A Maze of Death (11 page)

“I took one apart,” Belsnor said. “It’s not a receiver; the music is emitted by a speaker but it emanates from the fly’s works. The signal is created by a miniature generator in the form of an electrical impulse, not unlike a nerve impulse in an organic living creature. There’s a moist element ahead of the generator which alters a complex pattern of conductivity, so a very complex signal can be created. What’s it singing for you?”

“Granada,”
Seth Morley said. He wished he could keep it. The fly would be company for him. “Will you sell it?” he asked.

“Catch your own.” Belsnor retrieved his fly and placed the box back in his pocket.

“Is there anything else from outside the settlement?” Seth Morley asked. “Besides the bees, flies, printers and miniature buildings?”

Maggie Walsh said, “A sort of flea-sized printer. But it can only print one thing; it does it over and over again, grinding out a flood that seems endless.”

“A print of what?”

“Of Specktowsky’s Book,” Maggie Walsh said.

“And that’s it?”

“That’s all we know about,” Maggie amended. “There may be others unknown to us.” She shot a sharp glance at Belsnor.

Belsnor said nothing; he had again retracted into his own personal world, for the moment, oblivious to them.

Seth Morley picked up the abolished miniature building and said, “If the tenches only print duplicates of objects then they didn’t make this. Something with highly-developed technical skills would have had to.”

“It could have been made centuries ago,” Belsnor said, rousing himself. “By a race that’s no longer here.”

“And printed continually since?”

“Yes. Or printed after we arrived here. For our benefit.”

“How long do these miniature buildings last? Longer than your pen?”

“I see what you mean,” Belsnor said. “No, they don’t seem to decay rapidly. Maybe they’re not printings. I don’t see that it makes much difference; they could have been held in reserve all this time. Put aside until needed, until something along the lines of our colony manifested itself.”

“Is there a microscope here in the settlement?”

“Sure.” Belsnor nodded. “Babble has one.”

“I’ll go see Babble, then.” Seth Morley moved toward the door of the briefing chamber. “Goodnight,” he said, over his shoulder.

Neither of them answered; they seemed indifferent to him and to what he had said. Will I be this way in a couple of weeks? he asked himself. It was a good question, and before long he would have the answer.

“Yes,” Babble said. “You can use my microscope.” He had on pajamas and slippers and an ersatz-wool striped bathrobe. “I was just going to bed.” He watched Seth Morley bring forth the miniature building. “Oh, one of those. They’re all over the place.”

Seating himself at the microscope, Seth Morley pried open
the tiny structure, broke away the outer hull, then placed the component-complex onto the stage of the microscope. He used the low-power resolution, obtaining a magnification of 600x.

Intricate strands … printed circuitry, of course, on a series of modules. Resistors, condensers, valves. A power supply: one ultra-miniaturized helium battery. He could make out the swivel of the cannon barrel and what appeared to be the germanium arc which served as the source of the energy beam. It can’t be very strong, he realized. Belsnor in a sense was right: the output, in ergs, must be terribly small.

He focused on the motor which drove the cannon barrel as it moved from side to side. Words were printed on the hasp which held the barrel in place; he strained to read them—and saw, as he adjusted the fine focus of the microscope, a confirmation of what he most feared.

The construct had come from Earth.
It had not been invented by a superterrestrial race—it did not emanate from the native life forms of Delmak-O. So much for that.

General Treaton, he said to himself grimly. It is you, after all, who is destroying us. Our transmitter, our receiver—and the demand that we reach this planet by noser. Was it you who had Ben Tallchief killed? Obviously.

“What are you finding there?” Babble asked.

“I am finding,” he said, “that General Treaton is our enemy and that we don’t have a chance.” He moved away from the microscope. “Take a look.”

Babble placed his eye against the eye-piece of the microscope. “Nobody thought of that,” he said presently. “We could have examined one of these any time during the last two months. It just never occurred to us.” He looked away from the microscope, peering falteringly at Seth Morley. “What’ll we do?”

“The first thing is to collect all of these, everything brought into the settlement from outside, and destroy them.”

“That means the Building is Earth-made.”

“Yes.” Seth Morley nodded. Evidently so, he thought. “We are part of an experiment,” he said.

“We’ve got to get off this planet,” Babble said.

“We’ll never get off,” Seth Morley said.

“It must all be coming from the Building. We’ve got to find a way to destroy it. But I don’t see how we can.”

“Do you want to revise your autopsy report on Tallchief?”

“I have nothing more to go on. At this point I’d say he was probably killed by a weapon that we know nothing about. Something that generates fatal amounts of histamine in the blood supply. Which brings on what looks like a natural breathing-apparatus involvement. There is another possibility which you might consider. It could be a forgery. After all, Earth has become one giant mental hospital.”

“There are military research labs there. Highly secret ones. The general public doesn’t know about them.”

“How do you know about them?”

Seth Morley said, “At Tekel Upharsin, as the kibbutz’s marine biologist, I had dealings with them. And when we bought weapons.” Strictly speaking, this was not true; he had, really, only heard rumors. But the rumors had convinced him.

“Tell me,” Babble said, eyeing him, “did you really see the Walker-on-Earth?”

“Yes,” he said. “And I know firsthand about the secret military research labs on Terra. For example—”

Babble said, “You saw someone. I believe that. Someone whom you didn’t know came up and pointed out something that should have been obvious to you: namely, that the noser you had picked out was not spaceworthy. But you had it already in your mind—because it was taught to you throughout childhood—that if a stranger came to you and offered unsolicited help, that that stranger had to be a Manifestation of the Deity. But look: what you saw was what you expected
to see. You assumed that he was the Walker-on-Earth because Specktowsky’s Book is virtually universally accepted. But I don’t accept it.”

“You don’t?” Seth Morley said, surprised.

“Not at all. Strangers—true strangers, ordinary men—show up and give good advice; most humans are well-intentioned. If I had happened by I would have intervened too. I would have pointed out that your ship wasn’t spaceworthy.”

“Then you would have been in the possession of the Walker-on-Earth; you would have temporarily become him. It can happen to anyone. That’s part of the miracle.”

“There are no miracles. As Spinoza proved centuries ago. A miracle would be a sign of God’s weakness, as a failure of natural law. If there were a God.”

Seth Morley said, “You told us, earlier this evening, that you saw the Walker-on-Earth seven times.” Suspicion filled him; he had caught the inconsistency. “And the Intercessor too.”

“What I meant by that,” Babble said smoothly, “is that I encountered life-situations in which human beings
acted
as the Walker-on-Earth would have acted, did he exist. Your problem is that of a lot of people: it stems from our having encountered non-humanoid sentient races, some of them, the ones we call ‘gods,’ on what we call ‘god-worlds,’ so much superior to us as to put us in—for example—the role that, say, dogs or cats have to us. To a dog or a cat a man seems like God: he can do god-like things. But the quasi-biological, ultra-sentient life forms on god-worlds—they’re just as much the products of natural biological evolution as we are. In time we may evolve that far … even farther. I’m not saying we will, I’m saying we can.” He pointed his finger determinedly at Seth Morley. “They didn’t create the universe. They’re not Manifestations of the Mentufacturer. All we have is their verbal report that they are Manifestations of the Deity. Why should we believe them? Naturally, if we ask them, “Are you God? Did you make the universe?’ they’ll reply in the affirmative. We’d do the same thing; white men, back in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, told the natives of North and South America exactly the same thing.”

“But the Spanish and English and French were colonists. They had a motive for pretending to be gods. Take Cortez. He—”

“The life forms on so-called ‘god-worlds’ have a similar motive.”

“Like what?” He felt his dull anger beginning to glow. “They’re saint-like. They contemplate; they listen to our prayers—if they can pick them up—and they act to fulfill our prayers. As they did, for example, with Ben Tallchief.”

“They sent him here to die. Is that right?”

That had been acutely bothering him, starting at the moment he had first caught sight of Tallchief’s dead and inert body. “Maybe they didn’t know,” he said uncomfortably. “After all, Specktowsky points out that the Deity does not know everything. For instance, He did not know that the Form Destroyer existed, or that He’d be awakened by the concentric rings of emanation that make up the universe. Or that the Form Destroyer would enter the universe, and hence time, and corrupt the universe that the Mentufacturer had made in his own image, so that it was no longer his image.”

“Just like Maggie Walsh. She talks the same way.” Dr. Babble barked out a harsh, short laugh.

Seth Morley said, “I’ve never met an atheist before.” In actuality he had met one, but it had been years ago. “It seems very strange in this era, when we have proof of the Deity’s existence. I can understand there being widespread atheism in previous eras, when religion was based on faith in things unseen … but now it’s not unseen, as Specktowsky indicated.”

“The Walker-on Earth,” Babble said sardonically, “is a sort of anti-Person-from-Porlock. Instead of interfering with a good process or event he—” Babble broke off.

The door of the infirmary had opened. A man stood there, wearing a soft plastic work-jacket, semi-leather pants and boots. He was dark-haired, probably in his late thirties, with
a strong face; his cheekbones were high and his eyes were large and bright. He carried a flashlight, which he now shut off. He stood there, gazing at Babble and Seth Morley, saying nothing. Merely standing silent and waiting. Seth Morley thought,
This is a resident of the settlement that I’ve never seen.
And then, noticing Babble’s expression,
he realized that Babble had never seen him either.

“Who are you?” Babble said hoarsely.

The man said in a low, mild voice, “I just arrived here in my noser. My name is Ned Russell. I’m an economist.” He held out his hand toward Babble, who accepted it reflexively.

“I thought everyone was here,” Babble said. “We have thirteen people; that’s all there’s supposed to be.”

“I applied for a transfer and this was the destination. Delmak-O.” Russell turned to Seth Morley, again holding out his hand. The two men shook.

“Let’s see your transfer order,” Babble said.

Russell dug into his coat pocket. “This is a strange place you’re operating here. Almost no lights, the automatic pilot inoperative … I had to land it myself and I’m not that used to a noser. I parked it with all the others, in the field at the edge of your settlement.”

“So we have two points to raise with Belsnor,” Seth Morley said. “The made-at-Terra inscription on the miniaturized building. And him.” He wondered which would prove to be the more important. At the moment he could not see clearly enough ahead to know one way or the other. Something to save us, he thought; something to doom us. It—the equation of everything—could go either way.

In the nocturnal darkness Susie Smart slipped by degrees in the direction of Tony Dunkelwelt’s living quarters. She wore a black slip and high heels—knowing that the boy liked that. Knock, knock.

“Who is it?” a voice mumbled from within.

“Susie.” She tried the knob. The door was unlocked. So she went ahead on in.

In the center of the room Tony Dunkelwelt sat crosslegged on the floor in front of a single candle. His eyes, in the dim light, were shut; evidently he was in a trance. He showed no sign of noticing her or recognizing her, and yet he had asked her name. “Is it all right for me to come in?”

His trance-states worried her. In them he withdrew entirely from the regular world. Sometimes he sat this way for hours, and when they questioned the boy about what he saw he could give little or no answer.

“I don’t mean to butt in,” she said, when he did not answer.

In a modulated, detached voice, Tony said, “Welcome.”

“Thank you,” she said, relieved. Seating herself in a straight-backed chair she found her package of cigarettes, lit one, settled back for what she knew would be a long wait.

But she did not feel like waiting.

Cautiously, she kick-kicked at him with the toe of her high heeled shoe. “Tony?” she said. “Tony?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Tell me, Tony, what do you see? Another world? Can you see all the busy gods running about doing good deeds? Can you see the Form Destroyer at work? How does he look?” No one ever saw the Form Destroyer except Tony Dunkelwelt. He had the principle of evil all to himself. And it was this frightening quality about the boy’s trances which kept her from trying to interfere; when he was in a trance-state she tried to leave him alone, to work his way back from his vision of pure malignancy to their normal and everyday responsibility.

“Don’t talk to me,” Tony mumbled. He had his eyes squeezed shut, and his face was pinched and red.

“Knock off for a while,” she said. “You ought to be in bed. Do you want to go to bed, Tony? With me, for example?” She placed her hand on his shoulder; by degrees he then slid away, until she was holding nothing. “You remember what you said about me loving you because you’re not yet a real man? You are a real man. Wouldn’t I know? Leave the deciding up to me: I’ll tell you when you’re a man and when
you’re not, if you ever happen to be not. But up until now you’ve been more than a man. Did you know that an eighteen-year-old can have seven orgasms in one twenty-four-hour period?” She waited, but he said nothing. “That’s pretty good,” she said.