Charles Sheffield - Proteus in the Underworld

“No. Maybe. God, I don’t know.” Bey stared sightlessly around the room, looking right through Sondra. “I have to think through all this. Changing form-change. Maybe abandoning form-change. I have to think. And I have to get some fresh air.”

He headed for the stairs. Jumping Jack Flash, who had been sitting all the time at Sondra’s feet, stood up and scuttled after him. The house’s outer door slammed shut.

Sondra turned to glare accusingly at Robert Capman. “I’ve never seen Bey like this before. He’s unbelievably upset.”

“Inevitably, and naturally. As I suspected when I flew to Earth, Behrooz Wolf had come so far in his own deductions that there was no alternative to telling him the truth. And there was also no way to make that truth palatable to someone so intimately involved in form- change development.” Capman’s luminous eyes burned into Sondra’s. “I have a question for you, Miss Dearborn. Why were you present when Behrooz Wolf initiated this conversation with me?”

Again it seemed like a total change of subject. Sondra stared at the Logian in perplexity.

“Why was I here? I don’t know. I guess Bey wanted me here. He invited me, told me to come back from Mars with him, but I had no idea why. Is it relevant?”

“It is more than relevant. It is crucial. He wanted you to know of his own deductions, and also he wanted you to learn whatever he might find out from me about the reasons for Logian involvement on Mars.”

“So he wanted me to know. I still don’t see what that has to do with anything.” Sondra stood up abruptly. “And at the moment I don’t have time to share your worry about the long-term future of humanity. I’m worried about now. I’m worried about Bey. I’m going to see what’s happening to him.”

She ran for the stairs. The Logian, stolid and apparently unruffled, remained at his ship’s communications console. “Take your time,” he called after her. “There is no need to rush back.”

Outside it was almost dark, a warm, soft twilight in which the first stars were appearing. Sondra paused close to the front of the house and stared around her. The island was not all that big but Bey could have gone anywhere for solitude, to the top of the rocky central upthrust or down along the seashore. She would never find him by sight as it grew darker. She could shout and holler, but she was sure he would not like that. It also did not fit her own uneasy mood. The weather was flat calm, but her nerves were jangling as though a big thunderstorm was on the way.

She stood still and listened. The night sounds of the island were beginning. Faint rustles of small lizards and large insects, the former pursuing the latter through the undergrowth. The murmur of small waves ascending the sandy beach. A rush of night wings, as bats and small birds flitted above her head in their hunt for moths and gnats; and, far-off to the left, a muted whine of protest.

Sondra at once headed that way. She had heard that sound before—Janus and Siegfried, waiting impatiently and voicing their complaint until Bey threw the stick or ball out into the shallow water.

He was sitting down when she came up to him, perched on a jagged rock that had to be less than comfortable. She sat down cross-legged on the sand at his side. “You don’t have to do it, you know,” she said quietly. “You don’t have to take any notice of him at all.”

He did not look round, but stared out across the quiet water. It had the oil-black gleam that Sondra remembered from her first visit to Wolf Island. The slow ripples that crept up the beach were tiny. She counted them—one, two, three, up and back. About five seconds between successive waves.

“He traveled all the way from Saturn just to talk to me,” Bey replied at last. “A Logian, coming to see a human. It’s unheard of. I owe him an answer.”

“Then give him one. Tell him no. Tell him you are retired.” Sondra placed her hand gently on Bey’s thigh. “You’ve had experience with that particular line, haven’t you? Or tell him that you believe he is wrong.”

“Sure. Except that I don’t. He’s right.” The dogs ran up from the water to shake themselves and shower the two humans with salt spray. Bey did not even flinch.

“Do you know,” he went on, “what Capman said to me wasn’t even a surprise. I’d had the thought myself, but I always suppressed it as personal heresy: Purposive form-change runs contrary to evolution. We change to match a different environment, but it isn’t a genetic change. We don’t become any better suited to living in a place, generation by generation, the way that all of Nature adapts to its surroundings. In the far future, humans might evolve by natural selection until they could live on Mars as it is today. But they won’t do it as long as we have form-change.”

“So make that point to people, Bey. Tell them. Use the insight to change the way we think of and apply form-change. You can do it, if anyone can. But don’t run away to Saturn, not when you are needed here on Earth. You think Denzel Morrone has to be kicked out of the Office of Form Control, and I agree. But who will take over from him?”

“Not me. I worked my shift.”

“Other people won’t want to hear that. You’d be my first choice, the absolute best person.” Sondra listened to her own words, and was surprised by the passion in them. “Not that anyone is going to ask my opinion, I know that. I’m a peon. But you’re not. Even if it’s only for a little while, you ought to help out when Morrone goes.”

“Capman thinks that I should help, too—on Saturn.”

“Yes. And you know why?” Sondra felt a faint itch inside her, a mixture of anger and impatience. “It’s because he wants you there for himself. He likes you. You have a lot of common interests and he loves to talk to you. You are the only person in the solar system who reaches Capman whenever you like. He wants you there on Saturn for his sake, not yours or mine. Aybee says that Capman doesn’t normally ask people to become a Logian until they’re mentally past it, and you’re nowhere near that.”

“Aybee is wrong, Sondra. I love him like a son, and on the right subjects he’s the smartest being in the solar system; but sometimes he’s an idiot. You’ve heard Capman—did you think for one second that he is past it?”

“He’s old. Well over a century.”

“And he hasn’t lost a stroke. I’m not in Capman’s league, Sondra, but I’m getting old too.”

“Now that’s nonsense!” Bey was facing her, but in the dark she could make out his face only as a pale oval. She wished that she could see his eyes. “You’re getting older,” she went on, “but so am I. We’re all doing that, every day. You pretend to be old, but it’s all a big put-on, part of your act. Anyone who spends time with you soon realizes that you have more curiosity and energy than a teenager. Mary Walton and Sylvia Fernald certainly didn’t think you were old where it mattered.”

“Now where the devil did you hear those names?” Bey was silent for a moment, then he laughed into the darkness. “Aybee.”

“Who else? ‘The Wolfman and his bimboes.’ ”

“I’ll kill him. Anyway, that was a long time ago.”

“Four years, if you call that a long time. I don’t. But Trudy Melford wasn’t a long time ago, she was yesterday. And she made her views clear enough: you can have her and everything she possesses. You’ll never convince me she was talking about money. She doesn’t think you’re old and ready to be put out to pasture. Out to stud, maybe.”

Sondra felt the muscles of Bey’s thigh tighten under her hand. It was a long time—three waves to the shore before he said: “She was just trying to tell me how grateful she is for what I did for her son.”