Midnight at the Well of Souls - By Jack L. Chalker Page 0,3

that marked brilliance and creativity—but they were unsafe thoughts for a civilization like the one the boy had come from. It revived those old religious ideas that after perfection came true death.

Where could he have gotten an idea like that? And why had he not been caught and stopped?

Skander looked after their naked young bodies as they filed through the tunnel toward the showers and dorm.

Only barbarians thought that way.

Had the Confederacy guessed what he was up to here? Was Varnett not the innocent student he was supposed to be, but the agent of his nightmares?

Did they suspect?

Suddenly he felt very chilly, although the temperature was constant.

Suppose they all were. . . .

* * *

Three months passed. Skander looked at the picture on his television screen, an electron micrograph of the cellular tissue brought up a month before by the core drill.It was the same pattern as the older discoveries—that same fine cellular structure, but infinitely more complex inside than any human or animal cell—and so tremendously alien.

And a six-sided cell, at that. He had often wondered about the why of that—had even their cells been hexagonal? Somehow be doubted it, but the way that number kept popping up he wouldn't disbelieve it, either.

He stared and stared at the sample. Finally, he reached over and turned up the magnification to full and put on the special filters he had developed and refined in over nine years on this barren planet.

The screen suddenly came alive. Little sparks darted from one point in the cell to another. There was a minor electrical storm in the cell. He sat, fascinated as always, at the view only he had ever seen.

The cell was alive.

But the energy was not electrical—that was why it had never been picked up. He had no idea what it was, but it behaved like standard electrical energy. It just didn't measure or appear as electricity should.

The discovery had been an accident, he reflected, three years before. Some careless student had been playing with the screen to get good-looking effects and had left it that way. He had switched it on the next day without noticing anything unusual, then set up the usual energy-detection program for another dull run-through.

It was only a glimpse, a flicker, but he had seen it—and worked on his own for months more to get a filter system that would show that energy photographically.

He had tested the classical samples from other digs, even had one sent to him by 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