She stood up and held out a chubby, dimpled hand. “Welcome to the Outer System. I am Cinnabar Baker. I’m responsible for the operation of all the harvesters, including this one. Let me express my appreciation that you agreed to come here, and allow me to introduce you to some of my staff. Sylvia Fernald.” She gestured at the woman on her left. “In charge of all software development and control theory in the Outer System. Next to her, Apollo Belvedere Smith—Aybee for short and for preference—my top science adviser and general gadfly. Leo Manx, senior psych administrator and Inner System specialist, you know already—probably all too well after your trip together from the Inner System.”
“Behrooz Wolf,” Bey muttered. It hardly seemed necessary. They knew who he was. How many hairy strangers were there on the harvester, a foot and a half shorter than everyone else and with four times the muscles? Bey greeted the others, making his instinctive and immediate assessment of their ages, original appearance, and major form-changes. There were anomalies, points to be thought about later, particularly in the case of Apollo Belvedere Smith, who was extra-tall, rail-thin, and glowering angrily at Wolf for no discernible reason. But for the moment Bey was pondering a more substantial question.
Cinnabar Baker was there with three of the Cloud’s scientists, technicians, and administrators, all apparently tops in their fields. They had been summoned to worry a technical problem of malfunctioning form-change equipment. Wolf had come to know and like Leo Manx, with his quirky sense of humor and his shared interest in Earth history and literature. He felt that a perfect choice had been made: Manx was just the right combination of seniority, experience, and intellect to work with Bey on form-change questions. But the others? It made more sense for Bey and Leo Manx to go straight to work. Why a top science adviser? Most of all, why Cinnabar Baker? She was far more senior than the problem justified.
Bey felt the stir of an old feeling, something that had been dormant for too long within him: suspicion, and with it, the frisson of powerful curiosity.
“Sylvia Fernald and Leo Manx will be your principal day-to-day contacts,” Baker was saying. “If you find it necessary to travel through the system, one or both of them will accompany you. Aybee usually travels with me, and I have to be all over the place, but you will have first call. Any time you require him, he’s at your service. That’s enough, Aybee,” she put in as the man across the table grunted his disapproval. “I told you the rules.” She turned back to Wolf. “Tell us what you need to know about our form-change programs, Mr. Wolf, and we will do our best to provide it.”
Wolf sat down between Leo Manx and Aybee Smith. He wanted to see more of the harvester, but that could wait. It was time for a direct approach. “Naturally, I would like an overview of the problem you’ve been having with form-change equipment and programs. But that’s not my first priority.”
They were staring at him in surprise.
“I’d like to know what’s going on here,” he continued. “I don’t think I have been given the full story. There are factors that have not been described to me.” He caught Cinnabar Baker’s quick look at Leo Manx and the other’s tiny shake of the head. “I must know what they are.”
Apollo Belvedere Smith gave a grunt of approval. “Hey. I didn’t want to bring you here, but mebbe you can do something useful, after all.” He turned to Baker. “Was I right, or was I right? He cottoned. I guess I should brief the Wolfman.”
Cinnabar Baker shook her head. “You’ll go too fast and leave too much out.”
“Naw. If he’s smart as he needs to be, he’ll follow.”
“Maybe. But it’s still no. You can impress him with your brilliance later. I want Fernald to brief him. But before we begin—” She stared straight at Bey, and he saw past the fat, friendly exterior. Cinnabar Baker was a person with drive to match her bulk, a woman who made up her mind in a hurry. “I won’t ask you to pledge secrecy when you go back home, Behrooz Wolf,” she went on. “Just don’t talk about this while you’re around here. We want to minimize alarm—panic, if you prefer that word. Now I’m starting to sound mysterious. Go on, Fernald, let’s have it. Tell him what’s been happening.”
“Everything?”
“The whole story.”
While they were talking, Bey had taken a closer look at Aybee Smith. His appearance suggested a man in his early twenties, but that of course meant little. Bey listened, looked, integrated posture, speech style, and the exchange between Aybee and Cinnabar Baker, and came up with a surprising conclusion: Apollo Belvedere Smith was a teenager, still under twenty. Yet he was Baker’s top science adviser. Which meant he had to be at least half as smart as he seemed to think he was.
“Background first.” Sylvia Fernald had moved around to face Bey. She was a good and logical briefer, and she began with a summary of what Bey had already heard in fair detail from Leo Manx. Three years earlier there had been problems with form-change processes. Humans emerged from the tanks either with an incorrect final form or in just the same state as when they went in. The problem had not attracted much interest at first, since a repeat of the form-change process would always lead to the desired result.
That had become less true in the past two years. Deviations became more pronounced, and repeat treatments often led to new anomalies. One year earlier the first deaths had occurred in the form-change tanks. Every attempt to trace the problem had failed. And the numbers of deaths and abnormalities were growing exponentially.
Wolf was hearing little that was a surprise, and his main attention was concentrated on the speaker. Sylvia Fernald had chosen neither the walking skeleton of Leo Manx nor the roly-poly bulk of Cinnabar Baker. She was slim but not skinny, and incredibly ugly by Earth standards. She towered over Bey by a foot or more, with a gawky, angular build that seemed all spidery arms and legs. Like Baker, she wore her carroty-red hair short, swept way back from a high, pale forehead. But unlike the others at the table, she had eyebrows, pale sandy arches that emphasized the size and brightness of her deep-set gray eyes and the sharp angle of her thin, jutting nose. Bey ignored the overall unpleasant impression, did his usual summation of variables, and decided she was on the young side of early middle age.
“How many cases, total?” he asked when she paused.
She hesitated and looked at Baker, who nodded. “Tell him.”
“Nearly eighty thousand.”
“My God. That’s more than we’ve had on Earth in a century and a half.”
“I know. And remember, that’s out of a total population of fifty million, not your fifteen billion.”
“And getting worse. Can you provide me with the rates of change?”
Sylvia Fernald nodded after another quick look at Cinnabar Baker. “That’s not the end of it, Mr. Wolf. I’m not an expert on the technology of the Inner System, but here our form-change systems, hardware and software, are the most delicate devices we have. They have to be shielded against interference, and there’s triple redundancy and error checking in every electronic signal.”
Bey nodded. “Same on Earth. I’d be amazed if the procedures and the error-correcting codes are any different. I don’t see how they could be. Form-change won’t tolerate transmission errors. It’s so delicate that an error rate of one bit in ten to the twelfth is enough to show. Nothing else comes close in sensitivity.”