The Web Between the Worlds

CHAPTER 12: “…at the quiet limit of the world, a white-haired shadow roaming like a dream…”

Atlantis was still moving slowly out, away from Earth and farther from the Sun. At an acceleration of only a thousandth of a gee it would take a long time to spiral out to the Asteroid Belt, to the region where Regulo was planning to perform his next project.

“Of course, what we’ll be doing this time is just a small rehearsal for the real thing,” he said to Rob, as they sat again in the big, darkened study. “I’ve picked out a tiny one, just a few hundred meters across. You may think it isn’t worth bothering with, but I want to see if everything hangs together the way I’m expecting.”

“I agree with you. Always do a trial run.” Rob looked at the other man’s gaunt face. There seemed to be an urgency and a hardness there that he had never seen before. “Have you decided yet what your `real thing’ will be?”

“I fancy Lutetia. It’s an asteroid that’s not too far out, a good deal closer to the Sun than any of the really big ones. According to Sycorax, Lutetia is loaded with metals and big enough to be interesting.”

“What’s the diameter?”

“About a hundred and fifteen kilometers, give or take a couple.”

Rob leaned back in his chair. “And you think you can mine that?”

Regulo grinned at his expression. “Sure.” He leaned slowly across the desk and placed the palm of one hand at a point on the top of it. When he took it away, the glowing sign, THINK BIG, was revealed. “See that? You’re getting there, but you have to work at it. You still let your thinking become too crowded. I told you I was going to use a new method of mining the asteroids, and I meant it. Let’s get the screens working, and I’ll show you what we’re about.”

He sat up straight, slowly and painfully in spite of the low gravity. Rob could see him wince at the movement of each joint. “Anything I can do to help?” he asked.

“Not one thing,” Regulo grunted. “I don’t feel good today, that’s all. My own fault. I should have had treatment three days ago, and I put it off because we had a problem again with those damned shipping permits. If I ran my business the way Earth handles its trade laws, I’d be bankrupt in a month.”

“I was sorry to hear about your sickness,” Rob ventured. “If you want to put off the demonstration until you feel better, let’s do it. The beanstalk is coming along well, so there’s no big reason why I have to rush back there.”

“Never.” Regulo frowned and braced himself, arms straight, on the front of the desk. “Don’t ever suggest that. What do you think keeps me going? Work, and new ideas. Stop looking ahead, and you’re finished. Anyway, who’s been opening his mouth to you, talking about sickness? I don’t like to have it advertised. Bad enough to have the disease, sympathy only makes it worse. Who told you about it?”

Rob hesitated, not sure if honesty would be the best way to handle the brusque question. “Senta Plessey,” he said at last.

Regulo sat motionless for a long moment, his battered face unreadable.

“Senta, eh?” After a few more seconds he laughed, a harsh and humorless noise deep in his throat. “Poor little Senta. Well, she was aware of my sickness, if anybody was. How is she?”

“She’s all right.” Rob hesitated again, not sure how much Regulo already knew. “Less well than she should be. She has a drug problem, I’m afraid. Taliza — she’s a total addict.”

“With taliza, that’s the only sort of addict there is.” Regulo shook his big head. “I’m sorry to hear that. I ought to have guessed it, though. She would always try anything new, anything for a fresh experience. I used to warn her, but it didn’t make any difference.” He sighed, looking past Rob with unfocused eyes. “That’s bad news. My God, but she was a beauty, thirty years ago. I’ve never seen a woman with her looks, before or since.”

His eyes came back to Rob. “She told you, did she, that we lived together?”

“She didn’t say much about it.” Rob shrugged. “Only that it was a long time ago.”

“It surely was. Back before this” — Regulo rubbed his hand along his seamed jaw — “had a real hold. It took a while to get a full diagnosis. As soon as we knew for sure that it was bad and going to get worse, Senta packed her bags. I didn’t try and talk her out of it. I was going to get more and more like a horror-holo star, and Senta had just two things she couldn’t stand: poverty, and ugliness. The second worry turned out to be stronger. You mentioned that you’d had operations, eh? I could match your sixty-two, and then some.”

He was silent for a moment, reflecting. His face showed no fear or bitterness, only a still introspection. “Always worrying about losing her looks,” he said at last. “That was her biggest fear of all. How is she now? It’s been a long time.”

“Still beautiful.” Rob struggled with this new view of Senta Plessey. One perspective from Howard Anson, one from Corrie, and now this. “Look, Regulo, it isn’t any of my business, but you say that she walked out on you. And you still provide her support?”

That earned a piercing look for Rob from those bright blue eyes. “Now where the devil did you hear that?” Regulo said softly.

“Oh, from a man back on Earth,” Rob felt embarrassment, aware that he had gone beyond the acceptable questions. “I wasn’t trying to pry. It’s just something that I’d heard.”

“It’s true enough.” Regulo’s voice sounded even gruffer than usual. “I knew what Senta’s worries were. We had some good years together, and I wouldn’t let her be miserable for nothing. We both know I’ve got enough money, more than I can ever use, more than Senta realizes. She spends, but I don’t restrain her. Why should I? It’s only money.

“Now, let’s get off that subject.” His voice took on its old, eager tone. “I want to see what you’ve been doing, and I want to show you what we’ve been at. You’ll see why I wanted you up here. Take a look at this.”

He switched on a large holoscreen that ran from floor to ceiling on one side of the study. In it appeared a view of a small asteroid, swimming free in space. Away to one side of it Rob could see a familiar shape. He frowned.

“That’s one of my Spiders. I thought they were supposed to be out in the Belt.”

“That one will be, as soon as the demonstration is finished.” Regulo adjusted the control to zoom in on part of the image, and pointed at the upper part of the screen. “Now, take a look at the top of the rock there.”

“It looks like a drive unit.” Rob reached over and increased the magnification a little further. “There’s another one at the bottom, from the look of it.”

“Quite right. You can’t see this on the image, but the whole rock has been covered with a layer of tungsten fibers. They’ll hold their strength up to nearly three and a half thousand degrees. See anything else near where the Spider is hanging?”

Rob moved the joystick and the magnified area shifted until it was centered on the dark bulk of the Spider. “I can see a housing on the surface of the rock. It looks like a power attachment, without the rest of the powersat.”

“Right again.” Regulo was in his element. “We’ll be hooking a powersat in position four hours from now. The connections have been set up to work with either that or a power kernel, to take electricity from the power source and distribute it around the rock. Now, one more fact and then you’re on your own.” Any pain that Regulo was feeling had been pushed away from his conscious thoughts. His voice was full of a huge satisfaction. “Zoom in on the Spider, and tell me what else you see.”

Rob leaned forward, moving his head from side to side to get a better look at the holo-image. “You’ve done something to the proboscis,” he said at last. “It’s been lengthened, and it has a different reflectivity. Hm. Have you changed the composition?”

“To a high-temperature ceramic.” Regulo nodded. “I ought to brush up on my knowledge of spider anatomy. In my ignorance, I’ve been calling it a sting. All right, we’ve changed the proboscis. It will take very high temperatures, and it’s still flexible. Now you’ve seen everything, so you tell me. What game are we playing here?”

Rob stared at the image in front of him, his imagination hyperactive. Regulo wouldn’t have gone to these lengths unless he had something very real in mind. It was just a question of sorting through all the possibilities and choosing the one with the commercial slant.

“What’s the composition of this rock?” he said suddenly.

“Metals, mostly — several different ones.”

Regulo waited expectantly. After a minute or two more, Rob nodded.

“I see it,” he said. “It all seems feasible, but I’d want to explore the details.”

“Well, man.” Regulo was suddenly impatient. “Come on, tell me how you think it ought to work.”

“All right.” Rob stood up and went closer to the screen. He pointed at the drives in the rock. “Let’s start with these. You set them to provide equal and opposite thrusts, one on each side of the asteroid. You fire them tangential to the surface, and you use their torque to set the rock spinning fast about an axis. The faster, the better, provided that the tungsten sheath around the whole thing can take the strain.”

“No problem at all with a small rock like this. We might have more to worry about when we get to something the size of Lutetia.”

“Let’s finish this one first.” Rob pointed again at the image. “I’ll assume you have the powersat in position by the housing there. You picked that placing so the powersat sits on the axis of rotation of the rock. It would be a messy calculation, but the principles are easy. Now you begin to feed power in to the rock, through a grid over its surface. A lot of power. For something much bigger than this, I don’t think a powersat will do it. You’ll need a fusion plant or a power kernel, otherwise the job will take forever.”

He squinted again at the configuration on the screen. “Are you sure that the rotation will be all right? I’d expect a stability problem. It will be difficult to keep a smooth rotation about a single axis as the shape changes. I assume you looked into that and have the answers?”

Regulo nodded. “I cut my teeth on that sort of problem, calculating the change in mass and moments of inertia as the volatiles boil out of an asteroid during solar swing-by. We’ll have small adjustments to make as we go, but I have those worked out. Keep going.”

“Alternating currents,” Rob said. “Big ones, through the middle of the asteroid. When you apply those from the power source, you’ll get eddy current heating inside the rock from hysteresis effects. If you put enough power into it, you’ll melt the whole thing. You’ll produce a spinning ball of molten metals and rock. Spinning fast. I assume you’ve looked at the shapes and structures for a stable rotation? You’ll want a Maclaurin ellipsoid, with an axis of symmetry, rather than a Jacobi ellipsoid with three unequal axes.”

“You will indeed.” Regulo’s face was intent, his eyes fixed unwinkingly on Rob. “I’ve looked at the stability of the rotating mass. It will be all right. What next?”

“The rotation produces an acceleration gradient inside the rotating ball. The heaviest metals will migrate to the outside, the lightest ones will be forced to lie inside and closest to the axis of spin.” Rob was visualizing the ball, shaping it before him with his hands. “It’s like a big centrifuge, separating out the layers of melted materials. All you need now is the final stage: the Spider. It sits out on the axis of rotation, at the opposite end from the main power source. But it has that long, specialized proboscis, so it can reach any point inside the asteroid. You insert it to the depth that you want, and draw off that layer of rock or metal. Then you extrude it directly through the Spider — I already made the modifications you asked for, to permit high-temp extrusion.”

“You did.” Regulo’s eyes were gleaming. “And we can do away with all that mess that we had to use for the beanstalk. Chernick and the Coal Moles was a neat idea, but it was still a patched-up solution. With direct extrusion we’ll see a terrific improvement in what we can do. Give me access to Lutetia and I’ll spin you a cable from here to Alpha Centauri, with any material in the asteroid. No more grubbing about for different metals. They’ll come pre-sorted by density.”

He grinned at Rob’s expression. “All right, maybe not Alpha Centauri. We could certainly spin a web right through the Solar System, if we can think of a good use for one.”

“I like that. A beanstalk, all the way from Mercury to Pluto.” Rob was silent for a moment, chewing at his lower lip. “Won’t work, though,” he said at last. “You could never get it stable.”

“True enough.” Regulo leaned over the desk and cut back to a full display of the asteroid. “I’m just indulging in a little random speculation. That’s how everything starts, though I must admit I don’t see any way of making that one work — yet. There are a couple of other things that you didn’t mention about this system. How would you stop it from slowing down and stopping the rotation? You’ll have frictional losses, effects of the solar magnetic field, all that sort of thing working against you.”

“After the drives are switched off? I’d expect those to be small effects, but anyway it should be easy enough to compensate for them. It won’t be a perfectly homogeneous figure of revolution, even when it’s melted. Stick a pulsed magnetic field on it, about the rotation axis. You won’t need much torque to keep the spin rate constant.”

Regulo grunted his approval. “Where were you twenty years ago, when we were designing the Icarus solar scoop? I could have used your head on that. Most people don’t seem to be able to think straight even when they have all the facts.”

“Twenty years ago? I’d just lost my first milk tooth.”

“Aye. God knows it, I’m getting old.” Regulo rubbed at his lined forehead with a thin, veined hand. “Twenty years ago, to me it’s like yesterday. One more thing for you to think about, then we’ll pack this in and do some work on the beanstalk. From what you’ve seen of this so far, do you see any problems when we go to a really big one? Say, when we spin up Lutetia?”

Rob shrugged. “Well, there’s one obvious problem. You can’t possibly extend the proboscis far enough to penetrate through to the center of something that big. So you’ll have to mine the heavy materials on the outside first, even if that’s not the way you’d prefer to do it. I can see cases where you might want to get at the lighter metals and the volatiles first.”

“I’ve worried about that one, too. At the moment I’m playing with the idea of zone melting, but I’m not completely happy with it.” Regulo watched and waited in silence, while Rob mulled over that problem.

“I see what you mean,” Rob said at last. “You’re assuming that the materials are scattered fairly uniformly through the whole body of the asteroid. That looks like a big assumption to me — unless you’ve checked it some other way?”

Regulo shook his head. “The theory of formation suggests that most of the volatiles will be on the outside. I would melt just the first couple of kilometers in from the surface, and mine there first. I think the Spider could tap that deeply without much trouble.”

“And leave the middle solid until you want to melt further?” Rob looked thoughtful. “I don’t have your experience on differential melting. The Spider can do it all right, that’s not the issue. But I’m still not comfortable with the idea. Let me think about this for a few days and see if I come up with anything better. It’s not efficient to switch the power on and off, and I would expect that zone melting will give you problems with rotational stability.”

“It will, but I’m used to those.” Regulo nodded. “Think about it. That’s what I pay people for. I’ve held to one principle for fifty years, and it has never let me down: there is no way that you can overpay a really good worker. Maybe I ought to have that one built into the desk, along with the others.” He was staring at Rob speculatively. “You know, I’ve been thinking about you, and what you’ll do when the beanstalk is finished and working. How would you fancy the idea of coming out to the Belt and running the mining operation on Lutetia? The whole thing. Not as an employee,” he added, reading Rob’s expression. He paused for a moment to give his words more weight. “As my partner. I’ll set up an arrangement so that you can earn your way into Regulo Enterprises.”

“Your partner!” Rob was even more startled than he looked. “I’m flattered, of course. Enormously flattered. But I’m not sure I want to be away from Earth forever. I have projects planned down there.”

“I understand that.” Regulo switched off the display and the image of the asteroid quickly faded. “It’s not a decision that you make in a minute. Think about it, that’s all I ask you to do. You’ve seen the history of technology down on Earth. Has it ever occurred to you that there’s a constant pattern? It’s been the curse of science for a thousand years. Great men have ideas, lesser men implement them — and the least men gain control of their use. Look at atomic weapons as an example, running in a straight line from Einstein to Denaga, from a super-genius to a near moron.”

“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 lattice-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.” Corrie 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.