Charles Sheffield - Proteus in the Underworld

Did she need him all that much? Bey had little false modesty, but he doubted that his skills exceeded the combined talent available within the Biological Equipment Corporation. Trudy surely had her own hidden agenda, of which he must form a part.

Bey reached for the control panel at the bedside. Not for programmed sleep, not quite yet. He inserted the silver card that Trudy Melford had given him into the transportation module. Here at least she had not been deceiving him. The return showed huge available credit, beyond the number of digits that the machine could display. Bey instructed the module to arrange for a maximum-speed link from Wolf Island to Mars beginning in fourteen hours, with money no object. He asked for feedback only if Trudy balked at the cost.

At last he closed his eyes. He knew he would sleep now, and without the need for any program.

Had Sondra Dearborn or Trudy Melford been present in the room he would not have thanked them. But he should have. For if one thing in the world pleased Bey Wolf more than any other, it was the delicious sense of anticipation provided by new and perplexing questions.

Earth’s permanent link system composed an exact twenty entry points, located close to the vertices of a regular dodecahedron. It had been conceived by its creator, Gerald Mattin, as an instantaneous and energy-free system of transportation in flat space-time. Practical details had ruined that dream. Earth was not a perfect sphere, so the vertices were slightly off their ideal locations; space-time near Earth’s surface was slightly curved. Travel through the Martin Link was still effectively instantaneous, but it came at a price.

That price, for travel around Earth, was nothing compared with the cost of maintaining a link with one vertex on Earth and the other on Mars. Trudy Melford, with a profligate disregard of expense that still amazed Bey, had been holding a link open for her personal use and convenience for more than three years.

How could she—or anyone, no matter how rich—possibly afford it?

Bey had part of his answer when he arrived in Chetumal, at Trudy’s North American terminal point. He had linked in to the Yucatan on the east-bound route, traveling via Northern Australia, the Marianas, Johnston Island, and Portland, watching the sun flicker from horizon to horizon and morning turn to night in less than two minutes.

The people at each link stage were what he had learned to expect, nervous and harried guardians of goods too precious and too short-lived to be entrusted to conventional modes of travel. The cubes of bright red contained near-empty space. At their heart sat proprietary algorithms, embodied in microchips too small to see. The yellow lead containers held high radioactives, imprisoned behind their triple shields. Most urgent of all were the nano-flasks, their contents changing and evolving a thousand times as fast as their surroundings. The people who carried those also moved in more than real time, aware that a delay of half an hour could destroy their priority and the chance of a successful patent.

But at the Earth/Mars link point, all that changed. Travelers wore exotic forms and recreational clothing. They carried little or no luggage, and no commercial materials. There were scores of them, all apparently known to each other, and all chatting about earlier link trips that they had made to Mars. They had converged quietly and confidently on the Mars staging point, coming from all parts of Earth.

Bey studied them while he waited for the incoming link to operate. At last he realized what he was seeing. These were the super-rich of the Inner System, day-trippers who were using Trudy Melfords link to Mars not because of need, but to make a statement. A one-way link would consume the lifetime earnings of a normal person. These travelers did not need to go to Mars. They merely wanted to emphasize their own wealth and status. Trudy Melford could set the price of the link as high as she chose—and this group would compete to pay it.

They glanced at Bey and dismissed him. Their expressions said that he was not one of them, and therefore he was a nobody. It would have required a character more saintly than Bey’s to feel no satisfaction when the incoming link door opened and a dozen BEC employees emerged, ignored the beautiful people, and converged deferentially on him.

“All ready for Mars, Mr. Wolf?” In spite of Bey’s warning to Trudy Melford, the leader of the EEC group was Jarvis Dommer. He was grinning like Jumping Jack Flash, just as though he personally was responsible for Bey’s presence at die link point.

Bey nodded. “I’m ready.” He could hear the intrigued whispers from the glitterati around him: “Who is he?”

“They said his name is Wolf.”

“He’s someone really important.”

“He must be traveling incognito using a new form.”

The whole group walked forward into the link transition area. They fell silent, waiting. The air pressure of the ante-chamber had already been cycled slowly down to an oxygen-rich mixture at half a standard atmosphere, exactly what they would encounter when they emerged within the boundaries of Old Mars. Before he left Wolf Island, Bey had also briefly entered a form-change tank. The adjustment needed to feel comfortable in Mars gravity was a tiny one.

If Bey had been less experienced he might have believed he could make it without the use of form-change equipment at all. Purposive form-change was no more than the machine reinforcement of human will. Why bother with the hassle of computer feedback and mechanical equipment, when it ought to be possible to do everything by pure mental power?

Maybe it was; but over many years Bey had investigated scores of Secret Masters, sages who claimed to have a command of form-change without the use of equipment Every one had proved to be a lunatic, a charlatan, or both.

The tension in the link transition chamber was mounting. The wall display flickered the last part of its count-down. There was a long final second, while the display showed zero and nothing appeared to be happening. Then came a dizzying instant as the link transition was performed. The chamber walls seemed to blur and shimmer. Ambient gravity dropped instantly to Mars equatorial, thirty-six percent of Earth standard.

Everyone swallowed hard, then smiled at each other. That gravity change was the indisputable proof that they were now on Mars.

There was one more moment of drama. To Bey’s surprise, Trudy Melford herself was waiting outside the link transition point. She nodded to everyone who was emerging, as though she knew them all personally, but it was Bey whom she moved to and took by the arm. He received a special smile. Bey heard his own name coupled with Trudy’s by the people around them.

“Ready to go?” It was not a question. Already she was leading Bey toward the Mars immigration area. She was wearing the same form as at their meeting on Wolf Island, but this time her dress was less conventional, a lacy white veil that floated around her body like gossamer in the lower gravity and thinner air.

Bey thought she looked terrific. He said nothing.

In his case the formalities had been disposed of in advance. He was whisked away to a long, sleek open car before any other arrival had been offered a first entry document. With Dommer in front and Trudy seated snugly at Bey’s side in the cramped rear, the balloon- wheeled vehicle went snaking through a long, winding tunnel that steadily ascended.

It had been twenty-five years since Bey’s last visit to Mars. According to all reports the place had changed beyond recognition; but he had a pretty good idea where he must be.

Two hundred years ago the first colonists had burrowed in close to the equator, down past the sterile rubble of the regolith until they were deep enough to tap the underlying permafrost. That had yielded ample supplies of water, enough to discourage much exploration and settlement close to the ice-caps of the frigid Martian poles. When a hot summer afternoon on the equator was already fifteen degrees below the freezing point of water, why seek out colder places?