The Man In The Maze

1

Muller had often been alone for long periods. In drawing up the contract for his first marriage he had insisted on a withdrawal clause, the standard one; and Lorayn had not objected, for she knew that his work might occasionally take him to places where she would not or could not go. During the eight years of that marriage he had enforced the clause three times for a total of four years.

When they let the contract run out, Muller’s absences were not really a contributing factor. He had learned in those years that he could stand solitude, and even that he thrived on it in a strange way. We develop everything in solitude except character, Stendhal had written; Muller was not sure of that but, in any case, his character had been fully formed before he began accepting assignments that took him unaccompanied to empty dangerous worlds. He had volunteered for those assignments. In a different sense he had volunteered to immure himself on Lemnos, and this exile was more painful to him than those other absences. Yet he got along. His own adaptability astonished and frightened him. He had not thought he could shed his social nature so easily. The sexual part was difficult, but not as difficult as he had imagined it would be; and the rest—the stimulation of debate, the change of surroundings, the interplay of personalities—had somehow ceased quickly to matter. He had enough cubes to keep him diverted, and enough challenges surviving in this maze. And memories.

He could summon remembered scenes from a hundred worlds. Man sprawled everywhere, planting the seed of Earth on colonies of a thousand stars. Delta Pavonis VI, for example: twenty light-years out, and rapidly going strange. They called the planet Loki, which struck Muller as a whopping misnomer, for Loki was agile, shrewd, slight of build, and the settlers on Loki, fifty years isolated from Earth, went in for a cult of artificial obesity through glucostatic regulation. Muller had visited them a decade before his ill-starred Beta Hydri journey. It was essentially a troubleshooting mission to a planet that had lost touch with its mother world. He remembered a warm planet, habitable only in a narrow temperate belt. Passing through walls of green jungle bordering a black river; watching beasts with jeweled eyes jostling on the swampy banks; coming at last to the settlement, where sweaty Buddhas weighing a few hundred kilograms apiece sat in stately meditation before thatched huts. He had never seen so much flesh per cubic meter before. The Lokites meddled with their peripheral glucoreceptors to induce accumulation of body fat. It was a useless adaptation, unrelated to any problem of their environment; they simply liked to be huge. Muller recalled arms that looked like thighs, thighs that looked like pillars, bellies that curved and recurved in triumphant excess.

They had hospitably offered a woman to the spy from Earth. For Muller, it was a lesson in cultural relativity; for there were in the village two or three women who, although bulky enough, were scrawny by local standards and so approximated the norm of Muller’s own background. The Lokites did not give him any of these women, these pitiful underdeveloped hundred-kilogram wrecks, for it would have been a breach of manners to let a guest have a subpar companion. Instead they treated him to a blonde colossus with breasts like cannonballs and buttocks that were continents of quivering meat.

It was, at any rate, unforgettable.

There were so many other worlds. He had been a tireless voyager. To such men as Boardman he left the subtleties of political manipulation; Muller could be subtle enough, almost statesmanlike when he had to be, but he thought of himself more as an explorer than as a diplomat. He had shivered in methane lakes, had fried in post-Saharan deserts, had followed nomadic settlers across a purple plain in quest of their strayed arthropodic cattle. He had been shipwrecked by computer failure on airless worlds. He had seen the coppery cliffs of Damballa, ninety kilometers high. He had taken a swim in the gravity lake of Mordred. He had slept beside a multicolored brook under a sky blazing with a trio of suns, and he had walked the crystal bridges of Procyon XIV. He had few regrets.

Now, huddled at the heart of his maze, he watched the screens and waited for the stranger to find him. A weapon, small and cool, nestled in his hand.

2

The afternoon unrolled swiftly. Rawlins began to think that he would have done better to listen to Boardman and spend a night in camp before going on to seek Muller. At least three hours of deep sleep to comb his mind of tension—a quick dip under the sleep wire, always useful. Well, he hadn’t bothered. Now there was no opportunity. His sensors told him that Muller was just ahead.

Questions of morality and questions of ordinary courage suddenly troubled him.

He had never done anything significant before. He had studied, he had performed routine tasks in Boardman’s office, he had now and then handled a slightly sensitive matter. But he had always believed that his real career still was yet to open; that all this was preliminary. That sense of a future beginning was still with him, but it was time to admit that he was on the spot. This was no training simulation. Here he stood, tall and blond and young and stubborn and ambitious, at the verge of an action which—and Charles Boardman had not been altogether hypocritical about that —might well influence the course of coming history.

Ping.

He looked about. The sensors had spoken. Out of the shadows ahead emerged the figure of a man. Muller.

They faced each other across a gap of twenty meters. Rawlins had remembered Muller as a giant and was surprised to see now that they were about the same height, both of them just over two meters high. Muller was dressed in a dark glossy wrap, and in this light at this hour his face was a study in conflicting planes and jutting prominences, all peaks and valleys.

In Muller’s hand lay the apple-sized device with which he had destroyed the probe.

Boardman’s voice buzzed in Rawlins’ ear. “Get closer to him. Smile. Look shy and uncertain and friendly, and very concerned. And keep your hands where he can see them at all times.”

Rawlins obeyed. He wondered when he would begin to feel the effects of being this close to Muller. He found it hard to take his eyes from the shiny globe that rested like a grenade in Muller’s hand. When he was ten meters away he started to pick up the emanation from Muller. Yes. That must certainly be it. He decided that he would be able to tolerate it if he came no closer. Muller said, “What do you—”

The words came out as a raucous shriek. Muller stopped, cheeks flaming, and seemed to be adjusting the gears of his larynx. Rawlins chewed the corner of his lip. He felt an uncontrollable twitching in one eyelid. Harsh breathing was coming over the audio line from Boardman.

Muller began again. “What do you want from me?” he said, this time in his true voice, deep, crackling with suppressed rage.

“Just to talk. Honestly. I don’t want to cause any trouble for you, Mr. Muller.”

“You know me!”

“Of course I do. Everyone knows Richard Muller. I mean, you were the galactic hero when I was going to school. We did reports on you. Essays about you. We—”

“Get out of here!” The shriek again.

“—and Stephen Rawlins was my father. I knew you, Mr. Muller.”

The dark apple was rising. The small square window was facing him. Rawlins remembered how the relay from the drone probe had suddenly ceased.

“Stephen Rawlins?” The apple descended.

“My father.” Rawlins’ left leg seemed to be turning to water. Volatilized sweat drifted in a cloud about his shoulders. He was getting the outpouring from Muller more strongly now, as though it took a few minutes to tune to his wavelength. Now Rawlins felt the torrent of anguish, the sadness, the sense of yawning abysses sundering calm meadows. “I met you long ago,” Rawlins said. “You had just come back from—let’s see, it was 82 Eridani, I think, you were all tanned and windburned—I think I was eight years old, and you picked me up and threw me, only you weren’t used to Earthnorm gravity and you threw me too hard, and I hit the ceiling and began to cry, and you gave me something to make me stop, a little bead that changed colors—”

Muller’s hands were limp at his sides. The apple had disappeared into his garment.

He said tautly, “What was your name? Fred, Ted, Ed-that’s it. Yes. Ed. Edward Rawlins.”

“They started calling me Ned a little later on. So you remember me, then?”

“A little. I remember your father a lot better.” Muller turned away and coughed. His hand slipped into his pocket. He raised his head and the descending sun glittered weirdly against his face, staining it deep orange. He made a quick edgy gesture with one finger. “Go away, Ned. Tell your friends that I don’t want to be bothered. I’m a very sick man, and I want to be alone.”

“Sick?”

“Sick with a mysterious inward rot of the soul. Look, Ned, you’re a fine handsome boy, and I love your father dearly, if any of this is true, and I don’t want you hanging around me. You’ll regret it. I don’t mean that as a threat, just as a statement of fact. Go away. Far away.”

“Stand your ground,” Boardman told him. “Get closer. Right in, where it hurts.”

Rawlins took a wary step, thinking of the globe in Muller’s pocket and seeing from those eyes that the man was not necessarily rational. He diminished the distance between them by ten per cent. The impact of the emanation seemed to double.

He said, “Please don’t chase me away, Mr. Muller. I just want to be friendly. My father would never have forgiven me if he could have found out that I met you here, like this, and didn’t try to help you at all.”

“Would have? Could have found out? What happened to your father?”

“Dead.”

“When? Where?”

“Four years ago, Rigel XXII. He was helping to set up a tight-beam network connecting the Rigel worlds. There was an amplifier accident. The focus was inverted. He got the whole beam.”

“Jesus. He was still young!”

“He would have been fifty in a month. We were going to come out and visit him and give him a surprise party. Instead I came out by myself to bring his body back.”

Muller’s face softened. Some of the torment ebbed from his eyes. His lips became more mobile. It was as though someone else’s grief had momentarily taken him from his own.

“Get closer to him,” Boardman ordered.

Another step; and then, since Muller did not seem to notice, another. Rawlins sensed heat: not real but psychical, a furnace-blast of directionless emotion. He shivered in awe. He had never really believed in any essential way that the story of what the Hydrans had done to Richard Muller was true. He was too sharply limited by his father’s heritage of pragmatism. If you can’t duplicate it in the laboratory, it isn’t real. If you can’t graph it, it isn’t real. If there’s no circuitry, it isn’t real. How could a human being possibly be redesigned to broadcast his own emotions? No circuitry could handle such a function. But Rawlins felt the fringes of that broadcast.

Muller said, “What are you doing on Lemnos, boy?”

“I’m an archaeologist.” The lie came awkwardly. “This is my first field trip. We’re trying to carry out a thorough examination of the maze.”

“The maze happens to be someone’s home. You’re intruding.” Rawlins faltered.

“Tell him you didn’t know he was here,” Boardman prompted.

“We didn’t realize that anyone was here,” said Rawlins. “We had no way of knowing that—”

“You sent your damned robots in, didn’t you? Once you found someone here—someone you knew damned well wouldn’t want to have any company—”

“I don’t understand,” Rawlins said. “We had the impression you were wrecked here. We wanted to offer our help.”

How easily I do this, he told himself!

Muller scowled. “You don’t know why I’m here?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“You wouldn’t, I guess. You were too young. But the others— once they saw my face, they should have known. Why didn’t they tell you? Your robot relayed my face, didn’t it? You knew who it was in here. And they didn’t tell you a thing?”

“I really don’t understand—”

“Come close!” Muller bellowed.

Rawlins felt himself gliding forward, though he was unaware of taking individual steps. Abruptly he was face to face with Muller, conscious of the man’s massive frame, his furrowed brow, his fixed, staring, angry eyes. Muller’s immense hand pounced on Rawlins’ wrist. Rawlins rocked, stunned by the impact, drenched with a despair so vast that it seemed to engulf whole universes. He tried not to stagger.

“Now get away from me!” Muller cried harshly. “Go on! Out of here! Out!”

Rawlins did not move.

Muller howled a curse and ran ponderously into a low glassy-walled building whose windows, opaque, were like blind eyes. The door closed, sealing without a perceptible opening. Rawlins sucked in breath and fought for his balance. His forehead throbbed as if something behind it were struggling to burst free.

“Stay where you are,” said Boardman. “Let him get over his tantrum. Everything’s going well.”

3

Muller crouched behind the door. Sweat rolled down his sides. A chill swept him. He wrapped his arms about himself so tightly that his ribs complained.

He had not meant to handle the intruder that way at all.

A few words of conversation; a blunt request for privacy; then, if the man would not go away, the destructor globe. So Muller had planned. But he had hesitated. He had spoken too much and learned too much. Stephen Rawlins’ son? A party of archaeologists out there? The boy had hardly seemed affected by the radiation except at very close range. Was it losing its power with the years?

Muller fought to collect himself and to analyze his hostility. Why so fearful? Why so eager to cling to solitude? He had nothing to fear from Earthmen; they, not he, were the sufferers in any contact he had with them. It was understandable that they would recoil from his presence. But there was no reason for him to withdraw like this except out of some paralyzing diffidence, the encrusted inflexibilities of nine years of isolation. Had it come to that—a love of solitude for its own sake? Was he a hermit? His original pretense was that he had come here out of consideration for his fellow men, that he was unwilling to inflict the painful ugliness that was himself upon them. But the boy had wanted to be friendly and helpful. Why flee? Why react so churlishly?

Slowly Muller rose and undid the door. He stepped outside. Night had fallen with winter’s swiftness; the sky was black, and the moons seared across it. The boy was still standing in the plaza, looking a little dazed. The biggest moon, Clotho, bathed him in golden light so that his curling hair seemed to sparkle with inner flame. His face was very pale, with sharply accentuated cheekbones. His blue eyes gleamed in shock, like those of one who has been slapped.

Muller advanced, uncertain of his tactics. He felt like some great half-rusted machine called into action after too many years of neglect. “Ned?” he said. “Look, Ned, I want to tell you that I’m sorry. You’ve got to understand, I’m not used to people. Not-used—to—people.”

“It’s all right, Mr. Muller. I realize it’s been rough for you.”

“Dick. Call me Dick.” Muller raised both hands and spread them as if trying to cup moonbeams. He felt terribly cold. On the wall beyond the plaza small animal shapes leaped and danced. Muller said, “I’ve come to love my privacy. You can even cherish cancer if you get into the right frame of mind. Look, you ought to realize something. I came here deliberately. It wasn’t any shipwreck. I picked out the one place in the universe where I was least likely to be disturbed, and hid myself inside it. But, of course, you had to come with your tricky robots and find the way in.”

“If you don’t want me here, I’ll go,” Rawlins said.

“Maybe that’s best for both of us. No. Wait. Stay. Is it very bad, being this close to me?”

“It isn’t exactly comfortable,” said Rawlins. “But it isn’t as bad as—as—well, I don’t know. From this distance I just feel a little depressed.”

“You know why?” Muller asked. “From the way you talk, I think you do, Ned. You’re only pretending not to know what happened to me on Beta Hydri IV.”

Rawlins colored. “Well, I remember a little bit, I guess. They operated on your mind?”

“Yes, that’s right. What you’re feeling, Ned, that’s me, my goddam soul leaking into the air. You’re picking up the flow of neural current, straight from the top of my skull. Isn’t it lovely? Try coming a little closer… that’s it.” Rawlins halted. “There,” Muller said, “now it’s stronger. You’re getting a better dose. Now recall what it was like when you were standing right here. That wasn’t so pleasant, was it? From ten meters away you can take it. From one meter away it’s intolerable. Can you imagine holding a woman in your arms while you give off a mental stink like that? You can’t make love from ten meters away. At least, I can’t. Let’s sit down, Ned. It’s safe here. I’ve got detectors rigged in case any of the nastier animals come in, and there aren’t any traps in this zone. Sit.” He lowered himself to the smooth milky-white stone floor, the alien marble that made this plaza so sleek. Rawlins, after an instant of deliberation, slipped lithely into the lotus position a dozen meters away.

Muller said, “How old are you, Ned?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Married?”

A shy grin. “Afraid not.”

“Got a girl?”

“There was one, a liaison contract. We voided it when I took on this job.”

“Ah. Any girls in this expedition?”

“Only woman cubes,” said Rawlins.

“They aren’t much good, are they, Ned?”

“Not really. We could have brought a few women along, but—”

“But what?”

“Too dangerous. The maze—”

“How many men have you lost so far?” Muller asked.

“Five, I think. I’d like to know the sort of people who’d build a thing like this. It must have taken five hundred years of planning to make it so devilish.”

Muller said, “More. This was the grand creative triumph of their race, I believe. Their masterpiece, their monument. They must have been proud of this murderous place. It summed up the whole essence of their philosophy—kill the stranger.”

“Are you just speculating, or have you found some clues to their cultural outlook?”

“The only clue I have to their cultural outlook is all around us. But I’m an expert on alien psychology, Ned. I know more about it than any other human being, because I’m the only one who ever said hello to an alien race. Kill the stranger: it’s the law of the universe. And if you don’t kill him, at least screw him up a little.”

“We aren’t like that,” Rawlins said. “We don’t show instinctive hostility to—”

“Crap.”

“But—”

Muller said, “If an alien starship ever landed on one of our planets we’d quarantine it and imprison the crew and interrogate them to destruction. Whatever good manners we may have learned grow out of decadence and complacency. We pretend that we’re too noble to hate strangers, but we have the politeness of weakness. Take the Hydrans. A substantial faction within our government was in favor of generating fusion in their cloud layer and giving their system an extra sun—before sending an emissary to scout them.”

“No.”

“They were overruled, and an emissary was sent, and the Hydrans wasted him. Me.” An idea struck Muller suddenly. Appalled, he said, “What’s happened between us and the Hydrans in the last nine years? Any contact? War?”

“Nothing,” said Rawlins. “We’ve kept away.”

“Are you telling me the truth, or did we wipe the bastards out? God knows I wouldn’t mind that, but yet it wasn’t their fault they did this to me. They were reacting in a standard xenophobic way. Ned, has there been a war with them?”

“No. I swear it.”

Muller relaxed. After a moment he said, “All right. I won’t ask you to fill me in on all the other news developments. I don’t really give a damn. How long are you people staying on Lemnos?”

“We don’t know yet. A few weeks, I suppose. We haven’t even really begun to explore the maze. And then there’s the area outside. We want to run correlations on the work of earlier archaeologists, and—”

“And you’ll be here for a while. Are the others going to come into the center of the maze?”

Rawlins moistened his lips. “They sent me ahead to establish a working relationship with you. We don’t have any plan yet. It all depends on you. We don’t want to impose on you. So if you don’t want us to work here—”

“I don’t,” Muller told him crisply. “Tell that to your friends. In fifty or sixty years I’ll be dead, and they can sniff around here then. But while I’m here I don’t want them bothering me. Let them work in the outer four or five zones. If any of them sets foot in A, B, or C, I’ll kill him. I can do that, Ned.”

“What about me—am I welcome?”

“Occasionally. I can’t predict my moods. If you want to talk to me, come around and see. And if I tell you to get the hell out, Ned, then get the hell out. Clear?”

Rawlins grinned sunnily. “Clear.” He got to his feet. Muller, unwilling to have the boy standing over him, rose also. Rawlins took a few steps toward him.

Muller said, “Where are you going?”

“I hate having to talk at this distance, to shout like this. I can get a little closer to you, can’t I?”

Instantly suspicious, Muller replied, “Are you some kind of masochist?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Well, I’m no sadist either. I don’t want you near me.”

“It’s really not that unpleasant—Dick.”

“You’re lying. You hate it like all the others. I’m like a leper, boy, and if you’re queer for leprosy I feel sorry for you, but don’t come any closer. It embarrasses me to see other people suffer on my account.”

Rawlins stopped. “Whatever you say. Look, Dick, I don’t want to cause troubles for you. I’m just trying to be friendly and helpful. If doing that in some way makes you uncomfortable—well, just say so, and I’ll do something else. It doesn’t do me any good to make things worse for you.”

“That came out pretty muddled, boy. What is it you want from me, anyhow?”

“Nothing.”

“Why not leave me alone?”

“You’re a human being, and you’ve been alone here for a long time. It’s my natural impulse to offer companionship. Does that sound too dumb?”

Muller shrugged. “I’m not much of a companion. Maybe you ought to take all your sweet Christian impulses and go away. There’s no way you can help me, Ned. You can only hurt me by reminding me of all I can no longer have or know.” Stiffening, Muller looked past the tall young man toward the shadowy figures cavorting along the walls. He was hungry, and this was the hour to begin hunting for his dinner. He said brusquely, “Son, I think my patience is running out again. Time for you to leave.”

“All right. Can I come back tomorrow, though?”

“Maybe. Maybe.”

The boy smiled ingenuously. “Thanks for letting me talk to you, Dick. I’ll be back.”

4

By troublesome moonlight Rawlins made his way out of Zone A. The voice of the ship’s brain guided him back over the path he had taken inward, and now and then, in the safest spots, Boardman used the override. “You’ve made a good start,” Boardman said. “It’s a plus that he tolerated you at all. How do you feel?”

“Lousy, Charles.”

“Because of the close contact with him?”

“Because I’m doing something filthy.”

“Stop that, Ned. If I’m going to have to pump you full of moral reassurance every time you set out—”

“I’ll do my job,” said Rawlins, “but I don’t have to like it.” He edged over a spring-loaded stone block that was capable of hurling him from a precipice if he applied his weight the wrong way. A small toothy animal snickered at him as he crossed. On the far side, Rawlins prodded the wall in a yielding place and won admission to Zone B. He glanced at the lintel and saw the recessed slot of the visual pickup and smiled into it, just in case Muller was watching him withdraw.

He saw now why Muller had chosen to maroon himself here. Under similar circumstances he might have done the same thing. Or worse. Muller carried, thanks to the Hydrans, a deformity of the soul in an era when deformity was obsolete. It was an esthetic crime to lack a limb or an eye or a nose; these things were easily repaired, and one owed it to one’s fellow man to get a shape-up and obliterate troublesome imperfections. To inflict one’s flaws on society was clearly an antisocial act.

But no shape-up surgeon could do a cosmetic job on what Muller had. The only cure was separation from society. A weaker man would have chosen death: Muller had picked exile.

Rawlins still throbbed with the impact of that brief moment of direct contact. For an instant he had received from Muller a formless incoherent emanation of raw emotion, the inner self spilling out involuntarily and wordlessly. The flow of uncontrollable innerness was painful and depressing to receive.

It was not true telepathy that the Hydrans had given him. Muller could not “read” minds, nor could he communicate his thoughts to others. What came forth was this gush of self: a torrent of raw despair, a river of regrets and sorrows, all the sewage of a soul. He could not hold it back. For that eternal moment Rawlins had been bathed in it; the rest of the time he had merely picked up a vague and general sense of distress.

He could generate his own concretenesses out of that raw flow. Muller’s sorrows were not unique to himself; what he offered was nothing more than an awareness of the punishments the universe devises for its inhabitants. At that moment Rawlins had felt that he was tuned to every discord in creation: the missed chances, the failed loves, the hasty words, the unfair griefs, the hungers, the greeds, the lusts, the knife of envy, the acid of frustration, the fang of time, the death of small insects in winter, the tears of things. He had known aging, loss, impotence, fury, helplessness, loneliness, desolation, self-contempt, and madness. It was a silent shriek of cosmic anger.

Are we all like that? He wondered. Is the same broadcast coming from me, and from Boardman, and from my mother, and from the girl I used to love? Do we walk about like beacons fixed to a frequency we can’t receive? Thank God, then. That’s a song too painful to hear.

Boardman said, “Wake up, Ned. Stop brooding and watch out for trouble. You’re almost in Zone C now.”

“Charles, how did you feel the first time you came close to Muller?”

“We’ll discuss that later.”

“Did you feel as if you knew what human beings were all about for the first time?”

“I said we’ll discuss—”

“Let me say what I want to say, Charles. I’m not in any danger here. I just looked into a man’s soul, and I’m shaken by it. But— listen, Charles—he isn’t really like that. He’s a good man. That stuff he radiates, it’s just noise. It’s a kind of sludge that doesn’t tell you a real thing about Dick Muller. It’s noise we aren’t meant to hear, and the signal’s altogether different—like when you open an amplifier up to the stars, full blast, and you get that rasping of the spectrum, you know, and some of the most beautiful stars give you the most terrible noises, but that’s just an amplifier response, it has nothing to do with the quality of the star itself, it—it—”

“Ned?

“I’m sorry, Charles.”

“Get back to camp. We all agree that Dick Muller’s a fine human being. That’s why we need him. We need you, too, so shut your mouth and watch your step. Easy, now. Calm. Calm. Calm. What’s that animal on your left? Hurry along, Ned. But stay calm. That’s the way, son. Calm.”