“Excellent!” It was Skrynol’s calm voice, pulling him free. Mondrian jerked upright on the velvet couch. He was shivering, but lathered with perspiration. “Did you ever encounter that set of images before?”
“Never.” Mondrian again began fiddling nervously with the fire-opal at his collar. “And I’ll be happy if I never encounter them again.”
Skrynol laughed, with that high-pitched trill of delight. “Courage, Commander Mondrian! We have penetrated much farther in this first session than I had dared to hope.”
“The hidden thing. Do you know what it is?”
“I have no idea. If it were that simple, you would not need the services of a good Fropper. What we found today was a diversion, your own mind’s first level of defense against revealing its fears. The images that you built are at best an analogy for those fears — and the fears themselves stem in turn from a much deeper and earlier hidden experience. We have far to go.”
Mondrian felt the electrodes being tugged free from his body. “The session is over?”
“For today.”
“What do I owe you?”
“For today? Nothing.” Skrynol paused, a fleshy flipper resting on Mondrian’s chest. “To be more honest with you, I have already received my payment for today. Two of the electrodes that I attached contain small catheters. While you were building your memories, I drew blood through them. Don’t worry — it was just a little, less than a quarter of a liter. You have plenty left, and your body will replace the loss in a very short time.”
“Nice of you to tell me about it.” Mondrian breathed deep. He had finally stopped shivering, but he was still sweating all over. “Why do you want my blood? For analysis?”
“No, Commander. For the best, simplest, and most honest of reasons: to drink. My metabolism is not suited to the digestion of most forms of food.”
Mondrian was being lifted from the velvet seat to a standing position. “I suppose I ought to be thankful that your needs are so modest. Will that be your standard charge for services — or does the price increase as the treatment continues?”
“You are a strong man, Commander Mondrian. Few can joke at the end of a session.” There was sly humor in Skrynol’s voice as they wound their way back towards the exit. “I will not increase the price. I want you as a regular customer, you see, and if I drained you that would be the end of it.”
Mondrian felt the bottom of the upward ramp beneath his feet, and Skrynol was no longer holding him.
“You are safe enough.” The voice came from far above. “Safe, at least, as long as you are still receiving treatment. The time to watch out for is the day that I say you are cured. Because then you will not plan to return, and I will have no incentive to hold back my appetite. But for the moment, you have no need to worry. So until the next time, Commander …”
Mondrian was not sure of his own feelings as he made the return journey to the upper levels. On the one hand, Skrynol had made more progress in one session than anyone else in dozens. On the other, he could not get the spider web out of his mind. More sessions would surely mean more images, just as disturbing.
Back at Link entrance level he transferred to the appropriate exit point and made his way wearily to Tatty’s apartment. Without her presence, the living quarters felt cold and depressing. He went through to the inner room, reached up to his collar, and removed the fire-opal. The communicator had been placed in stand-by mode. He changed the setting and called for a scrambled circuit up from Earth. Within a few minutes he was connected with the Border Security facility on Pallas.
“Hasselblad? This is Mondrian. I have a special job for you. Multiple medium recording, all wavelengths.”
He was silent for a few seconds, listening to the questions from the other end.
“Sorry, but I have no idea.” He stared at the fire-opal, weighing it in his hand. “I know you do, but I couldn’t tell what screening might be operating. I just tried every setting. I’ll have this linked up to you in the next hour, and I want you to give it top priority. There might be nothing there at all. But if there is I need it by next week. ”
Chapter 9
To the human observer, nothing had changed. The green balloon of the air-bulb still floated free among a tangle of space flotsam. The overlapping folds on its side suggested an entry point. The guard of the Sargasso Dump who gestured Luther Brachis towards the lock mumbled nothing intelligible.
But Brachis had been warned by Phoebe Willard. Instead of a suit designed for vacuum or atmosphere, he was wearing a tempered form used in extreme environments. He passed through the four folds of the lock, and found himself immersed in an inviscid fluid. The suit sensors reported the outside temperature: a hundred-and-ninety-six degrees below freezing, seventy-seven above absolute zero. Brachis was floating in a bath of liquid nitrogen.
He followed a guiding line towards the center of the bulb. In just a few meters he reached a second curved wall, with its own locks. He negotiated them. Inside that, at last, was a spherical chamber with its own atmosphere.
Brachis glanced again at the sensors. Temperature just a few degrees higher — and pure helium all around him as an atmosphere. He wouldn’t be taking his suit off for a while.
“Over this way, Commander.” A familiar voice spoke in his ear. He looked to the directional signal recorded by his suit, and saw the figure of Phoebe Willard halfway across the interior of the air-bulb. The lattice-work was still in position, but now at its center sat a new structure, a second bubble of dark green.
“Not exactly a shirtsleeve working-place.” Brachis floated towards her. “I tried to call you from the Dump’s control room. Why didn’t you answer?”
“Because I couldn’t hear you. I designed it that way. For the same reason as I built the cold barrier.” She pointed at the outer, liquid nitrogen shell. “I never told you to lose communication ability.”
“That was just a side effect. No signals can get through that outer wall. You told me you wanted a secure environment. This is it.”
“Taken to extremes. And beyond them.”
“I don’t think so. Nor will you, when I tell you what’s going on here. But first, let’s get this out of the way.” She pushed across to a magnetic board clamped to the lattice and lifted from it two cubes like a pair of oversized dice. “You insisted on hand-delivery. I’m hand delivering. This is it. The specification, the best one I’ve been able to derive by putting together information from every fragment.”
Brachis slipped the data dice into a frost-proof, fireproof pouch in his suit wall. “How complete is it?”
“For perfectionists like you and me, it’s lousy. There’s functions and neural paths I shouldn’t even have guessed at.”
“But you did.”
“Naturally. The whole thing’s a plausible Construct logic to anybody but an expert. In the old words of wisdom, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and that’s usually enough to get by.”
“If you say it s plausible, that’s good enough for me. So what’s the bad news?”
“I didn’t say there was any. But there is certainly news.” Phoebe took the arm of Luther Brachis’s suit and drifted them both closer to the central green balloon. It loomed over them, and from a few feet away Brachis could see hair-thin and delicate spider filaments running from a computer station into the tough balloon wall. “What’s inside that? More liquid nitrogen?”
Phoebe nodded. “Nitrogen. And one other thing. Part of a Construct — the one I told you about, with a big chunk of its brain intact.”
“It had better be only the brain.”
“Luther, I’ve reviewed the records from Cobweb Station over and over. They’re terrifying. I bet I’m more afraid of the Morgan Constructs than you are. Before I did anything else I took this one completely apart, removed anything that might possibly be a weapon, and isolated the brain. Then I separated the pieces of the brain itself, and ran connections among them that I can interrupt any time from here. And then I put the whole thing in a bath of liquid nitrogen to reduce available energy, cut off all communication channels with anything except the computer over there, and put a communications break between that and everything outside the air-bulb. What more should I have done?’