Robert Silverberg - The Man In The Maze

Muller advanced, uncertain of his tactics. He felt like some great half-rusted machine called into action after too many years of neglect. “Ned?” he said. “Look, Ned, I want to tell you that I’m sorry. You’ve got to understand, I’m not used to people. Not-used—to— people.”

“It’s all right, Mr. Muller. I realize it’s been rough for you.”

“Dick. Call me Dick.” Muller raised both hands and spread them as if trying to cup moonbeams. He felt terribly cold. On the wall beyond the plaza small animal shapes leaped and danced. Muller said, “I’ve come to love my privacy. You can even cherish cancer if you get into the right frame of mind. Look, you ought to realize something. I came here deliberately. It wasn’t any shipwreck. I picked out the one place in the universe where I was least likely to be disturbed, and hid myself inside it. But, of course, you had to come with your tricky robots and find the way in.”

“If you don’t want me here, I’ll go,” Rawlins said.

“Maybe that’s best for both of us. No. Wait. Stay. Is it very bad, being this close to me?”

“It isn’t exactly comfortable,” said Rawlins. “But it isn’t as bad as—as—well, I don’t know. From this distance I just feel a little depressed.”

“You know why?” Muller asked. “From the way you talk, I think you do, Ned. You’re only pretending not to know what happened to me on Beta Hydri IV.”

Rawlins colored. “Well, I remember a little bit, I guess. They operated on your mind?”

“Yes, that’s right. What you’re feeling, Ned, that’s me, my goddam soul leaking into the air. You’re picking up the flow of neural current, straight from the top of my skull. Isn’t it lovely? Try coming a little closer… that’s it.” Rawlins halted. “There,” Muller said, “now it’s stronger. You’re getting a better dose. Now recall what it was like when you were standing right here. That wasn’t so pleasant, was it? From ten meters away you can take it. From one meter away it’s intolerable. Can you imagine holding a woman in your arms while you give off a mental stink like that? You can’t make love from ten meters away. At least, I can’t. Let’s sit down, Ned. It’s safe here. I’ve got detectors rigged in case any of the nastier animals come in, and there aren’t any traps in this zone. Sit.” He lowered himself to the smooth milky-white stone floor, the alien marble that made this plaza so sleek. Rawlins, after an instant of deliberation, slipped lithely into the lotus position a dozen meters away.

Muller said, “How old are you, Ned?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Married?”

A shy grin. “Afraid not.”

“Got a girl?”

“There was one, a liaison contract. We voided it when I took on this job.”

“Ah. Any girls in this expedition?”

“Only woman cubes,” said Rawlins.

“They aren’t much good, are they, Ned?”

“Not really. We could have brought a few women along, but—”

“But what?”

“Too dangerous. The maze—”

“How many men have you lost so far?” Muller asked.

“Five, I think. I’d like to know the sort of people who’d build a thing like this. It must have taken five hundred years of planning to make it so devilish.”

Muller said, “More. This was the grand creative triumph of their race, I believe. Their masterpiece, their monument. They must have been proud of this murderous place. It summed up the whole essence of their philosophy—kill the stranger.”

“Are you just speculating, or have you found some clues to their cultural outlook?”

“The only clue I have to their cultural outlook is all around us. But I’m an expert on alien psychology, Ned. I know more about it than any other human being, because I’m the only one who ever said hello to an alien race. Kill the stranger: it’s the law of the universe. And if you don’t kill him, at least screw him up a little.”

“We aren’t like that,” Rawlins said. “We don’t show instinctive hostility to—”

“Crap.”

“But — ”

Muller said, “If an alien starship ever landed on one of our planets we’d quarantine it and imprison the crew and interrogate them to destruction. Whatever good manners we may have learned grow out of decadence and complacency. We pretend that we’re too noble to hate strangers, but we have the politeness of weakness. Take the Hydrans. A substantial faction within our government was in favor of generating fusion in their cloud layer and giving their system an extra sun—before sending an emissary to scout them.”

“No.”

“They were overruled, and an emissary was sent, and the Hydrans wasted him. Me.” An idea struck Muller suddenly. Appalled, he said, “What’s happened between us and the Hydrans in the last nine years? Any contact? War?”

“Nothing,” said Rawlins. “We’ve kept away.”

“Are you telling me the truth, or did we wipe the bastards out? God knows I wouldn’t mind that, but yet it wasn’t their fault they did this to me. They were reacting in a standard xenophobic way. Ned, has there been a war with them?”

“No. I swear it.”

Muller relaxed. After a moment he said, “All right. I won’t ask you to fill me in on all the other news developments. I don’t really give a damn. How long are you people staying on Lemnos?”

“We don’t know yet. A few weeks, I suppose. We haven’t even really begun to explore the maze. And then there’s the area outside. We want to run correlations on the work of earlier archaeologists, and—”

“And you’ll be here for a while. Are the others going to come into the center of the maze?”

Rawlins moistened his lips. “They sent me ahead to establish a working relationship with you. We don’t have any plan yet. It all depends on you. We don’t want to impose on you. So if you don’t want us to work here—”

“I don’t,” Muller told him crisply. “Tell that to your friends. In fifty or sixty years I’ll be dead, and they can sniff around here then. But while I’m here I don’t want them bothering me. Let them work in the outer four or five zones. If any of them sets foot in A, B, or C, I’ll kill him. I can do that, Ned.”

“What about me—am I welcome?”

“Occasionally. I can’t predict my moods. If you want to talk to me, come around and see. And if I tell you to get the hell out, Ned, then get the hell out. Clear?”

Rawlins grinned sunnily. “Clear.” He got to his feet. Muller, unwilling to have the boy standing over him, rose also. Rawlins took a few steps toward him.

Muller said, “Where are you going?”

“I hate having to talk at this distance, to shout like this. I can get a little closer to you, can’t I?”

Instantly suspicious, Muller replied, “Are you some kind of masochist?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Well, I’m no sadist either. I don’t want you near me.”

“It’s really not that unpleasant—Dick.”

“You’re lying. You hate it like all the others. I’m like a leper, boy, and if you’re queer for leprosy I feel sorry for you, but don’t come any closer. It embarrasses me to see other people suffer on my account.”

Rawlins stopped. “Whatever you say. Look, Dick, I don’t want to cause troubles for you. I’m just trying to be friendly and helpful. If doing that in some way makes you uncomfortable—well, just say so, and I’ll do something else. It doesn’t do me any good to make things worse for you.”

“That came out pretty muddled, boy. What is it you want from me, anyhow?”

“Nothing.”

“Why not leave me alone?”

“You’re a human being, and you’ve been alone here for a long time. It’s my natural impulse to offer companionship. Does that sound too dumb?”