Robert Silverberg - The Man In The Maze

Rawlins himself was none too steady. Metabolic poisons boiled in the tubes and channels of his body. He was drenched with perspiration so thoroughly that his clothing was working overtime to get rid of it, distilling the moisture and volatilizing the substratum of chemical compounds. It was too early to rejoice. Brewster had died here in Zone F, thinking that his troubles were over once he got past the dangers of G. Well, they were.

“Resting?” Boardman asked. His voice came out thin and unfocussed.

“Why not? I’ve been working hard, Charles.” Rawlins grinned unconvincingly. “So have you. The computer says it’s safe to stay here a while. I’ll make room.”

Boardman came alongside and squatted. Rawlins had to steady him as he balanced before kneeling.

Rawlins said, “Muller came this way alone and made it.”

“Muller was always an extraordinary man.”

“How do you think he did it?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“I mean to,” Rawlins said. “Perhaps by this time tomorrow I’ll be talking to him.”

“Perhaps. We should go on now.”

“If you say so.”

“They’ll be coming out to meet us soon. They should have fixes on us by now. We must be showing up on their mass detectors. Up, Ned. Up.”

They stood. Once again Rawlins led the way.

In Zone F things were less cluttered but also less attractive. The prevailing mood of the architecture was taut, with a fussy line that generated a tension of mismatched objects. Though he knew that traps were fewer here, Rawlins still had the sensation that the ground was likely to open beneath him at any given moment. The air was cooler here. It had the same sharp taste as the air on the open plain. At each of the street intersections rose immense concrete tubs in which jagged, feathery plants were standing.

“Which is the worst part for you so far?” Rawlins asked.

“The distortion screen,” said Boardman.

“That wasn’t so bad—unless you feel peculiar about walking through stuff this dangerous with your eyes closed. You know, one of those little tigers could have jumped us then, and we wouldn’t have known about it until we felt the teeth in us.”

“I peeked,” said Boardman.

“In the distortion zone?”

“Just for a moment. I couldn’t resist it, Ned. I won’t try to describe what I saw, but it was one of the strangest experiences of my life.”

Rawlins smiled. He wanted to congratulate Boardman on having done something silly and dangerous and human, but he didn’t dare. He said, “What did you do? Just stand still and peek and then move on? Did you have any close escapes?”

“Once. I forgot myself and started to take a step, but I didn’t follow through. I kept my feet planted and looked around.”

“Maybe I’ll try that on the way out,” Rawlins said. “Just one little look can’t hurt.”

“How do you know the screen’s effective in the other direction?”

Rawlins frowned. “I never considered that. We haven’t tried to go outward through the maze yet. Suppose it’s altogether different coming out? We don’t have charts for that direction. What if we all get clipped coming out?”

“We’ll use the probes again,” said Boardman. “Don’t worry about that. When we’re ready to go out, we’ll bring a bunch of drones to the camp in Zone F here and check the exit route the same way we checked the entry route.”

After a while Rawlins said, “Why should there be any traps on the outward route, anyway? That means the builders of the maze were locking themselves in as well as locking enemies out. Why would they do that?”

“Who knows, Ned? They were aliens.”

“Aliens. Yes.”

Boardman remembered that the conversation was incomplete. He tried to be affable. They were comrades in the face of danger. He said, “And which has been the worst place for you so far?”

“That other screen farther back,” Rawlins said. “The one that shows you all the nasty, crawling stuff inside your own mind.”

“Which screen is that?”

“Toward the inside of Zone H. It was a golden screen, fastened to a high wall with metal strips. I looked at it and saw my father, for a couple of seconds. And then I saw a girl I once knew, a girl who became a nun. On the screen she was taking her clothes off. I guess that reveals something about my unconscious, eh? Like a pit of snakes. But whose isn’t?”

“I didn’t see any such things.”

“You couldn’t miss it. It was-oh, about fifty meters after the place where you shot the first animal. A little to your left, halfway up the wall, a rectangular screen—a trapezoidal screen, really, with bright white metal borders, and colors moving on it, shapes—”

“Yes. That one. Geometrical shapes.”

“I saw Maribeth getting undressed,” Rawlins said, sounding confused. “And you saw geometrical shapes?”

Zone F could be deadly too. A small pearly blister in the ground opened and a stream of gleaming pellets rolled out. They flowed toward Rawlins. They move with the malevolent determination of a stream of hungry soldier ants. They stung the flesh. He trampled a number of them, but in his annoyance and fervor he almost came too close to a suddenly flashing blue light. He kicked three pellets toward the light and they melted.

Boardman had already had much more than enough.

Their elapsed time out from the entrance to the maze was only one hour and forty-eight minutes, although it seemed much longer than that. The route through Zone F led into a pink-walled room where jets of steam blew up from concealed vents. At the far end of the room was an irising slot. If you did not step through it with perfect timing, you would be crushed. The slot gave access to a long low-vaulted passageway, oppressively warm and close, whose walls were blood-red in color and pulsated sickeningly. Beyond the passageway was an open plaza in which six slabs of white metal stood on end like waiting swords. A fountain hurled water a hundred meters into the air. Flanking the plaza were three towers with many windows, all of different sizes. Prismatic spotlights played against the windows. No windows were broken. On the steps of one of the towers lay the articulated skeleton of a creature close to ten meters long. The bubble of what was undoubtedly a space helmet covered its skull.

Alton, Antonelli, Cameron, Greenfield, and Stein constituted the Zone F camp, the relief base for the forward group. Antonelli and Stein went back to the plaza in the middle of F and found Rawlins and Boardman there.

“It’s just a short way on,” Stein said. “Would you like to rest a few minutes, Mr. Boardman?”

Boardman glowered. They went on.

Antonelli said, “Davis, Ottavio, and Reynolds passed on to E this morning when Alton, Cameron, and Greenfield reached us. Petrocelli and Walker are reconnoitering along the inner edge of E and looking a little way into D. They say it looks a lot better in there.”

“I’ll flay them if they go in,” Boardman said. Antonelli smiled worriedly.

The relief base consisted of a pair of extrusion domes side by side in a little open spot at the edge of a garden. The site had been thoroughly researched and no surprises were expected. Rawlins entered one of the domes and took his shoes off. Cameron handed him a cleanser. Greenfield gave him a food pack. Rawlins felt ill at ease among these men. They had not had the opportunities in life that had been given him. They did not have proper educations. They would not live as long, even if they avoided all of the dangers to which they were exposed. None of them had blond hair or blue eyes, and probably they could not afford to get shape-ups that would give them those qualifications. And yet they seemed happy. Perhaps it was because they never had to stop to confront the moral implications of luring Richard Muller out of the maze.