When the conference with Cinnabar Baker was over, he had been settled into a huge but pleasant set of rooms complete with form-change unit and extended library access. Leo Manx, who had taken him there, pointed out that the quarters provided a fortieth of a g sleeping environment. He obviously expected Wolf to be delighted. Bey, knowing that the source of the local gravitational field could only be a power kernel no more than thirty meters below his feet, was not pleased. The triple shielding on a Kerr-Newman black hole had never failed—yet—but according to Sylvia Fernald, several in Cloudland had recently come close. At thirty meters, a few gigawatts of hard radiation would not just kill him, it would dissolve him, melt his flesh from his bones before he knew what was happening.
Bey was tired by the journey and the novelty of the harvester, and glutted with new information. He wanted to he down for a while and digest what he had learned, but Leo Manx showed no signs of leaving.
“Sylvia Fernald and Aybee Smith will both be excellent colleagues,” he said. He had stretched himself out on Bey’s bed, just lengthy enough for him, and closed his eyes. “But there are things about them that you should know before we begin. Aybee is extremely able but a little immature.”
The bed was apparently very comfortable. Bey coveted it. “He’s just a kid.”
“Exactly. Nineteen years old, but more knowledgeable and scientifically creative than anyone else in the Outer System. You may rely on him for science, but not for judgment.”
“I’ll remember. What about Sylvia Fernald?”
“She is more mature and also more complex. Her judgment on some of the subjects we discussed today may not be sound.”
“Fifty-five years old?”
Manx lifted his head from the bed to stare at Wolf. “Fifty-six, as I recall. Are you able to do that with anyone?”
“I don’t know. Probably. I’ve had lots of form-change experience. Why is she suspect?”
“You saw the list of names of people who died or disappeared. One of them, Paul Chu, was Sylvia’s consort for many years. I believe they planned to become parents. But he vanished without a trace six months ago on a routine trip to the edge of the Halo.”
“The Halo again.”
“I know. I have had the same thought But without evidence…”
“We’ll have to look for evidence.”
“Certainly.” Manx lay silent, eyes closed, for another minute or two. He sighed. “You know, I was originally very doubtful about my trip to Earth, but it was a very good idea. Before I went, I always suspected that deep inside I was by nature an Earthman. Your history is so fascinating, and Earth is the origin of all the worthwhile cultures and arts. But not until I had made a journey there for myself did I realize that it was not for me. It was not home. This is home.” He patted the bed and lapsed into another and longer silence.
“I think I’ll have a sign made for that far wall,” Bey said at last.
“Indeed?”
“Yes. It will say, ‘If you have nothing to do, please don’t do it here.’ ”
Manx frowned and opened his eyes. “You wish for privacy?”
“I wish for sleep.”
Manx sat up reluctantly. “Very well. Then I will leave. But I must mention one other matter of importance to you. I have completed my analysis of your own difficulties.”
Fatigue changed to a tingle of anticipation. “The hallucinations? You think you can stop them?”
“No. On the contrary, I am sure I cannot. Because I am convinced that what you have been seeing are not the distorted constructs of your brain. They have been imposed from without.”
“That’s impossible. I’ve been in situations where I saw that Red Man, and there were other people watching the same broadcast. They saw nothing. I’ve seen him on a recorded program, too, then played the same program through a second time. He didn’t reappear. And anyway, why would anyone want to make me crazy?”
“I don’t know. However, I believe that if we can answer the first problem, of method, we will have gone far toward answering the second one, of intention. And an induced effect is a technological problem, not a psychological one. That offers us recourse. I propose to present the idea at once to Apollo Smith. If I know Aybee, it will intrigue him.” He levered himself off the bed, sighed, and nodded to Bey. “And so to bed. Sleep well.”
Which, of course, Leo Manx had now made out of the question. Bey turned off the light and lay on the bed, but he no longer felt sleepy. Induced effects, he thought. He had considered that idea when the Dancing Man had first appeared, but he had dropped it for two good reasons: he could not see how it might be done, and he could not imagine why anyone would want to do it.
After five useless minutes, during which he again concluded that he knew of no way to turn Leo Manx’s opinions to useful facts, Bey rose, dumped his clothes into the service hopper, and went through to the shower room. It was sinfully big, the size of a five-person apartment on Earth; no wonder Leo Manx had been crowded there. After a minute of juggling with unfamiliar controls, Bey ran the water as hot as he could stand, then accidentally switched it to an icy downpour. He jumped out of the spray with a scream and turned on the hot air.
As soon as he was dry he realized he had made another mistake. The only clothes offered by the dispenser were more of the pale yellow one-piece suits, too long and too narrow for his body. His own clothes had been eaten by the service hopper, and he could find no sign of shoes anywhere.
Finally he stuffed himself into one of the suits and managed to engage the fasteners. Looking at himself in the mirror was an unwise decision, but he suspected he was already as ugly as he could get by Cloudland standards. Bey left his quarters barefoot and headed along a corridor that spiraled slowly away from the kernel. He had no idea where he was going, but he felt confident that he could find his way home. There was not likely to be another kernel in the interior of the harvester, and as long as he followed the kernel’s gravity gradients “up” and “down,” he could not get lost.
After a few minutes of wandering he found himself in a broad accordion-pleated passage that was pouched and folded like the alimentary canal of some giant beast. That similarity went beyond appearances. Bey knew that the harvesters prowled the Oort Cloud, seeking bodies high in volatiles and complex organic materials. Once found, they were ingested by the comet-sized maw of the harvester for transfer to the interior. They were heated with energy extracted from the power kernel, thawed, and dropped into the internal lake-sized vats, to be stirred and aerated by jets of carbon dioxide and oxygen. In that enzyme-seeded brew, the prebiotic molecules of the fragments—porphyrins, carotenoids, polypeptides, and cellulose—were converted to edible fats, starches, sugars, and proteins.
Bey stood by a viewing port and peered into a bubbling sea of pale yellow-green. Close by him, there was a shudder of moving machinery. A great valve had opened. Hundreds of thousands of tons of broth went streaming along helical cooling tubes, on the way to extraction of water, chlorophylls, and yeasts. This batch was near its final stages. Most of the final product would be compressed, packaged into spaceproof containers, and launched on the long journey to the Inner System. The harvesters fed the population of the Cloud itself, but more important, their products were essential to the survival of everyone closer to the Sun. The same food products were the working capital that funded the outflow of technology and finished goods from the teeming Inner System.
And if there were a war or an embargo? As Bey left that enormous production plant, he could not help wondering what would happen if the supply line failed.