in. I figure we’ll be talking to Muller within a week.”
“Do you think he’ll be willing to cooperate?”
A cloud passed over Boardman’s heavy features. “He won’t be at first. He’ll be so full of bitterness that he’ll be spitting poison. After all, we’re the ones who cast him out. Why should he want to help Earth now? But he’ll come around, Ned, because fundamentally he’s a man of honor, and that’s something that never changes no matter how sick and lonely and anguished a man gets. Not even hatred can corrode real honor. You know that, Ned, because you’re that sort of person yourself. Even I am, in my own way. A man of honor. We’ll work on Muller. Well get him to come out of that damned maze and help us.”
“I hope you’re right, Charles.” Rawlins hesitated. “And what will it be like for us, confronting him? I mean, considering his sickness—the way he affects others—”
“It’ll be bad. Very bad.”
“You saw him, didn’t you, after it happened?”
“Yes. Many times.”
Rawlins said, “I can’t really imagine what it’s like to be next to a man and feel his whole soul spilling out over you. That’s what happens when you’re with Muller, isn’t it?”
“It’s like stepping into a bath of acid,” said Boardman heavily. “You can get used to it, but you never like it. You feel fire all over your skin. The ugliness, the terrors, the greeds, the sicknesses —they spout from him like a fountain of muck.”
“And Muller’s a man of honor…a decent man.”
“He was, yes.” Boardman looked toward the distant maze. “Thank God for that. But it’s a sobering thought, isn’t it, Ned? If a first-rate man like Dick Muller has all that garbage inside his brain, what do you think ordinary people are like in there? The squashed-down people with the squashed-down lives? Give them the same kind of curse Muller has and they’d be like beacons of flame, burning up every mind within light-years.”
“But Muller’s had nine years to stew in his misery,” Rawlins said. “What if it’s impossible to get near him now? What if the stuff he radiates is so strong that we won’t be able to stand it?”
“We’ll stand it,” Boardman said.
TWO
1
Within the maze, Muller studied his situation and contemplated his options. In the milky green recesses of the viewing tank he could see the ship and the plastic domes that had sprouted beside it, and the tiny figures of men moving about. He wished now that he had been able to find the fine control on the viewing tank; the images he received were badly out of focus. But he considered himself lucky to have the use of the tank at all. Many of the ancient instruments in this city had become useless long ago through the decay of some vital part. A surprising number had endured the eons unharmed, a tribute to the technical skill of their makers; but of these, Muller had been able to discover the function of only a few, and he operated those imperfectly.
He watched the blurred figures of his fellow humans working busily and wondered what new torment they were preparing for him.
He had tried to leave no clues to his whereabouts when he fled from Earth. He had come here in a rented ship, filing a deceptive flight plan by way of Sigma Draconis. During his warp trip, of course, he had had to pass six monitor stations; but he had given each one a simulated great-circle galactic route record, carefully designed to be as misleading as possible.
A routine comparison check of all the monitor stations would reveal that Muller’s successive announcements of location added up to nonsense, but he had gambled that he would manage to complete his flight and vanish before they ran one of the regular checks. Evidently he had won that gamble, for no interceptor ships had come after him.
Emerging from warp in the vicinity of Lemnos, he had carried out one final evasive maneuver by leaving his ship in a parking orbit and descending by drop-capsule. A disruptor bomb, preprogrammed, had blasted the ship to molecules and sent the fragments traveling on a billion conflicting orbits through the universe. It would take a fancy computer indeed to calculate a probable nexus of source for those! The bomb was designed to provide fifty false vectors per square meter of explosion surface, a virtual guarantee that no tracer could possibly be effective within a finite span of time. Muller needed only a very short finite span—say, sixty years. He had been close to sixty when he left Earth. Normally, he could expect at least another century of vigorous life; but, cut off from medical service, doctoring himself with a cheap diagnostat, he’d be doing well to last into his eleventh or twelfth decade. Sixty years of solitude and a peaceful, private death, that was all he asked. But now his privacy was interrupted after only nine years. Had they really traced him somehow?
Muller decided that they had not. For one thing, he had taken every conceivable antitracking precaution. For another, they had no motive for following him. He was no fugitive who had to be brought back to justice. He was simply a man with a loathsome affliction, an abomination in the sight of his fellow mortals, and doubtless Earth felt itself well rid of him. He was a shame and a reproach to them, a welling fount of guilt and grief, a prod to the planetary conscience. The kindest thing he could do for his own kind was to remove himself from their midst, and he had done that as thoroughly as he could. They would hardly make an effort to come looking for someone so odious to them.
Who were these intruders, then?
Archaeologists, he suspected. The ruined city of Lemnos still held a magnetic, fatal fascination for them— for everyone. Muller had hoped that the risks of the maze would continue to keep men away. It had been discovered over a century earlier, but before his arrival there had been a period of many years in which Lemnos was shunned. For good reason: Muller had many times seen the corpses of those who had tried and failed to enter the maze. He himself had come here partly out of a suicidal wish to join the roster of victims, partly out of overriding curiosity to get within and solve the secret of the labyrinth, and partly out of the knowledge that if he did penetrate he was not likely to suffer many invasions of his privacy. Now he was within; but intruders had come.
They will not enter, Muller told himself.
Snugly established at the core of the maze, he had command of enough sensing devices to follow, however vaguely, the progress of any living creatures outside. Thus he could trace the wanderings from zone to zone of the animals that were his prey, and also those of the great beasts who offered danger. To a limited degree he could control the snares of the maze, which normally were nothing more than passive traps but which could be employed aggressively, under the right conditions, against some enemy. More than once Muller had dumped an elephantine carnivore into a subterranean pit as it charged inward through Zone D. He asked himself if he would use those defenses against human beings if they penetrated that far, and had no answer. He did not really hate his own species; he just preferred to be left alone, in what passed for peace.
He eyed the screens. He occupied a squat hexagonal cell—apparently one of the housing units in the inner city—which was equipped with a wall of viewing tanks. It had taken him more than a year to find out which parts of the maze corresponded to the images on the screens; but by patiently posting markers he had matched the dim images to the glossy reality. The six lowest screens along the wall showed him pictures of areas in Zones A through F; the cameras, or whatever they were, swiveled through 180° arcs, enabling the hidden mysterious eyes to patrol the entire region around each of the zone entrances. Since only one entrance provided safe access to the zone within, all others being lethal, the screens effectively allowed Muller to watch the inward progress of any prowler. It did not matter what was taking place at any of the false entrances. Those who persisted there would die.
Screens seven through ten, in the upper bank, relayed images that apparently came from Zones G and H, the outermost, largest and deadliest zones of the maze. Muller had not wanted to go to the trouble of returning to
