Chalker, Jack L. - Well of Souls 02 Read Online Free PDF

Compressed air, aided by the lush vegetation planted all over, kept the environment stable.
    Theoretically, this was a place for party leaders on New Outlook to get away from the pressures for a bit. Actually the resort's existence was known to only a few people, all intensely loyal to Antor Trelig, who was, after all, the party chairman. Protected by computer battle systems erected both on nearby natural dust specks and in special ships, no one could approach within a light-year without being blown apart, not unless Antor Trelig or his people approved.
    The place was unassailable politically, too; it would take a majority vote of the Council to enter over Trelig's diplomatic immunity and sovereignty, and Trelig controlled the largest bloc of votes on the Council.
    When they brought Nikki Zinder to New Pompeii she didn't really pay much attention to her surroundings. All she could think of was Ben and Ben's promise that he'd come for her. They put her in a comfortable room; quiet, faceless human servants brought her food and cleared it away. She lay around most of the day, hugging pillows, pretending that he was there. She used some pencils and paper she found to draw innumerable pictures of him, none very good but all showing him as an angelic superman. She determined to lose some weight for him, to surprise him, but his absence, aided and abetted by the tremendous variety of natural foods offered, caused just the reverse. Every time she thought of him she ate, and she thought of him constantly. Already overweight, by the end of six weeks she had gained almost eighteen kilos. She didn't really notice.
    They also took pictures of her at various times, even had her read some words to a recorder. She didn't mind. It wasn't important to her.
    Time was meaningless to her; every minute was terrible and drawn out as long as he wasn't there. She wrote childish love poems to him and endless reams of letters, which they said they'd deliver.
    It took eight weeks before Gil Zinder completed all the procedures necessary to shut down the project and prepare to move. Yulin's role in all that had happened was still unknown to him, but he was somewhat suspicious of the younger scientist when the man so eagerly volunteered to work on the new Trelig project. As for Trelig, he kept Zinder at least satisfied that his daughter was still alive by providing coded messages along with fingerprint and retinal-pattern ID to go with the pictures. The fact that she read the statements did not disturb her father; it indicated to him that she still could read normally and that Trelig was being a man of his word on neutralizing the sponge.
    For the final transfer of the master computer center and console to New Pompeii, they had to disconnect Obie from the apparatus that could alter or affect reality. And when they did, they made a startling discovery.
    Zetta, who they had made younger and more attractive, remained the way they'd designed her, but now she suddenly realized that she had been changed. The old equations were restored when Obie broke with the mechanism; she was still transformed, because they had used the machine to transform her— but now she knew she had been transformed.
    She was coming with them, of course, so there was no danger that a third person who realized the potential of the device would spread the news, but that worried Ben.
    For good reason.
    * * *
    Nikki Zinder sat in her room on New Pompeii. She was eating and daydreaming as usual, when, suddenly, it seemed that a fog simply disappeared from her mind, and she began thinking with crystal clarity.
    She looked around the room, cluttered with the remains of a long habitation, as if she were seeing it for the first time. She shook her head and tried to reason out what had happened.
    She felt as if she were coming down from some sort of drug high. She remembered going to sleep, then she remembered getting this tremendous crush on Ben, who took her out and handed her to some people who