Read The Mind Pool for Free Online Page B

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-sized open space into a working laboratory. A lattice of interlocking beams ran from one side of the air-bulb to the other. Fixed to lattice nodes, neat as any museum collection of butterflies, hung sixteen fused and shattered objects: the Morgan Constructs.
    It was possible to deduce their original shapes only by comparison of the whole set. This one had wing panels intact, but a head that was fused to a melted blob of grey. Another, two farther over, had no wings and no legs, but the upper half of the rounded top was intact. Not one was more than a third complete.
    Phoebe was working on a well-defined compound eye, removing it from a blunt head. She saw Brachis and nodded to him.
    He floated across to her side and opened his suit. “Any hope?”
    “Are you kidding?” She gestured around her at the fragments. “The Cobweb Station guards should have posthumous medals. They blew this lot to hell and gone—except for the one you say got away.”
    “Nothing to be salvaged?”
    “I didn’t say that. This one”—Willard pointed the tool to the burnt mass she was working on—“doesn’t have weapons, or limbs, or working eyes. But I think there’s a fair sized chunk of brain intact. Maybe even most of it.”
    “Could it ever function again?”
    “Nope. Not in the way you were hoping.”
    “Then maybe we ought to quit.”
    “Don’t say that. I haven’t had so much fun in years. Livia Morgan was a genius. Half the time I can’t tell what her circuits are trying to accomplish. But it’s a hell of a game trying. ”
    “Phoebe, we’re not doing this for pleasure. Can you tell me one reason why we ought to go on?”
    “Because I’m getting results, Commander-man. I can’t build you one of these, now or ever. But give me another week in this hell-hole, and I’ll tell you a whole lot about how they work. That ought to be valuable when you people start chasing around the Perimeter.”
    “What you just said is secret information.”
    “Nuts. Everyone back at the shop knows it. Why do you think I agreed to come?”
    “To build me a detailed model of a Construct. One that functions and is safe to be around. That’s what I had in mind when I asked you.”
    “Bricks without straw, eh? Well, tough on you. It can’t be done.” Phoebe picked up a tiny fiber bundle inspection tube. “Give me a week, though, and if the half-wit zombies around here don’t get me I’ll have something close to a general schematic for this Construct. It’s the only one with any working brain functions, and it’s one of the more sophisticated. But we won’t have details. Will that do you?”
    “It will have to.”
    “Then go away, and let me work.”
    Brachis reached out and took the inspection unit from Phoebe Willard’s hand. “I will. But not right now. You and I have an assignation.”
    “Why Luther! I thought that was all over long ago.”
    “Not that, Phoebe. More fun than that. We’re going to sit down at a formal dinner, you and me and the staff of the Dump—every last half-wit zombie of them. I promised. They’ve not had visitors for years. So we’re going. And we—you and me both—are going to sit, and smile, and pretend we enjoy it.”
    “Nuts! I’m not going near those brain-dead buzzards.”
    “Look at the date on your orders. It expires tonight. You want to stay and play games? You go to dinner with us.”
    “Blackmail!”
    “And you smile, Phoebe. Like this.”