The Mind Pool

Every century the probes, creeping out at a fraction of light speed, extended the Perimeter by a few light- years. And somewhere near its extreme edge, in the three-lightyears-thick shell that comprised the little-explored Boundary Layer, lurked almost certainly the fugitive Morgan Construct.

“But where, for Shannon’s sake?” Flammarion had followed Mondrian’s look, and thought he understood it. “Maybe we’ll find the Construct out there — but where will we find the candidates? If you’re thinking, the Colonies, J don’t believe it. I’ve tried them before. They need every pair of hands they can get for their own projects.”

“Quite true. I don’t look for assistance from the Colonies.”

“There’s nowhere else.” Flammarion scratched his unshaven chin. “You’re saying what I thought when I read the directive — we’ll never staff the Pursuit Teams. It’s an impossible job.”

But Mondrian had turned to face another wall of his office, where a display showed a view from Ceres looking inward towards Sol. “Not impossible, Captain — just tricky. We tend to forget that one planet of the solar system still refuses to be part of the Federation. And people there seem ready for anything, including trading their offspring … if the price is right.” He pressed a control on his desk, and the display went into high speed zoom.

“Sir!” Kubo Flammarion knew that only one planet lay in that direction. “You don’t really mean it, do you?”

“Why don’t I? Have you ever been there, Captain?”

“Yessir. But it was a long time ago, before I was with the service. Everything I hear, it’s got even worse now than it was. And it was crazy then. You know what Commander Brachis says? He says it’s the world of madmen.”

“Indeed?” Mondrian smiled at Flammarion, but his voice took on a cold, bitter tone. “The world of madmen, eh? That’s the way the Stellar Group views all humans. To them every human world is a world of madmen. And what about you? Do you agree with Commander Brachis?”

“Well, I don’t know. From all I’ve seen — ”

“Of course you do. Don’t start being polite to me now, Captain — you never have before. Now listen closely. You have the memorandum from the Ambassador. I want you to review it in detail, and think about it hard. Then if you can bring me within forty-eight hours a proposal that will provide the necessary human members of the Pursuit Teams, I will consider it. But unless that happens, you will — within seventy-two hours — begin making arrangements for a visit. A visit to Earth. For you, me, and Commander Brachis. We’ll all see his ‘madworld’ at firsthand.”

He turned away, with a gesture of dismissal.

“Yes, sir. As you say, sir.” Kubo Flammarion rubbed his sleeve across his nose and tiptoed from the room. At the door he turned and took a long look at the display, now glowing with the cloudy blue-white ball of Earth at its center.

“Madworld,” he muttered to himself. “We’re going to madworld, are we? God help us all if it comes to that.”

Chapter 3

“No. Phoebe Willard. That’s who I want. Not the inventory. See, I already looked at that. Phoebe Willard. Where is she? Can you take me to her?”

The guard stared, first at Luther Brachis and then at the screen showing a segment of the dump contents. His eyes were puzzled.

Brachis sighed, and waited again for a reply. Patiently, although through the solar system he was not known as a patient man; because if there was one place where patience was a necessity, it was the Dump. Brachis knew that he was the cause of his own problem. He, personally, had made all the Dump’s staff assignments.

And now here he was himself, in the Dump.

Sargasso Dump.

The Sun and planets are the deep gravity wells of the solar system. Once a spacecraft — or a piece of space junk — has been parked around a planet, it can remain in stable orbit as long as the human species endures.

But space around the planets is valuable. No one wants it filled with floating garbage, or cares to have random hazards in orbit around the Sun.

Not when there are other options.

The Lagrange points are local minima of the gravitational potential. They are places where no planet is present, but a body may still remain in stable orbit. Their positions were plotted centuries before humanity went to space. Within the solar system, the deepest and best-defined of them are the Trojan positions, trailing and leading Jupiter in its orbit by a sixth of a revolution. Space flotsam drifts here naturally, and stays for millennia.

What Nature can do, Human can copy.

Three hundred years before the visit of Luther Brachis, the trailing Jupiter Lagrange point had been designated by the United Space Federation as a system “indefinite storage facility.” For that, read “garbage dump.” Everything from spent reactors to disabled Von Neumanns had been towed there, to float slowly (but stably) around the slopes of the shallow gravitational valley.

The Dump was computer-controlled. It had been that way for centuries, unattended by humans — until Luther Brachis took over as head of System Security, and began to lose men and women. To death, inevitably; murder and greed and sabotage still inhabited the system, and security work always carried risk. The incident on Cobweb Station was only the most recent. Brachis hated to lose his trained and dedicated guards. But it was part of the job. For the dead he could do nothing, and they could feel nothing.

And for the living? The pain of injury was temporary. Limbs could be re-grown, hearts and eyes and livers replaced. It was done, routinely.

But mental damage was another matter. Toxins and bullets and air loss could leave a body with normal function, and a ruined mind that hovered somewhere beyond the brink of humanity.

Brachis had seen a dozen human wrecks in his first year as head of Security. He made a personal decision. The guards would remain on Security payroll — for life. They could not be long hidden from the accountants on any inhabited body, but no accountant had ever, in Brachis’ experience, paid a visit to the wasteland of the Sargasso Dump. He saw a melancholy symmetry in his act: the throwaway material of the system, forgotten by humanity, would be guarded by the throwaway people.

The staff at Sargasso were Luther’s big secret. He could not protect them past the time of his own death, but they would be shielded until then. And he had never regretted the decision — although now, trying to coax the guard to rational response, he came close. “Phoebe Willard.” He tried again. “Remember her? Brown hair, not very tall, very pretty. She came here two days ago.” Brachis went to the control desk, and called another part of the Dump inventory to the screen. “These. See? She was working on these.”

The guard stared. There was a slow dawning of something behind those troubled eyes. He nodded. Without speaking he closed his suit helmet, turned and left the control room. Brachis followed in his own suit, still unsure. In any other situation he would have been furious at the waste of time. Here anger was futile, except perhaps to focus his own concentration.

Soon they were outside, twisting their way through a topsy-turvy array of debris. Brachis stared at the flotsam on all sides and re-evaluated the guard ahead of him. If the man knew where he was going, through such a tangled wilderness, then his mind was far from gone. Perhaps it was only that he could not speak, or interact with people.

The guard halted and pointed. Brachis saw a huge green balloon, blotting out the stars ahead. It might be an air-bulb, where he would find Phoebe Willard working inside. Or it could be that the brain-damaged guard was offering random responses to questions.

There was one way to find out. Brachis nodded his thanks and headed for the green sphere. Somewhere in that featureless facade there had to be an entry point. He found a layered sequence of four flexible flaps, and squeezed through into a lighted enclosure.

Phoebe Willard had been at the Sargasso Dump for two days. Typically, in that time she had turned a house-