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
“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
