Robert Silverberg - The Man In The Maze

“The offer stands.”

“Rejected,” Muller said. “If I kill you, it won’t be as part of any deal. But I’m much more likely to kill myself. You know, I’m a decent man at heart. Somewhat unstable, yes, and who’s to blame me for that? But decent. I’d rather use this gun on me than on you. I’m the one who’s suffering. I can end it.”

“You could have ended it at any time in the past nine years,” Boardman pointed out. “But you survived. You devoted all your ingenuity to staying alive in this murderous place.”

“Ah. Yes. But that was different! An abstract challenge, man against the maze. A test of my skills. Ingenuity. But if I kill myself now, I thwart you. I put the thumb to the nose, with all of mankind watching. I’m the indispensable man, you say? What better way then, to pay mankind back for my pain?”

“We regretted your suffering,” said Boardman.

“I’m sure you wept bitterly for me. But that was all you did. You let me go creeping away, diseased, corrupt, unclean. Now comes the release. Not really suicide, but revenge.” Muller smiled. He turned the gun to finest beam and let its muzzle rest against his chest. A touch of the finger, now. His eyes raked their faces. The four soldiers did not seem to care. Rawlins appeared deep in shock. Only Boardman was animated with concern and fright. “I could kill you first, I suppose, Charles. As a lesson to our young friend—the wages of deceit is death. But no. That would spoil everything. You have to live, Charles. To go back to Earth and admit that you let the indispensable man slip through your grasp. What a blotch on your career! To fail your most important assignment! Yes. Yes. My pleasure. Falling dead here, leaving you to pick up the pieces.”

His finger tightened on the stud.

“Now,” he said. “Quickly.”

“No!” Boardman screamed. “For the love of—”

“Man,” said Muller, and laughed, and did not fire. His arm relaxed. He tossed the weapon contemptuously toward Boardman. It landed almost at his feet.

“Foam!” Boardman cried. “Quick!”

“Don’t bother,” said Muller. “I’m yours.”

Rawlins took a long while to understand it. First they had the problem of getting out of the maze. Even with Muller as their leader, it was a taxing job. As they had suspected, coming upon the traps from the inner side was not the same as working through them from without. Warily Muller took them through Zone E; they could manage F well enough by now; and after they had dismantled their camp, they pressed on into G. Rawlins kept expecting Muller to bolt suddenly and hurl himself into some fearful snare. But he seemed as eager to come alive out of the maze as any of them. Boardman, oddly, appeared to recognize that. Though he watched Muller closely, he left him unconfined.

Feeling that he was in disgrace, Rawlins kept away from the others on the nearly silent outward march. He considered his career in ruins. He had jeopardized the lives of his companions and the success of the mission. Yet it had been worth it, he felt. A time comes when a man takes his stand against what he believes to be wrong.

The simple moral pleasure that he took in that was balanced and overbalanced by the knowledge that he had acted naively, romantically, foolishly. He could not bear to face Boardman now. He thought more than once of letting one of the deadly traps of these outer zones have him; but that too, he decided, would be naive, romantic, and foolish.

He watched Muller striding ahead—tall, proud, all tensions resolved, all doubts crystallized. And he wondered a thousand times why Muller had given back the gun.

Boardman finally explained it to him when they camped for the night in a precarious plaza near the outward side of Zone G.

“Look at me,” Boardman said. “What’s the matter? Why can’t you look at me?”

“Don’t toy with me, Charles. Get it over with.”

“Get what over with?”

“The tonguelashing. The sentence.”

“It’s all right, Ned. You helped us get what we wanted. Why should I be angry?”

“But the gun—I gave him the gun—”

“Confusion of ends and means again. He’s coming with us. He’s doing what we wanted him to do. That’s what counts.”

Floundering, Rawlins asked, “And if he had killed himself—or us?”

“He wouldn’t have done either.”

“You can say that, now. But for the first moment, when he held the gun—”

“No,” Boardman said. “I told you earlier, we’d work on his sense of honor. Which we had to reawaken. You did that. Look, here I am, the brutal agent of a brutal and amoral society, right? And I confirm all of Muller’s worst thoughts about mankind. Why should he help a tribe of wolves? And here you are, young and innocent, full of hope and dreams. You. remind him of the mankind he once served, before the cynicism corroded him. In your blundering way you try to be moral in a world that shows no trace of morality or meaning. You demonstrate sympathy, love for a fellow man, the willingness to make a dramatic gesture for the sake of righteousness. You show Muller that there’s still hope in humanity. See? You defy me, and give him a gun and make him master of the situation. He could do the obvious, and burn us down. He could do the slightly less obvious, and burn himself. Or he could match your gesture with one of his own, top it, commit a deliberate act of renunciation, express his revived sense of moral superiority. He does it. He tosses away the gun. You were vital, Ned. You were the instrument through which we won him.”

“You make it sound so ugly when you spell it out that way, Charles. As if you had planned even this. Pushing me so far that I’d give him the gun, knowing that he—”

Boardman smiled.

“Did you?” Rawlins demanded suddenly. “No. You couldn’t have calculated all those twists and turns. Now, after the fact, you’re trying to claim credit for having engineered it all. But I saw you in the moment I handed him the gun. There was fear on your face, and anger. You weren’t at all sure what he was going to do. Only when everything worked out could you claim it went according to plan. I see through you, Charles!”

“How delightful to be transparent,” Boardman said gaily.

The maze seemed uninterested in holding them. Carefully they traced their outward path, but they met few challenges and no serious dangers. Quickly they went toward the ship.

They gave Muller a forward cabin, well apart from the quarters of the crew. He seemed to accept that as a necessity of his condition, and showed no offense. He was withdrawn, subdued, self-contained; an ironic smile often played on his lips, and much of the time his eyes displayed a glint of contempt. But he was willing to do as they directed. He had had his moment of supremacy; now he was theirs.

Hosteen and his men bustled through the liftoff preparations. Muller remained in his cabin. Boardman went to him, alone, unarmed. He could make noble gestures too.

They faced each other across a low table. Muller waited, silent, his face cleansed of emotion. Boardman said after a long moment, “I’m grateful to you, Dick.”

“Save it.”

“I don’t mind if you despise me. I did what I had to do. So did the boy. And now so will you. You couldn’t forget that you were an Earthman, after all.”

“I wish I could.”

“Don’t say that. It’s easy, glib, cheap bitterness, Dick. We’re both too old for glibness. The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant.”

He sat quite close to Muller. The emanation hit him broadside, but he deliberately remained in place. That wave of despair welling out to him made him feel a thousand years old. The decay of the body, the crumbling of the soul, the heat-death of the galaxy… the coming of winter… emptiness… ashes…