It was impossible for him to know what shape the maze had taken for Marshall and Petrocelli as they succumbed to the screen. Unlike the drone probes, which relayed exact accounts of everything that passed through their eyes, the two men were not directly hooked to the computer and could not transmit their visual images to the screen. The best they could do was describe what they saw. It did not match the images sent back by the probe eyes mounted on their backpacks, nor did it match the genuine configurations apparent from outside the screen’s range.
They did as the computer said. They walked forward even where their own eyes told them that vast abysses lay in their path. They crouched to wriggle through a tunnel whose roof was bright with the suspended blades of guillotines. The tunnel did not exist. “Any minute I expect one of those blades to fall and chop me in half,” Petrocelli said. There were no blades. At the end of the tunnel they obediently moved to the left, toward a massive flail that lashed the ground in vicious swipes. There was no flail. Reluctantly they did not set foot on a plumply upholstered walkway that appeared to lead out of the region of the screen. The walkway was imaginary; they had no way of seeing the pit of acid that actually was there.
“It would be better if they simply closed their eyes,” Boardman said. “The way the drones went through—minus all visuals.”
“They claim it’s too scary to do it like that,” said Hosteen.
“Which is better—to have no visual information, or to have the wrong information?” Boardman asked. “They could follow the computer’s orders just as well with their eyes closed. And there’d be no chance that—”
Petrocelli screamed. On the split screen Boardman saw the real configuration—a flat, innocuous strip of road—and the screen-distorted one relayed by the backpack eyes—a sudden geyser of flame erupting at their feet.
“Stand where you are!” Hosteen bellowed. “It isn’t real!”
Petrocelli, one foot high in the air, brought it back into place with a wrenching effort. Marshall’s reaction time was slower. He had been whirling to escape the eruption when Hosteen had called to him, and he turned to the left before he halted. He was a dozen centimeters too far out of the safe road. A coil of bright metal flicked out of a block of stone and wrapped itself about his ankles. It cut through the bone without difficulty. Marshall toppled and a flashing golden bar stapled him to a wall.
Without looking back, Petrocelli passed through the column of flame unharmed, stumbled forward ten paces, and came to a halt, safe beyond the effective range of the distortion screen. “Dave?” he said hoarsely. “Dave, are you all right?”
“He stepped off the path,” said Boardman. “It was a quick finish.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Stay put, Petrocelli. Get calm and don’t try to go anywhere. I’m sending Chesterfield and Walker in after you. Wait right where you are.”
Petrocelli was trembling. Boardman asked the ship’s brain to give him a needle, and the backpack swiftly eased him with a soothing injection. Still rigid, unwilling to turn toward his impaled companion, Petrocelli stood quite still, awaiting the others.
It took Chesterfield and Walker close to an hour to reach the place of the distortion screen, and nearly fifteen minutes to shuffle through the few square meters the screen controlled. They did it with their eyes closed, and they didn’t like that at alclass="underline" but the phantoms of the maze could not frighten blind men, and in time Chesterfield and Walker were beyond their grasp. Petrocelli was much calmer by then. Warily, the three continued toward the heart of the maze.
Something would have to be done, Boardman thought, about recovering Marshall’s body. Some other time, though.
3
The longest days of Ned Rawlins’ life had been those spent on the journey to Rigel, four years before, to fetch his father’s body. These days now were longer. To stand before a screen, to watch brave men die, to feel every nerve screaming for relief hour after hour after hour—
But they were winning the battle of the maze. Fourteen men had entered it so far. Four were dead. Walker and Petrocelli had made camp in Zone E; five more men had set up a relief base in F; three others were currently edging past the distortion screen in G and soon would join them. The worst was over for these. It was clear from the probe work that the curve of danger dropped off sharply past Zone F, and that there were practically no hazards at all in the three inner zones. With E and F virtually conquered, it should not be difficult to break through to those central zones where Muller, impassive and uncommunicating, lurked and waited.
Rawlins thought that he knew the maze completely by now. Vicariously he had entered it more than a hundred times; first through the eyes of the probes, then through the relays from the crewmen. At night in feverish dreams he saw its dark patterns, its curving walls and sinuous towers. Locked in his own skull he somehow made the circuit of that labyrinth, kissing death a thousand times. He and Boardman would be the beneficiaries of hard-won experience when their turns came to go inside.
Their tons were coming near.
On a chill morning under an iron sky he stood with Boardman just outside the maze, by the upsloping embankment of soil that rimmed the outer flange of the city. In the short weeks they had been here, the year had dimmed almost startlingly toward whatever winter this planet had. Sunlight lasted only six hours a day now, out of the twenty; two hours of pale twilight followed, and dawns were thin and prolonged. The whirling moons danced constantly in the sky, playing twisting games with shadows.
Rawlins, by this time, was almost eager to test the dangers of the maze. There was a hollowness in his gut, a yearning born of impatience and embarrassment. He had waited, peering into screens, while other men, some hardly older than himself, gambled their lives to get inside. It seemed to him that he had spent all his life waiting for the cue to take the center of the stage.
On the screen, they watched Muller moving at the heart of the maze. The hovering probes kept constant check on him, marking his peregrinations with a shifting line on the master chart. Muller had not left Zone A since the time he encountered the drone; but he changed positions daily in the labyrinth, migrating from house to house as though he feared to sleep in the same one twice. Boardman had taken care not to let him have any contact with them since the encounter with the drone. It often seemed to Rawlins that Boardman was stalking some rare and fragile beast.
Tapping the screen, Boardman said, “This afternoon we go inside, Ned. We’ll spend the night in the main camp. Tomorrow you move forward to join Walker and Petrocelli in E. The day after that you go on alone toward the middle and find Muller.”
“Why are you going inside the maze, Charles?”