The Man In The Maze

1

Muller knew the maze quite well by this time. He understood its snares and its delusions, its pitfalls, its deadly traps. He had lived within it for nine years. That was long enough to come to terms with the maze, if not with the situation that had driven him to take refuge within it.

He still moved warily. Three or four times already he had learned that his knowledge of the maze, although adequate and workable, was not wholly complete. At least once he had come right to the edge of destruction, pulling back only by some improbable bit of luck just before the unexpected fountaining of an energy flare sent a stream of raw power boiling across his path. Muller had charted that flare, and fifty others; but as he moved through the city-sized labyrinth he knew there was no guarantee that he would not meet an uncharted one.

Overhead the sky was darkening; the deep, rich green of late afternoon was giving way to the black of night. Muller paused a moment in his hunting to look up at the pattern of the stars. Even that was becoming familiar now. He had chosen his own constellations on this desolate world, searching the heavens for arrangements of brightness that suited his peculiarly harsh and bitter taste. Now they appeared: the Dagger, the Back, the Shaft, the Ape, the Toad. In the forehead of the Ape flickered the small grubby star that Muller believed was the sun of Earth. He was not sure, because he had destroyed his chart tank after landing here somehow, though, he felt that that minor fireball must be Sol. The same dim star formed the left eye of the Toad. There were times when Muller told himself that Sol would not be visible in the sky of this world ninety light-years from Earth, but at other times he was quite convinced. Beyond the Toad lay the constellation that Muller had named Libra, the Scales. Of course, this set of scales was badly out of balance.

Three small moons glittered here. The air was thin but breathable; Muller had long ago ceased to notice that it had too much nitrogen, not enough oxygen. It was a little short on carbon dioxide, too, and one effect of that was that he hardly ever seemed to yawn. That did not trouble him. Gripping the butt of his gun tightly, he walked slowly through the alien city in search of his dinner. This too was part of a fixed routine. He had six months’ supply of food stored in a radiation locker half a kilometer away, but yet each night he went hunting so that he could replace at once whatever he drew from his cache. It was a way of devouring the time. And he needed that cache, undepleted, against the day when the maze might cripple or paralyze him. His keen eyes scanned the angled streets ahead. About him rose the walls, screens, traps and confusions of the maze within which he lived. He breathed deeply. He put each foot firmly down before lifting the other. He looked in all directions. The triple moonlight analyzed and dissected his shadow, splitting it into reduplicated images that danced and sprawled before him.

The mass detector mounted over his left ear emitted a high-pitched sound. That told Muller that it had picked up the thermals of an animal in the 50–100 kilogram range. He had the detector programmed to scan in three horizons, of which this was the middle one, the food-beast range. The detector would also report to him on the proximity of 10–20 kilogram creatures—the teeth-beast range—and on the emanations of beasts over 500 kilograms—the big-beast range. The small ones had a way of going quickly for the throat, and the great ones were careless tramplers; Muller hunted those in between and avoided the others.

Now he crouched, readying his weapon. The animals that wandered the maze here on Lemnos could be slain without stratagem; they kept watch on one another, but even after all the years of Muller’s presence among them they had not learned that he was predatory. Not in several million years had an intelligent life-form done any hunting on this planet, evidently, and Muller had been potting them nightly without teaching them a thing about the nature of mankind. His only concern in hunting was to strike from a secure, well-surveyed point so that in his concentration on his prey he would not fall victim to some more dangerous creature. With the kickstaff mounted on the heel of his left boot he probed the wall behind him, making certain that it would not open and engulf him. It was solid. Good. Muller edged himself backward until his back touched the cool, polished stone. His left knee rested on the faintly yielding pavement. He sighted along the barrel of his gun. He was safe. He could wait. Perhaps three minutes went by. The mass detector continued to whine, indicating that the beast was remaining within a hundred-meter radius; the pitch rose slightly from moment to moment as the thermals grew stronger. Muller was in no hurry. He was at one side of a vast plaza bordered by glassy curving partitions, and anything that emerged from those gleaming crescents would be an easy shot. Muller was hunting tonight in Zone E of the maze, the fifth sector out from the heart, and one of the most dangerous. He rarely went past the relatively innocuous Zone D, but some daredevil mood had prodded him into E this evening. Since finding his way into the maze he had never risked G or H again at all, and had been as far out as F only twice. He came to E perhaps five times a year.

To his right the converging lines of a shadow appeared, jutting from one of the curving glassy walls. The song of the mass detector reached into the upper end of the pitch spectrum for an animal of this size. The smallest moon, Atropos, swinging giddily through the sky, changed the shadow pattern; the lines no longer converged, but now one bar of blackness cut across the other two. The shadow of a snout, Muller knew. An instant later he saw his victim. The animal was the size of a large dog, gray of muzzle and tawny of body, hump-shouldered, ugly, spectacularly carnivorous. For his first few years here Muller had avoided hunting the carnivores, thinking that their meat would not be tasty. He had gone instead after the local equivalent of cows and sheep—mild-mannered ungulates which drifted blithely through the maze cropping the grasses in the garden places. Only when that bland meat palled did he go after one of the fanged, clawed creatures that harvested the herbivores, and to his surprise their flesh was excellent. He watched the animal emerge into the plaza. Its long snout twitched. Muller could hear the sniffing sounds from where he crouched. But the scent of man meant nothing to this beast.

Confidently, swaggeringly, the carnivore strode across the sleek pavement of the plaza, its unretracted claws clicking and scraping. Muller fined his beam down to needle aperture and took thoughtful aim, sighting now on the hump, now on the hindquarters. The gun was proximity-responsive and would score a hit automatically, but Muller always keyed in the manual sighting. He and the gun had different goals—the gun was concerned with killing, Muller with eating; and it was easier to do his own aiming than to try to convince the weapon that a bolt through the tender, juicy hump would deprive him of the tastiest cut. The gun, seeking the simplest target, would lance through that hump to the spine and bring the beast down: Muller favored more finesse.

He chose a target six inches forward from the hump: the place where the spine entered the skull. One shot did it. The animal toppled heavily. Muller went toward it as rapidly as he dared, checking every footfall. Quickly he carved away the inessentials—limbs, head, belly—and sprayed a seal around the raw slab of flesh he cut from the hump. He sliced a hefty steak from the hindquarters, too, and strapped both parcels to his shoulders. Then he swung around, searching for the zigzagging road that was the only safe entry to the core of the maze. In less than an hour he could be at his lair in the heart of Zone A.

He was halfway across the plaza when he heard an unfamiliar sound.

Pausing, he looked back. Three small loping creatures were heading toward the carcass he had abandoned. But the scrabbling of the scavengers was not what he had heard. Was the maze preparing some new deviltry? It had been a low rumbling sound overlaid by a hoarse throb in the middle frequencies, too prolonged to be the roaring of one of the large animals. It was a sound Muller had not heard before.

No: a sound he had not heard here before. It registered somewhere in his memory banks. He searched. The sound was familiar. That double boom, slowly dopplering into the distance—what was it?

He placed its position. The sound had come from over his right shoulder, so it seemed. Muller looked there and saw only the triple cascade of the maze’s secondary wall, rising in tier upon glittering amber tier. Above that wall? He saw the star-brightened sky: the Ape, the Toad, the Scales.

Muller remembered the sound now.

A ship; a starship, cutting out of warp onto ion drive to make a planetary landing. The boom of the expellers, the throb of the deceleration tubes, passing over the city. It was a sound he had not heard in nine years, since his self-exile on Lemnos had begun. So he was having visitors. Casual intruders, or had he been traced? What did they want? Anger blazed through him. He had had enough of them and their world. Why did they have to trouble him here? Muller stood braced, legs apart, a segment of his mind searching as always for perils even while he glared toward the probable landing point of the ship. He wanted nothing to do with Earth or Earthmen. He glowered at the faint point of light in the eye of the Toad, in the forehead of the Ape. They would not reach him, he decided.

They would die in the maze, and their bones would join the million-year accumulation that lay strewn in the outer corridors. And if they succeeded in entering, as he had done-Well, then they would have to contend with him. They would not find that pleasant. Muller smiled grimly, adjusted the meat on his back, and returned his full concentration to the job of penetrating the maze. Soon he was within Zone A, and safe. He reached his lair. He stowed his meat. He prepared his dinner. Pain hammered at his skull. After nine years he was no longer alone on this world. They had soiled his solitude. Once again, Muller felt betrayed. He wanted nothing more from Earth than privacy, now; and even that they would not give him. But they would suffer if they managed to reach him within the maze. If.

2

The ship had erupted from warp a little late, almost in the outer fringes of Lemnos’ atmosphere. Charles Boardman disliked that. He demanded the highest possible standards of performance from himself, and expected everyone about him to keep to the same standards. Especially pilots.

Concealing his irritation, Boardman thumbed the screen to life and the cabin wall blossomed with a vivid image of the planet below. Scarcely any clouds swathed its surface; he had a clear view through the atmosphere. In the midst of a broad plain was a series of corrugations that were sharply outlined even at a height of a hundred kilometers. Boardman turned to the young man beside him and said, “There you are, Ned. The labyrinth of Lemnos. And Dick Muller right in the middle of it!”

Ned Rawlins pursed his lips. “So big? It must be hundreds of kilometers across!”

“What you’re seeing is the outer embankment. The maze itself is surrounded by a concentric ring of earthen walls five meters high and nearly a thousand kilometers in outer circumference. But—”

“Yes, I know,” Rawlins burst in. Almost immediately he turned bright red, with that appealing innocence that Boardman found so charming and soon would be trying to put to use. “I’m sorry, Charles, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Quite all right. What did you want to ask?”

“That dark spot within the outer walls—is that the city itself?”

Boardman nodded. “That’s the inner maze. Twenty, thirty kilometers in diameter—and God knows how many millions of years old. That’s where we’ll find Muller.”

“If we can get inside.”

“When we get inside.”

“Yes. Yes. Of course. When we get inside,” Rawlins corrected, reddening again. He flashed a quick, earnest smile. “There’s no chance we won’t find the entrance, is there?”

“Muller did,” said Boardman quietly. “He’s in there.”

“But he’s the first who got inside. Everyone else who tried has failed. So why will we—”

“There weren’t many who tried,” Boardman said. “Those who did weren’t equipped for the problem. We’ll manage, Ned. We’ll manage. We have to. Relax, now, and enjoy the landing.”

The ship swung toward the planet—going down much too rapidly, Boardman thought, oppressed by the strains of deceleration. He hated travel, and he hated the moment of landing worst of all. But this was a trip he could not have avoided. He eased back in the webfoam cradle and blanked out the screen. Ned Rawlins was still upright, eyes glowing with excitement. How wonderful to be young, Boardman thought, not sure whether he meant to be sarcastic or not. Certainly the boy was strong and healthy—and cleverer than he sometimes seemed. A likely lad, as they would have said a few centuries ago. Boardman could not remember having been that sort of young man himself. He had the feeling of having always been on the brink of middle age—shrewd, calculating, well organized. He was eighty, now, with almost half his lifetime behind him, and yet in honest self-appraisal he could not bring himself to believe that his personality had changed in any essential way since he had turned twenty. He had learned techniques, the craft of managing men; he was wiser now; but he was not qualitatively different. Young Ned Rawlins, though, was going to be another person entirely sixty-odd years from now, and very little of the callow boy in the next cradle would survive. Board-man suspected, not happily, that this very mission would be the crucible in which Ned’s innocence was blasted from him.

Boardman closed his eyes as the ship entered its final landing maneuvers. He felt gravity clawing at his aging flesh. Down. Down. Down. How many planetfalls had he made, loathing every one? The diplomatic life was a restless one. Christmas on Mars, Easter on one of the Centaurine worlds, the midyear feast celebrated on a stinking planet of Rigel—and now this trip, the most complex of all. Man was not made to flash from star to star like this, Boardman thought. I have lost my sense of a universe. They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds.

He knew that his face was distorted by the pull of Lemnos as the ship plunged planetward. There were heavy fleshy jowls about his throat, and pockets of extra meat here and there about his body, giving him a soft, pampered look. With little effort Board-man could have had himself streamlined to the fashionably sleek appearance of a modern man; this was an era when men a century and a quarter old could look like striplings, if they cared to. Early in his career Boardman had chosen to simulate authentic aging. Call it an investment; what he forfeited in chic he gained in status. His business was selling advice to governments, and governments preferred not to buy their counsel from men who looked like boys. Boardman had looked fifty-five years old for the last forty years, and he expected to retain that look of strong, vigorous early middle age at least another half a century. Later, he would allow time to work on him again when he entered the final phase of his career. He would take on the whitened hair and shrunken cheek of a man of eighty, and pose as Nestor rather than as Ulysses. At the moment it was professionally useful to look only slightly out of trim, as he did.

He was a short man, though he was so stocky that he easily dominated any group at a conference table. His powerful shoulders, deep chest, and long arms would have been better suited to a giant. When he stood up Boardman revealed himself as of less than middle height, but sitting down he was awesome. He found that feature useful too, and had never considered altering it. An extremely tall man is better suited to command than to advise, and Boardman had never had the wish to command; he preferred a more subtle exercise of power. But a short man who looks big at a table can control empires. The business of empires is transacted sitting down.

He had the look of authority. His chin was strong, his nose thick and blunt and forceful, his lips both firm and sensuous, his eyebrows immense and shaggy, black strips of fur sprouting from a massive forehead that might have awed a Neanderthal. He wore his hair long and coarse. Three rings gleamed on his fingers, one a gyroscope of platinum and rubies with dull-hued inlays of U-238. His taste in clothing was severe and conservative, running to heavy fabrics and almost medieval cuts. In another epoch he might have been well cast as a worldly cardinal or as an ambitious prime minister; he would have been important in any court at any time. He was important now. The price of Boardman’s importance, though, was the turmoil of travel. Soon he would land on another strange planet, where the air would smell wrong, the gravity would be just a shade too strong, and the sun’s hue would not be right. Boardman scowled. How much longer would the landing take?

He looked at Ned Rawlins. Twenty-two, twenty-three years old, something like that: the picture of naive young manhood, although Boardman knew that Ned was old enough to have learned more than he seemed to show. Tall, conventionally handsome without the aid of cosmetic surgery; fair hair, blue eyes, wide, mobile lips, flawless teeth. He was the son of a communications theorist, now dead, who had been one of Richard Muller’s closest friends. Boardman was counting on that connection to carry them a good distance in the delicate transactions ahead.

Rawlins said, “Are you uncomfortable, Charles?”

“I’ll live. We’ll be down soon.”

“The landing seems so slow, doesn’t it?”

“Another minute now,” Boardman said.

The boy’s face looked scarcely stretched by the forces acting upon them. His left cheek was drawn down slightly, that was all. It was weird to see the semblance of a sneer on that shining visage.

“Here we come now,” Boardman muttered, and closed his eyes again.

The ship closed the last gap between itself and the ground. The expellers cut out; the deceleration tubes snarled their last. There was the final awkward moment of uncertainty, then steadiness, the landing jacks gripping firmly, the roar of landing silenced. We are here, Boardman thought. Now for the maze. Now for Mr. Richard Muller. Now to see if he’s become any less horrible in the past nine years. Maybe he’s just like everyone else, by now. If he is, Boardman told himself, God help us all.

3

Ned Rawlins had not traveled much. He had visited only five worlds, and three of them were in the mother system. When he was ten, his father had taken him on a summer tour of Mars. Two years later he had seen Venus and Mercury. As his graduation present at sixteen he had gone extrasolar as far as Alpha Centauri IV, and three years after that he had made the melancholy trip to the Rigel system to bring home his father’s body after the accident.

It wasn’t much of a travel record at a time when the warp drive made getting from one cluster to another not much more difficult than going from Europe to Australia, Rawlins knew. But he had time to do his jaunting later on, when he began getting his diplomatic assignments. To hear Charles Boardman tell it, the joys of travel palled pretty fast, anyway, and running around the universe became just another chore. Rawlins made allowances for the jaded attitude of a man nearly four times his own age, but he suspected that Boardman was telling the truth.

Let the jadedness come. Right now Ned Rawlins was walking an alien world for the sixth time in his life, and he loved it. The ship was docked on the big plain that surrounded Muller’s maze; the outer embankments of the maze itself lay a hundred kilometers to the southeast. It was the middle of the night on this side of Lemnos. The planet had a thirty-hour day and a twenty-month year; it was early autumn in this hemisphere, and the air was chilly. Rawlins stepped away from the ship. The crewmen were unloading the extruders that would build their camp. Charles Boardman stood to one side, wrapped in a thick fur garment and buried in an introspective mood so deep that Rawlins did not dare go near him. Rawlins’ attitude toward Boardman was one of mingled awe and terror. He knew that the man was a cynical old bastard, but despite that it was impossible to feel anything but admiration for him. Boardman, Rawlins knew, was an authentic great man. He hadn’t met many. His own father had been one, perhaps. Dick Muller had been another; but of course Rawlins hadn’t been much more than twelve years old when Muller got into the hideous mess that had shattered his life. Well, to have known three such men in one short lifetime was a privilege indeed, Rawlins told himself. He wished that his own career would turn out half as impressively as Boardman’s had. Of course he didn’t have Board-man’s foxiness, and hoped he never would. But he had other characteristics—a nobility of soul, in a way—which Boardman lacked. I can be of service in my own style, Rawlins thought, and then wondered if that was a naive hope.

He filled his lungs with alien air. He stared at a sky swarming with strange stars, and looked futilely for some familiar pattern. A frosty wind ripped across the plain. This planet seemed forlorn, desolate, empty. He had read about Lemnos in school: one of the abandoned ancient planets of an unknown alien race, lifeless for a thousand centuries. Nothing remained of its people except fossilized bones and shreds of artifacts—and the maze. Their deadly labyrinth ringed a city of the dead that seemed almost untouched by time.

Archaeologists had scanned the city from the air, probing it with sensors and curdling in frustration, unable to enter it safely. The first dozen expeditions to Lemnos had failed to find a way into the maze; every man who entered had perished, a victim of the hidden traps so cleverly planted in the outer zones. The last attempt to get inside had been made some fifty years ago. Then Richard Muller had come here, looking for a place to hide from mankind, and somehow he had found the route.

Rawlins wondered if they would succeed in making contact with Muller. He wondered, too, how many of the men he had journeyed with would die before they got into the maze. He did not consider the possibility of his own death. At his age, death was still something that happened to other people. But some of the men now working to set up their camp would be dead in a few days.

While he thought about that an animal appeared, padding out from behind a sandy hummock a short distance from him. Rawlins regarded the alien beast curiously. It looked a little like a big cat, but its claws did not retract and its mouth was full of greenish fangs. Luminous stripes gave its lean sides a gaudy hue. Rawlins could not see what use such a glowing hide would be to a predator, unless it used the radiance as a kind of bait.

The animal came within a dozen meters of Rawlins, peered at him without any sign of real interest, then turned gracefully and trotted toward the ship. The combination of strange beauty, power, and menace that the animal presented was an attractive one.

It was approaching Boardman now. And Boardman was drawing a weapon.

“No!” Rawlins found himself yelling. “Don’t kill it, Charles! It only wants to look at us—!” Boardman fired.

The animal leaped, convulsed in mid-air, and fell back with its limbs outspread. Rawlins rushed up, numb with shock. There hadn’t been any need for the killing, he thought. The beast was just scouting us out. What a filthy thing to do!

He blurted angrily, “Couldn’t you have waited a minute, Charles? Maybe it would have gone away by itself! Why—”

Boardman smiled. He beckoned to a crewman, who squirted a spray net over the fallen animal. The beast stirred groggily as the crewman hauled it toward the ship. Softly Boardman said, “All I did was stun it, Ned. We’re going to write off part of the budget for this trip against the account of the federal zoo. Did you think I was all that triggerhappy?”

Rawlins suddenly felt very small and foolish. “Well—not really. That is—”

“Forget it. No, don’t forget it. Don’t forget anything. Take a lesson from it: collect all the data before shouting nonsense.”

“But if I had waited, and you really had killed it—”

“Then you’d have learned something ugly about me at the expense of one animal life. You’d have the useful fact that I’m provoked to murderousness by anything strange with sharp teeth. Instead all you did was make a loud noise. If I had meant to kill, your shout wouldn’t have changed my intention. It might have ruined my aim, that’s all, and left me at the mercy of an angry wounded beast. So bide your time, Ned. Evaluate. It’s better sometimes to let a thing happen than to play your own hand too quickly.” Boardman winked. “Am I offending you, Ned? Making you feel like an idiot with my little lecture?”

“Of course not, Charles. I wouldn’t pretend that I don’t have plenty to learn.”

“And you’re willing to learn it from me, even if I’m an infuriating old scoundrel?”

“Charles, I—”

“I’m sorry, Ned. I shouldn’t be teasing you. You were right to try to stop me from killing that animal. It wasn’t your fault that you misunderstood what I was doing. In your place I’d have acted just the way you did.”

“You mean I shouldn’t have bided my time and collected all the data when you pulled the stungun?” Rawlins asked, baffled.

“Probably not.”

“You’re contradicting yourself, Charles.”

“It’s my privilege to be inconsistent,” Boardman said. “My stock in trade, even.” He laughed heartily. “Get a good night’s sleep tonight. Tomorrow we’ll fly over the maze and map it a little, and then we’ll start sending men in. I figure we’ll be talking to Muller within a week.”

“Do you think he’ll be willing to cooperate?”

A cloud passed over Boardman’s heavy features. “He won’t be at first. He’ll be so full of bitterness that he’ll be spitting poison. After all, we’re the ones who cast him out. Why should he want to help Earth now? But he’ll come around, Ned, because fundamentally he’s a man of honor, and that’s something that never changes no matter how sick and lonely and anguished a man gets. Not even hatred can corrode real honor. You know that, Ned, because you’re that sort of person yourself. Even I am, in my own way. A man of honor. We’ll work on Muller. Well get him to come out of that damned maze and help us.”

“I hope you’re right, Charles.” Rawlins hesitated. “And what will it be like for us, confronting him? I mean, considering his sickness—the way he affects others—”

“It’ll be bad. Very bad.”

“You saw him, didn’t you, after it happened?”

“Yes. Many times.”

Rawlins said, “I can’t really imagine what it’s like to be next to a man and feel his whole soul spilling out over you. That’s what happens when you’re with Muller, isn’t it?”

“It’s like stepping into a bath of acid,” said Boardman heavily. “You can get used to it, but you never like it. You feel fire all over your skin. The ugliness, the terrors, the greeds, the sicknesses —they spout from him like a fountain of muck.”

“And Muller’s a man of honor…a decent man.”

“He was, yes.” Boardman looked toward the distant maze. “Thank God for that. But it’s a sobering thought, isn’t it, Ned? If a first-rate man like Dick Muller has all that garbage inside his brain, what do you think ordinary people are like in there? The squashed-down people with the squashed-down lives? Give them the same kind of curse Muller has and they’d be like beacons of flame, burning up every mind within light-years.”

“But Muller’s had nine years to stew in his misery,” Rawlins said. “What if it’s impossible to get near him now? What if the stuff he radiates is so strong that we won’t be able to stand it?”

“We’ll stand it,” Boardman said.