Charles Sheffield - Proteus in the Underworld

“Mr. Wolf!” The man wore one of the standard forms of BEC management. He was handsome, impeccably dressed in a style new to Bey, and grinning broadly. “I have good news.”

Bey scowled back at him. “How did you get in?”

“Top priority interrupt circuit. My name is Jarvis Dommer. I’m with BEC.”

“I can see that. What do you want?”

“To make you an offer you can’t refuse.” Dommer seemed to have more teedi than a normal person, and now his grin widened even farther. “Mr. Wolf—may I call you Bey?”

“No.”

“Fine.” The smile remained intact. “Mr. Wolf, you may have heard that BEC has a whole new line of commercial forms on the drawing-board, planned for release two years from now.”

“The marine and free-space forms. Sure. I’ve seen the advertisements.”

“Good. But what you haven’t seen—because we’ve kept quiet about it—is the plans for multiform versions of the new releases. We’ll be using your own ideas, the ones that you sold to EEC three and a half years ago. And we said to ourselves, who better than Bey Wolf to be our exclusive consultant on this? No one knows as much as he does about the promise and potential of the multiforms—”

“No. I retired three years ago. I’m not interested.”

“That’s because you haven’t heard what we can offer you.”

“I said no. I have enough money. Forget it.”

“I’m not talking just a high consulting rate, the way you are thinking. You’d certainly get that, the most we’ve ever paid. But I’m authorized to offer you a royalty as well, one percent of everything that BEC makes when one of these new forms is licensed. Nobody in history has ever been offered that by BEC. You may think you’re well off now, but compared with what you can be you’re a pauper. You won’t just be a millionaire, you’ll be a billionaire, a billionaire, a jillionaire. You’ll be so wealthy that you’ll be able to—”

Bey hit the disconnect. The image of Jarvis Dommer, still talking a mile a minute, faded slowly away. Bey reset the house interrupt levels so that for the next three hours all messages, no matter their priority level, would be recorded for his later review.

He lay down again and reset the controls to continue programmed sleep. In the two minutes that the skull contacts needed to adjust his brain wave patterns, he thought about the BEC proposal. Jarvis Dommer was absolutely right about one thing: the offer to pay royalties for use of a form-change program to an individual was absolutely unprecedented. And since BEC was the biggest business enterprise in the whole solar system, Bey would surely become obscenely wealthy. He should feel flattered and overwhelmed by their offer.

He didn’t. He was too cynical for that. Instead he wondered what horrible problems BEC were having with the new forms. To promise so much, someone must be completely desperate.

Bey Wolf understood form-change theory and practice better than any human alive. Sondra admitted that, without reservations. What he didn’t understand so well, maybe not at all, was people.

Back on Wolf Island he had made it sound logical and easy. Go to Denzel Morrone, head of the Office of Form Control. Explain that a visit was needed to the Carcon Colony. If necessary, cite Behrooz Wolfs own assertion that the journey was essential if Sondra was to find out why a clearly non-human caged form had somehow passed the humanity test.

In the real world it wasn’t so simple. Sondra had waited in the ante-room to Denzel Morrone’s office for more than two hours while a succession of senior officials from the Planetary Coordinators swept in and out. The whole Form Control department had recently moved to an expensive new building, all airy columns of carbon composite and transparent outer walls. Sondra, perched above a thousand feet of open space, could see all the way across an ocean of smaller buildings to the dull grey bulk of Old City. The Office of Form Control had come a long way—physically as well as financially—since Denzel Morrone took over two years ago.

It had also changed in other, more subtle ways. Sondra, finally admitted to Morrone’s presence, told him at once that she would like to travel out to the Carcon Colony. Morrone, dressed in the smart new uniform that he had designed for members of the Form Control office, listened carefully as she explained her reasons: she must make a direct on-site inspection of the biofeedback equipment used in performing the humanity test. The tests that she had performed on Earth had all shown the caged form unable to interact with form- change equipment. It should never have passed the humanity test. Therefore a problem, hardware or software, existed within the colony’s form-change tanks.

As she concluded with a repeat of her request to visit the Carcon Colony, Morrone slowly shook his head.

“I understand your position, Sondra. But I don’t think you understand mine. What you have described sounds like a purely technical problem. It isn’t. It’s also politics. Solar system politics.”

“I wouldn’t be doing anything political in the Carcon Colony.”

“Nothing overtly political. But the colony is in the Kuiper Belt, and that lies in the transition zone between the Inner and Outer Systems. Anything involving the Outer System is politics. If I request that you make a visit there it’s another way of saying that we don’t think they are competent to evaluate the performance of their own equipment.”

To a political mind, everything is politics. Bey Wolf would probably have said just that. Sondra was shrewd enough to keep the thought to herself.

Morrone was continuing, a soothing smile on his big, pleasant face. “I’m not saying I won’t grant your request. I may. What I am saying is that I need to think about it further. Keep this whole thing in perspective, Sondra. The humanity test is given to every baby. That’s nearly three hundred thousand tests every day. And here, after centuries of use, we have one isolated failure. On a statistical basis we don’t have a problem at all.”

And on a statistical basis there was no need for an Office of Form Control. By definition, the office was concerned only with the anomalous: the form-change failures, the illegal forms, the investigation and labeling of borderline cases.

It wouldn’t help to say that either. Sondra changed tack. “I spoke to Behrooz Wolf about this. He feels that I ought to go out to the Carcon Colony as soon as possible.”

Morrone’s face froze. “Why did you talk to Wolf?”

Sondra, ready to mention that Bey was a distant relative of hers, decided that a statement of kinship would be a bad idea.

“I met him. Socially.”

Not quite a lie. She had stayed to dinner.

But Denzel Morrone was shaking his head. “The discussion of our problems with someone outside the office shows very poor judgment. I expect discretion on the part of my staff. Wolfs opinions on this subject are not relevant. He is no longer part of the Office of Form Control.”

“But he ran it for almost half a century!”

“He did.” Morrone snapped out the words. “And what happened? Under his guidance it remained an obscure component of a small and insignificant department. It should hardly be necessary to point out to you that the growth of influence of this office—and with it your own opportunity for employment and advancement—came after Behrooz Wolf had retired.”

Sondra wanted to snap back, that when it came to solving form-change problems everyone said one Bey Wolf was worth a hundred Denzel Morrones. She bit her tongue. Morrone obviously knew office opinion. He had his own inferiority complex, otherwise he would not have reacted so violently when she quoted Wolf’s suggestion. And everything that Morrone said was also true. The office had seen a spectacular growth in funding and influence since he took over.