Morel did not panic. Lifting the laser he used it to sever the two arms that held him, close to the point where they entered the room. Then he stood his ground, flushed with rage and excitement, and glared at the giant figure of Caliban hovering outside the window. The pressure difference between the air and water was very slight, and the surface between them was bulging slowly to a smooth convex meniscus. Rob cowered against the far wall, mesmerized by those tremendous tentacles. Each one was thicker than his waist. The two severed arms, convulsing with muscle spasms, spouted blue-green blood across the floor of the room.
“Get back.” Morel’s voice was triumphant. He trained the laser on Caliban as the squid threshed the water. “Back! To the outer rim — or I’ll burn all your arms off.”
The squid did not retreat. Morel reached into his pocket and pulled out the slim black communicator. He pressed a button on its side. “Get back, I say. Or I’ll give you a real lesson in what pain can be.”
It was not clear to Rob how much Caliban understood of the situation, but at the sight of the communicator the squid withdrew its third questing tentacle into the aquasphere. It was still hovering outside the window when Rob stood up by the wall, reached for the dimmer control, and turned the lights of the room completely off.
There was a moment of total darkness, then a ruby flash and the sputter of melting metal as the surgical laser discharged against the wall close to Rob. He felt droplets of molten aluminum and steel spatter his exposed arms and face. Dropping to the floor, he began to crawl towards the door. Over by the window there was a sudden grunt of pain or shock from Morel and the laser beam spun crazily from floor to ceiling. The heavy cylinder itself crashed into the wall, just a foot above Rob’s head. He felt for it and wedged it under his right arm, at the same time as he reached for the dimmer control by the door.
The lights brightened to show Morel, one tentacle around his neck and another about his hips, being pulled steadily toward the aquasphere. He still held the communicator and was keying in a sequence of command signals. Outside the window, Caliban was shuddering and convulsing, his skin a deep purple-red. But he was still dragging the man towards him. Morel was in the water, closer to the savage black beak.
Rob raised the laser and pointed it at Caliban. Before he could take accurate aim, the squid suddenly discharged its ink-sac. The aquasphere became a swirling sepia maelstrom, dark and impenetrable. Rob heard a bubbling scream. Somewhere within the dark cloud, Joseph Morel and his creation were in final combat.
Rob’s horrified trance was broken by the sight of another long tentacle groping its way out of the blackened water. Dropping the laser he dragged himself through the door, slid the metal barrier into position, and threw all the heavy outside bolts. Only when the last one was in position did he lie down by it, unmoving for several minutes.
When he at last stood up and glanced at his watch, he saw that almost five hours had passed since he set out to explore the secrets of Morel’s laboratory. Regulo would be in his study, waiting for Rob and busy with the final preparations for the mining of Lutetia.
Rob, dizzy with emotion and fatigue, staggered back toward the main living quarters.
CHAPTER 16: “Then I saw that there was a way to Hell, even from the Gates of Heaven”
By the time that Rob reached Regulo’s study, his left arm had begun to throb with pain. An impossible pain. With electrical power for all the sensory feeds switched off, there was no way for signals to pass from his mutilated hand. Rob told himself that, even as he gritted his teeth against the waves of agony that came pulsing up his arm. He staggered into the study and dropped into the chair by the big desk.
Regulo was sitting opposite. And Corrie was with him.
Corrie? What was she doing here? Had she told him that she might be going to Atlantis, when they last met? He could not remember. He was having trouble thinking at all.
She had jumped to her feet. Now she was coming around to touch his ruined left hand. He jerked it away from her, flinching at the pain of the contact.
“Rob!”
“Don’t touch my hand!”
“But what’s happened to you?” She was staring at his clothes and face.
Rob guessed that he was quite a sight. His clothes were splashed with water and the sepia discharge of Caliban’s ink-sac, and his face and arms were stinging with a red rash of small burns where the laser had spattered drops of boiling metal from the wall.
“I’ve been over in the labs.” With a big effort he sat upright. “Caliban got Morel. Can you switch in a display to see what happened?”
“Morel?” Regulo spoke for the first time. “What do you mean, Caliban got him? There’s no way that Joseph would ever go near the aquasphere.”
“Through the window. He got him through the window.” Rob lay back in the chair. “Corrie, can you find a spray injector and give me a shot of local anesthetic in my left arm? I won’t be able to talk straight unless you can kill the pain.”
“I’ll get a med-kit.” She looked with horror at the jagged ends of his prosthetic hand. “What have you been doing to yourself?”
Without waiting for an answer she hurried out of the room. Rob felt himself sliding down again in his seat. He felt weighted, bound by the tiny gravity of Atlantis. He watched mindlessly as Regulo ran his thin fingers over the display control panel. A succession of images from the aquasphere raced across the big screen, steadying at one that looked back at the living-sphere. Rob saw the gaping opening of the missing window, the lights within the chamber still blazing brightly. Floating in front of the window hung the mangled body of Joseph Morel, limbs, neck and torso impossibly twisted. The final contest was over. The winner had disappeared, gone to nurse his own wounds in the depths of the aquasphere.
Regulo increased the magnification and zoomed in on the window, focusing on the room beyond.
“Is that door sealed? If not, we’d better close other locks nearer to this area.”
“It’s sealed.” Rob winced as Corrie came back in and pressed a spray injector to his aching arm. Within seconds, the pain began to fade. He sat up straighter. “I closed the locks before I left.”
“I’d better do one more thing.” Regulo keyed in another long sequence of control commands. “I’m going to halt the count-down for the tapping of Lutetia. We’ll have to postpone it now, with your injury and the accident to Morel. I don’t understand what happened there. I know we built ample strength into those panels. Did Caliban manage to break through the window?”
Rob stared at the display screen again, where an image of the glowing ball of the molten asteroid now hung steady. While he had been in the labs they had moved much closer. Lutetia seemed within hands’ reach, it must be just a few kilometers away from them. Atlantis was positioned directly above the pole of the rotating sphere. Rob could see the black form of the Spider, crouched on Lutetia’s axis of rotation.
“Caliban didn’t break the window,” he said at last. He shook his head. Now the injection was working there was room for other thoughts than pain. He took a deep breath and looked straight at Regulo.
“I did it. I took out the bolts that held the window panel in position. I had to do it. Morel had me trapped inside that room. He was going to kill me.”
“Rob, you’ve been working too hard.” Regulo sat back in his chair, his voice full of disbelief. “Joseph wouldn’t try to kill you. Why should he? You only met each other half a dozen times.”
Rob glanced at Corrie. She fixed her eyes on him and shook her head. “I have to agree with Regulo. I never cared for Joseph Morel, you know that. But he wouldn’t try to kill you. What possible reason could he have?”
“Because of what I found out about him, over there in his secret lab. Because of what he has been doing. He surprised me a few hours ago while I was looking around there. After that, he had to keep me quiet. The only one sure way was to kill me.”
Regulo was still sitting at the control panel, his fingers running pattern
s over the keys and switches. “You’re wrong, Rob,” he said softly. “Morel has run that lab for twenty years and more, ever since we first moved to Atlantis. He has never caused the slightest trouble — just the opposite. If you look at the work he has done there, you’ll find it has won him dozens of medical honors. He pioneered the treatment for four or five tough biological problems.”
“I believe that. But how often have you been over there yourself, you or Corrie?”
“I can’t speak for Cornelia, but I’ve never been there. Joseph liked to do his work in privacy. I can understand the need for that.”
“Then you can’t be sure of what you’re saying, about what he was doing there.” Rob walked over to the desk. He stared into Regulo’s eyes. “Morel was breeding Goblins in that lab. Would you like me to tell you what Goblins are?”
Regulo stopped his manipulations of the control panel and sat perfectly still.
“Goblins?” he said at last. “I never heard Joseph or anybody else talk about Goblins. What are you trying to tell me?”
“Goblins is just my name for them, a name that my parents used. Morel caused their death, and if it hadn’t been for Caliban he would have been the cause of mine — and for the same reason. Gregor and Julia Merlin, my father and mother, had an opportunity to observe two of the Goblins. They knew what they were, understood what caused them. Morel couldn’t afford to let them tell that to anybody, so he arranged for their deaths. He killed my father in a fake lab fire, and my mother in a sabotaged aircraft accident. Dozens of innocent people died with her. And he brain-wiped Senta Plessey, when she somehow found out about the murders and the Goblins. He didn’t call them Goblins, he called them Expies, for Experimentals; but they are the same thing.”
“Rob, you’re delirious. You still haven’t told us what these Goblins are. And what the devil does it matter what Morel called them?” Regulo sounded solicitous but exasperated.
Delirious? Maybe Regulo was right. But so was Rob. “The Goblins are tiny people,” he said, “less than half a meter tall and just a few kilos in weight. When I first heard of them, I thought they couldn’t be human, they had to be some other species. I was wrong. They are human, as human as we are. Do you remember what Joseph Morel was doing before he came to work for you?”
“Of course I do.” Regulo sounded puzzled. “He was working on rejuvenation and life prolongation. That’s the whole reason why I hired him. I wanted him to work on the same things, for me. Surely you know that with the disease I have, the usual rejuvenation treatments don’t work at all.”
“I was told that. My parents were working on rejuvenation, too, at the Antigeria Labs in New Zealand. Morel used to exchange reports and results with them, and I’m sure they sometimes exchanged supplies as well. That’s how the original Goblins got to New Zealand, in a sealed medical supply box.”
“Are you trying to tell me that Morel shipped two of these `Goblins’ over to your parents in a box?” The skepticism in Regulo’s voice had increased.
“Of course not. Not intentionally. Morel probably thought he was shipping medication, or equipment. He didn’t realize what had happened until too late. By the time he found out, the Goblins were already down on Earth. But they were dead on arrival. They had stowed themselves away inside the box, not knowing that cargo holds aren’t pressurized. The Goblins died out in space, long before they got anywhere near Earth.”
“But why would these little people of yours want to get to the Antigeria Labs?” Corrie had moved to Rob’s side and was listening intently.
“They didn’t have anything that specific in mind. They had no idea where they were going. All they cared about was escaping from here. It was an accident that they came to that particular lab. Not a very improbable accident, because my parents ran one of the few groups that exchanged materials and information regularly with Morel. But from his point of view, the Antigeria Labs were about the worst place in the world for the Goblins to have landed. You see, my father recognized the Goblins. Or rather, he recognized their condition.” He paused, looking from Regulo to Corrie and back again. “Did either of you ever hear of something called progeria?”
Corrie shook her head. After a few seconds of silence, Regulo shrugged his thin shoulders. “I can make a guess as to what it means. It ought to be the opposite of antigeria, so I suppose it has something to do with increasing the rate of aging.”
“It’s more specific than that.” Rob took a slow, shallow breath. Now that the pain in his hand and arm had eased, it took an enormous effort to speak or listen. “There is a very rare natural disease called progeria, affecting one child in hundreds of millions. An infant who has the disease will reach sexual maturity a few months after birth. It will be fully developed — but still tiny — at one or two years old. At six or seven, it will die of senility. That’s natural progeria, well-known in the medical record books. It’s induced by a genetic defect, and it shows up as a malfunction of the glandular system. If it’s diagnosed early — that means within a couple of months of birth — it can be treated successfully. The patient can go on and live a normal life span, so long as the drugs remain available.”
Rob looked up at the display screen. Lutetia was looming still larger as Atlantis continued to narrow the distance between the two bodies. He turned his gaze back to Regulo.
“Morel had studied that disease,” he said wearily. “There’s no surprise in that. If you want to study the aging process, you look at anything that advances or retards it. But Morel went further. At some point in his studies, he came across a method that would let him do more than just understand progeria. He found a way to induce it.”
“You mean create it, in normal people?” asked Corrie.
Rob nodded. “With drugs, or surgery, or maybe a mixture of both, he could induce progeria. He could develop an infant that would mature, reproduce, and die in just a few years. That’s what the Goblins are. A colony of humans, all suffering from induced progeria. They never grow to more than a quarter of normal height, and they are only a tenth of our weight. And they die in a few years. Morel was breeding them, over in that lab.”
“Hold on now.” Regulo pushed his chair back from the desk and stared. “If you’re serious about all this — and I must say it’s not easy to believe any of it — then your `Goblins’ don’t make sense. Supposedly they are just a few years old. Not only that, if they’re as small as you say they don’t have anything like the brain capacity of an adult. They wouldn’t begin to know how to escape from Atlantis. But you are telling us that some did escape. How could they possibly know enough to do that?”
“They had help.” Rob’s arm was starting to throb again. It felt like the only thing keeping him awake. “They are just a few years old, and you are quite right about the smaller cranial capacity. Worse than that, they should never have known about a world outside the labs. And they wouldn’t have, except for one other factor: Caliban. I saw him once at the lab window. He can communicate with the Goblins, enough to tell them about the rest of the world. I’m sure that he was the instrument that helped a few of them to get away from here.”
“Caliban!” Regulo’s expression was as always unreadable, but his voice was thoughtful. He leaned farther back in his chair. “Why would Caliban do something like that?”
“I won’t pretend that I understand his motives, but he and the Goblins have one thing in common. They both had reasons to fear and hate Joseph Morel. So Caliban helped some of them get away. The trouble was, Caliban’s own views of the world outside Atlantis are pretty strange. He could tell them how to stow away, but apparently he didn’t realize that they might die from lack of oxygen on the journey. He finally learned that, just recently, and he came up with a different idea. He helped some of the Goblins to stow away on a space pod with a Mischener Drive. It had oxygen, and it had supplies, too. With any luck, the Goblins should have come through alive in a place where people could help them.”
“But you think that they didn’t?�
� Regulo was rubbing at his scarred chin.
“I know they didn’t. The pod made it to the Moon, but they were dead when it got there.”
“So how did you find out all this?” Corrie was very close to Rob, reloading the spray injector. “And what about progeria? Where did you find that out? You’re not a biologist.”
“I had help, too.” Rob rubbed his right hand gingerly along his aching left forearm. The pain was increasing again, and Corrie could probably see it in his face. “I got most of this information from a source back on Earth. The thing I couldn’t find out there was the reason for the whole thing. To understand that, I had to return here.” He looked back to Regulo. “The Goblins were launched from Atlantis — an unauthorized launch, but one that was flagged in the system monitors. Then they died on the way to the Earth-Moon system. They ran into an acceleration too big for them to endure.”
“From a Mischener Drive ?” Regulo had begun to play with the control keys on the desk in front of him. He glanced up at Rob. “You know better than that. The Mischeners can’t go better than half a gee. Are you saying your Goblins can’t stand that much?”
“I don’t know what they can stand. But they were given about thirty or forty gee, enough to kill any of us. And they didn’t get it from the Mischeners.”
“From what, then? You know the regulations on drive accelerations. There’s not a thing in the System that can give forty gees.”
“That’s what I told Howard Anson.” Rob watched Regulo closely. He saw no reaction to Anson’s name. “But then I realized I was wrong. On my way out here from Earth I decided that there is a way to get that acceleration, one that doesn’t depend on tampering with a ship’s drive. And it’s one that would appeal to Darius Regulo more than anyone else.”
The Web Between the Worlds Page 24
