Sight of Proteus Read Online Free PDF Page A

elevators. As they continued up to the fifth floor, Larsen could see a trace of a smile on Wolf's thin face.
    "All right, Bey, what is it? You only get that expression when there's a secret joke."
    "Oh, it's nothing much," said Wolf, though he continued to look very pleased with himself. "At least, for the sake of our friend back there I hope that it's nothing much. I wonder if he knows that for quite a while there have been theories—strong ones—that although the face he is wearing may have belonged to Shakespeare, all the plays were written by somebody else. Maybe he'd be better off trying to form-change to look like Bacon."
    Bey Wolf was a pleasant enough fellow, but to appeal to him a joke had to have a definite twist to it. He was still looking pleased with himself when they reached the office of the Director of Transplants. One thing he hadn't mentioned to John Larsen was the fact that a number of the theories he had referred to claimed that Shakespeare's works had been written by a woman.
    * * *
    "The liver came from a twenty-year-old female hydroponics worker, who had her skull crushed in an industrial accident."
    Doctor Morris, lean, intense and disheveled, removed the reply slip that he had just read from the machine and handed it to John Larsen, who stared at it in disbelief.
    "But that's impossible! Only yesterday, the ID tests gave a completely different result for that liver. You must have made a mistake, Doctor."
    Morris shook his head firmly. "You saw the whole process yourself. You were there when we did the micro-biopsy on the transplanted liver. You saw me prepare the specimen and enter the sample for chromosome analysis. You saw the computer matching I just gave you. Mr. Larsen, there are no other steps or possible sources of error. I think you are right, there has been a mistake all right—but it was made by the medical student who gave you the report."
    "But he told me that he did it three separate times."
    "Then he probably did it wrong three times. It is no new thing to repeat a mistake. I trust that you are not about to do that yourself."
    Larsen was flushed with anger and embarrassment, and Morris, pale and overworked, was clearly resentful at what he thought was a careless waste of his precious time. Wolf stepped in to try and create a less heated atmosphere.
    "One thing puzzles me a bit," he said. "Why did you use a transplant, Doctor Morris? Wouldn't it have been easier to re-develop a healthy liver, using the bio-feedback machines and a suitable program?"
    Morris cooled a little. He did not appear to find it strange that a specialist in form-change work should ask such a naive question.
    "Normally you would be quite right, Mr. Wolf. We use transplants for two reasons. Sometimes the original organ has been so suddenly and severely damaged that we do not have time to use the re-growth programs. More often, it is a question of speed and convenience."
    "You mean in convalescence time?"
    "Certainly. If I were to give you a new liver from a transplant, you would spend maybe a hundred hours, maximum, working with the bio-feedback machines. You would need to adjust immune responses and body chemistry balance, and that would be all. With luck, you might be able to get away with as little as fifty hours in interaction. If you wanted to re-grow a whole liver, though, and you weren't willing to wait for natural regeneration—which would happen eventually, in the case of the liver—well, you'd probably be faced with at least a thousand hours of work with the machines."
    Wolf nodded. "That all makes sense. But didn't you check the ID of this particular liver, before you even began the operation?"
    "That's not the way the system works." Morris went over to a wall screen, and called out a display of the hospital operational flow. "You can see it easiest if you follow it here. When the organs are first taken from their donors, they are logged in at this point by a human. Then, as you can see, the computer