To an inhabitant of Earth, all the harvesters were the same. They were remote, identical food factories, run by soulless machines and populated by a thin sprinkling of people.
Bey was beginning to learn the truth. Each harvester was different, as different as the separate planets and asteroids of the Inner System.
It had begun the moment they left the first air lock. He had been swathed from head to foot in flowing hospital robes that left only his eyes showing, strapped to a stretcher, and maneuvered swiftly inward from the surface. The sounds began in the first interior corridor. The Opik Harvester had been eerily quiet, but this habitat was filled with music, lush instrumental pieces that had not been heard on Earth for centuries. Each concentric set of chambers blended harmoniously into the next, even though the same work was never played in both.
Bey looked for the source of the music. It was invisible, projectors hidden behind the luxuriant green plants that climbed restlessly over walls and ceiling. He recognized them. They were an adaptation, a variant on the free-space vacuum vines popular in the Asteroid Belt.
And then there were the people. The ones he had met on the other harvester had been furious—angry at the Inner System in general and at Bey in particular. They had resented his presence enough to want to fight him.
The Marsden Harvester’s population did not show rage. They stank with fear. The people he saw as he was hurried through the corridors gave him not a second look. They were afraid, preoccupied with other matters, and most surprising of all, many of them were sick or deformed.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Sylvia said after they had moved past a group of agitated people. “This is the oldest of the harvesters, and usually it’s the most peaceful. They’re all scared.”
“They look terrible.”
“They do.” She turned to face him. “And so do you. Those cuts on your face are bleeding again. I’d take you right to the form-change tanks with Leo, but Cinnabar Baker wants to see you first.”
“It’s mutual.” Bey had been brooding over one fact since he had woken in the transit ship. According to Sylvia, it was Cinnabar Baker’s order for an emergency departure from the space farm that had given Sylvia enough lead time to save them. “I have a question for Baker.”
They had left the clean, open corridors of the harvester’s periphery and were plunging on toward the center of the main sphere. The region they were in had been built before mastery of construction without metals had been fully achieved. The vines were absent, and the chambers were shabby past hope of disguise. The walls sagged inward, the floor was wrinkled and blackened, and hairlike outgrowths of hydrocarbon filament blurred the clean outline of lighting units and ventilators. To Bey it was oddly comforting. It reminded him of Earth’s familiar run-down cities.
Cinnabar Baker’s apartment was the one point of constancy. It was identical to the bland chambers she had occupied before, with plain furniture and drab beige walls. Turpin was perched on the back of a chair, as dusty and disheveled-looking as ever. The crow greeted the newcomers with a sinister muttering.
“Don’t mind Turpin. He’s been in a bad mood since we got here.” Baker took a hard look at Sylvia, then at Bey’s mangled face. She gestured to the gray chairs. “Ten minutes, Mr. Wolf, that’s all I need. Then we’ll get you to a form-change tank for remedial treatment—if you still want to go there.”
“More problems?”
“And worse ones. Did you meet any people as you came here?”
“Dozens of them.”
“So you know how they look. Do you know what’s wrong with them?”
Bey shrugged. “Obviously, they’re not using the form-change tanks. And some of the people I saw appeared old. They need treatment—soon.”
“You didn’t see the worst cases. The population of this harvester has the highest average age of any group in the Outer System.”
“Then you have an emergency. Some of the people I saw won’t last more than a couple of weeks. Why won’t they use the tanks?”
“They’re afraid to.” Baker passed a card across to Bey. “Those are the statistics for the performance of form-change equipment on this harvester. I headed here as soon as I saw the figures. We’re facing a ten percent failure rate—many of them leading to death. Some of the units are going wrong three-quarters of the time, and the results are hideous. People won’t go near a tank, and it’s hard to blame them.” She frowned at Bey. “Mr. Wolf, why are you smiling? There is nothing funny in this.”
“Sorry.” What Bey was feeling was not humor. It was relief. “If I was smiling, it’s because I can finally do something to justify my presence.”
“Do you know what’s wrong?”
“Not yet. But I will in a few days.”
Both women were staring at him in perplexity. He realized that a smile on his stitched and battered face must be a gruesome sight.
“What we faced before were intermittent faults,” he went on. “One in a million faults. That kind are almost impossible to track down. You can set up test procedures and observe for years, but you may never run across anything wrong while you’re actually watching. Now we’re in a different situation. I can set up monitors on a few tanks and be sure I’ll find something on at least one of them in a reasonable time. Give me a day or two.”
“Can you correct the problem?” Baker’s face showed her own relief. “I know it’s early to ask that, but we need to tell people something.”
“If I can find it, I can fix it. And I’m pretty sure I’ll find it.”
“How?” Sylvia looked at Baker. “I don’t want to be the pessimist, but we have to know how he does it. Bey has to go into a form-change tank himself in a little while.”
She was worried about him. Bey Wolf’s surprise was genuine. He had lived with form-change equipment for so long, it had never occurred to him that someday he might die with it. In that one area he was completely confident. “I’ll tell you just what I’m going to do. It’s no big mystery, and once you understand it, you can do it, too. I’m sure the form-change problems are software, not hardware—we established that on the space farm. We’ll use a diagnostic program that exits the form-change program after every major step and performs a status check. When we find a software inconsistency, we run a ferret routine to trace it back to the block of instructions that produced it.”
“Is it easy?”
“It’s routine. It’s exactly what BEC does when they are testing a radically new form. I’ll show you how it’s done. But before we do that”—Sylvia was standing up—“I have a request.”
Cinnabar Baker nodded politely. Bey knew that she would have preferred him to get right down to work on the form-change process.
“You sent Sylvia an urgent message telling us all to leave the farm,” he said. “Why did you do that? If it was just to get me back here to look at form-change problems, why drag Aybee and Leo Manx back, too? They still had things to do on the farm.”
“Mr. Wolf, if you ever tire of the Inner System, there is a position for you in the Cloud.” Cinnabar Baker nodded slowly. “You are very astute. I had a warning—a tip-off—that something bad was going to happen to the farm. The farmers themselves would ignore any request to leave, but it would have been criminal to leave the four of you there without warning.”
“You were told that we were all in danger?”
“No. I was warned on your behalf, specifically. It was my conclusion that you were all at risk.”