“All right.” Regulo waved a hand, unwilling to prolong an old argument. He turned to Rob. “He treats the outputs from that beast like some kind of oracle. When you’ve been here a few times, Merlin, you’ll find that Joseph will never do anything that Caliban doesn’t approve of. Right, Joseph?”

“Exactly right.” Morel’s manner was surly. “It is a pity that we do not all have enough wisdom to follow the same policy.”

Regulo chuckled. “Don’t take any notice of that, Merlin. Joseph is hung up on the fact that Caliban advised against using you on the skyhook project. We never found out why, and after today’s session I’m more convinced than ever that I was right to override that advice. You’re the man to build the beanstalk for us, no matter what Caliban says.”

Rob was still watching the huge form of the squid, hovering motionless now outside the windows. “But where does he live in the aquasphere?” he asked.

“Where?” Regulo rubbed at his cratered face and stared at the great eye, a foot across, peering in at them through the panel. “Don’t you know the old joke about the man with a small apartment who was given a gorilla for a present? `So where does the gorilla sleep?’ `Absolutely any place he wants to.’ That’s Architeuthis princeps out there, the top of the food chain. Caliban is king of the aquasphere, it’s his world and he comes and goes as he pleases.”

“Unless he is called.” Morel patted the communicator that he was still holding in one hand. “Then Caliban admits a master.”

“I don’t think he does.” Corrie spoke for the first time since the beast had appeared outside the windows. “I’ve read about the cephalopods, too, Joseph. They’re big, fast and ferocious, and they don’t come fiercer than that one. You should be careful. Caliban has learned where those shocks come from that force him to come here, or drive him away again. He knows it very well. Look at those eyes.”

The pale yellow saucer next to the window, lidless and glistening, had no interest in anything but Morel. It followed every movement that he made, especially when he put his fingers again on the communicator buttons.

“I hope that he knows me, and knows what I am to him.” Morel’s tone was dreamy, with a hint of something else: an echo of sensual pleasure. He kept his eyes fixed on Caliban, and quietly pressed two more keys on the device in his hand. There was a sudden convulsion of the great tentacles, obscured almost immediately by a cloud of sepia discharge from the ink sac at the end of the trunk. When it cleared Caliban was gone, vanished into the depths of the aquasphere.

“Thus I banish thee,” Morel said softly.

He nodded to Regulo, stood up, and left the room; but the memory of the great squid lingered on for at least one participant in the meeting.

Rob could not get the thought of those giant arms out of his head. The image stayed with him even during his work session with Regulo; all through the hours where they hammered out more details of the beanstalk, working on through the long night, cushioned deep in the warm water bosom of Atlantis; safe, even against the power of the Sun itself.

There would be one more encounter with Joseph Morel before Rob left for Earth and the work of planning the beanstalk tether. He had been wandering the smooth outer wall of the living quarters, marvelling again at the strange flora and fauna of the aquasphere, and hoping for another glimpse of Caliban. He had made his way half-way around the central sphere, past the maintenance areas, and past the exit locks that led from the air-filled interior out into the water-world. He was drawn on by what he thought was the shadow of a great tentacle, winnowing the green gloom, when he found his further progress blocked. A locked door with a red seal around it lay before him.

Rob was standing in front of it, wondering where it led, when Morel appeared, drifting in soundlessly behind him.

“What are you doing here?” Despite his soft voice, Morel’s manner was brusque. Rob turned from the locked door.

“I’m trying to get another look at Caliban before I leave. I can’t get past this point.”

“You shouldn’t be here at all.” Morel was edgy, running his tongue over his full red lips. “These are the labs. They are off limits to everyone except for me and my staff.”

“What are you doing in there, still modifying the salt-water forms? I was wondering how you do that — it’s not something that I’ve seen attempted back on Earth.”

Morel hesitated, opened his mouth to speak, then paused again.

“It’s not easy,” he said at last. “Some of the forms we’ve been using for a long time still need modification. That’s why we keep the labs closed. There’s DNA splicing going on all the time in there. We don’t want a repeat of what happened to Laspar’s group, back in Tycho.”

Rob nodded. He was watching Morel’s hands. They were clenched hard, white knuckles showing. “I’d have thought it was much less dangerous here, though. After all, you do have an isolated environment on Atlantis.”

“Less dangerous to the rest of the human race, you mean.” Morel smiled grimly. “I wasn’t thinking of it quite that way. I doubt if Laspar was, either, during that last couple of days before he got the newts and they got him. The welfare of the species as a whole is something you tend to lose sight of if you are personally threatened. Only fools take chances with recombination experiments like the ones that we’re doing here.”

The other man was beginning to relax a little, but he was far too tense for such a casual conversation. What was it that Howard Anson had said to Rob? “Whatever the connection is between those names, it’s something terrible.” And one of those names had been Joseph Morel.

“How long have you been working on these experiments?”

Rob kept his voice as casual as possible, but there was no doubt about it: Morel had tensed again, biting at his lower lip for a long moment before he answered.

“This type of research has been my life’s work. I have been engaged in it for many, many years.” He turned abruptly away from Rob to look out of the window into the still, green shadows beyond. “So. You are interested in Caliban, are you? He is a worthy subject for study. One of my oldest successes. I began to sense his potential more than thirty years ago, back when I was aware of no more than a few unexplained reactions from him in early experiments. We didn’t try for communication for a long time after that. Even at the beginning, I felt that anything we did would probably have to be through a computerized interface — we are too much mutual aliens for any direct communication. Except, one might say, on the basics.”

Morel had pulled the communicator again from his pocket and was holding it close to his chest. He pressed twin buttons on the side of it.

“Are you calling him?” Rob asked.

Morel nodded. “Through Sycorax. It is curious, our work went much faster once we had done the modifications for him to live in a fresh-water environment.” He was staring again out of the window. “Caliban will be at the display screens, out in the aquasphere. He does not like to leave those once he has settled by them. You knew, did you, that Caliban sees everything that we receive through any of the video links? Not just here on Atlantis, but all over the System. I’m drawing his attention now to the screen outside here.”

Morel nodded at the camera set in the wall above their heads. As he did so, Rob recalled other cameras, in Regulo’s office, on the aircraft that Corrie had first used to pick him up, and in the Space Tug. Thinking back, he could not recall a time when they had not been under some kind of surveillance. If Caliban could accept all those inputs, his data-handling capacity must be enormous.

“But how do you get the signals to him?” he asked. “As I recall, radio frequencies don’t pass through water.”