“Hold on now.” Regulo pushed his chair back from the desk and stared. “If you’re serious about all this — and I must say it’s not easy to believe any of it — then your `Goblins’ don’t make sense. Supposedly they are just a few years old. Not only that, if they’re as small as you say they don’t have anything like the brain capacity of an adult. They wouldn’t begin to know how to escape from Atlantis. But you are telling us that some did escape. How could they possibly know enough to do that?”

“They had help.” Rob’s arm was starting to throb again. It felt like the only thing keeping him awake. “They are just a few years old, and you are quite right about the smaller cranial capacity. Worse than that, they should never have known about a world outside the labs. And they wouldn’t have, except for one other factor: Caliban. I saw him once at the lab window. He can communicate with the Goblins, enough to tell them about the rest of the world. I’m sure that he was the instrument that helped a few of them to get away from here.”

“Caliban!” Regulo’s expression was as always unreadable, but his voice was thoughtful. He leaned farther back in his chair. “Why would Caliban do something like that?”

“I won’t pretend that I understand his motives, but he and the Goblins have one thing in common. They both had reasons to fear and hate Joseph Morel. So Caliban helped some of them get away. The trouble was, Caliban’s own views of the world outside Atlantis are pretty strange. He could tell them how to stow away, but apparently he didn’t realize that they might die from lack of oxygen on the journey. He finally learned that, just recently, and he came up with a different idea. He helped some of the Goblins to stow away on a space pod with a Mischener Drive. It had oxygen, and it had supplies, too. With any luck, the Goblins should have come through alive in a place where people could help them.”

“But you think that they didn’t?” Regulo was rubbing at his scarred chin.

“I know they didn’t. The pod made it to the Moon, but they were dead when it got there.”

“So how did you find out all this?” Corrie was very close to Rob, reloading the spray injector. “And what about progeria? Where did you find that out? You’re not a biologist.”

“I had help, too.” Rob rubbed his right hand gingerly along his aching left forearm. The pain was increasing again, and Corrie could probably see it in his face. “I got most of this information from a source back on Earth. The thing I couldn’t find out there was the reason for the whole thing. To understand that, I had to return here.” He looked back to Regulo. “The Goblins were launched from Atlantis — an unauthorized launch, but one that was flagged in the system monitors. Then they died on the way to the Earth-Moon system. They ran into an acceleration too big for them to endure.”

“From a Mischener Drive ?” Regulo had begun to play with the control keys on the desk in front of him. He glanced up at Rob. “You know better than that. The Mischeners can’t go better than half a gee. Are you saying your Goblins can’t stand that much?”

“I don’t know what they can stand. But they were given about thirty or forty gee, enough to kill any of us. And they didn’t get it from the Mischeners.”

“From what, then? You know the regulations on drive accelerations. There’s not a thing in the System that can give forty gees.”

“That’s what I told Howard Anson.” Rob watched Regulo closely. He saw no reaction to Anson’s name. “But then I realized I was wrong. On my way out here from Earth I decided that there is a way to get that acceleration, one that doesn’t depend on tampering with a ship’s drive. And it’s one that would appeal to Darius Regulo more than anyone else.”

Rob looked up to the big display screen. Despite Regulo’s earlier words, Lutetia still loomed larger and larger.

“And what do you think appeals to Darius Regulo?” The quiet words interrupted Rob’s inspection of the display.

“You gave me a hint, last time I was here.” Rob’s tone was bitter. “I was just too stupid to see it. You gave me a lot of talk about matter transmitters, and the problem of transit times around the System. You had your method working even then. I should have realized what you were up to when you paid to use extra Spiders, and asked me to build the beanstalk instead of using Sala Keino. He was on your payroll, and he was your expert on space construction. But you had a better use for him.”

“No, Rob, don’t get that wrong.” Regulo’s voice showed an odd mixture of pride and reproof. “You are a better construction man than Keino will ever be. I picked you for the hard job, not the easy one. How far have you thought it through?”

That was a touch of the old Regulo. Rob wondered if his exhausted brain had jumped to a wrong conclusion about the old man. Well, a few more minutes and he could collapse.

“Just the general idea. It starts with the Spider again. Now it’s spinning a different kind of web. Rockets are wrong. That’s sitting there in your desk as we talk, but I didn’t follow it far enough. I should have known you wouldn’t stop with the beanstalk, that just gets us up and down from Earth. You wanted a way of moving materials around the whole System without using drives. And the Spider could give you that.”

Rob paused for a few seconds, to examine again his left forearm. The pain was mounting, from acute to intolerable. He checked once more that the power input was disconnected. No doubt about that. He massaged the arm again with his right hand, unable to imagine any possible explanation. He motioned to Corrie to use the injector a second time. What was the maximum permitted dose?

“Spin another cable,” he went on. “Make it like the beanstalk, with superconducting cables and drive train attached to the load cable. This time, put the powersat at the center of the cable, with an equal length on each side of it. Fabricate it in space, but don’t ever plan to fly it in and tether it. Leave it out near the orbit of Mars, or in the Belt, or in near Earth — key places in the System. Then start it rotating about its center, like a couple of spokes on a wheel. I assume that you began with just a couple of them, one in the Belt and one near Earth?”

Regulo nodded calmly. He had finished fiddling with the control panel and now seemed oddly relaxed. “We started with two. That’s just the beginning. The more you have, the better the efficiency of the whole operation. I’ve been thinking we’d build about five thousand of them through the Earth-Belt region.”

“You could handle that many?”

“With Sycorax? Easily. We can track that number, and more — there are millions of orbits in the data banks already. This is just a few extra ones.” Regulo’s tone was that of a patient teacher. “I’ve told you before, Rob,” he went on. “Think big. The System’s a big place. You have to scale your thinking to match it.”

Rob would normally have found the conversation totally fascinating. Now it felt increasingly surrealistic. Was Regulo on his own kind of tranquilizers? The image of Morel’s body had gone from the screen, and with it any interest by Regulo in Rob’s accusation. He seemed happy to talk engineering.

Apparently Corrie was having the same reaction. “Don’t you two have any feelings?” she broke in. “Joseph Morel is dead, Caliban seems to have gone mad, and you sit there talking about spinning beanstalks. What about the Goblins, Rob? First you tell us there are children in Morel’s lab. Then you start talking about something completely different.”

As she spoke she realized that she was not getting through to them. They both ignored her. Some invisible cord of tension bound them to each other, some other level of communication was taking place deep below the surface.

“So how would you work it, Rob?” said Regulo. His bright eyes were fixed on the other man’s pale face.