“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.”