Larry Niven - The Moon Maze Game

Ali tried to rebut. “We are being pursued! The bad people will be here soon. We do not have time for this!”

“Yes,” Scotty said. “We have time.” And he meant it, too. When it came to ferreting out the truth, they had all the time in the world.

“Ali. Your father invested heavily in the Heinlein dome. It looks very much as if the game was modified to make it easier for you. If that’s true, if you were cheating… I don’t know quite how to put it, but if there is anything you can tell me…”

Tears sparkled in the boy’s eyes. “I should confess to cheating? It would end me!”

Scotty was incredulous. “End you? End us! This is real, Ali. People are dying. You’re afraid of the IFGS? Screw the IFGS! You’d better be afraid of those killers following us!”

Angelique looked as if she wanted to murder him. “To hell with them, too. You’d better be afraid of me.”

“Maybe it’s more than that,” Maud said. “ His life was never at risk. They don’t want to kill Ali, they want to ransom him. So to him, this whole thing is still just a game.”

“That’s not true!” he yelped.

Scotty shot him a warning glance. Let her finish.

“To us, it’s life and death. Can you understand that?”

Ali paused, looking at the faces around him, tried to bluster, and then folded with a sigh. “I… have no direct knowledge. But in the months leading up to the game, my father’s advisers took special notice of my hobbies. I noticed that they examined my drawings most carefully. Asked many questions about things that had previously held no interest to them.”

Maud seemed to have calmed down a bit, assuming an almost grandmotherly air. “And then what happened, Ali?”

“Then I arrived here, and when the game began I saw many things that felt… familiar.”

Angelique slapped his face, hard. “Just ‘familiar’?”

“All right! All right,” Ali said, collapsing into surrender. His eyes glittered, but more with tears than anger. “These Moon creatures, they’re derived from my artwork. I didn’t know what to do, what to think. I thought you would throw me out of the game.”

Sharmela shook her head, dark curls jiggling. “And you didn’t think to say anything once our lives were at risk?”

Moisture glittered at the corner of Ali’s eye. “I’ve had no time to think. And when I did, I did not think it would make a difference.”

They looked at him, skeptically.

“It is the truth!” Ali said. “I did not know, was not certain. You… you all came back for me. I trust you.”

“But can we trust you? How was it done?” Angelique asked. “Are we supposed to believe that Xavier was bribed? Because frankly, I don’t.”

“Tricked,” said Wayne. “Never mind, it’s not important.” He grinned. “Except to Xavier. He’s not going to like this at all. Somehow, Ali’s father gamed the Game Master. What did he think, Ali? Let you win the biggest game in history, you’d get bored and decide to grow up?”

Learn to run a kingdom, Scotty thought. But Ali was in torment. “Darla?” Scotty asked. “What do you know about these things? About flying.”

“A scosh. Read some of the specs.” She closed her eyes, as if reading the inside of her lids. “I know that the most important thing in any flight is control. What is it…? Pitch, roll and yaw axis? You have to have all three in hand from the time you launch until you land.”

“Stability augmentation system,” Scotty said from memory, and she nodded enthusiastic agreement. “The thing has to be statically and dynamically stable around all three axes.”

“So…,” Wayne said, seeming to grow fascinated despite himself. “We don’t have a lot of thrust, but we do have an elevated surface.”

“Look,” Darla said. “We got to figure that they did all the calculations, and we have a pretty serious margin of error for sustained flight. In this place, muscles will produce power at greater than what they call ‘minimum sink rate.’”

“I like the sound of that,” Scotty said. “That lava might even give us a thermal!”

“Hell yes!” Angelique grinned, then sobered. “Wait a minute. That’s not real lava.” A pause. “At least, I don’t think it is.”

“Damn. I forgot,” Scotty said. “Nix on the thermal.”

“What about a safe landing?” Wayne asked.

Darla closed her eyes and concentrated. “We need a controlled energy loss. If there’s a short runway you might use some kind of netting for absorption-”

“Like an aircraft carrier?” Scotty asked.

“Exactly like that. If you were going for some kind of sustained flight you’d want some redundancy built into the system, but this was supposed to be short and sweet.” She ran her hands over the wiring, inspected the pulleys. At any distance it all looked jerry-rigged, but up close this was clearly the work of talented, sober artisans.

“It looks rickety for the camera, but trust me: This is first-class equipment. We can do this.”

Scotty tried to visualize it. A flying machine with beetle wings… the pilot would lie on a surface of leather over “wood,” with his feet stretched behind him on pedals…

Yes, it could work. It damned well better. And there were two of the wooden cradles. Xavier expected the first flyer to crash.

“How are we going to do this?” Scotty asked.

Angelique squatted, drawing in the dust with her fingertip. “We have to assume that Xavier knew that Ali and Sharmela had flown before, and that that was how the IFGS approved this.” On hands and knees, she looked down over the edge of the chasm into the flaming horror. “That smoke smells scary real.”

“Too bad the effects are off here. I’d like to know what that bloody munchkin had in mind.”

“Long way down,” Scotty said.

“Probably not as deep as it looks,” Angelique said. “A few of the holos are still working.”

“What exactly do you think we’re really dealing with?”

“Safety nets, masked with effects. No safety lines, I think… Foam stalactites on the ceilings… there may have been some kind of maglev device to take the sting off a fall.”

Wayne nodded. “Remember that we’re on the Moon. Falling just doesn’t have as much energy, so safety isn’t as stringent, I’d bet. I have no idea what Xavier must have said to Cowles, but I think he got his way. As usual.”

“All right, Scotty,” Angelique said. “What do you think?”

“That we have to go for it,” he said. “Mickey, you and I will keep an eye on the door?”

“What about me?” Darla asked. “I’m not just a pretty face.”

“Stay here. An engineer’s mind will come in useful.”

“Do what I can.”

Mickey clasped her shoulder. “Keep an eye on Maud, will you? She seems a little shaky.” Then to Scotty: “Let’s go.”

Ali and Sharmela were crawling over the flying machines, inspecting them inch by inch.

“So…,” Wayne said. “What do we have here?”

“Look,” Darla said. “We’ve had limited human flight at Heinlein, and some of the larger domes.” She glanced at Scotty. “I think your lady Ms. Griffin was big into it. Mostly, though, it’s just a little playtime in half-furnished domes. You know, before the liquid wall bubbles go in. The locals would gin up some hang-glider wings, and go at it. There’ve been a few flappers, but again, we just haven’t had open areas large enough to really take advantage.”

“Talked about it, though,” Scotty remembered.

“Absolutely,” Darla said. “I’m guessin’ they were planning to follow up this game with some kind of tourist flight package.”

“Should I feel comforted?” Ali asked.

Wayne donned an expression that he probably hoped would be comforting, but was actually a little creepy. “They wouldn’t want a disaster first time out.”