“I plan to be. Look, I’ll be on Atlantis again in less than a week, then straight back to Earth for the beanstalk landing and tether. I’ve sent you a list of equipment that I’ll want to take with me on the ship going out.”

“Wait until you’ve heard what I have to say, Rob. Then your plans may change. That’s the whole reason why I called you. We’ve found new evidence of Goblins.”

“What! More than the two you told me about?” Rob in his excitement leaned closer to the screen, so that the image of his intent face filled the whole wall display in Anson’s office. His eyes were alert, but everything else about his appearance suggested a man who had spent no time on personal care for many weeks. “When was it? A long time ago? Was it back when my parents were killed?”

“Stop right there.” Anson held up a well-manicured hand. “You’re asking four questions at once. Let me play you what I have, then you can ask questions. Get ready to record. This is audio only, but video wouldn’t add a thing.”

“Just a minute.” Rob cut in a data storage unit. The beanstalk control station, one of a dozen scattered between L-4 and synchronous orbit, permitted line-of-sight communications with Anson’s office back on Earth. To men who had been talking to each other with many seconds of round-trip delay, the fraction of a second that they were now experiencing was a pleasant luxury. Anson waited for the control check that would indicate that he could transmit straight to the recording mode.

“It’s not old information,” he said. “In fact, we almost missed it because it’s too new. We’ve been screening reports that mostly go back over twenty years. Then last week one of my people turned one up that’s only two weeks old. He got it from a `Can You Believe It?’ spot on a Tycho Base news station — just about the last place in the System that I’d have thought of looking. I was going to ignore it until I got to the physical descriptions, then I changed my mind and took a closer look. All right, get ready to record.”

“Well, it seems that the Little People are with us again, folks. At least, they are if you’re willing to believe Lenny Pascal.”

Anson held up his hand. “I’m holding the playback for a second, Rob. I’m used to the `Can You Believe It?’ spot, but if you don’t know it I ought to warn you. The news style is so cute you’ll probably throw up when you hear it. But I thought you ought to hear it word for word. Just ignore the form and settle for the content. All right? Then back to the recording.”

“Ole Lenny has been out there doin’ repair work on one of the big antennas, out by the relay station. He’s a systems engineer with ST T, and he’s been on that job nearly twenty-five years. He’s sittin’ there at the base of the antenna array when his suit tells him there’s this big ole rock floatin’ up towards him. It’s movin’ so slow and so near that he gets a real strong signal from the rangefinder. He says it’s up there near close enough to spit on, but the detection radars don’t flag it so he knows there’s no chance of it hittin’ anythin’. So he’s not worried any, and not much interested. You seen one rock, you seen `em all.

So ole Lenny he sits up there, and he thinks a’ this rock. Don’t often see `em that close, he thinks. After a while he says to himself, if it’s all that close, I ought to be able to see it with my eyes, not just my rangefinder. So he looks round, and sure enough, he can really see that rock. Only it isn’t a rock. It’s a sealed space pod, with a Mischener Drive stuck on one end of it. Reminds me of the time that I saw one of them pods myself.”

Anson paused. “I’m going to skip a bit here, Rob. There were about three minutes of broadcast where Tinman Petey — that’s the name of the half-witted fistula who was doing the broadcast — tells his audience all about the way that he met his third wife. I don’t know what they thought of it, but it was too much for me. I’ll skip to the point where he gets back to talking about Lenny Pascal.

“So Lenny claps on the old suit jets, and he hustles on over for a closer look. The rock’s goin’ on by at maybe ten meters a second, so he won’t be able to take too long lookin’ before he has to turn on around and get on back to the antennas. He’s in front of that pod now, and what do you think he’s seein’? Lindy Lamarr, maybe, naked as an overspun Kerr-Newman? Nope. Bet he wishes it was, eh?

“It’s two little men, floatin’ inside the pod, and they’re bare as a baby, except for a sort of collar. They don’t move none, so Lenny he figures he ought to take a closer look. Ain’t no law ’gainst naked little men, he figures, providin’ they’re after their own business, but he can’t help bein’ a wee bit curious. So he bangs on the outside of the pod.

“They don’t move a bit. So Lenny figures that’s near as good as an invite to go in, and in he goes through the lock. Full-size lock, he says, nothing midget about that. Now he sees why they’re not after tellin’ him to come in. Seems they’re dead, both of ’em. Two little men, beards on their faces and ugly as sin, half a meter long and dead as Marley. Spooky, eh?

“Ole Lenny takes a look around inside there, but he sees nothin’ as would have killed ’em, like wounds ’n burns. He takes a closer look at ’em, and he finds they’ve got a whole lot of broken bones, under the skin, just like somebody took and squeezed ’em flat. That’s scary, so Lenny calls out the computer log, but he can’t make no sense of that. Pod come on out of the Belt, thirty days back, now it’s a-floatin’ on past the Moon goin’ to god-knows-where. No power left on it.

“By now Lenny’s beginnin’ to feel spooked, and he’s gettin’ a long way from home, and he’s itchy about leavin’ his job on the antenna for so long. So he calls on over to Medaris Base and asks ’em to come on out where he is and look at the Little People.

“Would you believe it, over there on Medaris they don’t seem to want to listen to him at all?

“Seems like Lenny’s had a problem with the Base one time before, when he saw a space-dog out on the antenna after he’d been a while in Gippo’s Bar. This time, nobody will give him half an ear. He has to head back to work, and by the time he hits Tycho again he don’t have any idea where that pod’s heading to. Maybe down to Earth, maybe off into the Sun.

“So there you got it, friends. What do you think? Do we have the Little People, moved out here mebbe now Earth’s not so friendly as it used to be? Or do you think there might be an engineer who’s firin’ skew on one or two jets? One thing’s for sure. We won’t know which, ’less one of you can take off after ole Lenny’s rock and check it for yourself.”

Anson leaned across and flipped a switch. “There you have it, Rob. That’s the whole thing, except for Tinman Petey’s sign-off. And that’s the same every time.”

“You talked to Pascal?”

“Sure. Tinman Petey too. I couldn’t get much more than what you heard from either of them. Lenny Pascal’s physical description was a little more complete, but he couldn’t tell me any more about how the pod first appeared or where it was heading.” Anson picked up a sheet from the desk in front of him. “You ought to photo-record this, but I can give you the main points in a couple of sentences. Body mass for the Goblins, as near as Pascal could judge, would be about five kilos. He thought their bone structure was pretty normal, though it was hard to tell because they were so broken up. The air in the pod was breathable, so they didn’t die of asphyxiation like the other Goblins we’ve encountered. Pascal says that their skin color was odd, but it was more like bruises, not cyanosis.”

“Too much acceleration?” Rob interrupted. “That’s what it sounds like. Did Pascal check the drive log?”

“That’s the odd part. He had the same thought as you did, and he felt they must have been exposed to more than thirty gees. He looked at the drive log in the pod and all it had been used for was small control maneuvers. Nothing big. In fact, Pascal said that he didn’t think a Mischener can give much thrust, even at top power.”