Midnight at the Well of Souls

had tumbled and now was a foot or so from him on the floor. Slowly, his hand crept toward it.

“No!” Wu Julee suddenly screamed, but Hain already had the weapon, and was pointing it at both the snakeman and Brazil, who was sitting up, shaking his head and rubbing his jaw. Ortega’s back was to Hain, but Brazil suddenly looked up and spotted the gun. Ortega saw him stare and turned to face the fat man.

“Now both of you behave and I won’t do anything rash,” Hain told them in that same cool, confident tone he always used. “But I am leaving this charming place right now.”

“How?” asked Serge Ortega.

The question seemed to bother Hain, who was used to simple answers to simple questions. “The—the way we came in,” he said at last.

“The doorway leads to a corridor. The corridor leads to the Well in one direction—and that is strictly one way,” Ortega told him. “In the other direction are more rooms like this—seven hundred and eighty of them, in a honeycombed labyrinth. Beyond them are housing and recreation facilities for the types of creatures that use those offices—seven hundred and eighty different types of creatures, Hain. Some of them don’t breathe what you do. Some of them won’t like you a bit and may just kill you.”

“There is a way out,” Hain snarled, but there was desperation in his voice. “There must be. I’ll find it.”

“And then what?” Ortega asked calmly. “You’re out in a world that is moderately large. The surface area is best expressed as five point one times ten to the eighth power kilometers squared. And you don’t even know what the planet looks like, the languages, anything. You’re a smart man, Hain. What are the odds?”

Hain seemed confused, hesitant. Suddenly he looked at the pistol in his hand and brightened. “This gives me the odds,” he said firmly.

“Never play the odds until you know the rules of the game,” Ortega warned softly, and advanced slowly toward him.

“I’ll shoot!” Hain threatened, his voice an octave higher than usual.

“Go ahead,” Ortega invited, his great serpentine body sliding slowly toward the panicked man.

“All right, dammit!” Hain cried, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Hain pulled the trigger again and again. It clicked, making contact with the solenoid firing pin, but did nothing else.

Ortega suddenly moved with that blinding speed, and the gun seemed to vanish from the fat man’s hand.

“No weapon works in this room,” Ortega said crisply. Hain sat, a stupefied expression on his face, mouth half open. Possibly for the first time in his life that arrogant self-confidence was gone out of him.

“You all right, Nate?” Ortega shot to the small man, who still sat half-rising, holding his sore jaw.

“Yeah, you son of a bitch,” Brazil replied mushily, shaking his head to clear it. “Man! You sure as hell pack a wallop!”

Ortega chuckled. “I was the only man smaller than you once in a bar on Siprianos. I was full of booze and dope, and ready to take on the house, all of whom would have cheerfully slit my throat for the floor show. I just started to pick a fight with the bouncer when you grabbed me and knocked me cold. Took me ten weeks before I realized that you’d saved my neck.”

Brazil’s jaw dropped in wonder, and the pain hit him as he did so and he groaned. Still, he managed: “You are Serge Ortega!” in a tone of bewildered acceptance. “I had totally forgotten that…”

Ortega smiled. “I said I was, Nate.”

“But, oh, man, how you’ve changed,” Brazil noted, amazed.

“I told you this world changes people, Nate,” Ortega replied. “It’ll change you, too. All of you.”

“You wouldn’t have stopped me from finishing the pig in the old days, Serge.”

“I guess I wouldn’t have,” Ortega chuckled. “And I really wouldn’t have now—except that this is Zone. And, if you’ll sit over there, across the room from Hain,” he said, pointing to a backless couch, and, turning to Hain, continued, “and if you will stop all your little, petty games and promise to sit quietly, I’ll explain just what the situation is here—the rules and lack of them, and a few other things about your future.”

Hain mumbled something unintelligible and went back over to his seat. Brazil, still nursing his sore jaw, silently got up and moved over to the couch. He sank down in the cushions, his head against the back wall, and groaned.

“Still dizzy,” he complained. “And I’m getting a hell of a headache.”

Ortega smiled and moved back behind his desk.

“You’ve had worse and you know it,” the snakeman reminded the captain. “But, first things first. Want some more food? You spoiled yours.”

“You know damned well I won’t eat for days,” Brazil groaned. “Damn! Why didn’t you let me get him?”

“Two reasons, really. First, this is—well, a diplomatic legation, you might say. A murder by one Entry of another would be impossible to explain to my government no matter what. But, more than that, she’s not lost, Nate, and that makes your motive even flimsier.”

Brazil forgot his aches and pains. “What did you say?”

“I said she’s not lost, Nate, and that’s right. Just as this detour deprived Hain of justice, it also saved her. Arkadrian was no solution, really. Obviously you felt she was worth saving when you decided to detour—but, just here, she’s little more than a vegetable. Obviously Hain was decreasing the dosage as she became more and more accustomed to the pain. He was letting her rot out—but slowly enough to make the trip without problems. May I ask why, Hain?”

“She was from one of the Comworlds. Lived in the usual beehive and helped work on a big People’s Farm. I mean the dirt jobs—shoveling shit and the like, as well as painting the buildings, mending fences, and suchlike. IQ genetically manipulated to be low—she’s a basic worker, a manual laborer, basically mentally retarded and capable of carrying out simple commands—one at a time—but not of much in the way of original thought and action. She wasn’t even good at that work, and they used her as a Party whore. Failed at that, too.”

“That is a slander of the Com people!” Vardia protested vehemently. “Each citizen is here to do a particular task that needs doing, and is created for that task. Without people such as she as well as ones like me the whole society would fall apart.”

“Would you change jobs with her?” Brazil asked sarcastically.

“Oh, of course not,” Vardia responded, oblivious to the tone. “I’m glad I’m not anything but what I am. I would be happy at nothing else. Even so, such citizens are essential to the social fabric.”

“And you say my people have gone that route,” Ortega said sadly, almost to himself. “But—I would think the really basic menial stuff would be automated. A lot of it was in my time.”

“Oh, no,” Vardia protested. “Man’s future is with the soil and with nature. Automation produces social decay and only that necessary to the maintenance of equality can be permitted.”

“I see,” Ortega responded dryly. He was silent for a while, then he turned back to Hain. “But how did you wind up with the girl? And why hook her on sponge?”

“Occasionally we need a—a sample, as it were. An example, really. We almost always use such people— Comworld folk who will not be missed, who are never much more than vegetables anyway. We control most of them, of course. But it’s rather tough to get the stuff into their food, or even to get an audience with members of a Presidium, but, once you’ve done it, you control the entire world—a world of people programmed to be happy at whatever they’re doing and conditioned from birth to blind obedience to the Party. Control the queen and you control all the bees in the hive. I had an audience with a Presidium Member on Coriolanus—took three years of hard work to wangle it, I’ll assure you. There are hundreds of ways to infect someone once you’re face-to-face. By that point, poor Wu Julee would have been in the animalistic state from progressively smaller doses. She would be the threat to show the distinguished Member what my—er, client, would become if not treated.”

“Such a thing would not work on my world,” Vardia stated proudly. “A Presidium Member so infected would simply have you, her, and the Member all at a Death Factory.”

Hain laughed. “You people never cease to amaze me,” he chuckled. “You really think your Presidium members are like you? They’re descendants of the early Party that spread out in past, mostly