Robert Silverberg Read online

  Boardman said, "At least come out to Zone F with me. Let's sit down quietly and discuss this over brandy."

  "Side by side?" Muller laughed. "You'd vomit. You couldn't bear it."

  "I'm willing to talk."

  "I'm not," Muller said. He took a shaky step toward the northwest. His big powerful body seemed shrunken and withered, nothing but sinews stretching tighter over a yielding armature. He took another step. Boardman watched. Ottavio and Davis stood beside him to the left; Reynolds and Greenfield on the other side, between Muller and the flame pit. Rawlins, like an afterthought, was alone at the far side of the group.

  Boardman felt a throbbing in his larynx, a stirring and a tickle of tension in his loins. A great weariness possessed him, and at the same time a fierce soaring excitement of a kind he had not known since he had been a young man. He allowed Muller to take a third step toward self-destruction. Then, casually, Boardman gestured with two flicking fingers.

  Greenfield and Reynolds pounced.

  Catlike they darted forth, ready for this, and caught Muller by the inner forearms. Boardman saw the grayness sweep over their faces as the impact of Muller's field got to them. Muller struggled, heaved, tried to break loose. Davis and Ottavio were upon him now too. In the gathering darkness the group formed a surging Laocoon, Muller only half visible as the smaller men coiled and wound about his flexed battling body. A stungun would have been easier, Boardman reflected. But stunguns were risky, sometimes, on humans. They had been known to send hearts into wild runaways. They had no defibrillator here.

  A moment more, and Muller was forced to his knees.

  "Disarm him," Boardman said.

  Ottavio and Davis held him. Reynolds and Greenfield searched him. From a pocket Greenfield pulled forth the deadly little windowed globe. "That's all he seems to be carrying," Greenfield said.

  "Check carefully."

  They checked. Meanwhile Muller remained motionless, his face frozen, his eyes stony. It was the posture and the expression of a man at the headsman's block. At length Greenfield looked up again. "Nothing," he said.

  Muller said, "One of my left upper molars contains a secret compartment full of carniphage. I'll count to ten and bite hard, and I'll melt away before your eyes."

  Greenfield swung around and grabbed for Muller's jaws.

  Boardman said, "Leave him alone. He's joking."

  "But how do we know—" Greenfield began.

  "Let him be. Step back." Boardman gestured. "Stand five meters away from him. Don't go near him unless he moves."

  They stepped away, obviously grateful to get back from the full thrust of Muller's field. Boardman, fifteen meters from him, could feel faint strands of pain. He went no closer.

  "You can stand up now," Boardman said. "But please don't try to move. I regret this, Dick."

  Muller got to his feet. His face was black with hatred. But he said nothing, nor did he move.

  "If we have to," Boardman said, "we'll tape you in a webfoam cradle and carry you out of the maze to the ship. We'll keep you in foam from then on. You'll be in foam when you meet the aliens. You'll be absolutely helpless. I would hate to do that to you, Dick. The other choice is willing cooperation. Go with us of your own free will to the ship. Do what we ask of you. Help us this last time."

  "May your intestines rust," said Muller almost casually. "May you live a thousand years with worms eating you. May you choke on your own smugness and never die."

  "Help us. Willingly."

  "Put me in the webfoam, Charles. Otherwise I'll kill myself the first chance I get."

  "What a villain I must seem, eh?" Boardman said. "But I don't want to do it this way. Come willingly, Dick."

  Muller's reply was close to a snarl.

  Boardman sighed. This was an embarrassment. He looked toward Ottavio.

  "The webfoam," he said.

  Rawlins, who had been standing as though in a trance, burst into sudden activity. He darted forward, seized Reynolds' gun from its holster, ran toward Muller and pressed the weapon into his hand. "There," he said thickly. "Now you're in charge!"

  2

  Muller studied the gun as though he had never seen one before, but his surprise lasted only a fraction of a second. He slipped his hand around its comfortable butt and fingered the firing stud. It was a familiar model, only slightly changed from those he had known. In a quick flaring burst he could kill them all. Or himself. He stepped back so they could not come upon him from the rear. Probing with his kickstaff, he checked the wall, found it trustworthy, and planted his shoulderblades against it. Then he moved the gun in an arc of some 270°, taking them all in.

  "Stand close together," he said. "The six of you. Stand one meter apart in a straight row, and keep your hands out where I can see them at all times."

  He enjoyed the black, glowering look that Boardman threw at Ned Rawlins. The boy seemed dazed, flushed, confused, a figure in a dream. Muller waited patiently as the six men arranged themselves according to his orders. He was surprised at his own calmness.

  "You look unhappy, Charles," he said. "How old are you now, eighty years? You'd like to live that other seventy, eighty, ninety, I guess. You have your career planned, and the plan doesn't include dying on Lemnos. Stand still, Charles. And stand straight. You won't win any pity from me by trying to look old and sagging. I know that dodge. You're as healthy as I am, beneath the phony flab. Healthier. Straight, Charles!"

  Boardman said raggedly, "If it'll make you feel better, Dick, kill me. And then go aboard the ship and do what we want you to do. I'm expendable."

  "Do you mean that?"

  "Yes."

  "I almost think you do," Muller said wonderingly. "You crafty old bastard, you're offering a trade! Your life for my cooperation! But where's the quid pro quo? I don't enjoy killing. It won't soothe me at all to burn you down. I'll still have my curse."

  "The offer stands."

  "Rejected," Muller said. "If I kill you, it won't be as part of any deal. But I'm much more likely to kill myself. You know, I'm a decent man at heart. Somewhat unstable, yes, and who's to blame me for that? But decent. I'd rather use this gun on me than on you. I'm the one who's suffering. I can end it."

  "You could have ended it at any time in the past nine years," Boardman pointed out. "But you survived. You devoted all your ingenuity to staying alive in this murderous place."

  "Ah. Yes. But that was different! An abstract challenge, man against the maze. A test of my skills. Ingenuity. But if I kill myself now, I thwart you. I put the thumb to the nose, with all of mankind watching. I'm the indispensable man, you say? What better way then, to pay mankind back for my pain?"

  "We regretted your suffering," said Boardman.

  "I'm sure you wept bitterly for me. But that was all you did. You let me go creeping away, diseased, corrupt, unclean. Now comes the release. Not really suicide, but revenge." Muller smiled. He turned the gun to finest beam and let its muzzle rest against his chest. A touch of the finger, now. His eyes raked their faces. The four soldiers did not seem to care. Rawlins appeared deep in shock. Only Boardman was animated with concern and fright. "I could kill you first, I suppose, Charles. As a lesson to our young friend—the wages of deceit is death. But no. That would spoil everything. You have to live, Charles. To go back to Earth and admit that you let the indispensable man slip through your grasp. What a blotch on your career! To fail your most important assignment! Yes. Yes. My pleasure. Falling dead here, leaving you to pick up the pieces."

  His finger tightened on the stud.

  "Now," he said. "Quickly."

  "No!" Boardman screamed. "For the love of—"

  "Man," said Muller, and laughed, and did not fire. His arm relaxed. He tossed the weapon contemptuously toward Boardman. It landed almost at his feet.

  "Foam!" Boardman cried. "Quick!"

  "Don't bother," said Muller. "I'm yours."

  3

  Rawlins took a long while to understand it. First they had the problem of g
etting out of the maze. Even with Muller as their leader, it was a taxing job. As they had suspected, coming upon the traps from the inner side was not the same as working through them from without. Warily Muller took them through Zone E; they could manage F well enough by now; and after they had dismantled their camp, they pressed on into G. Rawlins kept expecting Muller to bolt suddenly and hurl himself into some fearful snare. But he seemed as eager to come alive out of the maze as any of them. Boardman, oddly, appeared to recognize that. Though he watched Muller closely, he left him unconfined.

  Feeling that he was in disgrace, Rawlins kept away from the others on the nearly silent outward march. He considered his career in ruins. He had jeopardized the lives of his companions and the success of the mission. Yet it had been worth it, he felt. A time comes when a man takes his stand against what he believes to be wrong.

  The simple moral pleasure that he took in that was balanced and overbalanced by the knowledge that he had acted naively, romantically, foolishly. He could not bear to face Boardman now. He thought more than once of letting one of the deadly traps of these outer zones have him; but that too, he decided, would be naive, romantic, and foolish.

  He watched Muller striding ahead—tall, proud, all tensions resolved, all doubts crystallized. And he wondered a thousand times why Muller had given back the gun.

  Boardman finally explained it to him when they camped for the night in a precarious plaza near the outward side of Zone G.

  "Look at me," Boardman said. "What's the matter? Why can't you look at me?"

  "Don't toy with me, Charles. Get it over with."

  "Get what over with?"

  "The tonguelashing. The sentence."

  "It's all right, Ned. You helped us get what we wanted. Why should I be angry?"

  "But the gun—I gave him the gun—"

  "Confusion of ends and means again. He's coming with us. He's doing what we wanted him to do. That's what counts."

  Floundering, Rawlins asked, "And if he had killed himself—or us?"

  "He wouldn't have done either."

  "You can say that, now. But for the first moment, when he held the gun—"

  "No," Boardman said. "I told you earlier, we'd work on his sense of honor. Which we had to reawaken. You did that. Look, here I am, the brutal agent of a brutal and amoral society, right? And I confirm all of Muller's worst thoughts about mankind. Why should he help a tribe of wolves? And here you are, young and innocent, full of hope and dreams. You. remind him of the mankind he once served, before the cynicism corroded him. In your blundering way you try to be moral in a world that shows no trace of morality or meaning. You demonstrate sympathy, love for a fellow man, the willingness to make a dramatic gesture for the sake of righteousness. You show Muller that there's still hope in humanity. See? You defy me, and give him a gun and make him master of the situation. He could do the obvious, and burn us down. He could do the slightly less obvious, and burn himself. Or he could match your gesture with one of his own, top it, commit a deliberate act of renunciation, express his revived sense of moral superiority. He does it. He tosses away the gun. You were vital, Ned. You were the instrument through which we won him."

  "You make it sound so ugly when you spell it out that way, Charles. As if you had planned even this. Pushing me so far that I'd give him the gun, knowing that he—"

  Boardman smiled.

  "Did you?" Rawlins demanded suddenly. "No. You couldn't have calculated all those twists and turns. Now, after the fact, you're trying to claim credit for having engineered it all. But I saw you in the moment I handed him the gun. There was fear on your face, and anger. You weren't at all sure what he was going to do. Only when everything worked out could you claim it went according to plan. I see through you, Charles!"

  "How delightful to be transparent," Boardman said gaily.

  4

  The maze seemed uninterested in holding them. Carefully they traced their outward path, but they met few challenges and no serious dangers. Quickly they went toward the ship.

  They gave Muller a forward cabin, well apart from the quarters of the crew. He seemed to accept that as a necessity of his condition, and showed no offense. He was withdrawn, subdued, self-contained; an ironic smile often played on his lips, and much of the time his eyes displayed a glint of contempt. But he was willing to do as they directed. He had had his moment of supremacy; now he was theirs.

  Hosteen and his men bustled through the liftoff preparations. Muller remained in his cabin. Boardman went to him, alone, unarmed. He could make noble gestures too.

  They faced each other across a low table. Muller waited, silent, his face cleansed of emotion. Boardman said after a long moment, "I'm grateful to you, Dick."

  "Save it."

  "I don't mind if you despise me. I did what I had to do. So did the boy. And now so will you. You couldn't forget that you were an Earthman, after all."

  "I wish I could."

  "Don't say that. It's easy, glib, cheap bitterness, Dick. We're both too old for glibness. The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant."

  He sat quite close to Muller. The emanation hit him broadside, but he deliberately remained in place. That wave of despair welling out to him made him feel a thousand years old. The decay of the body, the crumbling of the soul, the heat-death of the galaxy ... the coming of winter ... emptiness ... ashes. ...

  "When we reach Earth," said Boardman crisply, "I'll put you through a detailed briefing. You'll come out of it knowing as much about the radio people as we do, which isn't saying a great deal. After that you'll be on your own. But I'm sure you'll realize, Dick, that the hearts and souls of billions of Earthmen will be praying for your success and safety."

  "Who's being glib now?" Muller asked.

  "Is there anyone you'd like me to have waiting for you when we dock Earthside?"

  "No."

  "I can send word ahead. There are people who've never stopped loving you, Dick. They'll be there if I ask them."

  Muller said slowly, "I see the strain in your eyes, Charles. You feel the nearness of me, and it's ripping you apart. You feel it in your gut. In your forehead. Back of your breastbone. Your face is going gray. Your cheeks are sagging. You'll sit here if it kills you, yes, because that's your style. But it's hell for you. If there's anyone on Earth who never stopped loving me, Charles, the least I can do is spare her from hell. I don't want to meet anyone. I don't want to see anyone. I don't want to talk to anyone."

  "As you wish," said Boardman. Beads of sweat hung from his bushy brows and dropped to his cheeks. "Perhaps you'll change your mind when you're close to Earth."

  "I'll never be close to Earth again," Muller said.

  THIRTEEN

  He spent three weeks absorbing all that was known of the giant extragalactic beings. At his insistence he did not set foot on Earth during that time, nor was his return from Lemnos made known to the public. They gave him quarters in a bunker on Luna and he lived quietly beneath Copernicus, moving like a robot through steely gray corridors lit by warm glowing torches. They showed him all the cubes. They ran off a variety of reconstructs in every sensory mode. Muller listened. He absorbed. He said very little.

  They kept well away from him, as they had on the voyage from Lemnos. Whole days passed in which he saw no human being. When they came to him they remained at a distance of ten meters and more.

  He did not object.

  The exception was Boardman, who visited him three times a week and made a point always of coming well within the pain range. Muller found that contemptible. Boardman seemed to be patronizing him with this voluntary and wholly unnecessary submission to discomfort. "I wish you'd keep away," Muller told him on the fifth visit. "We can talk by screen. Or you could stay by the door."

  "I don't mind the close contact."

  "I do," said Muller. "Has it ever occurred to you that I've begun to find mankind as odious as mankind finds me? The reek of your meaty body, Charles—it goes in
to my nostrils like a spike. Not just you; all the others too. Sickening. Hideous. Even the look of your faces. The pores. The stupid gaping mouths. The ears. Look at a human ear closely some time, Charles. Have you ever seen anything more repulsive than that pink wrinkled cup? You all disgust me!"

  "I'm sorry you feel that way," Boardman said.

  The briefing went on and on. Muller was ready after the first week to undertake his assignment, but no, first they had to feed him all the data in the bank. He absorbed the information with twitchy impatience. A shadow of his old self remained to find it fascinating, a challenge worth accepting. He would go. He would serve as before. He would honor his obligation. At last they said he could depart.

  From Luna they took him by iondrive to a point outside the orbit of Mars, where they transferred him to a warp-drive ship already programmed to kick him to the edge of the galaxy. Alone. He would not, on this voyage, have to take care not to distress the crew by his presence. There were several reasons for this, the most important being that the mission was officially considered close to suicidal; and, since a ship could make the voyage without the use of a crew, it would have been rash to risk lives—other than his, of course. But he was a volunteer, Besides, Muller had requested a solo flight.

  He did not see Boardman during the five days prior to his departure, nor had he seen Ned Rawlins at all since their return from Lemnos. Muller did not regret the absence of Boardman, but he sometimes wished he could have another hour with Rawlins. There was promise in that boy. Behind all the confusion and the foggy innocence, Muller thought, lay the seeds of manhood.

  From the cabin of his small sleek ship he watched the technicians drifting in space, getting ready to sever the transfer line. Then they were returning to their own ship. Now he heard from Boardman, a final message, a Boardman special, inspirational, go forth and do your duty for mankind, et cetera, et cetera. Muller thanked him graciously for his words.

  The communications channel was cut.