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.”
