The Man In The Maze

1

Muller had almost come to like the Hydrans. What he remembered most clearly and most favorably about them was their grace of motion. They seemed virtually to float. The strangeness of their bodies had never bothered him much; he was fond of saying that one did not need to go far from Earth to find the grotesque. Giraffes. Lobsters. Sea anemones. Squids. Camels. Look objectively at a camel and ask yourself what is less strange about its body than about a Hydran’s.

He had landed in a damp, dreary part of the planet, a little to the north of its equator, on an amoeboid continent occupied by a dozen large quasicities, each spread out over several thousand square kilometers. His life-support system, specially designed for this mission, was little more than a thin filtration sheet that clung to him like a second skin. It fed air to him through a thousand dialysis plaques. He moved easily if not comfortably within it.

He walked for an hour through a forest of the giant toadstoollike trees before he came upon any of the natives. The trees ran to heights of several hundred meters; perhaps the gravity, five-eighths Earthnorm, had something to do with that. Their curving trunks did not look sturdy. He suspected that an external woody layer no thicker than a fingertip surrounded a broad core of soggy pulp. The cap-like crowns of the trees met in a nearly continuous canopy overhead, cutting almost all light from the forest floor. Since the planet’s cloud layer permitted only a hazy pearl-colored glow to come through, and even that was intercepted by the trees, a maroon darkness prevailed below.

When he encountered the aliens he was surprised to find that they were about three meters tall. Not since childhood had he felt so diminished; he stood ringed by them, straining upward to meet their eyes. Now it was time for his exercise in applied hermeneutics. In a quiet voice he said, “My name is Richard Muller. I come in friendship from the peoples of the Terran Cultural Sphere.”

Of course they could not understand that. But they remained motionless. He imagined that their expressions were not unfriendly.

Dropping to his knees, Muller traced the Pythagorean Theorem in the soft moist soil.

He looked up. He smiled. “A basic concept of geometry. A universal pattern of thought.”

Their vertical slitlike nostrils flickered slightly. They inclined their heads. He imagined that they were exchanging thoughtful glances. With eyes in a circlet entirely around their heads, they did not need to change posture to do that.

“Let me display some further tokens of our kinship,” Muller said to them.

He sketched a line on the ground. A short distance from it he sketched a pair of lines. At a greater distance he drew three lines. He filled in the signs. 1 + 11 = 111.

“Yes?” he said. “We call it addition.”

The jointed limbs swayed. Two of his listeners touched arms. Muller remembered how they had obliterated the spying eye as soon as they had discovered it, not hesitating even to examine it. He had been prepared for the same reaction. Instead they were listening. A promising sign. He stood up and pointed to his marks on the ground.

“Your turn,” he said. He spoke quite loudly. He smiled quite broadly. “Show me that you understand. Speak to me in the universal language of mathematics.”

No response at first.

He pointed again. He gestured at his symbols, then extended his hand, palm upraised, to the nearest Hydran.

After a long pause one of the other Hydrans moved fluidly forward and let one of its globe-like foot-pedestals hover over the lines in the soil. The leg moved lightly and the lines vanished as the alien smoothed the soil.

“All right,” said Muller. “Now you draw something.”

The Hydran returned to its place in the circle.

“Very well,” Muller said. “There’s another universal language. I hope this doesn’t offend your ears.” He drew a soprano recorder from his pocket and put it between his lips. Playing through the filtration sheet was cumbersome. He caught breath and played a diatonic scale. Their limbs fluttered a bit. They could hear, then, or at any rate could sense vibrations. He shifted to the minor, and gave them another diatonic scale. He tried a chromatic scale. They looked a trifle more agitated. Good for you, he thought. Connoisseurs. Perhaps the whole-tone scale is more in keeping with the cloudiness of this planet, he decided. He played both of them, and gave them a bit of Debussy for good measure.

“Does that get to you?” he asked.

They appeared to be conferring.

They walked away from him.

He tried to follow. He was unable to keep up, and soon he lost sight of them in the dark, misty forest; but he persevered, and found them clustered, as if waiting for him, farther on. When he neared them they began to move again. In this way they led him, by fits and starts, into their city.

He subsisted on synthetics. Chemical analysis showed that it would be unwise to try local foods.

He drew the Pythagorean Theorem many times. He sketched a variety of arithmetical processes. He played Schonberg and Bach. He constructed equilateral triangles. He ventured into solid geometry. He sang. He spoke French, Russian, and Mandarin, as well as English, to show them the diversity of human tongues. He displayed a chart of the periodic table. After six months he still knew nothing more about the workings of their minds than he had an hour before landing. They tolerated his presence, but they said nothing to him; and when they communicated with one another it was mainly in quick, evanescent gestures, touches of the hand, flickers of the nostrils. They had a spoken language, it seemed, but it was so soft and breathy that he could not begin to distinguish words or even syllables. He recorded whatever he heard, of course.

Eventually they wearied of him and came for him. He slept.

He did not discover until much later what had been done to him while he slept.

2

He was eighteen years old, naked under the California stars. The sky was ablaze. He felt he could reach for the stars and pluck them from the heavens.

To be a god. To possess the universe.

He turned to her. Her body was cool and slender, slightly tense.

He cupped her breasts. He let his hand move across her flat belly. She shivered a little. “Dick,” she said. “Oh.” To be a god, he thought. He kissed her lightly, and then not lightly. “Wait,” she said. “I’m not ready.” He waited. He helped her get ready, or did the things he thought would help her get ready, and shortly she began to gasp. She spoke his name again. How many stars can a man visit in one lifetime? If each star has an average of twelve planets, and there are one hundred million stars within a galactic globe X light-years in diameter… Her thighs opened. His eyes closed. He felt soft old pine needles against his knees and elbows. She was not his first, but the first that counted. As the lightning ripped through his brain he was dimly aware of her response, tentative, halting, then suddenly vigorous. The intensity of it frightened him, but only for a moment, and he rode with her to the end. To be a god must be something like this.

They rolled over. He pointed to the stars and called off their names for her, getting half of them wrong, but she did not need to know that. He shared his dreams with her. Later they made love a second time, and it was even better.

He hoped it would rain at midnight, so they could dance in the rain, but the sky was clear. They went swimming instead, and came out shivering, laughing. When he took her home she washed down her pill with Chartreuse. He told her that he loved her.

They exchanged Christmas cards for several years.

3

The eighth world of Alpha Centauri B was a gas giant, with a low-density core and gravity not much more troublesome than that of Earth. Muller had honeymooned there the second time. It was partly a business trip, for there were troubles with the colonists on the sixth planet; they were talking of setting up a whirlpool effect that would suck away most of the eighth world’s highly useful atmosphere to use as raw materials.

Muller’s conferences with the locals went fairly well. He persuaded them to accept a quota system for their atmospheric grabs, and even won their praise for the little lesson in interplanetary morality he had administered. Afterward he and Nola were government guests for a holiday on the eighth world. Nola, unlike Lorayn, was the traveling sort. She would be accompanying him on many of his voyages.

Wearing support suits, they swam in an icy methane lake. They ran laughing along ammonia coasts. Nola was as tall as he, with powerful legs, dark red hair, green eyes. They embraced in a warm room of one-way windows overhanging a forlorn sea that stretched for hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

“For always,” she said.

“Yes. For always.”

Before the week ended they quarreled bitterly. But it was only a game; for the more fiercely they quarreled, the more passionate was the reconciliation. For a while. Later they stopped bothering to quarrel. When the option in the marriage contract came up, neither of them wanted to renew. Afterward, as his reputation grew, he sometimes received friendly letters from her. He had tried to see her when he returned from Beta Hydri IV to Earth. Nola, he thought, would help him in his troubles. She of all people would not turn away from him. For old times’ sake.

But she was vacationing on Vesta with her seventh husband. Muller found that out from her fifth husband. He had been her third. He did not call her. He began to see there was no point in it.

4

The surgeon said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Muller. There’s nothing we can do for you. I wouldn’t want to raise false hopes. We’ve graphed your whole neural network. We can’t find the sites of alteration. I’m terribly sorry.”

5

He had had nine years to sharpen his memories. He had filled a few cubes with reminiscences, but that had mainly been in the early years of his exile, when he worried about having his past drift away to be lost in fog. He discovered that the memories grew keener with age. Perhaps it was training. He could summon sights, sounds, tastes, odors. He could reconstruct whole conversations convincingly. He was able to quote the full texts of several treaties he had negotiated. He could name England’s kings in sequence from first to last, William I through William VII. He remembered the names of the girls whose bodies he had known.

He admitted to himself that, given the chance, he would go back. Everything else had been pretense and bluster. He had fooled neither Ned Rawlins nor himself, he knew. The contempt he felt for mankind was real, but not the wish to remain isolated. He waited eagerly for Rawlins to return. While he waited he drank several goblets of the city’s liqueur; he went on a killing spree, nervously gunning down animals he could not possibly consume in a year’s time; he conducted intricate dialogues with himself; he dreamed of Earth.

6

Rawlins was running. Muller, standing a hundred meters deep in Zone C, saw him come striding through the entrance, breathless, flushed.

“You shouldn’t run in here,” Muller said, “not even in the safer zones. There’s absolutely no telling—”

Rawlins sprawled down beside a flanged limestone tub, gripping its sides and sucking air. “Get me a drink, will you?” he gasped. “That liqueur of yours—”

“Are you all right?”

“No.”

Muller went to the fountain nearby and filled a handy flask with the sharp liqueur. Rawlins did not wince at all as Muller drew near to give it to him. He seemed altogether unaware of Muller’s emanation. Greedily, sloppily, he emptied the flask, letting driblets of the gleaming fluid roll down his chin and on his clothes. Then he closed his eyes a moment.

“You look awful,” Muller said. “As though you’ve just been raped, I’d say.”

“I have.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“Wait. Let me get my breath. I ran all the way from Zone F.”

“You’re lucky to be alive, then.”

“Perhaps.”

“Another drink?”

“No,” said Rawlins. “Not just yet.”

Muller studied him, perplexed. The change was striking and unsettling, and mere fatigue could not account for it all. Rawlins was bloodshot, flushed, puffy-faced; his facial muscles were tightly knit; his eyes moved randomly, seeking and not finding. Drunk? Sick? Drugged?

Rawlins said nothing.

After a long moment Muller said, just to fill the vacuum of silence, “I’ve done a lot of thinking about our last conversation. I’ve decided that I was acting like a damned fool. All that cheap misanthropy I was dishing up.” Muller knelt and tried to peer into the younger man’s shifting eyes. “Look here, Ned, I want to take it all back. I’m willing to return to Earth for treatment. Even if the treatment’s experimental, I’ll chance it. I mean, the worst that can happen is that it won’t cure me, and—”

“There’s no treatment,” said Rawlins dully.

“No-treatment…”

“No treatment. None. It was all a lie.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“You said so yourself,” Rawlins reminded him. “You didn’t believe a word of what I was saying. Remember?”

“A lie.”

“You didn’t understand why I was saying it, but you said it was nonsense. You told me I was lying. You wondered what I had to gain by lying. I was lying, Dick.”

“Lying.”

“Yes.”

“But I’ve changed my mind,” said Muller softly. “I was ready to go back to Earth.”

“There’s no hope of a cure,” Rawlins told him.

He slowly rose to his feet and ran his hand through his long golden hair. He arranged his disarrayed clothing. He picked up the flask, went to the liqueur fountain and filled it. Returning, he handed the flask to Muller, who drank from it. Rawlins finished the flask. Something small and voracious-looking ran past them and slipped through the gate leading to Zone D.

Finally Muller said, “Do you want to explain some of this?”

“We aren’t archaeologists.”

“Go on.”

“We came here looking especially for you. It wasn’t any accident. We knew all along where you were. You were tracked from the time you left Earth nine years ago.”

“I took precautions.”

“They weren’t any use. Boardman knew where you were going, and he had you tracked. He left you in peace because he had no use for you. But when a need developed he had to come after you. He was holding you in reserve, so to speak.”

“Charles Boardman sent you to fetch me?” Muller asked.

“That’s why we’re here, yes. That’s the whole purpose of this expedition,” Rawlins replied tonelessly. “I was picked to make contact with you because you once knew my father and might trust me. And because I have an innocent face. All the time Boardman was directing me, telling me what to say, coaching me, even telling me what mistakes to make, how to blunder successfully. He told me to get into that cage, for instance. He thought it would help win your sympathy.”

“Boardman is here? Here on Lemnos?”

“In Zone F. He’s got a camp there.”

“Charles Boardman?”

“He’s here, yes. Yes.”

Muller’s face was stony. Within, all was turmoil. “Why did he do all this? What does he want with me?”

Rawlins said, “You know that there’s a third intelligent race in the universe, beside us and the Hydrans.”

“Yes. They had just been discovered when I left. That was why I went to visit the Hydrans. I was supposed to arrange a defensive alliance with them, before these other people, these extragalactics, came in contact with us. It didn’t work. But what does this have to—”

“How much do you know about these extragalactics?”

“Very little,” Muller admitted. “Essentially, nothing but what I’ve just told you. The day I agreed to go to Beta Hydri IV was the first time I had heard about them. Boardman told me, but he wouldn’t say anything else. All he said was that they were extremely intelligent—a superior species, he said—and that they lived in a neighboring cluster. And that they had a galactic drive and might visit us some day.”

“We know more about them now,” Rawlins said.

“First tell me what Boardman wants with me.”

“Everything in order, and it’ll be easier.” Rawlins grinned, perhaps a bit tipsily. He leaned against the stone tub and stretched his legs far out in front of himself. He said, “We don’t actually know a great deal about the extragalactics. What we did was send out a ramjet, throw it into warp, and bring it out a few thousand light-years away. Or a few million light-years. I don’t know the details. Anyway, it was a drone ship with all sorts of eyes. The place it went to was one of the X-ray galaxies, classified information, but I’ve heard it was either in Cygnus A or Scorpius II. We found that one planet of the galactic system was inhabited by an advanced race of very alien aliens.”

“How alien?”

“They can see all up and down the spectrum,” Rawlins said. “Their basic visual range is in the high frequencies. They see by the light of X-rays. They also seem to be able to make use of the radio frequencies to see, or at least to get some kind of sensory information. And they pick up most wavelengths in between, except that they don’t have a great deal of interest in the stuff between infrared and ultraviolet. What we like to call the visible spectrum.”

“Wait a minute. Radio senses? Do you have any idea how long radio waves are? If they’re going to get any information out of a single wave, they’ll need eyes or receptors or whatever of gigantic size. How big are these beings supposed to be?”

“They could eat elephants for breakfast,” said Rawlins.

“Intelligent life doesn’t come that big.”

“What’s the limitation? This is a gas giant planet, all ocean, no gravity to speak of. They float. They have no square-cube problems.”

“And a bunch of superwhales has developed a technological culture?” Muller asked. “You won’t get me to believe—”

“They have,” said Rawlins. “I’ve told you, these are very alien aliens. They can’t build machinery themselves. But they have slaves.”

“Oh,” said Muller quietly.

“We’re only beginning to understand this, and of course I don’t have much of the inside information myself, but as I piece it together it seems that these beings make use of lower life-forms, turning them essentially into radio-controlled robots. They’ll use anything with limbs and mobility. They started with certain animals of their own planet, a small dolphin-like form perhaps on the threshold of intelligence, and worked through them to achieve a space drive. Then they got to neighboring planets—land planets— and took control of pseudoprimates, protochimps of some kind. They look for fingers. Manual dexterity counts a great deal with them. At present their sphere of influence covers some eighty light-years and appears to be spreading at an exponential rate.”

Muller shook his head. “This is worse nonsense than the stuff you were handing me about a cure. Look, there’s a limiting velocity for radio transmission, right? If they’re controlling flunkeys from eighty light-years away, it’ll take eighty years for any command to reach its destination. Every twitch of a muscle, every trifling movement—”

“They can leave their home world,” said Rawlins.

“But if they’re so big—”

“They’ve used their slave beings to build gravity tanks. They also have a star drive. All their colonies are run by overseers in orbit a few thousand kilometers up, floating in a simulated home-world environment. It takes one overseer to run one planet. I suppose they rotate tours of duty.”

Muller closed his eyes a moment. The image came to him of these colossal, unimaginable beasts spreading through their distant galaxy, impressing animals of all sorts into service, forging a captive society, vicariously technological, and drifting in orbit like spaceborne whales to direct and coordinate the grandiose improbable enterprise while themselves remaining incapable of the smallest physical act. Monstrous masses of glossy pink protoplasm, fresh from the sea, bristling with perceptors functioning at both ends of the spectrum. Whispering to one another in pulses of X-rays. Sending out orders via radio. No, he thought. No.

“Well,” he said at length, “what of it? They’re in another galaxy.”

“Not any longer. They’ve impinged on a few of our outlying colonies. Do you know what they do when they find a human world? They station an orbiting overseer above it and take control of the colonists. They find that humans make outstanding slaves, which isn’t very surprising. At the moment they have six of our worlds. They had a seventh, but we shot up their overseer. Now they make it much harder to do that. They just take control of our missiles as they home in, and throw them back.”

“If you’re inventing this,” said Muller, “I’ll kill you!”

“It’s true. I swear.”

“When did this begin?”

“Within the past year.”

“And what happens? Do they just march right through our galaxy and turn us all into zombies?”

“Boardman thinks we have one chance to prevent that.”

“Which is?”

Rawlins said, “The aliens don’t appear to realize that we’re intelligent beings. We can’t communicate with them, you see. They function on a completely nonverbal level, some kind of telepathic system. We’ve tried all sorts of ways to reach them, bombarding them with messages at every wavelength, without any flicker of a sign that they’re receiving us. Boardman believes that if we could persuade them that we have—well, souls—they might leave us alone. God knows why he thinks so. It’s some kind of computer prediction. He feels that these aliens work on a consistent moral scheme, that they’re willing to grab any animals which look useful, but that they wouldn’t touch a species that’s on the same side of the intelligence boundary as they are. And if we could show them somehow—”

“They see that we have cities. That we have a star drive. Doesn’t that prove intelligence?”

“Beavers make dams,” said Rawlins. “But we don’t make treaties with beavers. We don’t pay reparations when we drain their marshes. We know that in some way a beaver’s feelings don’t count.”

“Do we? Or have we simply decided arbitrarily that beavers are expendable? And what’s this talk of an intelligence boundary? There’s a continuous spectrum of intelligence, from the protozoa up through the primates. We’re a little smarter than the chimps, sure, but is it a qualitative difference? Does the mere fact that we can record our knowledge and use it again make that much of a change?”

“I don’t want to argue philosophy with you,” Rawlins said hoarsely. “I’m trying to tell you what the situation is—and how it affects you.”

“Yes. How it affects me.”

“Boardman thinks that we really can get the radio beasts to leave our galaxy alone if we show them that we’re closer to them in intelligence than we are to their other slaves. If we get across to them that we have emotions, needs, ambitions, dreams.”

Muller spat. “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed?”

“Like that, yes.”

“How do we get this across to them if they don’t speak a verbal language?”

“Don’t you see?” Rawlins asked. “No, I—yes. Yes. God, yes!”

“We have one man, out of all our billions, who doesn’t need words to communicate. He broadcasts his inner feelings. His soul. We don’t know what frequency he uses, but they might.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“And so Boardman wanted to ask you to do one more thing for mankind. To go to these aliens. To allow them to pick up your broadcast. To show them what we are, that we’re something more than beasts.”

“Why the talk of taking me to Earth to be cured, then?”

“A trick. A trap. We had to get you out of the maze somehow. Once you were out, we could tell you the story and ask you to help.”

“Admitting that there was no cure?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you think I would lift a finger to keep all of man’s worlds from being swallowed up?”

“Your help wouldn’t have to be voluntary,” Rawlins said.

7

Now it came flooding forth, the hatred, the anguish, the fear, the jealousy, the torment, the bitterness, the mockery, the loathing, the contempt, the despair, the viciousness, the fury, the desperation, the vehemence, the agitation, the grief, the pangs, the agony, the furor, the fire. Rawlins pulled back as though singed. Now Muller cruised the depths of desolation. A trick, a trick, all a trick! Used again. Boardman’s tool. Muller blazed. He spoke only a few words aloud; the rest came from within, pouring out, the gates wide, nothing penned back, a torrent of anger.

When the wild spasm passed Muller said, standing braced between two jutting facades, “Boardman would dump me onto the aliens whether I was willing to go or not?”

“Yes. He said this was too important to allow you free choice. Your wishes are irrelevant. The many against the one.”

With deadly calm Muller said, “You’re part of this conspiracy. Why have you been telling me all this?”

“I resigned.”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean it. Oh, I was part of it. I was going along with Boardman, yes, I was lying in everything I said to you. But I didn’t know the last part—that you wouldn’t be given any choice. I had to pull out there. I couldn’t let them do this to you. I had to tell you the truth.”

“Very thoughtful. I now have two options, eh, Ned? I can let myself be dragged out of here to play catspaw for Boardman again —or I can kill myself a minute from now and let mankind go to hell. Yes?”

“Don’t talk like that,” Rawlins said edgily.

“Why not? Those are my options. You were kind enough to tell me the real situation, and now I can react as I choose. You’ve handed me a death sentence, Ned.”

“No.”

“What else is there? Let myself be used again?”

“You could—cooperate with Boardman,” Rawlins said. He licked his lips. “I know it sounds crazy. But you could show him what you’re made of. Forget all this bitterness. Turn the other cheek. Remember that Boardman isn’t all of humanity. There are billions of innocent people—”

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

“Yes!”

“Every one of those billions would run from me if I came near.”

“What of it? They can’t help that! But they’re your own people!”

“And I’m one of theirs. They didn’t think of that when they cast me out.”

“You aren’t being rational.”

“No I’m not. And I don’t intend to start now. Assuming that it could affect humanity’s destiny in the slightest if I became ambassador to these radio people—and I don’t buy that idea at all—it would give me great pleasure to shirk my duty. I’m grateful to you for your warning. Now that at last I know what’s going on here, I have the excuse I’ve been looking for all along. I know a thousand places here where death is quick and probably not painful. Then let Charles Boardman talk to the aliens himself. I—”

“Please don’t move, Dick,” said Boardman from a point about thirty meters behind him.