The Man in the Maze Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Rawlins suddenly felt very small and foolish. "Well—not really. That is-"

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

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

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

  "Of course not, Charles. I wouldn't pretend that I don't have plenty to learn."

  "And you're willing to learn it from me, even if I'm an infuriating old scoundrel?"

  "Charles, I-"

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

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

  "Probably not."

  "You're contradicting yourself, Charles."

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

  "Do you think he'll be willing to cooperate?"

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

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

  "It'll be bad. Very bad."

  "You saw him, didn't you, after it happened?"

  "Yes. Many times."

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

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

  "And Muller's a man of honor...a decent man."

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

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

  "We'll stand it," Boardman said.

  TWO

  Within the maze, Muller studied his situation and contemplated his options. In the milky green recesses of the viewing tank he could see the ship and the plastic domes that had sprouted beside it, and the tiny figures of men moving about. He wished now that he had been able to find the fine control on the viewing tank; the images he received were badly out of focus. But he considered himself lucky to have the use of the tank at all. Many of the ancient instruments in this city had become useless long ago through the decay of some vital part. A surprising number had endured the eons unharmed, a tribute to the technical skill of their makers; but of these, Muller had been able to discover the function of only a few, and he operated those imperfectly.

  He watched the blurred figures of his fellow humans working busily and wondered what new torment they were preparing for him.

  He had tried to leave no clues to his whereabouts when he fled from Earth. He had come here in a rented ship, filing a deceptive flight plan by way of Sigma Draconis. During his warp trip, of course, he had had to pass six monitor stations; but he had given each one a simulated great-circle galactic route record, carefully designed to be as misleading as possible.

  A routine comparison check of all the monitor stations would reveal that Muller's successive announcements of location added up to nonsense, but he had gambled that he would manage to complete his flight and vanish before they ran one of the regular checks. Evidently he had won that gamble, for no interceptor ships had come after him.

  Emerging from warp in the vicinity of Lemnos, he had carried out one final evasive maneuver by leaving his ship in a parking orbit and descending by drop-capsule. A disruptor bomb, preprogrammed, had blasted the ship to molecules and sent the fragments traveling on a billion conflicting orbits through the universe. It would take a fancy computer indeed to calculate a probable nexus of source for those! The bomb was designed to provide fifty false vectors per square meter of explosion surface, a virtual guarantee that no tracer could possibly be effective within a finite span of time. Muller needed only a very short finite span—say, sixty years. He had been close to sixty when he left Earth. Normally, he could expect at least another century of vigorous life; but, cut off from medical service, doctoring himself with a cheap diagnostat, he'd be doing well to last into his eleventh or twelfth decade. Sixty years of solitude and a peaceful, private death, that was all he asked. But now his privacy was interrupted after only nine years. Had they really traced him somehow?

  Muller decided that they had not. For one thing, he had taken every conceivable antitracking precaution. For another, they had no motive for following him. He was no fugitive who had to be brought back to justice. He was simply a man with a loathsome affliction, an abomination in the sight of his fellow mortals, and doubtless Earth felt itself well rid of him. He was a shame and a reproach to them, a welling fount of guilt and grief, a prod to the planetary conscience. The kindest thing he could do for his own kind was to remove himself from their midst, and he had done that as thoroughly as he could. They would hardly make an effort to come looking for someone so odious to them.

  Who were these intruders, then?

  Archaeologists, he suspected. The ruined city of Lemnos still held a magnetic, fatal fascination for them—for everyone. Muller had hoped that the risks of the maze would continue to keep men away. It had been discovered over a century earlier, but before his arrival there had been a period of many years in which Lemnos was shunned. For good reason: Muller had many times seen the corpses of those who had tried and failed to enter the maze. He himself had come here partly out of a suicidal wish to join the roster of victims, partly out of overriding curiosity to get within and solve the secret of the labyrinth, and partly out of the knowledge that if he did penetrate he was not likely to suffer many invasions of his privacy. Now he was within; but intruders had come.

  They will not enter, Muller told himself.

  Snugly established at the core of the maze, he had command of enough sensing devices to follow, however vaguely, the progress of any living creatures outside. Thus he could trace the wanderings from zone to zone of the animals that were his prey, and also those of the great beasts who offered danger. To a limited degree he could control the snares of the maze, which normally were nothing more than passive traps but which could be employed aggressively, under the right conditions, against some enemy. More than once Muller had dumped an elephantine carnivore into a subterranean pit as it charged inward through Zone D. He asked himself if he would use those defenses against human beings if they penetrated that far, and had no answer. He did not really hate his own species; he just preferred to be left alone, in what passed for peace.

  He eyed the screens. He occupied a squat hexagonal cell—apparently one of the housing units in the inner city—which was equipped with a wall of viewing tanks. It had taken him more than a year to find out which parts of the maze corresponded to the images on the screens; but by patiently posting markers he had matched the dim images to the glossy reality. The six lowest screens along the wall showed him pictures of areas in Zones A through F; the cameras, or whatever they were, swiveled through 180° arcs, enabling the hidden mysterious eyes to patrol the entire region around each of the zone entrances. Since only one entrance provided safe access to the zone within, all others being lethal, the screens effectively allowed Muller to watch the inward progress of any prowler. It did not matter what was taking place at any of the false entrances. Those who persisted there would die.

  Screens seven through ten, in the upper bank, relayed images that apparently came from Zones G and H, the outermost, largest and deadliest zones of the maze. Muller had not wanted to go to the trouble of returning to those zones to check his theory in detail; he was satisfied that the screens were pickups from points in the outer zones, and it was not worth risking those zones again to find out more accurately where the pickups were mounted. As for the eleventh and twelfth screens, they obviously showed views of the plain outside the maze altogether—the plain now occupied by a newly-arrived starship from Earth.

  Few of the other devices left by the ancient builders of the maze were as informative. Mounted on a dais in the center of the city's central plaza, shielded by a crystal vault, was a twelve-sided stone the color of ruby, in whose depths a mechanism like an intricate shutter ticked and pulsed. Muller suspected it was some sort of clock, keyed to a nuclear oscillation and sounding out the units of time its makers employed. Periodically the stone underwent temporary changes: its face turned cloudy, deepened in hue to blue or even black, swung on its mounting. Muller's careful record-keeping had not yet told him the meaning of those changes. He could not even analyze the periodicity. The metamorphoses were not random, but the pattern they followed was beyond his comprehension.

  At the eight corners of the plaza were metallic spikes, smoothly tapering to heights of some twenty feet. Throughout the cycle of the year these spikes revolved, so they were calendars, it seemed, moving on hidden bearings. Muller knew that they made one complete
revolution in each thirty-month turning of Lemnos about its somber orange primary, but he suspected some deeper purpose for these gleaming pylons. Searching for it occupied much of his time.

  Spaced neatly in the streets of Zone A were cages with bars hewn from an alabaster-like rock. Muller could see no way of opening these cages; yet twice during his years here he had awakened to find the bars withdrawn into the stone pavement, and the cages gaping wide. The first time they had remained open for three days; then the bars had returned to their positions while he slept, sliding into place and showing no seam where they could have parted. When the cages opened again, a few years later, Muller watched them constantly to find the secret of their mechanism. But on the fourth night he dozed just long enough to miss the closing again.

  Equally mysterious was the aqueduct. Around the length of Zone B ran a closed trough, perhaps of onyx, with angular spigots placed at fifty-meter intervals. When any sort of vessel, even a cupped hand, was placed beneath a spigot it yielded pure water. But when he attempted to poke a finger into one of the spigots he found no opening, nor could he see any even while the water was coming forth; it was as though the fluid issued through a permeable plug of stone, and Muller found it hard to accept that. He welcomed the water, though.

  It surprised him that so much of the city should have survived. Archaeologists had concluded, from a study of the artifacts and skeletons found on Lemnos outside the maze, that there had been no intelligent life here for upward of a million years—perhaps five or six million. Muller was only an amateur archaeologist, but he had had enough field experience to know the effects of the passing of time. The fossils in the plain were clearly ancient, and the stratification of the city's outer walls showed that the labyrinth was contemporary with those fossils.