with known species.

The ID patterns were transmitted to the central data banks back at Madrid. At that point every attention light on the planet went on, the whistles blew, and the buzzers buzzed. The computer response was prompt and unambiguous. The chromosome patterns were human.

The information that moves ceaselessly over the surface of the Earth, by cable, by ComSat link, by Mattin Link, by laser, and by microwave, is focused and redistributed through a small number of nodes. Bey Wolf, after much effort, had finally arranged that the Office of Form Control should be one of them. His recent appointment as head of Form Control ent.i.tled him to a complete interaction terminal in his office, and it was his peculiar pleasure to sit at this, delicately feeling the disturbances and vibrations in the normal pattern that flowed in the strands of the information web. John La.r.s.en had suggested that Bey sat there like a fat spider, waiting for prey, and the a.n.a.logy rather pleased him. His was, Bey would point out, only one of many webs, all interlocking, and not by any means the most important one.

Population, Food, and Energy all had much bigger staffs and bigger budgets.

But he would argue that his problems called for the shortest response times and needed a reaction time that some of the other systems could manage without.

Bey was sitting at the terminal, studying a type of omnivorous form that promised to be truly an omnivore-plants, animals, or minerals. He was oblivious to the unscheduled fierce snowstorm that was raging outside the building, and when the priority override interrupted his data link with news of the Mariana Monsters (the press's dubbing of the Guam discovery), his first reaction was one of annoyance. As the details came in, however, his interest grew. It looked very much as though some new group had been using the form-change equipment in unsuccessful experiments, and the results were nothing like any previous line of work.

Although he was fairly sure of the answers, Bey ran the routine checks. Were the experiments authorized as medical research? Were the forms already on the forbidden list? Negative answers, as he expected, came from the data banks.

Was quick action needed to stop the appearance of a potentially dangerous form? The answer to that was much harder. The computer pleaded shortage of data-which meant that the decision would have to be made by human judgment, and the human in this case was Bey Wolf.

He sighed a sigh of hidden pleasure and opened the circuits for more data. The physical parameters began to flow in. The cell tests were strange in both chemistry and structure, with a mixture of haploid and diploid forms. The lungs were modified, showing changes in alveolar patterns. A note added to the a.n.a.lysis pointed out the resemblance to animals that were adapted to life at high pressure. Strangest of all, the big eyes were most sensitive in the near infrared-but another added note pointed out that this wavelength region is cut out almost completely underwater.

Bey began to gather printed output. He liked to approach a job by asking very basic questions. What was the objective of a new form? Where was it designed to operate most effectively? Most important of all, what was the probable motive of the developer? With answers to those questions, the next step in the form-change sequence could usually be guessed.

The trouble was, it wasn't working. Bey swore softly and leaned back in his chair. The Mariana Monsters were breaking the rules. After looking at the physical variables of the forms for a couple of hours, it seemed to Bey that they were not adapting to any environment that he could imagine.

It was time to drop that line and try another attack. All right, how had the forms reached their position on the seabed? Certainly they had not placedthemselves there. And how had they died? There was information on that in the medical records. They had been asphyxiated. It was a fair guess that they had been weighted with steel after they were dead, then dropped to the seabed.

From a surface vessel, by the looks of it-the reports mentioned no sign of skin contusions.

Where had they come from? Bey pulled out the list. He had a complete catalog of the world's form-change centers, especially the ones elaborate enough to include the special life-support systems the new forms would have needed. He was reading steadily through the list of sites, correlating them with the physical changes noted for the Mariana forms, when La.r.s.en returned from a routine meeting on the certification of new BEC releases.

He halted in the doorway.

"How do you do it, Bey? You've only been in this office for a month, and it looks like a rubbish heap."

Bey looked around him in surprise at the ma.s.ses of new listings and form-change tabulations that cluttered the office.

"They are acc.u.mulating a bit. I think they reproduce at night. Come in, John, and look at this. I a.s.sume you didn't get too much excitement out of your review meeting?"

La.r.s.en dropped into a chair, pushing aside a pile of listings. As always, he marveled at Bey's ability to operate clearly and logically in the middle of such a mess of doc.u.ments and equipment.

"It was better than usual," he replied. "There were a couple of good ones.

C-forms, both of them, adapted for long periods in low gravity. They'll revolutionize asteroid work, but there were the usual protests from the Belter representatives."

"Naturally-there'll always be Luddites." Bey still had a weakness for outmoded historical references, even though his audience rarely understood them. "The law will change in a couple of years. The C-forms are so much better than the old ones that there's no real compet.i.tion. I'm telling you, Capman has changed s.p.a.ce exploration methods forever. I know the Belters claim they are losing jobs to the new forms, but they are on the wrong side of the argument.

Unmodified forms are an anachronism for free s.p.a.ce work."

He switched on a recall display and pulled a set of doc.u.ments from one of the heaps.

"Get your mind reset and let me tell you about the latest headache. It has the Capman touch. If I weren't convinced that he's not on Earth, I'd be inclined to label it as his work."

Bey ran rapidly over the background to the Mariana discoveries, finishing with the question of where they had come from.

"I suspect that they came into the general area of the Marianas through one of the Mattin Links," he concluded. "The question is, which one? We have twenty to choose from. I don't believe there is any way they could have come in from an off-Earth origin, otherwise I'd have thought they were aliens."

"With human chromosome IDs? That would take some explaining, Bey."

John La.r.s.en went over to the wall display, which Bey had tuned to show the locations of the Mattin Link entry points.

"No, I agree with you, Bey; they've come from a lab here on Earth. If they came through the Links, we can rule out a few of them-they're open ocean, and they only act as transfer points. Have you correlated the big form-change labs with the Mattin Link entry points?"

"I started to do it, but it's a big job. I'm waiting for more output on that to come back from the computer. I'm still waiting for the full identification of the three bodies, too. I don't know why it's all taking so long. I slapped a top priority code on the inquiry."

He joined La.r.s.en over at the wall screen. Working together, they reviewed the locations of the Mattin Links that formed the pivot points for Earth's global transportation system. They were deep in the middle of their work when the communicator beeped for attention. La.r.s.en went over to it, leaving Wolf to record the a.n.a.lysis of the wall outputs. As the first words of the messagescrolled onto the communicator display, La.r.s.en whistled softly to himself.

"Come over here and get a look at this, Bey," he called. "There's the reason that Central Records took so long to get you an answer. Are you still as sure that the forms didn't come from off-Earth?"

The message began, ID SEARCH COMPLETED AND IDENTIFICATION MADE. INDIVIDUALS OF INQUIRY ARE AS.

FOLLOWS: JAMES PEARSON MANAUR, AGE 34, NATIONALITY USF; CAPERTA LAFERTE, AGE.

25, NATIONALITY USF, LAO SARNA PREK, AGE 40, NATIONALITY USF. BIOGRAPHICAL.

DETAILS FOLLOW. CONTINUE/HALT?.

Wolf pressed CONTINUE, and the detailed ID records appeared: education, work, history, family, credit ratings. Bey noted with surprise that all three of the men had spectacular credit, up in the multimillionaire cla.s.s, but his mind was still mainly occupied with the first item of background. The three men were all members of the USF, and that made for a real mystery. Since the USF had declared its sovereignty fifty years earlier, in 2142, its citizens had always been a relative rarity down on Earth. Surely the disappearance of three of them should have roused a loud outcry long before their bodies had been found off the Guam sh.o.r.e.

The two men looked at each other. La.r.s.en nodded in response to Wolfs raised eyebrows.

"I agree. It makes no sense at all. The USF still have their ban on form-change experiments. If they won't accept the C-forms, I doubt if they'd be playing with completely new forms, even as part of their defense programs.

And it's still harder to believe that they'd bring their failures down to Earth."

"Even if they could get them here-you know how tight quarantine is since the Purcell spores." Wolf shook his head. "Well, we don't have much choice about what to do next. We have to get a USF man in on this-it's too sensitive for us to handle on our own."

He had a reason to look gloomy. The investigation had just grown two orders of magnitude in complexity. To go further without USF concurrence would create an interplanetary incident.