There was a long pause. The display screen fragmented into spinning pools of light, and finally formed the words: Answer: Their chance of success is in excess of 0.95, provided that certain conditions are met.
Question: Can you describe those conditions? Answer: No.
Another blind alley. Brachis tried the same question in a score of different ways, and got nowhere. He paused in the dialogue, and puzzled over the answers. The Pursuit Teams — “as presently constituted” — could not capture the rogue Construct. But the chance of success, for those same Pursuit Teams, was better than nineteen in twenty. Impossible.
Question: Should the composition of any Pursuit Team be changed to enhance the chance of success in destroying the Morgan Construct?
Answer: No.
Luther Brachis had had enough. The attempt to build a rational Construct brain from the damaged remnant must have failed. He was dealing with something as marred in its way as the brain-damaged guards of the Sargasso Dump.
Only a streak of stubbornness made him keep going. If precise, systematic inquiries did not work, what would general and random ones do? He went on a fishing expedition.
There is now an ongoing attempt by two Pursuit Teams to destroy the Morgan Construct which escaped from Cobweb Station. Question One: Will the Pursuit Teams succeed? Question Two: Will the Morgan Construct be totally destroyed?
He expected vague answers, or the old familiar message: More information must be provided before that question can be answered. Instead, the screen was already pooling to form new words: Answer One: Yes, the Pursuit Teams will succeed. Answer Two: No, the Morgan Construct will not be totally destroyed.
Brachis paused before he went on. It was time for a general sanity check on the isolated brain. The next few questions should be designed with that in mind — and to satisfy his own curiosity.
Four Questions: Is the future of the Stellar Group in danger? Will I, Luther Brachis, emerge at the end of this project increased in status? Where does my future lie after the conclusion of this project? Where does the future of Esro Mondrian lie?
Four Answers: The future of the Stellar Group is in danger. You will emerge at the end of this project increased in status. Your future lies here. The future of Esro Mondrian lies here.
It was worse than nothing. Luther Brachis had spent three precious hours at the terminal. Now he suspected that all the replies he had received were meaningless. He was in the process of signing off when Phoebe Willard returned.
“Progress?”
He shook his head. “If you want my unprofessional opinion, we’ve got ourselves an insane Construct.”
She was on him like a tiger. “Luther, that’s rubbish! We’ve been getting wonderful results, for all this past week. If anything is wrong, it has to be your way of asking questions. M-26A is fine.”
He had expected disagreement This was Phoebe’s baby now, and like any good project officer she defended her offspring. What he was amazed by was the vehemence. Blaine Ridley was not the only one at the Sargasso Dump who had been through a major change.
“So you think M-26A is fine. What’s your explanation of these answers? It’s like a damned Oracle — the answer can mean anything you want it to, or nothing at all.” Brachis began to play back the session, beginning with the statement that no pursuit team could capture or destroy the escaped Morgan Construct.
Phoebe watched for only a few seconds. “Luther, I’m too old to be trapped into giving two-second answers to two-hour problems. Drop a copy out on storage, and I’ll go over all this in detail — after you are back on Ceres.” She frowned at one of the answers that had scrolled into view. “ ‘Your future lies here’?”
“I know. It s a ridiculous answer.”
“To a ridiculous question. Commander, I don’t know what M-26A means by that, but I’ve been at the Dump so long I’m beginning to feel as though my future lies here. I have to sort out a few things back home, personal stuff that can’t be left much longer. Next week I’d like to make a quick trip to Mars.”
“You’re picking a bad time. The work ought to go on.”
“That’s what you always say, whenever I talk about taking any leave. But the work won’t stop. With your permission it will continue — under Blaine Ridley’s direction.”
It was tempting to say yes at once. Brachis wanted to think that Ridley could do the job, wanted to believe that something precious could be salvaged from the human debris of the Sargasso Dump.
He shook his head. “No.”
“Ridley can do it. You know he can.”
“Two months ago he couldn’t say his own name. How do you know he won’t be sitting in diapers again, a week from now?”
“Suppose he is. What harm can he possibly do?” Phoebe pointed at the screen. “Those are the best replies that you’ve been able to get out of M-26A. Do you think that Ridley can do w orse? Even if he does nothing but sit on his rear end from the time I leave to the time I get back, what difference will it make?”
She was probably right. Brachis stared at the screen. Your future lies here. Maybe. But his present lay back at Ceres. He had to get back there, without delay.
“You win, Phoebe. But not because I think it’s a good decision. I just don’t have time to sit around and debate it with you. Who will assist Ridley? If you needed an assistant, so will he.”
“Commander, you can’t know what’s going on here when you come in for flying visits and then head off again right away. We have over a dozen guards — maybe more than twenty of them — who are well enough to work as Captain Ridley’s assistants. He has been training people for weeks, snowing them this facility one by one. It always seems to make a terrific improvement in their condition. Maybe that’s what has been wrong here, no one has ever had enough real work to do. People have to feel useful.”
She stood up, and went across to where a session recording had been played out for her. “When I first came here you made me sit through meetings with the guards.”
“And you benefitted from it, Phoebe.”
“I did. It’s your turn now, Commander. Before you fly off again, I want you to shake hands with a few of the old-timers.” Phoebe headed for the lock folds. “Come on. I think you’ll be amazed at the changes.”
Chapter 28
The first experimenters with the Mattin Link transfer system had learned three lessons very quickly:
Know your exit point. Careless travellers had landed suitless in the hard vacuum of an extrasolar probe, or on the open surface of Mercury and Ganymede.
Close is not good enough. Travellers who missed the long, coded sequence of Link settings by a single digit tended to arrive as thin pink pancakes, or as long, braided ribbons of cytoplasm.
Someone always pays. The instantaneous transfer of messages and materials through the Mattin Link had opened the road to the stars, but it would never be cheap. The power for a single interstellar trip between points of different field potential could eat up the savings of a lifetime. Linkage of materials from the Oort Cloud to the Inner System consumed the full energy of three kernels aboard the Oort Harvester.
To those three rules, Esro Mondrian had added a fourth one of his own. A very old rule, familiar to the rulers of ancient Egypt: Access is power. Certain Link coordinates and transfer sequences were held strictly secret. Knowledge of them was not permitted without lengthy checking of credentials and need-to-know. The set of coordinates for the ship orbiting Travancore was not stored, not even in the Dominus data bank. It was known to just three people in the system: Mondrian, Kubo Flammarion, and Luther Brachis. The latter would use their information only if Mondrian himself were dead or unconscious.