Robert Silverberg - The Man In The Maze

“I’m on vacation,” Muller told him.

“Give me half a day of it.”

“I’m not alone, Charles.”

“I know that. Bring her along. We’ll take a ride. It’s an important matter.”

“I came here to escape important matters.”

“There’s never any escape, Dick. You know that. You are what you are, and we need you. Will you come?”

“Damn you,” Muller said mildly.

In the morning he and Marta flew by quickboat to Boardman’s hotel. Muller remembered the journey as vividly as though it had taken place last month and not almost fifteen years before. They soared above the continental divide, skimming the snowy summits of the mountains by so slim a margin that they could see the magnificent long-horned figure of a goatish rock-skipper capering across the gleaming rivers of ice: two metric tons of muscle and bone, an improbable colossus of the peaks, the costliest prey Marduk had to offer. Some men did not earn in a lifetime what it cost to buy a license to hunt rock-skipper. To Muller it seemed that even that price was too low.

They circled the mighty beast three times and streaked off into the lake country, the lowlands beyond the mountain range where a chain of diamond-bright pools girdled the fat waist of the continent, and by midday they were landed at the edge of a velvety forest of evergreens. Boardman had rented the hotel’s master suite, all screens and trickery. He grasped Muller’s wrist in salute, and embraced Marta with unabashed lechery. She seemed distant and restrained in Boardman’s arms; quite obviously she regarded the visit as so much time lost.

“Are you hungry?” Boardman asked. “Lunch first, talk later!”

He served drinks in his suite: an amber wine out of goblets made from blue rock crystal mined on Ganymede. Then they boarded a dining capsule and left the hotel to tour the forests and lakes while they ate. Lunch glided from its container and rolled toward them as they lounged in pneumochairs before a wraparound window. Crisp salad, grilled native fish, imported vegetables; a grated Centaurine cheese to sprinkle; flasks of cold rice beer; a rich, thick, spicy green liqueur afterward. Completely passive, sealed in their moving capsule, they accepted food and drink and scenery, breathed the sparkling air pumped in from outside, watched gaudy birds flutter past them and lose themselves in the soft, drooping needles of the thickly-packed conifers of the woods. Boardman had carefully staged all this to create a mood, but his efforts were wasted, Muller knew. He could not be lulled this easily. He might take whatever job Boardman offered, but not because he had been fooled into false unwariness.

Marta was bored. She showed it by the detached response she gave to Boardman’s inquiring lustful glances. The shimmering daywrap she wore was designed to reveal; as its long-chained molecules slid kaleidoscopically through their path of patterns they yielded quick, frank glimpses of thighs and breasts, of belly and loins, of hips and buttocks. Boardman appreciated the display and seemed ready to capitalize on Marta’s apparent availability, but she ignored his unvoiced overtures entirely. Muller was amused by that. Boardman was not.

After lunch the capsule halted by the side of a jewel-like lake, deep and clear. The wall opened, and Boardman said, “Perhaps the young lady would like to swim while we get the dull business talk out of the way?”

“A fine idea,” Marta said in a flat voice.

Arising, she touched the disrobing snap at her shoulder and let her garment slither to her ankles. Boardman made a great show of catching it up and putting it on a storage rack. She smiled mechanically at him, turned, walked down to the edge of the lake, a nude tawny figure whose tapering back and gently rounded rump were dappled by the sunlight slipping through the trees. For a moment she paused, shin-deep in the water; then she sprang forward and sliced the breast of the lake with strong steady strokes.

Boardman said, “She’s quite lovely, Dick. Who is she?”

“A girl. Rather young, I think.”

“Younger than your usual sort, I’d say. Also somewhat spoiled. Known her long?”

“Since last year, Charles. Interested?”

“Naturally.”

“I’ll tell her that,” Muller said. “Some other time.”

Boardman gave him a Buddha-smile and gestured toward the liquor console. Muller shook his head. Marta was backstroking in the lake, the rosy tips of her breasts just visible above the serene surface. The two men eyed one another. They appeared to be of the same age, mid-fifties; Boardman fleshy and graying and strong-looking, Muller lean and graying and strong-looking. Seated, they seemed of the same height, too. The appearances were deceptive: Boardman was a generation older, Muller half a foot taller. They had known each other for thirty years.

In a way, they were in the same line of work—both part of the corps of nonadministrative personnel that served to hold the structure of human society together across the sprawl of the galaxy. Neither held any official rank. They shared a readiness to serve, a desire to make their gifts useful to mankind; and Muller respected Boardman for the way he had used those gifts during a long and impressive career, though he could not say that he liked the older man. He knew that Boardman was shrewd, unscrupulous, and dedicated to human welfare—and the combination of dedication and unscrupulousness is always a dangerous one.

Boardman drew a vision cube from a pocket of his tunic and put it on the table before Muller. It rested there like a counter in some intricate game, six or seven centimeters along each face, soft yellow against the polished black marble face of the table. “Plug it in,” Boardman invited, “the viewer’s beside you.”

Muller slipped the cube into the receptor slot. From the center of the table there arose a larger cube, nearly a meter across. Images flowered on its faces. Muller saw a cloud-wrapped planet, soft gray in tone, it could have been Venus. The view deepened and streaks of dark red appeared in the gray. Not Venus, then. The recording eye pierced the cloud layer and revealed an unfamiliar, not very Earthlike planet. The soil looked moist and spongy, and rubbery trees that looked like giant toadstools thrust upward from it. It was hard to judge relative sizes, but they looked big. Their pale trunks were coarse with shredded fibers, and curved like bows between ground and crown. Saucerlike growths shielded the trees at their bases, ringing them for about a fifth of their height. Above were neither branches nor leaves, only wide flat caps whose undersurfaces were mottled by corrugated processes. As Muller watched, three alien figures came strolling through the somber grove. They were elongated, almost spidery, with clusters of eight or ten jointed limbs depending from their narrow shoulders. Their heads were tapered and rimmed with eyes. Their nostrils were vertical slits flush against the skin. Their mouths opened at the sides. They walked upright on elegant legs that terminated in small globe-like pedestals instead of feet. Though they were nude except for probably ornamental strips of fabric tied between their first and second wrists, Muller was unable to detect signs either of reproductive apparatus or of mammalian functions. Their skins were unpigmented, sharing the prevailing grayness of this gray world, and were coarse in texture, with a scaly overlay of small diamond-shaped ridges.

With wonderful grace the three figures approached three of the giant toadstools and scaled them until each stood atop the uppermost saucerlike projection of a tree. Out of the cluster of limbs came one arm that seemed specially adapted; unlike the others, which were equipped with five tendril-shaped fingers arranged in a circlet, this limb ended in a needle-sharp organ. It plunged easily and deeply into the soft rubbery trunk of the tree on which its owner stood. A long moment passed, as if the aliens were draining sap from the trees. Then they climbed down and resumed their stroll, outwardly unchanged.