Robert Silverberg Page 14

"I'm afraid so. He knows the access routes better than we do. He's covering them all."

  "And you haven't sent any drones in through routes we haven't charted?"

  "Two, sir. Lost them both."

  "Umm. We'd better send out a great many probes at once, then, and hope we can slip at least one of them past Muller. That boy is getting annoyed at being caged. Change the program, will you? The brain can manage diversionary tactics, if it's told. Say, twenty probes entering simultaneously."

  "We have only three left," Greenfield said.

  Boardman bit convulsively into his cigar. "Three here in the camp, or three altogether?"

  "Three in camp. Five more outside the maze. They're working their way inward now."

  "Who allowed this to happen? Call Hosteen! Get those templates working! I want fifty drones built by morning! No, make it eighty! Of all the stupidity, Greenfield!"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Get out!"

  "Yes, sir."

  Boardman puffed furiously. He dialed for brandy, the thick, rich, viscous stuff made by the Prolepticalist Fathers on Deneb XIII. The situation was growing infuriating. He knocked back half a snifter of the brandy, gasped, filled the glass again. He knew that he was in danger of losing his perspective—the worst of sins. The delicacy of this assignment was getting to him. All these mincing steps, the tiny complications, the painstaking edgings toward and away from the goal. Rawlins in the cage. Rawlins and his moral qualms. Muller and his neurotic world-outlook. The little beasts that nipped at your heels here and thoughtfully eyed your throat. The traps these demons had built. And the waiting extragalactics, saucer-eyed, radio-sensed, to whom even a Charles Boardman was no more than an insensate vegetable. Doom overhanging all. Irritably Boardman stubbed out his cigar, and immediately stared at its unfinished length in astonishment. The ignition cap would not work a second time. He leaned forward, got a beam of infrared from the room generator, and kindled it once more, puffing energetically until it was lit. With a petulant gesture of his hand Boardman reactivated his communication link with Ned Rawlins.

  The screen showed him moonlight, curving bars, and small furry snouts bristling with teeth.

  "Ned?" he said. "Charles here. We're getting you those drones, boy. We'll have you out of that stupid cage in five minutes, do you hear, five minutes!"

  2

  Rawlins was very busy.

  It seemed almost funny. There was no end to the supply of the little beasts. They came nosing through the bars two and three at a time, weasels, ferrets, minks, stoats, whatever they were, all teeth and eyes. But they were scavengers, not killers. God knew what drew them to the cage. They clustered about him, brushing his ankles with their coarse fur, pawing him, slicing through his skin with their claws, biting his shins.

  He trampled them. He learned very quickly that a booted foot placed just behind the head could snap a spinal column quickly and effectively. Then, with a swift kick, he could sweep his victim into a corner of the cage, where others would pounce upon it at once. Cannibals, too. Rawlins developed a rhythm of it. Turn, stomp, kick. Turn, stomp, kick. Turn, stomp, kick. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

  They were cutting him up badly, though. For the first five minutes he scarcely had time to pause for breath. Turn. Stomp. Kick. He took care of at least twenty of them in that time. Against the far side of the cage a heap of ragged little corpses had risen, with their comrades nosing around hunting for the tender morsels. At last a moment came when all the scavengers currently inside the cage were busy with their fallen cohorts, and no more lurked outside. Rawlins had a momentary respite. He seized a bar with one hand and lifted his left leg to examine the miscellany of cuts, scratches, and bites. Do they give a posthumous Stellar Cross if you die of galactic rabies, he wondered? His leg was bloody from the knee down, and the wounds, though not deep, were hot and painful. Suddenly he discovered why the scavengers had come to him. While he paused he had time to inhale, and he smelled the ripe fragrance of rotting meat. He could almost visualize it: a great bestial corpse, split open at the belly to expose red sticky organs, big black flies circling overhead, perhaps a maggot or two circumnavigating the mound of flesh-Nothing was rotting in here. The dead scavengers hadn't had time to go bad; little was left of most of them but picked bones by now anyway.

  Rawlins realized that it must be some sensory delusion: an olfactory trap touched off by the cage, evidently. The cage was broadcasting the stink of decay. Why? Obviously to lure that pack of little weasels inside. A refined form of torture. He wondered if Muller had somehow been behind it, going off to a nearby control center to set up the scent.

  He had no further time for contemplation. A fresh battalion of beasts was scurrying across the plaza toward the cage. These looked slightly larger, although not so large that they would not fit between the bars, and their fangs had an ugly gleam in the moonlight. Rawlins hastily stomped three of the snuffing, gorging cannibals still alive in his cage and, in a wondrous burst of inspiration, stuffed them through the bars, giving them a wristflip that tossed them eight or ten meters outside the cage. Good. The newcomers halted, skidding, and began at once to pounce on the twitching and not quite dead bodies that landed before them. Only a few of the scavengers bothered to enter the cage, and these came spaced widely enough so that Rawlins had a chance to trample each in turn and toss it out to feed the onrushing horde. At that rate, he thought, if only new ones would stop coming he could get rid of them all.

  New ones finally did stop coming. He had killed seventy or eighty by this time. The stink of raw blood overlaid the synthetic stench of rot; his legs ached from all the carnage, and his brain was orbiting dizzyingly. But at length the night grew peaceful once more. Bodies, some clad in fur, some just a framework of bone, lay strewn in a wide arc before the cage. A thick, deep-hued puddle of mingled bloods spread over a dozen square meters. The last few survivors, stuffed on their gluttony, had gone slinking away without even trying to harass the occupant of the cage. Weary, drained, close to laughter and close to tears, Rawlins clung to the bars and did not look down at his throbbing blood-soaked legs. He felt the fire rising in them. He imagined alien microorganisms launching their argosies in his bloodstream. A bloated purpling corpse by morning, a martyr to Charles Boardman's over-reaching deviousness. What an idiot's move to step into the cage! What a doltish way to win Muller's trust!

  Yet the cage had its uses, Rawlins realized suddenly.

  Three bulky brutes paraded toward him from different directions. They had the stride of lions, but the swinishness of boars: low-slung sharp-backed creatures, 100 kilograms or so, with long pyramidal heads, slavering thin-lipped mouths, and tiny squinting eyes arranged in two sets of two on either side just in front their ragged droopy ears. Curving tusks jutted down and intersected smaller and sharper canine teeth that rose from powerful jaws.

  The trio of uglies inspected one another suspiciously, and performed a complex series of loping movements which neatly demonstrated the three-body problem as they executed circular interlocking trots by way of staking out territory. They rooted about a bit in the heap of scavenger corpses, but clearly they were no scavengers themselves; they were looking for living meat, and their disdain for the broken cannibalized little bodies was evident. When they had completed their inspection they swung about to stare at Rawlins, standing at a three-quarters-profile angle so that each of them had one pair of eyes looking at him straight on. Rawlins was grateful for the security of his cage. He would not care to be outside, unprotected and exhausted, with these three cruising the city for their dinner.

  At that moment, of course, the bars of the cage silently began to retract.

  3

  Muller, arriving just then, took in the whole scene. He paused only briefly to admire the seductive vanishing of the cage into the recessed slots. He contemplated the three hungry pigs and the dazed, bloody form of Rawlins standing suddenly exposed before them. "Get down!" Muller yelled.

  Rawlins got down by taking four run
ning steps to the left, slipping on the blood-slicked pavement, and skidding into a heap of small cadavers at the edge of the street. In the same moment Muller fired, not bothering with keying in the manual sighting since these were not edible animals. Three quick bolts brought the pigs down. They did not move again. Muller started to go to Rawlins, but then one of the robots from the camp in Zone F appeared, gliding cheerfully toward them. Muller cursed softly. He pulled the destructor globe from his pocket and aimed the window at the robot. The probe turned a mindless blank face at him as he fired.

  The robot disintegrated. Rawlins had managed to get up. "You shouldn't have blasted it," he said woozily. "It was just coming to help."

  "No help was needed," said Muller. "Can you walk?"

  "I think so."

  "How badly are you hurt?"

  "I've been chewed on, that's all. It isn't as bad as it looks."

  "Come with me," Muller said. Already more scavengers were filing through the plaza, drawn by the mysterious telegraphy of blood. Small, toothy things were getting down to serious work on the trio of fallen boars. Rawlins looked unsteady; he seemed to be talking to himself. Forgetting his own emanation, Muller seized him by the arm. Rawlins winced and twitched away, and then, as if repenting the appearance of rudeness, gave Muller his arm again. They crossed the plaza together. Rawlins was shaking, and Muller did not know whether he was more disturbed by his narrow escape or by the jangling propinquity of an unshielded mind. "In here," Muller said roughly.

  They stepped into the hexagonal cell where he kept his diagnostat. Muller sealed the door, and Rawlins sank down limply on the bare floor. His blond hair was pasted by perspiration to his forehead. His eyes were moving jerkily, the pupils dilated.

  Muller said, "How long were you under attack?"

  "Fifteen, twenty minutes. I don't know. There must have been fifty or a hundred of them. I kept breaking their backs. A quick crunching sound, you know, like splitting twigs. And then the cage went away." Rawlins laughed wildly. "That was the best part. I had just finished smashing up all those little bastards and was catching my breath, and then the three big monsters came along, and so naturally the cage vanished and—"

  "Easy," Muller said, "you're talking so fast I can't follow everything. Can you get those boots off?"

  "What's left of them."

  "Yes. Get them off and we'll patch those legs of yours. Lemnos has no shortage of infectious bacteria. And protozoa, and for all I know algae and trypanosomes, and more."

  Rawlins picked at the catches. "Can you help me? I'm afraid that I can't-"

  "You won't like it if I come any closer," Muller warned. "To hell with that!"

  Muller shrugged. He approached Rawlins and manipulated the broken and bent snaps of the boots. The metal chasing was scarred by tiny teeth; so were the boots themselves, and so were the legs. In a few moments Rawlins was out of his boots and leggings. He lay stretched out on the floor, grimacing and trying to look heroic. His legs were in bad shape, though none of the wounds seemed really serious; it was just that there were so many of them. Muller got the diagnostat going. The lamps glowed and the receptor slot beckoned.

  "It's an old model," Rawlins said. "I'm not sure what to do."

  "Stick your legs in front of the scanner."

  Rawlins swiveled about. A blue light played on his wounds. In the bowels of the diagnostat things chuttered and clicked. A swab came forth on a jointed arm and ran deftly and lightly up his left leg to a point just above the knee. The machine engulfed the bloody swab and began to digest it back to its component molecules while a second swab emerged to clean Rawlins' other leg. Rawlins bit his lip. He was getting a coagulant as well as a cleanser so that when the swabs had done their work all blood was gone and the shallow gouges and rips were revealed. It still looked pretty bad, Muller thought, though not as grim as before.

  The diagnostat produced an ultrasonic node and injected a golden fluid into Rawlins' rump. Pain-damper, Muller guessed. A second injection, deep amber, was probably some kind of all-purpose antibiotic to ward off infection. Rawlings grew visibly less tense. Now a variety of arms sprang forward from various sectors of the device, inspecting Rawlins' lesions in detail and scanning them for necessary repairs. There was a humming sound and three sharp clicks. Then the diagnostat began to seal the wounds, clamping them firmly.

  "Lie still," Muller told him. "You'll be all right in a couple of minutes."

  "You shouldn't be doing this," said Rawlins. "We have our own medical supplies back in camp. You must be running short on necessities. All you had to do was let the drone probe take me back to my camp, and—"

  "I don't want those robots crawling around in here. And the diagnostat has at least a fifty-year supply of usefuls. I don't get sick often. It can synthesize most of what it's ever going to need for me. So long as I feed it protoplasm from time to time, it can do the rest."

  "At least let us send you replacements for some of the rare drugs."

  "Not necessary. No charity wanted. Ah! There, it's done with you. Probably you won't even have scars."

  The machine released Rawlins, who swung away from it and looked up at Muller. The wildness was gone from the boy's face now. Muller lounged against the wall, rubbing his shoulderblades against the angle where two faces of the hexagon met, and said, "I didn't think that you'd be attacked by beasts or I wouldn't have left you alone so long. You aren't armed?"

  "No."

  "Scavengers don't bother living things. What made them go after you?"

  "The cage did," Rawlins said. "It began to broadcast the smell of rotting flesh. A lure. Suddenly they were crawling all over me. I thought they'd eat me alive."

  Muller grinned. "Interesting. So the cage is programmed as a trap too. We get some useful information out of your little predicament, then. I can't tell you how interested I am in those cages. In every part of this weird environment of mine. The aqueduct. The calendar pylons. The streetcleaning apparatus. I'm grateful to you for helping me learn a little."

  "I know someone else who has that attitude," said Rawlins. "That it doesn't matter what the risk or cost so long as you collect some useful data out of the experience. Board—"

  He cut the word short with a crisp biting gesture.

  "Who?"

  "Bordoni," Rawlins said. "Emilio Bordoni, my epistemology professor at college. He gave this marvelous course. Actually it was applied hermeneutics, a course in how to learn."

  "That's heuristics," said Muller.

  "Are you sure? I have a distinct impression—"

  "It's wrong," said Muller. "You're talking to an authority. Hermeneutics is the art of interpretation. Originally Scriptural interpretation but now applying to all communications functions. Your father would have known that. My mission to the Hydrans was an experiment in applied hermeneutics. It wasn't successful."

  "Heuristics. Hermeneutics." Rawlins laughed. "Well, anyway, I'm glad to have helped you learn something about the cages. My heuristic good deed. Am I excused from the next round?"

  "I suppose," Muller said. Somehow an odd feeling of good will had come over him. He had almost forgotten how pleasant it was to be able to help another person. Or to enjoy lazy, irrelevant conversation. He said, "Do you drink, Ned?"

  "Alcoholic beverages?"

  "So I mean."

  "In moderation."

  "This is our local liqueur," said Muller. "It's produced by gnomes somewhere in the bowels of the planet." He produced a delicate flask and two wide-mouthed goblets. Carefully he tipped about twenty centiliters into each goblet. "I get this in Zone C," he explained, handing Rawlins his drink. "It rises from a fountain. It really ought to be labeled DRINK ME, I guess."

  Gingerly Rawlins tasted it. "Strong!"

  "About sixty per cent alcohol, yes. Lord knows what the rest of it is, or how it's synthesized or why. I simply accept it. I like the way it manages to be both sweet and gingery at the same time. It's terribly intoxicating, of course. It's intended as another t
rap, I suppose. You get happily drunk—and then the maze gets you." He raised his goblet amiably. "Cheers!"

  "Cheers!"

  They laughed at the archaic toast and drank.

  Careful, Dickie, Muller told himself. You're getting downright sociable with this boy. Remember where you are. And why. What kind of ogre are you, acting this way?

  "May I take some of this back to camp with me?" Rawlins asked.

  "I suppose so. Why?"

  "There's a man there who'd appreciate it. He's a gourmet of sorts. He's traveling with a liquor console that dispenses a hundred different drinks, I imagine, from about forty different worlds. I can't even remember the names."

  "Anything from Marduk?" Muller asked. "The Deneb worlds? Rigel?"

  "I really can't be sure. I mean, I enjoy drinking, but I'm no connoisseur."

  "Perhaps this friend of yours would be willing to exchange—" Muller stopped. "No. No. Forget I said that. I'm not getting into any deals."

  "You could come back to camp with me," said Rawlins. "He'd give you the run of the console, I'm sure."

  "Very subtle of you. No." Muller glowered at his liqueur. "I won't be eased into it, Ned. I don't want anything to do with the others."

  "I'm sorry you feel that way."

  "Another drink?"

  "No. I'll have to start getting back to camp now. It's late. I wasn't supposed to spend the whole day here, and I'll catch hell for not doing my share of the work."

  "You were in the cage most of the day. They can't blame you for that."

  "They might. They were complaining a little yesterday. I don't think they want me to visit you." Muller felt a sudden tightness within.

  Rawlins went on, "After the way I kicked away a day's work today I wouldn't be surprised if they refused to let me come in here again. They'll be pretty stuffy about it. I mean, considering that you don't seem very cooperative, they'll regard it as wasted time for me to be paying calls on you when I could be manning the equipment in Zone E or F." Rawlins finished his drink and got to his feet, grunting a little. He looked down at his bare legs. The diagnostat had covered the wounds with a nutrient spray, flesh-colored; it was almost impossible to tell that his skin had been broken anywhere. Stiffly, he pulled his tattered leggings on. "I won't bother with the boots," he said. "They're in bad shape, and it won't be pleasant trying to get them on. I suppose I can get back to camp barefoot."