The Web Between the Worlds

CHAPTER 9: “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain”

“Well, at first sight it doesn’t look like we have much that’s new.” Howard Anson, lean and elegant, was draped lazily over the back of a tall chair. As usual, he appeared to have come straight from some expensive personal grooming service. “Summing it up, you like Regulo, you like Corrie even more, you don’t care at all for Morel, and you had an encounter with an overgrown oyster. I’m not sure what all that will produce from Senta.”

Rob, sitting on the sofa opposite, seemed pale and tired in the golden light of a Rome evening. His eyes were reddened, and there were dark circles under them. The journey back had been a rough one, with little sleep and much to do.

“Oyster be damned,” he said. “If you got one look at Caliban, you’d change your tune. I’ve got a lot of respect for that big squid. The brightest cephalopods are no closer to the oysters than you are to a duck-billed platypus.”

Anson grinned, unabashed. “Both mollusks, aren’t they?”

“They are, and that’s the end of the resemblance. Caliban’s big and he’s fierce. And I’m inclined to agree with Joseph Morel, much as I dislike the man. There’s intelligence inside that decapod’s head. You should have seen the way that he tried to get into the dining area and tackle Morel. I wonder what they had to do to Caliban, so that he could survive in fresh water? Nothing pleasant, that I’ll bet.”

“If you really want an answer to that question, I may be able to find out.” Anson, as usual, found it unnecessary to make any sort of notes. “It might be one reason why Caliban hates Morel. I found out a good deal more about the fellow after you left. That tie to your father looks like a weak one, though I did confirm that Joseph Morel and Gregor Merlin were students at the same time in Göttingen. They studied rejuvenation and life-prolongation techniques together for a couple of years. That’s the only personal connection, though they seem to have kept in touch professionally after Morel left Germany.”

Anson was examining Rob closely, his lazy eyes shrewd. “God, I must say you do look terrible. You’ve been pushing yourself too hard. I think we should wait another day before we try and work with Senta, so you can get back in shape.”

Rob shook his head firmly. “I can’t afford to do that. In a couple more days I have to be back in space. We’ve got the final design for the beanstalk all worked out, and the next step is fabrication plans up at L-4. There’s a tough year ahead with no time for slippages, otherwise the schedule that I promised Regulo won’t hold. I didn’t build in much slack, and what little there is we have to keep for production outages.”

“I don’t think it’s your promise to Regulo that’s doing it. You want to see the beanstalk yourself, that’s what’s driving you along. Driving you too hard, I’d say.”

Rob shrugged. He found it hard to disagree with Howard Anson. The period since they had last met had indeed been hectic, with the trip to Atlantis, then the plunge into beanstalk design. He had modified the Spider to operate in a free space environment, shipped a second version equipped for high-temperature extrusion back up to Regulo, for passage to Keino out in the Belt, and begun recruiting for the main project.

The results of his first calls had surprised him. A high percentage of his old work crews were willing to follow him off Earth and help on the beanstalk.

Then the surprise left him. Of course the others wanted in. Like Rob, they were taken with the sheer scope of the project. No one who liked to work on big construction efforts could resist the lure of a bridge hundreds of times longer than any that ever had been built on Earth. So what that it would be going straight up, rather than along the surface?

He had been able to get most of them to sign on with hardly a mention of money. And if Regulo’s plans for new asteroid mining included a role for Rob, there might be even bigger projects ahead for all of them, out in the Belt and off in the Outer System. Regulo’s enthusiasm for space projects seemed to be infectious.

“All right.” Anson stood up. “If you’re going to simply sit there and look vacant, I may as well get Senta. She’s waiting to see if we want to go ahead.”

“Sorry.” Rob shook his head and sat straighter. “I’m feeling tired, that’s all. It makes me drift off and think about other things. You were quite right in what you just said. I’ve been pushing myself. Regulo hasn’t said one word about schedules. I think I’m trying to convince myself that I’m as smart as he is. You said I like him, but you’d have been more accurate to say that I respect the man. His brain works differently from anyone else’s I ever met. You ought to listen to him when he gets going on engineering design work, it’s no wonder he got to the position he has. Did you know that he controls more than half the ships that move around the Inner and Middle Systems?”

“Sixty-eight and a half percent.” Anson sniffed. “You are tired, Rob, if you think I wouldn’t know that. I run an Information Service, remember? If it’s random facts that you want, I’m your man.” He paused over by the door, his hand on the slide. “I have one request. Go easy on Senta, will you? She made herself stay on the lowest dose she could bear for the past few weeks, so she could tolerate a really intense high when we wanted her to. Right now, she’s feeling awful fragile.”

Rob nodded. He had seen enough of taliza addiction to know what those words implied. Withholding the drug from her would be slow, continuous torture for Senta Plessey; yet she had been willing to endure that, just to let them pursue their questioning. It settled one point beyond doubt: Senta returned Howard Anson’s feelings for her.

Anson left the room. Rob sat with his own thoughts for some minutes. He was beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong when Anson re-entered, leading Senta by the hand. She was a different woman from the one Rob had met in the social whirl of Way Down. Her damask cheek looked withered, and the bright brown eyes were dull and pained. Even her dark hair had lost its glossy sheen, hanging now in lifeless disorder about her downturned face.

As she came in she looked up at Rob, and forced a little smile. He went to her and took her hand in his. It felt cold and dry-skinned.

“Last time you saw me at my best — or worst,” she said. Her voice was husky and uncertain. “I don’t remember what you said to me, or what I did. It’s always like that when I come down again. Howard had to tell me what happened. Maybe this time I’ll be able to remember better. Afterwards.”

She spoke the final word like a threat of doom.

“Look.” Rob paused, still holding her hand. “Senta, I don’t know how to put this, but when you remember things under taliza-trance, is it painful for you?”

Senta did not look at him. She had turned and fixed her gaze on a small bottle of transparent fluid that Anson had taken from his pocket. The expression on her face made Rob shiver at the intensity of its yearning. Seeing that, he felt that no one who had seen a taliza addict could ever become one.

“Painful?” Senta’s voice was distant and uninterested. “That depends on what I remember. It is exactly as painful as the experience itself, no more and no less. How could it be anything other, since it is re-living? But this… this is more painful than memory.” Her voice faltered. “Howard, please don’t make me wait any longer.”

“Just a few more seconds, love.” Anson was pouring an ounce of liquid, carefully measured, onto a pad of clean cotton. He replaced the stopper, moved to Senta’s side and began to rub the pad steadily against her temples, first one side and then the other. After a pause of twenty seconds he repeated the action, watching Senta’s eyes.

She stood rigid and expressionless. Ten more seconds, and she sighed deeply. Her eyelids began to flutter in brief, spastic movements. Anson at once wrapped a dark cloth that he was holding around her brow, covering her eyes, and gently lowered her to sit on the sofa.

“Howard.” Rob spoke rapidly and softly, his eyes not moving from Senta’s face. “Do we have to do it like this? Isn’t there any other way to find out what we want to know from Senta, some way of just asking the right questions? If taliza can pull it out of her, she must have the information stored away somewhere.”

“I wish we could do it like that.” Anson was still watching Senta closely, apparently waiting for some key reaction. “But it’s not in her conscious mind at all, not now. I’ve asked her about it often enough when she’s not on the drug, and she can’t remember a thing. I don’t know if she was given a huge dose of Lethe and a spell of conditioning, or if she just rejected the memory herself because it was too painful to live with. The only thing we know for sure is that it’s buried deep. And we know that it’s there. When she is pulled into that experience during taliza-trance, it frightens her more than any other memory she has. Something is back there, something involving Morel and Merlin and Goblins.”

“I can see that memories of Joseph Morel might do that.” Rob was recalling the expression in Morel’s gray eyes as Regulo’s assistant fondled the communicator giving him control over Caliban. “He disturbs me, too. But doesn’t Senta—”

He broke off. Howard Anson was waving him urgently to silence. Senta had leaned forward and begun to breathe in rapid, shallow panting.

“A few more seconds,” Anson said softly. “She has the blindfold, so she won’t go off on some random visual trigger. Quiet now. The wrong words might push her off on some other memory track.”

He sat down on the sofa next to Senta, peering at her closely. Rob felt a shock of recognition. As he watched, Senta’s cheek was losing its shrunken look and taking on the bloom that he had seen at Way Down. Her full mouth was curving again into a faint, secret smile.

“Here I am, Howard,” she said. “I’m feeling good. Now, what game shall we play?”

She laughed, deep in her throat, and wriggled against the soft cushions of the sofa. Her look had become coquettish and full of explicit sexual promise. Anson gave Rob a quick, helpless glance, then bent forward close to Senta’s ear.

“Joseph Morel,” he said clearly. He paused after the name. “Gregor Merlin. Joseph Morel and Gregor Merlin. Say their names to me, Senta. Say them.”

Her look was blank, confused. “Joseph Morel. Gregor Merlin. Yes, I can say them. I’ve said them. But Howard, why do you…”

Her voice trailed away into silence. Once again, the parade of expressions was moving across her face: fear, joy, greed, compassion, lust. As her look stabilized, she bent her head to one side and nodded, then seemed to listen intently.

“Merlin… Merlin has them,” she said at last. She was looking up, a frown wrinkling her forehead and a look of worry and confusion on her face. “That’s right, Gregor Merlin. I just heard it from Joseph, over the video. He has no idea how they got there, but he’s convinced of their location in the labs.”

“Damnation.” Anson bit his lip and looked across at Rob. “I was afraid of that. It’s the same one that you heard before. There was a good chance of it, because I used almost the same key words. Now I’m afraid she’ll have to play it right through.”

Senta was listening to unseen companions, until at last she nodded firmly. “That’s right, there are two of them. No, they weren’t alive — there was no air in the supply capsule. I don’t know if Merlin knows where they came from, but he must have a good idea. He told McGill he had found two Goblins — that’s his name for them — in a returned medical supply box. He sent one of them to another man, Morrison, and now he’s going to try and do the full autopsy. He already knows what has been happening to them, but he won’t…”

Her face was changing, again becoming a melting-pot for all the human emotions. Before the change was complete, Howard Anson was leaning forward, ready to speak to her again. Rob put up his hand in protest.

“Don’t go on with it, Howard,” he cut in. “Didn’t you see her expression? She’s in absolute torment when she goes into that part of her past.”

“I know that, Rob.” Anson’s manner was full of pent-up anger. “I don’t enjoy this any more than you do. But we have to find it before we can exorcise it. We’re doing it for Senta’s sake. Now, keep quiet or we may apply the wrong trigger.”

He leaned forward again. “Senta, once more. Say these names after me. Morel, Merlin, Goblins, Caliban, Sycorax. Do you hear me? Say them, Senta.”

Even before he had finished speaking the reaction to the spoken trigger began. Her features began to writhe and grimace, a travesty of her usual beauty. As her face twisted into grotesque expressions, the veins in her neck stood out, swollen and congested. Her final look was one of mounting horror. For a second, her mouth opened and closed wordlessly.

“Killed?” she said at last. She began to rock back and forth on the sofa, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. “I don’t believe it. It can’t be true. You’re not serious, are you?” There was a pause, then: “Oh God. You do mean it. You’re insane, you must be. Do you realize what you’ve done? All those innocent people, dead. Why did you do it?”

There was a longer silence, while Rob and Howard Anson stared at each other. Rob could tell from Anson’s expression that this was not simply a repeat of a previously heard recall.

“I don’t care what they were doing,” Senta went on at last. “It makes no difference. It couldn’t be so bad that you had to kill them. Gregor Merlin was your friend, wasn’t he? You had known him for years, for the longest time.”

Anson flashed a look of fierce satisfaction and sympathy towards Rob, while Senta became once more the prisoner of those inner voices. After a few seconds, tears began to trickle from under the dark blindfold. She was shaking her head.

“It’s no good telling me that, Joseph,” she said. “I know you’re lying. Don’t try and pretend. I was watching the display. I heard the orders you gave, though I didn’t know what they meant. You said burn the building, and set the bomb.” She fell silent for a moment, then muttered again, almost too softly to hear, “Burn the building and set the bomb. But why? Why that? Nothing could be so important, nothing in the world. He said they were already dead when they got there, so they couldn’t have told anything, to him or his wife. I don’t understand what the `Goblins’ were, but it makes no difference.”

She paused again, then shook her head firmly. “No, I won’t. If you refuse to tell me the truth, I’ll find it out for myself. I’ll go to Christchurch, and I’ll visit the labs. Someone there will know.”

After a moment she leaned forward, listening intently. There was a silence, so long that Rob was convinced that Senta had moved to another phase of taliza-trance. He looked at Howard Anson and was opening his mouth to speak when the other man waved him urgently to silence. Senta gasped with a new emotion and put her hands to her eyes.

“God have mercy on you. You don’t seem to understand what you’ve told me. It’s inhuman. If you’re telling me the truth, I can’t stay here. I have to leave, I have to get away.” She was weeping openly, her words broken by deep, heaving sobs. “I can’t stay. You must go and tell them, explain what you’ve been doing. Tell them you didn’t know, tell them that you have been out of your mind. Somebody has to tell the truth. Surely you see there’s no way I can ever forgive this? It’s over.”

Once again she was silent, except for the ugly, choked sound of her sobbing. While Merlin and Anson waited, looking at each other bleakly, the tone changed. Little by little it became a harsh coughing, deep in her throat.

“She’s coming out of it.” Anson reached over to Senta and removed the blindfold. “She’ll need a few minutes to herself. Would you mind coming through into the next room.” He saw Rob’s look. “It’s all right, it’s safe to leave her alone now. She won’t want you to see her condition when she comes back all the way to the present. You go ahead, and let me do what I can for her. I’ll join you in a couple of minutes.”

Rob walked past Anson into the bedroom and closed the door. He went to the window and looked out across the pink and yellow face of the old city. It was almost sunset, a quiet, hushed time. He could hear the bells tolling vespers, far away across the array of rooftops. The evening service would be going on in the great structure two miles to the west, as they had for a thousand years. The air of the city was clear and calm.

And somewhere, somewhere far from Earth, the man roamed free who had murdered his parents; the man who had made Senta Plessey a shattered shell of a woman; the man who made it impossible for Rob to draw any pleasure from the scene before him.

He did not move. After a few minutes the door behind him opened and Howard Anson entered.

“She’ll be all right now,” he said. “I want her to lie down for a moment, then she will come and join us in here.” He took a deep breath. “No wonder she’s been so torn by this. That last session opened up more than I expected. I’ve been getting bad vibrations from the investigation we’ve been doing into your parents’ death, but nothing like Senta’s memories.”

Rob had not turned around. “Did you interpret all of that the same way as I did?” he asked quietly. His body seemed frozen, staring rigidly out across the face of the city. “It was murder. Murder for both of them. The fire in the lab, and the bomb in the aircraft — that very nearly got me, too. Another five minutes and I’d have been dead.” He looked down at his hands for a moment, reliving the months and years of operations. “And yet there has to be a lot more that we still haven’t heard.”

Anson nodded. “Much more. For one thing, we have no idea why it all happened. We don’t know who the Goblins were, we don’t know how they are related to Morel and Caliban. It sounded to me as though it was Morel who was responsible for the death of your parents, but we have no proof of that. We may be misinterpreting Senta’s words. I have a problem believing some of the things she said.” He rubbed morosely at his jaw. “We don’t have answers to any of this, and in some ways we have more questions than ever. I guess we have to keep digging.”

“I think you may have enough information already to help Senta. You know that she feels she has been directly involved in murders — and more than just my parents. There were a lot of other people on that aircraft. Can you use what you have to erase some of her painful memories? And maybe you can help me to delve deeper into these things, they involve me a lot more than Senta.”

Rob was beginning to understand the tie between Anson and the tormented woman in the next room. There was a mutual dependence that made simple physical attraction almost an irrelevance.

“We don’t want to involve Senta in this any more than she has been already,” he went on. “Tell me what you’ve turned up about Joseph Morel, and let me take it from there.”

“I might agree to that, for her sake. But Senta never would.” Anson turned abruptly from the window and went across to sit on the bed. “She’ll want to stay with this to the end, until she’s sure she has done everything she can to put things right. I’ll tell you all that I found out about Morel, but tying any of it to what we’ve heard from Senta just now is another matter. I can’t see the connection.”

He leaned back, head against the panelled wall, and closed his eyes. “All right, here goes. Let me try to summarize. Morel’s childhood and early career are no problem. Well-documented, and a pattern that I’ve seen a hundred times. I could show you many similar ones in our files. Strong father, pushing the child along hard from the time that he was one year old. Mother in the background, with no say in how Morel was raised. A prodigy in school, then on to the university when he was thirteen. Alienation there, from everything except his work — no wonder, a thirteen-year-old can’t make social contact with people five or six years older. So. No friends — not even your father, Rob. They were just fellow-students. As you might expect, Morel had a brilliant academic record. His first paper on longevity and rejuvenation was published before he was twenty — and it was a classic.”

Howard Anson opened his eyes again and looked at Rob. “Now for the part that’s different. With Morel’s development to this point, I would have bet money that I could have predicted the rest of it. He ought to have gone on to a career in university research, rising steadily through the ranks until he was a respected, senior authority. He would have always been a little withdrawn and reclusive, but that’s not unusual in a scientist. His friends would be other specialists in the same field of research, scattered all over the System.”

“But it’s obvious that it didn’t go like that.”

“Obviously. It might have, but another factor came along and broke the pattern. Morel met Darius Regulo.”

Anson paused as the door to his left opened and Senta entered. She was chalk-pale, even to her full lips, but her movements were steady and her mouth was firm. On impulse, Rob went over to her and took her hands in his. They were warm again, but not with the frenetic heat and tremor of the taliza high. She smiled at him, the first genuine smile that he had seen from her. It was Corrie’s smile. He realized how much the two women resembled each other, and wondered why he had not seen it at once.

“How are you feeling now?” he asked. “You shouldn’t have let us do that to you, just so I could take a look for a part of my own past.”

She shook her head, still smiling. “It’s my past, too, you know. I’m as curious as you are. Ever since I came out of it I’ve been sitting in there wondering what you found out. I’m hoping it was a lot, but I don’t remember a thing.” She licked her lips. “If we need more information, I’ll be willing to try again.”

“Not now.” Anson stepped towards her. “It would be too much for you, and I don’t think we should do anything more until we’ve looked into what we have now. You told us things that we had never heard before. Rob and I need to see where they lead, and that will take a while. But it doesn’t look pleasant.”

He gave Senta a summary of what they had heard from her while she was under the influence of the drug, quoting the words she had spoken verbatim — Rob envied him that remarkable memory. When he had finished Anson looked at Senta inquiringly.

She shook her head.

“I don’t have a conscious memory of any of it. So far as I’m concerned, it’s something I’m hearing for the first time. Thank God for small mercies. I wouldn’t want to live with that all the time. Something horrible happened back then, and it sounds as though Joseph Morel is a murderer.”

“You have no idea what he might have been trying to hide?” Rob asked. “I don’t like the man, but even he wouldn’t murder for no reason.”

“That’s logical, but I couldn’t begin to guess what he might be covering up.” Senta chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip, now returned to its natural full red. Her face was still pale, but a touch of color was creeping back into it. “Maybe he was trying to hide another murder. What are the two of you planning to do next?”

“I’ll try and follow up on this,” said Anson. “Rob is going to be off with the beanstalk, he can’t do much else for a while. It shouldn’t be rushed if we’re to do a thorough job. I suppose you could say it can wait a little longer, seeing how long it has waited already. But I don’t see it that way. I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but this thing may still be dangerous. If someone was willing to kill twenty-seven years ago to keep a secret, it’s more than likely they’d kill for the same reason now.”

“If it’s Morel, there’s no way he could hurt us here, when he’s on Atlantis.” Senta turned to Rob. “If you go back there, you must take care. He can’t know what we’ve found out, but he obviously knows that you are the son of Gregor Merlin.”

“I’ll take care, don’t worry about that. But don’t assume that you’re safe down here. There are ways that he could cause trouble even when he’s not present. People can be hired to do anything. Don’t take chances, and keep your eyes open.”

“I’ll be on the lookout, too,” Anson said. “I don’t know Morel, but I’ve been building up the picture of him and it’s not a good one. He’s very intelligent, and he has a lot of experience.”

“How old is he, anyway?” Rob recalled Morel’s expression of mingled innocence and experience.

“Sixty. He had one rejuvenation, but even so he looks younger than he ought. I think he must have been following his own techniques for life-prolongation. I saw his picture and placed him at thirty to thirty-five, but I’m quite sure of his age. I’ve seen copies of the birth record. He was twenty-three when Regulo came to see him for the first time. That was soon after he had refused a full professorship at Canberra. I don’t know what Regulo offered him, but it was enough. He went off to work in Regulo’s labs and he has been there ever since, continuously for the past thirty-seven years.”

“Working on rejuvenation?” asked Rob. “I don’t think so. That may have been where he started, but I know he’s doing other things on Atlantis. For one thing, he has Caliban.”

“Caliban.” Senta shuddered a little, as though a trace of taliza was still working within her. “That’s a name I haven’t thought about for a long time. When I first met Morel, that was all he would talk about. Caliban can do this, Caliban will do that. He has been working with that animal for many years. Even at the beginning, he said that he would make him do things that no squid had ever done before — he used to make him do tricks.”

“He still does that, and more,” said Rob. “You mean he had Caliban with him when he was here on Earth?”

Senta frowned, her dark brows drawn into a line over her wide-spaced eyes. “I find these things hard to remember. They seem vague, as though they happened to somebody else. I’m sure that he had Caliban then, but I don’t know if it was on Earth or off it. It was definitely thirty years ago, and that would make it three years before Regulo moved his operation away from Earth completely. So Morel must have been working with Caliban here, on Earth.”

“You mean that Regulo has been living in space for all that time — for the past twenty-seven years?” Rob’s face expressed his surprise. “I thought he had gone there much more recently, when he got old. That’s another thing I don’t understand. Morel is supposed to be a big expert on rejuvenation, one of the top authorities in the System. And Regulo is loaded with money, so expense isn’t an issue. Why hasn’t he had rejuvenation treatments? I know some people refuse them for religious reasons, but I doubt if that’s a factor with Regulo — his god is engineering. If that’s what he hired Morel for, why doesn’t he use him? And why does he go around with all the scar tissue on him, instead of using grafts and regeneration treatment?”

“Scar tissue?” Senta was frowning at him in surprise. “Which scar tissue? I don’t remember any scars.”

“It must be part of the memories that you’ve lost,” said Rob. He had stood up and was pacing up and down in front of the window. “He has scars over his whole face. You must have seen them, he got them from the solar fly-by that he did, fifty years ago. Corrie told me all about it. Did you forget all that, too? His face is a nightmare.”

Senta, seated on the sofa, was silent for so long that Rob was afraid of some new attack from her drug addiction. She seemed to have gone into another trance, her face puzzled and thoughtful. Finally, she nodded her head.

“I think I know what has happened,” she said. “You’ve been putting pieces together logically, and they seem to make sense. But you have a piece missing, because Cornelia left out an important fact.”

“Don’t play games, Senta,” said Anson quietly.

“It’s not games.” Senta patted Anson’s hand, while keeping her eyes fixed on Rob. “My memory has bad patches, but I’m quite sure of this. Regulo did get scars from the close approach to the Sun, but they could be removed. And they were removed, soon after he returned to Earth after that fly-by. Removed without trace. When I first met Regulo he was a handsome man. Rob, did Cornelia tell you why Regulo can’t ever have a rejuvenation treatment?”

“No. I didn’t even know that he can’t. I think I started to ask her about rejuvenation and the scar tissue once, soon after I first met Regulo, but something interrupted us and I never got an answer. She told me why Regulo didn’t like bright lights, and I just assumed that he got his scars in the same experience. She never raised the subject with me again.”

“And I can guess why.” Senta was nodding. “Did you ever hear of diseases called Cancer crudelis and Cancer pertinax?”

Rob shook his head. “What do they mean?”

“I don’t know what the words mean,” said Senta. “But they—”

“Ruthless cancer, and persistent cancer,” Howard Anson said. “That’s taking a literal translation. Sorry for interrupting, Senta, but when you have a rubbish heap for a mind, the way I do, you have to use it when you can.”

She smiled at him tolerantly. “You have your uses, Howard. No need to prove that to me. Anyway, Rob, they are two forms of cancer, as you might have guessed.”

“Old diseases?” suggested Rob. “I assume they were once killers, the way that most forms of cancer used to be killers.”

“That’s the difference.” Senta was leaning forward, her manner more lively. “They are not old diseases. They still exist. Very rare, but they are two of the only forms of the disease that can’t be cured — and they are both killers. Darius Regulo doesn’t have scar tissue on his face from the solar fly-by. What he has is cancer pertinax. It’s the rarer form, and it is very slow-growing. But it can’t be stopped, and it can’t be reversed. He has had it getting on for fifty years. It will get him in the end, in spite of the treatments and the operations. He had it already when I first met him, and it was just beginning to get noticeable. That was the main reason why he had to move off Earth — his system couldn’t take full gravity once the cancer had taken firm hold. I doubt if Darius will live to be ninety. You see, the disease acts as a double killer. Apart from the direct effects and the disfigurement it causes, it has a side effect that inhibits the effects of any rejuvenation treatments on the sufferer. They simply won’t work on someone who already has the disease established in his system.”

“That means he’ll lose more than half his life.” Rob thought suddenly of Regulo’s powerful and fertile mind, imprisoned behind the ruined face in a failing body. “Do you realize what a tragedy that is? I don’t just mean a personal tragedy — though it’s that, of course. I mean a loss to everyone. He’s one of the great men of the century. And I’ve never heard him ever complain that he is sick, only that he gets tired easily. He still has more energy than you’d believe, once he starts to work on a problem that interests him.”

“Ah, but you should have known him thirty years ago,” said Senta. She smiled at Anson. “Don’t misunderstand me, Howard, but thirty years ago, before the sickness took a hard hold on him, Darius was a superman. He had the energy of ten ordinary people, for work or for play. It was close to frightening. I never met anyone who had half his lust for life, and I met most of the dynamos, the men and women who make the System run. I know you think he’s something special now, and I’m sure he is; but he’s only a shadow of what he was. The disease is getting him, little by little.”

“You say there’s no treatment for it?” asked Rob. “Not even to slow it down?”

“Oh, there are treatments for both crudelis and pertinax.” Senta shook her dark head. “That’s one of the ironies of it. Joseph Morel found a treatment for cancer crudelis that is effective in every case tried so far. It’s used all the time, and it is called the Morel treatment. But that’s the wrong disease. It is cancer pertinax that Regulo suffers from, and Morel’s regime does not work for that. He tried various forms of it, but when the drugs are used on humans they produce deadly long-term side effects. There’s a subtle difference between the two forms of disease. I’m sure that Morel’s still working the problem, but from what you say about Regulo’s appearance there hasn’t been any breakthrough.”

“Don’t count Morel out too soon,” said Anson. He was lying back on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. “I’ve seen a good deal of his background, and he’s not just bright, he’s brilliant. And in one way at least he’s like Regulo — or like you, Rob, from what I’ve seen. Once he starts to pursue an idea, he never stops until he has it sorted out.”

“I had that impression, too.” Rob shrugged. “I don’t know how Morel operates, but all I do is follow up on things that interest me, wherever they lead. Maybe that’s why I don’t care for Morel. We want to chase after different goals, whereas Regulo and I are interested in many of the same things.”

“You’ve seen his desk?” Senta asked Rob. He nodded. “He had that thirty years ago,” she went on. “He was just starting to put those strange sayings into the top of it. He said he was building in his philosophy. I’d like to see what he has there now, see if he’s changed at all in thirty years.”

She shook her head, looking back over the years again, this time without the power of the drug. “What was it? Rockets are wrong. He put that motto in there, the first one of all. He was just starting to build Atlantis. I didn’t realize then that he meant to make it into a private world, one that he could retire to and leave the rest of the System to do what it liked. And now you two have the beanstalk, his answer to rockets after all this time. Howard is right, Regulo doesn’t give up easily.” She was looking at Rob with a different expression, seeing something in him that had not been visible before. “Be careful, Rob. Don’t overdo it. It’s good to have goals for yourself, but it’s bad to let them become obsessions. Darius is an addict to something as strong as taliza: he can’t bear to lose. Don’t let that rub off on you.”

Rob frowned. Senta was striking very close to home. “I’ll try not to. I know what you’re telling me, but I’ve always done things as hard and as well as I could. Stopping that wouldn’t be easy.”

“I know.” She took Rob’s right hand in hers and ran her finger lightly over the surface. “Don’t over-compensate for these, Rob. You’ve proved that you’re as good as anyone with natural hands, long ago. I spoke to Cornelia yesterday, and she says you’ve been working continuously, ever since you first met Regulo. Don’t forget that work can be an addiction and a form of escape, too.”

“I won’t overdo it.” Rob noticed that a faint trembling had returned to Senta’s hands. They were hotter than his own. “Corrie and I are going to take a break from work tonight and go over to Naples for a day, before we have to head for Quito and Tether Control. I know that you respect Regulo, but now I see there are some things about him that you don’t approve of. How do you feel about Corrie working for him? Some of the jobs he gives her are pretty strange ones — like telling her to go and collect me and bring me out to meet him in orbit. She has a lot of responsibility for her age. Did you introduce her to Regulo in the first place?”

Senta stared at Rob wide-eyed. Rob reached over and poked Anson in the ribs. The other man sat up, took one look at Senta and reached at once into his pocket.

“Come on, dear,” he said. “Time for a sedative. Thanks, Rob.”

“I’m all right,” Senta said. She was still staring at Rob. “I don’t know what you and Cornelia have been doing in all the time you’ve spent together. But didn’t she tell you anything about herself?”

“What’s the problem?” said Anson. He had lifted Senta’s bare arm and was holding a tiny vapor-injector against it. “I wasn’t listening. What did Corrie tell Rob?”

“It’s what she apparently didn’t tell him that has me surprised.” Senta let Anson move her over to the bed. “Rob, you’re so wrapped up in your work you don’t notice some things at all. Regulo and I lived together for more than five years. What do you imagine that we were doing all that time, designing rockets? When you meet Cornelia tonight, take a good look at her. Look at her eyes, and the shape of her forehead. She’s my daughter, and she uses my name — but she’s Darius Regulo’s daughter, too. I raised her, but I couldn’t keep her on Earth. As soon as she was old enough, she went off to Atlantis. Didn’t she tell you any of that?”

Rob was gazing at her in amazement. “Not a word. Maybe she thought it was obvious enough without saying it. And it ought to have been, now that you’ve told me. Corrie said she had been looking at the signs on Regulo’s desk for years and years, the very first time we met. I thought that was odd, because she looked so young, but I never took it any further. And she told me she had never seen you using taliza. Howard said you had been addicted for twelve years. That meant Corrie would have been only fourteen years old. I couldn’t understand why she had never seen you, unless she had gone off to Atlantis before that — and she wouldn’t have gone there so young to work. But it makes sense if she went there to stay with her father. I’ve just been unbelievably dense, that’s all.”

Senta was nodding her head, but while Rob was speaking her eyes had begun to lose focus. As the injection took effect, Howard Anson eased her back gently onto the pillow.

“Some day, Rob.” he said grimly. “Some day soon. I’m looking for another thing in our casting back to the past. I want to find the bastards who made Senta into a taliza addict. I’ve never believed that she did it to herself, and now I think it’s somehow tied in to another attempt to wipe her memory. But it’s working in reverse. She recalls exactly what they’d like her to forget, it’s planted so deep in her. Let’s find who did it. Then you’ll realize that I have my obsessions, too.”

“You are going to try again, and see what Senta recalls?”

“I don’t know. It’s obvious we still don’t have everything, but we can’t use a dose this strong very often. The after-effects are fierce. I’ll keep digging away at Morel’s background, you look for evidence when you are out on Atlantis. But take Senta’s advice. Be careful how you dig. I’ve heard Senta talk about Joseph Morel, and she’s terrified of the man. Don’t ever let him suspect what you’re trying to do.”

“It may be a bit late for that.” Rob stood up. “He was already suspicious when I was looking around last time. I’ll be careful. But we have to go on. I’ll admit to my own obsessions, even if they’ve been put on hold for ten years. I want to know who killed my parents, and I want to know why they did it. There’s one other thing I’d like you to look into while I’m away. Do a search for other reports of anything that might be a Goblin, on Earth or off it.”

Howard Anson shook his head. “I’ll try, Rob, but I don’t know where to start. What is a Goblin? You have no idea how much there will be in the files on references to `little people.’ We don’t even know if the Goblins are small. I’ll have to sift my way through mountains of material about elves, and midgets, and leprechauns, and every other sort of real or imagined small human-like being.”

“I know. If I didn’t have extraordinary faith in your tracking powers, Howard, I would never suggest it. But I think we do know, now, that the Goblins are small. Senta said there were two Goblins in a medical supply box. That would usually be less than a meter long. I assume you already tried to find references to the Expies, the name you had heard used before?”

“Long ago. There wasn’t a trace. I’ll try again. But it will take a massive effort.”

“Don’t worry about money.”

“I wasn’t. I was thinking about time.”

“As soon as possible. For all our sakes.” Rob paused at the door, his gaze turning back to the silent form on the bed. “One other question, then I’ll go. You told me that Senta was terrified of poverty, and she came from a poor background. Now she seems to have all the money she can use. Do you know where she gets it? If it’s yours, that’s fine and I don’t want to pry. But if it isn’t…”

“It’s not, and I do know where she gets it.” Anson’s tone was unusually bitter. “She has never taken anything from me — never needed to, though I’d give it gladly. She has an unlimited credit of her own. I traced the charge code back through the files, and everything terminates at a single number. Everything that Senta spends is charged to the central account of Regulo Enterprises.”