The Man In The Maze

“For always,” she said.

“Yes. For always.”

Before the week ended they quarreled bitterly. But it was only a game; for the more fiercely they quarreled, the more passionate was the reconciliation. For a while. Later they stopped bothering to quarrel. When the option in the marriage contract came up, neither of them wanted to renew. Afterward, as his reputation grew, he sometimes received friendly letters from her. He had tried to see her when he returned from Beta Hydri IV to Earth. Nola, he thought, would help him in his troubles. She of all people would not turn away from him. For old times’ sake.

But she was vacationing on Vesta with her seventh husband. Muller found that out from her fifth husband. He had been her third. He did not call her. He began to see there was no point in it.

4

The surgeon said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Muller. There’s nothing we can do for you. I wouldn’t want to raise false hopes. We’ve graphed your whole neural network. We can’t find the sites of alteration. I’m terribly sorry.”

5

He had had nine years to sharpen his memories. He had filled a few cubes with reminiscences, but that had mainly been in the early years of his exile, when he worried about having his past drift away to be lost in fog. He discovered that the memories grew keener with age. Perhaps it was training. He could summon sights, sounds, tastes, odors. He could reconstruct whole conversations convincingly. He was able to quote the full texts of several treaties he had negotiated. He could name England’s kings in sequence from first to last, William I through William VII. He remembered the names of the girls whose bodies he had known.

He admitted to himself that, given the chance, he would go back. Everything else had been pretense and bluster. He had fooled neither Ned Rawlins nor himself, he knew. The contempt he felt for mankind was real, but not the wish to remain isolated. He waited eagerly for Rawlins to return. While he waited he drank several goblets of the city’s liqueur; he went on a killing spree, nervously gunning down animals he could not possibly consume in a year’s time; he conducted intricate dialogues with himself; he dreamed of Earth.

6

Rawlins was running. Muller, standing a hundred meters deep in Zone C, saw him come striding through the entrance, breathless, flushed.

“You shouldn’t run in here,” Muller said, “not even in the safer zones. There’s absolutely no telling—”

Rawlins sprawled down beside a flanged limestone tub, gripping its sides and sucking air. “Get me a drink, will you?” he gasped. “That liqueur of yours—”

“Are you all right?”

“No.”

Muller went to the fountain nearby and filled a handy flask with the sharp liqueur. Rawlins did not wince at all as Muller drew near to give it to him. He seemed altogether unaware of Muller’s emanation. Greedily, sloppily, he emptied the flask, letting driblets of the gleaming fluid roll down his chin and on his clothes. Then he closed his eyes a moment.

“You look awful,” Muller said. “As though you’ve just been raped, I’d say.”

“I have.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“Wait. Let me get my breath. I ran all the way from Zone F.”

“You’re lucky to be alive, then.”

“Perhaps.”

“Another drink?”

“No,” said Rawlins. “Not just yet.”

Muller studied him, perplexed. The change was striking and unsettling, and mere fatigue could not account for it all. Rawlins was bloodshot, flushed, puffy-faced; his facial muscles were tightly knit; his eyes moved randomly, seeking and not finding. Drunk? Sick? Drugged?

Rawlins said nothing.

After a long moment Muller said, just to fill the vacuum of silence, “I’ve done a lot of thinking about our last conversation. I’ve decided that I was acting like a damned fool. All that cheap misanthropy I was dishing up.” Muller knelt and tried to peer into the younger man’s shifting eyes. “Look here, Ned, I want to take it all back. I’m willing to return to Earth for treatment. Even if the treatment’s experimental, I’ll chance it. I mean, the worst that can happen is that it won’t cure me, and—”

“There’s no treatment,” said Rawlins dully.

“No-treatment…”

“No treatment. None. It was all a lie.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“You said so yourself,” Rawlins reminded him. “You didn’t believe a word of what I was saying. Remember?”

“A lie.”

“You didn’t understand why I was saying it, but you said it was nonsense. You told me I was lying. You wondered what I had to gain by lying. I was lying, Dick.”

“Lying.”

“Yes.”

“But I’ve changed my mind,” said Muller softly. “I was ready to go back to Earth.”

“There’s no hope of a cure,” Rawlins told him.

He slowly rose to his feet and ran his hand through his long golden hair. He arranged his disarrayed clothing. He picked up the flask, went to the liqueur fountain and filled it. Returning, he handed the flask to Muller, who drank from it. Rawlins finished the flask. Something small and voracious-looking ran past them and slipped through the gate leading to Zone D.

Finally Muller said, “Do you want to explain some of this?”

“We aren’t archaeologists.”

“Go on.”

“We came here looking especially for you. It wasn’t any accident. We knew all along where you were. You were tracked from the time you left Earth nine years ago.”

“I took precautions.”

“They weren’t any use. Boardman knew where you were going, and he had you tracked. He left you in peace because he had no use for you. But when a need developed he had to come after you. He was holding you in reserve, so to speak.”

“Charles Boardman sent you to fetch me?” Muller asked.

“That’s why we’re here, yes. That’s the whole purpose of this expedition,” Rawlins replied tonelessly. “I was picked to make contact with you because you once knew my father and might trust me. And because I have an innocent face. All the time Boardman was directing me, telling me what to say, coaching me, even telling me what mistakes to make, how to blunder successfully. He told me to get into that cage, for instance. He thought it would help win your sympathy.”

“Boardman is here? Here on Lemnos?”