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Between the Strokes of Night

Charles Sheffield

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-3568-0

Cover art by David Mattingly

First printing, November 2002

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sheffield, Charles.

Between the strokes of night / by Charles Sheffield.

p. cm.

"A Baen Books original"—T.p. verso.

ISBN 0-7434-3568-0

1. Life on other planets—Fiction. 2. Space colonies—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3569.H39253 B4 2002

813'.54—dc21 2002028153

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

To Rose and Toria

Lying asleep between the strokes of night,

I saw my love lean over my sad bed,

Pale as the duskiest lily's leaf or head . . .

—Augustus Swinburne

SLOW DOWN, YOU MOVE TOO FAST . . .

Before Peron could get clear of the damaged airlock, a great force took him and drove him

end-over-end across the jagged rocks. Even as he was jerked and battered inside his pressure suit, his

own thoughts remained quite clear. The inner door seal must have been broken, ready to fail and hanging

on a thread, with tons of air pressure exerted upon it. And for anyone standing in the way . . .

Quite suddenly, it was over. He was lying supine on the surface, surprised to find that he was still

alive. The others came crowding round him, helping him to his feet. He was amazed to see that he was

almost fifty meters away from the dome.

"I'm all right," said Peron. There was a long, strange silence from the others. Peron noticed a faint

ominous chill on the lower left side of his abdomen. His suit was buckled and splintered from chest to

thighs.

"Air supply working, but he's lost two tanks." That was Lum. The suit radio still functioned.

"Oh-oh. Thermal system is out. And most of the suit insulation is stripped from the lower torso."

Peron evaluated his options. Fourteen hours back to the equator, then another six or seven hours

to ship rendezvous. Hopeless. He'd be dead of hypothermia long before.

"Private circuit," radioed Wilmer. "You and I have to talk for a couple of minutes," he said to

Peron, and waited until the personal suit frequency was confirmed. "All right. How do you rate your

chances?"

"As zero," said Peron.

"I don't have time to explain. Never mind. First, I'm going to give you an injection through your suit.

The self-sealing will take card of the puncture."

Before Peron had time to object, he felt the sharp sting of a needle.

"Sorry I don't have time to explain. I was in bad trouble myself on Whirlygig once, over three

hundred years ago. And I remember how I felt." Wilmer gripped his hand. "Good luck, Peron. When

you wake up again, you'll be in S-space."

In S-space? Three hundred years?Then the scene before Peron was blinking out, like a great

jigsaw puzzle where every piece was black. . . .

Baen Books by CHARLES SHEFFIELD:

Between the Strokes of Night

The Amazing Dr. Darwin

My Brother's Keeper

The Compleat McAndrew

Convergent Series

Transvergence

Resurgence

The Mind Pool

The Spheres of Heaven

Proteus in the Underworld

Borderlands of Science

The Web Between the Worlds

INTRODUCTION

Science fiction has a hundred definitions. That's all right. You pick the one that you're comfortable

with, and go with it.

My own definition is pretty unforgiving. If you can take the science out of the story, and still have a

story left, it's not science fiction. More than that, if the science in the story is wrong or ridiculous, again

it's not science fiction.

This hard-nosed attitude has consequences. First, and most obviously, it limits reading enjoyment.

I'm not totally rigid or self-consistent in my attitude. If I were, I would have to rule out such science

fiction staples as faster-than-light travel, telepathy, and time travel, and so miss out on about ninety

percent of everything that's written.

But there's no reason not to try it the hard way. Can we have a book with interstellar travel and

world-to-world contact, but not allow anything to travel faster than light, or employ one of the usual

magic wands like wormholes, ansibles, space tunnels, or interstellar jump points?

It sounded impossible, but there was the challenge. I wanted to write such a book. "Hard" science

fiction ought to be hard not because it's hard to read, but because it's hard to write. I also wanted to

impose another requirement. Humans must be able to wander over vast spans of time and space, while

still imposing the velocity of light as the maximum possible speed that anything can achieve.

I wrote the book—this book. And then, about a year ago, I was given the chance to produce a

new edition. That's when I realized that there was another constraint to the kind of science fiction I

wanted to write. The science ought to be consistentwith what we believe to be true today . No

swamps on Venus, no canals on Mars, no anti-gravity machines; but dinosaur extinction through

meteorite impact, and braided rings around Saturn, and the Oort Cloud, and an Earth that might possibly

be subject to global warming and nuclear winter.

Now, in the past few years our view of the universe as a whole has changed radically. Fifteen years

ago, a writer could be comfortable with one of three plausible choices: the universe was expanding, and

the expansion would never slow down; or, second choice, the universe was expanding, but the

expansion would proceed slower and slower, to produce a universe that was ultimately flat in a

geometrical sense; or, the third alternative, the universe was expanding, but would eventually stop that

expansion, reverse direction, and ultimately collapse back again in a "Big Crunch" fireball beyond which

no information from our present universe could possibly survive. Even ten years ago, no scientist was in

a position to rule out any one of the three choices.

These three options are no longer equally plausible. There is good evidence that the universe is not

merely expanding, but the expansion is running faster than ever. Unfortunately, I earlier opted for the Big

Crunch model. With an accelerating universe, any new edition would need a lot more than the fixing of

small errors or minor inconsistencies.

How much more? Well, this book is now twenty-five percent longer than the first version, with a

final new section undreamed of in the original. The universe in which the book exists has changed; and

therefore, in what is in some ways the most important change of all, the ending must follow a quite

different cosmology.

Suppose, five or ten years from now, there is another radical change in our understanding of the

origins, nature, and future of the universe. Does this mean another major revision of the text?

The one thing that would change this book so profoundly that I am not sure that it could survive,

even with the most radical revisions, would be the discovery that the speed of light is not a physical

velocity limit for objects and signals.

However, such a discovery would bring its compensations. One of the things I would like us to

learn, above most other things in this world, is that faster-than-light travel is possible. If that were true,

I'd give up this book in a heartbeat. After all, while there is only one universe, I can always write a new

and different story.

—Charles Sheffield

2002

Prolog

Gulf City; New Year 14 (29,872 A.D.)

From the diary of Charlene Bloom:

Today I received word from Kallen's World. Wolfgang IV is dead. He was five hundred and four

years old, and like his forebears he was respected by the whole planet. A picture of his own grandson

came with the message. I looked at it for a long time, but blood thins across six generations. It was

impossible, save in my imagination, to recognize any sign of the original (and to me the one-and-only)

Wolfgang in this descendant.

My Wolfgang is dead, long dead; but the great wager goes on. On days like this I feel that I am the

only person in the Universe who cares about the outcome. If Wolfgang and his friends are right, who but

I will know and be here to applaud him? And if we win, who but I will know the cost of victory?

It is significant that I record this death first, before acknowledging the report of a faster-than-light

drive from Beacon Four. Gulf City is throbbing with the news, but I have heard the same rumor a

hundred—a thousand?—times before. For 28,000 years our struggle to escape the yoke of relativity has

continued; still it binds us, as strongly as ever. In public I say that the research must go on even if Beacon

Four has nothing, that the faster-than-light drive will be the single most important discovery in human

history; but deep within me I deny even the possibility. If the Universe is apprehensible to the human

mind, then it must have some final laws. I am not permitted to admit it, but I believe the light-speed limit

is one. As humans explore the galaxy, it must be done at a sub-light crawl.

I wish I could believe otherwise. But most of all today I wish that I could spend one hour again

with Wolfgang. * * *

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,

They brought me bitter news to hear

and bitter tears to shed.

I wept as I remembered, how often you and I

Had tired the sun with talking,

and sent him down the sky.

But now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,

A handful of gray ashes, long, long ago at rest.

Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;

For death he taketh all away; but these he cannot take.

* * *

PART ONE:

A.D. 2016

CHAPTER ONE

The Road to Armageddon

The snow was drifting down in tiny flakes. Its fall, slow and steady, had added almost four inches

of new crystals to the frozen surface. Two feet below, torso curled and nose tucked into thick fur, the

great she-bear lay motionless. Walls of translucent ice caverned about the shaggy, light-brown pelt.

The voice came through to the cave as a disembodied thread of sound. "Sodium level still

dropping. Looks really bad. Jesus Christ. Try one more cycle."

On the periphery of the cave a flicker of colored light began to blink on and off. The walls shone

red, clear blue, then sparkled with dazzling green. A stippling of pure colors rippled a pattern to the

beast's closed eyelids.

The bear slept on at the brink of death. Its body temperature held steady, ten degrees above

freezing point. The massive heart pumped at a sluggish two beats per minute, the metabolic rate down by

a factor of fifty. Breathing was steadily weakening, betrayed now only by the thin layer of ice crystals in

the fringe of white beard and around the blunt muzzle.

"No good." The voice held an added urgency. "Still dropping, and we're losing the pulse trace. We

have to risk it. Give her a bigger jolt."

The light pattern altered. There was a stab of magenta, a rapid twinkle of sapphire and cyan, then a

scattershot of moving saffron and ruby dots on the icy wall. As the rainbow modulated, the bear

responded to the signal. Slate-gray eyes flickered in the long, smooth head. The massive chest

shuddered.

"That's as far as I dare take it." The second voice was deeper. "We're beginning to get more heart

fibrillation."

"Hold the level there. And keep an eye on that rectal temperature. Why is it happeningnow, of all

times?"

The voice echoed anguished through the thick-walled cavern. The chamber where the bear lay was

fifteen meters across, and through the outer wall ran a spidery filament of fiber optics. It passed beneath

the ice to a squat box next to the beast's body. Faint electronic signals came from needles implanted

deep in the tough skin, where sensors monitored the ebbing currents of life in the great body. Skin

conductivity, heartbeat, blood pressure, saliva, temperature, chemical balances, ion concentrations, eye

movements and brain waves were continuously monitored. Coded and amplified in the square box, the

signals passed as pulses of light along the optic bundle to a panel of equipment set outside the chamber's

wall. The woman who leaned over the panel outside the chamber was about thirty years old. Her dark

hair was cropped short over a high, smooth forehead that now creased with frown lines as she studied

the monitors. She was watching one digital readout as it flickered rapidly through a repeated sequence of

values. She was in her stockinged feet, and her toes and feet wriggled nervously as the digital readout

values moved faster.

"It's no good. She's still getting worse. Can we reverse it?"

The man next to her shook his head. "Not without killing her faster. Her temperature's down too far

already, and she's below our control on brain activity. I'm afraid we're going to lose her." His voice was

calm and slow under rigid control. He turned to look at the woman, waiting for an instruction. She took

a long, shuddering breath.

"We mustnot lose her. There must be something else to do. Oh my God." She stood up, revealing

a supple, willowy build that emphasized the thinness of her stooped shoulders. "Jinx might be in the same

condition. Did you check on his enclosure, see how he's doing?"

Wolfgang Gibbs snorted. "Give me credit for something, Charlene. I checked him a few minutes

ago. Everything is stable there. I held him four hours behind Dolly here, because I didn't know if this

move was a safe one." He shrugged. "I guess we know now. Look at Dolly's EEG. Better accept it,

boss woman. We can't do one thing for her."

On the screen in front of them, the pattern of electrical signals from the bear's brain was beginning

to flatten. All evidence of spindles was gone, and the residual sinusoid was dropping in amplitude.

The woman shivered, then sighed. "Damn, damn,damn ." She ran her hand through her dark hair.

"So what now? I can't stay here much longer—JN's meeting starts in less than half an hour. What the hell

am I going to tell her? She had such hopes for this one."

She straightened under the other's direct gaze. There was a speculative element to his look that

always made her uneasy.

He shrugged again and laughed harshly. "Tell her we never promised miracles." His voice had a flat

edge to the vowels that hinted at English as a late-learned second language. "Bears don't hibernate in the

same way as other animals do. Even JN will admit that. They sleep a lot, and the body temperature

drops, but it's a different metabolic process." There was a beep from the monitor console. "Look out

now—she's going."

On the screen in front of them the trace of brain activity was reduced to a single horizontal line.

They watched in silence for a full minute, until there was a final, faint shiver from the heart monitor.

The man leaned forward and turned the gain as high as it would go. He grunted. "Nothing. She's

gone. Poor old Dolly."

"And what do I tell JN?"

"The truth. She already knows most of it. We've gone farther with Jinx and Dolly than JN had any

reason to hope we could. I told you we were into a risky area with the bears, but we kept pushing on."

"I was hoping to keep Jinx under at least another four days. Now, we can't risk it. I'll have to tell

JN we're going to wake him up now."

"It's that, or kill him. You saw the monitors." As he spoke, he had already switched to the injection

control system for the second experimental chamber, and was carefully increasing the hormonal levels

through Jinx's half-ton body mass. "But you're the boss. If you insist on it, I'll hold him under a bit longer."

"No." She was chewing her lip, rocking backwards and forwards in front of the screen. "We can't

take the risk. Go ahead, Wolfgang, bring him up all the way. Full consciousness. How long had Dolly

been under, total time?"

"One hundred and ninety one hours and fourteen minutes."

She laughed nervously and wriggled her feet back into her shoes. "Well, it's a record for the

species. We have that much to comfort us. I have to go. Can you finish all right without me?"

"I'll have to, won't I? Don't worry, this is my fourth hour of overtime already today." He smiled

sourly, but more to himself than to Charlene. "You know what I think? If JN ever does find a way for a

human to stay awake and sane for twenty-four hours a day, first thing she'll do is work people like us

triple shifts."

Charlene Bloom smiled at him and nodded, but her mind was already moving on to the dreaded

meeting. Head down, she set off through the hangarlike building, her footsteps echoing to the high,

corrugated-steel roof. Behind her, Wolfgang watched her departure. His look was a combination of rage

and sorrow.

"That's right, Charlene," he grunted under his breath. "You're the boss, so you go off and take the

heat. Fair enough. We both deserve it after what we did to poor old Dolly. But you ought to stop kissing

JN's ass and tell her she's pushing us too fast. She'd probably put you in charge of paperclips, but serve

you right—you should have put your foot down before we lost one."

A hundred yards away along the length of the open floor, Charlene Bloom abruptly turned to stare

back at him. He looked startled, raised his hand, and gave an awkward half-wave.

"Reading my thoughts?" He sniffed and turned back to his control console. "Nah. She's just

chicken. She'd rather stay here than tell JN what's happened in the last half-hour."

He switched to Jinx's displays. The big brown bear had to be eased back up to consciousness, a

fraction of a degree at a time. They couldn't afford to lose another one.

He rubbed at his unshaven chin, scratched absentmindedly at his crotch, and pored over the

telemetry signals. What was the best way? Nobody had real experience at this, not even JN herself.

"Come on, Jinx. Let's do this right. We don't want you in pain when the circulation comes back.

Blood sugar first, shall we, then serotonin and potassium balance? That sounds pretty good."

Wolfgang Gibbs wasn't really angry at Charlene—he liked her too well. It was worry about Dolly

and Jinx that upset him. He had little patience or respect for many of his superiors; but for the Kodiak

bears and the other animal charges, he had a good deal of affection and concern.

CHAPTER TWO

Charlene Bloom took almost a quarter of an hour to make her way along the length of the main

hangar. More than reluctance to attend the impending meeting slowed her steps. Fifty experiments went

on in the building, most of them under her administrative control.

In one dim-lit vault a score of domestic cats prowled, sleepless and deranged. A delicate operation

had removed part of the reticular formation, the section of the hindbrain that controls sleep. She scanned

the records. They had been continuously awake now for eleven hundred and eighty hours—a month and

a half. The monitors were at last showing evidence of neurological malfunction. She could reasonably call

it feline madness in her monthly report.

Most of the animals now showed no interest in food or sex. A handful had become feral, attacking

anything that came near them. But they were all still alive. That was progress. Their last experiment had

failed after less than half the time.

Each section of the building held temperature-controlled enclosures. In the next area she came to

the rooms where the hibernating rodents and marsupials were housed. She walked slowly past each

walled cage, her attention divided between the animals and thoughts of the coming meeting.

Marmots and ground squirrels here, next to the mutated jerboas. Who was running this one? Aston

Naugle, if she had it right. Not as organized as Wolfgang Gibbs, and not as hardworking—but at least

he didn't make the shivers run up and down her spine. She was taller than Wolfgang.And his senior by

three grades. But there was something about those tawny eyes . . . like one of the animals. He wasn't

afraid of the bears, or the big cats—or his superior. A sudden disquieting thought came to her. That

look. He would ask her out one evening, she was sure of it. And then?

Suddenly conscious that time was passing, she began to hurry along the next corridor. Her shoes

were crippling, but it wouldn't do to be late. These damned shoes—why could she never get any that

fitted right, the way other people did?Mustn't be late . In the labs since JN had been made Director,

unpunctuality was a cardinal sin ("When you delay the start of a meeting, you steal everyone's time to

pay for your own lack of efficiency. . . .").

The corridor continued outside the main building, to become a long covered walkway. She took

her first look at the mid-morning cloud pattern. It was still trying to rain. What was going on with this

crazy weather? Since the climate cycle went haywire, not one of the forecasts was worth a thing. There

was a low ground mist curling over the hills near Christchurch, and it was hotter than it was ever

supposed to be. According to all the reports, the situation was as bad in the northern hemisphere as it

was in New Zealand. And the Americans, Europeans, and Soviets were suffering much worse crop

failures.

Her mind went back to the first lab. Everything had been designed for less moisture. No wonder

the air coolers were snowing on Jinx, the humidity outside must be close to a hundred percent. Maybe

they should add a dehumidifier to the system, what they had now was working like a damned snow

machine. Should she request that equipment at today's meeting?

The meeting.

Charlene jerked her attention away from the lab experiments. Time to worry about them later. She

hurried on. Up a short flight of stairs, a left turn, and she was at C-53, the conference room where the

weekly reviews were held. And, thank God, there before JN.

She slipped into her place at the long table, nodding at the others who were already seated:

"Catkiller" Cannon from Physiology, de Vries from External Subjects, Beppo Cameron from

Pharmacology (daffodil in his buttonhole—where did he getthat in this wild weather?). The others

ignored her and examined their open folders.

Five minutes to eleven. She had a few minutes to review her own statement and to stare for the

hundredth time at the framed embroidery on the wall opposite. It had been there as long as she had, and

she could close her eyes and recite it by heart.

"Do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is: it is so inestimable a jewel that, if a tyrant would

give his crown for an hour's slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautiful a shape is it, that though a man

lie with an Empress, his heart cannot be quiet till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the other:

yea, so greatly indebted are we to this kinsman of death that we owe the better tributary, half of our life

to him: and there is good cause why we should do so: for sleep is the golden chain that ties health and

our bodies together."—Thomas Dekker.

And underneath the beautifully needle-worked quotation, in Judith Niles' clear, bold cursive, was

the recent addition:

Nuts. In this Institute, sleep is the enemy.

Charlene Bloom opened her own folder, leaned back, and eased off her black shoes, one foot

tugging at the heel of the other. Eleven o'clock, and no Director. Something was wrong.

At four minutes past eleven, the other door of the conference room opened and Judith Niles

entered followed by her secretary. Late—and she looked angry. Peering past her into the adjoining

office, Charlene Bloom saw a tall man standing by the desk. He was curly haired and in his early thirties,

pleasant-faced but frowning now at something over on one of the walls.

A stranger. But those wide-set gray eyes seemed vaguely familiar; perhaps from an Institute

Newsletter picture?

Judith Niles had remained standing for a moment instead of taking her usual place. Her glance went

around the table, checking that all the department chiefs were already in position, then she nodded her

greeting.

"Good morning. I'm sorry to keep you waiting." Her lips pouted on the final word and held that

expression. "We have an unexpected visitor, and I have to meet with him again as soon as this meeting is

over." She at last sat down. "Let's begin. Dr. de Vries, would you start? I'm sure everyone is as

interested as I am in hearing of the results of your trip. When did you get back?"

Jan de Vries, short and placid, shrugged his shoulders and smiled at the Director. Judith Niles and

he saw the world from the same place, half a head lower than most of the staff. Perhaps that was what

allowed him to relax with her, in a way that Charlene Bloom found totally impossible.

"Late last night." His voice was soothing, slow and easy as warm syrup. "If you will permit me one

moment of tangential comment, the treatment for jet lag that we pioneered here at the Institute is less

than a total success."

Judith Niles never took notes. Her secretary would record every word, and she wanted all her own

mind concentrated on the pulse of the meeting. She leaned forward and looked closely at de Vries' face.

"I assume you speak from experience?"

He nodded. "I used it on the trip to Pakistan. Today I feel lousy, and the blood tests confirm it. My

circadian rhythms are still somewhere between here and Rawalpindi."

The Director looked across at Beppo Cameron and raised her dark eyebrows. "We'd better take

another look at the treatment, eh? But what about the main business, Jan? Ahmed Ameer—is he fact or

fiction?"

"Regrettably, he is fiction." De Vries opened his notebook. "According to the report we received,

Ahmed Ameer never slept more than an hour a night. From the time he was sixteen years old—that's

nine years, he's twenty-five now—he swore that he hadn't closed his eyes."

"And the truth?"

He grimaced and rubbed at his thin moustache. "I've got our complete notes here, and they'll go in

the file. But I can summarize in one word: exaggeration. In the six days and nights that we were with him,

he went two nights with no sleep. One night he slept for four and a quarter hours. For the other three

nights he averaged a little more than two and a half hours each."

"Normal health?"

"Looks like it. He doesn't sleep much, but we've had other subjects with less right here in the

Institute."

Judith Niles was watching him closely. "But you don't look like a man who wasted a week on a

wild-goose chase. What's the rest of it?"

"My perceptive superior." De Vries looked angelic. "You are quite right. On the way out I went

through Ankara to check out a long shot—another one of the rumors from the Cairo labs, about a monk

who keeps a vigil over the sacred relies of Saint Stephen. A vestment was stolen while he was on duty

two years ago, and after that he supposedly swore he would never sleep again."

"Well?" Judith Niles tensed as she waited for his answer.

"Not quite—but closer than we've ever come before." De Vries was all sly satisfaction. "Would

you believe an average total daily sleep oftwenty-nine minutes ? And he doesn't sit in a chair and nod

off for the odd few minutes when nobody's looking. We had him hooked up to a telemetry unit for

eleven days. We have the fullest biochemical tests that we could make. You'll see my full report as soon

as someone can transcribe it for you."

"I want it today. Tell Joyce Savin that it's top priority." Judith Niles gave de Vries a little nod of

approval. "Anything else?"

"Nothing good enough to tell. I'll have my complete report for you tomorrow."

He winked across the table at Charlene. And she'll never read it, said his expression. The Director

depended on her staff to keep track of the details. No one ever knew how much time she would spend

on any particular staff report. Sometimes the smallest element of data would engage her attention for

days, at other times major projects would run unstudied for months.

Judith Niles took a quick look at her watch. "Dr. Bloom, you're next. Keep it as short as possible

—I'd like to squeeze our visitor in before lunch if we can."

But at my back I always hear, Time's winged chariot hurrying near . . .

Charlene gritted her teeth. JN was obsessed with sleep and time. And most of what Charlene

could offer was bad news.

She bent her head over her notebook, reluctant to begin.

"We just lost one of the Kodiaks," she said abruptly. There was a rustle of movement as everyone

at the long table sat up straighter. Charlene kept her head bowed. "Gibbs took Dolly down to a few

degrees above freezing and tried to maintain a positive level of brain activity."

Now there was a charged silence in the room. Charlene swallowed, felt the lump in her throat, and

hurried on. "The procedure is the same as I described in last week's report for the Review Committee.

But this time we couldn't stabilize. The brain wave patterns were hunting, seeking new stable levels, and

there were spurious alpha thresholds. When we started to bring the temperature back up all the body

functions just went to hell. Oscillations everywhere. I brought the output listings with me, and if you want

to see them I'll pass them round."

"Later." Judith Niles' expression was a mixture of concentration and anger. Charlene knew the

look. The Director expected everyone—everything—to share her drive toward Zero Sleep. Dolly had

failed them. JN's face had turned pale, but her voice was calm and factual.

"Gibbs, you said? Wolfgang Gibbs. He's the heavy-set fellow with curly hair? Did he handle the

descent and ascent operations himself?"

"Yes. But I have no reason to question his competence—"

"Nor do I, I'm not suggesting that. I've read his reports. He's good." Judith Niles made a gesture to

the secretary at her side. "Were there any other anomalies that you consider significant?"

"There was one." Charlene Bloom took a deep breath and turned to a new page of her notebook.

"When we were about fifteen degrees above freezing, the brain wave patterns hit a very stable form.

And Wolfgang Gibbs noticed one very odd thing about them. They seemed to be the same profile as the

brain rhythms at normal temperature, just stretched out in time."

She paused. At the end of the table, Judith Niles had suddenly jerked upright.

"How similar?"

"We didn't run it through the computer yet. To the eye they were identical—but fifty times as slow

as usual."

For a fraction of a second Charlene thought she saw a look flicker between Judith Niles and Jan de

Vries, then the Director was staring at her with full intensity. "That's something I want to see for myself.

Later today, Dr. de Vries and I will come out to the hangar and take a look at this project. But let's run

over it in a little more detail now, when we're all here. How long did you hold the stable phase, and what

was the lowest body temperature? And what about tryptophan settings?"

Below table level, Charlene rubbed her hands along the side of her skirt. They were in for a digging

session, she just knew it. Her hands were beginning to tremble, and she could feel new sweat on her

palms. Was she well-prepared? She'd know in a few minutes. With the Director in the mood for detail,

the visitor to the Institute might be in for a long wait.

CHAPTER THREE

For Hans Gibbs it was turning into a long and confusing day.

When first suggested, a Downside visit to the U.N. Institute for Neurology in Christchurch had

sounded like the perfect break from routine. He would have a week in full earth gravity instead of the

quarter-gee of PSS-One. He would gain a batch of exercise credits, and he needed all he could scrape

together. He'd be able to pick up a few things Downside that were seldom shuttled up as cargo—how

long since anyone on PSS-One had tasted an oyster? And even though Christchurch was down in New

Zealand, away from the political action centers, he'd be able to form his own impressions on recent

world tensions. There were lots of charges and counter-accusations flying about, but chances are it was

more of the same old bluster that the Downsiders mislabelled as diplomacy.

Best of all, he could spend a couple of evenings with randy old Wolfgang. The last time they'd been

out on the town together, his cousin had still been married. That had put a crimp on things (but less than

it should have—one reason maybe why Wolfgang wasn't married now?).

The trip down had been a disaster. Not the Shuttle flight, of course; that had been a couple of

hours of relaxation, a smooth re-entry followed by activation of the turbofans and a long powered coast

to Aussieport in northern New Guinea. The landing had been precisely on schedule. But that was the last

thing that went according to plan.

The Australian spaceport, servicing Australia, New Zealand and Micronesia, normally prided itself

on informality and excitement. According to legend, a visitor could find within a few kilometers of the

port every one of the world's conventional vices, plus a few of the unconventional ones (cannibalism had

been part of native life in New Guinea long after it had disappeared elsewhere).

Today all informality had disappeared. The port had been filled with grim-faced officials, intent on

checking every item of his baggage, documents, travel plans, and reason for arrival. He had been

subjected to four hours of questioning. Did he have relatives in Japan or the United States? Did he have

sympathies with the Food Distribution Movement? What were his views on the Australian Isolationist

Party? Tell us, in detail, of any new synthetic food manufacturing processes developed for the outbound

arcologies.

Plenty was happening there, as he readily admitted, but he was saved by simple ignorance. Sure,

there were new methods for synthetics, good ones, but he didn't know anything about them—wouldn't

bepermitted to know about them; they carried a high level of commercial secrecy.

His first gift for Wolfgang—a pure two-carat gemstone, manufactured in the orbiting autoclave on

PSS-One—was retained for examination. It would, he was curtly informed, be sent along to his lodgings

at the Institute if it passed inspection. His other gift was confiscated with no promise of return. Seeds

developed in space might contaminate some element of Australasian flora.

His patience had run out at that point. The seeds weresterile, he pointed out. He had brought them

along only as a novelty, for their odd shapes and colors.

"What the hell has happened to you guys?" he complained. "It's not the first time I've been here. I'm

a regular—just take a look at those visas. What do you think I'm going to do, break into Cornwall

House and have a go at the First Lady?"

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摘要：

BetweentheStrokesofNightCharlesSheffieldThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©2002byCharlesSheffieldAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform.ABaenBoo...

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Sheffield, Charles - Between The Strokes Of Night

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