Robert Silverberg - The Man In The Maze

“There are things we can do at eighteen that we can’t do again either,” said Boardman. “Well, Dick? You’re past fifty now, right? You’ve walked in the stars. Do you feel like a god?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you want to go to Beta Hydri IV?”

“You know I do.”

“Alone?”

Muller felt the ground give way before him, and abruptly it seemed to him that he was taking his first spacewalk again, falling freely toward all the universe. “ Alone?”

“We’ve programmed the whole thing and concluded that to send a bunch of men down there at this point would be a mistake. The Hydrans haven’t responded very well to our eye probes. You saw that: they picked the eye up and smashed it. We can’t begin to fathom their psychologies, because we’ve never been up against alien minds before. But we feel that the safest thing—both in terms of potential manpower loss and in terms of impact on their society —is to send a single ambassador down there to them—one man, coming in peace, a shrewd, strong man who has been tested under a variety of stress situations and who will develop ways of initiating contact. That man may find himself chopped to shreds thirty seconds after making contact. On the other hand, if he survives he’ll have accomplished something utterly unique in human history. It’s your option.”

It was irresistible. Mankind’s ambassador to the Hydrans! To go alone, to walk alien soil and extend humanity’s first greeting to cosmic neighbors-It was his ticket to immortality. It would write his name forever on the stars.

“How do you figure the chances of survival?” Muller asked.

“The computation is one chance in sixty-five of coming out whole, Dick. Considering that it’s not an Earth-type planet to any great degree, you’ll need a life-support system. And you may get a chilly reception. One in sixty-five.”

“Not too bad.”

“I’d never accept such odds myself,” Boardman said, grinning. No, but I might.” He drained his glass. To carry it off meant imperishable fame. To fail, to be slain by the Hydrans, even that was not so dreadful. He had lived well. There were worse fates than to die bearing mankind’s banner to a strange world. That throbbing pride of his, that hunger for glory, that childlike craving for renown that he had never outgrown, drove him to it. The odds were not too bad.

Marta reappeared. She was wet from her swim, her nude body glossy, her hair plastered to the slender column of her neck. Her breasts were heaving rapidly, little cones of flesh tipped by puckered pink nipples. She might have been a leggy fourteen-year-old, Muller thought, looking at her narrow hips, her lean thighs. Boardman tossed her a drier. She thumbed it and stepped into its yellow field, making one complete turn. She took her garment from the rack and covered herself unhurriedly. “That was great,” she said. Her eyes met Muller’s for the first time since her return. “Dick, what’s the matter with you? You look wide open—stunned. Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“What happened?”

“Mr. Boardman’s made a proposition.”

“You can tell her about it, Dick. We don’t plan to keep it a secret. There’ll be a galaxy-wide announcement right away.”

“There’s going to be a landing on Beta Hydri IV,” Muller said in a thick voice. “One man. Me. How will it work, Charles? A ship in a parking orbit, and then I go down in a powered drop-capsule equipped for return?”

“Yes.”

Marta said, “It’s insane, Dick. Don’t do it. You’ll regret it forever.”

“It’s a quick death if things don’t work out, Marta. I’ve taken worse risks before.”

“No. Look, sometimes I think I’ve got a little precog. I see things ahead, Dick.” She laughed nervously, her pose of cool sophistication abruptly shattering. “If you go there, I don’t think you’ll die. But I don’t exactly think you’ll live, either. Say you won’t go. Say it, Dick!”

“You never officially accepted the proposition,” Boardman pointed out.

“I know,” Muller said. He got to his feet, nearly reaching the low roof of the dining capsule, and walked toward Marta, and put his arms around her, remembering that other girl so long ago under the California sky, remembering that wild surge of power that had come upon him as he swung over from the blaze of the stars to the warm, yielding flesh and the parting thighs beneath him. He held Marta firmly. She looked at him in horror. He kissed the tip of her nose and the lobe of her left ear. She shrank away from him, stumbled, nearly plunged into Boardman’s lap. Boardman caught her and held her. Muller said, “You know what the answer has to be.”

That afternoon one of the robot probes reached Zone F. They still had a distance to go; but it would not be long, Muller knew, before they were at the heart of the maze.

“There he is,” Rawlins said. “At last!”

Via the drone probe’s eyes he stared at the man in the maze. Muller leaned casually against a wall, arms folded; a big weather-beaten man with a harsh chin and a massive wedge-shaped nose. He did not seem at all alarmed by the presence of the drone.

Rawlins cut in the audio pickup and heard Muller say, “Hello, robot. Why are you bothering me?”

The probe, of course, did not reply. Neither did Rawlins, who could have piped a message through the drone. He stood by the data terminal, crouching a little for a better view. His weary eyes throbbed. It had taken them nine local-time days to get one of their probes all the way through the maze to the center. The effort had cost them close to a hundred probes; each inward extension of the safe route by twenty meters or so had required the expenditure of one of the robots. Still, that wasn’t so bad, considering that the number of wrong choices in the maze was close to infinite. Through luck, the inspired use of the ship’s brain, and a sturdy battery of sensory devices, they had managed to avoid all the obvious traps and most of the cleverer ones. And now they were in the center.

Rawlins felt exhausted. He had been up all night monitoring this critical phase, the penetration of Zone A. Hosteen had gone to sleep. So, finally, had Boardman. A few of the crewmen were still on duty here and aboard the ship, but Rawlins was the only member of the civilian complement still awake.

He wondered if the discovery of Muller had been supposed to take place during his stint. Probably not. Boardman wouldn’t want to risk blowing things by letting a novice handle the big moment. Well, too bad. They had left him on duty, and he had moved his probe a few meters inward, and now he was looking right at Muller.

He searched for signs of the man’s inner torment. They weren’t obvious. Muller had lived here alone for so many years—wouldn’t that have done something to his soul? And that other thing, the prank the Hydrans had played on him—surely that too would have registered on his face. So far as Rawlins could tell, it hadn’t.

Oh, he looked sad around the eyes, and his lips were compressed in a taut, tense line. But Rawlins had been expecting something more dramatic, something romantic, some mirror of agony on that face. Instead he saw only the craggy, indifferent, almost insensitive-looking features of a tough, durable man in late middle age. Muller had gone gray, and his clothing was a little ragged; he looked worn and frayed himself. But that was only to be expected of a man who had been living this kind of exile for nine years. Rawlins wanted something more, something picturesque, a gaunt, bitter face, eyes dark with misery.

“What do you want?” Muller asked the probe. “Who sent you? Why don’t you go away?”