The Man In The Maze

know; but he was convinced that the distinction was real.

He watched his screens. He eyed the tiny figures moving about the ship on the plain.

Let them come in, he thought. The city hasn’t had a victim in years. It’ll take care of them. I’m safe where I am.

And, he knew, that even if by some miracle they managed to reach him, they would not remain long. His own special malady would drive them away. They might be clever enough to defeat the maze, but they could not endure the affliction that made Richard Muller intolerable to his own species.

“Go away,” Muller said aloud.

He heard the whirr of rotors, and stepped from his dwelling to see a dark shadow traverse the plaza. They were scouting the maze from the air. Quickly he went indoors, then smiled at his own impulse to hide. They could detect him, of course, wherever he was. Their screens would tell them that a human being inhabited the labyrinth. And then, naturally, they would in their astonishment try to make contact with him although they would not be aware of his identity. After that—

Muller stiffened as a sudden overwhelming desire blazed through him. To have them come to him. To talk to men again. To break his isolation.

He wanted them here.

Only for an instant. After the momentary breakthrough of loneliness came the return of rationality—the chilling awareness of what it would be like to face his kind again. No, he thought. Keep out! Or die in the maze. Keep out. Keep out. Keep out.

2

“Right down there,” Boardman said. “That’s where he must be, eh, Ned? You can see the glow on the face of the tank. We’re picking up the right mass, the right density, the right everything. One live man, and it’s got to be Muller.”

“At the heart of the maze,” said Rawlins. “So he really did it!”

“Somehow.” Boardman peered into the viewing tank. From a height of a couple of kilometers the structure of the inner city was clear. He could make out eight distinct zones, each with its characteristic style of architecture; its plazas and promenades; its angling walls; its tangle of streets swirling in dizzyingly alien patterns. The zones were concentric, fanning out from a broad plaza at the heart of it all, and the scoutplane’s mass detector had located Muller in a row of low buildings just to the east of the plaza. What Boardman failed to make out was any obvious passage linking zone to zone. There was no shortage of blind alleys, but even from the air the true route was not apparent; what was it like trying to work inward on the ground?

It was all but impossible, Boardman knew. The master data banks in the ship held the accounts of those early explorers who had tried it and failed. Boardman had brought with him every scrap of information on the penetration of the maze, and none of it was very encouraging except the one puzzling but incontrovertible datum that Richard Muller had managed to get inside.

Rawlins said, “This is going to sound naive, I know, Charles.

But why don’t we just come down from here and land the scout-plane in the middle of that central plaza?”

“Let me show you,” said Boardman.

He spoke a command. A robot drone probe detached itself from the belly of the plane and streaked toward the city. Board-man and Rawlins followed the flight of the blunt gray metal projectile until it was only a few score meters above the tops of the buildings. Through its faceted eye they had a sharp view of the city, revealing the intricate texture of much of the stonework. Suddenly the drone probe vanished. There was a burst of incandescence, a puff of greenish smoke—and then nothing at all.

Boardman nodded. “Nothing’s changed. There’s still a protective field over the whole thing. It volatilizes anything that tries to get through.”

“So even a bird that comes too close—”

“There are no birds on Lemnos.”

“Raindrops, then. Whatever falls on the city—”

“Lemnos gets no rain,” said Boardman sourly. “At least not on this continent. The only thing that field keeps out is strangers. We’ve known it since the first expedition. Some brave men found out about that field the hard way.”

“Didn’t they try a drone probe first?”

Smiling, Boardman said, “When you find a dead city in the middle of a desert on a dead world you don’t expect to be blown up if you land inside it. It’s a forgivable sort of mistake—except that Lemnos doesn’t forgive mistakes.” He gestured, and the plane dropped lower, following the orbit of the outer walls for a moment. Then it rose and hovered over the heart of the city while photographs were being taken. The wrong-colored sunlight glistened off a hall of mirrors. Boardman felt curdled weariness in his chest. They overflew the city again and again, marking off a preprogrammed observation pattern, and he discovered he was wishing irritably that a shaft of sudden light would rise from those mirrors and incinerate them on the next pass to save him the trouble of carrying out this assignment. He had lost his taste for detail-work, and too many fine details stood between him and his purpose here. They said that impatience was a mark of youth, that old men could craftily spin their webs and plot their schemes in serenity, but somehow Boardman found himself longing rashly for a quick consummation to this job. Send some sort of drone scuttling through the maze on metal tracks to seize Muller and drag him out. Tell the man what was wanted of him and make him agree to do it. Then take off for Earth, quickly, quickly. The mood passed. Boardman felt foxy again.

Captain Hosteen, who would be conducting the actual entry attempt, came aft to pay his respects. Hosteen was a short, thick-framed man with a flat nose and coppery skin; he wore his uniform as though he felt it was all going to slip off his left shoulder at any moment. But he was a good man, Boardman knew, and ready to sacrifice a score of lives, including his own, to get into that maze.

Hosteen flicked a glance from the screen to Boardman’s face and said, “Learning anything?”

“Nothing new. We have a job.”

“Want to go down again?”

“Might as well,” Boardman said. He looked at Rawlins. “Unless you have anything else you’d like to check, Ned?”

“Me? Oh, no—no. That is—well, I wonder if we need to go into the maze at all. I mean, if we could lure Muller out somehow, talk to him outside the city—”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t it work?”

“No,” said Boardman emphatically. “Item one, Muller wouldn’t come out if we asked him. He’s a misanthrope. Remember? He buried himself here to get away from humanity. Why should he socialize with us? Item two, we couldn’t invite him outside without letting him know too much about what we want from him. In this deal, Ned, we need to hoard our resources of strategy, not toss them away in our first move.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

Patiently Boardman said, “Suppose we used your approach. What would you say to Muller to make him come out?”

“Why—that we’re here from Earth to ask him if he’ll help us in a time of system-wide crisis. That we’ve encountered a race of alien beings with whom we’re unable to communicate, and that it’s absolutely necessary that we break through to them in a hurry, and that he alone can do the trick. We—” Rawlins stopped, as though the fatuity of his own words had broken through to him. Color mounted in his cheeks. He said in a hoarse voice, “Muller isn’t going to give a damn for those arguments, is he?”

“No, Ned. Earth sent him before a bunch of aliens once before, and they ruined him. He isn’t about to try it again.”

“Then how are we going to make him help us?”

“By playing on his sense of honor. But at the moment that’s not the problem we’re talking about. We’re