Damage

by Emily Thornbury

The light in the observation room had broken, but Agnes Campbell felt that complaining would take up more time than she could afford. She stood in the dark, watching through one-way glass as Dr. Sandoval, the pediatrician in the examining room next door, put a penlight to the gaping hole in little Jordan Lee’s shoulder. The child kept twisting about, trying to see the procedure: he was not in pain, then. Perhaps he had been given drugs. Agnes watched, fascinated and rather sickened, as the physician held the light behind the wound.

It shone directly through the hole onto the opposite wall; and yet the edges of the wound did not glow red as flesh should when backlit. Agnes pressed her fingers to her lips and watched as the child gesticulated with his arm: his left arm, missing part of its veins, a large portion of its main nerve and the shoulderblade and muscles. The motion was slightly jerky, slightly strange; but had the little boy been wearing a shirt Agnes knew she would have noticed nothing. And there was no blood.

Dr. Sandoval held the child still and injected barium solution into his arm. Agnes turned to the video screen behind her, and waited until the machine in the next room began to transmit a faint tracery of illuminated lines that crept steadily upward through the veins leading to the heart. Then, inexplicably, they leaped a ten-centimeter gap and continued onward as if uninterrupted. "Reverse," said Agnes sharply. She slowed the video down until the picture was playing single frames one millisecond apart; and still, between one frame and the next, the blood skipped across the gap leaving no trace behind it. Even if the flesh within that ten-centimeter diameter had somehow been there, invisible, it would be dead by now, because the blood that should have fed it flowed from the open vein on one side of the wound to the opening on the other, as if not even space intervened.

Was it purely a distortion of space? Agnes had doubted that when she’d first heard of the injuries; she had suspected a new disease, and reacted accordingly. But now she began to wonder. Perhaps these injuries were wormholes, as everyone now was saying. She imagined them appearing, unnoticed (for they wouldn’t interrupt electrical or water flow) in the exterior walls, admitting Arcadian air, Arcadian microbes. She would have to find out. A wormhole: she supposed that could mean any spontaneous warping in space . . . it ought to be impossible to spread such a thing. For the first time, she began to have some hope.

Agnes ordered the video clip fed into the mail files of the governor and the department heads. The governor would–oh, the governor. She looked at her watch. Late again. She pressed the button by the door to tell the pediatrician she was leaving, and once in the corridor began to run.

Arcadia colony was wide and sprawling, rooted three levels below the surface in the planetary bedrock and rising four stories more above, towering over the alien landscape in a mass of steel and domed glass. It was terribly inconvenient to get around in, thought Agnes, waiting for the elevator; not built, so to speak, for speed. Nor for emergencies. There was too much glass, too much ornamental steel and structural plastic. The human body was not much more delicate than this environment.

The top floor on the east side was given over to colonial administration. Agnes’ own office was there, hidden away at the end of a corridor also containing Earth’s commissar and the draft officer; the governor’s office was at the far end of the floor, beneath a dome commanding a view of most of Arcadia. Agnes paused in the main hallway. She was already late, and Simon would be angry, regardless. She pushed open the fifth door on the right.

The facilities director glanced up from his computer, and smiled when he recognized her. "What can I do for you, Miss Campbell?" he asked cheerfully. "Sit down. Would you like some–"

"No time," she interrupted, rather short of breath. "But could you do me an enormous favor and run a structural diagnostic? Specifically I need to know if there are any breaches of any sort. They don’t need to be in exterior or weight-bearing walls necessarily."

"That’ll take some time," Felix Brundt replied.

"You can run it from my computer if you need to."

"Oh, no need." He made a vague gesture with one hand. "I’ll have it for you in–well, it will take two and a half hours, I guess, for the analysis." He leaned forward, lowering his voice. "Is this about those. . . ?"

"Possibly," said Agnes. "I appreciate your help, Felix. I’ll be back to see you at thirteen hundred. And–thank you." She was out the door before she heard his reply.

The governor’s office was triple-security. Agnes pressed her thumb against the doorplate and waited as the computer searched its files. "Name?" a mechanical voice demanded finally.

"Agnes Campbell, Sub-deputy Secretary of Defense."

More silence while the voiceprint was located, and then the intercom switched on with a sudden echo of air. "Agnes? That you?" Governor Simon’s voice sounded vaguely suspicious.

"Sorry I’m late," she told the microphone. "I was at the medlabs." The lock clicked.

Joshua Simon, as Agnes well knew and he himself fervently believed, was on the Colonial Department’s blacklist. He was clever and charismatic, a populist and all-but-avowed supporter of colonial independence; and her superiors considered him the last person to rely on to represent the interests of humanity at large in any sort of crisis. Thus Arcadia alone among Earth’s eighty-seven small scientific outposts had a permanent resident damage controller.

Agnes disliked the position. Though she herself had avoided open conflict with the Arcadians, the vicious infighting between Simon and her predecessor in the post had become a departmental legend. And after this disaster, of course, any question of friendly relations would be over. She sighed, and padded across the thick carpet into his office.

He stood with his back to her, staring out into the hazy green sky, and without turning asked, "Have you seen them?"

She wondered if "them" meant the wounded, the wounds themselves, or some mysterious perpetrators. "I saw the little boy–Jordan Lee. He seemed surprisingly–undamaged."

"Yes, well, there are six more, and some of them have not been so lucky." He went to his desk and sat down. Agnes dragged up a chair and sat across from him, feeling like a schoolgirl "sent to the office."

"I understand that so much of George Markham’s liver is gone that he isn’t expected to live," she said quietly. "His family was there, and so I did not ask to see him."

"Yes." There was a pause. Then abruptly he said, "I’m intending to request the protection of the Colonial Light Guard in preparation for a full-scale evacuation."

"I–" Agnes hesitated. "I have to say that–the Colonial Department will refuse."

"There’s no reason they shouldn’t give us at least a half-deployment," the governor said sharply.

"They have already denied evacuation."

"What!" He stood up, knocking his chair over, and Agnes leaned back involuntarily. "On what authority?"

"Title Four."

"The quarantine clause?" He stared at her, incredulous. "That’s absurd! Do they think we’re going to infect their sectors of space? How the hell could we spread space-time abnormalities?"

"The Commissioners are . . . not convinced that these phenomena are really wormholes."

"Oh no?" He leaned over the desk. "They’re holes in space-time. They also happen to be killing the citizens of Arcadia. Maybe that isn’t mathematical enough a definition for the Commissioners, but it’s good enough for me, and it seems to satisfy the people who are actually suffering this. Perhaps the Commissioners should consider taking that into account."

"The Commissioners," Agnes told him coldly, "have more to consider than merely Arcadia."

"Colonial politics, for instance."

"Governor Simon, politicking has nothing to do with it, and quite frankly, you have nothing to do with it. They have already placed us under yellow quarantine. It will be lifted if I prove to them that whatever is happening cannot be spread, or that we have removed the cause. Otherwise they will reevaluate our status in fifty Earth years."

"Then they’ve murdered twenty-five thousand people."

"Better that than fifty billion."

"Do you believe that, Agnes?" he asked, deliberately meeting her gaze.

She stared back. "It is my job to believe that. We are not posted unless we are willing to die on a quarantined colony, if necessary."

He thumped the desktop with a clenched fist. "But it isn’t necessary. Don’t you see that? There’s something wrong with this region of space. You know yourself that it had hardly been explored when they built the colony. Yes–" he punctuated this with another thump "–they endangered us by sending us here. But we can assume that they didn’t know then. To perpetuate that error, though, is criminal."

This is getting nowhere, Agnes thought. She stood up. "Governor, I really have nothing more to say about this. I will continue to update you on whatever I may find, and if the Department changes its position, I will tell you. Oh, and one more thing, Governor: don’t try making this into anything worse than it already is. The Commissioners are not amused by any of this, and if you try playing ‘colonial politics,’ there will be a communications blackout."

"Except on the Colonial officials’ band," he said sarcastically. "Tell me, what bonus do you get for removing yellow quarantine?"

"The amount they save by not holding an official funeral," she replied coldly, turning toward the door.

"Wait." It was an order, not a request, and reluctantly she stopped. "The department heads have requested an emergency meeting," he said. "I have scheduled it for this evening at nineteen hundred. You should attend."

"I will, then."

The relief she felt when the door swung shut was almost painfully physical. I wish I’d never seen him or any of these people, she thought despairingly; I wish I’d never come here at all. Agnes shook herself. There was no point in thinking that; she was on Arcadia now, and would in all likelihood die there. She went to her office.

The damage controller’s office was built to be riot-proof. Agnes had often considered staging a quiet little riot all to herself to test that, and just then the idea felt very appealing. The bonus! How dare he?

She woke up her computer and plodded through the layers of security surrounding the classified Colonial records bank. She would have to download anything useful, Agnes realized: Simon might well be perverse enough to provoke Colonial Security into destroying Arcadia’s hyperspace transmitter.

But every search she tried, failed. "Hyperspace drive malfunction" brought up a series of interstellar shipwrecks. "Plague (cause unknown)" showed an assortment of exotic illnesses totally unlike little Jordan’s. "Wounds (source unknown)" accessed, of all things, suicide reports; and "wormholes" brought up nothing. Arcadia, apparently, was unique in the entire experience of Earth’s Colonial government.

Suddenly she looked at the clock, and swore. Late again. Agnes ran down the hall to the facilities director’s office.

"Come," he called, sounding rather muffled, and she pushed the door open. Felix was holding a sandwich with one hand and using the pointer with the other.

He gestured to a chair with the sandwich hand. "There you are," he said, waving off her apologies, "I thought Josh had eaten you. He certainly looked as if he had indigestion when he came by here."

Agnes twisted her hands together and asked, "Did he tell you?"

Brundt shook his head. "Nothing as important as all that."

"The colony is under quarantine," she told him quietly. She wanted to say, the Commissioners ordered it, but didn’t. It would only be making excuses.

He seemed to deflate; the pointer dropped from his hand, and he did not move to pick it up. "Until when?" he asked hoarsely.

"Until I prove that Arcadia poses no danger."

"Well." He cleared his throat. "I hope this helps." He handed her a tablet.

Agnes turned it on and watched the structural diagrams cycle through, rotating for clarity. She looked up. "How are the breaches marked?"

"In red," he said. "But I don’t think there are any."

She frowned, staring intently at the pictures, searching for the slightest hint of red. Then she pressed the "highlight" button, and scrolled down to "Structural Breakage."

There was a pause while it computed, then SEARCH ITEM NOT FOUND blinked across the top drawing.

Her heart sank. "Felix, are you sure this is right? Could the diagnostic be malfunctioning?"

He shook his head. "The diagnostic tests itself first, and crashes if there’s any problem."

"I was afraid of this," she murmured, biting her thumbnail.

"Is there anything else I can do?" the facilities director asked hesitantly.

She considered, then rose. "No, this is what I needed. And I think perhaps it does help. Could you forward it to my file, the governor’s, and all the directors?"

"Certainly. And I guess I’ll see you tonight?"

Agnes started. "Oh yes. I’m afraid so."

Halfway to her office door, she decided there was nothing there worth bothering with the locks for. Agnes slumped against the wall, rubbing her eyes with a thumb and forefinger. What was really happening? With closed eyes she saw the light passing through the hole in Jordan’s thin shoulder. Each thing she learned seemed only to make the situation stranger.

So the facts: holes were made in human beings. They were perfectly, hermetically sealed in hyperspace (witness Jordan); but they were holes nevertheless, and the tissue seemed to be gone (witness Markham, doubtless dead by now). It had never happened before in human experience, and it was an organic phenomenon. At the very least it had affected seven people, but no part of the structure and there was a great deal more glass and steel and concrete in Arcadia colony than there was human flesh. Organic. So she might be right. She hoped not. The very thought of fifty years of quarantine was appalling.

Agnes went to the intercom box by the elevator and dialed the operator. "Head of the physics department," she told the computer.

"Dialing Dr. Gary Allston," it replied obediently. She was connected a moment later.

Agnes assumed her official persona. "Dr. Allston, this is Subdeputy Agnes Campbell. I need to speak with you immediately."

There was a pause. "Um . . . how immediately?"

No need, she thought, to answer that.

"All right, then." He sounded resigned. "I’m in Fourteen B."

The science departments rotated administrative responsibilities midway through each Arcadian year. Dr. Gary Allston seemed singularly unequipped, Agnes thought, for the unexpected consequences of what he must have assumed would be only a minor and temporary annoyance. He let her into his laboratory, and stood vaguely for a moment before leading her across the hall to his office.

"Sorry about all this," he said, shifting a stack of tablets from one chair to another. "What can I help you with?"

"Define a wormhole for me," Agnes said without preamble.

He blinked. "Well, it’s a sort of tunnel of–of extra-spatial space–that’s not very well put–but it’s a way of getting between two non-continuous points and not passing through the normal space in between. It’s caused by the gravitational distortion you get when there’s enough matter or energy to rip through space-time, like in black holes and–"

"Governor Simon informed you about the problems we’ve been having?" she interrupted.

"Oh, well, sort of. He did seem to say they were wormholes, didn’t he? But I don’t know–"

Agnes briefly outlined her observations of the wounds, and told him to open the video file she’d sent.

He watched the clip several times over before looking up. "That’s not a wormhole," he said finally. "I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t that."

"How do you know?"

"Well, first, to open a wormhole you’d need either matter dense enough to collapse itself into a singularity, or a high-energy discharge like our ship drives use; and then you’d need incredibly high pressures to keep it open, or it’ll collapse instantaneously. And also, you know, wormholes stay in one place–they’re part of space itself, I mean; you can’t walk around with one in your pocket, so to–"

"But could it still be some other kind of hyperspace distortion?"

He leaned back. "Lord. You’d have to ask the math people about that. Yes, I think maybe it is possible–or rather–I don’t know. Occasionally you get gravitational ripples from ships’ hyperspace engines, but if the matter that was in the holes is actually gone–it doesn’t sound like the same thing. But then hyperspace drives have produced some pretty strange side effects."

"If these things were random buckles in space from ship drives," said Agnes, "would they be able to distinguish between materials?"

"Like between matter and vacuum, or–"

"I mean between organic and inorganic substances."

"No."

She was mildly startled at so concise an answer. "Completely impossible, then?"

"Well, given that there’s nothing in four- or five-space, a ship drive for instance, directing the spatial penetration. But that’s silly; and I don’t think–"

"Thank you, Dr. Allston," Agnes said, rising abruptly, "you have been very helpful indeed. I’ll see you tonight."

"Really? Oh–oh, you mean the meeting. Well. Glad to be of help, and do let me know if there’s anything else I can do." He held the door for her on the way out, accidentally knocking over another pile of tablets as he did so.

Agnes, dialing the biology department, wished she were at leisure to be amused by the episode.

"This is Sita Mueller."

"Sita, this is Agnes. I need to talk to you now."

"Certainly," said the woman, sounding surprised. "Come down to my office."

Dr. Sita Mueller, herself Earth-born, did not resent the officials of its government. Partially because of this, she was one of Agnes’ few friends on Arcadia. "What is wrong?" she asked immediately. "You look terrible, Agnes. It is this–phenomenon?"

"Yes, and we’re under quarantine," she replied. "It was my fault, Sita. I recommended it to them–to the Commissioners, I mean–and the worst part is that I think I’m right. But listen–have your people ever come across anything like what’s happening now? In any of the Arcadian animals, for instance?"

The biologist thought for a moment. "It is possible," she said hesitantly. "Come here." She went to the computer. Agnes looked over her shoulder as images of Arcadian "trees" began to appear on the screen. "See there?" Sita pointed to several cross-sections. "Those are not separate sections–there are gaps caused by boring directly through the stems. This individual had three–see the healing here, and here? From the rings we can tell that they were formed at regular intervals of eighteen Arcadian years."

"Tree parasites?" asked Agnes with a sinking heart.

Sita shrugged. "It is not very good, as I told you. But the holes are nine to fifteen centimeters in diameter, usually at a height of one to one and a half meters, and they always form perfect chords in the tree’s circumference. It is unusual that the parasites occur at such fixed intervals with no overlap into other years, but we assumed that they had long larval stages, as some Earth insects do."

"Eighteen . . . That’s about forty Earth years," said Agnes. "Arcadia Colony is twenty-nine this year, so no one would have seen injuries before. Have you found any larvae?"

"No," said Sita, "but there has been no large-scale digging."

"But then of course they’d be invisible," said Agnes bitterly. "So your not seeing them is perfect proof."

The biologist smiled. "It is also possible that this is not some monstrous insect, but a bacterium of some sort," she added.

"That’s what I’ve been afraid of." Agnes rose to leave, then stopped. "Sita, supposing an organism were to exist in–a space that is parallel to ours. Would it be possible for it to evolve the ability to–to move between those spaces?"

"I have never heard of such a thing," she replied gravely. "One cannot say it is impossible. But it is, at very least–unlikely."

"How unlikely?"

"I do not know. Very."

Agnes sighed, and went out.

Rain was running down the dome of the refectory, and what sunlight penetrated through was gray-green and wavering. Agnes was finding it very hard to read; she had to hold the tablet at an awkward angle near her nose before the letters became visible. She wasn’t understanding it much anyway. It was a medical article from an obscure journal, describing how someone at the University of Kalypsos had apparently isolated a bacterium that seemed to live by feeding off living things–including humans–on the Kalypsian northeast continent; they knew this because of strangely bonded hydrogens that were actually water molecules rotated into four-space, a byproduct of the microorganisms’ method of penetration. There was also a blurred, hypermagnified photograph of something like a sphere. She tried to make the tablet focus; but even when the letters were sharp, the picture was still hazy. It didn’t seem like much, anyway.

Agnes turned the tablet off. None of it was very much; not enough to substantiate the mad claim she’d have to make in the meeting, but not enough to render it impossible, either. Should she hope something was wrong with space? If the fabric of the universe were somehow buckling in and destroying parts of itself–would that be better than if a four-space bacterium were invisibly, imperceptibly stalking humans? Agnes pressed her fingers to her eyes and wished she had never known any of this. But she had not known before, and ignorance had not made the world safe.

She looked at her watch, and stood up. There were fifteen minutes left until the meeting started, but she wanted to be early. She didn’t want to walk in with everyone watching.

Until Felix Brundt arrived, Agnes made strained and shallow conversation with Nicolas Gallarda, the director of provisions, who had arrived even before her. When she could finally fall silent and let the two men discuss the Mars-Nicomedes game, she realized how little she had understood Arcadia’s real dynamics before. Brundt and Gallarda ran the colony, since without them there would be neither air nor food; and yet here they were, ten minutes early to the directors’ meeting, sitting uncomfortably on the edges of seats at the bottom of the table. It seemed unfair. Agnes then wondered if she would be feeling quite so revolutionary if she were not herself an interloper.

The room quieted when Governor Simon walked in, precisely seven minutes late. "I’m glad you’re all here," he began, with a glance at Agnes. "We were originally going to discuss this outbreak of wormholes in Arcadian space, but first I think it would be best to inform you that the Colonial Commissioners have put us under yellow quarantine, which will be lifted only if Miss Campbell–whom I’ve asked to join us tonight–determines that we’re not a threat."

Everyone turned to stare at Agnes, who bit her lip furiously. She fully understood now why the Department hated that man.

"Yellow quarantine?" echoed the chemistry department head. "But that means–what about the shuttle coming tomorrow?"

The governor looked at Agnes, who quietly replied, "I imagine that it was turned back in hyperspace once the order was announced this morning."

"But–my niece–there were Arcadians on it!"

"The Department provides housing in such cases. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific, but I was not informed of the details. Unless a blackout is provoked–" it was a small but satisfying counterstroke "–you will still be able to communicate with anyone offworld."

"A blackout?" several voices exclaimed.

"Yes," Simon put in before Agnes could respond. "Apparently, if the Department perceives any of our communications as seditious, or intended to incite other colonies to violate Earth’s quarantine, they’ll shut down our hyperspace transmitter."

"That’s absurd," said the medical chief angrily. "How are we expected to treat this without access to supplies and labs offplanet?"

"Perhaps Miss Campbell can answer that better than I."

"Dr. Goldsmith, please understand that we may be dealing with an epidemic situation," Agnes said. "If this is proved to be purely a spatial phenomenon, Arcadia will be evacuated. But if it is a disease, as it may well be, then if it can’t be cured it must be contained."

"Madam," he said stiffly, "I examined all of the affected patients, and not one of them showed any sign of immune response–and humans do react to Arcadian microbes."

"All the known ones, sir, that I believe. But have you read Pavlovich and Karlsen’s paper on the four-space microbes on Kalypsos?"

"Yes, I have, and we saw no molecules like that here–and we put the blood under scanning microscopes. What we did see were trauma wounds and spatial distortions. I think the governor called them wormholes?"

"They’re not really, though," Dr. Allston put in nervously. "Wormholes, I mean. Obviously they’re spatial distortions."

"What do you mean?" Governor Simon demanded.

The physicist explained his definition of wormholes, then added, injudiciously Agnes thought, "But, of course, that’s only so far as we know."

"Oh, well, then," said Simon. "Obviously textbook theories won’t suffice now. We seem to be dealing with a new physical phenomenon."

"Or a new biological one," said Agnes sharply.

"What is Dr. Mueller’s opinion of that?"

"Dr. Campbell discussed this theory with me," the woman replied, leaning around a man next to her. "I confess I did not think it very likely, but this problem itself seems nearly impossible."

"Dr. Allston seemed to think it unlikely to be a spatial problem," Agnes explained, touched that Sita had remembered her Ph.D. "Even if it is a parasite, if it is isolated and controlled, the quarantine can still be lifted."

"Dr. Allston, however, admits that current knowledge of spatial physics may be inadequate," the governor said. "As such, I’d like to request that he and Dr. Zhou pool the resources of the physics and mathematics departments to investigate this. You are, of course, free to pursue your own inquiries, Miss Campbell. But I hope you will also consider any alternatives we might raise. Are there questions? No? Meeting dismissed, then."

Agnes was barricaded in her room when she heard the door buzzer. She considered ignoring it. No one could possibly have anything good to say to her. Why had she been such a fool at the meeting? Why had she let him do that to her? She could see everything now, as if it had already happened: one of the governor’s pet scientists would come up with a plausible-sounding theory of spatial distortions, and Simon would submit it to the Commissioners on his own authority. And they would reject it–because they had read her reports, because the law said they must, and because they distrusted him. It would be the only excuse Simon and the leaders of several other colonies needed. There would be war. And then, thought Agnes, there would be plague. Already there were fifteen more cases of the strange holes, and four people had died, with penetration of the heart or brain.

The buzzer rang a third time. Reluctantly, she went to the security camera. After a moment, she recognized Dr. Allston, clutching two oddly shaped lumps of glass. She unlocked the door.

"Oh, there you are," he said cheerfully. "I hope I didn’t wake you?"

"No," she said, bewildered.

"You must be another morning person, then. They’re few and far between here. Mind if I come in? I thought you might be interested in these." He held up the glass.

Agnes stepped back to let him pass. Morning? She felt feverish. "What is that?" she asked, trying to feel interested.

"One’s a prism–well, they’re both prisms, but one has a camera in it. You know how computer systems work, with four-space arrays? These are sort of what they use. U-Mars developed them forty years ago, after they discovered silicon rotates into four-space during very high pressure fluctuations. I could show you the math if you like, but I thought you might like a look at four-space. And then, if you want, I or my assistants can build a microscope with one of these things–if you still think these holes are caused by four-space bacteria?"

"You–I do think it might be something like the Kalypsos outbreak. But how could you? The governor–"

"Oh, well." He shrugged uncomfortably. "There are only a few specialists in hyperspace engineering, multidimensional geometry, that sort of thing here, so the rest of us are dead weight on Simon’s project anyway and might as well do something useful within our ken. And–well–you could be right. Or at least, he shouldn’t have treated you like that."

"Thank you," she said quietly. "So–what does this do?"

Allston started. "Oh yes. Mind if I move this plant? Okay. I’ll put the prism here where it can get some sun, and hook the camera feed up to your video screen. Can I turn it on?"

"Go ahead," she replied, feeling terribly confused.

"Okay. See? There we are–four-space. Kind of boring, really. The background is purple because almost all of the sunlight in four-space is in the violet-UV range, no one quite knows why, but that’s how you can tell it’s daytime there, and thus that time runs the same there and here."

She watched the fuzzy, motionless image. "And that triangle? That’s the prism?"

"Yes. It’s a hyper-pyramid, actually, but you can’t tell that because the camera only records in two dimensions and the illusion of a third. So we’re actually seeing a three-space, only in a different direction than ours."

Agnes considered this. "I think I see. And what’s that? A shadow? Are there clouds in four-space?" She pointed to a dark blotch moving slowly past.

He dropped to one knee to stare into the screen. "I don’t know what it is," he said at last. "But I think it’s avoiding the prism; it’s going off at an angle, and–Christ!"

Agnes gasped, too, as the four-space object was suddenly illuminated by refracted sunlight from the prism. Whatever it might be, it was no cloud-shadow; there was a pale, elongated something there, bearing what looked like faint stripes. "How is it moving?" she asked.

"It could be a section from some other dimension," he said slowly, "some parallel three-space. Or it could be that Arcadia has a four-space environment that we can’t perceive. Because that thing looks, doesn’t it, as if it were floating?"

"Look, it’s stopped–it’s changing colors! What’s it doing?"

The thing, now distant on the screen, had changed from bluish-pale to deep scarlet purple at one end. It hung nearly still for several minutes, inching forward as the color spread all through it; then, with a strange jerk, it moved quickly off into the gloom.

"How bizarre," the physicist murmured.

"The microscope," said Agnes. "How soon can you start on that? We know now that there is something in four-space."

"The governor is coming by the lab this afternoon," Allston said, rising and switching off the screen. "Tomorrow, I guess. But–Agnes, isn’t it? I can’t guarantee anything. Not with the materials we have."

"Well, we’ll all have to make do." She laughed. "If we’d only known beforehand, we’d have been better prepared."

He grinned. "Isn’t it always the way? Well–Agnes–I’m glad I could be of help–I really am. And if you think of anything more, stop by or call me or something."

"Thank you," she murmured, and showed him to the door.

Three hours later she did call. "Not a microscope," she said immediately when Allston answered. "I–is the governor there?"

"Just left. Agnes? What’s wrong?"

"Do you remember that–thing? There was an attack, just across the court, at the same time we saw it. I think it must be somehow penetrating our three-space with its mouthparts. And Sita says the tree borings have started. Is there any way of getting into four-space? What can we do?"

There was a long silence on the other end. "No, we can’t get through," Allston said finally. "But I think there is . . . yes, I think we can do it. That was full-spectrum sunlight through the prism. It just has to be amplified."

"What are you talking about?" she demanded, rather irritably.

"I’m sorry. A laser–we could direct a laser through the prisms. I think that might work. We can try. Should we? Do you want me to?"

"Yes. And if you need my help, tell me."

"I will," he said. After a few moments, she disconnected the call.

Three days later she went down to the optics lab, and immediately saw that Dr. Allston and the others with him hadn’t slept for most of that time. "Is that it?" she asked, trying not to look startled by the wheeled platform connected to what looked like a nineteenth-century diving helmet.

"Yes, but Agnes, there’s a problem," he said breathlessly. "Several problems, actually. Chiefly with the visuals, since we–"

"We can’t filter the UV," a young woman leaning against the cabinets broke in. "The only filters we can get to work with these prisms reduce full-spectrum intensity. But there’s almost no visible light in four-space, so the user wouldn’t be able to see at all. Without the filter, though, the UV’s strong enough to cause pain. And I’m worried about the laser burst itself. My boyfriend’s in the medlabs, see, and he calculates that only 8 percent reflectivity from the target could scar the user’s retinas."

"User?" said Agnes. "I thought an AI program would operate this."

"It will, but it has to get its programming from a human first," said Allston. "That’s why Myerson’s point about the visuals is such a problem, because the only programs we have to direct the laser on its own all need natural input for initial programming. We’ve been trying to find something that allows verbal or manual instructions, but there’s nothing that old in the software library here, and I don’t know that any of us would know how to use it if there were. I was thinking that–that we could send to an offworld university for a program and instructions, or get computer people here to help make an AI entity sophisticated enough to recognize and target these things without prior programming. But whether we use the hyperspace transmitter or co-opt part of another department, we’ll need Simon’s approval either way, and we can only get that if–"

If I apologize and beg, Agnes mentally filled in. "And how long would that take?" she asked.

"Three days, a week, I don’t know," he said meekly. "It’s the best I can do."

"Well, we haven’t got that time," she said. "I’ll do it. I’m sure it will be all right. And anyway," she added bitterly, "if anything goes wrong, I’m just Earth gov."

"No, Agnes, really, I can’t let you take that risk," Allston said, picking up a spare coil of wire and nervously twisting it into knots. "I’m sure bypassing the system won’t take that long, and Simon will give us–"

She was already struggling with the helmet. "No. I can’t afford that. Help me on with this, please, if everything else is ready."

Myerson stepped forward, but Allston waved her back and said, "Agnes, you can’t do this. I’d rather do it myself than–"

"This is my fight, Dr. Allston," she replied, "and also my job."

He sighed. "Very well. This is the trigger for the laser burst, and this will aim it. Hold still now–is that all right?"

She staggered under the helmet’s weight; the wires to the AI banks pricked her scalp, and she found it hard to breathe. "Yes. Turn it on."

"All right, but if your eyes start hurting, tell me." There was a humming sound, and she was suddenly surrounded by the wavering purplish-blue of four-space. Something seemed to pass above her, and she looked up.

The helmet nearly pulled her over backward; but before she re-balanced herself she had seen a luminous plane overhead, shifting with an unmistakable motion. Wind on waves: four-space Arcadia, she realized, was underwater.

Feeling her way along the wall, Agnes walked out of the laboratory and into the corridor. The helmet muffled the background noises, and she felt herself physically within the empty violet ocean of four-space. She could not tell how long it was before a motion caught her eye. Agnes tried to turn, and nearly struck the wall; she went quickly until she found a cross-corridor, and walked toward the object. It was surprisingly hard to focus in four-space, and she guessed she had gone twenty meters before she saw the creature clearly.

It was a worm: not like the tiny, slithering creatures Agnes remembered digging up in her father’s garden on Earth, but like the strange feathery sea-worms in aquariums or pictures. It was a full meter long, and propelled itself swiftly with a delicate, translucent fin that spiraled around it like the thread of a bolt.

And it was beautiful; she had not expected that. She brought the laser tracking beam to bear on its pale skin, and paused a moment to watch it glide gracefully along. And then with a strange, twisting jerk, it went rigid in the water, and its white flesh began to be suffused at one end with red.

Agnes stood horrified, one cold hand on the laser trigger, thinking, This may be the last thing I ever see. Retinal scarring . . . she imagined herself, years later, waking alone in the night, with nothing to banish the nightmare image of the worm. I could stop, she thought. It was just my pride: I couldn’t stand to beg, or for Simon to be a hero; but I could stop now, I could wait another week; surely there’s nothing on Arcadia worth my sight. . . .

"Agnes?" Allston’s worried voice came from behind her. "Do you see anything? Are you all right?"

I have a duty, she thought. Agnes inhaled slowly, aimed, and squeezed the trigger. Instantly there was a searing flash. When it cleared a little, she saw a dark shape drifting downward. Nearby there was a sound like screaming; then everything went black.

"I’ve turned it off," Allston said loudly. "You must have got the bastard, and just in time too–poor Myerson’s boyfriend has two-centimeter-deep hole in his stomach. But don’t worry, he’ll be all right, they’re stopping the bleeding. Hold still a moment, let me take this off–there, that should get a weight off your shoulders, as they say–Agnes?"

She was staring at her hands. It wasn’t as bad as she had feared, she told herself. She thought she could see her fingers moving, a little.

"Agnes?" said Allston. There was real fear in his voice now; and suddenly she felt someone put a hand under her chin and tilt her head back. She blinked, vacantly, and tried to focus on the brighter patch that must be the overhead light.

"Oh, my God," he murmured. "Agnes, I–oh, God. I did tell–I mean, I’m sure it’s reversible–but no, I didn’t mean–"

"It isn’t your fault," she said, and the steadiness of her voice surprised her. "But . . . I think I will need your help in sending to the Commissioners. They will lift the quarantine now, I think."

"They’d have to," he said savagely. "And at least now Simon will see that you were right and he was wrong. Though he won’t admit it."

"No. But I suppose, in a perverse way, he was right." She nearly smiled. "But please–you must lead me back upstairs, to my office." And she put out her hand, which he took.