“Got a girl?”
“There was one, a liaison contract. We voided it when I took on this job.”
“Ah. Any girls in this expedition?”
“Only woman cubes,” said Rawlins.
“They aren’t much good, are they, Ned?”
“Not really. We could have brought a few women along, but—”
“But what?”
“Too dangerous. The maze—”
“How many men have you lost so far?” Muller asked.
“Five, I think. I’d like to know the sort of people who’d build a thing like this. It must have taken five hundred years of planning to make it so devilish.”
Muller said, “More. This was the grand creative triumph of their race, I believe. Their masterpiece, their monument. They must have been proud of this murderous place. It summed up the whole essence of their philosophy—kill the stranger.”
“Are you just speculating, or have you found some clues to their cultural outlook?”
“The only clue I have to their cultural outlook is all around us. But I’m an expert on alien psychology, Ned. I know more about it than any other human being, because I’m the only one who ever said hello to an alien race. Kill the stranger: it’s the law of the universe. And if you don’t kill him, at least screw him up a little.”
“We aren’t like that,” Rawlins said. “We don’t show instinctive hostility to—”
“Crap.”
“But—”
Muller said, “If an alien starship ever landed on one of our planets we’d quarantine it and imprison the crew and interrogate them to destruction. Whatever good manners we may have learned grow out of decadence and complacency. We pretend that we’re too noble to hate strangers, but we have the politeness of weakness. Take the Hydrans. A substantial faction within our government was in favor of generating fusion in their cloud layer and giving their system an extra sun—before sending an emissary to scout them.”
“No.”
“They were overruled, and an emissary was sent, and the Hydrans wasted him. Me.” An idea struck Muller suddenly. Appalled, he said, “What’s happened between us and the Hydrans in the last nine years? Any contact? War?”
“Nothing,” said Rawlins. “We’ve kept away.”
“Are you telling me the truth, or did we wipe the bastards out? God knows I wouldn’t mind that, but yet it wasn’t their fault they did this to me. They were reacting in a standard xenophobic way. Ned, has there been a war with them?”
“No. I swear it.”
Muller relaxed. After a moment he said, “All right. I won’t ask you to fill me in on all the other news developments. I don’t really give a damn. How long are you people staying on Lemnos?”
“We don’t know yet. A few weeks, I suppose. We haven’t even really begun to explore the maze. And then there’s the area outside. We want to run correlations on the work of earlier archaeologists, and—”
“And you’ll be here for a while. Are the others going to come into the center of the maze?”
Rawlins moistened his lips. “They sent me ahead to establish a working relationship with you. We don’t have any plan yet. It all depends on you. We don’t want to impose on you. So if you don’t want us to work here—”
“I don’t,” Muller told him crisply. “Tell that to your friends. In fifty or sixty years I’ll be dead, and they can sniff around here then. But while I’m here I don’t want them bothering me. Let them work in the outer four or five zones. If any of them sets foot in A, B, or C, I’ll kill him. I can do that, Ned.”
“What about me—am I welcome?”
“Occasionally. I can’t predict my moods. If you want to talk to me, come around and see. And if I tell you to get the hell out, Ned, then get the hell out. Clear?”
Rawlins grinned sunnily. “Clear.” He got to his feet. Muller, unwilling to have the boy standing over him, rose also. Rawlins took a few steps toward him.
Muller said, “Where are you going?”
“I hate having to talk at this distance, to shout like this. I can get a little closer to you, can’t I?”
Instantly suspicious, Muller replied, “Are you some kind of masochist?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Well, I’m no sadist either. I don’t want you near me.”
“It’s really not that unpleasant—Dick.”
“You’re lying. You hate it like all the others. I’m like a leper, boy, and if you’re queer for leprosy I feel sorry for you, but don’t come any closer. It embarrasses me to see other people suffer on my account.”
Rawlins stopped. “Whatever you say. Look, Dick, I don’t want to cause troubles for you. I’m just trying to be friendly and helpful. If doing that in some way makes you uncomfortable—well, just say so, and I’ll do something else. It doesn’t do me any good to make things worse for you.”
“That came out pretty muddled, boy. What is it you want from me, anyhow?”
“Nothing.”
“Why not leave me alone?”
“You’re a human being, and you’ve been alone here for a long time. It’s my natural impulse to offer companionship. Does that sound too dumb?”
Muller shrugged. “I’m not much of a companion. Maybe you ought to take all your sweet Christian impulses and go away. There’s no way you can help me, Ned. You can only hurt me by reminding me of all I can no longer have or know.” Stiffening, Muller looked past the tall young man toward the shadowy figures cavorting along the walls. He was hungry, and this was the hour to begin hunting for his dinner. He said brusquely, “Son, I think my patience is running out again. Time for you to leave.”
“All right. Can I come back tomorrow, though?”
“Maybe. Maybe.”
The boy smiled ingenuously. “Thanks for letting me talk to you, Dick. I’ll be back.”
4
By troublesome moonlight Rawlins made his way out of Zone A. The voice of the ship’s brain guided him back over the path he had taken inward, and now and then, in the safest spots, Boardman used the override. “You’ve made a good start,” Boardman said. “It’s a plus that he tolerated you at all. How do you feel?”
“Lousy, Charles.”
“Because of the close contact with him?”
“Because I’m doing something filthy.”
“Stop that, Ned. If I’m going to have to pump you full of moral reassurance every time you set out—”
“I’ll do my job,” said Rawlins, “but I don’t have to like it.” He edged over a spring-loaded stone block that was capable of hurling him from a precipice if he applied his weight the wrong way. A small toothy animal snickered at him as he crossed. On the far side, Rawlins prodded the wall in a yielding place and won admission to Zone B. He glanced at the lintel and saw the recessed slot of the visual pickup and smiled into it, just in case Muller was watching him withdraw.
He saw now why Muller had chosen to maroon himself here. Under similar circumstances he might have done the same thing. Or worse. Muller carried, thanks to the Hydrans, a deformity of the soul in an era when deformity was obsolete. It was an esthetic crime to lack a limb or an eye or a nose; these things were easily repaired, and one owed it to one’s fellow man to get a shape-up and obliterate troublesome imperfections. To inflict one’s flaws on society was clearly an antisocial act.
But no shape-up surgeon could do a cosmetic job on what Muller had. The only cure was separation from society. A weaker man would have chosen death: Muller had picked exile.
Rawlins still throbbed with the impact of that brief moment of direct contact. For an instant he had received from Muller a formless incoherent emanation of raw emotion, the inner self spilling out involuntarily and wordlessly. The flow of uncontrollable innerness was painful and depressing to receive.