The Man In The Maze

1

They met again on the third day afterward, at midday in Zone B. Muller seemed relieved to see him, which was the idea. Rawlins came diagonally across the oval ball-court, or whatever it was, that lay between two snub-nosed dark blue towers, and Muller nodded. “How are your legs?”

“Doing fine.”

“And your friend—he liked the liqueur?”

“He loved it,” Rawlins said, thinking of the glow in Boardman’s foxy eyes. “He sends back your flask with some special brandy in it and hopes you’ll treat him to a second round.”

Muller eyed the flask as Rawlins held it forth. “He can go to hell,” Muller said coolly. “I won’t get into any trades. If you give me that flask I’ll smash it.”

“Why?”

“Give it here, and I’ll show you. No. Wait. Wait. I won’t. Here, let me have it.”

Rawlins surrendered it. Muller cradled the lovely flask tenderly in both hands, activated the cap, and put it to his lips. “You devils,” he said in a soft voice. “What is this, from the monastery on Deneb XIII?”

“He didn’t say. He just said you’d like it.”

“Devils. Temptations. It’s a trade, damn you! But only this once. If you show up here again with more liqueur—anything—the elixir of the gods—anything, I’ll refuse it. Where have you been all week, anyway?”

“Working. I told you they frowned on my coming to see you.”

He missed me, Rawlins thought. Charles is right: I’m getting to him. Why does he have to be such a difficult character?

“Where are they excavating?” Muller asked.

“They aren’t excavating at all. They’re using sonic probes at the border between Zones E and F, trying to determine the chronology—whether the whole maze was built at once, or in accretive layers out from the middle. What’s your opinion, Dick?”

“Go to hell. No free archaeology out of me!” Muller sipped the brandy again. “You’re standing pretty close to me, aren’t you?”

“Four or five meters, I guess.”

“You were closer when you gave me the brandy. Why didn’t you look sick? Didn’t you feel the effect?”

“I felt it, yes.”

“And hid your feelings like the good stoic you are?”

Shrugging, Rawlins said genially, “I guess the effect loses impact on repeated exposure. It’s still pretty strong, but not the way it was for me the first day. Have you ever noticed that happening with someone else?”

“There were no repeated exposures with anyone else,” said Muller. “Come over here, boy. See the sights. This is my water supply. Quite elegant. This black pipe runs right around Zone B. Onyx, I guess. Semiprecious. Handsome, at any rate.” Muller knelt and stroked the aqueduct. “There’s a pumping system. Brings up water from some underground aquifer, maybe a thousand kilometers down, I don’t know. This planet doesn’t have any surface water, does it?”

“It has oceans.”

“Aside from—well, whatever. Over here, you see, here’s one of the spigots. Every fifty meters. As far as I can tell it’s the water supply for the entire city, right here, so perhaps the builders didn’t need much water. It couldn’t have been very important if they set things up like this. No conduits that I’ve found. No real plumbing. Thirsty?”

“Not really.”

Muller cupped his hand under the ornately engraved spigot, a thing of concentric ridges. Water gushed. Muller took a few quick gulps; the flow ceased the moment the hand was removed from the area below the spigot. A scanning system of some kind, Rawlings thought. Clever. How had it lasted all these millions of years?

“Drink,” Muller said. “You may get thirsty later on.”

“I can’t stay long.” But he drank anyway. Afterward they walked into Zone A, an easy stroll. The cages had closed again; Rawlins saw several of them, and shuddered. He would try no such experiments today. They found benches, slabs of polished stone that curled at the ends into facing seats intended for some species very much broader in the buttock than the usual H. sapiens. Sitting like this they could talk at a distance, Rawlings feeling only mild discomfort from Muller’s emanation, and yet there was no sensation of separation.

Muller was in a talkative mood.

The conversation was fitful, dissolving every now and then into an acid spray of anger or self-pity, but most of the time Muller remained calm and even charming—an older man clearly enjoying the company of a younger one, the two of them exchanging opinions, experiences, scraps of philosophy. Muller spoke a good deal about his early career, the planets he had seen, the delicate negotiations on behalf of Earth with the frequently prickly colony-worlds. He mentioned Boardman’s name quite often; Rawlins kept his face studiously blank. Muller’s attitude toward Boardman seemed to be one of deep admiration shot through with furious loathing. He could not forgive Boardman, apparently, for having played on his own weaknesses in getting him to go to the Hydrans. Not a rational attitude, Rawlins thought. Given Muller’s trait of overweening curiosity, he would have fought for that assignment, Boardman or no, risks or no.

“And what about you?” Muller asked finally. “You’re brighter than you pretend to be. Hampered a little by your shyness, but plenty of brains, carefully hidden behind college-boy virtues. What do you want for yourself, Ned? What does archaeology give you?”

Rawlins looked him straight in the eyes. “A chance to recapture a million pasts. I’m as greedy as you are. I want to know how things happened, how they got this way. Not just on Earth or in the System. Everywhere.”

“Well spoken!”

I thought so too, Rawlins thought, hoping Boardman was pleased by his newfound eloquence.

He said, “I suppose I could have gone in for diplomatic service, the way you did. Instead I chose this. I think it’ll work out. There’s so much to discover, here and everywhere else. We’ve only begun to look.”

“The ring of dedication is in your voice.”

“I suppose.”

“I like to hear that sound. It reminds me of the way I used to talk.”

Rawlins said, “Just so you don’t think I’m hopelessly pure I ought to say that it’s personal curiosity that moves me on, more than abstract love of knowledge.”

“Understandable. Forgivable. We’re not too different, really. Allowing for forty-odd years between us. Don’t worry so much about your motives, Ned. Go to the stars, see, do. Enjoy. Eventually life will smash you, the way it’s smashed me, but that’s far off. Sometime, never, who knows? Forget about that.”

“I’ll try,” Rawlins said.

He felt the warmth of the man now, the reaching out of genuine sympathies. There was still that carrier wave of nightmare, though, the unending broadcast out of the mucky depths of the soul, attenuated at this distance but unmistakable. Imprisoned by his pity, Rawlins hesitated to say what it now was time to say. Boardman prodded him irritably. “Go on, boy! Slip it in!”

“You look very far away,” Muller said.

“Just thinking how—how sad it is that you won’t trust us at all, that you have such a negative attitude toward humanity.”

“I come by it honestly.”

“You don’t need to spend the rest of your life in this maze, though. There’s a way out.”

“Garbage.”

“Listen to me,” Rawlins said. He took a deep breath and flashed his quick, transparent grin. “I talked about your case to our expedition medic. He’s studied neurosurgery. He knew all about you. He says there’s now a way to fix what you have. Recently developed, the last couple of years. It—shuts off the broadcast, Dick. He said I should tell you. We’ll take you back to Earth. For the operation, Dick. The operation. The cure.”

2

The sharp glittering barbed word came swimming along on the breast of a torrent of bland sounds and speared him in the gut. Cure! He stared. There was reverberation from the looming dark buildings. Cure. Cure. Cure. Muller felt the poisonous temptation gnawing at his liver. “No,” he said. “That’s garbage. A cure’s impossible.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I know.”

“Science progresses in nine years. They understand how the brain works, now. Its electrical nature. What they did, they built a tremendous simulation in one of the lunar labs—oh, a few years ago, and they ran it all through from start to finish. As a matter of fact I’m sure they’re desperate to have you back, because you prove all their theories. In your present condition. And by operating on you, reversing your broadcast, they’ll demonstrate that they were right. All you have to do is come back with us.”

Muller methodically popped his knuckles. “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”

“I didn’t know a thing about it.”

“Of course.”

“Really. We didn’t expect to be finding you here, you realize. At first nobody was too sure who you were, why you were here. I explained it. And then the medic remembered that there was this treatment. What’s wrong—don’t you believe me?”

“You look so angelic,” Muller said. “Those sweet blue eyes and that golden hair. What’s your game, Ned? Why are you reeling off all this nonsense?”

Rawlins reddened. “It isn’t nonsense!”

“I don’t believe you. And I don’t believe in your cure.”

“It’s your privilege. But you’ll be the loser if—”

“Don’t threaten me!”

“I’m sorry.”

There was a long, sticky silence.

Muller revolved a maze of thoughts. To leave Lemnos? To have the curse lifted? To hold a woman in his arms again? Breasts like fire against his skin? Lips? Thighs? To rebuild his career. To reach across the heavens once more? To shuck nine years of anguish? To believe? To go? To submit?

“No,” he said carefully. “There is no cure for what I have.”

“You keep saying that. But you can’t know.”

“It doesn’t fit the pattern. I believe in destiny, boy. In compensating tragedy. In the overthrow of the proud. The gods don’t deal out temporary tragedies. They don’t take back their punishments after a few years. Oedipus didn’t get his eyes back. Or his mother. They didn’t let Prometheus off his rock. They—”

“You aren’t living a Greek play,” Rawlins told him. “This is the real world. The patterns don’t always fall neatly. Maybe the gods have decided that you’ve suffered enough. And so long as we’re having a literary discussion—they forgave Orestes, didn’t they? So why isn’t nine years here enough for you?”

“Is there a cure?”

“The medic says there is.”

“I think you’re lying to me, boy.”

Rawlins glanced away. “What do I have to gain by lying?”

“I can’t guess.”

“All right, I’m lying,” Rawlins said brusquely. “There’s no way to help you. Let’s talk about something else. Why don’t you show me the fountain where that liqueur rises?”

“It’s in Zone C,” said Muller. “I don’t feel like going there just now. Why did you tell me that story if it wasn’t true?”

“I said we’d change the subject.”

“Let’s assume for the moment that it is true,” Muller persisted. “That if I go back to Earth I can be cured. I want to let you know that I’m not interested, not even with a guarantee. I’ve seen Earthmen in their true nature. They kicked me when I was down. Not sporting, Ned. They stink. They reek. They gloried in what had happened to me.”

“That isn’t so!”

“What do you know? You were a child. Even more then than now. They treated me as filth because I showed them what was inside themselves. A mirror for their dirty souls. Why should I go back to them now? Why do I need them? Worms. Pigs. I saw them as they really are, those few months I was on Earth after Beta Hydri IV. The look in the eyes, the nervous smile as they back away from me. Yes, Mr. Muller. Of course, Mr. Muller. Just don’t come too close, Mr. Muller. Boy, come by here some time at night and let me show you the constellations as seen from Lemnos. I’ve given them my own names. There’s the Dagger, a long keen one. It’s about to be thrust into the Back. Then there’s the Shaft. And you can see the Ape, too, and the Toad. They interlock. The same star is in the forehead of the Ape and the left eye of the Toad. That star is Sol, my friend. An ugly little yellow star, the color of thin vomit. Whose planets are populated by ugly little people who have spread like trickling urine over the whole universe.”

“Can I say something that might offend you?” Rawlins asked. “You can’t offend me. But you can try.”

“I think your outlook is distorted. You’ve lost your perspective, all these years here.”

“No. I’ve learned how to see for the first time.”

“You’re blaming humanity for being human. It’s not easy to accept someone like you. If you were sitting here in my place, and I in yours, you’d understand that. It hurts to be near you. It hurts. Right now I feel pain in every nerve. If I came closer I’d feel like crying. You can’t expect people to adjust quickly to somebody like that. Not even your loved ones could—”

“I had no loved ones.”

“You were married.”

“Terminated.”

“Liaisons, then.”

“They couldn’t stand me when I came back.”

“Friends?”

“They ran,” Muller said. “On all six legs they scuttled away from me.”

“You didn’t give them time.”

“Time enough.”

“No,” Rawlins persisted. He shifted about uneasily on the chair. “Now I’m going to say something that will really hurt you, Dick. I’m sorry, but I have to. What you’re telling me is the kind of stuff I heard in college. Sophomore cynicism. The world is despicable, you say. Evil, evil, evil. You’ve seen the true nature of mankind, and you don’t want to have anything to do with mankind ever again. Everybody talks that way at eighteen. But it’s a phase that passes. We get over the confusions of being eighteen, and we see that the world is a pretty decent place, that people try to do their best, that we’re imperfect but not loathsome—”

“An eighteen-year-old has no right to those opinions. I do. I come by my hatreds the hard way.”

“But why cling to them? You seem to be glorying in your own misery. Break loose! Shake it off! Come back to Earth with us and forget the past. Or at least forgive.”

“No forgetting. No forgiving.” Muller scowled. A tremor of fear shook him, and he shivered. What if this were true? A genuine cure? Leave Lemnos? He was a trifle embarrassed. The boy had scored a palpable hit with that line about sophomore cynicism. It was. Am I really such a misanthrope? A pose. He forced me to adopt it. Polemic reasons. Now I choke on my own stubbornness. But there’s no cure. The boy’s transparent; he’s lying, though I don’t know why. He wants to trap me, to get me aboard that ship of theirs. What if it’s true? Why not go back? Muller could supply his own answers. It was the fear that held him. To see Earth’s billions. To enter the stream of life. Nine years on a desert island and he dreaded to return. He slipped into a pit of depression, recognizing hard truths. The man who would be a god was just a pitiful neurotic now, clinging to his isolation, spitting defiance at a possible rescuer. Sad, Muller thought. Very sad.

Rawlins said, “I can feel the flavor of your thoughts changing.”

“You can?”

“Nothing specific. But you were angry and bitter before. Now I’m getting something—wistful.”

“No one ever told me he could detect meanings,” Muller said in wonder. “No one ever said much. Only that it was painful to be near me. Disgusting.”

“Why did you go wistful just then, though? If you did. Thinking of Earth?”

“Maybe I was.” Muller hastily patched the sudden gap in his armor. His face darkened. He clenched his jaws. He stood up and deliberately approached Rawlins, watching the young man struggling to hide his real feelings of discomfort. Muller said, “I think you’d better get about your archaeologizing now, Ned. Your friends will be angry again.”

“I still have some time.”

“No, you don’t. Go!”

3

Against Charles Boardman’s express orders, Rawlins insisted on returning all the way to the Zone F camp that evening. The pretext was that Rawlins had to deliver the new flask of liqueur which he had finally been able to wheedle out of Muller. Board-man wanted one of the other men to pick up the flask, sparing Rawlins from the risks of Zone F’s snares. Rawlins needed the direct contact, though. He was badly shaken. His resolve was sagging.

He found Boardman at dinner. A polished dining-board of dark wood mortised with light woods sat before him. Out of elegant stoneware he ate candied fruits, brandied vegetables, meat extracts, pungent juices. A carafe of wine of a deep olive hue was near his fleshy hand. Mysterious pills of several types rested in the shallow pits of an oblong block of black glass; from time to time Boardman popped one into his mouth. Rawlins stood at the sector opening for a long while before Boardman appeared to notice him.

“I told you not to come here, Ned,” the old man said finally.

“Muller sends you this.” Rawlins put the flask down beside the carafe of wine.

“We could have talked without this visit.”

“I’m tired of that. I needed to see you.” Boardman left him standing and did not interrupt his meal. “Charles, I don’t think I can keep up the pretense with him.”

“You did an excellent job today,” said Boardman, sipping his wine. “Quite convincing.”

“Yes, I’m learning how to tell lies. But what’s the use? You heard him. Mankind disgusts him. He’s not going to cooperate once we get him out of the maze.”

“He isn’t sincere. You said it yourself, Ned. Cheap sophomore cynicism. The man loves mankind. That’s why he’s so bitter— because his love has turned sour in his mouth. But it hasn’t turned to hate. Not really.”

“You weren’t there, Charles. You weren’t talking to him.”

“I watched. I listened. And I’ve known Dick Muller for forty-odd years.”

“The last nine years are the ones that count. They’ve twisted him.” Rawlins bent into a crouch to get on Boardman’s level. Boardman nudged a candied pear onto his fork, equalized gravity, and flipped it idly toward his mouth. He’s intentionally ignoring me, Rawlins thought. He said, “Charles, be serious. I’ve gone in there and told Muller some monstrous lies. I’ve offered him a completely fraudulent cure, and he threw it back in my face.”

“Saying he didn’t believe it existed. But he does believe, Ned. He’s simply afraid to come out of hiding.”

“Please. Listen. Assume he does come to believe me. Assume he leaves the maze and puts himself in our hands. Then what? Who gets the job of telling him that there isn’t any cure, that we’ve tricked him shamelessly, that we merely want him to be our ambassador again, to visit a bunch of aliens twenty times as strange and fifty times as deadly as the ones that ruined his life? I’m not going to break that news to him!”

“You won’t have to, Ned. I’ll be the one.”

“And how will he react? Are you simply expecting him to smile and bow and say, very clever, Charles, you’ve done it again? To yield and do whatever you want? No. He couldn’t possibly. You can get him out of the maze, maybe, but the very methods you use for getting him out make it inconceivable that he can be of any use to you once he is out.”

“That isn’t necessarily true,” said Boardman calmly.

“Will you explain the tactics you propose to use, then, once you’ve informed him that the cure is a lie and that there’s a dangerous new job he has to undertake?”

“I prefer not to discuss future strategy now.”

“I resign,” Rawlins said.

4

Boardman had been expecting something like that. A noble gesture; a moment of headstrong defiance; a rush of virtue to the brain. Abandoning now his studied detachment, he looked up, his eyes locking firmly on Rawlins’. Yes, there was strength there. Yes, determination. But not guile. Not yet.

Quietly Boardman said, “You resign? After all your talk of service to mankind? We need you, Ned. You’re the indispensable man, our link to Muller.”

“My dedication to mankind includes a dedication to Dick Muller,” Rawlins said stiffly. “He’s part of mankind, whether he thinks so or not. I’ve already committed a considerable crime against him. If you won’t let me in on the rest of this scheme, I’m damned if I’ll have any part in it.”

“I admire your convictions.”

“My resignation still stands.”

“I even agree with your position,” said Boardman. “I’m not proud of what we must do here. I see it as part of historical necessity—the need for an occasional betrayal for the greater good. I have a conscience too, Ned, an eighty-year-old conscience, very well developed. It doesn’t atrophy with age. We just learn to live with its complaints, that’s all.”

“How are you going to get Muller to cooperate? Drug him? Torture him? Brainblast him?”

“None of those.”

“What, then? I’m serious, Charles. My role in this job ends right here unless I know what’s ahead.”

Boardman coughed, drained his wine, ate a peach, took three pills in quick succession. Rawlins’ rebellion had been inevitable, and he was prepared for it, and yet he was annoyed that it had come. Now was the time for calculated risks. He said, “I see that it’s time to drop the pretenses, then, Ned. I’ll tell you what’s in store for Dick Muller—but I want you to consider it within the framework of the larger position. Don’t forget that the little game we’ve been playing on this planet isn’t simply a matter of private moral postures. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I have to remind you that mankind’s fate is at stake.”

“I’m listening, Charles.”

“Very well. Dick Muller must go to our extragalactic friends and convince them that human beings are indeed an intelligent species. Agreed? He alone is capable of doing this, because of his unique inability to cloak his thoughts.”

“Agreed.”

“Now, it isn’t necessary to convince the aliens that we’re good people, or that we’re honorable people, or that we’re lovable people. Simply that we have minds and can think. That we feel, that we sense, that we are something other than clever machines. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter what emotions Dick Muller is radiating so long as he’s radiating something.”

“I begin to see.”

“Therefore, once he’s out of the maze we can tell him what his assignment is to be. No doubt he’ll get angry at our trickery. But beyond his anger he may see where his duty lies. I hope so. You seem to think he won’t. But it makes no difference, Ned. He won’t be given an option once he leaves his sanctuary. He’ll be taken to the aliens and handed over to them to make contact. It’s brutal, I know. But necessary.”

“His cooperation is irrelevant, then,” said Rawlins slowly.

“He’ll just be dumped. Like a sack.”

“A thinking sack. As our friends out there will learn.”

“I—”

“No, Ned. Don’t say anything now. I know what you’re thinking. You hate the scheme. You have to. I hate it myself. Just go off, now, and think it over. Examine it from all sides before you come to a decision. If you want out tomorrow, let me know and we’ll carry on somehow without you, but promise me you’ll sleep on it, first. Yes? This is no time for a snap judgment.”

Rawlins’ face was pale a moment. Then color flooded into it. He clamped his lips. Boardman smiled benignly. Rawlins clenched his fists, squinted, turned, hastily went out.

A calculated risk.

Boardman took another pill. Then he reached for the flask Muller had sent him. He poured a little. Sweet, gingery, strong. An excellent liqueur. He let it rest a while on his tongue.