“I’m very glad to have helped your research. I’d be happier if you’d let me out now.”
“I can’t control the movements of the bars.”
“You said you’d lase them open.”
“But why be destructive so fast? Let’s wait, shall we? Perhaps the bars will open again of their own accord. You’re perfectly safe in there. I’ll bring you food, if you have to eat. Will your people miss you if you’re not back by nightfall?”
“I’ll send a message to them,” said Rawlins glumly. “But I hope that I’m out by then.”
“Stay cool,” Boardman advised. “If necessary, we can get you out of that ourselves. It’s important to humor Muller in everything you can until you’ve got real rapport with him. If you hear me, touch your right hand to your chin.”
Rawlins touched his right hand to his chin.
Muller said, “That was pretty brave of you, Ned. Or stupid. I’m sometimes not sure if there’s a distinction. But I’m grateful, anyway. I had to know about those cages.”
“Glad to have been of assistance. You see, human beings aren’t all that monstrous.”
“Not consciously. It’s the sludge inside that’s ugly. Here, let me remind you.” He approached the cage and put his hands on the smooth bars, white as bone. Rawlins felt the emanation intensify. “That’s what’s under the skull. I’ve never really felt it myself, of course. I extrapolate it from the responses of others. It must be foul.”
“I could get used to it,” Rawlins said. He sat down crosslegged. “Did you make any attempt to have it undone when you returned to Earth from Beta Hydri IV?”
“I talked to the shape-up boys. They couldn’t begin to figure out what changes had been made in my neural flow, and so they couldn’t begin to figure out how to fix things. Nice?”
“How long did you stay?”
“A few months. Long enough to discover that there wasn’t one human being I knew who didn’t turn green after a few minutes of close exposure to me. I started to stew in self-pity, and in self-loathing, which is about the same thing. I was going to kill myself, you know, to put the world out of its misery.”
Rawlins said, “I don’t believe that. Some men just aren’t capable of suicide. You’re one who isn’t.”
“So I discovered, and thank you. I didn’t kill myself, you notice. I tried some fancy drugs, and then I tried drink, and then I tried living dangerously. And at the end of it I was still alive. I was in and out of four neuropsychiatric wards in a single month, I tried wearing a padded lead helmet to shield the thought radiations. It was like trying to catch neutrinos in a bucket. I caused a panic in a licensed house on Venus. All the girls stampeded out stark naked once the screaming began.” Muller spat. “You know, I could always take society or leave it. When I was among people I was happy, I was cordial, I had the social graces. I wasn’t a slick sunny article like you, all overflowing with kindness and nobility, but I interacted with others. I related, I got along. Then I could go on a trip for a year and a half and not see or speak to anyone, and that was all right too. But once I found out that I was shut off from society for good, I discovered that I had needed it after all. But that’s over. I outgrew the need, boy. I can spend a hundred years alone and never miss one soul. I’ve trained myself to see humanity as humanity sees me—something sickening, a damp hunkering crippled thing best avoided. To hell with you all. I don’t owe any of you anything, love included. I have no obligations. I could leave you to rot in that cage, Ned, and never feel upset about it. I could pass that cage twice a day and smile at your skull. It isn’t that I hate you, either you personally or the whole galaxy full of your kind. It’s simply that I despise you. You’re nothing to me. Less than nothing. You’re dirt. I know you now, and you know me.”
“You speak as if you belong to an alien race,” Rawlins said in wonder.
“No. I belong to the human race. I’m the most human being there is, because I’m the only one who can’t hide his humanity. You feel it? You pick up the ugliness? What’s inside me is also inside you. Go to the Hydrans and they’ll help you liberate it, and then people will run from you as they run from me. I speak for man. I tell the truth. I’m the skull beneath the face, boy. I’m the hidden intestines. I’m all the garbage we pretend isn’t there, all the filthy animal stuff, the lusts, the little hates, the sicknesses, the envies. And I’m the one who posed as a god. Hybris. I was reminded of what I really am.”
Rawlins said quietly, “Why did you decide to come to Lemnos?”
“A man named Charles Boardman put the idea into my head.” Rawlins recoiled in surprise at the mention of the name. Muller said, “You know him?”
“Well, yes. Of course. He—he’s a very important man in the government.”
“You might say that. It was Boardman who sent me to Beta Hydri IV, you know? Oh, he didn’t trick me into it, he didn’t have to persuade me in any of his slippery ways. He knew me well enough. He simply played on my ambitions. There’s a world there with aliens on it, he said, and we want a man to visit it. Probably a suicide mission, but it would be man’s first contact with another intelligent species, and are you interested? So of course I went. He knew I couldn’t resist something like that. And afterward, when I came back this way, he tried to duck me a while—either because he couldn’t abide being near me or because he couldn’t abide his own guilt. And finally I caught up with him and I said, look at me, Charles, this is how I am now, where can I go, what shall I do? I got up close to him. This far away. His face changed color. He had to take pills. I could see the nausea in his eyes. And he reminded me about the maze on Lemnos.”
“Why?”
“He offered it as a place to hide. I don’t know if he was being kind or cruel. I suppose he thought I’d be killed on my way into the maze—a decent finish for my sort of chap, or at any rate better than taking a gulp of carniphage and melting down a sewer. But of course I told Boardman I wouldn’t think of it. I wanted to cover my trail. I blew up and insisted that the last thing in the world I’d do was come here. Then I spent a month on the skids in Under New Orleans, and when I surfaced again I rented a ship and came here. Using maximum diversionary tactics to insure that nobody found out my true destination. Boardman was right. This was the place to come.”
Rawlins said, “How did you get inside the maze?”
“Through sheer bad luck.”
“Bad luck?”
“I was trying to die in a blaze of glory,” said Muller. “I didn’t give a damn if I survived the maze or not. I just plunged right in and headed for the middle.”
“I can’t believe that!”
“Well, it’s true, more or less. The trouble was, Ned, I’m a survival type. It’s an innate gift, maybe even something paranormal. I have unusual reflexes. I have a kind of sixth sense, as they say. Also my urge to stay alive is well developed. Besides that, I had mass detectors and some other useful equipment. So I came into the maze, and whenever I saw a corpse lying about I looked a little sharper than usual, and I stopped and rested when I felt my visualization of the place beginning to waver. I fully expected to be killed in Zone H. I wanted it. But it was my luck to make it where everybody else failed because I didn’t care one way or the other, I suppose. The element of tension was removed. I moved like a cat, everything twitching at once, and I got past the tough parts of the maze somehow, much to my disappointment, and here I am.”
“Have you ever gone outside it?”
“No. Now and then I go as far as Zone E, where your friends are. Twice I’ve been to F. Mostly I remain in the three inner zones. I’ve furnished things quite nicely for myself. I have a radiation locker for my meat supply, and a building I use as my library, and a place where I keep my woman cubes, and I do some taxidermy in one of the other buildings. I hunt quite a lot, also. And I examine the maze and try to analyze its workings. I’ve dictated several cubes of memoirs on my findings. I bet you archaeologist fellows would love to run through those cubes.”