“You sound absolutely serious, Charles.”
“I absolutely am. Sometimes there comes a moment when all the booming foolish inflated words mean something, and this is one of those moments. You’re standing at a crossroads in galactic history. And therefore, Ned, you’re going to go in there and lie and cheat and perjure and connive, and I expect that your conscience is going to be very sore for a while, and you’ll hate yourself extravagantly for it, and eventually you’ll realize that you’ve done a deed of heroism. The test of your communications equipment is now ended. Get back inside here and let’s ready you to march,”
22
He went alone only a short distance this time. Stein and Alton accompanied him as far as the gateway to Zone E. There were no incidents. They pointed in the right direction, and he passed through a pinwheeling shower of coruscating azure sparks to enter the austere funereal zone beyond. As he negotiated the uphill ramp of the entrance, he caught sight of a socket mounted in an upright stone column. Within the darkness of the socket was something mobile and gleaming that could have been an eye.
“I think I’ve found part of Muller’s scanning system,” Rawlins reported. “There’s a thing watching me in the wall.”
“Cover it with your spray,” Boardman suggested.
“I think he’d interpret that as a hostile act. Why would an archaeologist mutilate a feature like that?”
“Yes. A point. Proceed.”
There was less of an air of menace about Zone E. It was made up of dark, tightly-compacted low buildings which clung together like bothered turtles. Rawlins could see different topography ahead, high walls, and a shining tower. Each of the zones was so different from all the others that he began to think they had been built at different times: a core of residential sectors, and then a gradual accretion of trap-laden outer rings as the enemies grew more troublesome. It was the sort of thought an archaeologist might have; he filed it for use.
He walked a little way, and saw the shadowy figure of Walker coming toward him. Walker was lean, dour, cool. He claimed to have been married several times to the same wife. He was about forty, a career man.
“Glad you made it, Rawlins. Go easy there on your left. That wall is hinged.”
“Everything all right here?”
“More or less. We lost Petrocelli about an hour ago.”
Rawlins stiffened. “This zone is supposed to be safe!”
“It isn’t. It’s riskier than F, and nearly as bad as G. We underestimated it when we were using the probes. There’s no real reason why the zones have to get safer toward the middle, is there? This is one of the worst.”
“To lull us,” Rawlins suggested. “False security.”
“You bet. Come on, now. Follow me and don’t use your brain too much. There’s no value in originality in here. You go the way the path goes, or you don’t go anywhere.”
Rawlins followed. He saw no apparent danger, but he jumped where Walker jumped, and detoured where Walker detoured. Not too far on lay the inner camp. He found Davis, Ottavio, and Reynolds there, and also the upper half of Petrocelli. “We’re awaiting burial orders,” said Ottavio. Below the waist there was nothing left. “Hosteen’s going to tell us to bring him out, I bet.”
“Cover him, at least,” Rawlins told him.
“You going on into D today?” Walker asked.
“I may as well.”
“We’ll tell you what to avoid. It’s new. That’s where Petrocelli got it, right near the entrance to D, maybe five meters this side. You trip a field of some kind and it cuts you in half. The drones didn’t trip it at all.”
“Suppose it cuts everything in half that goes by?” Rawlins asked. “Except drones.”
“It didn’t cut Muller,” Walker said. “It won’t cut you if you step around it. We’ll show you how.”
“And beyond?”
“That’s all up to you.”
23
Boardman said, “If you’re tired, stay here for the night.”
“I’d rather go on.”
“You’ll be going alone, Ned. Why not be rested?”
“Ask the brain for a reading on me. See where my fatigue level is. I’m ready to go onward.”
Boardman checked. They were doing full telemetry on Rawlins; they knew his pulse rate, respiration count, hormone levels, and many more intimate things. The computer saw no reason why Rawlins could not continue without pausing.
“All right,” said Boardman, “go on.”
“I’m about to enter Zone D, Charles. This is where Petrocelli got it. I see the tripline—very subtle, very well hidden. Here I go past it. Yes. Ye-es. This is Zone D. I’m stopping and letting the brain get my bearings for me. Zone D looks a little cozier than E. The crossing shouldn’t take long.”
24
The auburn flames that guarded Zone C were frauds.
25
Rawlins said softly, “Tell the galaxies that their fate is in good hands. I should find Muller in fifteen minutes.”
SEVEN
1
Muller had often been alone for long periods. In drawing up the contract for his first marriage he had insisted on a withdrawal clause, the standard one; and Lorayn had not objected, for she knew that his work might occasionally take him to places where she would not or could not go. During the eight years of that marriage he had enforced the clause three times for a total of four years.
When they let the contract run out, Muller’s absences were not really a contributing factor. He had learned in those years that he could stand solitude, and even that he thrived on it in a strange way. We develop everything in solitude except character, Stendhal had written; Muller was not sure of that but, in any case, his character had been fully formed before he began accepting assignments that took him unaccompanied to empty dangerous worlds. He had volunteered for those assignments. In a different sense he had volunteered to immure himself on Lemnos, and this exile was more painful to him than those other absences. Yet he got along. His own adaptability astonished and frightened him. He had not thought he could shed his social nature so easily. The sexual part was difficult, but not as difficult as he had imagined it would be; and the rest—the stimulation of debate, the change of surroundings, the interplay of personalities—had somehow ceased quickly to matter. He had enough cubes to keep him diverted, and enough challenges surviving in this maze. And memories.
He could summon remembered scenes from a hundred worlds. Man sprawled everywhere, planting the seed of Earth on colonies of a thousand stars. Delta Pavonis VI, for example: twenty light-years out, and rapidly going strange. They called the planet Loki, which struck Muller as a whopping misnomer, for Loki was agile, shrewd, slight of build, and the settlers on Loki, fifty years isolated from Earth, went in for a cult of artificial obesity through glucostatic regulation. Muller had visited them a decade before his ill-starred Beta Hydri journey. It was essentially a troubleshooting mission to a planet that had lost touch with its mother world. He remembered a warm planet, habitable only in a narrow temperate belt. Passing through walls of green jungle bordering a black river; watching beasts with jeweled eyes jostling on the swampy banks; coming at last to the settlement, where sweaty Buddhas weighing a few hundred kilograms apiece sat in stately meditation before thatched huts. He had never seen so much flesh per cubic meter before. The Lokites meddled with their peripheral glucoreceptors to induce accumulation of body fat. It was a useless adaptation, unrelated to any problem of their environment; they simply liked to be huge. Muller recalled arms that looked like thighs, thighs that looked like pillars, bellies that curved and recurved in triumphant excess.