Charles Sheffield - Proteus in the Underworld

Aybee floated inside, ahead of Mario Amari. His suit protected him from temperature shock, but he heard Amari gasp. The air pumped into the room was warm enough, but the walls and floor were still cold enough to burn anything that touched them.

But maybe it was only a gasp of relief-because the room was empty. There was no sign of Sondra, dead or alive.

“She’s not here. Thank Heaven, she got out.” Amari, like Aybee, was scanning the interior, with its array of form-change tanks. “She must have.”

“Must have. But didn’t.” Aybee’s instincts had taken over as soon as he saw the tanks. “She’s still here, and she’s all right. Come on, man. I may need a little bit of local assistance for this.”

Every trainee in the Office of Form Control was required to take practical tests. One of them called for form-change program modification with re-calibration of a form-change tank. But no trainee, ever, had been asked to do that in six hours or less, nervous, wearing a suit, and filled with the awful knowledge that you would soon be evaluating the quality of your work using your own body as test subject.

Sondra had to make some working assumptions. The chamber’s ambient temperature might drop close to absolute zero, and the air pressure to vacuum. A human, suitably changed, might survive in that situation for a couple of days. It called for total hibernation and a severe alteration to body chemistry. Re-vivication probability was down around ten percent.

But that was the worst case. The tank itself would provide some thermal protection, maybe hold a little air. The chance of survival increased rapidly with every trace of oxygen and every degree of higher temperature.

Sondra did all the calculations that she had time for. She knew they were not enough, but she would have to act based on what she had. She recalled Bey’s words: Intuition is what remains after all the facts have been forgotten. Fine. But pray that intuition was also something that guided you when there was no more time for calculation.

She reviewed the program changes one more time; entered them into the tanks controller; climbed slowly into the tank; adjusted the sensors, electrodes, and catheters as best she could, to interact with an adult form a fraction of the size of a Fugate newborn; and then faced the final, most difficult judgment call.

She could not make the form-change tank attachments to her own body while she remained inside her suit. When that suit was removed, she would have no more than a few minutes before anoxia robbed her of consciousness. And the longer she waited, and the lower the chamber air pressure became, the quicker anoxia would set in.

Sondra lowered her internal suit pressure and switched to pure oxygen. She hyperventilated for a couple of minutes, until she felt her head swimming.

Now. Before she had a chance to change her mind or think more about the implications of what she was doing. Suit off.

Forty seconds.

Into the tank harness.

One minute twenty seconds.

Connections-fourteen of them. Can’t afford to rush. Can’t afford to make a mistake.

Two minutes twenty seconds.

Sondra’s lungs were empty. She felt them collapsing within her rib cage. Five more connections, just five. Not much to ask. Her head was swimming again.

Three minutes and thirty seconds.

Two more attachments. Tank turning dark, have to work by feel.

Four minutes something.

Last one. Was that right? Can’t tell. No more feeling in fingertips. Spears of ice, down throat and into chest.

Five …

Total darkness. Personal darkness. Strange way to go. But when it came to the final moment, maybe every way seemed like a strange way to go. And go where? No one had ever managed to answer that question. Maybe she would do it, be the first. Sondra turned to solid ice, wondering if her personal darkness would ever end.

When you plunged into a form-change that was both unplanned and desperately hurried, you gave little thought as to what you were likely to find waiting for you when you emerged. You were far more likely to be wondering if you would emerge.

But if you did think about it, there were certain things you would not expect to see as you struggled back to consciousness. One of them was the smug face of Aybee, whom Sondra had left a few days earlier back on Rini Base at the other side of the Kuiper Belt. But there he was. He was lolling before the open form-change tank and chomping on some sort of sugary cake.

He nodded to her in a self-satisfied way as soon as he noticed that her eyes were open. “Right on schedule. How you feeling?”

Only a moron would ask a question like that. Sondra doubled over in agony as a first breath burned into her lungs. She could not speak, but her glare was intended to crisp Aybee’s skin.

“The old Wolfman was right, you know.” Aybee went on as though he had not noticed her reaction. “I was sure he was talking through his hat when he asked me to fly out here, but he wasn’t. ’Course, you might say he was only half-right No real reason to worry. Even if I hadn’t come along, the Fugates would have took a look for you eventually. They’d have dragged you out. But you wouldn’t feel as good as you do now.”

Good? She had to speak, even if it killed her.

“I could have died here,” she rasped. “If I hadn’t known how to—” She ran out of air.

“If you hadn’t.” Aybee finished the cake and licked his fingers. “But you did. Way I see it, it’s pretty straightforward. If you’re smart, you figure out you gotta do the form-change bit and crawl into the tank if you want to survive. If you’re not smart enough to do that, then you die and no big loss. Plenty of dummies in the system already, one more won’t be missed.”

Sondra decided she was going to kill Aybee. She didn’t know when or how, but it was going to happen. Unfortunately, for the moment there were higher priorities.

“Who did it, Aybee? Who sealed this room and changed the air and temperature settings so it would kill me?”

“Dunno. The Fugates are working on that—they don’t like what happened any better than you do. No clues so far.”

“And why would anybody try to kill me?”

“That’s easier. You came here to find out why the Fugate form-change equipment said something was human that wasn’t I’d guess somebody didn’t want you passing that information on.” Aybee showed real interest for the first time since Sondra had awakened. “Except that don’t make logical sense, either. Someone wants to loll you, why do a half- assed job of it? Shoot you, or chop your head off, something final—don’t fool around with air and temperature. By the way, what did you find out?”

“Nothing.” The feeling of failure that swept through Sondra was worse than her physical woes. “That’s why none of this makes sense. I have no information to pass on to anybody, because I didn’t find one thing wrong with the form-change system here in the Fugate Colony. The hardware is just as it came from the BEC factory, with its seals unbroken. The controller software passed every test I could give it.”

“That so? Now you got me a little bit interested. You telling me there was no secret to hide?”

“Nothing that I could discover. When this chamber locked up on me I should have been ready to give up. Except that I wouldn’t have. If I hung around, it was only because I couldn’t stand the idea of crawling back to Bey Wolf and admitting that whatever was going wrong here, I couldn’t find it.”

“You telling me you’re ready to get out of here?”

“No! I want to know who tried to kill me.”

“I’m sure you do. But I’ll tell you right now, the chances of finding out here are just about zero. You don’t know this place. You don’t know the Fugates, you don’t know the colony’s geography, you don’t who’s been coming and going.”