Rob was gazing at her in amazement. “Not a word. Maybe she thought it was obvious enough without saying it. And it ought to have been, now that you’ve told me. Corrie said she had been looking at the signs on Regulo’s desk for years and years, the very first time we met. I thought that was odd, because she looked so young, but I never took it any further. And she told me she had never seen you using taliza. Howard said you had been addicted for twelve years. That meant Corrie would have been only fourteen years old. I couldn’t understand why she had never seen you, unless she had gone off to Atlantis before that — and she wouldn’t have gone there so young to work. But it makes sense if she went there to stay with her father. I’ve just been unbelievably dense, that’s all.”
Senta was nodding her head, but while Rob was speaking her eyes had begun to lose focus. As the injection took effect, Howard Anson eased her back gently onto the pillow.
“Some day, Rob.” he said grimly. “Some day soon. I’m looking for another thing in our casting back to the past. I want to find the bastards who made Senta into a taliza addict. I’ve never believed that she did it to herself, and now I think it’s somehow tied in to another attempt to wipe her memory. But it’s working in reverse. She recalls exactly what they’d like her to forget, it’s planted so deep in her. Let’s find who did it. Then you’ll realize that I have my obsessions, too.”
“You are going to try again, and see what Senta recalls?”
“I don’t know. It’s obvious we still don’t have everything, but we can’t use a dose this strong very often. The after-effects are fierce. I’ll keep digging away at Morel’s background, you look for evidence when you are out on Atlantis. But take Senta’s advice. Be careful how you dig. I’ve heard Senta talk about Joseph Morel, and she’s terrified of the man. Don’t ever let him suspect what you’re trying to do.”
“It may be a bit late for that.” Rob stood up. “He was already suspicious when I was looking around last time. I’ll be careful. But we have to go on. I’ll admit to my own obsessions, even if they’ve been put on hold for ten years. I want to know who killed my parents, and I want to know why they did it. There’s one other thing I’d like you to look into while I’m away. Do a search for other reports of anything that might be a Goblin, on Earth or off it.”
Howard Anson shook his head. “I’ll try, Rob, but I don’t know where to start. What is a Goblin? You have no idea how much there will be in the files on references to `little people.’ We don’t even know if the Goblins are small. I’ll have to sift my way through mountains of material about elves, and midgets, and leprechauns, and every other sort of real or imagined small human-like being.”
“I know. If I didn’t have extraordinary faith in your tracking powers, Howard, I would never suggest it. But I think we do know, now, that the Goblins are small. Senta said there were two Goblins in a medical supply box. That would usually be less than a meter long. I assume you already tried to find references to the Expies, the name you had heard used before?”
“Long ago. There wasn’t a trace. I’ll try again. But it will take a massive effort.”
“Don’t worry about money.”
“I wasn’t. I was thinking about time.”
“As soon as possible. For all our sakes.” Rob paused at the door, his gaze turning back to the silent form on the bed. “One other question, then I’ll go. You told me that Senta was terrified of poverty, and she came from a poor background. Now she seems to have all the money she can use. Do you know where she gets it? If it’s yours, that’s fine and I don’t want to pry. But if it isn’t…”
“It’s not, and I do know where she gets it.” Anson’s tone was unusually bitter. “She has never taken anything from me — never needed to, though I’d give it gladly. She has an unlimited credit of her own. I traced the charge code back through the files, and everything terminates at a single number. Everything that Senta spends is charged to the central account of Regulo Enterprises.”
CHAPTER 10: The Birth of Ourobouros
The city of Quito lay less than thirty miles to the south-west. From the excavation site it could no longer be seen. Immense mounds of earth and broken rock completely circled the pit, hiding all the surrounding countryside from anyone inside the lip of the crater.
The landscape had become lifeless. Nothing grew on the steep sides of the rock piles, nor in the cavernous interior of the pit with its sheer, metal-braced walls. Rob was standing about thirty meters from the edge, looking about him at the bleak, dead scene.
“I hope all this is worth it,” he said to the man standing beside him. “You’ve certainly carved the earth up here. You know we have to hit the point exactly, then hold it down when it starts to pull? Otherwise, we lose the whole thing.”
The other man was small, dark-skinned, and short of stature. He was much at home in the thin mountain air. His smile at Rob was brilliant and gap-toothed. “Not my department,” he said, with the ease of long familiarity. “Landing it in the right place is your job. Me, I just dig the holes. Come on over and take a look at the bottom of this one. She’s a big mother, biggest I’ve ever done.”
Rob allowed himself to be led to the edge of the pit. It was a little more than four hundred yards across, with an even, circular boundary. The sides were smoothly vertical. Rob took a quick look over, then stepped back.
“That’s enough for me, Luis. I’m not all that fond of heights.”
“You say?” The other man stared at Rob challengingly. “You try and tell me that, when Perrazo told me you went off climbing the Himalayas — alone? What is that, if it is not heights?”
“That’s different. I had my mind on getting up the mountain, and down again. Here, it’s all the way down in one swoop. I’ve always wondered how you could feel so comfortable, working the heights like this.” He took another quick step to look over the edge, then promptly backed up again. “It manages to look a lot deeper than five kilometers from up here. I can’t even see the excavation equipment, and they’re big machines.”
“Biggest I could find. We’ll be all ready here in a couple more months.” Luis advanced to the very edge of the pit and leaned casually over it. He nodded in satisfaction at what he saw and spat into the depths. “This is still the easy part, eh? When she comes in, and we have to get the rock back in there — that’s when we begin to sweat. She’ll be a bitch to tether. You sure you don’t have more time for me to fill her in? Couple billion tons, less than five minutes. That’s a tall order.” The confident tone of his voice belied his words as he leaned far over the edge and peered downwards.
“You’ll do it, Luis.” Rob was staring up, straight above them, as though seeing something descending in his mind’s eye. “We’ve built in a mushroom at the end of the beanstalk. It broadens out to about three hundred and fifty meters at the bottom, so you won’t have any trouble watching it arrive. It will be coming in at less than a hundred kilometers an hour on the final entry, and its arrival position will be accurate to better than one meter. You can start shovelling rock in there as soon as the leading edge goes below ground level. You’ll have loads of time. Way I look at it, I wonder why we’re paying you as much as we are — it’s like giving the money away.”
“All right.” Luis was laughing and still looking down into the pit. “Maybe you’d like to take over this job for yourself, eh? Then I can have the easy part, sit over there in Central Control and watch while other people do all the work.”
“Easy? Where do you think all the worry will be? You can sit here and be full of blind faith — I’m the one who has to worry about the stability, all the way in.”