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.
The receiving point for information from Travancore was just as closely guarded. The Link Exit point was at Anabasis Headquarters, and nowhere else. The Solar Ambassador had agreed to that grudgingly, after direct pressure on Dougal MacDougal from the other members of the Stellar Group.
What the Stellar Group ambassadors had not approved, and what no one outside the Anabasis had been told about, was Mondrian’s other decision concerning Team Alpha. The human team member was equipped with a personal Link communicator, to send sound and vision through a mentation unit for the entire period that Leah Rainbow was on Travancore. She knew that those data were being beamed to Team Alpha’s orbiting ship. What she did not know was that they were sent on from there, to be received in real-time at Anabasis Headquarters.
Mondrian would monitor those signals himself, with help only from Kubo Flammarion and Luther Brachis.
Dawn on Travancore, night on Ceres. Esro Mondrian tapped Flammarion on the shoulder to indicate his arrival and sat down on the other side of the desk. Flammarion nodded and disconnected. He placed the headset in his lap, rubbed his temples, and yawned. “Quiet night. They heard a few funny noises outside the tent, then there was half an hour of heavy rain. Rain like Leah says she never heard of, even on Earth’s surface. Now the whole team is awake.”
Mondrian nodded. “I’m probably going to spend most of the day with them. Don t interrupt me unless we have an emergency.” He fitted the set carefully over his head and turned on. After the first unpleasant moment of double sensory input he was linked abruptly across fifty-six lightyears. The Link connection was excellent. He was seeing through Leah’s eyes and hearing with her ears. Whatever she saw and heard, he would experience as long as he wore the headset.
Leah was standing now on the reinforced side lip of the balloon tent, gazing out across the vivid emerald of Travancore’s endless jungle. The growth below the tent formed a tight-woven fabric of stems and vines. The early dazzle of Talitha’s light scattered and diffused from the array of trunks and creepers, so that Leah could look straight down and see for maybe two hundred feet. At that depth a continuous layer of broad leaves hid everything beneath it. Even with Talitha’s brilliance, the barrier of leaves was effective. There could be little photosynthesis deeper than the top few hundred meters. That left a real mystery: How did the lower levels obtain their energy supply?