Rob’s weariness was gone completely. He leaned forward, face intent. “You found out about the Goblins? That’s more than I ever expected.”
“Hold it, now.” Anson held up his hand. “Don’t get too excited. First of all, I didn’t find out anything new about the ones that your parents were working on in the Antigeria Labs in Christchurch. I tried hard enough, but those have vanished without a trace. One presumably went in the fire, and I suspect that the other dived into the Antarctic Ocean in that plane crash. So I decided to forget those two, and see what else I might be able to dig out. I had every single report involving anything that might relate to a Goblin looked at in detail.”
He shook his head. “I won’t even start to tell you how much work that was. Every freak report in the files. After we’d finished with all that, we had just two cases that I thought sounded promising. I looked at them harder than I’ve ever looked at anything. There’s still no direct evidence, only second-hand reports from people who were casually involved and were not believed when they first talked about this. All the principal characters in each one are dead, disappeared, or somehow just refuse to talk. At this stage of my thinking, that’s suspicious, too. Do you want the full details now of each incident?”
Rob shook his head. Howard Anson looked ready to reel off facts for a few hours from that bottomless memory. “Just boil it down to the essentials. I’ll be leaving for Atlantis again in a few hours, and all I really need is enough to guide me on what I ought to look for while I’m there. I can’t follow anything back on Earth for a while. What’s the bottom line?”
“There is no bottom line. We’re dealing in a whole mass of conjectures, which I’ll try to put into some kind of logical framework. First of all, there have been no reports anywhere of live Goblins. Zero. In the cases I found, as well as the ones your parents were involved in, the Goblins were dead before anybody saw them. I got scraps of physical description which seem to build up a picture, but it’s an inconsistent one. There seem to be two different types of Goblins. I tried to get drawings made, but that was really hopeless. Nothing was easy. One of my supposed witnesses is senile, one was in the last stages of taliza collapse, and one of them was a half-wit to begin with. Here’s what we got after we put it all together. I did a summary sheet in case you want to record it there.”
Anson held a sheet up to the screen and waited for a few seconds while Rob activated the Record mode long enough to make a hard-copy facsimile.
“There are three things that I think we have to note about them,” Anson went on, when the copy was recorded out at the comlink in L-4. “First, look at their size. They are no more than a quarter of the height of a man, but they’re broad in proportion. They’ll weigh about five or six kilos, according to my best estimate. That fits in with the idea that they reached your parents in a medical supply box. They are not much bigger than babies. But they’re not children, according to these reports. The females have breasts, and one of the males had a beard. There seems to be good agreement on that, and all the witnesses noticed it — just shows you what people see first. Though I’m not sure you can really call my sources `witnesses,’ because what they told us was pretty random.”
“Hold it a moment.” Rob was scribbling a note on a sheet in front of him. “Do you have any information about what they were wearing? We could be dealing with human midgets, or some completely different form.”
“I tried that idea, too. The Goblins were naked, though the senile man we contacted was muttering something about a bracelet or a necklace that they all had. That was my second point. They couldn’t just be human midgets, judging from their appearance. A couple of them would pass for that, they were normal looking, but others were described as hideous and misshapen — mind you, the taliza addict we talked to was seeing trees full of snakes last time I met him, so you can take his evidence any way you choose. There’s no doubt they were adults, though, because of the breasts on the females. And they all had pubic hair, everybody agreed on that. I feel sure we have to be dealing with two separate types of Goblins.”
He paused. Rob looked at the screen expectantly. “Is that all?” he said after a few more seconds.
“All.” Anson glared pop-eyed at the screen. “Do you have any idea how much work went into finding out what I just told you? We screened over four hundred thousand reports, everything from the crazy columns of the news to the records of mental hospitals. You may not think it’s much, but you ought to see what we started with.”
“I’m not putting you down, Howard. But you said at the beginning that there were three things I should look at. So far, you’ve only given me two.”
“I was getting there, if you’d give me time. The other thing isn’t about the Goblins themselves, it’s my feeling about the quality of the information. I always try and tie an index to it. In one word, dreadful. I already told you what my data sources were like when we interviewed them. I didn’t tell you how old those reports were. One of them came from seventeen years ago, the other from five years ago. The only reason I’m willing to give them any credibility at all is because they are consistent with each other. There’s no way the two sets of people involved could have known anything about each other. Both sets of Goblins showed up on Earth, but on different continents. One set appeared in a medical supply house, the other in an old book warehouse.”
“Was either place anywhere close to a spaceport?”
“I had that thought, too. If it’s tied to Morel, and if Morel has been away on Atlantis all these years, then the Goblins ought to have come from off-Earth. It doesn’t help. The places were near enough to spaceports, but we couldn’t draw any correlation. We couldn’t track them back past the point where they were actually found, in either case.”
Rob was sitting, shoulders hunched, studying the sheet that Howard Anson had transmitted to him. “I was hoping you might have found something on the cause of death. Something must have killed them.”
“Nothing new. You heard what Senta said about lack of air in the supply capsule. It could have been lack of oxygen in all cases. I assume there was no obvious sign of violence, or we’d probably have heard at least one report on that.”
“I still can’t get past my basic question, Howard. Are we dealing with something that’s human? I have a strange thought running around in the back of my head.”
“They certainly looked more human than anything else, if you believe the reports we dug up. What are you getting at? Do you think they are some kind of animals?”
“Not quite that, either. I don’t know about your background, Howard, but where I grew up there are no bearded people forty centimeters high. I haven’t run across anything like that since my aunt told me fairy stories. But I can’t help thinking of some of the things you told me about Morel, back when he was in college. Even before he had Caliban, he was working on the big cephalopods, right?”
“He was studying their brain structure, that’s true enough. He was interested in the fact that they have an optic chiasma, the same as the higher vertebrates. No other mollusk has anything like that. It’s supposed to be one of the signs that they are smart. It means that each eye is coupled into both brain hemispheres, so the brain itself must have a more complicated structure.”
“I don’t remember you telling me that. What I remember is Morel’s experimental work. Didn’t you tell me that he was trying to make them smarter by playing games with genetic crosses?”
“That’s right.” Anson leaned back in his chair, plucking absently at a loose thread on the lapel of the dressing-gown. “I see where you’re going, Rob, and I don’t like the sound of it. Morel was doing coupling experiments with vertebrate and invertebrate DNA, until he was stopped because the university decided it was too expensive. You think he started again, doing more crosses? That would make the Goblins some sort of cross-species breed.” He shook his head. “I will bet you some fairly big money that what you suggest is genetically impossible.”