Philip Dick - A Maze of Death

Ignatz Thugg, wearing gaily-decorated pajamas, said loudly. “Susie Smart.”

Putting on his bathrobe, Belsnor moved numbly toward the door.

“Do you know what this means?” Wade Frazer said.

“Yes,” he said. “I know exactly what it means.”

Roberta Rockingham, touching the corner of a small linen handkerchief to her eyes, said, “She was such a bright spirit, always lighting up things with her presence. How could anybody do it to her?” A trail of tears materialized on her withered cheeks.

He made his way across the compound; the others clumped after him, none of them speaking.

There she lay, on the porch. A few steps from her door. He bent over her, touched the back of her neck. Absolutely cold. No life of any kind. “You examined her?” he said to Battle. “She really is dead? There’s no doubt about it?”

“Look at your hand,” Wade Frazer said.

Belsnor removed his hand from the girl’s neck. His hand dripped blood. And now he saw the mass of blood in her hair, near the top of her skull. Her head had been crushed in.

“Care to revise your autopsy?” he said scathingly to Babble. “Your opinion about Tallchief; do you care to change it now?”

No one spoke.

Belsnor looked around, saw not far off a loaf of bread. “She must have been carrying that,” he said.

“She got it from me,” Tony Dunkelwelt said. His face had paled from shock; his words were barely audible. “She left my room last night and I went to bed. I didn’t kill her. I didn’t even know about it until I heard Dr. Babble and the others yelling.”

“We’re not saying you did it,” Belsnor said to him. Yes, she used to flit from one room to another at night, he thought. We made fun of her and she was a little deranged… but she never hurt anybody. She was as innocent as a human being could get; she was even innocent of her own wrongdoing.

The new man, Russell, approached. The expression on his face showed that he, too, without even knowing her, understood what an awful thing it was, what an awful moment it was for all of them.

“You see what you came here to see?” Belsnor said to him harshly.

Russell said, “I wonder if you could get help by means of the transmitter in my noser.”

“They’re not good enough,” Belsnor said. “The noser radio-rig. Not good enough at all.” He rose to his feet stiffly, hearing his bones crack. And it’s Terra that’s doing this, he thought, remembering what Seth Morley and Babble had said last night when they brought Russell over. Our own government. As if we’re rats in a maze with death; rodents confined with the ultimate adversary, to die one by one until none are left.

Seth Morley beckoned him off to one side, away from the others. “You’re sure you don’t want to tell them? They have a right to know who the enemy is.”

Belsnor said, “I don’t want them to know because as I explained to you their morale is low enough already. If they knew it came from Terra they wouldn’t be able to survive; they’d go friggin’ mad.”

“I’ll leave it up to you,” Seth Morley said. “You’ve been elected as the group’s leader.” But his tone of voice showed that he disagreed, and very strongly. As he had last night.

“In time,” Belsnor said, clamping his long, expert fingers around Seth’s upper arm. “When the right time comes—”

“It never will,” Seth Morley said, moving back a step. “They’ll die without knowing.”

Maybe, Belsnor thought, it would be better that way. Better if all men, wherever they are, were to die without knowing who did it or why.

Squatting down, Russell turned Susie Smart over; he gazed down at her and said, “She certainly was a pretty girl.”

“Pretty,” Belsnor said harshly, “but batty. She had an overactive sex drive: she had to sleep with every man she came across. We can do without her.”

“You bastard,” Seth Morley said, his tone fierce. Belsnor lifted his empty hands and said, “What do you want me to say? That we can’t get along without her? That this is the end?”

Morley did not answer.

To Maggie Walsh, Belsnor said, “Say a prayer.” It was time for the ceremony of death, the rituals so firmly attached to it that even he himself could not imagine a death without it.

“Give me a few minutes,” Maggie Walsh said huskily. “I—just can’t talk now.” She retreated and turned her back; he heard her sobbing.

“I’ll say it,” Belsnor said, with savage fury.

Seth Morley said, “I’d like permission to go on an exploratory trip outside the settlement. Russell wants to come along.”

“Why?” Belsnor said.

Morley said in a low, steady voice, “I’ve seen the miniaturized version of the Building. I think it’s time to confront the real thing.”

“Take someone with you,” Belsnor said. “Someone who knows their way around out there.”

“I’ll go with them,” Betty Jo Berm spoke up.

“There should be another man with them,” Belsnor said. But, he thought, it’s a mistake for us not to stay together; death comes when one of us is off by himself. “Take Frazer and Thugg, both of them, with you,” he decided. “As well as B.J.” That would split the group, but neither Roberta Rockingham nor Bert Kosler were physically able to make such a journey. Neither had as yet left the camp. “I’ll stay here with the rest of them,” he said.

“I think we should be armed,” Wade Frazer said.

“Nobody is going to be armed,” Belsnor said. “We’re in a bad enough situation already. If you’re armed you’ll kill one another, either accidentally or intentionally.” He did not know why he felt this, but intuitively he knew himself to be correct. Susie Smart, he thought. Maybe you were killed by one of us… one who is an agent of Terra and General Treaton.

As in my dream, he thought. The enemy within. Age, deterioration and death. Despite the field-barrier surrounding the settlement. That’s what my dream was trying to tell me.

Rubbing at her grief-reddened eyes, Maggie Walsh said, “I’d like to go along with them.”

“Why?” Belsnor said. “Why does everyone want to leave the settlement? We’re safer here.” But his knowledge, his awareness of the untruth of what he was saying, found its way into his voice; he heard his own insincerity. “Okay,” he said. “And good luck.” To Seth Morley he said, “Try and bring back one of those singing flies. Unless you find something better.”

“I’ll do the best I can,” Seth Morley said. Turning, he moved away from Belsnor. Those who were going with him started away, too.

They’ll never come back, Belsnor said to himself. He watched them go and, within him, his heart struck heavy, muffled blows, as if the pendulum of the cosmic clock were swinging back and forth, back and forth, within his hollow chest.

The pendulum of death.

The seven of them trudged along the edge of a low ridge, their attention fixed on each object that they saw. They said very little.

Unfamiliar hazy hills spread out, lost in billowing dust. Green lichens grew everywhere; the soil was a tangled floor of growing plants. The air smelled of intricate organic life here. A rich, complex odor, nothing like any of them had smelled before. Off in the distance great columns of steam rose up, geysers of boiling water forcing its way through the rocks to the surface. An ocean lay far off, pounding invisibly in the drifting curtain of dust and moisture.

They came to a damp place. Warm slime, compounded from water, dissolved minerals and fungoid pulp, lapped at their shoes. The remains of lichens and protozoa colored and thickened the scum of moisture dripping everywhere, over the wet rocks and sponge-like shrubbery.

Bending down, Wade Frazer picked up a snail-like unipedular organism. “It’s not fake—this is alive. It’s genuine.”