A Maze of Death (14 page)

“Maybe you are,” Seth Morley said, scrutinizing him keenly; he tried to recall how the Walker had looked when he had revealed himself back at Tekel Upharsin. There was little resemblance. And yet—the odd intuition, to an extent, remained with him. It had come to him with no warning: one moment he had accepted Russell as an ordinary man and then all at once he had felt himself to be in the presence of the Deity. And it lingered; it did not completely go away.

“I’d know if I was,” Russell pointed out.

“Maybe you do know,” Maggie Walsh said. “Maybe Mr. Morley is right.” She, too, scrutinized Russell, who looked now a little embarrassed. “If you are,” she said, “we will know eventually.”

“Have you ever seen the Walker?” Russell asked her.

“No.”

“I am not he,” Russell said.

“Let’s just wade into the goddam water and see if we can make the other side,” Thugg said impatiently. “If it’s too deep then the hell with it; we’ll turn back. Here I go.” He strode toward the river and into it; his legs disappeared in the opaque blue-gray water. He continued on and, by degrees, the others followed after him.

They reached the far side with no trouble. All across, the river remained shallow. Feeling chagrined the six of them—and Russell—stood together, slapping water from their clothing. It had come up to their waists and no farther.

“Ignatz Thugg,” Frazer said. “Manifestation of the Deity. Equipped to ford rivers and battle typhoons. I never guessed.”

“Up yours,” Thugg said.

To Maggie Walsh, Russell said suddenly, “Pray.”

“For what?”

“For the veil of illusion to rise to expose the reality beneath.”

“May I do it silently?” she asked. Russell nodded. “Thank you,” she said, and turned her back to the group; she stood for a time, hands folded, her head bowed, and then she turned back. “I did as well as I could,” she informed them. She looked happier, now, Seth Morley noticed. Maybe, temporarily, she had forgotten about Susie Smart.

A tremendous pulsation throbbed nearby.

“I can hear it,” Seth Morley said, and felt fear. Enormous, instinctive fear.

A hundred yards away a gray wall rose up into the smoky haze of the midday sky. Pounding, vibrating, the wall creaked as if alive … while, above it, spires squirted wastes in the form of dark clouds. Further wastes, from enormous pipes, gurgled into the river. Gurgled and gurgled and never ceased.

They had found the Building.

“So now we can see it,” Seth Morley said. At last. It makes a noise, he thought, like a thousand cosmic babies dropping an endless number of giant pot lids onto a titanic concrete floor. What are they doing in there? he asked himself, and started toward the front face of the structure, to see what was inscribed over the entrance.

“Noisy, isn’t it?” Wade Frazer shouted.

“Yes,” he said, and was unable to hear his own voice over the stupendous racket of the Building.

He followed a paved road that led along the side of the structure; the others tagged after him, some of them holding their ears. Now he came out in front, shielded his eyes and peered up, focused on the raised surface above the closed sliding doors.

That much noise from a winery? he asked himself. It makes no sense.

A small door bore a sign reading: Customers’ entrance to wine and cheese tasting room. Holy smoke, he said to himself,
the thought of cheese drifting through his mind and burnishing all the shiny parts of his conscious attention. I ought to go in, he said to himself. Apparently it’s free, although they like you to buy a couple of bottles before you leave. But you don’t have to.

Too bad, he thought, that Ben Tallchief isn’t here. With his great interest in alcoholic beverages this would constitute, for him, a fantastic discovery.

“Wait!” Maggie Walsh called from behind him. “Don’t go in!”

His hand on the customers’ door, he half-turned, wondering what was the matter.

Maggie Walsh peeped up into the splendor of the sun and saw mixed with its remarkably strong rays a glimmer of words. She traced the letters with her finger, trying to stabilize them. What does it say? she asked herself. What message does it have for us, with all we yearn to know?

“Wait!” she called to Seth Morley, who stood with his hand on a small door marked: Customers’ entrance. “Don’t go in!”

“Why not?” he yelled back.

“We don’t know what it is!” She came breathlessly up beside him. The great structure shimmered in the mobile sunlight which spilled and dribbled over its higher surfaces. As if one could walk up on a single mote, she said to herself longingly. A carrier to the universal self: made partly of this world, partly of the next.
Wittery.
A place where knowledge is accumulated? But it made too much noise to be a book and tape and microfilm depository. Where witty conversations take place? Perhaps the essences of man’s wit were being distilled within; she might find herself immersed in the wit of Dr. Johnson, of Voltaire.

But wit did not mean humor. It meant perspicacity. It
meant the most fundamental form of intelligence coupled with a certain amount of grace. But, over all, the capacity of man to possess absolute knowledge.

If I go in there, she thought, I will learn all that man can know in this interstice of dimensions. I must go in. She hurried up to Seth Morley, nodding. “Open the door,” she said. “We must go inside the wittery; we’ve got to learn what is in there.”

Ambling after them, regarding their agitation with distinguished irony, Wade Frazer perceived the legend incised above the closed, vast doors of the Building.

At first he was perplexed. He could decipher the letters and thus make out the word. But he had not the foggiest notion as to the meaning of the word.

“I don’t get it,” he said to Seth Morley and the religious fanatic of the colony, Mag the Hag. He strained once more to see, wondering if his problem lay in a psychological ambivalence; perhaps on some lower level he did not really desire to know what the letters spelled. So he had garbled it, to foil his own maneuvering.

Wait, he thought. I think I know what a stoppery is. It is based on the Celtic, I believe. A dialect word only comprehensible to someone who has a varied and broad background of liberal, humanistic information at his disposal. Other persons would walk right by.

It is, he thought, a place where deranged persons are apprehended and their activities curtailed. In a sense it’s a sanitarium, but it goes much further than that. The aim is not to cure the ill and then return them to society—probably as ill as they ever were—but to close the final door on man’s ignorance and folly. Here, at this point, the deranged preoccupations of the mentally ill come to an end; they
stop
, as the incised sign reads. They—the mentally ill who come
here—are not returned to society, they are quietly and painlessly put to sleep. Which, ultimately, must be the fate for all who are incurably sick. Their poisons must not continue to contaminate the galaxy, he said to himself. Thank God there is such a place as this; I wonder why I wasn’t notified of it vis-à-vis the trade journals.

I must go in, he decided. I want to see how they work. And let’s find out what their legal basis is; there remains, after all, the sticky problem of the nonmedical authorities—if they could be called that—intervening and blocking the process of stoppery.

“Don’t go in!” he yelled at Seth Morley and the religious nut Maggie Baggie. “This isn’t for you; it’s probably classified. Yes. See?” He pointed to the legend on the small aluminum door; it read: Trained personnel entrance only. “I can go in!” he yelled at them over the din, “but you can’t! You’re not qualified!” Both Maggie Baggie Haggie and Seth Morley looked at him in a startled way, but stopped. He pushed past them.

Without difficulty, Mary Morley perceived the writing over the entrance of the gray, large building.

I know what it is, she said to herself, but they don’t. A witchery is a place where the control of people is exercised by means of formulas and incantations. Those who rule are masters because of their contact with the witchery and its brews, its drugs.

“I’m going in there,” she said to her husband.

Seth said, “Wait a minute. Just hold on.”

“I can go in,” she said, “but you can’t. It’s there for me. I know it. I don’t want you to stop me; get out of the way.”

She stood before the small door, reading the gold letters that adhered to the glass. Introductory chamber open to all qualified visitors, the door read. Well, that means me, she
thought. It’s speaking directly to me. That’s what it means by “qualified.”

“I’ll go in with you,” Seth said.

Mary Morley laughed. Go in with her? Amusing, she thought; he thinks they’ll welcome him in the witchery. A man. This is only for women, she said to herself; there aren’t any male witches.

After I’ve been in there, she realized, I’ll know things by which I can control him; I can make him into what he ought to be, rather than what he is. So in a sense I’m doing it for his sake.

She reached for the knob of the door.

Ignatz Thugg stood off to one side, chuckling to see their antics. They howled and bleated like pigs. He felt like walking up and sticking them but who cared? I’ll bet they stink when you get right up close to them, he told himself. They look so clean and underneath they stink. What is this poop place? He squinted, trying to read the jerky letters.

Hey, he said to himself. That’s swell; that’s where they have people hop onto animals for youknowwhat. I always wanted to watch a horse and a woman make it together; I bet I can see that inside there. Yeah; I really want to see that, for everyone to watch. They show everything really good in there and like it really is.

And there’ll be real people watching who I can talk to. Not like Morley and Walsh and Frazer using fatass words that’re so long they sound like farting. They use words like that to make it look like their poop don’t stink. But they’re no different from me.

Maybe, he thought, they have fat asses, people like Babble, making it with big dogs. I’d like to see some of these fatassed people in there plugging away; I’d like to see that Walsh plugged by a Great Dane for once in her life. She’d probably
love that. That’s what she really wants out of life; she probably dreams about it.

“Get out of the way,” he said to Morley and Walsh and Frazer. “You can’t go in there. Look at what it says.” He pointed to the words painted in classy gold on the glass window of the small door. Club members only. “I can go in,” he said, and reached for the knob.

Going swiftly forward, Ned Russell interposed himself between them and the door. He glanced up at the class-one building, saw then on their various faces separate and intense cravings, and he said, “I think it would be better if none of us goes in.”

“Why?” Seth Morley said, visibly disappointed. “What could be harmful in going into the tasting room of a winery?”

“It’s not a winery,” Ignatz Thugg said, and chortled with glee. “You read it wrong; you’re afraid to admit what it really is.” He chortled once again. “But I know.”

“‘Winery’!” Maggie Walsh exclaimed. “It’s not a winery, it’s a symposium of the achievement of man’s highest knowledge. If we go in there we’ll be purified by God’s love for man and man’s love for God.”

“It’s a special club for certain people only,” Thugg said.

Frazer said, with a smirk. “Isn’t it amazing, the lengths people will go to in an unconscious effort to block their having to face reality. Isn’t that correct, Russell?”

Russell said, “It’s not safe in there. For any of us.” I know now what it is, he said to himself, and I am right. I must get them—and myself—away from here. “Go,” he said to them, forcefully and sternly. He remained there, not budging.

Some of their energy faded.

“You think so, really?” Seth Morley said.

“Yes,” he said. “I think so.”

To the others, Seth Morley said, “Maybe he’s right.”

“Do you really think so, Mr. Russell?” Maggie Walsh said in a faltering voice. They retreated from the door. Slightly. But enough.

Crushed, Ignatz Thugg said, “I knew they’d close it down. They don’t want anyone to get any kickers out of life. It’s always that way.”

Russell said nothing; he stood there, blocking the door, and patiently waiting.

All at once Seth Morley said, “Where’s Betty Jo Berm?”

Merciful God, Russell thought, I forgot her. I forgot to watch. He turned rapidly and, shielding his eyes, peered back the way they had come. Back at the sunlit, midday river.

She had seen again what she had seen before. Each time that she saw the Building she clearly made out the vast bronze plaque placed boldly above the central entrance.

As a linguist she had been able to translate it the first time around.
Mekkis
, the Hittite word for power; it had passed into the Sanskrit, then into Greek, Latin, and at last into modern English as
machine
and
mechanical.
This was the place denied her; she could not come here, as the rest of them could.

I wish I were dead, she said to herself.

Here was the font of the universe … at least as she understood it. She understood as literally true Specktowsky’s theory of concentric circles of widening emanation. But to her it did not concern a Deity; she understood it as a statement of material fact, with no transcendental aspects. When she took a pill she rose, for a brief moment, into a higher, smaller circle of greater intensity and concentration of power. Her body weighed less; her ability, her motions, her animation—all functioned as if powered by a better fuel. I burn better, she said to herself as she turned and walked away from the Building, back toward the river. I am able to think more clearly; I am not clouded over as I am now, drooping under a foreign sun.

The water will help, she said to herself. Because in water you no longer have to support your heavy body; you are not lifted into greater
mekkis
but you do not care; the water erases everything. You are not heavy; you are not light. You are not even there.