Proteus in the Underworld (32 page)

This was the crucial moment, the place where Sondra was afraid that Trudy would dig in her heels. All she had to do was scoff, deny everything, and ask for hard evidence. Sondra had none, and she knew she was not likely to get any. Errol Ergan Melford's tracks were four years old and surely thoroughly covered, while Trudy was free to travel anywhere in the solar system that she chose to go. She was under no obligation to explain her visits to Samarkand to anyone.

Sondra waited, suddenly sure that her trip to Mars had been for nothing. But Trudy did not act either annoyed or defensive. She seemed pleased, and she was actually
smiling.

"Suppose that I agree with you, Sondra, and tell you privately that everything you have said is correct? You are not recording this—I am sure of that, because you were scanned on your way into Melford Castle. So what do you propose to do now?"

It was the last answer in the world that Sondra had expected. She glanced helplessly at Bey. Trudy seemed to be admitting everything. But she was also telling them:
So what if I did what you say? You can't do a thing to me.

And she was right. As soon as Sondra returned to Earth she was going to be fired or assigned to a basement-level job with nothing to do with feral forms. And even if Bey became involved, the Samarkand colonists would never cooperate with Earth's Office of Form Control for anything.

"I don't know what I will do." Sondra felt she might as well be honest. No matter what happened, she had been given the satisfaction of solving the problem.

"That's a good, honest answer." Trudy's attitude to Sondra seemed to have changed completely since the accusations were put out on the table. There was no sign of resentment as she went on, "Look, I know that if you don't produce an answer accepted by the Office of Form Control, your career will suffer. But I have influence there, and I'll make sure that it doesn't happen. All right? Is that all right with you, too, Bey?"

"That part of it is fine." Bey's eyes were hard to see, his gaze directed down to the table-top. "And Sondra, you did a great job sorting out what has been going on in the Kuiper Belt. But some of us know that it's not quite the whole story."

Trudy's smile froze. "What do you mean?"

"Let's start with easy things." Bey turned to Sondra. "I have to say this with you present, even though I know you won't like to hear it. Trudy is right. She can certainly make sure that your career won't suffer at the Office of Form Control; because Trudy happens to have Denzel Morrone thoroughly in her pocket. Right, Trudy?"

"You have no reason to say that."

"Which is not quite the same as a denial. Morrone is on the take from BEC, and he has been for years. He has to go, Trudy, and quickly. You have to help me make that happen. The head of the Office of Form Control can have faults—God knows, I proved that often enough—but being for sale isn't one of them."

"Lots of things go on in BEC at the detail level that I don't know about. Why do you think I had anything to do with Morrone? I've never even met the man."

"Maybe; but he had to do something specific for you. You knew that there were going to be problems with the humanity test, because you had arranged them. So you passed the word to Morrone, probably through Jarvis Dommer—a hint from you goes a long way in BEC—that someone junior and inexperienced was to be assigned to the feral form problem.

"Morrone picked you, Sondra. Just a couple of years out of graduate school, not much practical experience of form-change and little knowledge of the Kuiper Belt."

Bey lifted his head and stared at Trudy. "And you, Empress, you agreed with his choice. He didn't pick Sondra for what she might
do
, you see, he picked her out for what he didn't think she could possibly do. Morrone doesn't have the whole picture, I feel sure of that, but he knew that Sondra was supposed to see so far and no farther. You
do
have the whole picture. You thought that Sondra would probably find nothing, in which case the humanity test would become increasingly suspect. At the very worst, if she was extra smart or became extra lucky, she might realize that you had been making visits to Samarkand, and draw some conclusions from that. You were prepared for it.

"But there was one piece of information that neither you nor Morrone had at first. You didn't realize when she was selected that Sondra Dearborn was related to Behrooz Wolf, and she might try to drag me in to help her.

"And now here's the funny thing: I wouldn't have helped Sondra at all—I had already told her to go away and solve her own problems—if you hadn't heard that she had been to see me, and become nervous. You decided to be double safe and tuck me safely out of the way here on Mars. But you tried a little bit too hard. I began to ask myself, why am I being recruited? What can I do that a BEC employee can't do? And if I'm valuable, why now and not three years ago when I first retired from the Office of Form Control? It seemed like too much of a coincidence, Sondra and you appearing on the scene at just the same time. So I became a little bit more interested in what Sondra was doing."

Trudy was not smiling at all. Her blue-green gaze was fixed on Bey's face with a total and fixed intensity. Sondra, watching both of them, suddenly understood Trudy's expression. The Empress of BEC, a senior force of the solar system, was
frightened.

"And then your BEC people got into the act." Bey sighed and shook his head. "It's an old, old story, one I suffered with myself for half a century. Your employees try to do what they think you want done, but they only know half the facts. So they do things you later wish they hadn't done. Jarvis Dommer—I feel sure it was his work—somehow guessed that you were worried about Sondra. He arranged for her to have an 'accident' out on the Fugate colony. Since it was supposed to be an accident it couldn't be made foolproof, and Sondra was smart enough to survive. But it was more evidence, proof to me that we were close to learning something that you really didn't want learned."

"I didn't intend for anything bad to happen to Sondra. I didn't even know anything was going to happen." Trudy Melford stared at them across the table. "Believe that, Sondra, if you believe nothing else. As for your accident, Bey, I had nothing to do with that, either."

"You don't surprise me. There's a problem with people like Dommer, who only really work for money. So long as you are paying them top rate, they are good, loyal employees. But the moment some other group offers them
more,
they automatically work for them and not for you."

"I pay Jarvis Dommer very well—ridiculously well."

"But someone was willing to outbid you. My bet is that the Old Mars team got to Dommer. They thought—wrongly—that I was behind the surface forms, and they decided it would be cheaper to put me out of circulation than buy me."

"Rafael Fermiel?"

"No. I'm not sure I can even suggest the name. By the way, Fermiel should be arriving here in just a few minutes. He was doing something for me, then he'll be along. Georgia Kruskal, too, the designer and leader of the Mars surface forms. So I'd better press on.

"I was out of the picture for a while, sitting in a form-change tank recovering from my own 'accident.' I didn't know anything about Samarkand until Aybee Smith told me that Sondra was going there, and why. Then I dumped the transport records. I found that sure enough, you had been making trips out there, yourself. But you know what, Trudy? You were a little bit careless. You didn't fix the
old
transport records. They show that you visited Samarkand only during the past year. That's not long enough if Errol Ergan Melford had been out there for four years. I added that to my own set of puzzles.

"The list was starting to grow. Let me give you another item or two on it: If you are really interested in the surface forms, and I believe you are, why weren't you all for them and deadly opposed to the Underworld? Yet when we talked about it you came across as neutral, telling me that you didn't play politics—when it's BEC s main stock in trade and everybody knows it. And here's another puzzle for you: Why did you move BEC Headquarters to Mars? I know what you told me, that it was simple economics. But I did a little of my own digging. I found that the Planetary Coordinators on Earth were willing to give BEC a deal every bit as good as the one that Mars offered. You didn't
need
to move—didn't need to, at least, for the reason that you gave. What other possible reason could there be, for such a major undertaking? You had to move all the records, the business, the castle itself. Is there any single explanation that could cover the whole list?"

"Get it over with, Bey." Trudy Melford was nothing like an Empress now. Her lips were trembling and her face was set and bloodless. "I know that you know. Just tell me what you want."

"I can't do that yet." Every few seconds Bey was glancing impatiently toward the door.

"You mean
won't.
Don't play with me, Bey Wolf. I'm not a mouse."

"And I'm not a cat, Trudy. I don't enjoy hurting people."

"You don't even have to tell me what you want. I'll give you
everything.
Everything I possess if you'll keep what you know to yourself."

"I can't do that, either. Damnation, where are they? Trudy, if I'm right it may not be as bad as you think—"

"It couldn't be." Trudy leaned forward until her head rested on the smooth table top. "You have no idea what I think—how I feel."

Sondra had watched in total amazement. She had little idea what Bey was talking about, but in a few minutes she had seen Trudy Melford change from the Empress of BEC, a regal woman in full control of herself, to a pathetic lump of misery. In spite of herself, the sympathy swelled inside Sondra. She went around to Trudy's side of the table, sat down next to her, and took her hand. And then, at what should have been a very private moment, in came a chubby red-bearded stranger, bounding along on the balls of his feet.

"Done," he said to Bey. "Took a bit longer than I expected, but you were exactly right."

"Where is he?"

"Outside."

"What the devil's the point of having him out there before we've seen him? Bring him in, Fermiel."

"Sure." Red-beard bounced away again, leaving Sondra wondering what could possibly come next.

"Come on, Trudy." Bey was speaking again, almost chiding. "You can't let him see you like this. It would upset him."

"He's here?" Trudy Melford straightened up at once, staring wild-eyed about her. "But how—how did you find out what he looks like and where he was?
Nobody
should know that, except me and a few people in the Underworld."

"There is far more to a person than external appearance." Bey paused. Rafael Fermiel had entered again leading a small blond child. The boy took one look around the room and ran to Trudy Melford's arms.

"Mummy!"

Bey gazed at Trudy and the little boy with curiosity and huge satisfaction as they hugged each other. "Sondra, I don't think the two of you have met. I feel sure that there is an official Mars name, which Trudy can tell us, but let me use his Earth name. Allow me to introduce you to Errol Ergan Melford."

CHAPTER 21

Trudy had the child clutched in a great bear hug. "It's all right, sweetie. Everything's going to be all right." She glared defiantly at Bey over the boy's head. "You can do anything you like to me, I don't care. But can't you leave him alone?"

"I could, but I don't think I ought to." Bey came around to stand by Trudy and placed one hand on the top of Errol Melford's shoulder. "He deserves something better in life than skulking in the deep Underworld." The fair head turned up to look at him with clear, trusting eyes. "Errol, my name is Behrooz Wolf. I work with your mother."

"Are you her friend?"

"I hope I am. I hope she will think so, too. Will you do something for me?"

"I'll try."

"Will you wait outside again with Mr. Fermiel for a little bit longer? I need to talk to your mother again."

"Business?"

"Business."

The blond head nodded. Bey waited until Fermiel had led the boy out of the room, then he sat down on Trudy's other side. He stared thoughtfully at Trudy and Sondra.

He did not speak, until Sondra said tartly, "Are you going to sit there forever? Or are you sometime going to explain what's happening here?"

"Sorry." Bey sighed. "
I summon up remembrance of things past.
Sorry, I'm at it again. I'm not supposed to do that. But all this carries me back a long way." He roused himself and reached into a shirt pocket. He took out a single sheet of paper and placed it on the table. "Some of this you already know, Trudy better than anyone. But let me summarize.

"A baby, apparently normal physically and psychologically, who failed the humanity test. A mother who couldn't bear the idea of losing him, of seeing her child dumped into the organ banks. So she used her money and her influence to erase the evidence that the test had ever been taken, and then faked her infant son's death. But that couldn't be the end of the story. What was Trudy Melford going to do with Errol Melford?

"There was more than one possible answer to that question. She could send him to a place like Samarkand, far off in the Kuiper Belt, where humanity tests and purposive form-change had no place. But if she did that, she would see her son only rarely, maybe a couple of times a year.

"Was there somewhere closer, and almost as good? Well, there was the Mars Underworld. It was not as safe as Samarkand, but the struggle between Old Mars and the developing surface forms was having an effect. Although form-change was not banned outright in the Underworld, it was increasingly unpopular. Errol could hide there, with a new identity. And his mother could see him as often as she chose—particularly if she moved to Mars herself, along with BEC Headquarters and Melford Castle. Then she might see him every day. Relocation would be a major step, but who was going to argue with her? She was the Empress, she made the rules.

"You did all that, Trudy, and still you were worried. It was hard to see how it could happen, but suppose someone learned that Errol had not died in the Aegean Sea. Suppose they suspected that he was still alive?