The Man in the Maze

by Robert Silverberg

  He found Boardman at dinner. A polished dining-board of dark wood mortised with light woods sat before him. Out of elegant stoneware he ate candied fruits, brandied vegetables, meat extracts, pungent juices. A carafe of wine of a deep olive hue was near his fleshy hand. Mysterious pills of several types rested in the shallow pits of an oblong block of black glass; from time to time Boardman popped one into his mouth. Rawlins stood at the sector opening for a long while before Boardman appeared to notice him.

  "I told you not to come here, Ned," the old man said finally.

  "Muller sends you this." Rawlins put the flask down beside the carafe of wine.

  "We could have talked without this visit."

  "I'm tired of that. I needed to see you." Boardman left him standing and did not interrupt his meal. "Charles, I don't think I can keep up the pretense with him."

  "You did an excellent job today," said Boardman, sipping his wine. "Quite convincing."

  "Yes, I'm learning how to tell lies. But what's the use? You heard him. Mankind disgusts him. He's not going to cooperate once we get him out of the maze."

  "He isn't sincere. You said it yourself, Ned. Cheap sophomore cynicism. The man loves mankind. That's why he's so bitter— because his love has turned sour in his mouth. But it hasn't turned to hate. Not really."

  "You weren't there, Charles. You weren't talking to him."

  "I watched. I listened. And I've known Dick Muller for forty-odd years."

  "The last nine years are the ones that count. They've twisted him." Rawlins bent into a crouch to get on Boardman's level. Boardman nudged a candied pear onto his fork, equalized gravity, and flipped it idly toward his mouth. He's intentionally ignoring me, Rawlins thought. He said, "Charles, be serious. I've gone in there and told Muller some monstrous lies. I've offered him a completely fraudulent cure, and he threw it back in my face."

  "Saying he didn't believe it existed. But he does believe, Ned. He's simply afraid to come out of hiding."

  "Please. Listen. Assume he does come to believe me. Assume he leaves the maze and puts himself in our hands. Then what? Who gets the job of telling him that there isn't any cure, that we've tricked him shamelessly, that we merely want him to be our ambassador again, to visit a bunch of aliens twenty times as strange and fifty times as deadly as the ones that ruined his life? I'm not going to break that news to him!"

  "You won't have to, Ned. I'll be the one."

  "And how will he react? Are you simply expecting him to smile and bow and say, very clever, Charles, you've done it again? To yield and do whatever you want? No. He couldn't possibly. You can get him out of the maze, maybe, but the very methods you use for getting him out make it inconceivable that he can be of any use to you once he is out."

  "That isn't necessarily true," said Boardman calmly.

  "Will you explain the tactics you propose to use, then, once you've informed him that the cure is a lie and that there's a dangerous new job he has to undertake?"

  "I prefer not to discuss future strategy now."

  "I resign," Rawlins said.

  4

  Boardman had been expecting something like that. A noble gesture; a moment of headstrong defiance; a rush of virtue to the brain. Abandoning now his studied detachment, he looked up, his eyes locking firmly on Rawlins'. Yes, there was strength there. Yes, determination. But not guile. Not yet.

  Quietly Boardman said, "You resign? After all your talk of service to mankind? We need you, Ned. You're the indispensable man, our link to Muller."

  "My dedication to mankind includes a dedication to Dick Muller," Rawlins said stiffly. "He's part of mankind, whether he thinks so or not. I've already committed a considerable crime against him. If you won't let me in on the rest of this scheme, I'm damned if I'll have any part in it."

  "I admire your convictions."

  "My resignation still stands."

  "I even agree with your position," said Boardman. "I'm not proud of what we must do here. I see it as part of historical necessity—the need for an occasional betrayal for the greater good. I have a conscience too, Ned, an eighty-year-old conscience, very well developed. It doesn't atrophy with age. We just learn to live with its complaints, that's all."

  "How are you going to get Muller to cooperate? Drug him? Torture him? Brainblast him?"

  "None of those."

  "What, then? I'm serious, Charles. My role in this job ends right here unless I know what's ahead."

  Boardman coughed, drained his wine, ate a peach, took three pills in quick succession. Rawlins' rebellion had been inevitable, and he was prepared for it, and yet he was annoyed that it had come. Now was the time for calculated risks. He said, "I see that it's time to drop the pretenses, then, Ned. I'll tell you what's in store for Dick Muller—but I want you to consider it within the framework of the larger position. Don't forget that the little game we've been playing on this planet isn't simply a matter of private moral postures. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I have to remind you that mankind's fate is at stake."

  "I'm listening, Charles."

  "Very well. Dick Muller must go to our extragalactic friends and convince them that human beings are indeed an intelligent species. Agreed? He alone is capable of doing this, because of his unique inability to cloak his thoughts."

  "Agreed."

  "Now, it isn't necessary to convince the aliens that we're good people, or that we're honorable people, or that we're lovable people. Simply that we have minds and can think. That we feel, that we sense, that we are something other than clever machines. For our purposes, it doesn't matter what emotions Dick Muller is radiating so long as he's radiating something."

  "I begin to see."

  "Therefore, once he's out of the maze we can tell him what his assignment is to be. No doubt he'll get angry at our trickery. But beyond his anger he may see where his duty lies. I hope so. You seem to think he won't. But it makes no difference, Ned. He won't be given an option once he leaves his sanctuary. He'll be taken to the aliens and handed over to them to make contact. It's brutal, I know. But necessary."

  "His cooperation is irrelevant, then," said Rawlins slowly.

  "He'll just be dumped. Like a sack."

  "A thinking sack. As our friends out there will learn."

  "I--"

  "No, Ned. Don't say anything now. I know what you're thinking. You hate the scheme. You have to. I hate it myself. Just go off, now, and think it over. Examine it from all sides before you come to a decision. If you want out tomorrow, let me know and we'll carry on somehow without you, but promise me you'll sleep on it, first. Yes? This is no time for a snap judgment."

  Rawlins' face was pale a moment. Then color flooded into it. He clamped his lips. Boardman smiled benignly. Rawlins clenched his fists, squinted, turned, hastily went out.

  A calculated risk.

  Boardman took another pill. Then he reached for the flask Muller had sent him. He poured a little. Sweet, gingery, strong. An excellent liqueur. He let it rest a while on his tongue.

  ELEVEN

  Muller had almost come to like the Hydrans. What he remembered most clearly and most favorably about them was their grace of motion. They seemed virtually to float. The strangeness of their bodies had never bothered him much; he was fond of saying that one did not need to go far from Earth to find the grotesque. Giraffes. Lobsters. Sea anemones. Squids. Camels. Look objectively at a camel and ask yourself what is less strange about its body than about a Hydran's.

  He had landed in a damp, dreary part of the planet, a little to the north of its equator, on an amoeboid continent occupied by a dozen large quasicities, each spread out over several thousand square kilometers. His life-support system, specially designed for this mission, was little more than a thin filtration sheet that clung to him like a second skin. It fed air to him through a thousand dialysis plaques. He moved easily if not comfortably within it.

  He walked for an hour through a forest of the giant toadstoollike trees before he came upon any of
the natives. The trees ran to heights of several hundred meters; perhaps the gravity, five-eighths Earthnorm, had something to do with that. Their curving trunks did not look sturdy. He suspected that an external woody layer no thicker than a fingertip surrounded a broad core of soggy pulp. The cap-like crowns of the trees met in a nearly continuous canopy overhead, cutting almost all light from the forest floor. Since the planet's cloud layer permitted only a hazy pearl-colored glow to come through, and even that was intercepted by the trees, a maroon darkness prevailed below.

  When he encountered the aliens he was surprised to find that they were about three meters tall. Not since childhood had he felt so diminished; he stood ringed by them, straining upward to meet their eyes. Now it was time for his exercise in applied hermeneutics. In a quiet voice he said, "My name is Richard Muller. I come in friendship from the peoples of the Terran Cultural Sphere."

  Of course they could not understand that. But they remained motionless. He imagined that their expressions were not unfriendly.

  Dropping to his knees, Muller traced the Pythagorean Theorem in the soft moist soil.

  He looked up. He smiled. "A basic concept of geometry. A universal pattern of thought."

  Their vertical slitlike nostrils flickered slightly. They inclined their heads. He imagined that they were exchanging thoughtful glances. With eyes in a circlet entirely around their heads, they did not need to change posture to do that.

  "Let me display some further tokens of our kinship," Muller said to them.

  He sketched a line on the ground. A short distance from it he sketched a pair of lines. At a greater distance he drew three lines. He filled in the signs. 1 + 11 = 111.

  "Yes?" he said. "We call it addition."

  The jointed limbs swayed. Two of his listeners touched arms. Muller remembered how they had obliterated the spying eye as soon as they had discovered it, not hesitating even to examine it. He had been prepared for the same reaction. Instead they were listening. A promising sign. He stood up and pointed to his marks on the ground.

  "Your turn," he said. He spoke quite loudly. He smiled quite broadly. "Show me that you understand. Speak to me in the universal language of mathematics."

  No response at first.

  He pointed again. He gestured at his symbols, then extended his hand, palm upraised, to the nearest Hydran.

  After a long pause one of the other Hydrans moved fluidly forward and let one of its globe-like foot-pedestals hover over the lines in the soil. The leg moved lightly and the lines vanished as the alien smoothed the soil.

  "All right," said Muller. "Now you draw something."

  The Hydran returned to its place in the circle.

  "Very well," Muller said. "There's another universal language. I hope this doesn't offend your ears." He drew a soprano recorder from his pocket and put it between his lips. Playing through the filtration sheet was cumbersome. He caught breath and played a diatonic scale. Their limbs fluttered a bit. They could hear, then, or at any rate could sense vibrations. He shifted to the minor, and gave them another diatonic scale. He tried a chromatic scale. They looked a trifle more agitated. Good for you, he thought. Connoisseurs. Perhaps the whole-tone scale is more in keeping with the cloudiness of this planet, he decided. He played both of them, and gave them a bit of Debussy for good measure.

  "Does that get to you?" he asked.

  They appeared to be conferring.

  They walked away from him.

  He tried to follow. He was unable to keep up, and soon he lost sight of them in the dark, misty forest; but he persevered, and found them clustered, as if waiting for him, farther on. When he neared them they began to move again. In this way they led him, by fits and starts, into their city.

  He subsisted on synthetics. Chemical analysis showed that it would be unwise to try local foods.

  He drew the Pythagorean Theorem many times. He sketched a variety of arithmetical processes. He played Schonberg and Bach. He constructed equilateral triangles. He ventured into solid geometry. He sang. He spoke French, Russian, and Mandarin, as well as English, to show them the diversity of human tongues. He displayed a chart of the periodic table. After six months he still knew nothing more about the workings of their minds than he had an hour before landing. They tolerated his presence, but they said nothing to him; and when they communicated with one another it was mainly in quick, evanescent gestures, touches of the hand, flickers of the nostrils. They had a spoken language, it seemed, but it was so soft and breathy that he could not begin to distinguish words or even syllables. He recorded whatever he heard, of course.

  Eventually they wearied of him and came for him. He slept.

  He did not discover until much later what had been done to him while he slept.

  2

  He was eighteen years old, naked under the California stars. The sky was ablaze. He felt he could reach for the stars and pluck them from the heavens.

  To be a god. To possess the universe.

  He turned to her. Her body was cool and slender, slightly tense.

  He cupped her breasts. He let his hand move across her flat belly. She shivered a little. "Dick," she said. "Oh." To be a god, he thought. He kissed her lightly, and then not lightly. "Wait," she said. "I'm not ready." He waited. He helped her get ready, or did the things he thought would help her get ready, and shortly she began to gasp. She spoke his name again. How many stars can a man visit in one lifetime? If each star has an average of twelve planets, and there are one hundred million stars within a galactic globe X light-years in diameter. ... Her thighs opened. His eyes closed. He felt soft old pine needles against his knees and elbows. She was not his first, but the first that counted. As the lightning ripped through his brain he was dimly aware of her response, tentative, halting, then suddenly vigorous. The intensity of it frightened him, but only for a moment, and he rode with her to the end. To be a god must be something like this.

  They rolled over. He pointed to the stars and called off their names for her, getting half of them wrong, but she did not need to know that. He shared his dreams with her. Later they made love a second time, and it was even better.

  He hoped it would rain at midnight, so they could dance in the rain, but the sky was clear. They went swimming instead, and came out shivering, laughing. When he took her home she washed down her pill with Chartreuse. He told her that he loved her.

  They exchanged Christmas cards for several years.

  3

  The eighth world of Alpha Centauri B was a gas giant, with a low-density core and gravity not much more troublesome than that of Earth. Muller had honeymooned there the second time. It was partly a business trip, for there were troubles with the colonists on the sixth planet; they were talking of setting up a whirlpool effect that would suck away most of the eighth world's highly useful atmosphere to use as raw materials.

  Muller's conferences with the locals went fairly well. He persuaded them to accept a quota system for their atmospheric grabs, and even won their praise for the little lesson in interplanetary morality he had administered. Afterward he and Nola were government guests for a holiday on the eighth world. Nola, unlike Lorayn, was the traveling sort. She would be accompanying him on many of his voyages.

  Wearing support suits, they swam in an icy methane lake. They ran laughing along ammonia coasts. Nola was as tall as he, with powerful legs, dark red hair, green eyes. They embraced in a warm room of one-way windows overhanging a forlorn sea that stretched for hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

  "For always," she said.

  "Yes. For always."

  Before the week ended they quarreled bitterly. But it was only a game; for the more fiercely they quarreled, the more passionate was the reconciliation. For a while. Later they stopped bothering to quarrel. When the option in the marriage contract came up, neither of them wanted to renew. Afterward, as his reputation grew, he sometimes received friendly letters from her. He had tried to see her when he returned from Beta Hydri IV to Earth. Nola, he
thought, would help him in his troubles. She of all people would not turn away from him. For old times' sake.

  But she was vacationing on Vesta with her seventh husband. Muller found that out from her fifth husband. He had been her third. He did not call her. He began to see there was no point in it.

  4

  The surgeon said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Muller. There's nothing we can do for you. I wouldn't want to raise false hopes. We've graphed your whole neural network. We can't find the sites of alteration. I'm terribly sorry."

  5

  He had had nine years to sharpen his memories. He had filled a few cubes with reminiscences, but that had mainly been in the early years of his exile, when he worried about having his past drift away to be lost in fog. He discovered that the memories grew keener with age. Perhaps it was training. He could summon sights, sounds, tastes, odors. He could reconstruct whole conversations convincingly. He was able to quote the full texts of several treaties he had negotiated. He could name England's kings in sequence from first to last, William I through William VII. He remembered the names of the girls whose bodies he had known.

  He admitted to himself that, given the chance, he would go back. Everything else had been pretense and bluster. He had fooled neither Ned Rawlins nor himself, he knew. The contempt he felt for mankind was real, but not the wish to remain isolated. He waited eagerly for Rawlins to return. While he waited he drank several goblets of the city's liqueur; he went on a killing spree, nervously gunning down animals he could not possibly consume in a year's time; he conducted intricate dialogues with himself; he dreamed of Earth.

  6

  Rawlins was running. Muller, standing a hundred meters deep in Zone C, saw him come striding through the entrance, breathless, flushed.

  "You shouldn't run in here," Muller said, "not even in the safer zones. There's absolutely no telling—"

  Rawlins sprawled down beside a flanged limestone tub, gripping its sides and sucking air. "Get me a drink, will you?" he gasped. "That liqueur of yours—"