“Killed?” she said at last. She began to rock back and forth on the sofa, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. “I don’t believe it. It can’t be true. You’re not serious, are you?” There was a pause, then: “Oh God. You do mean it. You’re insane, you must be. Do you realize what you’ve done? All those innocent people, dead. Why did you do it?”

There was a longer silence, while Rob and Howard Anson stared at each other. Rob could tell from Anson’s expression that this was not simply a repeat of a previously heard recall.

“I don’t care what they were doing,” Senta went on at last. “It makes no difference. It couldn’t be so bad that you had to kill them. Gregor Merlin was your friend, wasn’t he? You had known him for years, for the longest time.”

Anson flashed a look of fierce satisfaction and sympathy towards Rob, while Senta became once more the prisoner of those inner voices. After a few seconds, tears began to trickle from under the dark blindfold. She was shaking her head.

“It’s no good telling me that, Joseph,” she said. “I know you’re lying. Don’t try and pretend. I was watching the display. I heard the orders you gave, though I didn’t know what they meant. You said burn the building, and set the bomb.” She fell silent for a moment, then muttered again, almost too softly to hear, “Burn the building and set the bomb. But why? Why that? Nothing could be so important, nothing in the world. He said they were already dead when they got there, so they couldn’t have told anything, to him or his wife. I don’t understand what the `Goblins’ were, but it makes no difference.”

She paused again, then shook her head firmly. “No, I won’t. If you refuse to tell me the truth, I’ll find it out for myself. I’ll go to Christchurch, and I’ll visit the labs. Someone there will know.”

After a moment she leaned forward, listening intently. There was a silence, so long that Rob was convinced that Senta had moved to another phase of taliza-trance. He looked at Howard Anson and was opening his mouth to speak when the other man waved him urgently to silence. Senta gasped with a new emotion and put her hands to her eyes.

“God have mercy on you. You don’t seem to understand what you’ve told me. It’s inhuman. If you’re telling me the truth, I can’t stay here. I have to leave, I have to get away.” She was weeping openly, her words broken by deep, heaving sobs. “I can’t stay. You must go and tell them, explain what you’ve been doing. Tell them you didn’t know, tell them that you have been out of your mind. Somebody has to tell the truth. Surely you see there’s no way I can ever forgive this? It’s over.”

Once again she was silent, except for the ugly, choked sound of her sobbing. While Merlin and Anson waited, looking at each other bleakly, the tone changed. Little by little it became a harsh coughing, deep in her throat.

“She’s coming out of it.” Anson reached over to Senta and removed the blindfold. “She’ll need a few minutes to herself. Would you mind coming through into the next room.” He saw Rob’s look. “It’s all right, it’s safe to leave her alone now. She won’t want you to see her condition when she comes back all the way to the present. You go ahead, and let me do what I can for her. I’ll join you in a couple of minutes.”

Rob walked past Anson into the bedroom and closed the door. He went to the window and looked out across the pink and yellow face of the old city. It was almost sunset, a quiet, hushed time. He could hear the bells tolling vespers, far away across the array of rooftops. The evening service would be going on in the great structure two miles to the west, as they had for a thousand years. The air of the city was clear and calm.

And somewhere, somewhere far from Earth, the man roamed free who had murdered his parents; the man who had made Senta Plessey a shattered shell of a woman; the man who made it impossible for Rob to draw any pleasure from the scene before him.

He did not move. After a few minutes the door behind him opened and Howard Anson entered.

“She’ll be all right now,” he said. “I want her to lie down for a moment, then she will come and join us in here.” He took a deep breath. “No wonder she’s been so torn by this. That last session opened up more than I expected. I’ve been getting bad vibrations from the investigation we’ve been doing into your parents’ death, but nothing like Senta’s memories.”

Rob had not turned around. “Did you interpret all of that the same way as I did?” he asked quietly. His body seemed frozen, staring rigidly out across the face of the city. “It was murder. Murder for both of them. The fire in the lab, and the bomb in the aircraft — that very nearly got me, too. Another five minutes and I’d have been dead.” He looked down at his hands for a moment, reliving the months and years of operations. “And yet there has to be a lot more that we still haven’t heard.”

Anson nodded. “Much more. For one thing, we have no idea why it all happened. We don’t know who the Goblins were, we don’t know how they are related to Morel and Caliban. It sounded to me as though it was Morel who was responsible for the death of your parents, but we have no proof of that. We may be misinterpreting Senta’s words. I have a problem believing some of the things she said.” He rubbed morosely at his jaw. “We don’t have answers to any of this, and in some ways we have more questions than ever. I guess we have to keep digging.”

“I think you may have enough information already to help Senta. You know that she feels she has been directly involved in murders — and more than just my parents. There were a lot of other people on that aircraft. Can you use what you have to erase some of her painful memories? And maybe you can help me to delve deeper into these things, they involve me a lot more than Senta.”

Rob was beginning to understand the tie between Anson and the tormented woman in the next room. There was a mutual dependence that made simple physical attraction almost an irrelevance.

“We don’t want to involve Senta in this any more than she has been already,” he went on. “Tell me what you’ve turned up about Joseph Morel, and let me take it from there.”

“I might agree to that, for her sake. But Senta never would.” Anson turned abruptly from the window and went across to sit on the bed. “She’ll want to stay with this to the end, until she’s sure she has done everything she can to put things right. I’ll tell you all that I found out about Morel, but tying any of it to what we’ve heard from Senta just now is another matter. I can’t see the connection.”

He leaned back, head against the panelled wall, and closed his eyes. “All right, here goes. Let me try to summarize. Morel’s childhood and early career are no problem. Well-documented, and a pattern that I’ve seen a hundred times. I could show you many similar ones in our files. Strong father, pushing the child along hard from the time that he was one year old. Mother in the background, with no say in how Morel was raised. A prodigy in school, then on to the university when he was thirteen. Alienation there, from everything except his work — no wonder, a thirteen-year-old can’t make social contact with people five or six years older. So. No friends — not even your father, Rob. They were just fellow-students. As you might expect, Morel had a brilliant academic record. His first paper on longevity and rejuvenation was published before he was twenty — and it was a classic.”

Howard Anson opened his eyes again and looked at Rob. “Now for the part that’s different. With Morel’s development to this point, I would have bet money that I could have predicted the rest of it. He ought to have gone on to a career in university research, rising steadily through the ranks until he was a respected, senior authority. He would have always been a little withdrawn and reclusive, but that’s not unusual in a scientist. His friends would be other specialists in the same field of research, scattered all over the System.”