The Mind Pool

Chapter 3

“No. Phoebe Willard. That’s who I want. Not the inventory. See, I already looked at that. Phoebe Willard. Where is she? Can you take me to her?”

The guard stared, first at Luther Brachis and then at the screen showing a segment of the dump contents. His eyes were puzzled.

Brachis sighed, and waited again for a reply. Patiently, although through the solar system he was not known as a patient man; because if there was one place where patience was a necessity, it was the Dump. Brachis knew that he was the cause of his own problem. He, personally, had made all the Dump’s staff assignments.

And now here he was himself, in the Dump.

Sargasso Dump.

The Sun and planets are the deep gravity wells of the solar system. Once a spacecraft — or a piece of space junk — has been parked around a planet, it can remain in stable orbit as long as the human species endures.

But space around the planets is valuable. No one wants it filled with floating garbage, or cares to have random hazards in orbit around the Sun.

Not when there are other options.

The Lagrange points are local minima of the gravitational potential. They are places where no planet is present, but a body may still remain in stable orbit. Their positions were plotted centuries before humanity went to space. Within the solar system, the deepest and best-defined of them are the Trojan positions, trailing and leading Jupiter in its orbit by a sixth of a revolution. Space flotsam drifts here naturally, and stays for millennia.

What Nature can do, Human can copy.

Three hundred years before the visit of Luther Brachis, the trailing Jupiter Lagrange point had been designated by the United Space Federation as a system “indefinite storage facility.” For that, read “garbage dump.” Everything from spent reactors to disabled Von Neumanns had been towed there, to float slowly (but stably) around the slopes of the shallow gravitational valley.

The Dump was computer-controlled. It had been that way for centuries, unattended by humans — until Luther Brachis took over as head of System Security, and began to lose men and women. To death, inevitably; murder and greed and sabotage still inhabited the system, and security work always carried risk. The incident on Cobweb Station was only the most recent. Brachis hated to lose his trained and dedicated guards. But it was part of the job. For the dead he could do nothing, and they could feel nothing.

And for the living? The pain of injury was temporary. Limbs could be re-grown, hearts and eyes and livers replaced. It was done, routinely.

But mental damage was another matter. Toxins and bullets and air loss could leave a body with normal function, and a ruined mind that hovered somewhere beyond the brink of humanity.

Brachis had seen a dozen human wrecks in his first year as head of Security. He made a personal decision. The guards would remain on Security payroll — for life. They could not be long hidden from the accountants on any inhabited body, but no accountant had ever, in Brachis’ experience, paid a visit to the wasteland of the Sargasso Dump. He saw a melancholy symmetry in his act: the throwaway material of the system, forgotten by humanity, would be guarded by the throwaway people.

The staff at Sargasso were Luther’s big secret. He could not protect them past the time of his own death, but they would be shielded until then. And he had never regretted the decision — although now, trying to coax the guard to rational response, he came close. “Phoebe Willard.” He tried again. “Remember her? Brown hair, not very tall, very pretty. She came here two days ago.” Brachis went to the control desk, and called another part of the Dump inventory to the screen. “These. See? She was working on these.”

The guard stared. There was a slow dawning of something behind those troubled eyes. He nodded. Without speaking he closed his suit helmet, turned and left the control room. Brachis followed in his own suit, still unsure. In any other situation he would have been furious at the waste of time. Here anger was futile, except perhaps to focus his own concentration.

Soon they were outside, twisting their way through a topsy-turvy array of debris. Brachis stared at the flotsam on all sides and re-evaluated the guard ahead of him. If the man knew where he was going, through such a tangled wilderness, then his mind was far from gone. Perhaps it was only that he could not speak, or interact with people.

The guard halted and pointed. Brachis saw a huge green balloon, blotting out the stars ahead. It might be an air-bulb, where he would find Phoebe Willard working inside. Or it could be that the brain-damaged guard was offering random responses to questions.

There was one way to find out. Brachis nodded his thanks and headed for the green sphere. Somewhere in that featureless facade there had to be an entry point. He found a layered sequence of four flexible flaps, and squeezed through into a lighted enclosure.

Phoebe Willard had been at the Sargasso Dump for two days. Typically, in that time she had turned a house-sized open space into a working laboratory. A lattice of interlocking beams ran from one side of the air-bulb to the other. Fixed to lattice nodes, neat as any museum collection of butterflies, hung sixteen fused and shattered objects: the Morgan Constructs.

It was possible to deduce their original shapes only by comparison of the whole set. This one had wing panels intact, but a head that was fused to a melted blob of grey. Another, two farther over, had no wings and no legs, but the upper half of the rounded top was intact. Not one was more than a third complete.

Phoebe was working on a well-defined compound eye, removing it from a blunt head. She saw Brachis and nodded to him.

He floated across to her side and opened his suit. “Any hope?”

Are you kidding?” She gestured around her at the fragments. “The Cobweb Station guards should have posthumous medals. They blew this lot to hell and gone — except for the one you say got away.”

“Nothing to be salvaged?”

“I didn’t say that. This one” — Willard pointed the tool to the burnt mass she was working on — “doesn’t have weapons, or limbs, or working eyes. But I think there’s a fair sized chunk of brain intact. Maybe even most of it.”

“Could it ever function again?”

“Nope. Not in the way you were hoping.”

“Then maybe we ought to quit.”

“Don’t say that. I haven’t had so much fun in years. Livia Morgan was a genius. Half the time I can t tell what her circuits are trying to accomplish. But it’s a hell of a game trying.”

“Phoebe, we’re not doing this for pleasure. Can you tell me one reason why we ought to go on?”

“Because I’m getting results, Commander-man. I can’t build you one of these, now or ever. But give me another week in this hell-hole, and I’11 tell you a whole lot about how they work. That ought to be valuable when you people start chasing around the Perimeter.”

“What you just said is secret information.”

“Nuts. Everyone back at the shop knows it. Why do you think I agreed to come?”

“To build me a detailed model of a Construct. One that functions and is safe to be around. That’s what I had in mind when I asked you.”

“Bricks without straw, eh? Well, tough on you. It can’t be done.” Phoebe picked up a tiny fiber bundle inspection tube. “Give me a week, though, and if the half-wit zombies around here don’t get me I’l1 have something close to a general schematic for this Construct. It’s the only one with any working brain functions, and it’s one of the more sophisticated. But we won’t have details. Will that do you?”

“It will have to.”

“Then go away, and let me work.”

Brachis reached out and took the inspection unit from Phoebe Willard’s hand. “I will. But not right now. You and I have an assignation.”

“Why Luther! I thought that was all over long ago.”

“Not that, Phoebe. More fun than that. We’re going to sit down at a formal dinner, you and me and the staff of the Dump — every last half-wit zombie of them. I promised. They’ve not had visitors for years. So we’re going. And we — you and me both — are going to sit, and smile, and pretend we enjoy it.”

“Nuts! I’m not going near those brain-dead buzzards.”

“Look at the date on your orders. It expires tonight. You want to stay and play games? You go to dinner with us.”

“Blackmail!”

“And you smile, Phoebe. Like this.” Luther Brachis grinned wide and hideous. “You can do it. Just imagine you’re the belle of the ball, all dressed up in a long gown, looking beautiful, and dancing…”

“Bastard!”

“…on my grave.”