The Man In The Maze

FIVE

Muller saw them coming closer, and did not understand why he was so calm about it. He had destroyed that robot, yes, and after that they had stopped sending in robots. But his viewing tanks showed him the men camping in the outer levels. He could not see their faces clearly. He could not see what they were doing out there. He counted about a dozen of them, give or take two or three; some were settled in Zone E, and a somewhat larger group in F. Muller had seen a few of them die in the outer zones.

He had ways of attacking. He could, if he cared to, flood Zone E with backup from the aqueduct. He had done that once, by accident, and it had taken the city almost a full day to clean things up. He recalled how, during the flood, Zone E had been sealed off, bulkheaded to keep the water from spilling out. If the intruders did not drown in the first rush, they would certainly blunder in alarm into some of the traps. Muller could do other things, too, to keep them from getting to the inner city.

Yet he did nothing. He knew that at the heart of his inaction was a hunger to break his years of isolation. Much as he hated them, much as he feared them, much as he dreaded the puncturing of his privacy, Muller allowed the men to work their way toward him. A meeting now was inevitable. They knew he was here. (Did they know who he was?) They would find him, to their sorrow and to his. He would learn whether in his long exile he had been purged of his affliction so that he was fit for human company again. But Muller already was sure of the answer to that.

He had spent part of a year among the Hydrans; and then, seeing that he was accomplishing nothing, he entered his powered drop-capsule, rode it into the heavens, and, repossessed his orbiting ship. If the Hydrans had a mythology, he would become part of it.

Within his ship Muller went through the operations that would return him to Earth. As he notified the ship’s brain of his presence, he caught sight of himself in the burnished metal plate of the input bank and it frightened him, a little. The Hydrans did not use mirrors. Muller saw deep new lines etched on his face, which did not bother him, and he saw a strangeness in his eyes, which did. The muscles are tense, he told himself. He finished programming his return and then went to the medic chamber and ordered a forty-db drop in his neural level along with a hot bath and a thorough massage. When he came out, his eyes still looked strange; and he had sprouted a facial tic, besides. He got rid of the tic easily enough, but he could do nothing about his eyes.

The eyes have no expression, Muller told himself. It’s the lids that do the work. My eyelids are strained from living in the breathing suit so long. I’ll be all right. It was a rough few months, but now I’ll be all right.

The ship gulped power from the nearest designated donor star. The ship’s rotors whirled along the axes of warp, and Muller, along with his plastic and metal container, was hurled out of the universe on one of the shortcut routes. Even in warp, a certain amount of absolute time loss is experienced as the ship zips through the stitch in the continuum. Muller read, slept, listened to music, and played a woman cube when the need got great. He told himself that the stiffness was going out of his facial expression, but he might need a mild shape-up when he got to Earth. This jaunt had put a few years on him.

He had no work to do. The ship duly popped from warp within the prescribed limits, 100,000 kilometers out from Earth, and colored lights flashed on his communications board as the nearest traffic station signalled for his bearings. Muller instructed the ship to deal with the traffic station.

“Match velocities with us, Mr. Muller, and we’ll send a pilot aboard to get you to Earth,” the traffic controller said.

Muller’s ship took care of it. The coppery globe of the traffic station appeared in sight. It floated just ahead of Muller for a while, but gradually his ship drew abreast of it.

“We have a relay message for you from Earth,” the controller said. “Charles Boardman calling.”

“Go ahead,” said Muller.

Boardman’s face filled the screen. He looked pink and newly-buffed, quite healthy, well rested. He smiled and put his hand forward. “Dick,” he said. “God, it’s great to see you!”

Muller activated tactile and put his hand on Boardman’s wrist through the screen. “Hello, Charles. One in sixty-five, eh? Well, I’m back.”

“Should I tell Marta?”

“Marta,” Muller said, thinking for a moment. Yes. The blue-haired wench with the swivel hips and the sharp heels. “Yes. Tell Marta. It would be nice if she met me when I landed. Woman cubes aren’t all that thrilling.”

Boardman gave him a you-said-a-mouthful-boy kind of laugh. Then he changed gears abruptly and said, “How did it go?”

“Poorly.”

“You made contact, though?”

“I found the Hydrans, yes. They didn’t kill me.”

“Were they hostile?”

“They didn’t kill me.”

“Yes, but—”

“I’m alive, Charles.” Muller felt the tic beginning again. “I didn’t learn their language. I can’t tell you if they approved of me. They seemed quite interested. They studied me closely for a long time. They didn’t say a word.”

“What are they, telepaths?”

“I can’t tell you that, Charles.”

Boardman was silent for a while. “What did they do to you, Dick?”

“Nothing.”

“That isn’t so.”

“What you’re seeing is travel fatigue,” Muller said. “I’m in good shape, just a little stretched in the nerve. I want to breathe real air and drink some real beer and taste real meat, and I’d like to have some company in bed, and I’ll be as good as ever. And then maybe I’ll suggest some ways of making contact with the Hydrans.”

“How’s the gain on your broadcast system, Dick?”

“Huh?”

“You’re coming across too loud,” said Boardman.

“Blame it on the relay station. Jesus, Charles. What does the gain on my system have to do with anything?”

“I’m not sure,” Boardman said. “I’m just trying to find out why you’re shouting at me.”

“I’m not shouting,” Muller shouted.

Soon after that they broke contact. Muller had word from the traffic station that they were ready to send a pilot aboard. He got the hatch ready, and let the man in. The pilot was a very blond young man with hawklike features and pale skin. As soon as he unhelmeted he said, “My name is Les Christiansen, Mr. Muller, and I want to tell you that it’s an honor and a privilege for me to be the pilot for the first man to visit an alien race. I hope I’m not breaking security when I say that I’d love to know a little about it while we’re descending. I mean, this is sort of a moment in history, me being the first to see you in person since you’re back, and if it’s not an intrusion I’d be grateful if you’d tell me just some of the—highlights—of your—of—”

“I guess I can tell you a little,” Muller said affably. “First, did you see the cube of the Hydrans? I know it was supposed to be shown, and—”

“You mind if I sit down a second, Mr. Muller?”

“Go ahead. You saw them, then, the tall skinny things with all the arms—”

“I feel very woozy,” said Christiansen. “I don’t know what’s happening.” His face was crimson, suddenly, and beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. “I think I must be getting sick. I—you know, this shouldn’t be happening—” The pilot crumpled into a webfoam cradle and huddled there, shivering, covering his head with his hands. Muller, his voice still rusty from the long silences of his mission, hesitated helplessly. Finally he reached down to take the man’s elbow and guide him toward the medic chamber. Christiansen whirled away as if touched by fiery metal. The motion pulled him off balance and sent him into a heap on the cabin floor. He rose to his knees and wriggled until he was as far away from Muller as it was possible to get. In a strangled voice he said, “Where is it?”

“That door here.”

Christiansen rushed for it, sealed himself in, and rattled the door to make sure of it. Muller, astonished, heard retching sounds, and then something that could have been a series of dry sobs. He was about to signal the traffic station that the pilot was sick, when the door opened a little and Christiansen said in a muffled voice, “Would you hand me my helmet, Mr. Muller?”

Muller gave it to him.

“I’m going to have to go back to my station, Mr. Muller.”

“I’m sorry you reacted this way. Christ, I hope I’m not carrying some kind of contagion.”

“I’m not sick. I just feel-lousy.” Christiansen fastened the helmet in place. “I don’t understand. But I want to curl up and cry. Please let me go, Mr. Muller. It-I-that is-it’s terrible. That’s what I feel!” He rushed into the hatch. In bewilderment Muller watched him cross the void to the nearby traffic station.

He got on the radio. “You better not send another pilot over just yet,” Muller told the controller. “Christiansen folded up with instant plague as soon as he took his helmet off. I may be carrying something. Let’s check it out.”

The controller, looking troubled, agreed. He asked Muller to go to his medic chamber, set up the diagnostat, and transmit its report. A little while later the solemn chocolate-hued face of the station’s medical officer appeared on Muller’s screen and said, “This is very odd, Mr. Muller.”

“What is?”

“I’ve run your diagnostat transmission through our machine. No unusual symptoms. I’ve also put Christiansen through the works without learning anything. He feels fine now, he says. He told me that an acute depression hit him the moment he saw you, and it deepened in a hurry to a sort of metabolic paralysis. That is, he felt so gloomy that he could hardly function.”

“Is he prone to these attacks?”

“Never,” the medic replied. “I’d like to check this out myself. May I come over?”

The medic didn’t curl up with the miseries as Christiansen had done. But he didn’t stay long, either, and when he left his face was glossy with tears. He looked as baffled as Muller. When the new pilot appeared twenty minutes later, he kept his suit on as he programmed the ship for planetary descent. Sitting rigidly upright at his controls, his back turned to Muller, he said nothing, scarcely acknowledged Muller’s presence. As required by law, he brought the ship down until its drive system was in the grip of a groundside landing regulator, and took his leave. Muller saw the man’s face, tense, sweat-shiny, tight-lipped. The pilot nodded curtly, and went through the hatch. I must have a very bad smell, Muller thought, if he could smell it through his suit like that.

The landing was routine.

At the starport he cleared Immigration quickly. It took only half an hour for Earth to decide that he was acceptable; and Muller, who had passed through these computer banks hundreds of times before, figured that that was close to the record. He had feared that the giant starport diagnostat would detect whatever malady he carried that his own equipment and the traffic station medic had failed to find; but he passed through the bowels of the machine, letting it bounce sonics off his kidneys, and extract some molecules of his various bodily fluids, and at length he emerged without the ringing of bells and the flashing of warning lights. Approved. He spoke to the Customs machine. Where from, traveler? Where bound? Approved. His papers were in order. A slit in the wall widened into a doorway and he stepped through, to confront another human being for the first time since his landing.

Boardman had come to meet him. Marta was with him. A thick brown robe shot through with dull metal enfolded Boardman; he seemed weighted down with rings, and his brooding eyebrows were thick as dark tropical moss. Marta’s hair was short and sea-green; she had silvered her eyes and gilded the slender column of her throat, so that she looked like some jeweled statuette of herself. Remembering her wet and naked from the crystalline lake, Muller disapproved of these changes. He doubted that they had been made for his benefit. Boardman, he knew, liked his women ornate; it was probable that they had been bedding in his absence. Muller would have been surprised and even a little shaken if they had not.

Boardman’s hand encircled Muller’s wrist in a firm greeting that incredibly turned flabby within seconds. The hand slipped away even before Muller could return the embrace. “It’s good to see you, Dick,” Boardman said without conviction, stepping back a couple of paces. His cheeks seemed to sag as though under heavy gravitational stress. Marta slipped between them and pressed herself against him. Muller seized her, touching her shoulder-blades and running his hands swiftly down to her lean buttocks. He did not kiss her. Her eyes were dazzling as he looked within them and felt himself lost in rebounding mirror images. Her nostrils flared. Through her thin flesh he felt muscles bridling. She was trying to get free of him. “Dick,” she whispered. “I’ve prayed for you every night. You don’t know how I’ve missed you.” She struggled harder. He moved his hands to her haunches and pushed inward so fiercely that he could imagine her pelvic cage yielding and flexing. Her legs were trembling, and he feared that if he let go of her, she would fall. She turned her head to one side. He put his cheek against her delicate ear. “Dick,” she murmured, “I feel so strange—so glad to see you that I’m all tangled up inside—let go, Dick, I feel queasy somehow—”

Yes. Yes. Of course. He released her.

Boardman, sweating, nervous, mopped at his face, jabbed himself with some soothing drug, fidgeted, paced. Muller had never seen him look this way before. “Suppose I let the two of you have some time together, eh?” Boardman suggested, his voice coming out half an octave too high. “The weather’s been getting to me, Dick. I’ll talk with you tomorrow. Your accommodations are all arranged.” Boardman fled. Now Muller felt panic rising. “Where do we go?” he asked.

“There’s a transport pod outside. We have a room at the Starport Inn. Do you have luggage?”

“It’s still aboard the ship,” Muller answered. “It can wait.”

Marta was chewing at the corner of her lower lip. He took her by the hand and they rode the slidewalk out of the terminal room to the transportation pods. Go on, he thought. Tell me that you don’t feel well. Tell me that mysteriously you’ve come down with something in the last ten minutes.

“Why did you cut your hair?” he asked.

“It’s a woman’s right. Don’t you like it this way?”

“Not as much.” They entered the pod. “Longer, bluer, it was like the sea on a stormy day.” The pod shot off on a bath of quicksilver. She kept far to her side, hunched against the hatch. “And the makeup, too. I’m sorry, Marta. I wish I could like it.”

“I was prettying for your homecoming.”

“Why are you doing that with your lip?”

“What am I doing?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Here we are. The room is booked already?”

“In your name, yes.”

They went in. He put his hand on the registration plate. It flashed green and they headed for the liftshaft. The inn began in the fifth sublevel of the starport and went down for fifty levels; their room was near the bottom. Choice location, he thought. The bridal suite, maybe. They stepped into a room with kaleidoscopic hangings and a wide bed with all accessories. The roomglow was tactfully dim. Muller thought of months of woman cubes and a savage throbbing rose in his groin. He knew he had no need to explain any of that to Marta. She moved past him, into the personal room, and was in there a long while. Muller undressed.

She came out nude. All the tricky makeup was gone, and her hair was blue again.

“Like the sea,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t grow it back in there. The room wasn’t programmed for it.”

“It’s much better now,” he told her.

They were ten meters apart. She stood at an angle to him, and he studied the contours of her frail but tough form, the small up-jutting breasts, the boyish buttocks, the elegant thighs.

“The Hydrans,” he said, “have either five sexes or none, I’m not sure which. That’s a measure of how well I got to know them while I was there. However they do it, I think people have more fun. Why are you standing over there, Marta?”

Silently she came toward him. He put one arm around her shoulders and cupped his other hand over one of her breasts. At other times when he did that he felt the nipple pebble-hard with desire against his hand. Not now. She quivered a little, like a shy mare wanting to bolt. He put his lips to her lips, and they were dry, taut, hostile. When he ran his hand along the fine line of her jaw she seemed to shudder. He drew her down and they sat side by side on the bed. Her hand reached for him, almost unwillingly.

He saw the pain in her eyes.

She rolled away from him, her head snapping back hard onto the pillow, and he watched her face writhe with some barely suppressed agony. Then she took his hands in hers and tugged him toward her. Her knees came up and her thighs opened.

“Take me, Dick,” she said stagily. “Right now!”

“What’s the hurry?”

She tried to force him onto her, into her. He wasn’t having it that way. He pulled free of her and sat up. She was crimson to the shoulders, and tears glistened on her face. He knew as much of the truth now as he needed to know, but he had to ask.

“Tell me what’s wrong, Marta.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re acting like you’re sick.”

“I think I am.”

“When did you start feeling ill?”

“I—oh, Dick, why all these questions? Please, love, come close.”

“You don’t want me to. Not really. You’re being kind.”

“I’m—trying to make you happy, Dick. It—it hurts so much—so —much.”

“What does?”

She wouldn’t answer. She gestured wantonly and tugged at him again. He sprang from the bed.

“Dick, Dick, I warned you not to go! I said I had some precog.

And that other things could happen to you there besides getting killed.”

“Tell me what hurts you.”

“I can’t. I-don’t know.”

“That’s a lie.”

“When did it start?”

“This morning. When I got up.”

“That’s another lie. I have to have the truth!”

“Make love to me, Dick. I can’t wait much longer. I—”

“You what?”

“Can’t-stand—”

“Can’t stand what?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” She was off the bed too, rubbing against him, a cat in heat, shivering, muscles leaping in her face, eyes wild.

He caught her wrists and ground the bones together.

“Tell me what it is you can’t stand much longer, Marta.”

She gasped. He squeezed harder. She swung back, head lolling, breasts thrust toward the ceiling. Her body was oiled now with sweat. Her nakedness maddened and inflamed him.

“Tell me,” he said. “You can’t stand—”

“—being near you,” she said.