The Web Between the Worlds

by Charles Sheffield

  “What have you been doing to yourself?” Howard Anson peered anxiously into the holoscreen, where Rob’s weary face was displayed. “You look terrible.”

  “Thank you. I’ve been working, and worrying. Too much of both.” Rob took in the details of Anson’s strange costume, and his face relaxed into a tired smile.

  Anson nodded. “That’s better. Now you’re more like the man I met at Way Down. You don’t need me to tell you this, but you don’t look good. I think you’d better find some way to take a rest for a while. You’ve added ten years since we first met.”

  “I feel all of them.” Rob wriggled his shoulders, trying to get the tension out of them. “More than ten years, inside. I can’t get my mind off the beanstalk, and if ever I do I’m back to worrying about my parents. A year ago, I felt like an engineer. Now, I feel like a mess.” He stared again at Anson’s outfit. “Less of one than you look, though.”

  Howard Anson glanced down at himself with undisguised irritation. “It’s not my idea, you know. A couple of my big clients are doing this as the latest madness. If I want to stay close to my customer base, I have to go along with it.”

  He picked at the lapel of his flowered dressing-gown with disgust. “You know what this is, don’t you? We’re all supposed to dress as `gay young things’ from a hundred and forty years ago.”

  He picked up a small black cylinder from the table in front of him and regarded it gloomily. “I think I know what’s been happening to you, though I doubt it does much to help. Until a year ago, you were a real orphan. You probably never thought of that as an advantage, but there’s a positive side to a lack of ties. You don’t have anything to live up to when you start out in life with no family. Now, you’ve started to think of your parents as real people — not just abstract nouns, but individuals with lives and deaths. That’s what is getting to you, Rob. I take a lot of the responsibility for that, and I’m sorry.”

  He sniffed at the cylinder he was holding, while Rob watched him curiously.

  “You may be right, Howard. Something started me off, and now I can’t stop. What is that thing?”

  “This?” Anson held up the cylinder. “It’s a cigarette holder. Something else that was de rigeur for a man-about-town around 1925. A fire on one end and a fool on the other. It was Senta’s idea. We’re supposed to go to a Dawn-of-Man party in these clothes later today. Now I’m not sure we’ll make it. Maybe that’s a good thing.” He put down the holder. “Let’s get down to serious stuff. How’s the ’stalk coming along?”

  “We’re well past seventy thousand kilometers of cable. Four more months and we’ll be flying it in for landing. How would you like to come over to the Control Center and see it happen?”

  “Out in space?”

  “No.” Rob smiled at the mixture of disdain and trepidation on Anson’s face. “The Control Center will be down on Earth, near Santiago. But it would do you good to get out into space. You’re a creeping Earth-worm, you know. `What can men know of Terra, who only Terra know?’ “

  “Indeed.” Anson raised his eyebrows. “Half a year ago you felt the same about space as I do. And you’d certainly never have said that, misquotation and all, when we first met. Somebody’s been educating you. Keep it up, maybe you’ll become human after all. I’ll stick with my own views of space travel. Anybody who wants to sit on a heap of explosives and have it lit underneath him can have my share of space. I’ll stay on terra firma — and the more firmer, the less terror. I’ll take you up on your other offer, though, and come to Control Center. You’ll be able to get Senta in, too?”

  “Sure. Where is she now?”

  “Gone to talk to the Perions, if you remember them. They were with us when we first met you. They were one of the couples who had a narrow escape, and Senta thought they might need to talk it out with somebody.”

  “Escape?”

  Rob waited impatiently as the radio signal sped on its three-second round-trip path between the L-4 communications center and the surface of Earth. The delay encouraged longer exchanges of information at each end, with passage of single-word exchanges especially annoying.

  “Don’t you bother to listen to any news when you’re out there?” Anson’s reply came at last. “I thought you’d know all about it — every news outlet here has been full of nothing else. It happened two days ago. Way Down went away. Closed up completely, at the worst possible time — evening, when it was at its busiest. The Perions were down there in the afternoon, but Lucetta had a headache, the sort she usually gets before a thunderstorm. They left Way Down and came up to the surface about six o’clock. Two hours later there was a small earthquake in Mexico. Not even enough to do more than tickle the seismometers. After it, Way Down had gone.”

  “My God. How many people?”

  “Twenty-two hundred. Trapped twelve miles down, and not a chance of getting to them.”

  There was a long silence over the comlink. Rob had always been blessed — or cursed — with a strong visual imagination. Now he could see the whole thing in his mind’s eye: the basalt walls of Way Down moving inexorably in on the central cavern; the sudden and total darkness as electrical power from the surface was cut off. Then the panic, the random movement of people; and finally, the quick extinction in that deep mass grave, many miles below the surface.

  “No one else at all got out?” he said at last.

  “No one but the other couple who were with the Perions, the ones they persuaded to leave with them.” Howard Anson laughed shortly and looked down again at the flowered robe he was wearing. “Maybe I should be blessing this outfit instead of cursing it. Senta stayed back here for a costume fitting, otherwise we might have been there, too. You know, when I was down there I always had this funny feeling that there could be an accident. Maybe everybody did, and maybe that was part of the attraction of the place.”

  Rob shook his head, dark eyes somber. “Not to me. I felt uncomfortable all the time I was down there, and I couldn’t wait to get out. There were enough dangers in bridge construction work, I never needed to look for more. It must be horrible to be so bored with life that you have to introduce artificial dangers into it. I’m sure you’re right, though, that was part of the draw of Way Down for some people.” He stared thoughtfully at the brocaded robe that showed its multiple colors in the display screen.

  “Not me,” Anson said hastily. “Don’t get the wrong impression, Rob. I do this for business, not entertainment.” He glanced down again at his colorful costume and scowled. “You don’t know how lucky you are. Your line of work doesn’t call for any posturing, the way that mine does.”

  “Rubbish.” The word took a long time to get there. “How much money do you have, Howard? Don’t even bother to answer that. You don’t have to work if you don’t choose to, I know that. The Information Service must be pulling in money hand over fist. Digging out information when other people fail is your life-blood. You’re just unnaturally interested in other people’s affairs.”

  Anson listened to Rob with no trace of expression on his fine-boned face. “Hmph,” he said at last. “We’re cutting close to the bone tonight. After those kind words, I don’t know if I should tell you what I’ve been doing while you’ve been away.”

  “You don’t need to. You’ve been digging. From the look on your face you’ve found something, too.”

  “Maybe.” Anson rubbed his chin. “Rob, you take the fun out of everything. I expect to get some credit for this. The sort of thing I’ve been doing is damned hard. I don’t believe there’s another man in the System who can do it half as well as I can. I’ve been digging all right. We’re following a scent that’s old, and one that has been well covered up. I’m getting somewhere, but not as fast as I’d like or in anything like the detail we really need.”

  Rob’s weariness was gone completely. He leaned forward, face intent. “You found out about the Goblins? That’s more than I ever expected.”

  “Hold it, now.” Anson held up his hand. “Don’t
get too excited. First of all, I didn’t find out anything new about the ones that your parents were working on in the Antigeria Labs in Christchurch. I tried hard enough, but those have vanished without a trace. One presumably went in the fire, and I suspect that the other dived into the Antarctic Ocean in that plane crash. So I decided to forget those two, and see what else I might be able to dig out. I had every single report involving anything that might relate to a Goblin looked at in detail.”

  He shook his head. “I won’t even start to tell you how much work that was. Every freak report in the files. After we’d finished with all that, we had just two cases that I thought sounded promising. I looked at them harder than I’ve ever looked at anything. There’s still no direct evidence, only second-hand reports from people who were casually involved and were not believed when they first talked about this. All the principal characters in each one are dead, disappeared, or somehow just refuse to talk. At this stage of my thinking, that’s suspicious, too. Do you want the full details now of each incident?”

  Rob shook his head. Howard Anson looked ready to reel off facts for a few hours from that bottomless memory. “Just boil it down to the essentials. I’ll be leaving for Atlantis again in a few hours, and all I really need is enough to guide me on what I ought to look for while I’m there. I can’t follow anything back on Earth for a while. What’s the bottom line?”

  “There is no bottom line. We’re dealing in a whole mass of conjectures, which I’ll try to put into some kind of logical framework. First of all, there have been no reports anywhere of live Goblins. Zero. In the cases I found, as well as the ones your parents were involved in, the Goblins were dead before anybody saw them. I got scraps of physical description which seem to build up a picture, but it’s an inconsistent one. There seem to be two different types of Goblins. I tried to get drawings made, but that was really hopeless. Nothing was easy. One of my supposed witnesses is senile, one was in the last stages of taliza collapse, and one of them was a half-wit to begin with. Here’s what we got after we put it all together. I did a summary sheet in case you want to record it there.”

  Anson held a sheet up to the screen and waited for a few seconds while Rob activated the Record mode long enough to make a hard-copy facsimile.

  “There are three things that I think we have to note about them,” Anson went on, when the copy was recorded out at the comlink in L-4. “First, look at their size. They are no more than a quarter of the height of a man, but they’re broad in proportion. They’ll weigh about five or six kilos, according to my best estimate. That fits in with the idea that they reached your parents in a medical supply box. They are not much bigger than babies. But they’re not children, according to these reports. The females have breasts, and one of the males had a beard. There seems to be good agreement on that, and all the witnesses noticed it — just shows you what people see first. Though I’m not sure you can really call my sources `witnesses,’ because what they told us was pretty random.”

  “Hold it a moment.” Rob was scribbling a note on a sheet in front of him. “Do you have any information about what they were wearing? We could be dealing with human midgets, or some completely different form.”

  “I tried that idea, too. The Goblins were naked, though the senile man we contacted was muttering something about a bracelet or a necklace that they all had. That was my second point. They couldn’t just be human midgets, judging from their appearance. A couple of them would pass for that, they were normal looking, but others were described as hideous and misshapen — mind you, the taliza addict we talked to was seeing trees full of snakes last time I met him, so you can take his evidence any way you choose. There’s no doubt they were adults, though, because of the breasts on the females. And they all had pubic hair, everybody agreed on that. I feel sure we have to be dealing with two separate types of Goblins.”

  He paused. Rob looked at the screen expectantly. “Is that all?” he said after a few more seconds.

  “All.” Anson glared pop-eyed at the screen. “Do you have any idea how much work went into finding out what I just told you? We screened over four hundred thousand reports, everything from the crazy columns of the news to the records of mental hospitals. You may not think it’s much, but you ought to see what we started with.”

  “I’m not putting you down, Howard. But you said at the beginning that there were three things I should look at. So far, you’ve only given me two.”

  “I was getting there, if you’d give me time. The other thing isn’t about the Goblins themselves, it’s my feeling about the quality of the information. I always try and tie an index to it. In one word, dreadful. I already told you what my data sources were like when we interviewed them. I didn’t tell you how old those reports were. One of them came from seventeen years ago, the other from five years ago. The only reason I’m willing to give them any credibility at all is because they are consistent with each other. There’s no way the two sets of people involved could have known anything about each other. Both sets of Goblins showed up on Earth, but on different continents. One set appeared in a medical supply house, the other in an old book warehouse.”

  “Was either place anywhere close to a spaceport?”

  “I had that thought, too. If it’s tied to Morel, and if Morel has been away on Atlantis all these years, then the Goblins ought to have come from off-Earth. It doesn’t help. The places were near enough to spaceports, but we couldn’t draw any correlation. We couldn’t track them back past the point where they were actually found, in either case.”

  Rob was sitting, shoulders hunched, studying the sheet that Howard Anson had transmitted to him. “I was hoping you might have found something on the cause of death. Something must have killed them.”

  “Nothing new. You heard what Senta said about lack of air in the supply capsule. It could have been lack of oxygen in all cases. I assume there was no obvious sign of violence, or we’d probably have heard at least one report on that.”

  “I still can’t get past my basic question, Howard. Are we dealing with something that’s human? I have a strange thought running around in the back of my head.”

  “They certainly looked more human than anything else, if you believe the reports we dug up. What are you getting at? Do you think they are some kind of animals?”

  “Not quite that, either. I don’t know about your background, Howard, but where I grew up there are no bearded people forty centimeters high. I haven’t run across anything like that since my aunt told me fairy stories. But I can’t help thinking of some of the things you told me about Morel, back when he was in college. Even before he had Caliban, he was working on the big cephalopods, right?”

  “He was studying their brain structure, that’s true enough. He was interested in the fact that they have an optic chiasma, the same as the higher vertebrates. No other mollusk has anything like that. It’s supposed to be one of the signs that they are smart. It means that each eye is coupled into both brain hemispheres, so the brain itself must have a more complicated structure.”

  “I don’t remember you telling me that. What I remember is Morel’s experimental work. Didn’t you tell me that he was trying to make them smarter by playing games with genetic crosses?”

  “That’s right.” Anson leaned back in his chair, plucking absently at a loose thread on the lapel of the dressing-gown. “I see where you’re going, Rob, and I don’t like the sound of it. Morel was doing coupling experiments with vertebrate and invertebrate DNA, until he was stopped because the university decided it was too expensive. You think he started again, doing more crosses? That would make the Goblins some sort of cross-species breed.” He shook his head. “I will bet you some fairly big money that what you suggest is genetically impossible.”

  Rob’s face was perplexed, and he rubbed at his eyes. “Then to hell with it. I was afraid you’d say that. I don’t think it’s possible, either. But I must find some way of understanding what the Goblins are. Did you find out more about their
other names, the ones that Senta used?”

  “No progress there. No mention of `Expies’ or `Minnies’ — no names at all, in fact. I’ll keep looking, Rob, but I’m at the end of the rope. I need more inputs, or some other kind of break. Do you think there’s anything to help us out on Atlantis?”

  “I’m sure of it.” Rob was silent for a moment, recalling the interior structure of the asteroid. “There’s a locked part of the labs, a piece of the central living sphere. I told you how edgy Morel got when I went near it. I’ll see if I can find an opportunity to look there on this trip, and I’ll send it to you as soon as I’m back here. I daren’t risk sensitive messages from there, though, not even scrambled ones.”

  “How long before you’ll be able to call me again?”

  “That depends what Regulo has come up with out there. It may be as long as a couple of weeks. While I’m gone, would you look at a couple of other things? Find some background on Sala Keino. I know he’s Regulo’s expert on space structures, but I’d like to find out what his personality is like.”

  “I’ll try. Any special questions you want answered?”

  “Just one. I’d like to know how much interest he has in money.”

  “Hm. You don’t bother with the easy ones, do you, Rob?” Anson rubbed again at his chin. “I don’t know if I could answer that question about myself, still less for Keino. Are you thinking of trying to bribe him?”

  “No. I want to know how much Regulo controls his actions. I’ve never met the man.” Rob leaned towards the screen. “Howard, I’m running out of time. One other thing. Did you make any progress finding out how Senta got hooked on taliza?”

  “Not yet. She has no idea of it herself. I’m beginning to think she has been an addict for a very long time — much longer than the twelve years that she remembers. I suspect somebody was playing games with her memory on this, blocking it the way they have for the Goblins.”

  “Morel?” Rob saw Anson’s look. “I know we don’t have any evidence. But she’s scared of him — and I don’t like him, either.”