The Man in the Maze Read online

  They drew lots for the job.

  The man chosen to go first was a lieutenant named Burke, who looked fairly young and probably was, since military men rarely went in for shape-ups until they were in the top echelons. He was a short, sturdy, dark-haired man who acted as if he could be replaced from a template aboard the ship, which was not the case.

  "When I find Muller," Burke said-he did not say if-"I tell him I'm an archaeologist. Right? And that if he doesn't mind, I'd like some of my friends to come inside also?"

  "Yes," said Boardman. "And remember, the less you say to him in the way of professional-sounding noises, the less suspicious he's going to be."

  Burke was not going to live long enough to say anything to Richard Muller, and all of them knew it. But he waved goodbye jauntily, somewhat stagily, and strode into the maze. Through a backpack he was connected with the ship's brain. The computer would relay his marching orders to him, and would show the watchers in the camp exactly what was happening to him.

  He moved smartly and smoothly past the terrors of Zone H. He lacked the array of detection devices that had helped the probes find the pivot-mounted slabs and the deathpits beneath, the hidden energy flares, the clashing teeth set in doorways, and all the other nightmares; but he had something much more useful riding with him: the accumulated knowledge of those nightmares, gathered through the expenditure of a lot of probes that had failed to notice them. Boardman, watching his screen, saw the by now familiar pillars and spokes and escarpments, the airy bridges, the heaps of bones, the occasional debris of a drone probe. Silently he urged Burke on, knowing that in not too many days he would have to travel this route himself. Boardman wondered how much Burke's life meant to Burke.

  Burke took nearly forty minutes to pass from Zone H to Zone G. He showed no sign of elation as he negotiated the passageway; G, they all knew, was nearly as tough as H. But so far the guidance system was working well. Burke was executing a sort of grim ballet, dancing around the obstacles, counting his steps, now leaping, now turning sideways, now straining to step over some treacherous strip of pavement. He was progressing nicely. But the computer was unable to warn him about the small toothy creature awaiting atop a gilded ledge forty meters inside Zone G. It was no part of the maze's design.

  It was a random menace, transacting business on its own account. Burke carried only a record of past experiences in this realm.

  The animal was no bigger than a very large cat, but its fangs were long and its claws were quick. The eye in Burke's backpack saw it as it leaped—but by then it was too late. Burke, half-warned, half-turned and reached for his weapon with the beast already on his shoulders and scrambling for his throat.

  The jaws opened astonishingly wide. The computer's eye relayed an anatomical touch Boardman could well have done without: within the outer row of needle-sharp teeth was an inner one, and a third one inside that, perhaps for better chewing of the prey or perhaps just a couple of sets of replacements in case outer teeth were broken off. The effect was one of a forest of jagged fangs. A moment later the jaws closed.

  Burke tumbled to the ground, clutching at his attacker. A trickle of blood spurted. Man and beast rolled over twice, tripped some secret waiting relay, and were engulfed in a gust of oily smoke. When the air was clear again neither of them was in view.

  Boardman said a little later, "There's something to keep in mind. The animals wouldn't bother attacking a probe. We'll have to carry mass detectors and travel in teams."

  That was how they worked it the next time. It was a stiff price to pay for the knowledge, but now they realized they had to deal with the wild beasts as well as with the cunning of ancient engineers. Two men named Marshall and Petrocelli, armed, went together into the maze, looking in all directions. No animal could come near them without telltaling its thermal output into the infrared pickups of the mass detectors they carried. They shot four animals, one of them immense, and had no trouble otherwise.

  Deep within Zone G they came to the place where the distortion screen made a mockery of all information-gathering devices.

  How did the screen work, Boardman wondered? He knew of Earth-made distorters that operated directly on the senses, taking perfectly proper sensory messages and scrambling them within the brain to destroy all one-to-one correlations. But this screen had to be different. It could not attack the nervous system of a drone probe, for the drones had no nervous systems in any meaningful sense of that term, and their eyes gave accurate reports of what they saw. Somehow what the drones had seen—and what they had reported to the computer—bore no relation to the real geometry of the maze at that point. Other drones, posted beyond the range of the screen, had given entirely different and much more reliable accounts of the terrain. So the thing must work on some direct optical principle, operating on the environment itself, rearranging it, blurring perspective, subtly shifting and concealing the outlines of things, transforming normal configurations into bafflement. Any sight organ within reach of the screen's effect would obtain a wholly convincing and perfectly incorrect image of the area, whether or not it had a mind to be tinkered with. That was quite interesting, Boardman thought. Perhaps later the mechanisms of this place could be studied and mastered. Later.

  It was impossible for him to know what shape the maze had taken for Marshall and Petrocelli as they succumbed to the screen. Unlike the drone probes, which relayed exact accounts of everything that passed through their eyes, the two men were not directly hooked to the computer and could not transmit their visual images to the screen. The best they could do was describe what they saw. It did not match the images sent back by the probe eyes mounted on their backpacks, nor did it match the genuine configurations apparent from outside the screen's range.

  They did as the computer said. They walked forward even where their own eyes told them that vast abysses lay in their path. They crouched to wriggle through a tunnel whose roof was bright with the suspended blades of guillotines. The tunnel did not exist. "Any minute I expect one of those blades to fall and chop me in half," Petrocelli said. There were no blades. At the end of the tunnel they obediently moved to the left, toward a massive flail that lashed the ground in vicious swipes. There was no flail. Reluctantly they did not set foot on a plumply upholstered walkway that appeared to lead out of the region of the screen. The walkway was imaginary; they had no way of seeing the pit of acid that actually was there.

  "It would be better if they simply closed their eyes," Boardman said. "The way the drones went through—minus all visuals."

  "They claim it's too scary to do it like that," said Hosteen.

  "Which is better—to have no visual information, or to have the wrong information?" Boardman asked. "They could follow the computer's orders just as well with their eyes closed. And there'd be no chance that—"

  Petrocelli screamed. On the split screen Boardman saw the real configuration—a flat, innocuous strip of road—and the screen-distorted one relayed by the backpack eyes—a sudden geyser of flame erupting at their feet.

  "Stand where you are!" Hosteen bellowed. "It isn't real!"

  Petrocelli, one foot high in the air, brought it back into place with a wrenching effort. Marshall's reaction time was slower. He had been whirling to escape the eruption when Hosteen had called to him, and he turned to the left before he halted. He was a dozen centimeters too far out of the safe road. A coil of bright metal flicked out of a block of stone and wrapped itself about his ankles. It cut through the bone without difficulty. Marshall toppled and a flashing golden bar stapled him to a wall.

  Without looking back, Petrocelli passed through the column of flame unharmed, stumbled forward ten paces, and came to a halt, safe beyond the effective range of the distortion screen. "Dave?" he said hoarsely. "Dave, are you all right?"

  "He stepped off the path," said Boardman. "It was a quick finish."

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "Stay put, Petrocelli. Get calm and don't try to go anywhere. I'm sending Chesterfie
ld and Walker in after you. Wait right where you are."

  Petrocelli was trembling. Boardman asked the ship's brain to give him a needle, and the backpack swiftly eased him with a soothing injection. Still rigid, unwilling to turn toward his impaled companion, Petrocelli stood quite still, awaiting the others.

  It took Chesterfield and Walker close to an hour to reach the place of the distortion screen, and nearly fifteen minutes to shuffle through the few square meters the screen controlled. They did it with their eyes closed, and they didn't like that at all: but the phantoms of the maze could not frighten blind men, and in time Chesterfield and Walker were beyond their grasp. Petrocelli was much calmer by then. Warily, the three continued toward the heart of the maze.

  Something would have to be done, Boardman thought, about recovering Marshall's body. Some other time, though.

  3

  The longest days of Ned Rawlins' life had been those spent on the journey to Rigel, four years before, to fetch his father's body. These days now were longer. To stand before a screen, to watch brave men die, to feel every nerve screaming for relief hour after hour after hour-

  But they were winning the battle of the maze. Fourteen men had entered it so far. Four were dead. Walker and Petrocelli had made camp in Zone E; five more men had set up a relief base in F; three others were currently edging past the distortion screen in G and soon would join them. The worst was over for these. It was clear from the probe work that the curve of danger dropped off sharply past Zone F, and that there were practically no hazards at all in the three inner zones. With E and F virtually conquered, it should not be difficult to break through to those central zones where Muller, impassive and uncommunicating, lurked and waited.

  Rawlins thought that he knew the maze completely by now. Vicariously he had entered it more than a hundred times; first through the eyes of the probes, then through the relays from the crewmen. At night in feverish dreams he saw its dark patterns, its curving walls and sinuous towers. Locked in his own skull he somehow made the circuit of that labyrinth, kissing death a thousand times. He and Boardman would be the beneficiaries of hard-won experience when their turns came to go inside.

  Their tons were coming near.

  On a chill morning under an iron sky he stood with Boardman just outside the maze, by the upsloping embankment of soil that rimmed the outer flange of the city. In the short weeks they had been here, the year had dimmed almost startlingly toward whatever winter this planet had. Sunlight lasted only six hours a day now, out of the twenty; two hours of pale twilight followed, and dawns were thin and prolonged. The whirling moons danced constantly in the sky, playing twisting games with shadows.

  Rawlins, by this time, was almost eager to test the dangers of the maze. There was a hollowness in his gut, a yearning born of impatience and embarrassment. He had waited, peering into screens, while other men, some hardly older than himself, gambled their lives to get inside. It seemed to him that he had spent all his life waiting for the cue to take the center of the stage.

  On the screen, they watched Muller moving at the heart of the maze. The hovering probes kept constant check on him, marking his peregrinations with a shifting line on the master chart. Muller had not left Zone A since the time he encountered the drone; but he changed positions daily in the labyrinth, migrating from house to house as though he feared to sleep in the same one twice. Boardman had taken care not to let him have any contact with them since the encounter with the drone. It often seemed to Rawlins that Boardman was stalking some rare and fragile beast.

  Tapping the screen, Boardman said, "This afternoon we go inside, Ned. We'll spend the night in the main camp. Tomorrow you move forward to join Walker and Petrocelli in E. The day after that you go on alone toward the middle and find Muller."

  "Why are you going inside the maze, Charles?"

  "To help you."

  "You could keep in touch with me from out here," said Rawlins. "You don't need to risk yourself."

  Boardman tugged thoughtfully at his dewlap. "What I'm doing is calculated for minimum risk this way."

  "How?"

  "If you get into problems," Boardman said, "I'll need to go to you and give you assistance. I'd rather wait in Zone F, if I'm needed, than have to come rushing in suddenly from the outside through the most dangerous part of the maze. You see what I'm telling you? I can get to you quickly from F without much danger. But not from here."

  "What kind of problems?"

  "Stubbornness from Muller. He's got no reason to cooperate with us, and he's not an easy man to deal with. I remember him in those months after he came back from Beta Hydri IV. We had no peace with him. He was never actually level-tempered before, but afterward he was a volcano. Mind you, Ned, I don't judge him for it. He's got a right to be furious with the universe. But he's troublesome. He's a bird of ill omen. Just to go near him brings bad luck. You'll have your hands full."

  "Why don't you come with me, then?"

  "Impossible," Boardman said. "It would ruin everything if he even knew I was on this planet. I'm the man who sent him to the Hydrans, don't forget. I'm the one who in effect marooned him on Lemnos. I think he might kill me if he saw me again."

  Rawlins recoiled from that idea. "No. He hasn't become that barbaric."

  "You don't know him. What he was. What he's become."

  "If he's as full of demons as you say, how am I ever going to win his trust?"

  "Go to him. Look guileless and trustworthy. You don't have to practice that, Ned. You've got a naturally innocent face. Tell him you're here on an archaeological mission. Don't let him know that we realized he was here all along. Say that the first you knew was when our probe stumbled into him—that you recognized him, from the days when he and your father were friends."

  "I'm to mention my father, then?"

  "By all means. Tell him who you are. It's the only way. Tell him that your father's dead, and that this is your first expedition to space. Work on his sympathies, Ned. Dig for the paternal in him."

  Rawlins shook his head. "Don't get angry with me, Charles, but I've got to tell you that I don't like any of this. These lies."

  "Lies?" Boardman's eyes blazed. "Lies to say that you're your father's son? That this is your first expedition?"

  "That I'm an archaeologist?"

  Boardman shrugged. "Would you rather tell him that you came here as part of a search mission looking for Richard Muller? Will that help win his trust? Think about our purpose, Ned."

  "Yes. Ends and means. I know."

  "Do you, really?"

  "We're here to win Muller's cooperation because we think that he alone can save us from a terrible menace," Rawlins said stolidly, unfeelingly, flatly. "Therefore we must take any approach necessary to gain that cooperation."

  "Yes. And I wish you wouldn't smirk when you say it."

  "I'm sorry, Charles. But I feel so damned queasy about deceiving him."

  "We need him."

  "Yes. But a man who's suffered so much already—"

  "We need him."

  "All right, Charles."

  "I need you, too," Boardman said. "If I could do this myself, I would. But if he saw me, he'd finish me. In his eyes I'm a monster. It's the same with anyone else connected with his past career. But you're different. He might be able to trust you. You're young, you look so damned virtuous, and you're the son of a good friend of his. You can get through to him."

  "And fill him up with lies so we can trick him."

  Boardman closed his eyes. He seemed to be containing himself with an effort.

  "Stop it, Ned."

  "Go on. Tell me what I do after I've introduced myself."

  "Build a friendship with him. Take your time about it. Make him come to depend on your visits."

  "What if I can't stand being with him?"

  "Conceal it. That's the hardest part, I know."

  "The hardest part is the lying, Charles."

  "Whatever you say. Anyhow, show that you can tolerate his comp
any. Make the effort. Chat with him. Make it clear to him that you're stealing time from your scientific work—that the villainous bastards who are running your expedition don't want you to have anything to do with him, but that you're drawn to him by love and pity and won't let him interfere. Tell him all about yourself, your ambitions, your love life, your hobbies, whatever you want. Run off at the mouth. It'll reinforce the image of the naive kid."

  "Do I mention the galactics?" Rawlins asked.

  "Not obtrusively. Work them in somewhere by way of bringing him up to date on current events. But don't tell him too much. Certainly don't tell him of the threat they pose. Or a word about the need we have for him, you understand. If he gets the idea that he's being used, we're finished."

  "How will I get him to leave the maze, if I don't tell him why we want him?"

  "Let that part pass for now," Boardman said. "I'll coach you in the next phase after you've succeeded in getting him to trust you."

  "The translation," Rawlins said, "is that you're going to put such a whopper in my mouth that you don't even dare tell me now what it is for fear I'll throw up my hands and quit."

  "Ned-"

  "I'm sorry. But—look, Charles, why do we have to trick him out? Why can't we just say that humanity needs him, and force him to come out?"

  "Do you think that's morally superior to tricking him out?"

  "It's cleaner, somehow. I hate all this dirty plotting and scheming. I'd much rather help knock him cold and haul him from the maze than have to go through what you've planned. I'd be willing to help take him by force—because we really do need him. We've got enough men to do it."

  "We don't," Boardman said. "We can't force him out. That's the whole point. It's too risky. He might find some way to kill himself the moment we tried to grab him."