Exiles at the Well of Souls

“Well, sir, as near as I can figure out, it seems to be asking me for instructions,” Obie replied.

On Trelig’s Ship, Half a Light-year Out from New Pompeii—1210 Hours

The world returned suddenly. Mavra Chang looked around, slightly dazed, then checked the instruments. They read total nonsense, so she looked over at Renard and saw him groggily shaking his head.

“What happened?” he managed.

“We were caught in the field and carried along with them,” Mavra explained with more authority than she felt. She looked down at the instruments again, then punched a random search pattern. The screen flickered but remained blank in front of her. Finally, she turned the damned thing off.

“Well, that tears it,” she said, resigned.

Renard looked over at her strangely. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“I just punched the star chart navigational locator. Inside the little chip is stored every known star pattern, from every angle. There are billions of combinations. It went through them all—and didn’t flash once. We’re not in any section of known space.”

He envied her calm acceptance of the fact. “So what do we do now?” he asked apprehensively.

Mavra flipped a series of switches and then pulled back on the long handle to her right. The whine and vibration of the ship’s engines slowed. “First we see what the neighborhood looks like, then we decide where in it we want to go,” she told him matter-of-factly.

She punched up another series on the small control board, and the main screen in front of them, which usually showed a simulated starfield, showed something else entirely. There were stars there—more stars than either of them had ever seen before. They were so close together it looked as if the firmament were on fire with a white heat. It took some filters to get any definition, and that didn’t help much. There were also great clouds of space gas, glowing crimson and yellow, and there were shapes and forms never seen, not even in astronomical photos.

“We’re definitely in somebody else’s neighborhood,” Mavra commented dryly, and, after checking speed, started to turn the craft around. “We’re just about dead still now,” she told him. “I’m going to give us a panorama.”

The enormous clouds of stars and strange shapes did not diminish; they were surrounded by them. A small green grid to Mavra’s left was mostly blank, indicating nothing within a light-year or more of them. Then, suddenly, a small series of dots appeared.

“Look, Trelig’s robot guardians,” she noted. “Everything else is debris from the rest of that fragmented system. It seems the whole neighborhood moved. If that’s true—yes, see it? The big dot, there, with the slightly smaller one just off it. That’s New Pompeii and its would-be target.”

Renard nodded. “But what’s that huge object just to its right?” he asked.

“A planet. From the looks of it, the only planet in the system. Funny it took the whole solar system with it but not the star. That star’s definitely larger and older,” she pointed out.

“It’s moving,” Renard said, fascinated in spite of himself. “New Pompeii’s moving.”

Mavra studied it, punched in, got the data back. “It’s in orbit around that planet, a satellite of it now. Let’s get a good look at the place.” Again more button-pushing, and the screen zeroed in on the central object shown electronically on the green scope.

“Not a big place,” Mavra said. “Let’s see… about average, I’d say. A little more than forty thousand kilometers around. Hmmm… that’s interesting!”

“What?” Renard prodded, staring.

“The diameter’s exactly the same pole to pole,” she replied in a puzzled tone. “That’s almost impossible. The damned thing’s a perfect ball, not the slightest meter of variation!”

“I thought most planets were round,” he said, slightly confused.

She shook her head. “No, there’s never been a round one. Rotation, revolution, they all take their toll. Planets bulge, or get pear-shaped, or a million other things. Roughly round, yes—but this thing’s perfectly round, as if somebody—” she paused for a second, and an awed tone crept into her voice “—as if somebody built it,” she finished.

Before Renard could reply, she eased the ship forward, toward the strange world.

“You’re going there?” he asked her.

Mavra nodded. “Well, if we pulled through, so did the folks on New Pompeii,” she reasoned. “That means there’s a furious, probably murderous Antor Trelig somewhere back there, and a lot of scared people. If he’s still in control, the three of us would be better off blowing up this ship than landing. If he’s not, then we’d walk into a human hell.”

Renard’s expression was blank, his eyes somewhat glassy. Mavra, busy looking at the ship’s controls and the world that would be visible to them shortly, hardly noticed for a while. Soon the magnifiers were getting a better view, though; the planet was about the size of an orange. The green grid said that New Pompeii was about to go around the other side.

“It’s got a straight up and down axis!” she said excitedly. “It was built by somebody!” She turned to Renard, then her excitement faded, turning to concern. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

He licked his lips but remained with that vacant expression, staring not at her or at the screen but at nothing.

“The sponge,” he replied hollowly. “It comes in daily at eighteen hundred hours, from a roving supply ship. Your ship didn’t come with us, so it wouldn’t have either, if it was there at all.” He turned to look at her, and there was mild terror building in his eyes. “There’s no sponge today. There’s no sponge ever again. Not for me, not for them.”

Mavra understood suddenly what was going through his mind, and perhaps Nikki’s as well. She was under restraining straps in the back and they’d almost forgotten about her.

She sighed, wishing she could say something. Being sorry didn’t seem right, somehow, and her pity was too apparent to need expression.

“The only hope then,” she said at last, “is that there’s somebody living on that world out there, somebody with a good chemical lab.”

Renard smiled weakly. “Nice try, but even if there is, by the time we contact them, figure out how to talk to them, explain the problem, and have them mix a batch, you’ll be preserving a couple of naked apes.”

She shrugged. “What other choice is there?” Suddenly a thought came to her. “I wonder if the rest of the guards on New Pompeii have figured that out yet? What will they do when the shipment doesn’t come at eighteen hundred and confirms their fears?”

Renard thought that over. “Probably the same thing I’d do. Find Trelig and take a great deal of pleasure in torturing him to death.”

“The computer!” Mavra exclaimed excitedly. “It can cure sponge! If we can get in contact with it somehow—” She started frantically scanning all the Com bands, punching in a call sign. Obie would recognize it if he could hear it—Obie had her memories in storage.

The radio crackled and wheezed. Several times in the scan they swore they could hear voices of some kind, but speaking strange tongues, or so inhuman-sounding as to cause chills in them.

Then, quite abruptly, a familiar voice popped in.

“Well, Mavra, I see you didn’t make it,” Obie sighed. She returned the sigh, hers one of relief.

“Obie!” she responded. “Obie, what’s the situation down there?”

There was silence for a moment, then the computer replied, “It’s a mess. Dr. Zinder recovered first and got to me, and I have some of his instructions before Ben pulled him away. Two of the guards were there, and they heard me tell Dr. Zinder that we were in a different area of space. They started screaming about sponge, and Trelig shot them dead.”

“So they figured it out already,” she said. “What about Topside?”

“Trelig figured they had to go up and try and control the other guards. They could have trapped him down