Proteus in the Underworld

CHAPTER 13

Bey had said nothing good about Sondra’s brains, but he had given her top marks for stubbornness.

She clung to that thought. She needed every scrap of obstinacy that she could muster, just to persuade herself to keep going.

All the way to the Fugate Colony she had warned herself to expect an environment stranger than anything she had found with the Carcons. They, whatever their oddities, had retained standard human size. That bond with Earth would vanish, the moment that the ship’s docking was complete and Sondra eased forward into the main Fugate entry lock.

She had been advised to remain in a suit all the time that she was in Fugate territory. Now it was easy to see why. As new air hissed into the lock she found herself floating within a foggy chamber whose nearest wall began to drip with moisture. The atmospheric pressure rose to twice Earth normal. Her suit informed Sondra that the outside temperature was 33 degrees Celsius-almost blood heat. The chamber’s far walls, at least fifty meters away, were soon barely visible through thick swirls of mist.

But Earth had its fogs, too, and its hot, steamy jungles. Sondra’s sense of alienation came not from heat or humidity, but from scale. She stared around her and felt dwarfed and diminished. By Fugate standards she was insignificant, a mouse who had strayed into a human house. The lock was automatic and that was just as well. The manual controls were fifteen meters up, far above her head, and in an emergency she would need to use her suit’s jets and fly to reach them.

She headed for the far side of the chamber. As the lock cycled and its inner door slid open, Sondra for the first time saw her reception committee.

She had spoken to them on her trip through the Belt from the Carcon Colony, but it had been a low-capacity line with sound-only communication. The Fugate voices, two of them, proved easy to understand and yet not quite right in their timbre. Slightly thin, slightly fluting, they did not seem to be a local accent, understandable in a colony established a century ago and living in relative isolation from the rest of the solar system. It was something else, something that Sondra could not put her finger on.

And now, looking at the two great forms floating in front of her, it became obvious.

Examining the Fugate that had been shipped to Earth orbit, Sondra had known very well that it was a baby and that the adult Fugates must be a lot bigger. But that was an intellectual understanding. Confronting the reality was far different.

The two forms waiting beyond the airlock were not wearing suits, and their clothing was limited to a blue tunic that covered only the main torso. Sondra estimated that it was at least seventy feet from the top of the thinly-haired heads to the bare feet and stubby pink toes. The arms and legs were short in proportion to the body, which was in turn dwarfed by the head and thick neck. The heads themselves were pear-shaped, dominated by the bulging cranium. Even so, the mouths that now smiled a greeting to Sondra must be at least six feet across. There was no way that such lips, tongues, and vocal chords would produce the same range and type of sounds as the midgets of Earth.

The smiles did a little to establish a more comfortable feeling. Sondra smiled back at them, not sure that they could see her face through the foggy visor of her suit. She lifted her arm and waved. They ought to be able to follow her movements all right because their eyes were not that much bigger than hers, tiny compared with their heads.

She felt as much as heard a peculiar rumbling, at the same time as a familiar female voice spoke in her suit, receiver. “Welcome to Fugate, Sondra Dearborn. We are Maria and Mario Amari. If you would like to begin work at once, the equipment that led to the anomalous result of the humanity test is waiting. If you would prefer to rest before you begin, a special area has been prepared for you.”

Normal Fugate speech from those great vocal chords was not subsonic for Sondra, but it was close to it. The female Fugate was using a frequency converter, which must also have been in operation when she spoke to Sondra on board the ship. It presumably worked both ways, lowering the pitch of Sondra’s voice to a standard Fugate range.

But the woman—think of her as a woman. Maria Amari is human, as human as you are—- was coming closer, and continuing: “Or, if you prefer it, we will arrange for you to see something of this world before your work begins.”

The urge to blurt out “No way!” was close to overwhelming. Sondra wanted to do her work and then leave as soon as possible. Only the knowledge that background information about the Fugate Colony and the general life-style there could be important allowed her to grit her teeth, nod, and reply, “I would be honored to be shown your home.”

Before she could change her mind, a stubby-fingered hand big enough to enfold her whole body was reaching forward. “If you do not object, this is the easiest way for you to travel. If you wish to observe without being observed, this is also by far the best way.”

No matter how alien the Fugates were in appearance, they certainly understood human psychology—hers as well as their own. Sondra nodded and snuggled down into the soft hand. The index finger close to her head was about three feet long. The whirls of fingerprint on the final joint were those of a normal human finger, written a dozen times larger.

Sondra had not said anything in reply, but the Fugates must have seen the nod of her head. She was suddenly in motion. It was an oddly comfortable ride, although she knew that with one sharp contraction of the muscles in the hand that held her, her insides would be squeezed out like tomato paste from a tube.

“We were chosen to meet with you.” Mario Amari spoke for the first time since Sondra’s arrival. To Sondra’s ears, the male Fugate sounded no different from the female, a bass rumble she felt more than heard. “Chosen, because we were judged typical of our colony in both body and mind. But we would like you to know that we also volunteered to meet with you. Our own efforts to solve the mystery of a human who is clearly not human have not progressed. We need someone far more familiar than we with the failures of the form- change process. Your willingness to come here is much appreciated.”

Sondra nodded again. Now she felt like a real fake. Change theory, yes. But when it came to the analysis of problem forms she could think of dozens with better practical experience. And that was just within the Office of Form Control. BEC must have scores, if not hundreds, of more experienced people working for them.

Why weren’t they here, since their company’s equipment was involved?

Before Sondra had time to pursue that thought they were out of the first chamber and entering what must be one of the main agricultural centers of the colony. A huge cubic room, a kilometer or more on a side, was filled with a three-dimensional lattice of smaller cubical tanks, thousand after uncountable thousand of them. The six faces of each tank were of transparent material, glass or plastic, and the tanks were complexly connected by meter- thick tubes emerging from the center of each face.

A second lattice, offset from the array of tanks, contained ribbon illuminators. Each one streamed with hellish light, an eye-damaging blue actinic glare that penetrated every cubic centimeter of every tank. The single-celled organisms who filled the cloudy interiors seemed to thrive on it. They were greenish-black in color, designed to drink in every available photon and use its energy to convert simple nutrients to high-level food materials. Like the Cloudlanders, the Fugates took their food from single-celled organisms, avoiding the unnecessary and wasteful step of a food chain to the multi-celled forms of a traditional Earth diet.

Sondra wondered if exposure to that short-wavelength deluge of light might be the cause of the mutations leading to the creation of the feral form. She threw that thought away before it had even taken root. Even if the Fugates had not planned for their own protection, the worst that the radiation bath might do was to produce skin cancer, and even that was unlikely given the thick epidermis of the two Fugates she had seen.

In any case, there were few Fugates within the monster room. She saw only three of them, far-off in the foggy distance. The workers and caretakers of the agricultural center were not humans, but machines. There were many thousands of them and they did not operate at the same scale as the Fugates. None bigger than a rabbit, they went scurrying along the lines of tanks, reading tank temperatures and chemical balance, tightening connections, and adjusting connector tube positions.

The Fugates took no notice of them, nor the machines of the Fugates, except to remain well out of the way of the giant visitors. The machines were not smart enough to talk. Had they been able to do so, Sondra felt sure they would have agreed that the Fugate supervisors were nothing but a pain-quite unnecessary, and a hindrance to good, efficient machine operations.

That prompted another thought, this one about form-change tanks. It was obvious that the Fugate tanks would be on a monstrous scale, with monitors, feedback attachments, and nutrients built large enough to serve their twenty-five meter occupants. But the physical plant in the tanks was really the trimmings, the necessary peripherals. The true heart of a form-change tank remained its computer hardware and its associated unique software. And those, assuming that they were BEC equipment rather than pirated versions, meant that they were designed to be serviced and repaired by humans, closer to two meters in length than twenty-five.

Put that another way: the three-foot digits enclosing Sondra in their cozy embrace might be able, with difficulty, to remove the cover from a form-change controller. But they would no more be able to manage the delicate work of changing form-change functions than Sondra could sit down and weave a spider’s web.

They had almost reached the far end of the agricultural center. The single Fugate they had passed, a woman even larger than the one who carried Sondra, took little notice of them. She raised one hand in casual greeting, rumbled something that was not translated by the frequency converter, and went on her way. It was doubtful that she even saw Sondra.

“Shall we continue, Sondra Dearborn?” The Fugates had paused, and Sondra found herself lifted toward a great questioning face, its expanse of brow creased by six-foot horizontal lines of query. “If you would prefer to rest … ”

“Let’s keep going. I’d like to see more.” The colony was totally different from any place that Sondra had ever been, yet she was feeling more and more at home there. For the first time, she felt that she understood the central dogma of form-change: “Humanity is defined not by appearances. It is defined by actions.”

(Bey Wolf was not there to offer his personal point of view. “The central dogma of the Office of Form Control adds one more sentence. Be kind, be polite, be nice—and watch out for the nasty surprise.)

The two Fugates were proceeding without hesitation, out of the agricultural plant and on through a corridor wide enough to pass a fair-sized space freighter. Sondra had noted long ago, on her first examination of the Fugate data base, that the colony occupied one of the largest planetoids in the Kuiper Belt. Occupied it, and needed every cubic meter of space. A Fugate could reasonably claim to need for comfort a thousand times as much living space as the average Earth human. Presumably a thousand times as much food, too, to go with their mass. A middle-sized Fugate weighed as much as a big Earth whale, and had the same nutritional needs.

In fact, when they first emerged into another chamber Sondra assumed that it was another agricultural plant. There was a similar lattice of vast cubical tanks, the same interstitial array of ribbon lights.

Then the difference hit her. She gasped. These were tanks all right—form-change tanks. Thousands of them, enormous, each large enough to hold a Fugate.

“For adults only, of course,” said the combination of deep rumble and its thin, high- pitched modulation. The tanks that will be of most interest to you are the ones employed in humanity tests. They are located in the children’s creche section, which follows Earth convention and has been placed well away from here, on the other side of the world.”

“But so many!” Sondra waved her arm at the array, trying as she did so to make a rough estimate of numbers. The tanks were far too numerous for her to actually count them. “How many? I mean, why so many?”

It was hard to read expressions on faces so large and so near that her eyes could not take their features in all at once. The Fugates were frowning, in either annoyance or perplexity. The woman held Sondra even closer, until every separate pore and bristly hair was visible on her plump cheeks.

“So many? Is this many? We do not think the number of tanks excessive to our needs. With our current population, and a session for each person every two days … ”

She went on speaking, but Sondra had moved to an internal space where no external sound meant anything. Every two days. A session in the form-change tanks, every two days. That was something Aybee had not mentioned—probably had not even known, although he had given her similar data for the Carcons. It made physiological sense. Those huge bodies, so far from human normal, would be enormously difficult to stabilize in that form. Blood flow, internal temperature control, digestion, breathing, circulation—a hundred body variables would have to hold values wildly far from those natural in humans.

The Carcons and the Fugates, so different in so many ways, had one important thing in common: The continued existence of their colonies depended on the availability of form- change equipment all the time. And that meant they were critically dependent on BEC; or else—far more likely—they were employing pirate form-change equipment to avoid that dependency. The Carcon representative had pretty much admitted that they did use illegal equipment, although he had assured Sondra they did so only after a child was one year old.

At the time Sondra had felt sure that he was telling the truth. Now she felt just as sure that he had been lying. The Carcons and the Fugates were surely using cheap form-change tanks, suspect in both hardware and software. Despite EEC’s best efforts to wipe out such patent violators, rip-off manufacturers for cut-price form-change equipment kept popping up all over the solar system. But then—Sondra felt her first twinge of doubt. It made sense for a colony to use cheap pirated equipment as long as they had no trouble with it. But the Carcon Colony had now encountered two cases where a supposedly human baby who had passed the humanity test later proved to be non-human. Would any group be stupid enough to keep using the same flawed equipment, when it would be so easy to put it aside and use only tanks that had never given trouble?

It ought to be easy enough to answer that question. “The tanks employed in the humanity tests—you said they are over on the other side of the colony. Could you take me there? Immediately.” Sondra’s body had gone rigid, and the Fugate holding her must have noticed. Both of them were peering at her in surprise. She had to offer at least a word of explanation for her frozen silence. “I’ve just had an idea,” she stumbled on, “an idea as to what might be causing the problem with the failed form.”

Two giant heads were nodding in unison. “We will go at once,” said the man. The Fugate woman was already moving, her massive body setting a pace across the chamber that Sondra could never have matched. “Can you give us some idea what you think is happening?”

They deserved the truth, but Sondra was not ready to give it to them. Suppose she was wrong? She didn’t think she was, but it would be awfully embarrassing to accuse the Fugates with no real evidence.

“I think it may be the signal multiplexer. That device mixes and unmixes the multiple input data streams to and from the computer. If it were to go wrong, there could be a recursive signal to the main decision algorithm, and that would create a resonance in the purposive feedback loop.”

She was spouting gibberish, pure and simple. But when Sondra looked up at the Fugate woman’s face she saw that the hurrying giant was nodding respectfully.

If anything, that confirmed Sondra’s suspicions. When waffle like that, made up and delivered off-the-cuff, was enough to snow the Fugates, a real professional salesman of junk form-change equipment would find this colony an easy mark.

Or maybe not. The man, close behind, was speaking. “We did not arrange for our own form-change staff to be present for the initial meeting with you. As you will surely understand, there are questions of ego and self-esteem involved here. Our own people failed to discover the problem, but they were not happy with the idea that an outsider should be brought here, all the way from Earth. Not even when that outsider comes from die famous Office of Form Control. But when we tell them that you have almost certainly identified the source of our problems, they will surely be more than willing to work with you. Just tell us when you need their assistance—at once, perhaps?”

Sondra felt goose bumps break out on her skin. What combination of ignorance and arrogance had allowed her to assume that the Fugates lacked specialists in form-control, even though they were too big to work directly with the equipment? It was sheer blind luck that the people with her now had not seen right through her flim-flam.

“Not at once.” Sondra’s throat felt tight, and she had to clear it a couple of times before she could continue. “Better let me have a look at the equipment by myself before we pull anyone else in on this.”

“There will also be engineers from BEC, arriving here in a few days for routine machine maintenance. If you need help at that point … ”

“We’ll see.” BEC engineers, too. With so many form-change machines in use, regular visits from them would be natural. But maybe they had not seen the tank that produced the wild form. The Fugates would presumably not be willing to ask BEC employees to service pirate equipment that violated the company’s own patents.

Sondra’s rapid ride through the interior of the Fugate world would in other circumstances have caused her to marvel, and many times to ask her bearer to slow down. In the century since its first colonization, the home of the Fugates had been subjected to vast internal reconstruction. Sondra was whisked through a series of great chambers carved in the interior of the planetoid, each with its own carefully-planned functions. Some, like agriculture, form-change, and nanoculture, were easy to understand. Others had a tantalizing mixture of the familiar and the strange. The presence of half a dozen kernels in one great room indicated that it was the main energy-producing center for the colony; but why so many kernels, when one ought to suffice? And why were the kernels’ triple shields all linked together, to form a matrix of interlocking dumbbells?

She saw and wondered, but with only half her mind. The other half was already rehearsing the task that lay ahead. She was mentally taking apart form-change equipment and running a detailed history of its use for the past year. Few people not directly involved in form-change realized that the control computer for every tank maintained a log of all executed instructions and every piece of subject bio-feedback measurement. It took years of experience to read efficiently that avalanche of raw data. Bey Wolf would probably do it twenty times as fast as Sondra, and might be able to skip whole sections of data because he could see at a glance what they were doing. But Sondra would get there eventually, no matter how long it took her.

“If we agree that stubbornness is a field for which marks can be given … ” Bey Wolf was going to learn that it was.

They were finally at their destination. Sondra knew it the moment that they entered a chamber, smaller than any she had seen so far, and she took a first look at its contents. These were form-change tanks, enormous by Earth standards, but still tiny compared with the others that she had seen in the Fugate Colony. They were designed to hold babies between one and two months old. That was the critical age, the time of the humanity test. Pass, and you were defined as human; fail, and you soon ceased to exist. Somewhere close by stood the chamber where failures of the humanity test were absorbed into a general organ pool.

“Stop for a few moments, just here.”

At Sondra’s command, the Fugate woman paused on the threshold of the chamber.

Long ago, Bey Wolf had instituted general procedures to be followed in the Office of Form Control. Proceed from the general to the specific. Before beginning the detailed work, make an overall sanity check.

Sondra did a quick count. Twenty tanks. But according to the red tell-tale on each, all were empty. That did not seem right “You have no children taking the humanity test at the moment?”

“Indeed we do. They are in the next chamber.” Maria Amari was moving again, returning through the great sliding door and along a short corridor to enter another room. “Since we have some extra capacity, we judged it better to avoid the tanks in the room where the problem arose. Recent tests have all been given here.”

Sondra ran her eye over the array of form-change tanks and made a quick calculation. There were twenty more units here, with twelve in use at the moment. The humanity test was currently being administered to a dozen babies, and it lasted about two days. So say, six a day, which meant roughly two thousand a year. Assuming the same failure rate as the rest of the solar system, of less than one in ten thousand births, that would be consistent with a stable population of a couple of hundred thousand people-and that was the stated size of the Fugate Colony. What Sondra was seeing was adequate to the task of the humanity tests, with plenty of extra capacity to take care of natural peaks and valleys in the birth rate.

“All right. Let’s go back to the other room. I’d like you to put me down at the tank which produced the feral form, if you know which one that is.”

“We do indeed.” The woman’s thin voice sounded mildly reproachful. “Naturally, that tank was marked as off-limits as soon as we realized that a problem had occurred in it. We will not use it again until we are sure that there is no danger of another malfunction.”

Sondra felt another moment of uneasiness, a touch of cold doubt at the base of her brain. The Fugates were doing everything right, behaving exactly as she would have behaved herself in the same situation. Her glib assumption, that this was just a question of using flawed equipment and then lying about it, felt less and less plausible. But if it wasn’t that …

The Fugate woman had placed her down gently by the side of one of the great tanks, next to its controller. Sondra saw, to her relief, that it had the size and shape she was most familiar with from her training back on Earth. She knew exactly how to operate it, how to open it, how to take it apart.

She moved to examine the controller’s settings, then realized that the two Fugates showed no signs of leaving. They stood motionless and were watching her attentively.

Maybe it was simple curiosity. Maybe they had been told to stay close to Sondra and watch everything that she did. Maybe they had been told to stay close to her, and make sure that she didn’t do some particular thing. Maybe …

“If I have to take the tank controller apart I’m going to be faced with some very delicate operations. I might be able to do the work in my suit, but it would be much quicker and easier to work without it. Is there any way that this room can be taken to Earth-ambient conditions?’

Part of what Sondra said was simple truth. Things would go quicker and easier if she didn’t have to keep her suit on. More than that, though, there was at least a little personal insecurity. If she screwed up and had to repeat some step three or four times, did she really like the idea of an audience?

And there was a final reason. The Fugates would surely find Earth conditions hard to take. If they stayed, it would have to be for some compelling cause—such as, they had something to hide from Sondra.

The man and woman were looking at each other. Sondra thought she read uncertainty on those great faces, huge and distorted as the floating balloons of an Earth parade.

“We can certainly make this chamber self-contained,” said Mario Amari at last “We can also change the general environment here to match any conditions that you desire.”

“Except that we do not know,” the Fugate woman continued, “we do not know what changes to make for you. According to everything that we have heard, Earth is not a single environment. We understand that temperature and humidity and atmosphere vary widely from place to place, and from time to time.”

Naturally there was uncertainty. Sondra realized that no Fugate had been to Earth—or would ever go there. The gravity of Earth would crush those soft bodies. Even lying down, the weight of the torsos would compress their lungs and make them unable to breathe. The Fugate colonists might survive in water, buoyed like Earth’s own largest fishes and sea mammals, but the land surface of Earth was forever closed to them.

“I can specify a set of standard physical parameters in which I can operate most efficiently. However”—time for Sondra to learn where she really stood—“I suspect that you would not find those conditions well suited to your own comfort.”

“That is of secondary importance.” Mario Amari’s reply came without hesitation. “Our presence is in no way essential. We are here only to be of service to you, in any way that we can, and if you do not need us we will leave. Tell us when you would like us to return.”

“I don’t know. It may take me a long time and I would rather work alone. Is there food and drink close by?”

“Certainly.” Maria Amari waved a huge arm. “We passed a supply area two rooms back, small enough for use by someone in your form.”

It was more evidence of frequent visitors to the colony.

More possibilities that someone from outside had tampered with form-change hardware or software. Sondra could hardly wait to get her hands on the equipment.

“But we need to know your environmental preference,” Maria went on. “We will arrange that it be created within this chamber as soon as possible.”

Which would guarantee privacy. No Fugate colonist was likely to relish an Earth-normal environment Sondra listed the standard operating temperature, pressure, and humidity for the Office of Form Control, and watched Maria and Mario Amari as they drifted out of the room. There was nothing in their actions to suggest that they were reluctant to leave. The woman even seemed rather relieved. Once she had released Sondra from the safe confines of her hand she had never seemed quite at ease. They said they had both volunteered, but it must be a bit hard to serve as tour guide and general factotum for a being small and fragile enough to be destroyed with a single accidental move of hand or foot The chamber door sealed with a hiss of hydraulics. Within seconds, Sondra’s suit monitors showed that the external temperature and pressure were falling. She waited, spending the next few minutes examining the exteriors of all the form-change tanks in the room. Every one was the same model. Every one was outsized by Earth standards, but it bore the BEC logo. That didn’t mean too much. If a pirate manufacturing company was willing to steal the BEC patents, it would not hesitate to steal the company’s trademark, too.

The real test came inside the controller, in the details of hardware and software. To Sondra’s knowledge, no one had ever managed to duplicate those exactly.

Conditions within the chamber were still changing, but they were close enough to their final values for Sondra to dispense with her suit. She eased out of it, picked up her portable test kit, and went across to the tank identified by the Fugates as the one where the feral form had passed its humanity test. She took a deep breath. This was it. Somewhere within this tank’s controller lay the exact evidence as to why humanity had been affirmed where none existed. Either she would understand the problem, and return vindicated to Earth; or she would fail to find an answer, and everyone—Bey Wolf, Denzel Morrone, Trudy Melford, Robert Capman—would be provided with the confirmation of her inadequacy.

Sondra ran the standard diagnostics for the tank’s computer. It was no surprise to find that the unit passed every one; the Fugate engineers would certainly have done that test as soon as they realized that something had gone wrong. Sondra went to the next level. She removed the cover of the controller and exposed the hardware.

Again, there was the EEC logo. There, too, was the BEC serial number, indicating that the unit had been fabricated on Earth. The date of BEC final inspection which and performed the inspection. Sondra checked that ID with her test kit. It was a valid one, still operating in the inner system. Either this was genuine BEC hardware, or some pirate had achieved a level of forgery new to the Office of Form Control.

Sondra moved to the next and more difficult step. If there had been later tampering with the original BEC hardware, traces of that would certainly remain. Subtle traces, but the Office of Form Control had developed a whole suite of delicate tests for just such manipulation.

There were forty-two diagnostics, of steadily increasing complexity and difficulty of associated analysis. Sondra began to work through the tests, patiently recording every result in the test kit. The first one showed normal unit operation. Second test: normal; third test …

After seven hours of continuous work she was finished. She paused, moved across to her suit, and took a stimulant pill and a drink of water. She sat on the floor, to stare at the tank and its controller.

Nothing. No sign of malfunction, no abnormalities. The BEC hardware appeared to be performing exactly as it had been designed to perform. She had found no sign of tampering. The original seals, applied when the unit left BEC, seemed unbroken. This was genuine BEC equipment, exactly as it had been provided from the BEC factory.

Sondra sighed. All that was left were the software functions. Compared with the tests for those, she knew from experience that the hardware tests she had just completed were child’s play. Hardware solutions were standardized. Software, by its nature, was as flexible as thought itself. It admitted an infinite number of valid variations. Just because something was different did not at all imply that it was wrong.

Give up, go home, and say the assignment was beyond her?

Never. Before she did that, she would stay here until she starved or died of exhaustion.

Sondra’s stomach gave a sympathetic grumble. How long since she had eaten? Too long, that was for sure. When she had examined the software routines she would treat herself to the best meal that the Fugate Colony could provide.

Until then? Well, she had heard stories in the Office of Form Control, about Bey Wolf in his younger days. When he got his teeth into a problem he would work forty-eight hour stretches, without stopping for anyone or anything.

Anything that he could do, she could do. Properly regarded, hunger was nothing more than a driving force for work.

Sondra returned to her seat at the tank’s controller and went at it.

The stories told in the Office of Form Control about Bey Wolf were true; they were also incomplete. He did have an ability to immerse himself in a problem, with a concentration that ignored irrelevant internal signals like fatigue or hunger. He also had a habit of emerging from that profound introspection every half hour or so. Then his consciousness would sweep over the external world like a radar beam, examining it for danger signals.

It was a habit-not instinct, but learned from hard experience-that Sondra had not yet acquired.

Sondra’s task was both easier and harder than any that she had faced in her time at the Office of Form Control. Easier, because the software that she was working with involved the humanity test, and only the humanity test. The bewildering set of metamorphoses offered by purposive form-control, everything from cosmetics to long-term encystment for free- space survival, was not an issue.

But harder, too, because the property under examination in the humanity test, namely, the ability to interact with purposive form-change equipment, was itself so variable. One could not say that every individual was the same in this respect; one could say, with far more accuracy, that everyone was different, carrying a unique form-change profile as characteristic of that person as a chromosomal ID.

The programs that Sondra was now examining contained millions of branch points and options. It was conceivable that some of those branches had never before been exercised during the humanity tests. Logical errors could occur with even the best techniques of structured programming.

Fortunately, finding every error was not her job. She could follow the specific path that the form-change programs had employed when they interacted with the feral form and declared it to be human. Since every interaction and every executed instruction was on file, there was no particular skill in tracking that path. It was actually rather easy to do using the special ferret routines that Bey had provided. They would detect and flag any invalid piece of logic.

What was far more tricky was spotting a program patch—a place where someone had, for his or her own purposes, taken the original logic and substituted a modified version. That was her own best bet as to the source of the trouble.

Sondra slaved on, totally absorbed in her work. At first it was exciting, with the prospect of a surprise at any point. That lift slowly faded, as more and more of the program was examined and found to be logically perfect. There came a point when she felt sure that she was more than halfway through.

She had no thought of stopping.

If it’s not hardware, it has to be software. There’s nothing else. Keep going. Don’t lose concentration.

But at last Sondra realized that she was coming to the final section, a mere few thousand instructions. She ground her way on to the bitter end, reluctant to admit that the chance of finding anything wrong in the final tenth of a percent of the code was close to zero.

At last she found herself staring at stark truth, in the form of a simple final message. It read PROGRAM COMPLETE; in Sondra’s own mind it spelled FAILURE.

There had been no hardware tampering. The machine was just as BEC had delivered it, with the original seal intact. And it was not software tampering, nor syntax error, nor more complex logic error.

It was nothing. There was nothing left to look at.

Sondra stood up and began to meander hopelessly around the room, pausing to stare blindly at each empty form-change tank. She felt sick. She was hyperventilating, her head spun giddily, and she was chilled to the bone.

How long had she been here, slaving away to no purpose? She glanced at her watch. More than eighteen hours-eighteen wasted hours, with nothing to show but exhaustion.

And finally, as though faculties that she had held in suspension were suddenly clicking back into use, a horde of questions raced through her mind.

Was it as cold in here as it felt? Was the air as thin as it seemed when it entered her straining lungs? And where were the Fugates?

They had left her to work, but surely they must wonder why she had not asked for food, not called them, not said how she was doing or when she was likely to come out. They did not know of her determination to keep at it non-stop until she was finished.

She went over to her suit and checked its monitors. Temperature in the room, close to freezing. Air pressure, less than half a standard Earth atmosphere. At some time while she was working it had dropped, so slowly that she had not been aware of the change. It was still dropping.

She moved over to the chamber door-cautiously, because any exertion left her dizzy and panting. The great door was sealed, and she could see no way to open it. She realized for the first time that the room had no way of communicating with the outside.

Even if the Fugate colonists who had brought her did not return, surely some others would come here soon.

But why should they? There were no babies in these tanks. The humanity tests were being conducted elsewhere.

She went again to the door and hammered on it as hard as she could. She listened. There was no sound but her own breath, rasping in her throat.

She returned to her suit and eased her way into it. As the seals closed, the internal air pressure began to move back to normal suit ambient, slowly enough so that she did not suffer compression effects. Her head cleared, and she had the welcome feeling of pins and needles in her chilled hands and feet.

Sondra sat down at the control station for a form-change tank and inspected her suit monitors. When she came to the colony she had been advised to remain in her suit as long as she was here. That had seemed easy enough to do—provided that she could replenish her air and power supplies as often as necessary.

Which was no longer a good working assumption.

Power would not be a problem. The suit’s heating unit was more than adequate. It would keep her body warm, long after she ran out of air. That would happen in six hours, unless someone came or she could find a way to escape. Maybe she could stretch her time to as much as eight hours if she sat very still. First, though, she would have to stop trembling; and her shivers inside the warm suit had nothing to do with outside cold. She glanced again at the suit monitors.

Air pressure in the room, one tenth of a standard atmosphere—and falling. Temperature, thirty degrees below freezing.

She could not rely on any Fugate appearing to save her in the next few hours, not when they had been happy to ignore her for the past eighteen. She had to find a way to escape. How? Her mind felt drained, empty, sluggish, unable to produce a useful thought of any land.

Bey Wolf’s assessment of her to Robert Capman had been accurate: not much above average intelligence. If he could see her now, he would offer a far harsher opinion. Sondra leaned forward, put her weary head down on the flat surface of the tank’s control station, and closed her eyes.