Robert Silverberg - The Man In The Maze

“There’s no treatment,” said Rawlins dully.

“No-treatment…”

“No treatment. None. It was all a lie.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“You said so yourself,” Rawlins reminded him. “You didn’t believe a word of what I was saying. Remember?”

“A lie.”

“You didn’t understand why I was saying it, but you said it was nonsense. You told me I was lying. You wondered what I had to gain by lying. I was lying, Dick.”

“Lying.”

“Yes.”

“But I’ve changed my mind,” said Muller softly. “I was ready to go back to Earth.”

“There’s no hope of a cure,” Rawlins told him.

He slowly rose to his feet and ran his hand through his long golden hair. He arranged his disarrayed clothing. He picked up the flask, went to the liqueur fountain and filled it. Returning, he handed the flask to Muller, who drank from it. Rawlins finished the flask. Something small and voracious-looking ran past them and slipped through the gate leading to Zone D.

Finally Muller said, “Do you want to explain some of this?”

“We aren’t archaeologists.”

“Go on.”

“We came here looking especially for you. It wasn’t any accident. We knew all along where you were. You were tracked from the time you left Earth nine years ago.”

“I took precautions.”

“They weren’t any use. Boardman knew where you were going, and he had you tracked. He left you in peace because he had no use for you. But when a need developed he had to come after you. He was holding you in reserve, so to speak.”

“Charles Boardman sent you to fetch me?” Muller asked.

“That’s why we’re here, yes. That’s the whole purpose of this expedition,” Rawlins replied tonelessly. “I was picked to make contact with you because you once knew my father and might trust me. And because I have an innocent face. All the time Boardman was directing me, telling me what to say, coaching me, even telling me what mistakes to make, how to blunder successfully. He told me to get into that cage, for instance. He thought it would help win your sympathy.”

“Boardman is here? Here on Lemnos?”

“In Zone F. He’s got a camp there.”

“Charles B oardman?”

“He’s here, yes. Yes.”

Muller’s face was stony. Within, all was turmoil. “Why did he do all this? What does he want with me?”

Rawlins said, “You know that there’s a third intelligent race in the universe, beside us and the Hydrans.”

“Yes. They had just been discovered when I left. That was why I went to visit the Hydrans. I was supposed to arrange a defensive alliance with them, before these other people, these extragalactics, came in contact with us. It didn’t work. But what does this have to—”

“How much do you know about these extragalactics?”

“Very little,” Muller admitted. “Essentially, nothing but what I’ve just told you. The day I agreed to go to Beta Hydri IV was the first time I had heard about them. Boardman told me, but he wouldn’t say anything else. All he said was that they were extremely intelligent—a superior species, he said—and that they lived in a neighboring cluster. And that they had a galactic drive and might visit us some day.”

“We know more about them now,” Rawlins said.

“First tell me what Boardman wants with me.”

“Everything in order, and it’ll be easier.” Rawlins grinned, perhaps a bit tipsily. He leaned against the stone tub and stretched his legs far out in front of himself. He said, “We don’t actually know a great deal about the extragalactics. What we did was send out a ramjet, throw it into warp, and bring it out a few thousand light-years away. Or a few million light-years. I don’t know the details. Anyway, it was a drone ship with all sorts of eyes. The place it went to was one of the X-ray galaxies, classified information, but I’ve heard it was either in Cygnus A or Scorpius II. We found that one planet of the galactic system was inhabited by an advanced race of very alien aliens.”

“How alien?”

“They can see all up and down the spectrum,” Rawlins said. “Their basic visual range is in the high frequencies. They see by the light of X-rays. They also seem to be able to make use of the radio frequencies to see, or at least to get some kind of sensory information. And they pick up most wavelengths in between, except that they don’t have a great deal of interest in the stuff between infrared and ultraviolet. What we like to call the visible spectrum.”

“Wait a minute. Radio senses? Do you have any idea how long radio waves are? If they’re going to get any information out of a single wave, they’ll need eyes or receptors or whatever of gigantic size. How big are these beings supposed to be?”

“They could eat elephants for breakfast,” said Rawlins.

“Intelligent life doesn’t come that big.”

“What’s the limitation? This is a gas giant planet, all ocean, no gravity to speak of. They float. They have no square-cube problems.”

“And a bunch of superwhales has developed a technological culture?” Muller asked. “You won’t get me to believe—”

“They have,” said Rawlins. “I’ve told you, these are very alien aliens. They can’t build machinery themselves. But they have slaves.”

“Oh,” said Muller quietly.

“We’re only beginning to understand this, and of course I don’t have much of the inside information myself, but as I piece it together it seems that these beings make use of lower life-forms, turning them essentially into radio-controlled robots. They’ll use anything with limbs and mobility. They started with certain animals of their own planet, a small dolphin-like form perhaps on the threshold of intelligence, and worked through them to achieve a space drive. Then they got to neighboring planets—land planets— and took control of pseudoprimates, protochimps of some kind. They look for fingers. Manual dexterity counts a great deal with them. At present their sphere of influence covers some eighty light-years and appears to be spreading at an exponential rate.”

Muller shook his head. “This is worse nonsense than the stuff you were handing me about a cure. Look, there’s a limiting velocity for radio transmission, right? If they’re controlling flunkeys from eighty light-years away, it’ll take eighty years for any command to reach its destination. Every twitch of a muscle, every trifling movement—”

“They can leave their home world,” said Rawlins.

“But if they’re so big—”

“They’ve used their slave beings to build gravity tanks. They also have a star drive. All their colonies are run by overseers in orbit a few thousand kilometers up, floating in a simulated home-world environment. It takes one overseer to run one planet. I suppose they rotate tours of duty.”

Muller closed his eyes a moment. The image came to him of these colossal, unimaginable beasts spreading through their distant galaxy, impressing animals of all sorts into service, forging a captive society, vicariously technological, and drifting in orbit like spaceborne whales to direct and coordinate the grandiose improbable enterprise while themselves remaining incapable of the smallest physical act. Monstrous masses of glossy pink protoplasm, fresh from the sea, bristling with perceptors functioning at both ends of the spectrum. Whispering to one another in pulses of X-rays. Sending out orders via radio. No, he thought. No.

“Well,” he said at length, “what of it? They’re in another galaxy.”

“Not any longer. They’ve impinged on a few of our outlying colonies. Do you know what they do when they find a human world? They station an orbiting overseer above it and take control of the colonists. They find that humans make outstanding slaves, which isn’t very surprising. At the moment they have six of our worlds. They had a seventh, but we shot up their overseer. Now they make it much harder to do that. They just take control of our missiles as they home in, and throw them back.”