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.