have any plan yet. It all depends on you. We don’t want to impose on you. So if you don’t want us to work here —”
“I don’t,” Muller told him crisply. “Tell that to your friends. In fifty or sixty years I’ll be dead, and they can sniff around here then. But while I’m here I don’t want them bothering me. Let them work in the outer four or five zones. If any of them sets foot in A, B, or C, I’ll kill him. I can do that, Ned.”
“What about me—am I welcome?”
“Occasionally. I can’t predict my moods. If you want to talk to me, come around and see. And if I tell you to get the hell out, Ned, then get the hell out. Clear?”
Rawlins grinned sunnily. “Clear.” He got to his feet. Muller, unwilling to have the boy standing over him, rose also. Rawlins took a few steps toward him.
Muller said, “Where are you going?”
“I hate having to talk at this distance, to shout like this. I can get a little closer to you, can’t I?”
Instantly suspicious, Muller replied, “Are you some kind of masochist?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Well, I’m no sadist either. I don’t want you near me.”
“It’s really not that unpleasant—Dick.”
“You’re lying. You hate it like all the others. I’m like a leper, boy, and if you’re queer for leprosy I feel sorry for you, but don’t come any closer. It embarrasses me to see other people suffer on my account.”
Rawlins stopped. “Whatever you say. Look, Dick, I don’t want to cause troubles for you. I’m just trying to be friendly and helpful. If doing that in some way makes you uncomfortable—well, just say so, and I’ll do something else. It doesn’t do me any good to make things worse for you.”
“That came out pretty muddled, boy. What is it you want from me, anyhow?”
“Nothing.”
“Why not leave me alone?”
“You’re a human being, and you’ve been alone here for a long time. It’s my natural impulse to offer companionship. Does that sound too dumb?”
Muller shrugged. “I’m not much of a companion. Maybe you ought to take all your sweet Christian impulses and go away. There’s no way you can help me, Ned. You can only hurt me by reminding me of all I can no longer have or know.” Stiffening, Muller looked past the tall young man toward the shadowy figures cavorting along the walls. He was hungry, and this was the hour to begin hunting for his dinner. He said brusquely, “Son, I think my patience is running out again. Time for you to leave.”
“All right. Can I come back tomorrow, though?”
“Maybe. Maybe.”
The boy smiled ingenuously. “Thanks for letting me talk to you, Dick. I’ll be back.”
4
By troublesome moonlight Rawlins made his way out of Zone A. The voice of the ship’s brain guided him back over the path he had taken inward, and now and then, in the safest spots, Boardman used the override. “You’ve made a good start,” Boardman said. “It’s a plus that he tolerated you at all. How do you feel?”
“Lousy, Charles.”
“Because of the close contact with him?”
“Because I’m doing something filthy.”
“Stop that, Ned. If I’m going to have to pump you full of moral reassurance every time you set out—”
“I’ll do my job,” said Rawlins, “but I don’t have to like it.” He edged over a spring-loaded stone block that was capable of hurling him from a precipice if he applied his weight the wrong way. A small toothy animal snickered at him as he crossed. On the far side, Rawlins prodded the wall in a yielding place and won admission to Zone B. He glanced at the lintel and saw the recessed slot of the visual pickup and smiled into it, just in case Muller was watching him withdraw.
He saw now why Muller had chosen to maroon himself here. Under similar circumstances he might have done the same thing. Or worse. Muller carried, thanks to the Hydrans, a deformity of the soul in an era when deformity was obsolete. It was an esthetic crime to lack a limb or an eye or a nose; these things were easily repaired, and one owed it to one’s fellow man to get a shape-up and obliterate troublesome imperfections. To inflict one’s flaws on society was clearly an antisocial act.
But no shape-up surgeon could do a cosmetic job on what Muller had. The only cure was separation from society. A weaker man would have chosen death: Muller had picked exile.
Rawlins still throbbed with the impact of that brief moment of direct contact. For an instant he had received from Muller a formless incoherent emanation of raw emotion, the inner self spilling out involuntarily and wordlessly. The flow of uncontrollable innerness was painful and depressing to receive.
It was not true telepathy that the Hydrans had given him. Muller could not “read” minds, nor could he communicate his thoughts to others. What came forth was this gush of self: a torrent of raw despair, a river of regrets and sorrows, all the sewage of a soul. He could not hold it back. For that eternal moment Rawlins had been bathed in it; the rest of the time he had merely picked up a vague and general sense of distress.
He could generate his own concretenesses out of that raw flow. Muller’s sorrows were not unique to himself; what he offered was nothing more than an awareness of the punishments the universe devises for its inhabitants. At that moment Rawlins had felt that he was tuned to every discord in creation: the missed chances, the failed loves, the hasty words, the unfair griefs, the hungers, the greeds, the lusts, the knife of envy, the acid of frustration, the fang of time, the death of small insects in winter, the tears of things. He had known aging, loss, impotence, fury, helplessness, loneliness, desolation, self-contempt, and madness. It was a silent shriek of cosmic anger.
Are we all like that? He wondered. Is the same broadcast coming from me, and from Boardman, and from my mother, and from the girl I used to love? Do we walk about like beacons fixed to a frequency we can’t receive? Thank God, then. That’s a song too painful to hear.
Boardman said, “Wake up, Ned. Stop brooding and watch out for trouble. You’re almost in Zone C now.”
“Charles, how did you feel the first time you came close to Muller?”
“We’ll discuss that later.”
“Did you feel as if you knew what human beings were all about for the first time?”
“I said we’ll discuss—”
“Let me say what I want to say, Charles. I’m not in any danger here. I just looked into a man’s soul, and I’m shaken by it. But— listen, Charles—he isn’t really like that. He’s a
“I’m sorry, Charles.”
“Get back to camp. We all agree that Dick Muller’s a fine human being. That’s why we need him. We need you, too, so shut your mouth and watch your step. Easy, now. Calm. Calm. Calm. What’s that animal on your left? Hurry along, Ned. But stay calm. That’s the way, son. Calm.”
EIGHT
