closest friends. Boardman was counting on that connection to carry them a good distance in the delicate transactions ahead.
Rawlins said, “Are you uncomfortable, Charles?”
“I’ll live. We’ll be down soon.”
“The landing seems so slow, doesn’t it?”
“Another minute now,” Boardman said.
The boy’s face looked scarcely stretched by the forces acting upon them. His left cheek was drawn down slightly, that was all. It was weird to see the semblance of a sneer on that shining visage.
“Here we come now,” Boardman muttered, and closed his eyes again.
The ship closed the last gap between itself and the ground. The expellers cut out; the deceleration tubes snarled their last. There was the final awkward moment of uncertainty, then steadiness, the landing jacks gripping firmly, the roar of landing silenced. We are here, Boardman thought. Now for the maze. Now for Mr. Richard Muller. Now to see if he’s become any less horrible in the past nine years. Maybe he’s just like everyone else, by now. If he is, Boardman told himself, God help us all.
3
Ned Rawlins had not traveled much. He had visited only five worlds, and three of them were in the mother system. When he was ten, his father had taken him on a summer tour of Mars. Two years later he had seen Venus and Mercury. As his graduation present at sixteen he had gone extrasolar as far as Alpha Centauri IV, and three years after that he had made the melancholy trip to the Rigel system to bring home his father’s body after the accident.
It wasn’t much of a travel record at a time when the warp drive made getting from one cluster to another not much more difficult than going from Europe to Australia, Rawlins knew. But he had time to do his jaunting later on, when he began getting his diplomatic assignments. To hear Charles Boardman tell it, the joys of travel palled pretty fast, anyway, and running around the universe became just another chore. Rawlins made allowances for the jaded attitude of a man nearly four times his own age, but he suspected that Boardman was telling the truth.
Let the jadedness come. Right now Ned Rawlins was walking an alien world for the sixth time in his life, and he loved it. The ship was docked on the big plain that surrounded Muller’s maze; the outer embankments of the maze itself lay a hundred kilometers to the southeast. It was the middle of the night on this side of Lemnos. The planet had a thirty-hour day and a twenty-month year; it was early autumn in this hemisphere, and the air was chilly. Rawlins stepped away from the ship. The crewmen were unloading the extruders that would build their camp. Charles Boardman stood to one side, wrapped in a thick fur garment and buried in an introspective mood so deep that Rawlins did not dare go near him. Rawlins’ attitude toward Boardman was one of mingled awe and terror. He knew that the man was a cynical old bastard, but despite that it was impossible to feel anything but admiration for him. Boardman, Rawlins knew, was an authentic great man. He hadn’t met many. His own father had been one, perhaps. Dick Muller had been another; but of course Rawlins hadn’t been much more than twelve years old when Muller got into the hideous mess that had shattered his life. Well, to have known three such men in one short lifetime was a privilege indeed, Rawlins told himself. He wished that his own career would turn out half as impressively as Boardman’s had. Of course he didn’t have Board-man’s foxiness, and hoped he never would. But he had other characteristics—a nobility of soul, in a way—which Boardman lacked. I can be of service in my own style, Rawlins thought, and then wondered if that was a naive hope.
He filled his lungs with alien air. He stared at a sky swarming with strange stars, and looked futilely for some familiar pattern. A frosty wind ripped across the plain. This planet seemed forlorn, desolate, empty. He had read about Lemnos in school: one of the abandoned ancient planets of an unknown alien race, lifeless for a thousand centuries. Nothing remained of its people except fossilized bones and shreds of artifacts—and the maze. Their deadly labyrinth ringed a city of the dead that seemed almost untouched by time.
Archaeologists had scanned the city from the air, probing it with sensors and curdling in frustration, unable to enter it safely. The first dozen expeditions to Lemnos had failed to find a way into the maze; every man who entered had perished, a victim of the hidden traps so cleverly planted in the outer zones. The last attempt to get inside had been made some fifty years ago. Then Richard Muller had come here, looking for a place to hide from mankind, and somehow he had found the route.
Rawlins wondered if they would succeed in making contact with Muller. He wondered, too, how many of the men he had journeyed with would die before they got into the maze. He did not consider the possibility of his own death. At his age, death was still something that happened to other people. But some of the men now working to set up their camp would be dead in a few days.
While he thought about that an animal appeared, padding out from behind a sandy hummock a short distance from him. Rawlins regarded the alien beast curiously. It looked a little like a big cat, but its claws did not retract and its mouth was full of greenish fangs. Luminous stripes gave its lean sides a gaudy hue. Rawlins could not see what use such a glowing hide would be to a predator, unless it used the radiance as a kind of bait.
The animal came within a dozen meters of Rawlins, peered at him without any sign of real interest, then turned gracefully and trotted toward the ship. The combination of strange beauty, power, and menace that the animal presented was an attractive one.
It was approaching Boardman now. And Boardman was drawing a weapon.
“No!” Rawlins found himself yelling. “Don’t kill it, Charles! It only wants to look at us—!” Boardman fired.
The animal leaped, convulsed in mid-air, and fell back with its limbs outspread. Rawlins rushed up, numb with shock. There hadn’t been any need for the killing, he thought. The beast was just scouting us out. What a filthy thing to do!
He blurted angrily, “Couldn’t you have waited a minute, Charles? Maybe it would have gone away by itself! Why—”
Boardman smiled. He beckoned to a crewman, who squirted a spray net over the fallen animal. The beast stirred groggily as the crewman hauled it toward the ship. Softly Boardman said, “All I did was stun it, Ned. We’re going to write off part of the budget for this trip against the account of the federal zoo. Did you think I was all that triggerhappy?”
Rawlins suddenly felt very small and foolish. “Well—not really. That is—”
“Forget it. No, don’t forget it. Don’t forget anything. Take a lesson from it: collect all the data before shouting nonsense.”
“But if I had waited, and you really had killed it—”
“Then you’d have learned something ugly about me at the expense of one animal life. You’d have the useful fact that I’m provoked to murderousness by anything strange with sharp teeth. Instead all you did was make a loud noise. If I had meant to kill, your shout wouldn’t have changed my intention. It might have ruined my aim, that’s all, and left me at the mercy of an angry wounded beast. So bide your time, Ned. Evaluate. It’s better sometimes to let a thing happen than to play your own hand too quickly.” Boardman winked. “Am I offending you, Ned? Making you feel like an idiot with my little lecture?”
“Of course not, Charles. I wouldn’t pretend that I don’t have plenty to learn.”
“And you’re willing to learn it from me, even if I’m an infuriating old scoundrel?”
“Charles, I—”
“I’m sorry, Ned. I shouldn’t be teasing you. You were right to try to stop me from killing that animal. It wasn’t your fault that you misunderstood what I was doing. In your place I’d have acted just the way you did.”
“You mean I shouldn’t have bided my time and collected all the data when you pulled the stungun?” Rawlins asked, baffled.
“Probably not.”
“You’re contradicting yourself, Charles.”
“It’s my privilege to be inconsistent,” Boardman said. “My stock in trade, even.” He laughed heartily. “Get a good night’s sleep tonight. Tomorrow we’ll fly over the maze and map it a little, and then we’ll start sending men
