The Man In The Maze

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