01. Midnight At the Well of Souls Read Free

a supply ship. They had all been dead.
    But not this one.
    Somewhere, forty or so kilometers beneath them, the Markovian brain was still alive.
    "What is that, Professor?" Skander heard a voice behind him. He quickly flipped the screen off and whirled around in one anxious moment.
    It was Varnett, that perennial look of innocence on his permanently childlike face.
    "Nothing, nothing," he covered excitedly, the anxiety in his voice betraying the lie. "Just putting on some playful programs to see what the electrical charges in the cell might have looked like."
    Varnett seemed skeptical. "Looked pretty real to me," he said stubbornly. "If you've made a major breakthrough you ought to tell us about it. I mean—"
    "No, no, it's nothing," Skander protested angrily. Then, regaining his composure, he said, "That will be all, Citizen Varnett! Leave me now!"
    Varnett shrugged and left.
    Skander sat in his chair for several minutes. His hands—in fact, his whole body—began shaking violently, and it was a while before the attack subsided. Slowly, a panicked look on his face, he went over to the microscope and carefully removed the special filter. His hand was still so unsteady he could hardly hold on to it. He slipped the filter into its tiny case with difficulty and placed it in the wide belt for tools and personal items that was the only clothing any of them wore inside.
    He went back to his private room in the dorm section and lay down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling for what seemed like hours.
    Varnett, he thought. Always Varnett. In the three months since they had first arrived, the boy had been into everything. Many of the others played their off-duty games and engaged in the silliness students do, but not he. Serious, studious to a fault, and always reading the project reports, the old records.
    Skander suddenly felt that everything was closing in on him. He was still so far from his goal!
    And now Varnett knew. Knew, at least, that the brain was alive. The boy would surely take it the step further—guess that Skander had almost broken the code, was ready, perhaps in another year or so, to send that brain a message, reactivate it.
    To become a god.
    He would be the one who would save the human race with the very tools that must have destroyed its maker.
    * * *
    Suddenly Skander jumped up and made his way back to the lab. Something nagged at him, some suspicion that things were even more wrong than he knew.
    Quietly, he stepped into the lab.
    Varnett was sitting at the television console. And, on the screen, the same cell Skander had been examining was depicted with its energy connectors clearly visible!  
    Skander was stunned. Quickly his hands reached for the little pocket in which he kept his filter. Yes, it was still there.
    How was this possible?
    Varnett was doing computations, checking against a display on a second screen that hooked him to the math sections of the lab computer. Skander stood there totally still and silent. He heard Yarnett mumble an assent to himself, as if some problem he had been running through the computer had checked out correct.
    Skander stole a glance at his chronometer. Nine hours! It had been nine hours! He had slept through part of his dark thoughts and given the boy the chance to confirm his worst nightmare.
    Something suddenly told Varnett he wasn't alone. He sat still for a second, then glanced fearfully around.
    "Professor!" he exclaimed. "I'm glad it's you! This is stupendous! Why aren't you telling everyone?"
    "How—" Skander stumbled, gesturing at the screen. "How did you get that picture?"
    Varnett smiled. "Oh, that's simple. You forgot to dump the computer memory when you closed up. This is what you were looking at, which the computer held in new storage."
    Skander cursed himself for a fool. Of course, everything on every instrument was recorded by the computer as standard procedure. He had been so shook up by Varnett's discovery of his work that he had forgotten to dump the