The Man In The Maze

1

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.

Yet most of the city, supposedly built before the evolution of mankind on Earth, appeared untouched by the ages. The dry weather could account in part for that; there were no storms here, and rain had not fallen since Muller’s arrival. But wind and windblown sand could carve walls and pavements over a million years, and there was no sign of such carving here. Nor had sand accumulated in the open streets of the city. Muller knew why. Hidden pumps collected all debris, keeping everything spotless. He had gathered handfuls of soil from the garden plots, scattering little trails here and there. Within minutes the driblets of soil had begun to slither across the polished pavement, vanishing into slots that opened briefly and closed again at the intersection of buildings and ground.

Evidently beneath the city lay a network of inconceivable machinery—imperishable caretaker devices that guarded the city against the tooth of time. Muller had not been able to reach that network, though. He lacked the equipment for breaching the pavement; it seemed invulnerable at all points. With improvised tools he had begun to dig in the garden areas, hoping to reach the sub-city that way, but though he had driven one pit more than a dozen feet and another even deeper he had come upon no signs of anything below but more soil. The hidden guardians had to be there, however: the instruments that operated the viewing tanks, swept the streets, repaired the masonry, and controlled the murderous traps that studded the outer zones of the labyrinth.

It was hard to imagine a race that could build a city of this sort —a city designed to last millions of years. It was harder still to imagine how they could have vanished. Assuming that the fossils found in the burial yards outside the walls were those of the builders—not necessarily a safe assumption—this city had been put together by burly humanoids a meter and a half tall, immensely thick through the chest and shoulders, with long cunning fingers, eight to the hand, and short double-jointed legs.

They were gone from the known worlds of the universe, and nothing like them had been found in any other system; perhaps they had withdrawn to some far galaxy yet unvisited by man. Or, possibly, they had been a nonspacegoing race that evolved and perished right here on Lemnos, leaving this city as their only monument.

The rest of the planet was without trace of habitation although burial grounds had been discovered in a diminishing series radiating outward a thousand kilometers from the maze. Maybe the years had eroded all their cities except this one. Maybe this, which could have sheltered perhaps a million beings, had been their only city. There was no clue to their disappearance. The devilish ingenuity of the maze argued that in their last days they had been harassed by enemies and had retreated within this tricky fortress; but Muller knew that this hypothesis too was a speculation. For all he was aware, the maze represented nothing more than an outburst of cultural paranoia and had no relation to the actual existence of an external threat.

Had they been invaded by beings for whom the maze posed no problems, and had they been slaughtered in their own sleek streets, and had the mechanical wardens swept away the bones? No way of knowing. They were gone. Muller, entering their city, had found it silent, desolate, as if it had never sheltered life; an automatic city, sterile, flawless. Only beasts occupied it. They had had a million years to find their way through the maze and take possession. Muller had counted some two dozen species of mammals in all sizes from rat-equivalent to elephant-equivalent. There were grazers who munched on the city’s gardens, and hunters who fed on the herbivores, and the ecological balance seemed perfect. The city in the maze was like unto Isaiah’s Babylon: wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.

The city was his now. He had the rest of his lifetime to probe its mysteries.

There had been others who had come here, and not all of them had been human. Entering the maze, Muller had been treated to the sight of those who had failed to go the route. He had sighted a score of human skeletons in Zones H, G, and F. Three men had made it to E, and one to D. Muller had expected to see their bones; but what took him off guard was the collection of alien bones. In H and G he had seen the remains of great dragon-like creatures, still clad in the shreds of spacesuits. Some day curiosity might triumph over fear and he might go back out there for a second look at them. Closer to the core lay an assortment of life-forms, mostly humanoid but veering from the standard structure. How long ago they had come here, Muller could not guess; even in this dry climate, would exposed skeletons last more than a few centuries? The galactic litter was a sobering reminder of something Muller already adequately knew: that despite the experience of man’s first two centuries of extrasolar travel, in which no living intelligent alien race was encountered, the universe was full of other forms of life, and sooner or later man would meet them. The boneyard on Lemnos contained relics of at least a dozen different races. It flattered Muller’s ego to know that he alone, apparently, had reached the heart of the maze; but it did not cheer him to think of the diversity of peoples in the universe. He had already had his fill of galactics.

The inconsistency of finding the litter of bones within the maze did not strike him for several years. The mechanisms of the city, he knew, cleaned relentlessly, tidying up everything from particles of dust to the bones of the animals on whom he fed. Yet the skeletons of would-be invaders of the maze were allowed to remain where they lay. Why the violation of neatness? Why cart away the corpse of a dead elephant-like beast that had blundered into a power snare, and leave the remains of a dead dragon killed by the same snare? Because the dragon wore protective clothing, and so was sapient? Sapient corpses were deliberately allowed to remain, Muller realized.

As warnings. ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.

Those skeletons were part of the psychological warfare waged against all intruders by this mindless, deathless, diabolical city. They were reminders of the perils that lurked everywhere. How the guardian drew the subtle distinction between bodies that should be left in situ and those that should be swept away, Muller did not know; but he was convinced that the distinction was real.

He watched his screens. He eyed the tiny figures moving about the ship on the plain.

Let them come in, he thought. The city hasn’t had a victim in years. It’ll take care of them. I’m safe where I am.

And, he knew, that even if by some miracle they managed to reach him, they would not remain long. His own special malady would drive them away. They might be clever enough to defeat the maze, but they could not endure the affliction that made Richard Muller intolerable to his own species.

“Go away,” Muller said aloud.

He heard the whirr of rotors, and stepped from his dwelling to see a dark shadow traverse the plaza. They were scouting the maze from the air. Quickly he went indoors, then smiled at his own impulse to hide. They could detect him, of course, wherever he was. Their screens would tell them that a human being inhabited the labyrinth. And then, naturally, they would in their astonishment try to make contact with him although they would not be aware of his identity. After that—

Muller stiffened as a sudden overwhelming desire blazed through him. To have them come to him. To talk to men again. To break his isolation.

He wanted them here.

Only for an instant. After the momentary breakthrough of loneliness came the return of rationality—the chilling awareness of what it would be like to face his kind again. No, he thought. Keep out! Or die in the maze. Keep out. Keep out. Keep out.

2

“Right down there,” Boardman said. “That’s where he must be, eh, Ned? You can see the glow on the face of the tank. We’re picking up the right mass, the right density, the right everything. One live man, and it’s got to be Muller.”

“At the heart of the maze,” said Rawlins. “So he really did it!”

“Somehow.” Boardman peered into the viewing tank. From a height of a couple of kilometers the structure of the inner city was clear. He could make out eight distinct zones, each with its characteristic style of architecture; its plazas and promenades; its angling walls; its tangle of streets swirling in dizzyingly alien patterns. The zones were concentric, fanning out from a broad plaza at the heart of it all, and the scoutplane’s mass detector had located Muller in a row of low buildings just to the east of the plaza. What Boardman failed to make out was any obvious passage linking zone to zone. There was no shortage of blind alleys, but even from the air the true route was not apparent; what was it like trying to work inward on the ground?

It was all but impossible, Boardman knew. The master data banks in the ship held the accounts of those early explorers who had tried it and failed. Boardman had brought with him every scrap of information on the penetration of the maze, and none of it was very encouraging except the one puzzling but incontrovertible datum that Richard Muller had managed to get inside.

Rawlins said, “This is going to sound naive, I know, Charles.

But why don’t we just come down from here and land the scout-plane in the middle of that central plaza?”

“Let me show you,” said Boardman.

He spoke a command. A robot drone probe detached itself from the belly of the plane and streaked toward the city. Board-man and Rawlins followed the flight of the blunt gray metal projectile until it was only a few score meters above the tops of the buildings. Through its faceted eye they had a sharp view of the city, revealing the intricate texture of much of the stonework. Suddenly the drone probe vanished. There was a burst of incandescence, a puff of greenish smoke—and then nothing at all.

Boardman nodded. “Nothing’s changed. There’s still a protective field over the whole thing. It volatilizes anything that tries to get through.”

“So even a bird that comes too close—”

“There are no birds on Lemnos.”

“Raindrops, then. Whatever falls on the city—”

“Lemnos gets no rain,” said Boardman sourly. “At least not on this continent. The only thing that field keeps out is strangers. We’ve known it since the first expedition. Some brave men found out about that field the hard way.”

“Didn’t they try a drone probe first?”

Smiling, Boardman said, “When you find a dead city in the middle of a desert on a dead world you don’t expect to be blown up if you land inside it. It’s a forgivable sort of mistake—except that Lemnos doesn’t forgive mistakes.” He gestured, and the plane dropped lower, following the orbit of the outer walls for a moment. Then it rose and hovered over the heart of the city while photographs were being taken. The wrong-colored sunlight glistened off a hall of mirrors. Boardman felt curdled weariness in his chest. They overflew the city again and again, marking off a preprogrammed observation pattern, and he discovered he was wishing irritably that a shaft of sudden light would rise from those mirrors and incinerate them on the next pass to save him the trouble of carrying out this assignment. He had lost his taste for detail-work, and too many fine details stood between him and his purpose here. They said that impatience was a mark of youth, that old men could craftily spin their webs and plot their schemes in serenity, but somehow Boardman found himself longing rashly for a quick consummation to this job. Send some sort of drone scuttling through the maze on metal tracks to seize Muller and drag him out. Tell the man what was wanted of him and make him agree to do it. Then take off for Earth, quickly, quickly. The mood passed. Boardman felt foxy again.

Captain Hosteen, who would be conducting the actual entry attempt, came aft to pay his respects. Hosteen was a short, thick-framed man with a flat nose and coppery skin; he wore his uniform as though he felt it was all going to slip off his left shoulder at any moment. But he was a good man, Boardman knew, and ready to sacrifice a score of lives, including his own, to get into that maze.

Hosteen flicked a glance from the screen to Boardman’s face and said, “Learning anything?”

“Nothing new. We have a job.”

“Want to go down again?”

“Might as well,” Boardman said. He looked at Rawlins. “Unless you have anything else you’d like to check, Ned?”

“Me? Oh, no—no. That is—well, I wonder if we need to go into the maze at all. I mean, if we could lure Muller out somehow, talk to him outside the city—”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t it work?”

“No,” said Boardman emphatically. “Item one, Muller wouldn’t come out if we asked him. He’s a misanthrope. Remember? He buried himself here to get away from humanity. Why should he socialize with us? Item two, we couldn’t invite him outside without letting him know too much about what we want from him. In this deal, Ned, we need to hoard our resources of strategy, not toss them away in our first move.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

Patiently Boardman said, “Suppose we used your approach. What would you say to Muller to make him come out?”

“Why—that we’re here from Earth to ask him if he’ll help us in a time of system-wide crisis. That we’ve encountered a race of alien beings with whom we’re unable to communicate, and that it’s absolutely necessary that we break through to them in a hurry, and that he alone can do the trick. We—” Rawlins stopped, as though the fatuity of his own words had broken through to him. Color mounted in his cheeks. He said in a hoarse voice, “Muller isn’t going to give a damn for those arguments, is he?”

“No, Ned. Earth sent him before a bunch of aliens once before, and they ruined him. He isn’t about to try it again.”

“Then how are we going to make him help us?”

“By playing on his sense of honor. But at the moment that’s not the problem we’re talking about. We’re discussing how to get him out of his sanctuary in there. Now, you were suggesting that we set up a speaker and tell him exactly what we want from him, and then wait for him to waltz out and pledge to do his best for good old Earth. Right?”

“I guess so.”

“But it won’t work. Therefore we’ve got to get inside the maze ourselves, win Muller’s trust, and persuade him to cooperate. And to do that we have to keep quiet about the real situation until we’ve eased him out of his suspicions.”

A look of newborn wariness appeared on Rawlins’ face. “What are we going to tell him, then, Charles?”

“Not we. You.”

“What am I going to tell him, then?” Boardman sighed. “Lies, Ned. A pack of lies.”

3

They had come equipped for solving the problem of the maze. The ship’s brain, of course, was a first-class computer, and it carried the details of all previous Earth-based attempts to enter the city. Except one, and unfortunately that had been the only successful one. But records of past failures have their uses. The ship’s data banks had plenty of mobile extensions: airborne and groundborne drone probes, spy-eyes, sensor batteries, and more. Before any human life was risked on the maze Boardman and Hosteen would try the whole mechanical array. Mechanicals were expendable, anyway; the ship carried a set of templates, and it would be no trouble to replicate all devices destroyed. But a point would come at which the drone probes had to give way to men: the aim was to gather as much information as possible for those men to use.

Never before had anyone tried to crack the maze this way. The early explorers had simply gone walking in, unsuspecting, and had perished. Their successors had known enough of the story to avoid the more obvious traps, and to some extent had been aided by sophisticated sensory devices, but this was the first attempt to run a detailed survey before entering. No one was overly confident that the technique would let them in unscathed, but it was the best way to approach the problem.

The overflights on the first day had given everybody a good visual image of the maze. Strictly speaking, it hadn’t been necessary for them to leave the ground; they could have watched big-screen relays from the comfort of their camp and gained a decent idea of the conformation below, letting airborne probes do all the work. But Boardman had insisted. The mind registers things one way when it picks them off a relay screen, and another when the sensory impressions are flooding in straight from the source. Now they all had seen the city from the air, and had seen what the guardians of the maze could do to a drone probe that ventured into the protective field overlying the city.

Rawlins had suggested the possibility that there might be a null spot in that protective field. Toward late afternoon they checked it out by loading a probe with metal pellets and stationing it fifty meters above the highest point of the maze. Scanner eyes recorded the action as the drone slowly turned, spewing the pellets one at a time into preselected one-square-meter boxes above the city. Each in turn was incinerated as it fell. They were able to calculate that the thickness of the safety field varied with distance from the center of the maze; it was only about two meters deep above the inner zones, much deeper at the outer rim, forming an invisible cup over the city. But there were no null spots; the field was continuous. Hosteen tested the notion that the field was capable of overstrain by having the probe reloaded with pellets which were catapulted simultaneously into each of the test rectangles. The field dealt with them all, creating for a moment a single pucker of flame above the city.

At the expense of a few mole probes they found out that reaching the city through a tunnel was equally impossible. The moles burrowed into the coarse sandy soil outside the outer walls, chewed themselves passageways fifty meters down, and nosed upward again when they were beneath the maze. They were destroyed by the safety field while still twenty meters below ground level. A try at burrowing in right at the base of the embankments also failed; the field went straight down, apparently, all around the city.

A power technician offered to rig an interference pylon to drain the energy of the field. It didn’t work. The pylon, a hundred meters tall, sucked in power from all over the planet; blue lightning leaped and hissed along its accumulator bank, but it had no effect on the safety field. They reversed the pylon and sent a million kilowatts shooting into the city, hoping to short the field. The field drank everything and seemed ready for more. No one had any rational theory to explain the field’s power source. “It must tap the planet’s own energy of rotation,” the technician who had rigged the pylon said, and then, realizing he hadn’t contributed anything useful, he looked away and began to snap orders into the hand-mike he carried.

Three days of similar researches demonstrated that the city was invulnerable to intrusion from above or below.

“There’s only one way in,” said Hosteen, “and that’s on foot, through the main gate.”

“If the people in the city really wanted to be safe,” Rawlins asked, “why did they leave even a gate open?”

“Maybe they wanted to go in and out themselves, Ned,” said Boardman quietly. “Or maybe they wanted to give invaders a sporting chance. Hosteen, shall we send some probes inside?”

The morning was gray. Clouds the color of wood smoke stained the sky; it looked almost as if rain were on the way. A harsh wind knifed the soil from the plain and sent it slicing into their faces. Behind the veil of clouds lay the sun, a flat orange disk that seemed to have been pasted into the sky. It seemed only slightly larger than Sol as seen from Earth, though it was less than half as distant. Lemnos’ sun was a gloomy M dwarf, cool and weary, an old star circled by a dozen old planets. Lemnos, the innermost, was the only one that had ever sustained life; the others were frigid and dead, beyond the range of the sun’s feeble rays, frozen from core to atmosphere. It was a sleepy system with so little angular momentum that even the innermost planet dawdled along in a thirty-month orbit; the three zippy moons of Lemnos, darting on crisscrossing tracks a few thousand kilometers overhead, were flagrantly out of keeping with the prevailing mood of these worlds.

Ned Rawlins felt a chill at his heart as he stood beside the data terminal a thousand meters from the outer embankment of the maze, watching his shipmates marshalling their probes and instruments. Not even dead pockmarked Mars had depressed him like this, for Mars was a world that had never lived at all, while here life had been and had moved onward. This world was a house of the dead. In Thebes, once, he had entered the tomb of Pharaoh’s vizier, five thousand years gone, and while the others in his group had eyed the gay murals with their glowing scenes of white-garbed figures punting on the Nile, he had looked toward the cool stone floor where a dead beetle lay, clawed feet upraised on a tiny mound of dust. For him Egypt would always be that stiffened beetle in the dust; for him Lemnos was likely to be autumn winds and scoured plains and a silent city. He wondered how anyone as gifted, as full of life and energy and human warmth as Dick Muller, could ever have been willing to maroon himself inside that dismal maze.

Then he remembered what had happened to Muller on Beta Hydri IV, and conceded that even a man like Muller might very well have good reasons for coming to rest on a world like this, in a city like this. Lemnos offered the perfect escape: an Earthlike world, uninhabited, where he was almost guaranteed freedom from human company. And we’re here to flush him out and drag him away. Rawlins scowled. Dirty dirty dirty, he thought. The old thing about the ends and the means. Across the way Rawlins could see the blocky figure of Charles Boardman standing in front of the big data terminal, waving his arms this way and that to direct the men fanning out near the walls of the city. He began to understand that he had let Boardman dragoon him into a nasty adventure. The glib old devil hadn’t gone into details, back on Earth, about the exact methods by which they were going to win Muller’s cooperation. Boardman had made it sound like some kind of shining crusade. Instead it was going to be a dirty trick. Boardman never went into the details of anything before he had to, as Rawlins was beginning to see. Rule one: hoard your resources of strategy. Never tip your hand. And so here I am, part of the conspiracy.

Hosteen and Boardman had deployed a dozen drones at the various entrances to the inner part of the maze. It was already clear that the only safe way into the city was through the northeastern gate; but they had drones to spare, and they wanted all the data they could gather. The terminal Rawlins was watching flashed a partial diagram of the maze on the screen—the section immediately in front of him—and gave him a good long time to study its loops and coils, its zigzags and twists. It was his special responsibility to follow the progress of the drone through this sector. Each of the other drones was being monitored both by computer and by human observer, while Boardman and Hosteen were at the master terminal watching the progress of the entire operation all at once.

“Send them in,” Boardman said.

Hosteen gave the command, and the drones rolled forward through the city’s gates. Looking now through the eyes of the squat mobile probe, Rawlins got his first view of what lay in Zone H of the maze. He saw a scalloped wall of what looked like puckered blue porcelain undulating away to the left, and a barrier of metallic threads dangling from a thick stone slab to the other side. The drone skirted the threads, which tinkled and quivered in delicate response to the disturbance of the thin air; it moved to the base of the porcelain wall, and followed it at an inward-sloping angle for perhaps twenty meters. There the wall curved abruptly back on itself, forming a sort of chamber open at the top. The last time anyone had entered the maze this way—on the fourth expedition—two men had passed that open chamber; one had remained outside and was destroyed, the other had gone inside and was spared. The drone entered the chamber. A moment later a beam of pure red light lanced from the center of a mosaic decoration on the wall and swept over the area immediately outside the chamber.

Boardman’s voice came to Rawlins through the speaker taped to his ear. “We lost four of the probes the moment they went through their gates. That’s exactly as expected. How’s yours doing?”

“Following the plan,” said Rawlins. “So far, it’s okay.”

“You ought to lose it within six minutes of entry. What’s your elapsed time now?”

“Two minutes fifteen.”

The drone was out of the chamber now and shuttling quickly through the place where the light-beam had flashed. Rawlins keyed in olfactory and got the smell of scorched air, lots of ozone. The path divided ahead. To one side was a single-span bridge of stone, arching over what looked like a pit of flame; to the other was a jumbled pile of cyclopean blocks resting precariously edge to edge. The bridge seemed far more inviting, but the drone immediately turned away from it and began to pick its way over the jumbled blocks. Rawlins asked it why, and it relayed the information that the “bridge” wasn’t there at all; it was a projection beamed from scanners mounted beneath the facing piers. Requesting a simulation of an approach anyway, Rawlins got a picture of the probe walking out onto the pier and stepping unsuspectingly through the solid-looking bridge to lose its balance; and as the simulated probe struggled to regain its equilibrium, the pier tipped forward and shucked it into the fiery pit. Cute, Rawlins thought, and shuddered.

Meanwhile the real probe had clambered over the blocks and was coming down the other side, unharmed. Three minutes and eight seconds had gone by. A stretch of straight road here turned out to be as safe as it looked. It was flanked on both sides by windowless towers a hundred meters high, made of some iridescent mineral, sleek and oily-surfaced, that flashed shimmering moiré patterns as the drone hurried along. At the beginning of the fourth minute the probe skirted bright grillwork like interlocking teeth, and sidestepped an umbrella-shaped piledriver that descended with crushing force. Eighty seconds later it stepped around a tilt-block that opened into a yawning abyss, deftly eluded a quintet of tetrahedal blades that sheared upward out of the pavement, and emerged onto a sliding walkway that carried it quickly forward for exactly forty seconds more.

All this had been traversed long ago by a Terran explorer named Cartissant, since deceased. He had dictated a detailed record of his experiences within the maze. He had lasted five minutes and thirty seconds, and his mistake had come in not getting off the walkway by the forty-first second. Those who had been monitoring him outside, back then, could not say what had happened to him after that.

As his drone left the walkway, Rawlins asked for another simulation and saw a quick dramatization of the computer’s best guess: the walkway opened to engulf its passenger at that point. The probe, meanwhile, was going swiftly toward what looked like the exit from this outermost zone of the maze. Beyond lay a well-lit, cheerful-looking plaza ringed with drifting blobs of a pearly glowing substance.

Rawlins said, “I’m into the seventh minute, and we’re still going, Charles. There seems to be a door into Zone G just ahead. Maybe you ought to cut in and monitor my screen.”

“If you last two more minutes, I will,” Boardman said.

The probe paused just outside the inner gate. Warily it switched on its gravitron and accumulated a ball of energy with a mass equivalent to its own. It thrust the energy ball through the doorway. Nothing happened. The probe, satisfied, trundled toward the door itself. As it passed through, the sides of the door abruptly crashed together like the jaws of a mighty press, destroying the probe. Rawlins’ screen went dark. Quickly he cut in one of the overhead probes; it beamed him a shot of his probe lying on the far side of the door, flattened into a two-dimensional mock-up of itself. A human being caught in that same trap would have been crushed to powder, Rawlins realized.

“My probe’s been knocked out,” he reported to Boardman. “Six minutes and forty seconds.”

“As expected,” came the reply. “We’ve got only two probes left. Switch over and watch.”

The master diagram appeared on Rawlins’ screen: a simplified and stylized light-pen picture of the entire maze as viewed from above. A small X had been placed wherever a probe had been destroyed. Rawlins found, after some searching, the path his own drone had taken, with the X marked between the zone boundaries at the place of the clashing door. It seemed to him that the drone had penetrated farther than most of the others, but he had to smile at the childish pride the discovery brought him. Anyhow, two of the probes were still moving inward. One was actually inside the second zone of the maze, and the other was cruising through a passageway that gave access to that inner ring.

The diagram vanished and Rawlins saw the maze as it looked through the pickup of one of the drones. Almost daintily, the man-high pillar of metal made its way through the baroque intricacies of the maze, past a golden pillar that beamed a twanging melody in a strange key, past a pool of light, past a web of glittering metal spokes, past spiky heaps of bleached bones. Rawlins had only glancing views of the bones as the drone moved on, but he was sure that few were human relics. This place was a galactic graveyard for the bold.

Excitement built in him as the probe went on and on. He was so thoroughly wedded to it now that it was as if he were inside the maze, avoiding one deathtrap after another, and he felt a sense of triumph as minutes mounted. Fourteen had elapsed now. This second level of the maze was not so cluttered as the first; there were spacious avenues here, handsome colonnades, long radiating passages leading from the main path. He relaxed; he felt pride in the drone’s agility and in the keenness of its sensory devices. The shock was immense and stinging when a paving-block upended itself unexpectedly and dumped the probe down a long chute to a place where the gears of a giant mill turned eagerly.

They had not expected that probe to get so far, anyway. The probe the others were watching was the one that had come in via the main gate—the safe gate. The slim fund of information accumulated at the price of many lives had guided that probe past all its perils, and now it was well within Zone G, and almost to the edge of F. Thus far, everything had gone as expected; the drone’s experiences had matched those of them who had tackled this route on earlier expeditions. It followed their way exactly, turning here, dodging there, and it was eighteen minutes into the maze without incident.

“All right,” Boardman said. “This is where Mortenson died, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Hosteen answered. “The last thing he said was that he was standing by that little pyramid, and then he was cut off.”

“This is where we start gaining new information, then. All we’ve learned so far is that our records are accurate. This is the way in. But from here on—”

The probe, lacking a guidance pattern, now moved much more slowly, hesitating at every step to extend its network of data-gathering devices in all directions. It looked for hidden doors, for concealed openings in the pavement, for projectors, lasers, mass-detectors, power sources. It fed back to the central data banks all that it learned, thus adding to the store of information with each centimeter conquered.

It conquered, altogether, twenty-three meters. As the probe passed the small pyramid it scanned the broken body of the explorer Mortenson, lost at this point 72 years earlier. It relayed the news that Mortenson had been seized by a pressure-sensitive mangle activated by an unwary footstep too close to the pyramid. Beyond, it avoided two minor traps before failing to safeguard itself from a distortion, screen that baffled its sensors and left it vulnerable to the descent of a pulverizing piston.

“The next one through will have to cut off all its inputs until it’s past that point,” Hosteen muttered. “Running through blindfolded —well, we’ll manage.”

“Maybe a man would do better than a machine there,” said Boardman. “We don’t know if that screen would muddle a man the way it did a batch of sensors.”

“We’re not yet ready to run a man in there,” Hosteen pointed out.

Boardman agreed—none too graciously, Rawlins thought, listening to the interchange. The screen brightened again; a new drone probe was coming through. Hosteen had ordered a second wave of the machines to pick through the labyrinth, following what was now known to be the one safe access route, and several of them were at the eighteen-minute point where the deadly pyramid was located. Hosteen sent one ahead, and posted the others to keep watch. The lead probe came within range of the distortion screen and cut out its sensors; it heaved tipsily for a moment, lacking any way to get its bearings, but in a moment it was stable. It was deprived now of contact with its surroundings, and so it paid no heed to the siren song of the distortion screen, which had misled its predecessor into coming within range of the pulverizing piston. The phalanx of drones watching the scene was all outside the reach of the distorter’s mischief, and fed a clear, true picture to the computer, which matched it with the fatal path of the last probe and plotted a route that skirted the dangerous piston. Moments later the blind probe began to move, guided now by inner impulses. Lacking all environmental feedback it was entirely a captive of the computer, which nudged it along in a series of tiny prods until it was safely around the hazard. On the far side, the sensors were switched on again. To check the procedure, Hosteen sent a second drone through, likewise blinded and moving entirely on internal guidance. It made it. Then he tried a third probe with its sensors on and under the influence of the distortion screen. The computer attempted to direct it along the safe path, but the probe, bedeviled by the faulty information coming through the distorter, tugged itself furiously to the side and was smashed.

“All right,” Hosteen said. “If we can get a machine past it, we can get a man past it. He closes his eyes, and the computer calculates his motions step by step. We’ll manage.”

The lead probe began to move again. It got seventeen meters past the place of the distorter before it was nailed by a silvery grillwork that abruptly thrust up a pair of electrodes and cut loose with a bath of flame. Rawlins watched bleakly as the next probe avoided that obstacle and shortly fell victim to another. Plenty of probes waited patiently for their turn to press forward.

And soon men will be going in there too, Rawlins thought. We’ll be going in there.

He shut off his data terminal and walked across to Boardman.

“How does it look so far?” he asked.

“Rough, but not impossible,” Boardman said. “It can’t be this tough all the way in.”

“And if it is?”

“We won’t run out of probes. We’ll chart the whole maze until we know where all the danger points are, and then we’ll start trying it ourselves.”

Rawlins said, “Are you going to go in there, Charles?”

“Of course. So are you.”

“With what odds on coming out?”

“Good ones,” said Boardman. “Otherwise I doubt that I’d tackle it. Oh, it’s a dangerous trip, Ned, but don’t overestimate it. We’ve just begun to test that maze. We’ll know it well enough in a few days more.”

Rawlins considered that a moment. “Muller didn’t have any probes,” he said finally. “How did he survive that stuff?”

“I’m not sure,” Boardman murmured. “I suppose he’s just a naturally lucky man.”