Sight of Proteus by Charles Sheffield

data—which meant that the decision would have to be made by human judgement, and the human in this case was Bey Wolf.
    He sighed a sigh of hidden pleasure, and opened the circuits for more data. The physical parameters began to flow in. The cell tests were strange in both chemistry and structure, with a mixture of haploid and diploid forms. The lungs were modified, showing changes in alveolar patterns. A note added to the analysis pointed out the resemblance to animals that were adapted to life at high pressure. Strangest of all, the big eyes were most sensitive in the near infra-red—but another added note pointed out that this wavelength region is cut out almost completely under water.
    Bey began to gather printed output. He liked to approach a job by asking very basic questions. What was the objective of a new form? Where was it designed to operate most effectively? Most important of all, what was the probable motive of the developer? With answers to those questions, the next step in the form-change sequence could usually be guessed.
    The trouble was, it wasn't working. Bey swore softly and leaned back in his chair. The Mariana Monsters were breaking the rules. After looking at the physical variables of the forms for a couple of hours, it seemed to Bey that they were not adapting to any environment that he could imagine.
    It was time to drop that line and try another attack. All right, how had the forms reached their position on the sea-bed? Certainly, they had not placed themselves there. And how had they died? There was information on that in the medical records. They had been asphyxiated. It was a fair guess that they had been weighted with steel after they were dead, then dropped to the sea-bed. From a surface vessel, by the looks of it—the reports mentioned no sign of skin contusions.
    Where had they come from? Bey pulled out the list. He had a complete catalog of the world's form-change centers, especially the ones elaborate enough to include the special life-support systems the new forms would have needed. He was reading steadily through the list of sites, correlating them with the physical changes noted for the Mariana forms, when Larsen returned from a routine meeting on the certification of new BEC releases.
    He halted in the doorway.
    "How do you do it, Bey? You've only been in this office for a month, and it looks like a rubbish heap."
    Bey looked around him in surprise at the masses of new listings and form-change tabulations that cluttered the office.
    "They are accumulating a bit. I think they reproduce at night. Come in, John, and look at this. I assume you didn't get too much excitement out of your review meeting?"
    Larsen dropped into a chair, pushing aside a pile of listings. As always, he marvelled at Bey's ability to operate clearly and logically in the middle of such a mess of documents and equipment.
    "It was better than usual," he replied. "There were a couple of good ones. C-forms, both of them, adapted for long periods in low gravity. They'll revolutionize asteroid work, but there were the usual protests from the Belter representatives."
    "Naturally—there'll always be Luddites." Bey still had a weakness for outmoded historical references, even though his audience rarely understood them. "The law will change in a couple of years. The C-forms are so much better than the old ones that there's no real competition. I'm telling you, Capman has changed space exploration methods forever. I know the Belters claim they are losing jobs to the new forms, but they are on the wrong side of the argument. Unmodified forms are an anachronism for free space work."
    He switched on a recall display and pulled a set of documents from one of the heaps.
    "Get your mind re-set, and let me tell you about the latest headache. It has the Capman touch. If I weren't convinced that he's not on Earth, I'd be inclined to label it as his work."
    Bey ran rapidly over the background to the Mariana discoveries, finishing with