Charles Sheffield - Proteus in the Underworld

Even if you were, climbing into a car with a broken ankle, arm and ribs would be quite a trick. Something new would be needed for that. Better think it through. Bey slithered his way along like a crippled snail. Or maybe better not think it through. One problem at a time was enough. More than enough.

He lifted his head. Good news: The car was noticeably nearer, and the pain in his ankle was marginally less. Bad news: Before he could reach the level of the car, he would have to hoist himself up a two-foot step on the tunnel floor.

One problem at a time. Bey humped and slithered and scrabbled, until the fingertips on his right hand were bloodied and broken-nailed. At last he was as close to the car as he could get. It was maybe five meters away; and he could no more lift himself up the two-foot barrier than fly across it.

The car was open and waiting. It could respond to his voice command and move freely backward and forward. What it could not do, ever, was move sideways toward Bey. It was a rail car, it sat on tracks, and its motion was totally fixed by them.

Bey sympathized with it. Both of them were stuck in grooves, their actions completely decided by outside constraints.

He could order the car to proceed at maximum speed and smash into the courtyard of Melford Castle. That should arouse enough excitement to bring someone here. Only it wouldn’t work. The car’s own safety system would override any command and slow it down before it approached the castle.

He lifted his head as far as he could and surveyed the walls and ceiling of the tunnel. Nothing there. Both were simple plain surfaces, made of compacted regolith. There would be scheduled maintenance monitoring, looking for fallen rocks from wall or ceiling, and unlike the waiting car the machines that did the work were smart and mobile and general-purpose. But their inspections would be few and far between. He might wait for weeks before the next one was due.

Wrong again. His desiccated corpse would wait for weeks. Bey, the real Bey Wolf, would be long gone.

He stared again at the rail car. It could hear his commands, but it had no voice circuits to reply to them. That was no problem for a passenger, who could see the internal displays. Bey, lying flat on the floor, enjoyed no such privilege.

Did it have visual sensors, enough to make sure that it did not run into fallen rocks? Probably, and it would surely report what it saw to the maintenance machines. But it probably saw only things in its immediate path.

But it might accept other reports.

“Attention. There has been a major rock fall, close to the rail car escalator terminus.” Bey spoke as loudly and clearly as he could, aware that his voice was shaking. He was tempted to continue, adding a warning that fallen rock might form a danger to traffic. Except that he would be wasting his time. The car was simple. If it accepted a message at all, it would be a simple one.

A loud buzzing click came from the car. Bey prepared to repeat his message, thinking that a communications system might be switching on; then he realized that the car was moving. Before he could move or speak again, it accelerated smoothly away along the tunnel and vanished from view.

Bey lowered his head, until his face was again touching the floor. It was colder than ever, but it no longer felt unpleasant. Wasn’t freezing supposed to be one of the best ways to go, with death stealing over you like a gentle sleep?

Maybe it was—if you were ready to go.

Bey lifted his head and deliberately flexed the muscles of his left arm and leg. The pain was quite intolerable and it brought him up to full alertness. He waited a few seconds, then did the same thing again. Isometric exercises with broken bones. A new form of calisthenics, guaranteed to keep the subject awake. Again. And again. Every thirty seconds.

Bey squeezed his eyes shut, gritted his teeth, and counted out the interval. Thirty seconds. Again. And again.

He was still doing it half an hour later, when a hiss sounded just a few feet away. He opened his eyes. A wheeled, multi-armed machine stood there facing him. The arms were reaching out, reaching down. They were strong enough to move two-ton rocks, but they were not used to dealing with delicate human tissue.

“Hey! You can’t just pick me up like that—I have broken bones. I need careful handling. I need—”

What Bey needed was lost in a scream of pain. It made no difference at all to the machine, which could not hear him. It was a simple rock-clearer. What it had just picked up was not what it had been sent to pick up, namely, a fall of rocks. This object was in the way and it certainly had to be moved; however, its final disposition must be referred to a different and more sophisticated machine.

Decisions like that went far beyond rock-clearer grade level.

The full extent of Sondra’s failure didn’t hit her until she was fed, rested, and back inside Rini Base.

She had traveled all the way from Earth to the Carcon and Fugate Colonies, seen everything there was to see, examined form-change hardware and software in enormous detail—and learned nothing. Nothing about the anomaly of the feral forms, that is. Someone had tried to kill her, but what had she learned from that?

She needed to talk it over with somebody but Aybee was useless. He was retreating again into his own world of physics, unpersuaded that there had really been a murder attempt.

“Be logical.” He was frowning over an equation, a single line of squiggles that went right across the screen. “I told you, if somebody wanted to zap you they’d choose a better way. For one thing, it didn’t work.”

“It would have, if you hadn’t come along when you did.”

“Nah. You could have survived in that tank for weeks. The Fugates would have found you and hauled you out.”

“Whoever did it hadn’t realized I could change the tank so it would keep me alive.”

“So what? If I want to off somebody, I don’t fiddle with air pressure and temperature. I do it more direct. A nice big explosion, or a hundred thousand volts in a terminal keyboard or toilet seat, or nerve poison in the food.”

“Not if you want people to think it might have been an accident.”

“Hey, I think it was an accident. One of the Fugates screwed up and changed that chamber to open space conditions, but they didn’t want to admit it.”

This, from someone who had actually been present. How would it sound to Denzel Morrone and the Office of Form Control, tucked away safe back on Earth? They’d all say she was just being paranoid.

“I wish I could talk to Bey Wolf about this, Aybee. I bet he’d know what’s going on. He was the one who told me my answer would be out here in the Kuiper Belt.”

“Yeah. But your answer to what?” Aybee swiveled impatiently around in his chair. “Did he tell you that? See, everybody looks at the world from his own point of view. I call it the ground state of the resting mind. It’s like an excited electron, left to itself it drops back to its ground state. And your brain does the same thing, left alone it returns to and thinks about what it’s really interested in. With me, the ground state is physics. With the Wolfman, it’s form-change methods. Question is, what is it for you?” And, when Sondra showed no sign of answering, “Look, if you want to talk to Wolf be my guest.”

“I don’t just mean sending him a message. I mean talk to him on Wolf Island, in real- time.”

“I know you do. But this here is Liberty Hall.” Aybee gestured around him. “You’re on Rini Base, where the fancy stuff is standard. I’ll patch you direct to the inner system through the kernels.”

“You can really do that?”

“Would I lie to you? It’s how I talked to Bey before I took off for the Fugates. Takes a few minutes to set up the links, but then you only have just a short chat lag when either one of you speaks. I’ll fix you up with your own line, too, so you can talk private.”