Part 16 (1/2)
The data bank on the s.h.i.+p, primed by Betha Mestel, had informed him of Pearl's mission, bearing back to Earth the precious stabilization equations. It had told him nothing about his own mission. Bey sighed. He would know soon enough.
He took a last look at the ringed planet, growing steadily ahead of him, and at the Sun-still the wrong color-shrunk to a fiery pinpoint, far behind. With a little reluctance, knowing that a boring time was ahead in the tank, Bey set all the s.h.i.+p controls to automatic. He climbed slowly into the form-change tank in the central part of the s.h.i.+p, called out the necessary program, and began the change.
By luck or skill, his timing had been good. When he emerged from the tank, the vast bulk of Saturn was filling the sky ahead like a mottled and striated balloon. The trajectory maintenance system was already operating. The s.h.i.+p waspast the outer satellites, moving from Enceladus to Mimas, then beyond, heading for a bound orbit inside the innermost ring of the planet.
Bey looked back at the Sun. It was only a hundredth of its familiar area, but now it was the usual yellow orb, with all traces of blue-violet gone. The tackiness had gone from his lips. When he reached out to touch the control panel, his coordination already felt better. On the panel, the attention light was blinking steadily like an insistent emerald lightning bug.
Bey had no nerves at all-or so he claimed. The tremor in his hand as he reached out to press the connect b.u.t.ton had to be, he told himself, a lingering aftereffect of the form-change procedure. He hesitated, swallowed, and finally pressed.
The display gave him an immediate estimate of the direction and range of the signal being beamed to him. The other s.h.i.+p was less than ten thousand kilometers ahead of him, in a decaying orbit that would spiral it slowly and steadily down toward the upper atmosphere of Saturn. When the video signal appeared on the screen, Bey could examine the fittings of the other s.h.i.+p's interior. They were unfamiliar, neither form-change tank nor conventional living quarters. But the figure who crouched over the computer console was very familiar. There could be no mistaking that ma.s.sive torso and wrinkled gray hide. Bey watched in silence for a few seconds and finally realized that the other was unaware of his surveillance. The monitor must be on a different part of the console.
”Well, John,” said Bey at last. ”Last time I saw you, I certainly didn't expect we would ever meet here. We've come a long way from the Form Control office, haven't we?”
The Logian figure swung around to face the video camera and looked at Bey quietly through huge, luminous eyes.
”Come on, John,” said Bey as the silence lengthened. ”At least you might say h.e.l.lo to me.”
The broad face was inscrutable, but finally the head and upper body nodded and the fringed mouth opened.
”A natural mistake on your part, but my fault. Not John La.r.s.en, Mr. Wolf.
Robert Capman. Welcome to our company.”
While Bey was still struggling to grasp the implications of what he had heard, the other spoke again.
”I am pleased to see that you are none the worse for the form-change that you went through on the way here. May I ask, how long did it take you to realize what had been done to you?”
”How long?” Bey thought for a few moments. ”Well, I knew I'd been changed as soon as I became conscious in the tank, and I knew it had to be something that affected the senses the moment I saw the Sun. It looked as though it had been Doppler-s.h.i.+fted toward the blue, by a big factor-and I knew that couldn't be real. The s.h.i.+p was heading away from the Sun, not toward it, and in any case it wasn't going that fast. I didn't catch on then, though, and I still didn't catch on when I noticed that the sound of the s.h.i.+p's engines seemed to be at the wrong frequency. Not too smart. But when I saw Jupiter as we swung by, lo was going into occultation. As I was watching it, I realized that it looked to be happening much faster than it ought to. Physical laws are pretty inflexible. So, it had to be me. It was a subjective change in speed. I had been slowed down.”
The Logian form of Capman was nodding slowly. ”So just when did you understand what had happened?”
”Oh, I suppose it was about ten minutes after I came out of the tank. I should have caught it sooner-after all, I already knew all about Project Timeset.
Ever since we found your underground lab, I've been expecting to meet forms that have been rate-changed the way that I was. I can't have been thinking too well when I first came through the form-change.”
The Logian was nodding his head now in a different rhythm, one that Bey had learned was the alien smile. ”You may be interested to know, Mr. Wolf, that I made a small wager with Betha Mestel before I left Pearl. She a.s.serted thatyou would take a long time to realize what had been done to you. She thought you would understand it only when you read it out of the data banks that had been loaded on the s.h.i.+p. I disagreed. I said that you would achieve that realization for yourself, and I bet her that it would happen within two hours of your leaving the form-change tank.”
Capman rubbed at the swollen boss below his chest with a tri-digit paw. ”The only thing we did not resolve, now that I look back on it, is any mechanism by which I might collect the results of the wager. It is three months now since Betha Mestel pa.s.sed on to Dolmetsch the stabilization equations. She is well on her way out of the system and should not be back for several centuries. She could afford to make her bet with impunity.”
The appearance and structural changes were irrelevant. It was still the same Robert Capman. Bey was convinced of it and realized again the insight of Capman's remark soon after their first meeting: the two of them would recognize each other through any external changes.
Before Bey could speak again, a vivid flash of color lit up the screen in front of the console on the other s.h.i.+p.
”One moment,” said Capman. He faced the transmission screen and held his body quite still. For a brief second, the panel on his chest became a bewildering pointillism of colored light. It ended as suddenly as it had begun, returning to a uniform gray. Capman turned back to face Bey.
”Sorry to cut off like that. I had to give John La.r.s.en an update on what has been happening here. He wanted to know if you had arrived yet. He's very busy there, getting ready for atmospheric entry, but he wants to set up a standard voice and video link and talk to you.”
”What sort of link do you have with him? I saw John change the color of his chest panel, but always one color at a time. You did it with a whole lot of different color elements.”
Capman nodded, head and trunk together. ”That was for rapid transfer of information. I didn't want to take much time to explain to John what we are doing. Burst mode, we've been calling it. We found out about it soon after John changed, but I wanted to use it as a special method of communicating with him, so we kept quiet about it. It handles information thousands of times faster than conventional methods.”
”Are you being literal or exaggerating the rate?” asked Bey, unable to imagine an information transfer rate of hundreds of thousands of words a minute.
”I'm not exaggerating. If anything, I'm understating. I suspect that this is the usual way that Logians communicated-they only used speech when they were in a situation where they could not see each other's chest panels. It's a question of simple efficiency of data transfer. The Logian chest panel can produce an individual, well-defined spot of color about three millimeters on a side, like this.”
On Capman's chest panel, an orange point of light suddenly appeared, then next to it a green one.
”I can make that any color, from ultraviolet through infrared. The Logian eye can easily resolve that single spot from a distance of a couple of meters.
That was probably the natural distance apart for typical Logian conversation.
Each spot can modulate its color independently, so.”
The pair of points changed color, then for a moment the whole panel swirled with a s.h.i.+fting, iridescent pattern of colors. It returned quickly to the uniform gray tone.
”I ran the color changes near to top speed there. It's very tiring to do that for more than a few seconds, though John has held it for several minutes when he had a real ma.s.s of information to get to me quickly. Now, you can do the arithmetic. The panel on my chest is about forty-five centimeters by thirty-five. That lets me use roughly sixteen thousand spots there as independent message transmitters. If he were here, John could read all those in directly. His eyes and central nervous system can handle that data load. If we were in a real hurry, he'd come closer, and I could decrease the spot size to about a millimeter on a side-just about the limit. The number of channelsgoes up to over a hundred thousand, and each one can handle about the same load as a voice circuit. That would be hard work for both of us, but we've tried it to see what the limits are.”
Bey was shaking his head sadly. ”I knew there had to be something strange about the com system that you put in the tank back on Earth-there was no reason for it to have such a big capacity. But I never thought of anything like this.”
”You would have if we had used it much. It was one of the things that worried me when John was using that mode to send me information when I was on Pearl: Would somebody notice the comlink load and start to investigate it? I don't think anyone did, but as you well know there is really no such thing as a completely secret operation. You always need to send and store data, and sometime that will give you away. John tried to be careful, but it was still a danger.”
Bey sat down on the bench next to the communicator screen. ”I don't know who could have discovered you. I tried to guess what was happening, and I think I know a part of it-but it's only a part. I a.s.sume that John knows the whole story.”
”He deduced it for himself within a couple of days after a.s.suming the Logian form. His powers of logic had increased so much that I couldn't believe it at first. Now, I have observed it in myself also.”
There was another flicker of light from the screen in front of Capman.
”John will be in voice communication in a couple of minutes,” he said. ”He's very busy making the last minute checks on the s.h.i.+p.”
”I heard you say he would be making atmospheric entry. Surely he can't survive on Saturn. The form he is in was designed for Loge, and I a.s.sume that he's still in that.”
”He is-but don't worry. The s.h.i.+p he's in has some special features, as does this one. You can see his s.h.i.+p from here if you look ahead of you. He's already in the upper atmosphere, and the fusion drive is on.”
Bey looked at the forward screen. A streak of phosph.o.r.escence was moving steadily across the upper atmosphere of the planet. As he watched, it brightened appreciably. The s.h.i.+p was moving deeper into the tenuous gases high above Saturn's surface. In a few minutes more, ionization would begin to interfere with radio communications. Bey felt a sense of relief when the second channel light went on and a second image screen became active.
The two Logian forms were very similar, too similar for Bey to distinguish by a rapid inspection. However, there were other factors that made identification easy. The second figure was festooned with intravenous injectors and electronic condition monitors. It raised one arm in greeting.
”Sorry I couldn't stay up there to greet you, Bey,” said John La.r.s.en. ”We're working on a very tight entry window. I want to descend as near as possible to one place on the planet. We've calculated the optimum location for low winds and turbulence.”
”John. You can't survive down there.”
”I think I can. We have no intention of committing suicide. This s.h.i.+p has been modified past anything you've ever seen before. It will monitor the outside conditions and keep the form-change programs going that will let me adapt to them. The rate of descent can be controlled, so that I can go down very slowly if necessary.” John La.r.s.en's Logian form sounded confident and cheerful.
”Well, Bey, you've had a while to think on the way out here. How much of it have you been able to deduce?”
Bey looked at the two forms, each on then- separate screens. ”The basic facts about what's been going on for the past forty years. Those are fairly clear to me now. But I don't have any real idea of motives. I a.s.sume you know those too, John.”
”I do. But if it's any consolation to you, I had to be told them. I don't think they are amenable to pure logic.”
”I agree,” cut in Capman. ”You would have to know some of Earth's hidden history before you can understand why I would rather be thought of as amurderer than have the truth known about the experiments. I am curious to see how far your own logic has taken you. What do you know about my work?”