The Man In The Maze

some underground aquifer, maybe a thousand kilometers down, I don’t know. This planet doesn’t have any surface water, does it?”

“It has oceans.”

“Aside from—well, whatever. Over here, you see, here’s one of the spigots. Every fifty meters. As far as I can tell it’s the water supply for the entire city, right here, so perhaps the builders didn’t need much water. It couldn’t have been very important if they set things up like this. No conduits that I’ve found. No real plumbing. Thirsty?”

“Not really.”

Muller cupped his hand under the ornately engraved spigot, a thing of concentric ridges. Water gushed. Muller took a few quick gulps; the flow ceased the moment the hand was removed from the area below the spigot. A scanning system of some kind, Rawlings thought. Clever. How had it lasted all these millions of years?

“Drink,” Muller said. “You may get thirsty later on.”

“I can’t stay long.” But he drank anyway. Afterward they walked into Zone A, an easy stroll. The cages had closed again; Rawlins saw several of them, and shuddered. He would try no such experiments today. They found benches, slabs of polished stone that curled at the ends into facing seats intended for some species very much broader in the buttock than the usual H. sapiens. Sitting like this they could talk at a distance, Rawlings feeling only mild discomfort from Muller’s emanation, and yet there was no sensation of separation.

Muller was in a talkative mood.

The conversation was fitful, dissolving every now and then into an acid spray of anger or self-pity, but most of the time Muller remained calm and even charming—an older man clearly enjoying the company of a younger one, the two of them exchanging opinions, experiences, scraps of philosophy. Muller spoke a good deal about his early career, the planets he had seen, the delicate negotiations on behalf of Earth with the frequently prickly colony-worlds. He mentioned Boardman’s name quite often; Rawlins kept his face studiously blank. Muller’s attitude toward Boardman seemed to be one of deep admiration shot through with furious loathing. He could not forgive Boardman, apparently, for having played on his own weaknesses in getting him to go to the Hydrans. Not a rational attitude, Rawlins thought. Given Muller’s trait of overweening curiosity, he would have fought for that assignment, Boardman or no, risks or no.

“And what about you?” Muller asked finally. “You’re brighter than you pretend to be. Hampered a little by your shyness, but plenty of brains, carefully hidden behind college-boy virtues. What do you want for yourself, Ned? What does archaeology give you?”

Rawlins looked him straight in the eyes. “A chance to recapture a million pasts. I’m as greedy as you are. I want to know how things happened, how they got this way. Not just on Earth or in the System. Everywhere.”

“Well spoken!”

I thought so too, Rawlins thought, hoping Boardman was pleased by his newfound eloquence.

He said, “I suppose I could have gone in for diplomatic service, the way you did. Instead I chose this. I think it’ll work out. There’s so much to discover, here and everywhere else. We’ve only begun to look.”

“The ring of dedication is in your voice.”

“I suppose.”

“I like to hear that sound. It reminds me of the way I used to talk.”

Rawlins said, “Just so you don’t think I’m hopelessly pure I ought to say that it’s personal curiosity that moves me on, more than abstract love of knowledge.”

“Understandable. Forgivable. We’re not too different, really. Allowing for forty-odd years between us. Don’t worry so much about your motives, Ned. Go to the stars, see, do. Enjoy. Eventually life will smash you, the way it’s smashed me, but that’s far off. Sometime, never, who knows? Forget about that.”

“I’ll try,” Rawlins said.

He felt the warmth of the man now, the reaching out of genuine sympathies. There was still that carrier wave of nightmare, though, the unending broadcast out of the mucky depths of the soul, attenuated at this distance but unmistakable. Imprisoned by his pity, Rawlins hesitated to say what it now was time to say. Boardman prodded him irritably. “Go on, boy! Slip it in!”

“You look very far away,” Muller said.

“Just thinking how—how sad it is that you won’t trust us at all, that you have such a negative attitude toward humanity.”

“I come by it honestly.”

“You don’t need to spend the rest of your life in this maze, though. There’s a way out.”

“Garbage.”

“Listen to me,” Rawlins said. He took a deep breath and flashed his quick, transparent grin. “I talked about your case to our expedition medic. He’s studied neurosurgery. He knew all about you. He says there’s now a way to fix what you have. Recently developed, the last couple of years. It—shuts off the broadcast, Dick. He said I should tell you. We’ll take you back to Earth. For the operation, Dick. The operation. The cure.”

2

The sharp glittering barbed word came swimming along on the breast of a torrent of bland sounds and speared him in the gut. Cure! He stared. There was reverberation from the looming dark buildings. Cure. Cure. Cure. Muller felt the poisonous temptation gnawing at his liver. “No,” he said. “That’s garbage. A cure’s impossible.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I know.”

“Science progresses in nine years. They understand how the brain works, now. Its electrical nature. What they did, they built a tremendous simulation in one of the lunar labs—oh, a few years ago, and they ran it all through from start to finish. As a matter of fact I’m sure they’re desperate to have you back, because you prove all their theories. In your present condition. And by operating on you, reversing your broadcast, they’ll demonstrate that they were right. All you have to do is come back with us.”

Muller methodically popped his knuckles. “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”

“I didn’t know a thing about it.”

“Of course.”

“Really. We didn’t expect to be finding you here, you realize. At first nobody was too sure who you were, why you were here. I explained it. And then the medic remembered that there was this treatment. What’s wrong —don’t you believe me?”

“You look so angelic,” Muller said. “Those sweet blue eyes and that golden hair. What’s your game, Ned? Why are you reeling off all this nonsense?”

Rawlins reddened. “It isn’t nonsense!”

“I don’t believe you. And I don’t believe in your cure.”

“It’s your privilege. But you’ll be the loser if—”

“Don’t threaten me!”

“I’m sorry.”

There was a long, sticky silence.

Muller revolved a maze of thoughts. To leave Lemnos? To have the curse lifted? To hold a woman in his arms again? Breasts like fire against his skin? Lips? Thighs? To rebuild his career. To reach across the heavens once more? To shuck nine years of anguish? To believe? To go? To submit?

“No,” he said carefully. “There is no cure for what I have.”

“You keep saying that. But you can’t know.”

“It doesn’t fit the pattern. I believe in destiny, boy. In compensating tragedy. In the overthrow of the proud. The gods don’t deal out temporary tragedies. They don’t take back their punishments after a few years. Oedipus didn’t get his eyes back. Or his mother. They didn’t let Prometheus off his rock. They—”

“You aren’t living a Greek play,” Rawlins told him. “This is the real world. The patterns don’t always fall