The Practice Effect (2 page)

After the lecture, as the crowd of sleepy junior scientists dispersed to find secret corners in which to nap, Dennis paused by the department bulletin board, hoping to see an advertisement for another research center working in zievatronics.

Of course, there weren’t any. Sahara Tech was the only place doing really advanced work with the ziev effect. Dennis should know. He had been responsible for many of those advances. Until six months ago.

As the conference room emptied, Dennis saw Gabriella leave, chattering with her hand on Bernald Brady’s arm. Brady looked pumped up, as if he had just conquered Mt. Everest. Clearly he was crazy in love.

Dennis wished the fellow luck. It would be nice to have Gabriella’s attentions focused elsewhere for a while. Gabbie was a competent scientist in her own right, of course. But she was just a bit too tenacious for Dennis to relax with.

He looked at his watch. It was time to go see what Flaster wanted. Dennis brought his shoulders back. He had decided he wouldn’t put up with any further put-offs. Flaster was going to answer some questions, or Dennis was going to quit!

“Ah, Nuel! Come in!”

Silver-haired and slightly paunched, Marcel Flaster rose from behind the gleamingly empty expanse of his desk. “Take a seat, my boy. Have a cigar? They’re fresh from New Havana, on Venus.” He motioned Dennis to a plush chair next to a floor-to-ceiling lavalamp.

“So tell me, young man, how is it going with that artificial-intelligence project you’ve been working on?”

Dennis had spent the past six months directing a small AI program mandated by an unbreakable old endowment—even though it had been proved back in 2024 that true artificial intelligence was a dead end field.

He still had no idea why Flaster had asked him here. He didn’t want to be gratuitously impolite, so he reported on the recent, modest advances his small group had made.

“Well, there’s been some progress. Recently we’ve developed a new, high-quality mimicry program. In telephone tests it conversed with randomly selected individuals for an average of six point three minutes before they suspect that they’re actually talking to a machine. Rich Schwall and I think …”

“Six and a half minutes!” Flaster interrupted. “Well, you’ve certainly broken the old record, by over a minute, I believe! I’m impressed!”

Then Flaster smiled condescendingly. “But honestly, Nuel, you don’t think I assigned a young scientist of your obvious talents to a project with so little long-range potential for no reason, do you?”

Dennis shook his head. He had long ago concluded that the Chief Scientist had shoved him into a corner of Sahara Tech in order to put his own cronies into the zievatronics lab.

Until the death of Dennis’s old mentor, Dr. Guinasso, Dennis had been at the very center of the exciting field of reality analysis.

Then, within weeks of the tragedy, Flaster had moved his own people in and Guinasso’s inexorably out. Thinking about it still made Dennis bitter. He had felt sure they were just about to make tremendous discoveries when he was exiled from the work he loved.

“I couldn’t really guess why you transferred me,” Dennis said. “Umm, could it be you were grooming me for better things?”

Oblivious to the sarcasm, Flaster grinned. “Exactly, my boy! You do show remarkable insight. Tell me, Nuel. Now that you’ve had experience running a small department, how would you like to take charge of the zievatronics project here at Sahara Tech?”

Dennis blinked, taken completely by surprise.

“Uh,” he said concisely.

Flaster got up and went to an intricate espresso urn on a sideboard. He poured two demitasses of thick Atlas Mountains coffee and offered one to Dennis. Dennis took the small cup numbly. He barely tasted the heavy, sweet brew.

Flaster returned to his desk and sipped delicately from his demitasse.

“Now, you didn’t think we’d let our best expert on the ziev effect molder in a backwater forever, did you? Of course not! I was planning to move you back into Lab One in a matter of weeks, anyway. And now that the subministry position has opened up …”

“The what?”

“The subministry! Mediterranea’s government has shifted again, and my old friend Boona Calumny is slotted for the Minister of Science portfolio. So when he called me just the other day to ask for help …” Flaster spread his hands as if to say the rest was obvious.

Dennis couldn’t believe he was hearing this. He had been certain the older man disliked him. What in the world would motivate him to turn to Dennis when it came to choosing a replacement?

Dennis wondered if his dislike for Flaster had blinded him to some nobler side of the man.

“I take it you’re interested?”

Dennis nodded. He didn’t care what Flaster’s motives were, so long as he could get his hands on the zievatron again.

“Excellent!” Flaster raised his cup again. “Of course, there is one small detail to overcome first—only a minor matter, really. Just the sort of thing that would show the lab your leadership ability and guarantee your universal acceptance by all.”

“Ah,” Dennis said. I
knew it! Here it comes! The catch!

Flaster reached under the desk and pulled out a glass box. Within it was a furry-winged, razor-toothed monstrosity, rigid and lifeless.

“After you helped us recapture it last Saturday night, I decided it was more trouble than it was worth. I handed it over to our taxidermist.…”

Dennis tried to breathe normally. The small black eyes
stared back at him glassily. Right now they seemed filled less with malevolence than with deep mystery.

“You wanted to know more about this thing,” Flaster said. “As my heir apparent, you have a right to find out.”

“The others think it’s from the Gene-craft Center,” Dennis said.

Flaster chuckled. “But you knew better all along, right? The lifemakers aren’t good enough at their new art to make anything quite so unique,” he said with savor. “So very savage.

“No. As you guessed, our little friend here is not from the genetics labs, nor from anywhere in the solar system, for that matter. It came from Lab One—from one of the anomaly worlds we’ve latched onto with the zievatron.”

Dennis stood. “You got it to work! You latched onto something better than vacuum, or purple mist!”

His mind whirled. “It breathed Earth air! It gobbled down a dozen canapes, along with a corner of Brian Yen’s ear, and kept going! The thing’s biochemistry must be …”

“Is
 … it is almost precisely Terran.” Flaster nodded.

Dennis shook his head. He sat down heavily. “When did you find this place?”

“We found it during a zievatronics anomaly search three weeks ago. After five months of failure, I’ll freely admit that we finally achieved success only after returning to the search routine you first designed, Nuel.”

Flaster took off his glasses and wiped them with a silk handkerchief. “Your routines worked almost at once. And turned up the most amazingly Earthlike world. The biologists are ecstatic, to say the least.”

Dennis stared at the dead creature in the glass.
A whole world! We did it!

Dr. Guinasso’s dream had come true. The zievatron was the key to the stars! Dennis’s personal resentment had disappeared. He was genuinely thrilled by Flaster’s accomplishment.

The Director rose and returned to the coffee urn for a refill. “There’s only one problem,” he said nonchalantly, his back to the younger man.

Dennis looked up, his thoughts still spinning. “Sir? A problem?”

“Well, yes.” Flaster turned around, stirring his coffee. “Actually, it has to do with the zievatron itself.”

Dennis frowned.

“What about the zievatron?”

Flaster raised his demitasse with two fingers. “Well,” he sighed between sips. “It seems we can’t get the darned thing to work anymore.”

Flaster wasn’t kidding. The zievatron was busted.

After most of a day spent poking through the guts of the machine, Dennis was still getting used to the changes that had been made in Laboratory One since his banishment.

The main generators were the same, as were the old reality probes he and Dr. Guinasso had laboriously handtuned back in the early days. Flaster and Brady hadn’t dared tamper with those.

But they had brought in so much new equipment that even the cavernous main lab was almost filled to bursting. There were enough electrophoresis columns, for instance, to analyze a Bordeaux bouillabaisse.

The zievatron itself took up most of the chamber. White-coated technicians moved across catwalks along its broad face, making adjustments.

Most of the techs had come down to greet Dennis when he came in. They were obviously relieved to have him back. The backslapping reunion had kept him away from his beloved machine for almost an hour and had irritated the hell out of Bernald Brady.

When, finally, Dennis had been able to get to work, he concentrated on the two huge reality probes. Where they met, deep within the machine, there was a spot in space that was neither exactly here nor quite elsewhere. The anomalous point could be flipped between Earth and Somewhere Else, depending on which probe dominated.

Six months ago there had been a small port through which samples could be taken of the purple mists and strange dust clouds he and Dr. Guinasso had found. But since then it had been replaced by a large, armored airlock.

Working near the heavy hatch, Dennis realized that all a person had to do was walk through that door to be on another world! It was a strange feeling.

“Stumped yet, Nuel?”

Dennis looked up. Bernald Brady’s small mouth always seemed to be slightly pursed in disapproval. The fellow was under instructions to cooperate, but that apparently didn’t extend to being civil.

Dennis shrugged. “I’ve narrowed the problem down. Something’s cockeyed about the part of the zievatron that’s been pushed into the anomaly world!—the return mechanism. It may be that the only way to fix it is from the other end.”

He had come to realize that Marcel Flaster would exact a price for putting him in charge of the lab. If Dennis wasn’t able to figure out a way to repair it from this end, he might have to go through and fix the return mechanism in person.

He hadn’t yet decided whether to be thrilled by the idea, or petrified.

“Flasteria,” Brady said.

“I beg your pardon?” Dennis said, blinking.

“We’ve named the planet Flasteria, Nuel.”

Dennis tried to work his mouth around the word, then gave up.
The hell you say
.

“Anyway,” Brady went on, “that’s no great discovery. I’d already figured out it was the return mechanism that had broken down.”

Dennis was starting to get irritated with the fellow’s attitude. He shrugged. “Sure you knew it already. But how long did it take you?”

He knew he had struck home when Brady’s face reddened.

“Never mind,” Dennis said as he stood up, brushing off his hands. “Come on, Brady. Take me on a tour of your zoo. If I’m expected to go through and visit this place, I want to know more about it.”

Mammals! The captive animals were air-breathing, four-legged, hairy mammals!

He looked over one that resembled a small ferret, going through a short mental checklist. There were two nostrils above the mouth and below forward-facing hunter’s eyes. There were five clawed toes on each paw, and a long, furry
tail. A tomography chart in front of the cage showed a four-chambered heart, a rather Earthly-looking skeleton, and apparently all the right sorts of viscera in all the right places.

Yet it was alien!

The creature stared back at Dennis for a moment, then yawned and turned away.

“The biologists have checked for bad germs and such,” Brady said, answering Dennis’s next question. “The guinea pigs they sent through aboard one of the exploring robots lived on Flasteria for several days and came back perfectly healthy.”

“What about the biochemistry? Are the amino acids the same, for instance?”

Brady picked up a large binder, about five inches thick. “Doc Nelson was called away to Palermo yesterday. Part of the government shake-up, I suppose. But here’s his report.” He dropped the heavy tome into Dennis’s hands. “Study it!”

Dennis was about to tell Brady where he could put the report for the time being. But just then a sharp, snapping sound came from the far end of the row of cages. Both men turned to witness a stout wooden crate begin shaking and rattling.

Brady cursed loudly. “Hot damn! It’s getting out again!” He ran to one wall and slapped an alarm button. At once a siren began to wail.

“What’s
getting out?” Dennis backed up. The panic in Brady’s voice had affected him. “What
is
it?”

“The
creature!
” Brady shouted into the intercom, hardly encouraging Dennis. “The one we recaptured and put in that temporary box … 
yes
, the tricky one! It’s getting out again!”

There was the sound of splintering wood, and a slat fell out of the side of the crate. From the blackness within, a pair of tiny green reflections gleamed at Dennis.

Dennis could only presume they were eyes, small and spaced no more than an inch apart. The green sparks seemed to lock onto him, and he could not look away. They stared at each other—Earthman and alien.

Brady was shouting as a work gang hurried into the room. “Quick! Get the nets in here in case it jumps! Make sure it doesn’t let the other animals loose, like the last time!”

Dennis was growing increasingly uneasy. The green-eyed
stare was disconcerting. He looked for a place to put down the heavy book in his hands.

The creature seemed to come to a decision. It squeezed through the narrow gap between the slats, then leaped just in time to escape a descending net.

In a glimpse Dennis saw that it looked like a tiny, flat-nosed pig. But this pig was one of a kind! In midleap its legs spread wide, snapping open a pair of membranes, creating two gliding wings!

“Block it, Nuel!” Brady shouted.

Dennis didn’t have much choice. The alien creature flew right at him! He tried to duck, but too late. The “flying pig” landed on his head and clung to his hair, squeaking frantically.