“Escape?”
Rob waited impatiently as the radio signal sped on its three-second round-trip path between the L-4 communications center and the surface of Earth. The delay encouraged longer exchanges of information at each end, with passage of single-word exchanges especially annoying.
“Don’t you bother to listen to any news when you’re out there?” Anson’s reply came at last. “I thought you’d know all about it — every news outlet here has been full of nothing else. It happened two days ago. Way Down went away. Closed up completely, at the worst possible time — evening, when it was at its busiest. The Perions were down there in the afternoon, but Lucetta had a headache, the sort she usually gets before a thunderstorm. They left Way Down and came up to the surface about six o’clock. Two hours later there was a small earthquake in Mexico. Not even enough to do more than tickle the seismometers. After it, Way Down had gone.”
“My God. How many people?”
“Twenty-two hundred. Trapped twelve miles down, and not a chance of getting to them.”
There was a long silence over the comlink. Rob had always been blessed — or cursed — with a strong visual imagination. Now he could see the whole thing in his mind’s eye: the basalt walls of Way Down moving inexorably in on the central cavern; the sudden and total darkness as electrical power from the surface was cut off. Then the panic, the random movement of people; and finally, the quick extinction in that deep mass grave, many miles below the surface.
“No one else at all got out?” he said at last.
“No one but the other couple who were with the Perions, the ones they persuaded to leave with them.” Howard Anson laughed shortly and looked down again at the flowered robe he was wearing. “Maybe I should be blessing this outfit instead of cursing it. Senta stayed back here for a costume fitting, otherwise we might have been there, too. You know, when I was down there I always had this funny feeling that there could be an accident. Maybe everybody did, and maybe that was part of the attraction of the place.”
Rob shook his head, dark eyes somber. “Not to me. I felt uncomfortable all the time I was down there, and I couldn’t wait to get out. There were enough dangers in bridge construction work, I never needed to look for more. It must be horrible to be so bored with life that you have to introduce artificial dangers into it. I’m sure you’re right, though, that was part of the draw of Way Down for some people.” He stared thoughtfully at the brocaded robe that showed its multiple colors in the display screen.
“Not me,” Anson said hastily. “Don’t get the wrong impression, Rob. I do this for business, not entertainment.” He glanced down again at his colorful costume and scowled. “You don’t know how lucky you are. Your line of work doesn’t call for any posturing, the way that mine does.”
“Rubbish.” The word took a long time to get there. “How much money do you have, Howard? Don’t even bother to answer that. You don’t have to work if you don’t choose to, I know that. The Information Service must be pulling in money hand over fist. Digging out information when other people fail is your life-blood. You’re just unnaturally interested in other people’s affairs.”
Anson listened to Rob with no trace of expression on his fine-boned face. “Hmph,” he said at last. “We’re cutting close to the bone tonight. After those kind words, I don’t know if I should tell you what I’ve been doing while you’ve been away.”
“You don’t need to. You’ve been digging. From the look on your face you’ve found something, too.”
“Maybe.” Anson rubbed his chin. “Rob, you take the fun out of everything. I expect to get some credit for this. The sort of thing I’ve been doing is damned hard. I don’t believe there’s another man in the System who can do it half as well as I can. I’ve been digging all right. We’re following a scent that’s old, and one that has been well covered up. I’m getting somewhere, but not as fast as I’d like or in anything like the detail we really need.”
Rob’s weariness was gone completely. He leaned forward, face intent. “You found out about the Goblins? That’s more than I ever expected.”
“Hold it, now.” Anson held up his hand. “Don’t get too excited. First of all, I didn’t find out anything new about the ones that your parents were working on in the Antigeria Labs in Christchurch. I tried hard enough, but those have vanished without a trace. One presumably went in the fire, and I suspect that the other dived into the Antarctic Ocean in that plane crash. So I decided to forget those two, and see what else I might be able to dig out. I had every single report involving anything that might relate to a Goblin looked at in detail.”
He shook his head. “I won’t even start to tell you how much work that was. Every freak report in the files. After we’d finished with all that, we had just two cases that I thought sounded promising. I looked at them harder than I’ve ever looked at anything. There’s still no direct evidence, only second-hand reports from people who were casually involved and were not believed when they first talked about this. All the principal characters in each one are dead, disappeared, or somehow just refuse to talk. At this stage of my thinking, that’s suspicious, too. Do you want the full details now of each incident?”
Rob shook his head. Howard Anson looked ready to reel off facts for a few hours from that bottomless memory. “Just boil it down to the essentials. I’ll be leaving for Atlantis again in a few hours, and all I really need is enough to guide me on what I ought to look for while I’m there. I can’t follow anything back on Earth for a while. What’s the bottom line?”
“There is no bottom line. We’re dealing in a whole mass of conjectures, which I’ll try to put into some kind of logical framework. First of all, there have been no reports anywhere of live Goblins. Zero. In the cases I found, as well as the ones your parents were involved in, the Goblins were dead before anybody saw them. I got scraps of physical description which seem to build up a picture, but it’s an inconsistent one. There seem to be two different types of Goblins. I tried to get drawings made, but that was really hopeless. Nothing was easy. One of my supposed witnesses is senile, one was in the last stages of taliza collapse, and one of them was a half-wit to begin with. Here’s what we got after we put it all together. I did a summary sheet in case you want to record it there.”
Anson held a sheet up to the screen and waited for a few seconds while Rob activated the Record mode long enough to make a hard-copy facsimile.
“There are three things that I think we have to note about them,” Anson went on, when the copy was recorded out at the comlink in L-4. “First, look at their size. They are no more than a quarter of the height of a man, but they’re broad in proportion. They’ll weigh about five or six kilos, according to my best estimate. That fits in with the idea that they reached your parents in a medical supply box. They are not much bigger than babies. But they’re not children, according to these reports. The females have breasts, and one of the males had a beard. There seems to be good agreement on that, and all the witnesses noticed it — just shows you what people see first. Though I’m not sure you can really call my sources `witnesses,’ because what they told us was pretty random.”
“Hold it a moment.” Rob was scribbling a note on a sheet in front of him. “Do you have any information about what they were wearing? We could be dealing with human midgets, or some completely different form.”
“I tried that idea, too. The Goblins were naked, though the senile man we contacted was muttering something about a bracelet or a necklace that they all had. That was my second point. They couldn’t just be human midgets, judging from their appearance. A couple of them would pass for that, they were normal looking, but others were described as hideous and misshapen — mind you, the taliza addict we talked to was seeing trees full of snakes last time I met him, so you can take his evidence any way you choose. There’s no doubt they were adults, though, because of the breasts on the females. And they all had pubic hair, everybody agreed on that. I feel sure we have to be dealing with two separate types of Goblins.”