Damon Knight - Orbit 17

Bastard! Dirty son of a bitch! She almost says it. But it’s been so long since she’s used her voice, all she can do is croak. Just when the mice looked like they had the maze beat, thanks to their sonar, he hooks up a device to “recondition” them. It’s a sonar detector that triggers an electroshock. Whenever one of them beeps, the waves activate the current, electrifying the entire maze. Not enough of a jolt to kill them, but enough to have them writhing and jerking. Without the sonar they’re back to nosing up blind alleys, going nuts again in comers. It wasn’t part of the original concept to match wits with the subjects. The idea was to build the most complex maze mankind had ever devised, and if they solved it, fine, that was a measure of their evolution, but it wasn’t supposed to have become a contest. This isn’t the first time he’s done it, either. The mice would have defeated it years ago if he hadn’t kept enlarging it constantly. He’s added over a hundred stories since the original, and spokes of corridors winding off in all directions. She wonders what they think in the city when they see it sprouting out of the dome of the Institute and twisting off toward the horizon like some runaway roller coaster. Some of the new passageways go straight up, with stainless-steel sides, and others plunge suddenly like elevator shafts. They’d have to sprout wings to solve those. And there’s exits with doors like safes with intricate combination locks on them, and when they finally solve the locks and the door opens, a wall of water is waiting on the other side to flood the passages, and there’s other doors booby-trapped with explosives, or emitting cyanide, and passages lined with razor blades, and stretches where the floor heats red hot, wind tunnels, miles that twist through a deep freeze . . .

He’s losing his hair and reeks like he hasn’t bathed in months —the stink of nervous sweats mingled with the peculiar musk those golden creatures spray him with. Maybe they’re a little too much for a man his age, she chuckles. What does he see through the greasy lenses of those glasses? The hairs sprouting out of that mole by his nose have turned white. His scraggly beard is clotted with bits of food and snot he doesn’t bother wiping away when he comes in huffing and stamping his galoshes from the cold. It doubles her over thinking about it, him—Dr. Fastidious with his gas mask, rubber gloves, and waders. Heh-heh. Slobbering as he mumbles to himself, spitting into the receiver as he phones all over the world, each conversation ending the same, with him beet-faced and raving, cursing his colleagues, and in between trying to explain how the mice have nearly evolved the “ultimate mutation”—the ability to determine future mutations by harnessing the collective energy of their brains.

At night, when he goes to his golden paramours, she opens the maze door and crawls inside. Sits right in the doorway with her legs bunched up against the wall. The sounds well up from deep inside her. She’s come to understand how a rooster crows, a coyote howls. She cups her hands over her mouth, her thumbs jammed up her nose to produce the right nasal accent, and calls out the new plans he’s spent the day concocting against them, her warnings reverberating down the shining hallways, echo after echo of their oboe-like language.

Screams from the nursery! The biochemist with a meat cleaver, the famous mutation expert wearing a welder’s mask and blasting with a blowtorch, and him with a German Luger firing point-blank, furry wedges of skull splattered across the walls. She wakes. The lab empty and dark, only the machines humming, the computer winking through its circuits. Inside the nursery everything is quiet: the mamas sleeping in their caged steel cribs, the little ones cradled in glass incubators. Without hesitation she raises the lid off her favorite, cooing mouse sounds in his ear, lifts him gently out. He clutches her shriveled breasts with his small leathery hands. She can feel his heart beating what seems like twice the rate of hers, and hers is pounding. She shuts the door to the nursery without looking back and they huddle together on the floor beneath the vivisection table. They close their eyes. He is trembling. The lab door bursts open. Cursing and shouting, the three of them stumble past into the screaming nursery.

To say “love” correctly it’s not necessary to put your fingers up your nose. It’s a sound that comes from deep inside, like a cat’s purr, a dove’s coo. She can’t really make it, only approximate it by vibrating her tongue against her alveolar ridge while a high-pitched r sound wells up from her heart. Nor does it really mean love in the way Man uses it—it means being together and knowing that wherever you are will lead somewhere else.

He lived like a prisoner in this cramped storeroom no bigger than a closet. She named him Theseus, explained his name to him, told and retold the old myths. But after a while she got to calling him Theo. If one whistles as it’s said: Tee-ooo, then it almost sounds like a name out of their language. Once he asked her what her old name was, what her life was like before she came here, was she a child? But when she tried to think back, her mind got lost in the coils of her brain, she felt her blood staggering around in the darkness, blind, trying to distinguish memories from nightmares by their feel. He helped her sit down, held her till the dizziness passed, brushed away her tears. —I’ll just keep calling you Mother, he said.

TIPTON. Wayne Miller reported his silo has been incorporated into a construction with “a lot of comers” emerging from the well and rambling in numerous directions across the 200-acre tundra, which had previously been his alfalfa field, before disappearing into a storm drain off Interstate 80.

—North Liberty Gazette

How long was he here, she wonders. Time’s been gone for a long time. It disappears before space leaving endless rooms, filling even the smallest cupboard with eternity. She tried to make his little room homey. As if such a space could be home, with Death always compressing it further, its enormous weight always just the other side of the door. She tries to count the years, but it’s all become one winter. She sits alone in the closet now just to feel the old minutes pass. The same room they’d stored all the materials from the original maze in so long ago—rolls of blueprints, stacks of manuscripts, files, partially disassembled scale models that Theo played with to kill the time of his childhood. He slept through the days. At night, they’d prowl the hallways, planning an escape. But right at dawn she’d always find him transfixed before the entrance of the maze, antennae perked up. He wasn’t a happy child. And now he’s gone leaving only a little pellet behind she’d sweep away except it helps her to believe he was really here.

TUKWILA. Authorities are still trying to explain the disappearance of a fifty-car freight train. It was last seen by motorists entering the tunnel near Midway.

—Puyallup Herald

The second quake in the last few days. This one cracked the ceiling and buckled the walls. She’s heard rumors that part of the east wing has collapsed, allowing packs of half-starved dogs to escape into the city. Now the three of them, wearing hard hats and football helmets, are in the lab squabbling on how to program the computer. —It’s the maze, he’s yelling, don’t you see they’re extending the maze themselves I building it from inside out . . . these quakes . . . look here! He’s arranged a series of back-page clippings from obscure newspapers into a pattern connected by red lines and superimposed against a wall map. She reads through the clippings: reports of miners in West Virginia and Montana refusing to enter “haunted” mines, fishermen off the Carolina coast complaining about nets snagged on "underwater obstructions,” almost identical articles from several different states regarding the mysterious disappearance of sewer workers. —They’ve probably linked up with a natural system of underground caves, he says, I think we did research on that once. Before she can intercept him he’s opened the door to the closet, standing there gaping at Theo’s burlap bed, the books, and little decorations she’d fixed up and hadn’t been able to discard. He picks up the last dried pellet, shriveled and darkened now, in his handkerchief, holding it out, his eyes narrowed with suspicion, then bugging out in rage. —What’s this! he shouts, waving it in her face. —What in the hell is this!