The Web Between the Worlds

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 patterns 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.”

Rob looked up to the big display screen. Despite Regulo’s earlier words, Lutetia still loomed larger and larger.

“And what do you think appeals to Darius Regulo?” The quiet words interrupted Rob’s inspection of the display.

“You gave me a hint, last time I was here.” Rob’s tone was bitter. “I was just too stupid to see it. You gave me a lot of talk about matter transmitters, and the problem of transit times around the System. You had your method working even then. I should have realized what you were up to when you paid to use extra Spiders, and asked me to build the beanstalk instead of using Sala Keino. He was on your payroll, and he was your expert on space construction. But you had a better use for him.”

“No, Rob, don’t get that wrong.” Regulo’s voice showed an odd mixture of pride and reproof. “You are a better construction man than Keino will ever be. I picked you for the hard job, not the easy one. How far have you thought it through?”

That was a touch of the old Regulo. Rob wondered if his exhausted brain had jumped to a wrong conclusion about the old man. Well, a few more minutes and he could collapse.

“Just the general idea. It starts with the Spider again. Now it’s spinning a different kind of web. Rockets are wrong. That’s sitting there in your desk as we talk, but I didn’t follow it far enough. I should have known you wouldn’t stop with the beanstalk, that just gets us up and down from Earth. You wanted a way of moving materials around the whole System without using drives. And the Spider could give you that.”

Rob paused for a few seconds, to examine again his left forearm. The pain was mounting, from acute to intolerable. He checked once more that the power input was disconnected. No doubt about that. He massaged the arm again with his right hand, unable to imagine any possible explanation. He motioned to Corrie to use the injector a second time. What was the maximum permitted dose?

“Spin another cable,” he went on. “Make it like the beanstalk, with superconducting cables and drive train attached to the load cable. This time, put the powersat at the center of the cable, with an equal length on each side of it. Fabricate it in space, but don’t ever plan to fly it in and tether it. Leave it out near the orbit of Mars, or in the Belt, or in near Earth — key places in the System. Then start it rotating about its center, like a couple of spokes on a wheel. I assume that you began with just a couple of them, one in the Belt and one near Earth?”

Regulo nodded calmly. He had finished fiddling with the control panel and now seemed oddly relaxed. “We started with two. That’s just the beginning. The more you have, the better the efficiency of the whole operation. I’ve been thinking we’d build about five thousand of them through the Earth-Belt region.”

“You could handle that many?”

“With Sycorax? Easily. We can track that number, and more — there are millions of orbits in the data banks already. This is just a few extra ones.” Regulo’s tone was that of a patient teacher. “I’ve told you before, Rob,” he went on. “Think big. The System’s a big place. You have to scale your thinking to match it.”

Rob would normally have found the conversation totally fascinating. Now it felt increasingly surrealistic. Was Regulo on his own kind of tranquilizers? The image of Morel’s body had gone from the screen, and with it any interest by Regulo in Rob’s accusation. He seemed happy to talk engineering.

Apparently Corrie was having the same reaction. “Don’t you two have any feelings?” she broke in. “Joseph Morel is dead, Caliban seems to have gone mad, and you sit there talking about spinning beanstalks. What about the Goblins, Rob? First you tell us there are children in Morel’s lab. Then you start talking about something completely different.”

As she spoke she realized that she was not getting through to them. They both ignored her. Some invisible cord of tension bound them to each other, some other level of communication was taking place deep below the surface.

“So how would you work it, Rob?” said Regulo. His bright eyes were fixed on the other man’s pale face.

Rob hesitated, but the urge to explain was too strong.

“Just as you did. You have a rotating cable out in a free orbit — thousands of kilometers of it.” He leaned forward, at the same time as Regulo moved his chair farther away from the desk.

“Now suppose you want to move a space pod from the Belt to the Moon,” Rob went on. “You make it rendezvous with the center of the cable, where the powersat sits. The center of mass of the cable would be moving in a free-fall orbit, travelling about the sane speed as the pod, so you use hardly any reaction mass to make the rendezvous. You don’t need much acceleration from the pod’s drives, either, just a fraction of a gee will be enough. Once you have the pod at the middle of the cable, you let it move out along the drive train. As the pod moves from the center it feels a centripetal acceleration. You need to use the drive train on the cable to restrain it. When it reaches the end of the cable, you release it to move in free fall. You’ve given it a big velocity boost. But the trouble from the point of view of a human on the pod is the acceleration. Out at the end of the cable, it’s huge. I looked at a couple of examples. A cable four thousand kilometers long, with end velocity of twenty-four kilometers a second, would give thirty gees at each end. That’s what killed the Goblins.”

“They were unlucky.” Regulo had moved his chair farther and farther from the desk, until it was almost back to the wall. “If you like, you could even say that it was Caliban’s fault. He received no inputs on space operations for passenger transfer, and intelligence can’t replace experience. He put the space pod to a cable rendezvous with a cargo Slingshot — one with high accelerations, never intended for people.”

“Do you have Slingshots for passengers?” Rob moved forward right up to the desk.

“We built the first two, just a month ago. I could find out which cable your Goblins used easily enough, by checking the angular momentum of all of them. Each time we use a Slingshot we naturally increase or decrease its angular momentum.” Regulo stood up, his back to the wall. “We lose angular momentum when we throw a cargo in toward the Sun, and pick it up when we catch something thrown in from Mars or the Belt. Provided we move the same mass of materials in and out, the whole system balances — just like the beanstalk back on Earth. I would have given you details of the Slingshot as soon as we had Lutetia under control. You’ve got the idea, but you’ll be surprised when you see how much we can cut off transit times.

“Well, enough of that.” Regulo’s voice changed in timbre, becoming gruffer and more intense. “The Slingshot was used in a way I never expected. It killed two of the `Goblins,’ if you’re correct. But what about the rest of it? Joseph was secretly performing some kind of social experiment here, that’s what you’re telling us. If he had a self-sustaining colony they would have been through many generations in thirty years. It makes me wonder what type of social structure they could have evolved. Did Joseph tell you what he was trying to achieve in his colony, before Caliban got him?”

“Not a thing.” Rob stood up. “Morel didn’t intend to tell me anything. He was supremely logical, and logical people don’t bother to explain things to a dead man. I had one other factor to consider while I was locked in that lab. Morel wasn’t an anthropologist. He didn’t have the slightest interest in social structures. He never told me what he was doing. But you see, Regulo, I know it anyway.”

“Aye.” Regulo’s voice was as calm as ever. “I was afraid of that. The second that you came in here, I thought that the game might be over.”

He waved a thin hand at the control panel. “While you were talking, I gave the signal for the maintenance crews to make emergency departure from Atlantis. They’re clear now, wondering what the devil is going on. See the ship?”

On the display, a large freighter hovered beside Atlantis. Near it, filling the screen, the swollen balloon of Lutetia hung, its surface white-hot and smoking with escaping volatiles.

“I have to ask you one more thing,” Regulo went on, “though I think I know the answer. I suppose that it would be a waste of time to offer you part of Regulo Enterprises?”

Rob shook his head. The movement sent a flare of pain down his left arm.

“I thought not.” Regulo’s hands were behind him against the wall. A panel slid open to reveal a dimly lit corridor. “We respect money, you and I, but it has never been the main drive for either of us.” He sighed. “It’s a pity. We could have done great things as a team.”

“I know. Great things.” Rob’s voice was scarcely loud enough to hear. “To work with you, Regulo, for that I’d have given everything I own. But this is different. There are some rules that I can’t break.” He cleared his throat and spoke more loudly. “It’s over.”

“Not everything.” Regulo stepped back through the opening. Rob and Corrie did not move. “When you came in, I suspected that Atlantis was finished one way or another. So while were were talking I set the controls for collision with Lutetia. We have a few more minutes before impact.” He pointed again to the screen, to Lutetia’s swelling bulk. “After that, it’s no more Atlantis. No more Morel, no Goblins, no Caliban, no Sycorax. No evidence to support anything that you said. Follow me, both of you, or there will be no Rob Merlin and no Cornelia.”

The panel began to close.

“I’ll hold the ship for you.” There was a plea in Regulo’s bright eyes. “Hurry. I have to destroy Atlantis, but I can’t stand the thought of losing either of you.”

While the wall panel was still closing, Corrie ran rapidly around the desk and began to examine the settings on the controls. Rob dragged himself wearily across to join her.

“What’s the maximum drive setting for Atlantis?” He could feel pulses of pain running up his arm and through his whole body.

“About a thirtieth of a gee.” Without waiting to consult Rob, Corrie was throwing in new settings. “That’s not the point. The outer surface will fail at much less than that. I don’t think we dare try for more than a hundredth of a gee.”

“What happens if the outer membrane bursts?”

“The aquasphere would flood the drives. We’ll burn up in Lutetia.”

Rob moved to the display console and switched in a camera to show the exterior of Atlantis.

“Don’t use that drive unit, Corrie. It’s the best one for the direction of thrust that we need, but we’d fry Regulo. He’ll be coming out of that shaft. Take the next two drives and balance their thrusts. It will be close enough to tangential, we won’t lose more than a few percent effectiveness.”

He leaned across the desk, wincing as his left hand touched it. “Give us a fiftieth of a gee.”

“That’s too high. We’re only rated for half that.”

“Do it — and pray that Regulo over-engineered his products.”

There was a small but perceptible jolt as the two drives cut in. The image of Lutetia did not move on the screen.

“It’s not working, Rob.”

“Give it time. Accelerations take a while before you see the effects.” He was watching a second display, but it blurred as he stared at it. His eyes were refusing to focus. “Good thing we didn’t use that first drive, Corrie. Here comes Regulo, out of the shaft.”

A small, white-suited figure emerged from the exit tunnel closest to the waiting ship.

“He’ll go across to the ship, Rob.”

“Let him. We can’t stop him.”

“What happens if we can’t save Atlantis?”

Rob shrugged. “Tough on us, good for Regulo. He was right, without the Goblins or Caliban there will be no evidence. Even if we escaped, he still has all the money and influence. No one would ever believe me.”

Strain gauge readings from the skin of the aquasphere were well past the safety limits. Under the steady acceleration, a billion tons of water wanted to stay behind.

“It’s going to be close.” Corrie was looking at the fiery ball of Lutetia, now beginning to drift slightly sideways on the screen. “Awful close. The surface of Atlantis seems to be holding, but we have to get by Lutetia without boiling the aquasphere.”

“Look at the other screen.” The tone in Rob’s voice brought Corrie’s instant attention.

“What’s he doing, Rob?”

“I don’t know. Can you bring in his audio channel?”

“I’ll try.”

Regulo’s suit was visible as a tiny white speck on the screen in front of them. Instead of heading for the waiting ship he was moving in erratic bursts, backwards and forwards. Under the random thrusts of the suit jets he was still approaching the molten surface of Lutetia. The asteroid blazed before him with an intense white heat, filling the sky.

“I’ve got him on audio.”

Corrie’s words were lost in a hoarse, painful grunting. It was Regulo, muttering something to himself.

“Lutetia is blinding him,” Rob said suddenly. “It’s so bright, and so close. The photo-shield on that suit was never intended to handle that much intensity. Corrie, he’s lost his bearings.”

The erratic to-and-fro motion had ceased. Regulo was spinning aimlessly, jets firing at random. The white suit was moving closer to the surface of Lutetia.

“What’s he saying, Rob? Listen to him. He doesn’t seem to know what’s happening.”

“You got Alexis and you got Nita.” The hoarse voice from the suit was suddenly loud and intense. “Not me, though. You won’t get me. I beat you once, I’ll beat you again. I’ll master you.”

Rob looked back to the other screen. The swollen sphere of Lutetia was sweeping past Atlantis. It seemed close enough to touch, but they would clear it. His arm shot bolts of agony through his whole body. How could that happen, with the power off? Would he ever find out?

He slumped back in his seat, holding his forearm with his right hand. Atlantis was groaning and straining about them, the complaining creak of twisting braces and stressed partitions as loud as the angry words of defiance from Regulo’s suit. Rob felt a white tide rising in his head, sweeping up to engulf him as Lutetia would engulf Darius Regulo.

They were clearing the asteroid. In the moment before the tide swallowed him completely, Rob saw the tiny figure of the King of Heaven move on to its final rendezvous.