The Man in the Maze

  Muller had been privy to the frantic conferences that followed the discovery of the Hydrans. He knew the reasons why they had been placed under quarantine, and he realized that only much more urgent reasons had resulted in the lifting of that quarantine. Unsure of its ability to handle a relationship with nonhuman beings, Earth had wisely chosen to keep away from the Hydrans for a while longer; but now all that was changed.

  "What happens now?" Muller asked. "An expedition?"

  "Yes."

  "How soon?"

  "Within the next year, I'd say."

  Muller tensed. "Under whose leadership?"

  "Perhaps yours, Dick."

  "Why 'perhaps'?"

  "You might not want it."

  "When I was eighteen," Muller said, "I was with a girl out in the woods on Earth, in the California forest preserve, and we made love, and it wasn't exactly my first time but the first time it worked out in any kind of proper way, and afterward we were lying on our backs looking up at the stars and I told her I was going to go out and walk around among them. And she said, Oh, Dick, how wonderful, but of course it wasn't anything special I was saying. Any kid that age says it when he looks up at the stars. And I told her that I was going to discover things out in space, that men were going to remember me the way they remember Columbus and Magellan and the early astronauts and all. I said I was going to be right in the front of whatever was happening, that I was going to move through the stars like a god. I was very eloquent. I went on like that for about ten minutes, until we were both carried away by the wonder of it all, and I turned to her and she pulled me down on top of her and I turned my backside to the stars and worked hard to nail her to the Earth, and that was the night I grew my ambitions." He laughed. "There are things we can say at eighteen that we can't say again."

  "There are things we can do at eighteen that we can't do again either," said Boardman. "Well, Dick? You're past fifty now, right? You've walked in the stars. Do you feel like a god?"

  "Sometimes."

  "Do you want to go to Beta Hydri IV?"

  "You know I do."

  "Alone?"

  Muller felt the ground give way before him, and abruptly it seemed to him that he was taking his first spacewalk again, falling freely toward all the universe. "Alone?"

  "We've programmed the whole thing and concluded that to send a bunch of men down there at this point would be a mistake. The Hydrans haven't responded very well to our eye probes. You saw that: they picked the eye up and smashed it. We can't begin to fathom their psychologies, because we've never been up against alien minds before. But we feel that the safest thing—both in terms of potential manpower loss and in terms of impact on their society —is to send a single ambassador down there to them—one man, coming in peace, a shrewd, strong man who has been tested under a variety of stress situations and who will develop ways of initiating contact. That man may find himself chopped to shreds thirty seconds after making contact. On the other hand, if he survives he'll have accomplished something utterly unique in human history. It's your option."

  It was irresistible. Mankind's ambassador to the Hydrans! To go alone, to walk alien soil and extend humanity's first greeting to cosmic neighbors-It was his ticket to immortality. It would write his name forever on the stars.

  "How do you figure the chances of survival?" Muller asked.

  "The computation is one chance in sixty-five of coming out whole, Dick. Considering that it's not an Earth-type planet to any great degree, you'll need a life-support system. And you may get a chilly reception. One in sixty-five."

  "Not too bad."

  "I'd never accept such odds myself," Boardman said, grinning. No, but I might." He drained his glass. To carry it off meant imperishable fame. To fail, to be slain by the Hydrans, even that was not so dreadful. He had lived well. There were worse fates than to die bearing mankind's banner to a strange world. That throbbing pride of his, that hunger for glory, that childlike craving for renown that he had never outgrown, drove him to it. The odds were not too bad.

  Marta reappeared. She was wet from her swim, her nude body glossy, her hair plastered to the slender column of her neck. Her breasts were heaving rapidly, little cones of flesh tipped by puckered pink nipples. She might have been a leggy fourteen-year-old, Muller thought, looking at her narrow hips, her lean thighs. Boardman tossed her a drier. She thumbed it and stepped into its yellow field, making one complete turn. She took her garment from the rack and covered herself unhurriedly. "That was great," she said. Her eyes met Muller's for the first time since her return. "Dick, what's the matter with you? You look wide open—stunned. Are you all right?"

  "Fine."

  "What happened?"

  "Mr. Boardman's made a proposition."

  "You can tell her about it, Dick. We don't plan to keep it a secret. There'll be a galaxy-wide announcement right away."

  "There's going to be a landing on Beta Hydri IV," Muller said in a thick voice. "One man. Me. How will it work, Charles? A ship in a parking orbit, and then I go down in a powered drop-capsule equipped for return?"

  "Yes."

  Marta said, "It's insane, Dick. Don't do it. You'll regret it forever."

  "It's a quick death if things don't work out, Marta. I've taken worse risks before."

  "No. Look, sometimes I think I've got a little precog. I see things ahead, Dick." She laughed nervously, her pose of cool sophistication abruptly shattering. "If you go there, I don't think you'll die. But I don't exactly think you'll live, either. Say you won't go. Say it, Dick!"

  "You never officially accepted the proposition," Boardman pointed out.

  "I know," Muller said. He got to his feet, nearly reaching the low roof of the dining capsule, and walked toward Marta, and put his arms around her, remembering that other girl so long ago under the California sky, remembering that wild surge of power that had come upon him as he swung over from the blaze of the stars to the warm, yielding flesh and the parting thighs beneath him. He held Marta firmly. She looked at him in horror. He kissed the tip of her nose and the lobe of her left ear. She shrank away from him, stumbled, nearly plunged into Boardman's lap. Boardman caught her and held her. Muller said, "You know what the answer has to be."

  That afternoon one of the robot probes reached Zone F. They still had a distance to go; but it would not be long, Muller knew, before they were at the heart of the maze.

  FOUR

  "There he is," Rawlins said. "At last!"

  Via the drone probe's eyes he stared at the man in the maze. Muller leaned casually against a wall, arms folded; a big weather-beaten man with a harsh chin and a massive wedge-shaped nose. He did not seem at all alarmed by the presence of the drone.

  Rawlins cut in the audio pickup and heard Muller say, "Hello, robot. Why are you bothering me?"

  The probe, of course, did not reply. Neither did Rawlins, who could have piped a message through the drone. He stood by the data terminal, crouching a little for a better view. His weary eyes throbbed. It had taken them nine local-time days to get one of their probes all the way through the maze to the center. The effort had cost them close to a hundred probes; each inward extension of the safe route by twenty meters or so had required the expenditure of one of the robots. Still, that wasn't so bad, considering that the number of wrong choices in the maze was close to infinite. Through luck, the inspired use of the ship's brain, and a sturdy battery of sensory devices, they had managed to avoid all the obvious traps and most of the cleverer ones. And now they were in the center.

  Rawlins felt exhausted. He had been up all night monitoring this critical phase, the penetration of Zone A. Hosteen had gone to sleep. So, finally, had Boardman. A few of the crewmen were still on duty here and aboard the ship, but Rawlins was the only member of the civilian complement still awake.

  He wondered if the discovery of Muller had been supposed to take place during his stint. Probably not. Boardman wouldn't want to risk blowing things by letting a novice handle the big moment. Well,
too bad. They had left him on duty, and he had moved his probe a few meters inward, and now he was looking right at Muller.

  He searched for signs of the man's inner torment. They weren't obvious. Muller had lived here alone for so many years—wouldn't that have done something to his soul? And that other thing, the prank the Hydrans had played on him—surely that too would have registered on his face. So far as Rawlins could tell, it hadn't.

  Oh, he looked sad around the eyes, and his lips were compressed in a taut, tense line. But Rawlins had been expecting something more dramatic, something romantic, some mirror of agony on that face. Instead he saw only the craggy, indifferent, almost insensitive-looking features of a tough, durable man in late middle age. Muller had gone gray, and his clothing was a little ragged; he looked worn and frayed himself. But that was only to be expected of a man who had been living this kind of exile for nine years. Rawlins wanted something more, something picturesque, a gaunt, bitter face, eyes dark with misery.

  "What do you want?" Muller asked the probe. "Who sent you? Why don't you go away?"

  Rawlins did not dare to answer. He had no idea of the gambit Boardman had in mind at this point. Brusquely he keyed the probe to freeze and sped away toward the dome where Boardman slept.

  Boardman was sleeping under a canopy of life-sustaining devices. He was, after all, at least eighty years old—though he certainly didn't look it—and one way to keep from looking it was to plug oneself into one's sustainers every night. Rawlins was a trifle embarrassed to intrude on the old man when he was enmeshed in his paraphernalia this way. Strapped to Boardman's forehead were a couple of meningeal electrodes that guaranteed a proper and healthy progression through the levels of sleep, thus washing the mind of the day's fatigue poisons. An ultrasonic drawcock filtered dregs and debris from Boardman's arteries. Hormone flow was regulated by the ornate webwork hovering above his chest. The whole business was linked to and directed by the ship's brain. Within the elaborate life system Boardman looked unreal and waxy. His breathing was slow and regular; his soft lips were slack; his cheeks seemed puffy and loose-fleshed. Boardman's eyeballs were moving rapidly beneath the lids; a sign of dreaming, of upper sleep. Could he be awakened safely now?

  Rawlins feared to risk it. Not directly, anyway. He ducked out of the room and activated the terminal just outside. "Take a dream to Charles Boardman," Rawlins said. "Tell him we found Muller. Tell him he's got to wake up right away. Say, Charles, Charles, wake up, we need you. Got it?"

  "Acknowledged," said the ship's brain.

  The impulse leaped from dome to ship, was translated into response-directed form, and returned to the dome. Rawlins' message seeped into Boardman's mind through the electrodes on his forehead. Feeling pleased with himself, Rawlins entered the old man's sleeproom once again and waited.

  Boardman stirred. His hands formed claws and scraped gently at the machinery in whose embrace he lay.

  "Muller-" he muttered.

  His eyes opened. For a moment he did not see. But the waking process had begun, and the life system jolted his metabolism sufficiently to get him functioning again. "Ned?" he said hoarsely. "What are you doing here? I dreamed that—"

  "It wasn't a dream, Charles. I programmed it for you. We got through to Zone A. We found Muller."

  Boardman undid the life system and sat up instantly, alert, aware. "What time is it?"

  "Dawn's just breaking."

  "And how long ago did you find him?"

  "Perhaps fifteen minutes. I froze the probe, and came right to you. But I didn't want to rush you awake, so—"

  "All right. All right." Boardman had swung out of bed, now. He staggered a little as he got to his feet. He wasn't yet at his daytime vigor, Rawlins realized; his real age was showing. He found an excuse to look away, studying the life system to avoid having to see the meaty folds of Boardman's body.

  When I'm his age, Rawlins thought, I'll make sure I get regular shape-ups. It isn't a matter of vanity, really. It's just courtesy to other people. We don't have to look old if we don't want to look old. Why offend?

  "Let's go," Boardman said. "Unfreeze that probe. I want to see him right away."

  Using the terminal in the hall, Rawlins brought the probe back to life. The screen showed them Zone A of the maze, cozier-looking than the outer reaches. Muller was not in view. "Turn the audio on one way," Boardman said.

  "It is."

  "Where'd he go?"

  "Must have walked out of sight range," Rawlins said. He moved the probe in a standing circle, taking in a broad sweep of low cubical houses, high-rising archways, and tiered walls. A small cat-like animal scampered by, but there was no sign of Muller.

  "He was right over there," Rawlins insisted unhappily. "He—"

  "All right. He didn't have to stay in one place while you were waking me up, Walk the probe around."

  Rawlins activated the drone and started it in a slow cruising exploration of the street. Instinctively he was cautious, expecting to find more traps at any moment, though he told himself a couple of times that the builders of the maze would surely not have loaded their own inner quarters with perils. Muller abruptly stepped out of a windowless building and planted himself in front of the probe.

  "Again," he said. "Back to life, are you? Why don't you speak up? What's your ship? Who sent you?"

  "Should we answer?" Rawlins asked. "No."

  Boardman's face was pressed almost against the screen. He pushed Rawlins' hands from the controls and went to work on the fine tuning until Muller was sharply in focus. Boardman kept the probe moving, sliding around in front of Muller, as though trying to hold the man's attention and prevent him from wandering off again.

  In a low voice Boardman said, "That's frightening. The look on his face—"

  "I thought he looked pretty calm."

  "What do you know? I remember that man. Ned, that's a face out of hell. His cheekbones are twice as sharp as they used to be. His eyes are awful. You see the way his mouth turns down—on the left side? He might even have had a light stroke. But he's lasted well enough, I suppose."

  Baffled, Rawlins searched for the signs of Muller's passion. He had missed them before, and he missed them now. But of course he had no real recollection of the way Muller was supposed to look. And Boardman, naturally, would be far more expert than he at reading character.

  "It won't be simple; getting him out of there," Boardman said. "He'll want to stay. But we need him, Ned. We need him."

  Muller, keeping pace with the drone, said in a deep gruff voice, "You've got thirty seconds to state your purpose here. Then you'd better turn around and get going back the way you came."

  "Won't you talk to him?" Rawlins asked. "He'll wreck the probe!"

  "Let him," said Boardman. "The first person who talks to him is going to be flesh and blood, and he's going to be standing face to face with him. That's the only way it can be. This has to be a courtship, Ned. We can't do it through the speakers of a probe."

  "Ten seconds," said Muller.

  He reached into his pocket and came out with a glossy black metal globe the size of an apple, with a small square window on one side. Rawlins had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps it was some alien weapon Muller had found in this city, he decided, for swiftly Muller raised the globe and aimed the window at the face of the drone probe.

  The screen went dark.

  "Looks like we've lost another probe," Rawlins said. Boardman nodded. "Yes. The last probe we're going to lose. Now we start losing men."

  2

  The time had come to risk human lives in the maze. It was inevitable, and Boardman regretted it, the way he regretted paying taxes or growing old or voiding waste matter or feeling the pull of strong gravity. Taxes, aging, excretion, and gravity were all permanent aspects of the human condition, though, however much all four had been alleviated by modern scientific progress. So was the risk of death. They had made good use of the drone probes here, and had probably saved a dozen lives that
way; but now lives were almost surely going to be lost anyhow. Boardman grieved over that, but not for long and not very deeply. He had been asking men to risk their lives for decades, and many of them had died. He was ready to risk his own, at the right time and in the right cause.

  The maze now was thoroughly mapped. The ship's brain held a detailed picture of the inward route, with all the known pitfalls charted, and Boardman was confident that he could send drones in with a ninety-five per cent probability of getting them to Zone A unharmed. Whether a man could cover that same route with equal safety was what remained to be seen. Even with the computer whispering hints to him every step of the way, a man filtering information through a fallible, fatigue-prone human brain might not quite see things the same way as a lathe-turned probe, and perhaps would make compensations of his own in the course that would prove fatal. So the data they had gathered had to be tested carefully before he or Ned Rawlins ventured inside.

  There were volunteers to take care of that.

  They knew they were likely to die. No one had tried to pretend otherwise to them, and they would have it no other way. It had been put to them that it was important for humanity to bring Richard Muller voluntarily out of that maze, and that it could best be accomplished by having specific human beings—Charles Board-man and Ned Rawlins—speak to Muller in person, and that since Boardman and Rawlins were nonreplaceable units it was necessary for others to explore the route ahead of them. Very well. The explorers were ready, knowing that they were expendable. They also knew that it might even be helpful for the first few of them to die. Each death brought new information; successful traversals of the inward route brought none, at this point.