Proteus in the Underworld Read Free

nerveless, and ironic, a man of immense mental energy who loved the challenge of tough form-change problems better than anything in the world (except possibly for his known obsession with the fusty and obscure works of long-dead poets and playwrights). He was also an ascetic, as little interested in elaborate food as in clothes or form-change fashions or social fads.
    So how did a man whose energy had been legendary turn into a remote idler untouched by a unique new twist on purposive form-change? How did the ascetic fit with the array of epicurean courses that were appearing before them?
    Sondra had no answers, but she noticed something during the seventh course. Wolf had described every dish to her in detail and made sure that both of them were served generous portions, but he hardly touched anything on his own plate. Instead he distracted Sondra with easy, fluent talk about the island and its history— and he watched her.
    She finally pushed away her plate, the latest course untasted. "I didn't travel eight thousand miles for you to study me while I eat. And I have no more interest in fancy food than you do. I came here to talk to Behrooz Wolf."
    "You can learn more about a person by watching them eat one meal than by listening to them speak for a whole day."
    "And?"
    "You like food well enough, but you don't worship your stomach. That's good." Wolf pushed his plate away from him but he kept his eyes turned down toward it. "You say you came to talk to me, Sondra Wolf Dearborn." Her middle name was slightly emphasized. "So, talk to me. Then it will be time for you to go home."
    Since she had already lost, Sondra had nothing more to lose.
    "I'm terribly disappointed—in you." She blurted it out. "I'd heard about you from my family ever since I was a small child. I've read about all your most famous cases, here on Earth, out in the Horus Cluster, off in Cloudland and the Kernel Ring. You're the reason I joined the Office of Form Control. And you're still a legend in that office" -there, she had used the word she had sworn never to use—"as a man who can solve any form-change mystery, no matter how strange."
    "I am not to be held responsible for office gossip, nor for your own preconceptions. If that's all you have to say to me, you should go."
    "I don't believe that it is gossip. I believe it's true. Three years ago you'd have had that poor creature out of its cage and been examining it in two seconds. You've changed. I want to know why you changed. You can hide away here on your island, but there's still a real world out there with real problems to be solved."
    "There is indeed." Wolf was smiling. She had hoped to break through to him, but he remained as cool and unemotional as ever. "As there has always been. I have had"—he paused, and gave her another careful inspection—"fifty-one years more than you to work on such problems."
    Evidence of humanity from Wolf at last, in the form of a touch of wounded ego. Like most people, Sondra held her physical appearance at age twenty-two. She was actually twenty-seven and a half, and somehow Wolf had read that. With his last statement he was just pointing out to her that his mistake about the age of the caged form-change failure was an exception.
    But he was continuing: "You say I hid away. I say, I need solitude. It is also time for me to move out of the way and allow the next generation—yours—to spread its wings. Crabbed age and youth cannot live together. "
    It was one of his damnable old quotations, she was sure of it. Sondra didn't know who had said it—and she certainly didn't care. "That's rubbish. We need your experience. You talk about being old, but unless you have an accident you'll be around for another fifty good years. You developed the multiforms just four years ago, and that was your best work ever."
    "In whose opinion? Yours?"
    "Mine and everyone's. The multiforms add a whole new dimension to form-change. You are still at your peak and it was criminal of