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.
CHAPTER 13: The Masters of Atlantis
The evening meal was an uncomfortable affair, despite the astonishing array of edible products that Regulo had again conjured from the sea-gardens of Atlantis.
Rob knew that his own sensitivity to the atmosphere in the big dining-room was unusually heightened. He needed evidence that his trip through the aquasphere had gone unobserved. Even making allowance for that, he felt that he could sense quick looks of anger from Morel, directed towards him whenever his attention was diverted elsewhere. There was an unpleasant tension between the two men. Regulo was clearly suffering from the after-effects of Morel’s treatment — his “regular dose of poison,” as he put it — and did not have the energy to lead the free-ranging speculation that usually marked meals on Atlantis. And Corrie, for whatever reason, would meet no one’s eye. She sat, aloof and monosyllabic, and showed no appetite for her food.
It came as a relief when Regulo suggested that Corrie should take Rob up to the outer surface of Atlantis and show him the little asteroid, sitting all ready for the mining operations that were scheduled to begin in a few hours time.
“I don’t have the strength for a look at it myself,” he said. “But there’s always the chance that you will see something directly that doesn’t show on a holoscreen. You ought to put your head on that problem, Merlin — the holoscreen is supposed to carry all the amplitude and phase information for a reconstruction in here that’s good enough to fool the human eye, but somewhere along the line there’s an information loss.”
“Noisy transmission channels?”
“Not that I’ve been able to find. Take a look for yourself, and see if you think it’s all my imagination.”
Corrie’s manner changed as soon as they were in their suits and ascending the broad shaft that led from the living-sphere to the surface of Atlantis.
“What’s the problem with you and Morel?” she said.
“I don’t care for him.” Rob paused in their ascent at the observation panel where he had caught the first faint glimpse of Caliban on his initial visit to Atlantis. “You noticed the way he was looking at me, didn’t you?”
“And the way you were looking at him. I could feel you two throwing knives at each other across the table.” She began to lead the way up the shaft, heading for the outer air lock. “Look, if you’re going to spend much time on Atlantis, you and Morel will have to learn to work with each other. I wanted to get away from the living quarters so that we could talk about this. I think Regulo must have guessed that, when he suggested we take a look outside. You don’t like Morel, and that’s fine. I don’t like him either. But he’s immensely useful to Regulo.”
“He’s a brilliant man,” said Rob. “I know that, but I don’t trust him. How dependent is Regulo on Morel for treatment?”
“He could get another doctor, but that’s not the point. Morel happens to be the top man in the System for treatment of Cancer crudelis and Cancer pertinax. He pioneered everything that’s worth trying for the diseases. Regulo would be insane to accept another doctor, when Morel is willing to stay here and work on Atlantis.”
Rob looked at her in surprise. Corrie seemed to assume that he knew all about Regulo’s disease, despite her earlier reluctance to mention it. Her face was invisible behind the reflecting plate of her suit. “Do you think that Morel is getting close to a cure?” he said.
“Not for Regulo’s disease. Morel has had complete success with crudelis, and he has been able to arrest pertinax and even reverse it with drugs, in lab tests. But when he tried it on Regulo, the side effects were so bad that he had to stop after a few weeks.”
“But he’s still trying?”
“Of course. Morel had plenty of tenacity and works tremendously hard. But it’s a terrible and difficult disease.” She shuddered. “Have you ever seen pictures of Regulo as a young man? He was handsome. You would never recognize him from the way he looks now.”
They had reached the outer surface of Atlantis. The asteroid was floating about five kilometers above their heads, glowing a bright orange-red against the star field. The slight difference between its orbit and that of Atlantis was slowly reducing the distance between the two bodies. On one polar axis of the spinning asteroid, Rob could see the black outline of the Spider. Its elongated proboscis formed a long, thin line against the orange glow. The powersat, photovoltaic receptors turned to face the sun, hung like a huge sail at the other pole of the asteroid. Spin-up was finished, and in a few more hours the whole interior would be molten.
Based on the color of the rotating mass, Rob judged that it had reached about twelve hundred degrees. The jagged outline of the rock was already blurring as the materials softened and flowed in the sustained heat.
Corrie was hovering close by him in the entrance of the shaft. “Who was it told you about Regulo’s sickness?” she asked softly.
“Senta,” Rob said, and at once regretted his answer. He saw Corrie’s body stiffen in her suit.