A Maze of Death

  The sky turned dark.

  Incredulous, Wade Frazer said, “Good God, Morley; what have you done with your—question?” He gestured in a seizure of motor-spasms. “This place is breaking up!”

  The man was correct. Fissions had appeared everywhere now; in a few moments there would be no safe spot to stand on. The squib, Seth Morley realized. We’ve got to get back to it. “Babble,” he said hoarsely, “get us all into the squib.” But Babble had gone. Looking around in the turbulent gloom, Seth Morley saw no sign of him—nor of the others.

  They’re in the squib already, he told himself. As best he could he made his way in that direction. Even Mary, he realized. The bastards. He falteringly reached the hatch of the squib; it hung open.

  A fast-widening crack in the ground, almost six feet wide, appeared crashingly beside him; it burgeoned as he stood there. Now he found himself looking into the orifice. At the bottom something undulated. A slimy thing, very large, without eyes; it swam in a dark, stinking liquid and ignored him.

  “Babble,” he croaked, and managed to make the first step that led up into the squib. Now he could see in; he clambered clumsily up, using only his good arm.

  No one was in the squib.

  I’m Christ-awful alone, he said to himself. Now the squib shuddered and bucked as the ground beneath it heaved. Rain had begun; he felt hot, dark drops on him, acrid rain, as if it was not water but some other, less-pleasant substance. The drops seared his skin; he scrambled into the squib, stood wheezing and choking, wondering frantically where the others had gone. No sign of them. He hobbled to the squib’s viewscreen … the squib heaved; its hull shuddered and became unstable. It’s being pulled under, he said to himself. I’ve got to take off; I can’t spend any more time searching for them. He jabbed at a button and turned on the squib’s engine. Tugging on the control ball he sent the squib—with himself inside, alone—up into the dark and ugly sky … a sky obviously ominous to all life. He could hear the rain beating against the hull; the rain of what? he wondered. Like an acid. Maybe, he thought, it will eat its way through the hull and destroy both the squib and me.

  Seating himself, he clicked on the viewscreen to greatest magnification; he rotated it, simultaneously sending the squib into a rotating orbit.

  On the viewscreen appeared the Building. The river, swollen and mud-colored, angrily lapped at it. The Building, faced with its last danger, had thrown a temporary bridge across the river and, Seth Morley saw, men and women were crossing the bridge, crossing thereby the river, and going on into the Building.

  They were all old. Gray and fragile, like wounded mice, they huddled together and advanced step by step in the direction of the Building. They’re not going to make it, he realized. Who are they?

  Peering into the viewscreen he recognized his wife. But old, like the others. Hunched over, tottering, afraid … and then he made out Susie Smart. And Dr. Babble. Now he could distinquish them all. Russell, Ben Tallchief, Glen Belsnor, Wade Frazer, Betty Jo Berm, Tony Dunkelwelt, Babble, Ignatz Thugg, Maggie Walsh, old Bert Kosler—he had not changed, he had already been old—and Roberta Rockingham, and, at the end, Mary.

  The Form Destroyer has seized them, Seth Morley realized. And done this to them. And now they are on their way back to where they came from. Forever. To die there.

  The squib, around him, vibrated. Its hull clanged, again and again. Something hard and metallic was pinging off the hull. He sent the squib higher and the noise abated. What had done it? he wondered, again inspecting the viewscreen.

  And then he saw.

  The Building had begun to disintegrate. Parts of it, chunks of plastic and alloy bonded together, hurled as if in a giant wind up into the sky. The delicate bridge across the river broke, and as it fell it carried those crossing it to their death: they fell with the fragments of the bridge into the snarling, muddy water and vanished. But it made no difference; the Building was dying, too. They would not have been safe in it anyhow.

  I’m the only one who survived, he said to himself. Moaning with grief he revolved the control ball and the ship putt-putted out of its orbit and on a tangent leading back to the settlement.

  The engine of the squib died into silence.

  He heard nothing, now, but the slap-slap of rain against its hull. The squib sailed in a great arc, dropping lower each moment.

  He shut his eyes. I did what I could throughout, he said to himself. There was nothing more possible for me. I tried.

  The squib hit, bounced, threw him from his chair onto the floor. Sections of the hull broke off, ripped away; he felt the acrid, acid-like rain pour in on him, drenching him. Opening his pain-glazed eyes he saw that the downpour had burned holes in his clothing; it was devouring his body. He perceived that in a fragment of a second—time seemed to have stopped as the squib rolled over and over, skated on its top across the terrain … he felt nothing, no fear, no grief, no pain any longer; he merely experienced the death of his ship—and of himself—as a kind of detached observer.

  The ship skidded, at last, to a halt. Silence, except for the drip-drip of the rain of acid on him. He lay half-buried in collapsed junk: portions of the control board and viewscreen, all shattered. Jesus, he thought. Nothing is left, and presently the earth will swallow the squib and me. But it does not matter, he thought, because I am dying. In emptiness, meaninglessness and solitude. Like all the others, who have gone before this fragment of the one-time group. Intercessor, he thought, intercede for me. Replace me; die for me.

  He waited. And heard only the tap-tap of the rain.

  15

  Glen Belsnor removed the polyencephalic cylinder from his aching head, set it carefully down, rose unsteadily to a standing position. He rubbed his forehead and experienced pain. That was a bad one, he said to himself. We did not do well this time at all.

  Going unsteadily to the dining hall of the ship he poured himself a glass of tepid, bottled water. He then rummaged in his pockets until he found his powerful analgesic tablet, popped it into his mouth, swallowed it with more of the reprocessed water.

  Now, in their cubicles, the others stirred. Wade Frazer tugged at the cylinder which enclosed his brain and skull and scalp and, a few cubicles off, Sue Smart, too, appeared to be returning to active awareness of a homoencephalic kind.

  As he helped Sue Smart off with her heavy cylinder he heard a groan. A lament, telling of deep suffering. It was Seth Morley, he discovered. “Okay,” Belsnor said. “I’ll get to you as soon as I can.”

  All of them were coming out of it, now. Ignatz Thugg yanked violently at his cylinder, managed to detach it from its screw-lock base at his chin … he sat up, his eyes swollen, an expression of displeasure and hostility on his wan, narrow face.

  “Give me a hand,” Belsnor said. “I think Morley is in shock. Maybe you better get Dr. Babble up.”

  “Morley’ll be all right,” Thugg said huskily; he rubbed his eyes, grimacing as if nauseated. “He always is.”

  “But he’s in shock—his death must have been a bad one.”

  Thugg stood up, nodding dully. “Whatever you say, captain.”

  “Get them warm,” Belsnor said. “Set up the standby heat to a higher notch.” He bent over the prone Dr. Milton Babble. “Come on, Milt,” he said emphatically as he removed Babble’s cylinder.

  Here and there others of the crew sat up. Groaned.

  Loudly, to them all, Captain Belsnor said, “You are all right now. This one turned out to be a fiasco, but you are going—as always—to be fine. Despite what you’ve gone through. Dr. Babble will give you a shot of something to ease the transition from polyencephalic fusion to normal homoencephalic functioning.” He waited a moment, then repeated what he had said.

  Seth Morley, trembling, said, “Are we aboard Persus 9?”

  “You are back on the ship,” Belsnor informed him. “Back aboard Persus 9. Do you remember how you died, Morley?”

  “Something awful happened to me,” Seth Morley managed to say.
br />   “Well,” Belsnor pointed out, “you had that shoulder wound.”

  “I mean later. After the tench. I remember flying a squib … it lost power and split up—disintegrated in the atmosphere. I was either torn or knocked into pieces; I was all over the squib, by the time it had finished plowing up the landscape.”

  Belsnor said, “Don’t expect me to feel sorry for you.” After all, he himself, in the polyencephalic fusion, had been electrocuted.

  Sue Smart, her long hair tangled, her right breast peeping slyly from between the buttons of her blouse, gingerly touched the back of her head and winced.

  “They got you with a rock,” Belsnor told her.

  “But why?” Sue asked. She seemed dazed, still. “What did I do wrong?”

  Belsnor said, “It wasn’t your fault. This one turned out to be a hostile one; we were venting our long-term, pent-up aggressiveness. Evidently.” He could remember, but only with effort, how he had shot Tony Dunkelwelt, the youngest member of the crew. I hope he won’t be too angry, Captain Belsnor said to himself. He shouldn’t be. After all, in venting his own hostility, Dunkelwelt had killed Bert Kosler, the cook of Persus 9.

  We snuffed ourselves virtually out of existence, Captain Belsnor noted to himself. I hope—I pray!—the next one is different. It should be; as in previous times we probably managed to get rid of the bulk of our hostilities in that one fusion, that (what was it?) Delmak-O episode.

  To Babble, who stood unsteadily fooling with his disarranged clothing, Belsnor said, “Get moving, doctor. See who needs what. Painkiller, tranquilizers, stimulants … they need you. But—” He leaned close to Babble. “Don’t give them anything we’re low on, as I’ve told you before, and as you ignore.”

  Leaning over Betty Jo Berm, Babble said, “Do you need some chemical-therapy help, Miss Berm?”

  “I—I think I’ll be okay,” Betty Jo Berm said as she sat painstakingly up. “If I can just sit here and rest …” She managed a brief, cheerless smile. “I drowned,” she said. “Ugh.” She made a weary, but now somewhat relieved, face.

  Speaking to all of them, Belsnor said quietly but with firm insistence, “I’m reluctantly writing off that particular construct as too unpleasant to try for again.”

  “But,” Frazer pointed out, lighting his pipe with shaking fingers, “it’s highly therapeutic. From a psychiatric standpoint.”

  “It got out of hand,” Sue Smart said.

  “It was supposed to,” Babble said as he worked with the others, rousing them, finding out what they wanted. “It was what we call a total catharsis. Now we’ll have less free-floating hostility surging back and forth between everyone here on the ship.”

  Ben Tallchief said, “Babble, I hope your hostility toward me is over.” He added, “And for what you did to me—” He glared.

  “‘The ship,’” Seth Morley murmured.

  “Yes,” Captain Belsnor said, slightly, sardonically, amused. “And what else have you forgotten this time? Do you want to be briefed?” He waited, but Seth Morley said nothing. Morley seemed still to be entranced. “Give him some kind of amphetamine,” Belsnor said to Dr. Babble. “To get him into a lucid state.” It usually came to this with Seth Morley; his ability to adapt to the abrupt transition between the ship and the polyencephalically-determined worlds was negligible.

  “I’ll be okay,” Seth Morley said. And shut his weary eyes.

  Clambering to her feet, Mary Morley came over to him, sank down beside him and put her lean hand on his shoulder. He started to slide away from her, remembering the injury to his shoulder … and then he discovered that, strangely, the pain had gone. Cautiously, he patted his shoulder. No injury. No blood-seeping wound. Weird, he thought. But—I guess it’s always this way. As I seem to recall.

  “Can I get you anything?” his wife asked him.

  “Are you okay?” he asked her. She nodded. “Why did you kill Sue Smart?” he said. “Never mind,” he said, seeing the strong, wild expression on her face. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but this one really bothered me. All the killing. We’ve never had so much of it before; it was dreadful. We should have been yanked out of this one by the psychocircuit-breaker as soon as the first murder took place.”

  “You heard what Frazer said,” Mary said. “It was necessary; we were building too many tensions here on the ship.”

  Morley thought, I see now why the tench exploded. When we asked it, What does Persus 9 mean? No wonder it blew up … and, with it, took the entire construct. Piece by piece.

  The large, far-too-familiar cabin of the ship forced itself onto his attention. He felt a kind of dismal horror, seeing it again. To him the reality of the ship was far more unpleasant than—what had it been called?—Delmak-O, he recalled. That’s right. We arranged random letters, provided us by the ship’s computer … we made it up and then we were stuck with what we made up. An exciting adventure turned into gross murder. Of all of us, by the time it had finished.

  He examined his calendar wristwatch. Twelve days had passed. In real time, twelve whole, overly long days; in polyencephalic time, only a little over twenty-four hours. Unless he counted the “eight years” at Tekel Upharsin, which he could not really do: it had been a manufactured recall-datum, implanted in his mind during fusion, to add the semblance of authenticity in the polyencephalic venture.

  What did we make up? he asked himself blearily. The entire theology, he realized. They had fed into the ship’s computer all the data they had in their possession concerning advanced religions. Into T.E.N.C.H. 889B had gone elaborated information dealing with Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Zoroastrianism, Tibetan Buddhism … a complex mass, out of which T.E.N.C.H. 889B was to distill a composite religion, a synthesis of every factor involved. We made it up, Seth Morley thought, bewildered; memory of Specktowsky’s Book still filled his mind. The Intercessor, the Mentufacturer, the Walker-on-Earth—even the ferocity of the Form Destroyer. Distillate of man’s total experience with God—a tremendous logical system, a comforting web deduced by the computer from the postulates given it—in particular the postulate that God existed.

  And Specktowsky … he shut his eyes, remembering.

  Egon Specktowsky had been the original captain of the ship. He had died during the accident which had disabled them. A nice touch by T.E.N.C.H. 889B, to make their dear former captain the author of the galaxy-wide worship which had acted as the base of this, their latest world. The awe and near-worship which they all felt for Egon Specktowsky had been neatly carried over to their episode on Delmak-O because for them, in a sense, he was a god—functioned, in their lives, as a god would. This touch had given the created world a more plausible air; it fitted in perfectly with their preconceptions.

  The polyencephalic mind, he thought. Originally an escape toy to amuse us during our twenty-year voyage. But the voyage had not lasted twenty years; it would continue until they died, one by one, in some indefinably remote epoch, which none of them could imagine. And for good reason: everything, especially the infinitude of the voyage, had become an endless nightmare to them.

  We could have survived the twenty years, Seth Morley said to himself, Knowing it would end; that would have kept us sane and alive. But the accident had come and now they circled, forever, a dead star. Their transmitter, because of the accident, functioned no longer, and so an escape toy, typical of those generally used in long, interstellar flights, had become the support for their sanity.

  That’s what really worries us, Morley realized. The dread that one by one we will slip into psychosis, leaving the others even more alone. More isolated from man and everything associated with man.

  God, he thought, how I wish we could go back to Alpha Centaurus. If only—

  But there was no use thinking about that.

  Ben Tallchief, the ship’s maintenance man, said, “I can’t believe that we made up Specktowsky’s theology by ourselves. It seemed so real. So—airtight.”

  Belsnor said, “The computer did mos
t of it; of course it’s airtight.”

  “But the basic idea was ours,” Tony Dunkelwelt said. He had fixed his attention on Captain Belsnor. “You killed me in that one,” he said.

  “We hate one another,” Belsnor said. “I hate you; you hate me. Or at least we did before the Delmak-O episode.” Turning to Wade Frazer he said, “Maybe you’re right; I don’t feel so irritated now.” Gloomily, he said, “But it’ll come back, give or take a week or so.”

  “Do we really hate one another that much?” Sue Smart asked.

  “Yes,” Wade Frazer said.

  Ignatz Thugg and Dr. Babble helped elderly Mrs. Rockingham to her feet. “Oh dear,” she gasped, her withered and ancient face red, “that was just simply dreadful! What a terrible, terrible place; I hope we never go there again.” Coming over, she plucked at Captain Belsnor’s sleeve. “We won’t have to live through that again, will we? I do think, in all honesty, that life aboard the ship is far preferable to that wicked, uncivilized little place.”

  “We won’t be going back to Delmak-O,” Belsnor said.

  “Thank heavens,” Mrs. Rockingham seated herself; again Thugg and Dr. Babble assisted her. “Thank you,” she said to them. “How kind of you. Could I have some coffee, Mr. Morley?”

  “‘Coffee’?” he echoed and then he remembered; he was the ship’s cook. All the precious food supplies, including coffee, tea and milk, were in his possession. “I’ll start a pot going,” he told them all.

  In the kitchen he spooned heaping tablespoonfuls of good black ground coffee into the top of the pot. He noticed, then, as he had noticed many times before, that their store of coffee had begun to run low. In another few months, they would be out entirely.