The Man In The Maze

1

“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.

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 Chesterfield 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 company. 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.”

“A stungun,” said Rawlins. “I could do it, even. Just get within range and gun him down, and then we carry him out of the maze, and when he wakes up we explain—”

Boardman vehemently shook his head. “He’s had nine years to figure out that maze. We don’t know what tricks he’s learned or what defensive traps he’s planted. While he’s in there I don’t dare take any kind of offensive action against him. He’s too valuable to risk. For all we know he’s programmed the whole place to blow up if someone pulls a gun on him. He’s got to come out of that labyrinth of his own free will, Ned, and that means we have to trick him with false promises. I know it stinks. The whole universe stinks, sometimes. Haven’t you discovered that yet?”

“It doesn’t have to stink!” Rawlins said sharply, his voice rising. “Is that the lesson you’ve learned in all those years? The universe doesn’t stink. Man stinks! And he does it by voluntary choice because he’d rather stink than smell sweet! We don’t have to lie. We don’t have to cheat. We could opt for honor and decency and—” Rawlins stopped abruptly. In a different tone he said, “I sound young as hell to you, don’t I, Charles?”

“You’re entitled to make mistakes,” Boardman said. “That’s what being young is for.”

“You genuinely believe and know that there’s a cosmic malevolence in the workings of the universe?”

Boardman touched the tips of his thick, short fingers together. “I wouldn’t put it that way. There’s no personal power of darkness running things, any more than there’s a personal power of good. The universe is a big impersonal machine. As it functions it tends to put stress on some of its minor parts, and those parts wear out, and the universe doesn’t give a damn about that, because it can generate replacements. There’s nothing immoral about wearing out parts, but you have to admit that from the point of view of the part under stress it’s a stinking deal. It happened that two small parts of the universe clashed when we dropped Dick Muller onto the planet of the Hydrans. We had to put him there because it’s our nature to find out things, and they did what they did to him because the universe puts stress on its parts, and the result was that Dick Muller came away from Beta Hydri IV in bad shape. He was drawn into the machinery of the universe and got ground up. Now we’re having a second clash of parts, equally inevitable, and we have to feed Muller through the machine a second time. He’s likely to be chewed again—which stinks—and in order to push him into a position where that can happen, you and I have to stain our souls a little—which also stinks—and yet we have absolutely no choice in the matter. If we don’t compromise ourselves and trick Dick Muller, we may be setting in motion a new spin of the machine that will destroy all of humanity—and that would stink even worse. I’m asking you to do an unpleasant thing for a decent motive. You don’t want to do it, and I understand how you feel, but I’m trying to get you to see that your personal moral code isn’t always the highest factor. In wartime, a soldier shoots to kill because the universe imposes that situation on him. It may be an unjust war, and that might be his brother in the ship he’s aiming at, but the war is real and he has his role.”

“Where’s the room for free will in this mechanical universe of yours, Charles?”

“There isn’t any. That’s why I say the universe stinks.”

“We have no freedom at all?”

“The freedom to wriggle a little on the hook.”

“Have you felt this way ail your life?”

“Most of it,” Boardman said.

“When you were my age?”

“Even earlier.”

Rawlins looked away. “I think you’re all wrong, but I’m not going to waste breath trying to tell you so. I don’t have the words. I don’t have the arguments. And you wouldn’t listen anyway.”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t, Ned. But we can discuss this some other time. Say, twenty years from now. Is it a date?”

Trying to grin, Rawlins said, “Sure. If I haven’t killed myself from guilt over this.”

“You won’t.”

“How am I supposed to live with myself after I’ve pulled Dick Muller out of his shell?”

“Wait and see. You’ll discover that you did the right thing, in context. Or the least wrong thing, anyhow. Believe me, Ned. Just now you may feel that your soul will forever be corroded by this job, but it won’t happen that way.”

“We’ll see,” said Rawlins quietly. Boardman seemed more slippery than ever when he was in this avuncular mood. To die in the maze, Rawlins thought, was the only way to avoid getting trapped in these moral ambiguities; and the moment he hatched the thought, he abolished it in horror. He stared at the screen. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “I’m tired of waiting.”