Hidden Variables (23 page)

Bey nodded. "I want to make one comment. I've spent my life studying form-change, and I believe I understand it as well as anyone. One man is my master in the theory, but when it comes to seeing through exterior changes I match myself against anyone. I believe that we have met before, Mr. Ling, and under very different circumstances. I do not propose to do anything about it, but I want you to know that I can tell the lion by his paw."

Karl Ling's acid look seemed to soften briefly. Bey Wolf thought there was the trace of a smile on his lips. "I'm sorry, Mr. Wolf, but I really have no idea what you are talking about. Would you please let me get down to this biological work—help me, if you wish. I want to be in Cap City four hours from now."

* * *

After Bey Wolf and Karl Ling had left, Park Green and John Larsen went for a drink and a sharing of dissatisfaction. By the third one Larsen had become more morose and militant.

"Just our luck. Those two go off to sample Pleasure Dome and leave us here to handle the brainless bureaucrats," he complained. "It's always the same, we get all the dog work, they get all the excitement."

He had never met or heard of Ling until that day, but fine points of logic were beneath him.

"I'd like to show those two," he went on. "I'd like to show them what we can do without them. Solve this whole thing while they're gone." He slid a little lower in his seat. "That would show them."

Green and Larsen had been going drink for drink, but with twice the body mass Green was in much better shape. He watched Larsen sink lower yet.

"Come on," he said. "Let's do it." He lifted the limp figure of Larsen easily to a standing position and held him there while he paid the bill."Just let's get a shot of de-toxer in you and we'll be all set. Let's go and work over the full records and see if we can come up with something new. It would do me a lot of good to beat that smarmy supercilious midget to the answer."

Fifteen minutes later they were both cold sober and deep into the case records.

There was a long period of sifting before John Larsen sat back, looked up at the ceiling for a spell and finally said:

"Question: what is there about the crew of the 'Jason' that made them very unusual? Answer: they had recently been handling large quantities of transuranic elements, probably experiencing high levels of radioactivity. So here is my second question: did the autopsies look for radioactivity in the bodies? My bet is that they didn't. So, final question: is what happened the effects of transuranic elements in their central nervous systems? I doubt if anyone knows what a substantial amount of transuranics could do. It's a long shot, but it's a new line."

Green shrugged. "It's a long shot, but we should check it. Do you know where the bodies are now?"

"In the Form Control center in Manila."

Green stood up. "Come on. We'll need authorization for another autopsy and a pathologist."

* * *

The exit point from the Mattin Link system is in the upper levels of Cap City, almost at the surface itself. Bey Wolf and Karl Ling came out of the Link and looked about them for the elevators that would take them down to Pleasure Dome, four thousand feet below in the polar ice. As they stood there, a soft voice spoke in their ears:

'Come to Pleasure Dome, satisfy your heart's desires.'

Ling looked at Wolf and smiled. "An omni projector. What a waste of a technology. We'd give millions for that system in Tycho Base."

The soft voice continued. 'In Pleasure Dome, you can shed the cares of the world and feel free again. Visit the Caves of Ice and swim in the Pool of Lethe. Win a world in the great Xanadu Casino, or spend a day as part of the Coupling Loom. Be free, be with us in Pleasure Dome.'

Free, at a price, thought Wolf, as the omni advertising went on. Finally, a useful comment came.

'Follow the blue lights to the temple of earthly delights.'

Following the blue lights as directed, they were soon dropped swiftly, deep into the polar cap. The entrance to Pleasure Dome was a great sparkling chamber, lined with perfect mirrors, like the inside of a giant multi-faceted diamond. The effect was shattering. Walls, floor and ceiling were all perfectly reflective. Images of the room marched off to infinity in every direction. Bey looked about him, struggling to orient himself.

"Better get used to it. Mr. Wolf," remarked Ling coolly. "Pleasure Dome is all like this."

"I didn't realize you'd been here before."

"Long ago. These walls are a necessity, not a luxury, you know. When they cut this city beneath the ice cap, twenty years ago, the big problem was the heat. People produce heat, from themselves and their equipment. The ice walls would have melted in no time. These walls—all the walls in Pleasure Dome—are coated with Passivine. It's perfectly reflecting and has a very low coefficient of thermal conductivity. A negligible amount of heat passes through the ice walls, and a modest refrigeration system takes care of that easily."

Bey looked at Karl Ling ironically. "For one who is from off-Earth, Mr. Ling, you have an amazing knowledge of Earth affairs."

"The long lunar nights give us plenty of time for reading." There was a definite hint of humor in Ling's formal reply. Before Bey could comment further, a third person had joined them.

"Welcome to Pleasure Dome, Sirs." The speaker was a tall woman dressed all in white. Her skin was pale and flawless, her hair a fine white cloud. She looked at them quietly with cool grey eyes. A Snow Queen. Bey wondered how much of it was natural, and how much she owed to form-change.

"I will be your hostess and help you to arrange your pleasures. Do not be afraid to ask, whatever your tastes. There are few wishes that we cannot accommodate. Before we begin, there are a few formalities."

"You want our identifications?" asked Bey.

"Only if you wish to give them, Sirs. We do need proof of adequate means, but that may be cash if you prefer to use it."

"We are together," said Ling. "My credit will serve for both. Do you have a bank connection?"

"Here, Sir." The Snow Queen produced a small silver box, onto which Ling placed his right index finger. In a few seconds, the I.D. was established and the central bank returned a credit rating. As she read the credit, the Snow Queen lost her composure for the first time and became a young woman. Bey suspected that Ling's credit rating was that of the entire U. S. F.

"What is your pleasure, Sirs?" Even her voice seemed changed. It was now uncertain, nervous, almost childish. With that much credit available, Bey realized, there was nothing, literally nothing, that could not be bought at Pleasure Dome. That included the body or soul of their hostess, and she knew it. It was dangerous to be in contact with such financial power. She could never know when one of Ling's whims might include her as a purchased pleasure.

Ling's businesslike manner helped to reassure her. "We want to talk to the man who controls the form-change tanks. The one who handled the three off-worlders recently. Don't worry, you may not know what I'm referring to, but he certainly will."

She hesitated. Ling's request fell far outside the usual list of fancies.

"One moment, Sirs."

She slipped quietly out through a glittering arch. Karl Ling looked at Bey quizzically.

"I thought the direct approach would be best," Ling said. "If necessary, can you threaten these people enough to make them worried—say you'll close down their illegal form-change services if they don't cooperate?"

"I can threaten all right—but I'm not sure what I can really do if the threats don't work. With any luck they won't want to find out either."

The Snow Queen had brought reinforcements. An equally striking blond haired man, again dressed in white.

"Sirs, your credit is enough to purchase any pleasure," he began. "But certain things in Pleasure Dome are not available at any price. The detail of our operations is one. Please state your wishes again, so that we can see if we are able to accommodate them."

"We have no intention of causing trouble here," replied Ling. "But if we wished to do so there is no doubt that we could. This is Behrooz Wolf, the head of Form Control for Earth. I am Karl Ling, special assistant to the U. S. F. Cabinet. All we are looking for is information. Three men died recently during form-change. We believe that they died here. We want to speak to the man in charge of that operation, and we want to see the full records of the monitors that were recording and supervising the form-changes."

The man made no attempt to deny the charge. He was silent for a few moments, then asked:

"If we cooperate, you will take our involvement no further, here or elsewhere?"

"You have our word."

"Then come with me." The blond man smiled. "You should be pleased. You are obtaining a service free of charge. To my knowledge, this has never happened before since Pleasure Dome was first created."

The three men walked through a maze of ice caves, fairy grottoes lit by lights of different colors, and came at last to a door that led to an ordinary office with panelled walls and a functional looking desk.

He motioned to them to sit down.

"I will return in a moment. This, by the way, is the luxury that we aspire to in Pleasure Dome—normal walls and furniture, and privacy. Our lives here rarely permit us either."

He returned a few minutes later with his identical twin. That seemed to answer Bey's question about the use of form-change on Pleasure Dome staff. The ultimate bondage: someone else dictated the shape of their bodies.

Ling wanted the man to be at ease and displayed a new side of his personality—warmth and kindness. Bey noted it and marked up one more data point on a growing list. The examination began. The man was at first ill-at-ease, but soon relaxed and became more talkative.

"All those three wanted was a full-speed reconditioning program. The only thing we did for them here that is in any way illegal was the speed. We used the bio-feedback machines twenty-four hours a day, and provided nutrients intravenously. So it looked like a completely straightforward request and we didn't give them any special monitoring, the way we would if a customer was to come in and ask for a special change. The full program they'd asked for takes about a hundred and fifty hours, nearly a week of changing if you run it continuously, the way we do."

"You've run this course many times before?" asked Ling.

"Often, especially for offworlders. Of course, we never ask their origins, but we can make a guess from clothing and speech. Since Capman's form-change work, a straightforward program like this has been completely automatic. The tank has automatic monitors that control air supply and nutrient supply and regulate the pace of the process. The subject has to be conscious at some level, since it is purposive form-change that's involved. But the unit's completely self-contained and the only way we know what's happening inside the tank is through looking at the automatic monitor tell-tales on the outside."

"And how often do you do that?"

"In a simple case like this, once a day. We never have anything to do, but we check anyway. In the case of these three off-worlders, they all began at the same time and they all asked for the same reconditioning program. Needed it, too. They looked done in when they arrived here.

"The evening of the third day, I took my routine look at the tell-tales. All three men were dead. I couldn't believe it. At first I suspected the tell-tales were lying, or there'd been a programming error, or something. Then we opened the tanks. God, it was awful. Like a nightmare. They had changed, they weren't men anymore. They were monsters, with great glowing eyes and thick skin, like a horror holo. We confirmed that they were dead, then we looked at their I.D.'s and realized they were off-worlders. Then everybody around here really panicked, and we tried to get them off-Earth. When we found we couldn't do that, we tried to put them deep at sea. That apparently failed too."

The man fell silent and there was a long pause.

Ling was too engrossed even to give Bey Wolf a look of triumph. He was bound in a spell of concentration so intense that he looked blind, his eyes unblinking and focused on infinity.

"Did you do any chemical analyses of the bodies?" he asked.

"God, no. We wanted to get them out of here. But there will be records on the tapes that were made by the monitors and tell-tales, and there should be continuous monitoring of some cell chemistry and blood chemistry."

"Right. I want to examine those now. Bring them here or take me to them."

"We'll get them. But they'll be in raw form. Only a form-change expert can read them."

Ling caught Bey Wolf's look. "Bring them in. We'll manage somehow," he said. "It's a skill you never lose once you've mastered it completely."

* * *

John Larsen looked at the spectrograph output, then at Park Green.

"It's not as much as I expected," he said. "But there are traces of Asfanium in all three bodies. There's slight radioactivity because of that, but it's not enough to make a strong physical effect. I wonder, do you think that it could be a
chemical
effect of Asfanium that did it? We don't have a good understanding of that aspect of the transuranics in the island of stability up around element 114."

"That's quite possible," Green replied. "You know, we are still doing a lot of work on Asfanium and Polkium and are finding some odd chemical properties, up in Lunar Base. One other thing occurs to me, the crew of the 'Jason' had never encountered form-change before. Do you think that they let things get out of control, maybe, due to their inexperience? Then they ran into something new, like the effect of a trace of Asfanium?"

Larsen slapped the spectrogram output sheet against his thigh. "Park, I bet you're on to something. With inexperienced people in purposive form-change, anything might happen. Now, we can test that. Asfanium concentrates in the thymus gland. If we take an extract from one of these three, we can conduct a controlled test and see if there is a tendency to form-change the way they did."

Park Green frowned. "I didn't realize you had suitable test animals. Isn't it true that humans alone can achieve purposive form-change? After all, that's the basis of the humanity tests."