What was he supposed to do when everything began to look fuzzy? Squint, or make himself eyeglasses? He closed the cover of the unit in disgust. On Earth no one had used anything so primitive for over a hundred years.
Bey went once more to the open door and tried to walk directly through it. The waiting Roguard again blocked him. He put his hand onto the machine’s exterior, estimating its strength and sensitivity. It did not move.
“How long will I remain here?”
“That information is unavailable.” There was a pause, then the machine added, “It will be no longer than two years, since the food supply has been set for such a period.”
“Two years! That’s terrific news.”
“Thank you.”
Bey closed the door in the Roguard’s face, went to the bed, and stretched out on it. He should have known better than to waste his time talking. No machine of that type could recognize sarcasm.
He closed his eyes, but he had no thought of sleeping. There was a job to do, and it was a big one. The first step was a rough time estimate. How long would it need for development and testing, and then how long for the process itself to be completed? If the answers came out too high, he might as well relax and forget the whole idea.
Within ten minutes Bey had a first estimate. Five weeks, total, if he worked day and night. That was far too long. He had to cut it somehow by a factor of at least three. It was time for something rough and ready and less than perfection. The logic flow and accompanying condensed code for an alternative approach began to take shape in his head.
The next estimate came out at two weeks. Still too long, and he had taken all the legitimate speed-up steps. It was time for desperate measures. He had to begin accepting higher physical risks.
Bey lay on the bed for another four hours. At last he sat up, ready to start. As he made his last-minute preparations, it occurred to him that he had one unexpected asset. Ironically, the wild card in his favor was the Negentropic Man himself.
In his lectures to the beginning class at the Office of Form Control, Bey Wolf used an analogy:
“Purposive form-change is a process, a tight interaction of life-support machinery and real-time computer code.” The display on the wall behind him provided a flow diagram, bewildering in its complexity. “There’s a typical sample up on the screen—a straightforward one, as a matter of fact. By the time you get out of here, that will seem simple and familiar. But knowing how to read one of those schematics won’t be enough to protect you. To be useful in this office, you have to see beyond the detail, to grasp a whole form-change picture in one swoop.”
The wall display changed to show an old-fashioned map, bright with colors and dotted with fanciful illustrations. “Each form-change is a journey from a defined starting point to a defined end point. But those journeys all cross a part of the great ocean of form-change. Some areas of that ocean have been explored completely, and all commercial form-change programs navigate within that charted region. But beyond the safe waters lies a wilderness, unmapped and unknown. And dangerous. Never forget that.
“Everyone who tries a radically new form-change experiment is embarking on a trip through the unknown. And when you work in this office, you often have to follow the route of the pioneers, across those perilous waters.
“Now, we can’t provide an infallible pilot across that unknown sea. No one can. But what we can do is teach you what to look for. You’ll learn to recognize—and avoid—the shoals and reefs of form-change, the whirlpools and undertows. You’ll always design your programs to follow the safe, smooth trade routes…”
Sound advice.
But the lessons of the classroom had not been designed for desperate emergencies.
Bey sealed the lid of the tank, stared at the control sequences, and prepared for coming agonies. With this degree of uncertainty, anything might happen. He was using change sequences that he had never employed before—never heard of before. They ignored his own teachings, driving an accelerated program that skirted the reefs, risked the whirlpools, and ran the gauntlet of lee shores. It was a guarantee of discomfort and danger, of disaster. He entered the final command.
The first few minutes were filled with the familiar touch of sensors and catheters, followed by the flicker and swirling rainbow of colors and sounds. Biofeedback was beginning, no different from what it had been a thousand times. Soon it would bypass his eyes and ears to establish direct brain contact. A dozen steps flickered by in a few minutes, the standard preliminary tests as the form-change machine confirmed the parameters of his body.
And then… the change.
He sensed a ripple of command, a cold and alien touch through all his being. Strange discomfort touched him—entered him—became a pain that grew as rapidly and irresistibly as a windblown fire, until it burned in every cell. His body shook in surprised agony.
Wrong, totally wrong. Stop it now, while you can.
He thrust away the panic response that rose from the base of his brain. The pain was to be expected, the result of too-rapid change. The shortcuts were wrong, but that was by his own design—shape change achieved by deformation and muscular contraction, not by slow and careful rebuilding of body structure. It was a perversion of true form-change. He tried to stay calm as his body’s core temperature climbed over twenty degrees. Chemical reactions were running at ten times the normal speed, but still he could understand and follow the processes.
And then pain passed a new threshold, and logic failed.
…he was stretched on a rack, seared by internal flames. His body was melting, twitching and writhing against the control straps. A thick layer of mucus squeezed from his skin. Catheter pumps doubled their rate of chemical transfer.
A new change came, more basic and more deadly.
…heart pounding an irregular rhythm. Heart stopping. A moment of supreme agony, heart lifeless, a stone in his chest. Lungs collapsed. Kidneys and bowels and bladder, frozen in their action. Blood congealing.
The form-change machine had taken over completely. Only his brain was left, directing the purposive form-change.
The fatal form-change. The change should take weeks, not days. He had underestimated the pain, misjudged the danger. No one could endure such change-speed. It would kill him.
Heartless, lungless, he could neither groan nor scream. He had made a choice—and he was paying the price. Even with the machine’s help, body parameters were uncontrollable. A dozen times the monitors in the form-change unit flared their warning signs. Chemical concentrations were wildly far from equilibrium, ion balances at fatal levels, synapses firing spastically out of sequence. He had lost awareness of his surroundings. The semiconscious body in the tank shuddered and writhed, enduring rates of adaptation beyond all rational limits.
Slow down. Slow down. Reverse the process. Every organ, every cell screamed for relief. And relief was possible. With purposive form-change, the will of the subject always played a central part. The urge to retreat became irresistible.
Stop now, stop now. The fear was no longer deep in his brain. It was rampant surges of pain and terror, invading every hiding place of will and resolve.