Robert Silverberg - The Man In The Maze

“No!” Rawlins found himself yelling. “Don’t kill it, Charles! It only wants to look at us—!” Boardman fired.

The animal leaped, convulsed in mid-air, and fell back with its limbs outspread. Rawlins rushed up, numb with shock. There hadn’t been any need for the killing, he thought. The beast was just scouting us out. What a filthy thing to do!

He blurted angrily, “Couldn’t you have waited a minute, Charles? Maybe it would have gone away by itself! Why—”

Boardman smiled. He beckoned to a crewman, who squirted a spray net over the fallen animal. The beast stirred groggily as the crewman hauled it toward the ship. Softly Boardman said, “All I did was stun it, Ned. We’re going to write off part of the budget for this trip against the account of the federal zoo. Did you think I was all that triggerhappy?”

Rawlins suddenly felt very small and foolish. “Well—not really. That is—”

“Forget it. No, don’t forget it. Don’t forget anything. Take a lesson from it: collect all the data before shouting nonsense.”

“But if I had waited, and you really had killed it—”

“Then you’d have learned something ugly about me at the expense of one animal life. You’d have the useful fact that I’m provoked to murderousness by anything strange with sharp teeth. Instead all you did was make a loud noise. If I had meant to kill, your shout wouldn’t have changed my intention. It might have ruined my aim, that’s all, and left me at the mercy of an angry wounded beast. So bide your time, Ned. Evaluate. It’s better sometimes to let a thing happen than to play your own hand too quickly.” Boardman winked. “Am I offending you, Ned? Making you feel like an idiot with my little lecture?”

“Of course not, Charles. I wouldn’t pretend that I don’t have plenty to learn.”

“And you’re willing to learn it from me, even if I’m an infuriating old scoundrel?”

“Charles, I—”

“I’m sorry, Ned. I shouldn’t be teasing you. You were right to try to stop me from killing that animal. It wasn’t your fault that you misunderstood what I was doing. In your place I’d have acted just the way you did.”

“You mean I shouldn’t have bided my time and collected all the data when you pulled the stungun?” Rawlins asked, baffled.

“Probably not.”

“You’re contradicting yourself, Charles.”

“It’s my privilege to be inconsistent,” Boardman said. “My stock in trade, even.” He laughed heartily. “Get a good night’s sleep tonight. Tomorrow we’ll fly over the maze and map it a little, and then we’ll start sending men in. I figure we’ll be talking to Muller within a week.”

“Do you think he’ll be willing to cooperate?”

A cloud passed over Boardman’s heavy features. “He won’t be at first. He’ll be so full of bitterness that he’ll be spitting poison. After all, we’re the ones who cast him out. Why should he want to help Earth now? But he’ll come around, Ned, because fundamentally he’s a man of honor, and that’s something that never changes no matter how sick and lonely and anguished a man gets. Not even hatred can corrode real honor. You know that, Ned, because you’re that sort of person yourself. Even I am, in my own way. A man of honor. We’ll work on Muller. Well get him to come out of that damned maze and help us.”

“I hope you’re right, Charles.” Rawlins hesitated. “And what will it be like for us, confronting him? I mean, considering his sickness—the way he affects others—”

“It’ll be bad. Very bad.”

“You saw him, didn’t you, after it happened?”

“Yes. Many times.”

Rawlins said, “I can’t really imagine what it’s like to be next to a man and feel his whole soul spilling out over you. That’s what happens when you’re with Muller, isn’t it?”

“It’s like stepping into a bath of acid,” said Boardman heavily. “You can get used to it, but you never like it. You feel fire all over your skin. The ugliness, the terrors, the greeds, the sicknesses —they spout from him like a fountain of muck.”

“And Muller’s a man of honor…a decent man.”

“He was, yes.” Boardman looked toward the distant maze. “Thank God for that. But it’s a sobering thought, isn’t it, Ned? If a first-rate man like Dick Muller has all that garbage inside his brain, what do you think ordinary people are like in there? The squashed-down people with the squashed-down lives? Give them the same kind of curse Muller has and they’d be like beacons of flame, burning up every mind within light-years.”

“But Muller’s had nine years to stew in his misery,” Rawlins said. “What if it’s impossible to get near him now? What if the stuff he radiates is so strong that we won’t be able to stand it?”

“We’ll stand it,” Boardman said.

Within the maze, Muller studied his situation and contemplated his options. In the milky green recesses of the viewing tank he could see the ship and the plastic domes that had sprouted beside it, and the tiny figures of men moving about. He wished now that he had been able to find the fine control on the viewing tank; the images he received were badly out of focus. But he considered himself lucky to have the use of the tank at all. Many of the ancient instruments in this city had become useless long ago through the decay of some vital part. A surprising number had endured the eons unharmed, a tribute to the technical skill of their makers; but of these, Muller had been able to discover the function of only a few, and he operated those imperfectly.

He watched the blurred figures of his fellow humans working busily and wondered what new torment they were preparing for him.

He had tried to leave no clues to his whereabouts when he fled from Earth. He had come here in a rented ship, filing a deceptive flight plan by way of Sigma Draconis. During his warp trip, of course, he had had to pass six monitor stations; but he had given each one a simulated great-circle galactic route record, carefully designed to be as misleading as possible.

A routine comparison check of all the monitor stations would reveal that Muller’s successive announcements of location added up to nonsense, but he had gambled that he would manage to complete his flight and vanish before they ran one of the regular checks. Evidently he had won that gamble, for no interceptor ships had come after him.

Emerging from warp in the vicinity of Lemnos, he had carried out one final evasive maneuver by leaving his ship in a parking orbit and descending by drop-capsule. A disruptor bomb, preprogrammed, had blasted the ship to molecules and sent the fragments traveling on a billion conflicting orbits through the universe. It would take a fancy computer indeed to calculate a probable nexus of source for those! The bomb was designed to provide fifty false vectors per square meter of explosion surface, a virtual guarantee that no tracer could possibly be effective within a finite span of time. Muller needed only a very short finite span—say, sixty years. He had been close to sixty when he left Earth. Normally, he could expect at least another century of vigorous life; but, cut off from medical service, doctoring himself with a cheap diagnostat, he’d be doing well to last into his eleventh or twelfth decade. Sixty years of solitude and a peaceful, private death, that was all he asked. But now his privacy was interrupted after only nine years. Had they really traced him somehow?

Muller decided that they had not. For one thing, he had taken every conceivable antitracking precaution. For another, they had no motive for following him. He was no fugitive who had to be brought back to justice. He was simply a man with a loathsome affliction, an abomination in the sight of his fellow mortals, and doubtless Earth felt itself well rid of him. He was a shame and a reproach to them, a welling fount of guilt and grief, a prod to the planetary conscience. The kindest thing he could do for his own kind was to remove himself from their midst, and he had done that as thoroughly as he could. They would hardly make an effort to come looking for someone so odious to them.