“But it’s obvious that it didn’t go like that.”

“Obviously. It might have, but another factor came along and broke the pattern. Morel met Darius Regulo.”

Anson paused as the door to his left opened and Senta entered. She was chalk-pale, even to her full lips, but her movements were steady and her mouth was firm. On impulse, Rob went over to her and took her hands in his. They were warm again, but not with the frenetic heat and tremor of the taliza high. She smiled at him, the first genuine smile that he had seen from her. It was Corrie’s smile. He realized how much the two women resembled each other, and wondered why he had not seen it at once.

“How are you feeling now?” he asked. “You shouldn’t have let us do that to you, just so I could take a look for a part of my own past.”

She shook her head, still smiling. “It’s my past, too, you know. I’m as curious as you are. Ever since I came out of it I’ve been sitting in there wondering what you found out. I’m hoping it was a lot, but I don’t remember a thing.” She licked her lips. “If we need more information, I’ll be willing to try again.”

“Not now.” Anson stepped towards her. “It would be too much for you, and I don’t think we should do anything more until we’ve looked into what we have now. You told us things that we had never heard before. Rob and I need to see where they lead, and that will take a while. But it doesn’t look pleasant.”

He gave Senta a summary of what they had heard from her while she was under the influence of the drug, quoting the words she had spoken verbatim — Rob envied him that remarkable memory. When he had finished Anson looked at Senta inquiringly.

She shook her head.

“I don’t have a conscious memory of any of it. So far as I’m concerned, it’s something I’m hearing for the first time. Thank God for small mercies. I wouldn’t want to live with that all the time. Something horrible happened back then, and it sounds as though Joseph Morel is a murderer.”

“You have no idea what he might have been trying to hide?” Rob asked. “I don’t like the man, but even he wouldn’t murder for no reason.”

“That’s logical, but I couldn’t begin to guess what he might be covering up.” Senta chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip, now returned to its natural full red. Her face was still pale, but a touch of color was creeping back into it. “Maybe he was trying to hide another murder. What are the two of you planning to do next?”

“I’ll try and follow up on this,” said Anson. “Rob is going to be off with the beanstalk, he can’t do much else for a while. It shouldn’t be rushed if we’re to do a thorough job. I suppose you could say it can wait a little longer, seeing how long it has waited already. But I don’t see it that way. I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but this thing may still be dangerous. If someone was willing to kill twenty-seven years ago to keep a secret, it’s more than likely they’d kill for the same reason now.”

“If it’s Morel, there’s no way he could hurt us here, when he’s on Atlantis.” Senta turned to Rob. “If you go back there, you must take care. He can’t know what we’ve found out, but he obviously knows that you are the son of Gregor Merlin.”

“I’ll take care, don’t worry about that. But don’t assume that you’re safe down here. There are ways that he could cause trouble even when he’s not present. People can be hired to do anything. Don’t take chances, and keep your eyes open.”

“I’ll be on the lookout, too,” Anson said. “I don’t know Morel, but I’ve been building up the picture of him and it’s not a good one. He’s very intelligent, and he has a lot of experience.”

“How old is he, anyway?” Rob recalled Morel’s expression of mingled innocence and experience.

“Sixty. He had one rejuvenation, but even so he looks younger than he ought. I think he must have been following his own techniques for life-prolongation. I saw his picture and placed him at thirty to thirty-five, but I’m quite sure of his age. I’ve seen copies of the birth record. He was twenty-three when Regulo came to see him for the first time. That was soon after he had refused a full professorship at Canberra. I don’t know what Regulo offered him, but it was enough. He went off to work in Regulo’s labs and he has been there ever since, continuously for the past thirty-seven years.”

“Working on rejuvenation?” asked Rob. “I don’t think so. That may have been where he started, but I know he’s doing other things on Atlantis. For one thing, he has Caliban.”

“Caliban.” Senta shuddered a little, as though a trace of taliza was still working within her. “That’s a name I haven’t thought about for a long time. When I first met Morel, that was all he would talk about. Caliban can do this, Caliban will do that. He has been working with that animal for many years. Even at the beginning, he said that he would make him do things that no squid had ever done before — he used to make him do tricks.”

“He still does that, and more,” said Rob. “You mean he had Caliban with him when he was here on Earth?”

Senta frowned, her dark brows drawn into a line over her wide-spaced eyes. “I find these things hard to remember. They seem vague, as though they happened to somebody else. I’m sure that he had Caliban then, but I don’t know if it was on Earth or off it. It was definitely thirty years ago, and that would make it three years before Regulo moved his operation away from Earth completely. So Morel must have been working with Caliban here, on Earth.”

“You mean that Regulo has been living in space for all that time — for the past twenty-seven years?” Rob’s face expressed his surprise. “I thought he had gone there much more recently, when he got old. That’s another thing I don’t understand. Morel is supposed to be a big expert on rejuvenation, one of the top authorities in the System. And Regulo is loaded with money, so expense isn’t an issue. Why hasn’t he had rejuvenation treatments? I know some people refuse them for religious reasons, but I doubt if that’s a factor with Regulo — his god is engineering. If that’s what he hired Morel for, why doesn’t he use him? And why does he go around with all the scar tissue on him, instead of using grafts and regeneration treatment?”

“Scar tissue?” Senta was frowning at him in surprise. “Which scar tissue? I don’t remember any scars.”

“It must be part of the memories that you’ve lost,” said Rob. He had stood up and was pacing up and down in front of the window. “He has scars over his whole face. You must have seen them, he got them from the solar fly-by that he did, fifty years ago. Corrie told me all about it. Did you forget all that, too? His face is a nightmare.”

Senta, seated on the sofa, was silent for so long that Rob was afraid of some new attack from her drug addiction. She seemed to have gone into another trance, her face puzzled and thoughtful. Finally, she nodded her head.

“I think I know what has happened,” she said. “You’ve been putting pieces together logically, and they seem to make sense. But you have a piece missing, because Cornelia left out an important fact.”

“Don’t play games, Senta,” said Anson quietly.

“It’s not games.” Senta patted Anson’s hand, while keeping her eyes fixed on Rob. “My memory has bad patches, but I’m quite sure of this. Regulo did get scars from the close approach to the Sun, but they could be removed. And they were removed, soon after he returned to Earth after that fly-by. Removed without trace. When I first met Regulo he was a handsome man. Rob, did Cornelia tell you why Regulo can’t ever have a rejuvenation treatment?”

“No. I didn’t even know that he can’t. I think I started to ask her about rejuvenation and the scar tissue once, soon after I first met Regulo, but something interrupted us and I never got an answer. She told me why Regulo didn’t like bright lights, and I just assumed that he got his scars in the same experience. She never raised the subject with me again.”