Exiles at the Well of Souls

“Stop! Stop!” Zinder sobbed. “What is your price, you monster?”

“Well, remission is possible,” Trelig responded, still sympathetic. “Sponge isn’t the drug, of course, it’s the remittent agent. Daily doses and there’s no pain and little loss. The—ah, disease, is made dormant.”

“What is your price?” Zinder almost screamed.

“I believe I can locate her. Buy off these men. My medical staff has some sponge cultures—quite illegal, of course, but we’ve discovered many people in high places in your situation, blackmailed by these villains. We could go after her, retrieve her, and give her sufficient sponge to restore her to normal.” He shifted slightly, enjoying himself immensely.

“But I’m a politician, and ambitious. That’s true enough. If I do something, particularly going up against an illegal band of cutthroats and then risking discovery of my illegal sponge, I must have something in return. To do it—”

“Yes? Yes?” Zinder was almost in tears.

“Report your project a failure and put in to close down,” Trelig suggested. “I will arrange the transfer of— Obie, I think you call it—to my planetoid of New Pompeii. There you will plan and direct the construction of a much larger model than the one you have here, one large enough to be used at a distance on, say, an entire planet.”

Zinder was appalled. “Oh, my god! No! All those people! I can’t!”

Trelig smiled smugly. “You don’t have to decide now. Take as long as you want.” He got up, smoothing out his angelic white robes. “But remember, every passing day Nikki is more subject to the drug. Pain aside, the brain damage is ongoing. Consider that when thinking over your decision. Every second you waste the pain increases, and your daughter’s brain dies a tiny bit.”

“You bastard,” Zinder breathed angrily.

“I’ll initiate a search anyway,” the big man told the scientist. “What I can spare, but not all-out, because it’s merely in the name of humanity. Might take days, though. Even weeks. In the meantime, with a single call to my office saying you agree, I will put everybody on it, sparing nothing. Good-bye, Dr. Zinder.”

Trelig walked slowly to the door, then out. It shut behind him.

Zinder stared hard at the door, then sank into his chair. He considered calling the Intersystem Police but thought better of it. Nikki would be well-hidden, and accusing the vice president of the Council of being a sponge merchant and kidnapper without a shred of evidence—Zinder knew the big man would have an ironclad alibi for the night past—would be futile. They’d investigate, of course, take days, even weeks, while poor Nikki… They’d let her rot, of course. Let her rot for five or six days. Then what? A lowgrade moron, washing floors happily for them, or perhaps a toy given to Trelig’s men for sex and sadism.

It was that last he couldn’t stand. Her death he thought he could accept, but not that. Not that.

His mind whirled. There would be ways later. Obie could cure her if he could get her back soon enough. And the device he was to build—it could be a two-edged sword.

He sighed, a tired and defeated little man, and punched the code for Trelig’s liaison office on Makeva. He knew the big man would still be there. Waiting. Waiting for the inevitable response.

Defeated for now, he thought resolutely, but not vanquished. Not yet.

On New Pompeii, an Asteroid Circling the Uninhabited System of the Star Asta

New Pompeii was a large asteroid, a little over four thousand kilometers at its equator. It was one of those few small bits that inhabit all solar systems that deserved to be called a planetoid; it was fairly round, rounder than most planets, and its core was made up of particularly dense material, giving it a gravity of .7 G when balanced against its ample centrifugal force. The effect took a little getting used to, and people tended to do things faster and feel tremendous. But since it was a government-owned resort, that was all to the good.

Its orbit was relatively stable, by far more circular than elliptical, although night and day were hard to take; thirty-two sunrises and sunsets in a Council-standard twenty-five hours did tend to be unsettling to people’s internal clocks.

The discomfort was partially offset by the fact that half the entire planetoid was encased in a great bubble made of a very thin and light synthetic material; the bubble was a good light reflector and blurred the view, so it merely seemed to get darker, then lighter, and so forth, the effect being similar to that on much nicer and more natural worlds on a partly cloudy day. Accounting for the glow effect, was a thin—less than a millimeter—gauze material in somewhat liquid form between the two layers of the bubble. Any punctures were instantly sealed. Even a large one could if necessary be closed long enough to activate safety bubbles around the human centers inside. Compressed air, aided by the lush vegetation planted all over, kept the environment stable.

Theoretically, this was a place for party leaders on New Outlook to get away from the pressures for a bit. Actually the resort’s existence was known to only a few people, all intensely loyal to Antor Trelig, who was, after all, the party chairman. Protected by computer battle systems erected both on nearby natural dust specks and in special ships, no one could approach within a light-year without being blown apart, not unless Antor Trelig or his people approved.

The place was unassailable politically, too; it would take a majority vote of the Council to enter over Trelig’s diplomatic immunity and sovereignty, and Trelig controlled the largest bloc of votes on the Council.

When they brought Nikki Zinder to New Pompeii she didn’t really pay much attention to her surroundings. All she could think of was Ben and Ben’s promise that he’d come for her. They put her in a comfortable room; quiet, faceless human servants brought her food and cleared it away. She lay around most of the day, hugging pillows, pretending that he was there. She used some pencils and paper she found to draw innumerable pictures of him, none very good but all showing him as an angelic superman. She determined to lose some weight for him, to surprise him, but his absence, aided and abetted by the tremendous variety of natural foods offered, caused just the reverse. Every time she thought of him she ate, and she thought of him constantly. Already overweight, by the end of six weeks she had gained almost eighteen kilos. She didn’t really notice.

They also took pictures of her at various times, even had her read some words to a recorder. She didn’t mind. It wasn’t important to her.

Time was meaningless to her; every minute was terrible and drawn out as long as he wasn’t there. She wrote childish love poems to him and endless reams of letters, which they said they’d deliver.

It took eight weeks before Gil Zinder completed all the procedures necessary to shut down the project and prepare to move. Yulin’s role in all that had happened was still unknown to him, but he was somewhat suspicious of the younger scientist when the man so eagerly volunteered to work on the new Trelig project. As for Trelig, he kept Zinder at least satisfied that his daughter was still alive by providing coded messages along with fingerprint and retinal-pattern ID to go with the pictures. The fact that she read the statements did not disturb her father; it indicated to him that she still could read normally and that Trelig was being a man of his word on neutralizing the sponge.

For the final transfer of the master computer center and console to New Pompeii, they had to disconnect Obie from the apparatus that could alter or affect reality. And when they did, they made a startling discovery.

Zetta, who they had made younger and more attractive, remained the way they’d designed her, but now she suddenly realized that she had been changed. The old equations were restored when Obie broke with the mechanism; she was still transformed, because they had used the machine to transform her—but now she knew she had been transformed.

She was coming with them, of course, so there was no danger that a third person who realized the potential of the device would spread the news, but that worried Ben.

For good reason.

* * *