Sight of Proteus (24 page)

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 viewports was of open space, 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 changes there. He sat down by the viewport 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 was 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 it 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, focussing 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. Io was close to occultation by the great mass of the planet. The satellite's angular separation from the main body was steadily decreasing as he looked on. Just before Io 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. Tem 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 assigned to Farside. Those were few enough, and not too enthralling at that. Now they had retired to opposite ends of the main monitor room, Tem 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 assignments.

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 button that cancelled 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.

"Tem," he said urgently. "Get over here. We've got a ship approaching, and according to these read-outs 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."

Tem 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 at 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 Larsen'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, Tem 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."

Tem gestured him to silence. The voice circuit had corrected for Doppler shift and was now tuned correctly to the sending frequency of the ship.

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

Alfeo threw in the send 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?—Massey? What are you doing on Farside duty?"

"I'm not sure. Penance, maybe," said Alfeo. "And it's Masti, not Massey. 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 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 fly-by. "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 Libration 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 Tem, 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 Tem. 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 Titan 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 Cluster."

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

"I guess that makes sense," said Tem 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 re-classification, the way they did when they put drives on Icarus for the solar scoop. You should be classified now as interplanetary passenger."

"Not quite," said Betha Mestel's voice. "For one thing, there's only one passenger—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 Cluster, 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 specific message to 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 Cluster, 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 Larsen. 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 sandheap 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 can approach 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 Tem 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?"