Read 01. Midnight At the Well of Souls for Free Online

recordings of what he was seeing live and question him as to motive. This wasn't something done lightly.
    Cabin 6—Hain's cabin—was empty, but the missing passenger was in Wu Julee's Cabin 7. A less-experienced, less-jaded man would have been repulsed at the scene.
    Hain was standing near the closed and bolted door, stark naked. Wu Julee, a look of terror on her face, was also naked.
    Brazil turned up the volume.
    "Come on, Julee," Hain commanded, a tone of delightful expectancy in his harsh voice. There was no question as to what he had in mind.
    The girl cowed back in horror. "Please! Please, Master!" she pleaded with all the hysterical emotion she had hidden in public.
    "When you do it, Julee," Hain said in a hushed but still excited tone. "Only then."
    She did what he asked.
    Less-experienced and less-jaded men would have been repulsed at the sight, it was true.
    Brazil was becoming aroused.
    After she finished, Wu Julee continued to plead with the fat man to give it to her. Brazil waited expectantly, half-knowing what it was already. He just had to see where it was hidden and how it was protected.
    Hain promised her he would go get it and then donned the toga once more. He unbolted the door and appeared to look up and down the hallway. Satisfied, he walked out to his own cabin and unlocked the door. The unseen watcher turned his gaze to Cabin 6.
    Hain entered and took a small, thin attaché case from beneath the washbasin. It had the high-security locks, Brazil noted—five small squares programmed to receive five of Hain's ten fingerprints in a certain order. Hain's body blocked reading the combination, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway—without Hain's touch the whole inside would dissolve in a quick acid bath.
    Hain opened the case to reveal a tray of jewelry and body paint. Normal enough, and the tray seemed deep enough to fill the whole case. No customs problems.
    Working a second set of fingerprint-coded combinations through the thin plastic which hid the additional guards, the tray came loose and appeared to be floating on something else. The fat man lifted the tray out.
    For the first time Brazil noticed that Hain had on some thin gloves. He hadn't seen them being put on—maybe they were already on during the scene he had just witnessed—but there they were.
    The fat man reached in and picked out a tiny object that almost dripped with liquid. The rest of the case bottom, Brazil could see, was filled with the stuff. His suspicions were confirmed.
    Datham Hain was a sponge merchant.
    The contraband was called sponge because that was what the stuff was—an alien sponge spawned on a distant sea world now interdicted by the Confederacy.
    The story came back to Brazil. A nice planet, mostly ocean but dotted with millions of islands connected in a network of shallows. A tropical climate except at the poles. It looked like a paradise, and, tests had shown nothing that could hurt the human race. A test colony—two, three hundred people—was landed on the two largest islands for the five-year trial, as per standard procedure. Volunteers, of course, the last remnant of frontiersmen in the human race.
    If they survived and prospered, they owned the world—to develop it or do with it what they would. But because man's test instruments could analyze only the known and the theoretical, there was no way to detect a threat so alien it hadn't even been imagined. That was the reason for the trial in the first place.
    So those people had settled in and lived and loved and played and built on their islands.
    For almost a month.
    That was when they started to go mad, the people of that colony. They regressed—slowly, at first, then increasingly faster and faster. They turned into primitive beasts as the thing that had caught them ate away at their brains. They became like wild apes, only without even the most rudimentary reasoning ability. Finally they died, from their inability to cope with even the basics of eating and