“I agree with that.” Rob looked at Darius Regulo, his face showing his doubt. “But do you believe that you can change the system? I’m skeptical.”
“You can’t change it down there,” Regulo said impatiently. “The pattern on Earth is fixed. But there’s plenty to be done in the System, and most of it isn’t on Earth. It’s out in the Belt and beyond. That’s where the action is. That’s where there’s a chance to break the old way of doing things. If Morton is right, the Halo ought to be full of power kernels. With enough available energy you can do almost anything. A few more generations, and all the top engineers will be working out past Pluto. We can be at the beginning of that, with a head start on everybody in the System.”
There was an edge of passion — almost a religious fervor — in the harsh voice. It made Rob feel uncomfortable. He felt an obsessive power in Regulo that went beyond Rob’s own limits.
“I’ve seen Morton’s analysis,” he said. “It’s an impressive piece of work. The move outward is your prediction, too?”
“Mine, and Caliban’s.” Regulo glanced over to the camera set in the opposite wall of the study. “I don’t go along with all his analyses, as you know, but I can’t argue with him on this one. I base my conclusions on engineering. Lord knows where his come from.”
Rob had followed the quick look. “Is that camera transmitting to him now, out there in the aquasphere?”
“All the time. There are inputs going to him from all over Atlantis — from everywhere in the System. We argue about the kind of logic that he uses, but whatever it is he can’t draw conclusions without input data. Sycorax stores the ones that come in as parallel data streams, and Caliban takes them when he can. He’ll be busy there for the next four or five hours, absorbing the new data that came in with your ship.”
Regulo glanced idly at the wall clock as he was speaking, then brought his full attention to it. “We’d better move on and look at the beanstalk. Do you know how long this chat has taken? That’s your trouble, Merlin — you talk about the things that really interest me.”
He started to stand up, then gasped and grabbed at the front of the desk. His face went white with pain. Rob moved quickly around the desk and took him by the arm.
“Can I help?”
Regulo nodded. “Call Morel,” he said through clenched teeth. “Tell him I’ll be over in a few minutes for some more of his damned injections.”
He slowly straightened in the chair. “I sometimes wonder if that man is killing me or curing me. Help me stand up. I’ll have to postpone talking about the beanstalk until I’m in better shape.” His forehead was beaded with perspiration, but his voice was firmly controlled. “This session with Morel will take three or four hours. He won’t let me rush it. If I do, we have to start the whole thing over — I learned that the hard way. We’ll have to postpone our meeting until after the sleep period.”
He moved out from behind the desk, waving away Rob’s proffered hand, and steadied himself against the wall.
“And tell Cornelia that I need to see her, too, will you, as soon as I’m through with Morel. She ought to be over in the recreation area.” He managed to smile, though there was little humor in it. “You may not believe this, but there was a time when I could beat her in a swimming race. That was a long while ago, though.”
He eased himself out through the door, while Rob picked up the comlink and passed on Regulo’s brief messages. Neither Morel nor Corrie replied to the signal, and he left both messages for automatic repeat. Then he looked at his own watch. It would be five hours to the next meal, three or four before Morel and Regulo came back from the clinic. With Caliban occupied on new data inputs, this ought to be the best possible time.
Moving quickly, Rob left the study and headed for the outer perimeter of the central living-sphere. Corrie would be in the recreation area, hard at work on her conditioning exercises. He didn’t make the turn in that direction. Instead, he doubled back towards the other side of the sphere, to the point where the industrial plant and maintenance services were all located.
Two or three quick trips towards Morel’s locked laboratory had convinced Rob that security was tight. The lab was locked, all the time, and somewhere there must be a monitor that warned Morel whenever anyone approached the door with the red seal. Rob had tried from all directions, but he had been unable to find any other path that might lead to the lab interior. Logic also said that no such path would exist, or Morel’s security precautions would be meaningless.
Rob had been able to think of only one other possibility, one way to satisfy his steadily increasing curiosity and his conviction that the lab held some deep secret.
The lab lay in the outer segment of the living-sphere. One of its walls must form a partition that separated the human living area from the aquasphere. Rob’s first assumption had been the natural one: the partition would be no more than a blank wall. Then he had observed that Caliban often took up a position close to the area of the living quarters that housed the lab; in fact, it was observation of the squid that had first drawn Rob to the lab area. It seemed hard to believe that Caliban would go there, unless there was something more than a blank wall facing outward to the aquasphere. There must be a display screen or a window in the lab wall. Investigation of that could not be done from the interior living quarters.
After a few hours of investigation, Rob had ruled out the possibility that he would be able to see anything useful from outside Atlantis, or from the main entry shafts that led through to the central sphere. The range of visibility, even through the clear water of Atlantis, was at best a hundred and fifty meters. Any inspection would have to be done from the aquasphere itself.
When his train of thought took him that far, Rob was at first inclined to follow it no further. There must be entry points to the aquasphere from the inner sphere, that much he knew. They were used when the food for Regulo’s table was caught or collected. But even if he could find a way into the aquasphere, and also find suitable underwater equipment, he still had not tackled the main difficulty: Regulo did not rule that domain. It belonged to Caliban. Morel could bind the great beast to inactivity when someone was in the aquasphere for food collection, but he would not do that for Rob’s benefit. More likely he would stir Caliban to action.
Rob watched and waited, increasingly impatient and curious. Finally he found the extra fact that he needed. When new data were available for Caliban from anywhere off-Atlantis, it would be displayed on screens for the animal’s viewing. In such cases, the squid would not leave that area until the presentation of data was complete. Apparently Caliban’s curiosity about the world outside Atlantis was not easily sated. Rob wondered how much the huge animal understood of its own unique existence.
He had checked the data that he had brought in with him, and agreed with Regulo’s assessment. Caliban ought to be fully occupied for at least four hours, digesting everything on the viewtapes and data disks. Ample time for Rob’s needs.
The suits for moving about in the water-filled interior of Atlantis were of a standard design, familiar to Rob from undersea construction projects back on Earth. They held enough oxygen for about two and a half hours of use. He carried one with him to the main entry point to the aquasphere, close to the main industrial plant where heating, light and power were controlled, and carefully looked about him. No maintenance staff were in sight. As he slipped into the suit, Rob cursed his own negligence. He had not been exercising his hands adequately since leaving Earth, and his clumsiness with the suit fastenings pointed that out to him. Fully suited at last, he went out through the lock and on into the dim, green world outside the central sphere.
It took a few seconds to orient himself correctly. The water temperature was lower than he had expected, but not enough to cause real discomfort. At this depth there was little diffused sunlight. Any heat here must come from the thermal source that the central living sphere provided, or from the illumination of the arrays of lights. They hung on the spaced lat
tice-work that filled the water-sphere, and they offered adequate light for Rob to navigate by.
He surveyed the scene about him. The original water of Atlantis may have been very pure, but now it was filled with the detritus of organic matter left by dead plants and animals, and with the nutrients circulated by the re-cycling system of the central living area. Visibility was down to about eighty meters, all through a green, clouded haze. Beyond that, the lights became dim globes of turquoise, soft and unreal.
Rob began to swim steadily through the quiet water, keeping the wall of the sphere close to his left hand. He followed the equatorial zone of the living area, avoiding window panels and keeping his eyes always looking outward into the green gloom. Vegetation grew in profusion from every point of the internal grid, breaking and diffusing the white light at its center. Every thirty meters, a long, clear avenue ran out towards the surface of Atlantis, four or five meters wide and free of all plant growth.
Rob paused and looked out along one of these. The vegetation seemed to have been neatly trimmed, or eaten away. His first thought was of Caliban. Then he recalled, with no comfort at all, that the great cephalopod was purely carnivorous. What he was seeing in the cleared avenues must be the effects of systematic crop farming, carried out by the army of complicated robo-servers who handled most of the maintenance for Atlantis.
Rob halted briefly when he reached the window of the dining-room where he had first seen Caliban. He was about halfway to the area of the living-sphere where the sealed lab was located. He looked at his watch. Almost an hour had gone by since Regulo had left for his appointment with Morel. Not fast enough. Increasing his pace, Rob swam on around the sphere and came a few minutes later to another window area. Keeping all but his head shielded by the metal walls, he looked cautiously in. This was the room with the sealed metal door, guarding the entrance to the lab. Rob turned and stared about him through the gloom. His heart began to pump harder when he thought for a moment that he could see a big, moving shape at the limit of his vision. After a few tense seconds, he realized that it was no more than the shadow of a long frond of weed, moving sluggishly in the thermal currents that transported nutrient supplies around the interior of Atlantis. He swam along to the next window area, and allowed himself to drift along until he could see within.
At first, he felt disappointed. It was a room that he had not seen before, large and dimly lit, but there was no one inside. The numerous tables and benches occupying the interior space seemed to support Morel’s assertion that this was no more than a standard bio-lab, unusual only in that it contained the best equipment that could be bought anywhere. At the far end was a complete surgery, with the fittings for major operations and automated anesthesia, and over by one wall was a full analytical lab. It was while Rob was peering in at that, his face mask pressed close to the transparent plastic surface, that he caught a flicker of movement through the open door that stood at the very end of the lab. He quickly drew back out of sight, then slowly returned to peer in over the edge of the window area.
The door at the end of the lab was less than a meter wide, in a room at least twenty-five meters long. It offered a narrow and tantalizing view of the area beyond. Rob cursed his lack of forethought. What he needed was a scope, to give him a close-up view of the other room. He hadn’t seen such an instrument on Atlantis, but there must be several of them. They were the most convenient way of taking a good look at the interior of the aquasphere without entering the water.
Rob pressed closer to the window. After a few seconds, something again moved across the doorway. It went swiftly, offering Rob no more than a fleeting look. That was enough. He had seen a small, misshapen form, man-like but undoubtedly deformed. It was difficult to make an estimate of its true size, but the head reached no higher than a fourth of the height of the door opening. A moment later, a second and similar shape crossed the doorway in the other direction; then two more, moving together. After that there was nothing to be seen for several minutes.
Rob waited, completely absorbed in his desire to see past the door area to the room beyond. He had forgotten his earlier, nervous scanning of the aquasphere, and at the time there seemed no reason for his sudden turn to face outward from the window. Much later, he realized that he must have felt the pressure wave. As he turned, he at once saw the dark, streamlined shape of Caliban sweeping towards him at monstrous speed. The motion of the animal was completely silent, propelled by powerful jets of water emitted from the siphon at the end of the squid’s mantle.
It was too late to swim away again along the side of the living-sphere. Rob pushed off hard from the window, straightening his legs with all his strength and plunging into the nearest clump of floating vegetation. He cowered in its green shade, while Caliban seemed to deliberate as to whether or not to pursue the vanishing shape. In that long moment, Rob had time to wonder again about the squid’s preferred diet. Finally, Caliban moved on, towards the window that Rob had just left. The animal secured itself to the smooth surface with four of its long, suckered arms and began to rap against the window with a black, parrot-like beak. After a few seconds Rob saw a flicker of movement on the other side of the transparent panel. Caliban brought another pair of arms close to the surface of the living-sphere, and began to move them in strange, formal patterns against the clear plastic.
Rob was torn between two strong urges. Caution told him that he must leave at once, while the squid was preoccupied with the inside of the lab; but having come this far, Rob wanted to learn all that he could. Another glance at his watch made the decision for him. More than two hours had passed since he had put on the suit. Keeping as much as possible in the shelter of the lush water-weeds, Rob began to swim cautiously back towards the entry lock, drifting silently from one dense clump to the next. Before he was quite out of sight of Caliban, he paused and turned back for a last look.
The squid was still at the window, one great yellow eye turned to look inside. The other eye was facing roughly in Rob’s direction, but the regular waving of one pair of arms continued. Rob swam for another ten yards, then finally risked a dive towards the surface of the sphere. The curvature of the surface took him out of sight of Caliban, and he abandoned his cautious progress and plunged as fast as possible to the entry lock. He hurried through it, removed his suit with clumsy fingers, and at once began to make his way back to Regulo’s study.
He reached the door as Corrie was coming along the corridor from the opposite direction. She stared hard at his pale face and uncombed hair, but said only, “There you are. I’ve been wondering where you’d got to.”
“I went to have a look at the recycling and maintenance plant,” Rob said, as casually as he could manage. “I’ve been wondering how self-sufficient Atlantis would be with just an internal power supply. Did you get the message I left for you? Regulo wants you to meet with him, as soon as he’s through with Morel.”
“I just spoke with him. He thought you would have joined me in the recreation area. You’ve been over in maintenance all this time?”
Rob shrugged, deliberately off-hand in his manner. “I didn’t feel energetic. Exercise without scenery is boring. After Regulo left the study I took another look at the beanstalk geometry. We’re still playing games with it, making sure we have good stability. I don’t know how long that took, but when nobody came back here I went for a tour of the other side of the sphere.”
Corrie was giving him an odd look, but she did not question his statements. Where else did the camera in Regulo’s study send its images? Perhaps there were others, apart from Caliban and Sycorax, who could monitor activities. Rob slid open the door as Corrie moved past him along the corridor.
“I’m on my way now to meet with Regulo,” she said. “Will you be with him after dinner, for more work?”
“I think Regulo should take a rest. He was in bad shape earlier. I’ll try and hold him to what he said, and put off more work until after the sleep period.”
“Good luck with that.” C
orrie grimaced. “You know Regulo. He eats work.”
She left him, and Rob went back into the study. To his relief the camera in the wall was switched off. There must be an automatic control that activated the system only when there was sound or movement in the room. Rob moved to stand in front of the desk, and was relieved to see that the red light below the camera at once flickered on. He must be sure to tell Corrie that he had been sitting well away from the desk, out of view of the camera. Even so, Rob wondered just where those signals were being received in the rest of Atlantis.
CHAPTER 13: The Masters of Atlantis
The evening meal was an uncomfortable affair, despite the astonishing array of edible products that Regulo had again conjured from the sea-gardens of Atlantis.
Rob knew that his own sensitivity to the atmosphere in the big dining-room was unusually heightened. He needed evidence that his trip through the aquasphere had gone unobserved. Even making allowance for that, he felt that he could sense quick looks of anger from Morel, directed towards him whenever his attention was diverted elsewhere. There was an unpleasant tension between the two men. Regulo was clearly suffering from the after-effects of Morel’s treatment — his “regular dose of poison,” as he put it — and did not have the energy to lead the free-ranging speculation that usually marked meals on Atlantis. And Corrie, for whatever reason, would meet no one’s eye. She sat, aloof and monosyllabic, and showed no appetite for her food.
It came as a relief when Regulo suggested that Corrie should take Rob up to the outer surface of Atlantis and show him the little asteroid, sitting all ready for the mining operations that were scheduled to begin in a few hours time.
“I don’t have the strength for a look at it myself,” he said. “But there’s always the chance that you will see something directly that doesn’t show on a holoscreen. You ought to put your head on that problem, Merlin — the holoscreen is supposed to carry all the amplitude and phase information for a reconstruction in here that’s good enough to fool the human eye, but somewhere along the line there’s an information loss.”
The Web Between the Worlds Page 19
