Robert Silverberg - The Man In The Maze

“All right,” said Boardman, “go on.”

“I’m about to enter Zone D, Charles. This is where Petrocelli got it. I see the tripline—very subtle, very well hidden. Here I go past it. Yes. Ye-es. This is Zone D. I’m stopping and letting the brain get my bearings for me. Zone D looks a little cozier than E. The crossing shouldn’t take long.”

The auburn flames that guarded Zone C were frauds.

Rawlins said softly, “Tell the galaxies that their fate is in good hands. I should find Muller in fifteen minutes.”

Muller had often been alone for long periods. In drawing up the contract for his first marriage he had insisted on a withdrawal clause, the standard one; and Lorayn had not objected, for she knew that his work might occasionally take him to places where she would not or could not go. During the eight years of that marriage he had enforced the clause three times for a total of four years.

When they let the contract run out, Muller’s absences were not really a contributing factor. He had learned in those years that he could stand solitude, and even that he thrived on it in a strange way. We develop everything in solitude except character, Stendhal had written; Muller was not sure of that but, in any case, his character had been fully formed before he began accepting assignments that took him unaccompanied to empty dangerous worlds. He had volunteered for those assignments. In a different sense he had volunteered to immure himself on Lemnos, and this exile was more painful to him than those other absences. Yet he got along. His own adaptability astonished and frightened him. He had not thought he could shed his social nature so easily. The sexual part was difficult, but not as difficult as he had imagined it would be; and the rest—the stimulation of debate, the change of surroundings, the interplay of personalities—had somehow ceased quickly to matter. He had enough cubes to keep him diverted, and enough challenges surviving in this maze. And memories.

He could summon remembered scenes from a hundred worlds. Man sprawled everywhere, planting the seed of Earth on colonies of a thousand stars. Delta Pavonis VI, for example: twenty light-years out, and rapidly going strange. They called the planet Loki, which struck Muller as a whopping misnomer, for Loki was agile, shrewd, slight of build, and the settlers on Loki, fifty years isolated from Earth, went in for a cult of artificial obesity through glucostatic regulation. Muller had visited them a decade before his ill-starred Beta Hydri journey. It was essentially a troubleshooting mission to a planet that had lost touch with its mother world. He remembered a warm planet, habitable only in a narrow temperate belt. Passing through walls of green jungle bordering a black river; watching beasts with jeweled eyes jostling on the swampy banks; coming at last to the settlement, where sweaty Buddhas weighing a few hundred kilograms apiece sat in stately meditation before thatched huts. He had never seen so much flesh per cubic meter before. The Lokites meddled with their peripheral glucoreceptors to induce accumulation of body fat. It was a useless adaptation, unrelated to any problem of their environment; they simply liked to be huge. Muller recalled arms that looked like thighs, thighs that looked like pillars, bellies that curved and recurved in triumphant excess.

They had hospitably offered a woman to the spy from Earth. For Muller, it was a lesson in cultural relativity; for there were in the village two or three women who, although bulky enough, were scrawny by local standards and so approximated the norm of Muller’s own background. The Lokites did not give him any of these women, these pitiful underdeveloped hundred-kilogram wrecks, for it would have been a breach of manners to let a guest have a subpar companion. Instead they treated him to a blonde colossus with breasts like cannonballs and buttocks that were continents of quivering meat.

It was, at any rate, unforgettable.

There were so many other worlds. He had been a tireless voyager. To such men as Boardman he left the subtleties of political manipulation; Muller could be subtle enough, almost statesmanlike when he had to be, but he thought of himself more as an explorer than as a diplomat. He had shivered in methane lakes, had fried in post-Saharan deserts, had followed nomadic settlers across a purple plain in quest of their strayed arthropodic cattle. He had been shipwrecked by computer failure on airless worlds. He had seen the coppery cliffs of Damballa, ninety kilometers high. He had taken a swim in the gravity lake of Mordred. He had slept beside a multicolored brook under a sky blazing with a trio of suns, and he had walked the crystal bridges of Procyon XIV. He had few regrets.

Now, huddled at the heart of his maze, he watched the screens and waited for the stranger to find him. A weapon, small and cool, nestled in his hand.

The afternoon unrolled swiftly. Rawlins began to think that he would have done better to listen to Boardman and spend a night in camp before going on to seek Muller. At least three hours of deep sleep to comb his mind of tension—a quick dip under the sleep wire, always useful. Well, he hadn’t bothered. Now there was no opportunity. His sensors told him that Muller was just ahead.

Questions of morality and questions of ordinary courage suddenly troubled him.

He had never done anything significant before. He had studied, he had performed routine tasks in Boardman’s office, he had now and then handled a slightly sensitive matter. But he had always believed that his real career still was yet to open; that all this was preliminary. That sense of a future beginning was still with him, but it was time to admit that he was on the spot. This was no training simulation. Here he stood, tall and blond and young and stubborn and ambitious, at the verge of an action which—and Charles Boardman had not been altogether hypocritical about that —might well influence the course of coming history.

Ping.

He looked about. The sensors had spoken. Out of the shadows ahead emerged the figure of a man. Muller.

They faced each other across a gap of twenty meters. Rawlins had remembered Muller as a giant and was surprised to see now that they were about the same height, both of them just over two meters high. Muller was dressed in a dark glossy wrap, and in this light at this hour his face was a study in conflicting planes and jutting prominences, all peaks and valleys.

In Muller’s hand lay the apple-sized device with which he had destroyed the probe.

Boardman’s voice buzzed in Rawlins’ ear. “Get closer to him. Smile. Look shy and uncertain and friendly, and very concerned. And keep your hands where he can see them at all times.”

Rawlins obeyed. He wondered when he would begin to feel the effects of being this close to Muller. He found it hard to take his eyes from the shiny globe that rested like a grenade in Muller’s hand. When he was ten meters away he started to pick up the emanation from Muller. Yes. That must certainly be it. He decided that he would be able to tolerate it if he came no closer. Muller said, “ What do you—”

The words came out as a raucous shriek. Muller stopped, cheeks flaming, and seemed to be adjusting the gears of his larynx. Rawlins chewed the corner of his lip. He felt an uncontrollable twitching in one eyelid. Harsh breathing was coming over the audio line from Boardman.

Muller began again. “What do you want from me?” he said, this time in his true voice, deep, crackling with suppressed rage.

“Just to talk. Honestly. I don’t want to cause any trouble for you, Mr. Muller.”