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Rob stared at the display screen again, where an image of the glowing ball of the molten asteroid now hung steady. While he had been in the labs they had moved much closer. Lutetia seemed within hands’ reach, it must be just a few kilometers away from them. Atlantis was positioned directly above the pole of the rotating sphere. Rob could see the black form of the Spider, crouched on Lutetia’s axis of rotation.
“Caliban didn’t break the window,” he said at last. He shook his head. Now the injection was working there was room for other thoughts than pain. He took a deep breath and looked straight at Regulo.
“I did it. I took out the bolts that held the window panel in position. I had to do it. Morel had me trapped inside that room. He was going to kill me.”
“Rob, you’ve been working too hard.” Regulo sat back in his chair, his voice full of disbelief. “Joseph wouldn’t try to kill you. Why should he? You only met each other half a dozen times.”
Rob glanced at Corrie. She fixed her eyes on him and shook her head. “I have to agree with Regulo. I never cared for Joseph Morel, you know that. But he wouldn’t try to kill you. What possible reason could he have?”
“Because of what I found out about him, over there in his secret lab. Because of what he has been doing. He surprised me a few hours ago while I was looking around there. After that, he had to keep me quiet. The only one sure way was to kill me.”
Regulo was still sitting at the control panel, his fingers ru
“I believe that. But how often have you been over there yourself, you or Corrie?”
“I can’t speak for Cornelia, but I’ve never been there. Joseph liked to do his work in privacy. I can understand the need for that.”
“Then you can’t be sure of what you’re saying, about what he was doing there.” Rob walked over to the desk. He stared into Regulo’s eyes. “Morel was breeding Goblins in that lab. Would you like me to tell you what Goblins are?”
Regulo stopped his manipulations of the control panel and sat perfectly still.
“Goblins?” he said at last. “I never heard Joseph or anybody else talk about Goblins. What are you trying to tell me?”
“Goblins is just my name for them, a name that my parents used. Morel caused their death, and if it hadn’t been for Caliban he would have been the cause of mine — and for the same reason. Gregor and Julia Merlin, my father and mother, had an opportunity to observe two of the Goblins. They knew what they were, understood what caused them. Morel couldn’t afford to let them tell that to anybody, so he arranged for their deaths. He killed my father in a fake lab fire, and my mother in a sabotaged aircraft accident. Dozens of i
“Rob, you’re delirious. You still haven’t told us what these Goblins are. And what the devil does it matter what Morel called them?” Regulo sounded solicitous but exasperated.
Delirious? Maybe Regulo was right. But so was Rob. “The Goblins are tiny people,” he said, “less than half a meter tall and just a few kilos in weight. When I first heard of them, I thought they couldn’t be human, they had to be some other species. I was wrong. They are human, as human as we are. Do you remember what Joseph Morel was doing before he came to work for you?”
“Of course I do.” Regulo sounded puzzled. “He was working on rejuvenation and life prolongation. That’s the whole reason why I hired him. I wanted him to work on the same things, for me. Surely you know that with the disease I have, the usual rejuvenation treatments don’t work at all.”
“I was told that. My parents were working on rejuvenation, too, at the Antigeria Labs in New Zealand. Morel used to exchange reports and results with them, and I’m sure they sometimes exchanged supplies as well. That’s how the original Goblins got to New Zealand, in a sealed medical supply box.”
“Are you trying to tell me that Morel shipped two of these `Goblins’ over to your parents in a box?” The skepticism in Regulo’s voice had increased.
“Of course not. Not intentionally. Morel probably thought he was shipping medication, or equipment. He didn’t realize what had happened until too late. By the time he found out, the Goblins were already down on Earth. But they were dead on arrival. They had stowed themselves away inside the box, not knowing that cargo holds aren’t pressurized. The Goblins died out in space, long before they got anywhere near Earth.”
“But why would these little people of yours want to get to the Antigeria Labs?” Corrie had moved to Rob’s side and was listening intently.
“They didn’t have anything that specific in mind. They had no idea where they were going. All they cared about was escaping from here. It was an accident that they came to that particular lab. Not a very improbable accident, because my parents ran one of the few groups that exchanged materials and information regularly with Morel. But from his point of view, the Antigeria Labs were about the worst place in the world for the Goblins to have landed. You see, my father recognized the Goblins. Or rather, he recognized their condition.” He paused, looking from Regulo to Corrie and back again. “Did either of you ever hear of something called progeria?”
Corrie shook her head. After a few seconds of silence, Regulo shrugged his thin shoulders. “I can make a guess as to what it means. It ought to be the opposite of antigeria, so I suppose it has something to do with increasing the rate of aging.”
“It’s more specific than that.” Rob took a slow, shallow breath. Now that the pain in his hand and arm had eased, it took an enormous effort to speak or listen. “There is a very rare natural disease called progeria, affecting one child in hundreds of millions. An infant who has the disease will reach sexual maturity a few months after birth. It will be fully developed — but still tiny — at one or two years old. At six or seven, it will die of senility. That’s natural progeria, well-known in the medical record books. It’s induced by a genetic defect, and it shows up as a malfunction of the glandular system. If it’s diagnosed early — that means within a couple of months of birth — it can be treated successfully. The patient can go on and live a normal life span, so long as the drugs remain available.”
Rob looked up at the display screen. Lutetia was looming still larger as Atlantis continued to narrow the distance between the two bodies. He turned his gaze back to Regulo.
“Morel had studied that disease,” he said wearily. “There’s no surprise in that. If you want to study the aging process, you look at anything that advances or retards it. But Morel went further. At some point in his studies, he came across a method that would let him do more than just understand progeria. He found a way to induce it.”
“You mean create it, in normal people?” asked Corrie.
Rob nodded. “With drugs, or surgery, or maybe a mixture of both, he could induce progeria. He could develop an infant that would mature, reproduce, and die in just a few years. That’s what the Goblins are. A colony of humans, all suffering from induced progeria. They never grow to more than a quarter of normal height, and they are only a tenth of our weight. And they die in a few years. Morel was breeding them, over in that lab.”