Charles Sheffield - Proteus in the Underworld

Aybee was already busy, setting up the pathway. Sondra started to thank him, but as he waved her away she realized the truth. He would set her up with her own line to the inner system so that he had privacy. He had suffered through the past few days as a favor to Bey Wolf; now he couldn’t wait to get back to physics, the “ground state of his resting mind.”

The trouble was, the connection was not going to Aybee’s liking. He was grunting and muttering, trying different combinations.

“Not on Wolf Island.” He glanced up at Sondra. “In fact, not anywhere on Earth, unless he switched his personal code right out of the system. What do you think?”

“Mars?” I’ll bet Trudy Melford has her claws in him again.

Sondra had a sudden faint memory of something else. Something about Trudy, something that Aybee had mentioned just after they left the Fugate Colony. She had to ask him about that, and all the stuff about the history of elliptic functions that she had not been able to take in at the time.

But not right now. “Try him on Mars.”

“Sure. He called me from there last time.” Aybee tinkered again with the path settings. After a couple of minutes he shook his head. “No good.”

“He’s not there?”

“He is. His ID shows a definite location. See that code, Melford Castle. Melford Castle! I didn’t realize the Wolfman was in so deep with the high and mighty.” Aybee was too intent on the displays to notice Sondra’s reaction to his phrasing. “But he’s not answering. He’s busy, or he’s in bed.” Or both. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk to him any more.”

She couldn’t leave it at that Aybee had turned to stare. Her anger—a totally irrational irritation that she could not explain to herself-was showing through. “I really shouldn’t be talking to Bey anyway, I ought to be in touch with the people who sent me out here. Can you reach Earth’s Office of Form Control?”

“Anything that turns you on. You want me to leave a ‘call waiting’ for the Wolfman?”

“No. I mean, yes. Tell him I’d like to talk to him. But tell him I wouldn’t want it to interfere with his other activities—whatever they are.”

God, she was at it again. It was a great relief—probably to both of them—when Aybee finally nodded and said, “We got a call going in to the Office of Form Control. You can pick it up a couple of rooms down.”

Sondra fled along the corridor to the room that Aybee had described. In front of the terminal she paused, marvelling at her own stupidity. The link to the Office of Form Control was ready and waiting. In trying to turn aside Aybee’s curiosity she had forced herself to communicate with her own office. And she had nothing to offer them but an admission of failure. After pushing for permission to fly all the way out to the Kuiper Belt, she had learned nothing new about the feral forms.

Maybe she could get away with a check of her own answering service, and escape. She sat down and signaled the interaction to begin. She expected the standard response, which would ask where she wanted the call routed. Instead she found the smooth, well-groomed face of Denzel Morrone staring out at her.

He seemed as surprised as Sondra. As well he should be. He was three levels up from her, head of the whole show. He would normally speak to her only when he decided he wanted to, or she made a special and formal request.

“Excuse me.” At the moment Sondra would have made a special request not to speak to him. “I didn’t expect my call to go—”

“All Rini-transmitted calls from the Kuiper Belt and beyond are screened by my office.” Morrone’s surprised expression was gone, replaced by the usual bland facade. “I trust that what you have to report is significant enough to justify the use of such a high-priority channel.”

I can’t blame Aybee. He was just trying to help.

“I believe that an attempt was made to kill me while I was on the Fugate Colony.”

“Indeed?” One eyebrow lifted perhaps a millimeter. Sondra immediately regretted her words. She should have thought everything through before she spoke.

“That is an extraordinary accusation,” Morrone continued. “I hope you are able to justify it. It is a far cry from the investigation of a couple of humanity test failures, which is the reason that your journey to the Kuiper Belt was approved by this office, to a claim of attempted murder. Tell me, please, exactly what happened on the Fugate Colony, from the moment of your arrival there.”

She was in the trap, just as she had feared, and there was no way out. Sondra described everything in detail, from her reception by the two Amaris and on through her painstaking examination of the form-change equipment. She began to talk about her modification of the tank controller, with the tricky and delicate modifications she had been forced to make.

“But what did you discover?” Denzel Morrone interrupted her as she was telling how the air pressure and temperature had continued to plummet. “I mean, what do you know now that you did not know when you left Earth? I am referring, of course, to the reason that the feral form passed the humanity test.”

Sondra swallowed hard. Here came the worst part. “Nothing. I could determine no way that the test might have failed. I still see no way.”

“Indeed.” Denzel Morrone studied his well-buffed fingernails, refusing to meet Sondra’s eye. “Maybe we can both agree that something certainly failed. Go on.”

It was obvious what he was implying. Sondra bit back her anger. She described the sealed chamber, the deadly temperature, the thinning air.

“Certainly, certainly.” Morrone flourished a large, fleshy hand to cut her off. “All the form- change tanks in that chamber were empty, you already told me that. There was no reason to keep the place warm and pressurized.”

“But I was inside—”

“Of the two hundred thousand and more people who live and work on the Fugate Colony, a small handful knew that you were a visitor; and just two of those realized that you were inside that form-change room. No doubt some member of the maintenance staff, engaged in routine duties of cleaning and sterilizing an area—”

“The room was an interior chamber, not near to the outside. It couldn’t have happened that way.” Except that as she spoke, Sondra realized that it surely could. The very fact that the Fugates had been able to provide the chamber with her preferred working environment implied that it had its own controls for temperature and pressure.

“I would appreciate it if you will refrain from interrupting me when I am speaking.” Morrone’s tone was as polite and easy as ever. His face told a different story. “As I said, this sounds to me like an accident, and a simple and natural one. It is not attempted murder. It is merely a case where one personnel unit on the colony was unaware of the actions of another. When you attain the management level where a large number of people work for you—assuming that such an unlikely event ever occurs—you will realize that in spite of the best possible safeguards and written regulations, occasional misunderstandings are inevitable.”

The unforgiving mouth pursed. “I feel sure that is what happened on the colony. As for the rest of your report, I need to consider it in some detail. It would not be fair to you if I failed to mention, here and now, that I am greatly disappointed by your total failure to achieve progress on the project assigned to you. That, too, I must consider in detail.” The carefully groomed head nodded. “In great detail.”

Sondra opened her mouth to reply, although just what she would say she did not know. And then it became totally irrelevant. Before she could offer a word in her defense the connection was terminated at the other end. Denzel Morrone nodded and vanished from the screen.