The door at the end of the lab was less than a meter wide, in a room at least twenty-five meters long. It offered a narrow and tantalizing view of the area beyond. Rob cursed his lack of forethought. What he needed was a scope, to give him a close-up view of the other room. He hadn’t seen such an instrument on Atlantis, but there must be several of them. They were the most convenient way of taking a good look at the interior of the aquasphere without entering the water.
Rob pressed closer to the window. After a few seconds, something again moved across the doorway. It went swiftly, offering Rob no more than a fleeting look. That was enough. He had seen a small, misshapen form, man-like but undoubtedly deformed. It was difficult to make an estimate of its true size, but the head reached no higher than a fourth of the height of the door opening. A moment later, a second and similar shape crossed the doorway in the other direction; then two more, moving together. After that there was nothing to be seen for several minutes.
Rob waited, completely absorbed in his desire to see past the door area to the room beyond. He had forgotten his earlier, nervous scanning of the aquasphere, and at the time there seemed no reason for his sudden turn to face outward from the window. Much later, he realized that he must have felt the pressure wave. As he turned, he at once saw the dark, streamlined shape of Caliban sweeping towards him at monstrous speed. The motion of the animal was completely silent, propelled by powerful jets of water emitted from the siphon at the end of the squid’s mantle.
It was too late to swim away again along the side of the living-sphere. Rob pushed off hard from the window, straightening his legs with all his strength and plunging into the nearest clump of floating vegetation. He cowered in its green shade, while Caliban seemed to deliberate as to whether or not to pursue the vanishing shape. In that long moment, Rob had time to wonder again about the squid’s preferred diet. Finally, Caliban moved on, towards the window that Rob had just left. The animal secured itself to the smooth surface with four of its long, suckered arms and began to rap against the window with a black, parrot-like beak. After a few seconds Rob saw a flicker of movement on the other side of the transparent panel. Caliban brought another pair of arms close to the surface of the living-sphere, and began to move them in strange, formal patterns against the clear plastic.
Rob was torn between two strong urges. Caution told him that he must leave at once, while the squid was preoccupied with the inside of the lab; but having come this far, Rob wanted to learn all that he could. Another glance at his watch made the decision for him. More than two hours had passed since he had put on the suit. Keeping as much as possible in the shelter of the lush water-weeds, Rob began to swim cautiously back towards the entry lock, drifting silently from one dense clump to the next. Before he was quite out of sight of Caliban, he paused and turned back for a last look.
The squid was still at the window, one great yellow eye turned to look inside. The other eye was facing roughly in Rob’s direction, but the regular waving of one pair of arms continued. Rob swam for another ten yards, then finally risked a dive towards the surface of the sphere. The curvature of the surface took him out of sight of Caliban, and he abandoned his cautious progress and plunged as fast as possible to the entry lock. He hurried through it, removed his suit with clumsy fingers, and at once began to make his way back to Regulo’s study.
He reached the door as Corrie was coming along the corridor from the opposite direction. She stared hard at his pale face and uncombed hair, but said only, “There you are. I’ve been wondering where you’d got to.”
“I went to have a look at the recycling and maintenance plant,” Rob said, as casually as he could manage. “I’ve been wondering how self-sufficient Atlantis would be with just an internal power supply. Did you get the message I left for you? Regulo wants you to meet with him, as soon as he’s through with Morel.”
“I just spoke with him. He thought you would have joined me in the recreation area. You’ve been over in maintenance all this time?”
Rob shrugged, deliberately off-hand in his manner. “I didn’t feel energetic. Exercise without scenery is boring. After Regulo left the study I took another look at the beanstalk geometry. We’re still playing games with it, making sure we have good stability. I don’t know how long that took, but when nobody came back here I went for a tour of the other side of the sphere.”
Corrie was giving him an odd look, but she did not question his statements. Where else did the camera in Regulo’s study send its images? Perhaps there were others, apart from Caliban and Sycorax, who could monitor activities. Rob slid open the door as Corrie moved past him along the corridor.
“I’m on my way now to meet with Regulo,” she said. “Will you be with him after dinner, for more work?”
“I think Regulo should take a rest. He was in bad shape earlier. I’ll try and hold him to what he said, and put off more work until after the sleep period.”
“Good luck with that.” Corrie grimaced. “You know Regulo. He eats work.”
She left him, and Rob went back into the study. To his relief the camera in the wall was switched off. There must be an automatic control that activated the system only when there was sound or movement in the room. Rob moved to stand in front of the desk, and was relieved to see that the red light below the camera at once flickered on. He must be sure to tell Corrie that he had been sitting well away from the desk, out of view of the camera. Even so, Rob wondered just where those signals were being received in the rest of Atlantis.
CHAPTER 13: The Masters of Atlantis
The evening meal was an uncomfortable affair, despite the astonishing array of edible products that Regulo had again conjured from the sea-gardens of Atlantis.
Rob knew that his own sensitivity to the atmosphere in the big dining-room was unusually heightened. He needed evidence that his trip through the aquasphere had gone unobserved. Even making allowance for that, he felt that he could sense quick looks of anger from Morel, directed towards him whenever his attention was diverted elsewhere. There was an unpleasant tension between the two men. Regulo was clearly suffering from the after-effects of Morel’s treatment — his “regular dose of poison,” as he put it — and did not have the energy to lead the free-ranging speculation that usually marked meals on Atlantis. And Corrie, for whatever reason, would meet no one’s eye. She sat, aloof and monosyllabic, and showed no appetite for her food.
It came as a relief when Regulo suggested that Corrie should take Rob up to the outer surface of Atlantis and show him the little asteroid, sitting all ready for the mining operations that were scheduled to begin in a few hours time.
“I don’t have the strength for a look at it myself,” he said. “But there’s always the chance that you will see something directly that doesn’t show on a holoscreen. You ought to put your head on that problem, Merlin — the holoscreen is supposed to carry all the amplitude and phase information for a reconstruction in here that’s good enough to fool the human eye, but somewhere along the line there’s an information loss.”
“Noisy transmission channels?”
“Not that I’ve been able to find. Take a look for yourself, and see if you think it’s all my imagination.”
Corrie’s manner changed as soon as they were in their suits and ascending the broad shaft that led from the living-sphere to the surface of Atlantis.
“What’s the problem with you and Morel?” she said.
“I don’t care for him.” Rob paused in their ascent at the observation panel where he had caught the first faint glimpse of Caliban on his initial visit to Atlantis. “You noticed the way he was looking at me, didn’t you?”