After a few more minutes, Rob’s night vision was good enough for him to see general outlines. He began to move quietly forward, a pencil light held in his left hand. At the right-hand wall he halted and shone the light downward and ahead of him.

He realized at once that his search for the Goblins was over.

A row of pallets had been placed along the wall. Each was less than seventy centimeters long, and most of them were occupied by small sleeping figures. Rob stepped closer. He shone the light onto the nearest two recumbent forms, long enough to make a visual recording of the scene on the miniaturized video he had taken from his pocket. The Goblins were a mature male and a mature female, both well-formed and symmetrical in face and figure. Neither wore clothing. When the light touched her face, the female grunted softly in her sleep and lifted a tiny, plump arm to cover her eyes.

Rob switched off the flashlight and stood silent in the darkness. These were the Goblins, beyond a doubt, but they did not match the description that he had heard before. Lenny Pascal had said that they were “ugly as sin.” The sleeping forms in front of Rob were handsome and shapely, with fine, smooth skin and regular child-like features. The male was unshaven, with a fine blond beard that was just developing.

After a few moments of thought Rob went quietly along the line of cots, flashing his light briefly on each sleeper in turn. All were naked. At the twentieth one he stopped and took a much longer look. This Goblin, a male, was of a different type. The face was old and gnarled, like the bark of a tree, and his breathing was heavy and labored, like drugged slumber. Rob bent closer, examining each feature. He recorded the image of what he was seeing, then moved on slowly along the line.

There were two main types, in roughly equal numbers: handsome elfin folk, and hideous gnomes. There seemed to be no young ones, but Rob at one point heard an infant’s cry, so faint that in other circumstances he would have dismissed it as imagination. The babies must be sleeping in another nearby room. He made a quick circuit of the room that he was in. Most of it was food and water dispensers and sanitation facilities, with no real furniture or other equipment except for the cots on which the Goblins were sleeping.

He moved on into the other area, where he had seen the green light of the aquasphere shining through the door.

This room was completely empty and had no other door. On the wall opposite the transparent panel that led to the aquasphere, Rob saw low braces mounted in secure wall fittings. He bent to take a closer look, wondering if they were used to hold the Goblins prisoner. As he did so, the lights in the room suddenly came on to full brilliance. Rob straightened and turned to the door. Standing in the entrance was Joseph Morel. His face was drained of its usual high color and he was glaring at Rob with a cold and burning anger.

Before Rob could do anything or try to explain his presence, Morel took two quick paces backward through the doorway. The heavy metal seal slid swiftly shut. Rob heard the clang of external bolts as they were drawn into position across the entrance.

With the lights of the room turned high, Rob could confirm his original impression. He was in a square chamber, almost ten meters on a side and two meters and a half high. There was a single large window, facing out towards the aquasphere. The only door had been securely blocked by Morel. Rob examined it carefully, but in the first few seconds he knew that the instruments he carried with him would be useless to move the heavy outside bolts.

Rob went quickly around the whole room, examining walls, floor and ceiling. The overhead lights could be dimmed from two stations, one near the door and the other at the far end of the area. He could darken the room when Morel returned, but it was hard to define any advantage in doing so.

Rob completed his inspection with no enthusiasm. As he expected, there was no alternate exit. Yet he felt that he had to find one. Morel had not spoken when he discovered Rob, but the look in his eyes had been unmistakable. Whatever the secret of the Goblins — and Rob was becoming increasingly sure that he understood that secret — Morel was determined to keep it. He had killed before, he would be willing to kill again. He would surely return with a weapon. Rob needed a means of self-defense, no matter how primitive. He sat down on the floor, next to the big window, and bared his left forearm. Pressing at carefully chosen points along the inner arm, he turned off all sensory inputs coming from his left hand. It was still attached to his own bones, nerves and sinews, but now beyond the wrist there was no feeling. If need be he could use it as a club or a shield with no possibility of pain.

Rob would have to get near Morel for that to be of any use. He was not optimistic that he would be given the chance. When the other man came back he would certainly have weapons or assistance, and his instinctive caution in locking Rob in at once without waiting to hear any explanation suggested that it would be impossible to trick him into coming close enough for physical attack. From the look of him, Morel was also at least as strong as Rob.

Using his deadened left hand as a convenient hammer, Rob went again around all the walls, rapping them and listening to the tone that his blows produced. It confirmed his first impression. No escape that way. The seamless planes of walls, floor and ceiling offered no chance of penetration to anything short of a drill or a power laser.

Rob sat down to think again. He needed a different angle.

After half a minute, he went to the wall control and dimmed the lights. Morel would not be fooled by darkness, but Rob wanted to take a better look at what lay outside in the quiet aquasphere. He knew it could not offer an escape. Even if he reached it, he would drown long before he could swim around to any entry point of the living-sphere. If he lived long enough to drown… Where was Caliban?

The water-world was usually illuminated only by the lights of the grid within it. Now, the extra radiation from the approaching Lutetia provided an added dim glow through the whole interior. Rob could see past the nearest nutrient dispensers, with the tangle of vegetation that grew around them. For ten minutes, he waited in the dark and silence. Was it imagination? He thought he could see a hint of a great, dark shape, hovering just beyond the fringe of plant growth. It was close to the place where he had seen Caliban on his first foray into the aquasphere. Was it too unlikely that he would be there again, watching one of the big display screens that gave him his knowledge of the external world? The distant form was tantalizingly vague and unresolved.

Rob went back to the wall control, turned the lighting up a fraction, and returned to examine the window panel. It was a standard form of construction for space use, employed wherever a vacuum seal was needed. A single sheet of tough plastic was secured to the wall opening by twelve heavy bolts, with a thick strip of adhesive seal covering them to make the fit watertight and airtight. The sealing material was designed for easy replacement. Rob peeled back an inch or two and examined the bolts beneath. As he expected they were hardened aluminum, their heads about two inches across and tightened flush with the wall.

Rob pulled all the sealing strip away from the perimeter of the window, using his left hand and forearm as a simple lever. He tried to turn one of the bolts, using the end of an electronic picklock applied to the central groove in the bolt.

It was useless. The tool had never been intended for heavy use and it bent under even a slight force. Rob swore. He needed something with a head about a quarter of an inch thick and two inches wide, something able to stand all his strength in turning it. He made another search of the room. There was nothing, no fitting that he could pry loose to use as an improvised screwdriver.