Robert Silverberg - The Man In The Maze

Boardman nodded. “Nothing’s changed. There’s still a protective field over the whole thing. It volatilizes anything that tries to get through.”

“So even a bird that comes too close—”

“There are no birds on Lemnos.”

“Raindrops, then. Whatever falls on the city—”

“Lemnos gets no rain,” said Boardman sourly. “At least not on this continent. The only thing that field keeps out is strangers. We’ve known it since the first expedition. Some brave men found out about that field the hard way.”

“Didn’t they try a drone probe first?”

Smiling, Boardman said, “When you find a dead city in the middle of a desert on a dead world you don’t expect to be blown up if you land inside it. It’s a forgivable sort of mistake—except that Lemnos doesn’t forgive mistakes.” He gestured, and the plane dropped lower, following the orbit of the outer walls for a moment. Then it rose and hovered over the heart of the city while photographs were being taken. The wrong-colored sunlight glistened off a hall of mirrors. Boardman felt curdled weariness in his chest. They overflew the city again and again, marking off a preprogrammed observation pattern, and he discovered he was wishing irritably that a shaft of sudden light would rise from those mirrors and incinerate them on the next pass to save him the trouble of carrying out this assignment. He had lost his taste for detail-work, and too many fine details stood between him and his purpose here. They said that impatience was a mark of youth, that old men could craftily spin their webs and plot their schemes in serenity, but somehow Boardman found himself longing rashly for a quick consummation to this job. Send some sort of drone scuttling through the maze on metal tracks to seize Muller and drag him out. Tell the man what was wanted of him and make him agree to do it. Then take off for Earth, quickly, quickly. The mood passed. Boardman felt foxy again.

Captain Hosteen, who would be conducting the actual entry attempt, came aft to pay his respects. Hosteen was a short, thick-framed man with a flat nose and coppery skin; he wore his uniform as though he felt it was all going to slip off his left shoulder at any moment. But he was a good man, Boardman knew, and ready to sacrifice a score of lives, including his own, to get into that maze.

Hosteen flicked a glance from the screen to Boardman’s face and said, “Learning anything?”

“Nothing new. We have a job.”

“Want to go down again?”

“Might as well,” Boardman said. He looked at Rawlins. “Unless you have anything else you’d like to check, Ned?”

“Me? Oh, no—no. That is—well, I wonder if we need to go into the maze at all. I mean, if we could lure Muller out somehow, talk to him outside the city—”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t it work?”

“No,” said Boardman emphatically. “Item one, Muller wouldn’t come out if we asked him. He’s a misanthrope. Remember? He buried himself here to get away from humanity. Why should he socialize with us? Item two, we couldn’t invite him outside without letting him know too much about what we want from him. In this deal, Ned, we need to hoard our resources of strategy, not toss them away in our first move.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

Patiently Boardman said, “Suppose we used your approach. What would you say to Muller to make him come out?”

“Why—that we’re here from Earth to ask him if he’ll help us in a time of system-wide crisis. That we’ve encountered a race of alien beings with whom we’re unable to communicate, and that it’s absolutely necessary that we break through to them in a hurry, and that he alone can do the trick. We—” Rawlins stopped, as though the fatuity of his own words had broken through to him. Color mounted in his cheeks. He said in a hoarse voice, “Muller isn’t going to give a damn for those arguments, is he?”

“No, Ned. Earth sent him before a bunch of aliens once before, and they ruined him. He isn’t about to try it again.”

“Then how are we going to make him help us?”

“By playing on his sense of honor. But at the moment that’s not the problem we’re talking about. We’re discussing how to get him out of his sanctuary in there. Now, you were suggesting that we set up a speaker and tell him exactly what we want from him, and then wait for him to waltz out and pledge to do his best for good old Earth. Right?”

“I guess so.”

“But it won’t work. Therefore we’ve got to get inside the maze ourselves, win Muller’s trust, and persuade him to cooperate. And to do that we have to keep quiet about the real situation until we’ve eased him out of his suspicions.”

A look of newborn wariness appeared on Rawlins’ face. “What are we going to tell him, then, Charles?”

“Not we. You.”

“What am I going to tell him, then?” Boardman sighed. “Lies, Ned. A pack of lies.”

They had come equipped for solving the problem of the maze. The ship’s brain, of course, was a first-class computer, and it carried the details of all previous Earth-based attempts to enter the city. Except one, and unfortunately that had been the only successful one. But records of past failures have their uses. The ship’s data banks had plenty of mobile extensions: airborne and groundborne drone probes, spy-eyes, sensor batteries, and more. Before any human life was risked on the maze Boardman and Hosteen would try the whole mechanical array. Mechanicals were expendable, anyway; the ship carried a set of templates, and it would be no trouble to replicate all devices destroyed. But a point would come at which the drone probes had to give way to men: the aim was to gather as much information as possible for those men to use.

Never before had anyone tried to crack the maze this way. The early explorers had simply gone walking in, unsuspecting, and had perished. Their successors had known enough of the story to avoid the more obvious traps, and to some extent had been aided by sophisticated sensory devices, but this was the first attempt to run a detailed survey before entering. No one was overly confident that the technique would let them in unscathed, but it was the best way to approach the problem.

The overflights on the first day had given everybody a good visual image of the maze. Strictly speaking, it hadn’t been necessary for them to leave the ground; they could have watched big-screen relays from the comfort of their camp and gained a decent idea of the conformation below, letting airborne probes do all the work. But Boardman had insisted. The mind registers things one way when it picks them off a relay screen, and another when the sensory impressions are flooding in straight from the source. Now they all had seen the city from the air, and had seen what the guardians of the maze could do to a drone probe that ventured into the protective field overlying the city.

Rawlins had suggested the possibility that there might be a null spot in that protective field. Toward late afternoon they checked it out by loading a probe with metal pellets and stationing it fifty meters above the highest point of the maze. Scanner eyes recorded the action as the drone slowly turned, spewing the pellets one at a time into preselected one-square-meter boxes above the city. Each in turn was incinerated as it fell. They were able to calculate that the thickness of the safety field varied with distance from the center of the maze; it was only about two meters deep above the inner zones, much deeper at the outer rim, forming an invisible cup over the city. But there were no null spots; the field was continuous. Hosteen tested the notion that the field was capable of overstrain by having the probe reloaded with pellets which were catapulted simultaneously into each of the test rectangles. The field dealt with them all, creating for a moment a single pucker of flame above the city.