A Maze of Death Read online

  “He may not want to use any,” Susie Smart said tartly. “We better decide on our own. Isn’t that part of the art of praying?”

  “Yes,” Maggie Walsh said.

  “Somebody write this down,” Wade Frazer said. “We should start by saying, ‘Thank you for all the help you have given us in the past. We hesitate to bother you again, what with all you have to do all the time, but our situation is as follows.’” He paused, reflecting. “What is our situation?” he asked Belsnor. “Do we just want the transmitter fixed?”

  “More than that,” Babble said. “We want to get entirely out of here, and never have to see Delmak-O again.”

  “If the transmitter’s working,” Belsnor said, “we can do that ourselves.” He gnawed on a knuckle of his right hand. “I think we ought to settle for getting replacement parts for the transmitter and do the rest on our own. The less asked for in a prayer the better. Doesn’t The Book say that?” He turned toward Maggie Walsh.

  “On page 158,” Maggie said, “Specktowsky says, ‘The soul of brevity—the short time we are alive—is wit. And as regards the art of prayer, wit runs inversely proportional to length.’ ”

  Belsnor said, “Let’s simply say, ‘Walker-on-Earth, help us find spare transmitter parts.’ ”

  “The thing to do,” Maggie Walsh said, “is to ask Mr. Tallchief to word the prayer, inasmuch as he was so successful in his recent previous prayer. Evidently he knows how to phrase properly.”

  “Get Tallchief,” Babble said. “He’s probably moving his possessions from his noser to his living quarters. Somebody go find him.”

  “I’ll go,” Seth Morley said. He rose, made his way out of the briefing chamber and into the evening darkness.

  “That was a very good idea, Maggie,” he heard Babble saying, and other voices joined his. A chorus of agreement went up from those gathered in the briefing room.

  He continued on, feeling his way cautiously; it would be so easy to get lost in this still unfamiliar colony site. Maybe I should have let one of the others go, he said to himself. A light shone in the window of a building ahead. Maybe he’s in there, Seth Morley said to himself, and made his way toward the light.

  Ben Tallchief finished his drink, yawned, picked at a place on his throat, yawned once again and clumsily rose to his feet. Time to start moving, he said to himself. I hope, he thought, I can find my noser in the dark.

  He stepped outdoors, found the gravel path with his feet, began moving in the direction which he supposed the nosers to be. Why no guide lights around here? he asked himself, and then realized that the other colonists had been too preoccupied to turn the lights on. The breakdown of the transmitter had ensnared the attention of every one of them, and justly so. Why aren’t I in there? he asked himself. Functioning as part of the group. But the group didn’t function as a group anyhow; it was always a finite number of self-oriented individuals squalling with one another. With such a bunch he felt as if he had no roots, no common source. He felt nomadic and in need of exercise; right now something called to him: it had called him from the briefing room and back to his living quarters, and now it sent him trudging through the dark, searching for his noser.

  A vague area of darkness moved ahead of him, and, against the less-dark sky, a figure appeared. “Tallchief?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Who is it?” He peered.

  “Morley. They sent me to find you. They want you to compose the prayer, since you had such good luck a couple of days ago.”

  “No more prayers for me,” Tallchief said, and clamped his teeth in bitterness. “Look where that last prayer got me—stuck here with all of you. No offense, I just mean—” He gestured. “It was a cruel and inhuman act to grant that prayer, considering the situation here. And it must have known it.”

  “I can understand your feeling,” Morley said.

  “Why don’t you do it? You just recently met the Walker; it would be smarter to use you.”

  “I’m no good at prayers. I didn’t summon the Walker; it was his idea to come to me.”

  “How about a drink?” Tallchief said. “And then maybe you could give me a hand with my stuff, moving it to my quarters and like that.”

  “I have to move my own stuff.”

  “That’s an outstanding cooperative attitude.”

  “If you had helped me—”

  Tallchief said, “I’ll see you later.” He continued on, groping and flailing in the darkness, until all at once he stumbled against a clanking hull. A noser. He had found the right area; now to pick out his own ship.

  He looked back. Morley had gone; he was alone.

  Why couldn’t the guy have helped me? he asked himself. I’m going to need another person for most of the cartons. Let’s see, he pondered. If I can turn on the landing lights of the noser I’ll be able to see. He located the locking wheel of the hatch, spun it, tugged the hatch open. Automatically the safety lights came on; now he could see. Maybe I’ll just move in my clothes, bathroom articles and my copy of The Book, he decided. I’ll read The Book until I get ready to go to sleep. I’m tired; piloting the noser here took everything out of me. That and the transmitter failing. Utter defeat.

  Why did I ask him to help me? he wondered. I don’t know him, he hardly knows me. Getting my stuff moved is my own problem. He has problems of his own.

  He picked up a carton of books, began to lug it away from the parked noser in the general direction—he hoped—of his living quarters, I’ve got to get a flashlight, he decided as he waddled along. And hell, I forgot to turn on the landing lights. This is all going wrong, he realized. I might as well go back and join the others. Or I could move this one carton and then have another drink, and possibly by that time most of them would have come out of the briefing room and could help me. Grunting and perspiring, he made his way up the gravel path toward the dark and inert structure which provided them with their living quarters. No lights on. Everyone was still involved in pasting together an adequate prayer. Thinking about that he had to laugh. They’ll probably haggle about it all night, he decided, and laughed again, this time with angry disgust.

  He found his own living quarters, by virtue of the fact that the door hung open. Entering, he dropped the carton of books to the floor, sighed, stood up, turned on all the lights … standing there he surveyed the small room with its dresser and bed. The bed did not please him; it looked small and hard. “Christ,” he said, and seated himself on it. Lifting several books from the carton he rummaged about until he came onto the bottle of Peter Dawson scotch; he unscrewed the lid and drank somberly from the bottle itself.

  Through the open door he gazed out at the nocturnal sky; he saw the stars haze over with atmospheric disturbances, then clear for a moment. It is certainly hard, he thought, to make out stars through the refractions of a planetary atmosphere.

  A great gray shape merged with the doorway, blotting out the stars.

  It held a tube and it pointed the tube at him. He saw a telescopic sight on it and a trigger mechanism. Who was it? What was it? He strained to see, and then he heard a faint pop. The gray shape receded and once more stars appeared. But now they had changed. He saw two stars collapse against one another and a nova form; it flared up and then, as he watched, it began to die out. He saw it turn from a furiously blazing ring into a dim core of dead iron and then he saw it cool into darkness. More stars cooled with it; he saw the force of entropy, the method of the Destroyer of Forms, retract the stars into dull reddish coals and then into dust-like silence. A shroud of thermal energy hung uniformly over the world, over this strange and little world for which he had no love or use.

  It’s dying, he realized. The universe. The thermal haze spread on and on until it became only a disturbance, nothing more; the sky glowed weakly with it and then flickered. Even the uniform thermal disbursement was expiring. How strange and goddam awful, he thought. He got to his feet, moved a step toward the door.

  And there, on his feet, he died.

  They
found him an hour later. Seth Morley stood with his wife at the far end of the knot of people jammed into the small room and said to himself, To keep him from helping with the prayer.

  “The same force that shut down the transmitter,” Ignatz Thugg said. “They knew; they knew if he phrased the prayer it would go through. Even without the relay.” He looked gray and frightened. All of them did, Seth Morley noticed. Their faces, in the light of the room, had a leaden, stone-like cast. Like, he thought, thousand-year-old idols.

  Time, he thought, is shutting down around us. It is as if the future is gone, for all of us. Not just for Tallchief.

  “Babble, can you do an autopsy?” Betty Jo Berm asked.

  “To a certain extent.” Dr. Babble had seated himself beside Tallchief’s body and was touching him here and there. “No visible blood. No sign of an injury. His death could be natural, you all realize; it might be that he had a cardiac condition. Or, for example, he might have been killed by a heat gun at close range … but then, if that’s the case, I’ll find the burn marks.” He unfastened Tallchief’s collar, reached down to explore the chest area. “Or one of us might have done it,” he said. “Don’t rule that out.”

  “They did it,” Maggie Walsh said.

  “Possibly,” Babble said. “I’ll do what I can.” He nodded to Thugg and Wade Frazer and Glen Belsnor. “Help me carry him into the clinic; I’ll start the autopsy now.”

  “None of us even knew him,” Mary said.

  “I think I probably saw him last,” Seth Morley said. “He wanted to bring his things from his noser here to his living area. I told him I’d help him later on, when I had time. He seemed to be in a bad mood; I tried to tell him we needed him to compose a prayer but he didn’t seem interested. He just wanted to move his things.” He felt acutely guilty. Maybe if I had helped him he’d still be alive, he said to himself. Maybe Babble’s right; maybe it was a heart attack, brought on by moving heavy cartons. He kicked at the box of books, wondering if this box had done it—this box and his own refusal to help. Even when I was asked I wouldn’t give it, he realized.

  “You didn’t see any indication of a suicidal attitude at work, did you?” Dr. Babble asked.

  “No.”

  “Very strange,” Babble said. He shook his head wearily. “Okay, let’s get him to the infirmary.”

  6

  The four men carried Tallchief’s body across the dark, nocturnal compound. Cold wind licked at them and they shivered; they drew together against the hostile presence of Delmak-O—the hostile presence which had killed Ben Tailchief.

  Babble switched on lights here and there. At last they had Tallchief up on the high, metal-topped table.

  “I think we should retire to our individual living quarters and stay there until Dr. Babble has finished his autopsy,” Susie Smart said, shivering.

  Wade Frazer spoke up. “Better if we stay together, at least until Dr. Babble’s report is in. And I also think that under these unexpected circumstances, this terrible event in our lives, that we must immediately elect a leader, a strong one who can keep us together as a group, when in fact right now we are not, but should be—must be. Doesn’t everyone agree?”

  After a pause Glen Belsnor said, “Yeah.”

  “We can vote,” Betty Jo Berm said. “In a democratic way. But I think we must be careful.” She struggled to express herself. “We mustn’t give a leader too much power. And we should be able to recall him when and if at any time we’re not satisfied with him; then we can vote him out as our leader and elect someone else. But while he is leader we should obey him—we don’t want him to be too weak, either. If he’s too weak we’ll just be like we are now: a mere collection of individuals who can’t function together, even in the face of death.”

  “Then let’s get back to the briefing room,” Tony Dunkelwelt said, “rather than to our personal quarters. So we can start casting votes. I mean, it or they could kill us before we have a leader; we don’t want to wait.”

  In a group they made their way somberly from Dr. Babble’s infirmary to the briefing room. The transmitter and receiver were still on; each person, entering, heard the dull, low hum.

  “So big,” Maggie Walsh said, gazing at the transmitter. “And so useless.”

  “Do you think we should arm ourselves?” Bert Kosler said, plucking at Morley’s sleeve. “If there’s someone after us to kill all of us—”

  “Let’s wait for Babble’s autopsy report,” Seth Morley said.

  Seating himself, Wade Frazer said in a business-like way, “We’ll vote by a show of hands. Everybody sit down and be quiet and I’ll read off our names and keep the tally. Is that satisfactory to everyone?” There was a sardonic undertone to his voice, and Seth Morley did not like it.

  Ignatz Thugg said, “You won’t get it, Frazer. No matter how badly you want it. Nobody in this room is going to let somebody like you tell them what to do.” He dropped into a chair, crossed his legs, and got a tobacco cigarette from his jacket pocket.

  As Wade Frazer read off the names and took the tally, several others made their own notations. They don’t trust Frazer to make an accurate account, Seth Morley realized. He did not blame them.

  “The greatest number of votes for one person,” Frazer said, when all the names had been read, “goes to Glen Belsnor.” He dropped his tally sheet with a blatant sneer … as if, Morley thought, the psychologist is saying Go ahead and doom yourselves. It’s your lives, if you want to toss them away. But it seemed to him that Belsnor was a good choice; on his own very limited knowledge he had himself voted for the electronics maintenance man. He was satisfied, even if Frazer was not. And by their relieved stir he guessed that most of the others were, too.

  “While we’re waiting for Dr. Babble’s report,” Maggie Walsh said, “perhaps we should join in a group prayer for Mr. Tallchief’s psyche to be taken immediately into immortality.”

  “Read from Specktowsky’s Book,” Betty Jo Berm said. She dipped into her pocket and brought out her own copy, which she passed to Maggie Walsh. “Read the part on page 70 about the Intercessor. Isn’t it the Intercessor that we want to reach?”

  From memory, Maggie Walsh intoned the words which all of them knew. “‘By His appearance in history and creation, the Intercessor offered Himself as a sacrifice by which the Curse could be partially nullified. Satisfied as to the redemption of His creation by this manifestation of Himself, this signal of His great—but partial—victory, the Deity “died” and then remanifested Himself to indicate that He had overcome the Curse and hence death, and, having done this, moved up through the concentric circles back to God Himself.’ And I will add another part which is pertinent. “The next—and last—period is the Day of Audit, in which the heavens will roll back like a scroll and each living thing—and hence all creatures, both sentient man and man-like nonterrestrial organisms—will be reconciled with the original Deity, from whose unity of being everything has come (with the possible exception of the Form Destroyer).’” She paused a moment and then said, “Repeat what I say after me, all of you, either aloud or in your thoughts.”

  They lifted their faces and gazed straight upward, in the accepted fashion. So that the Deity could hear them more readily.

  “We did not know Mr. Tallchief too well.”

  They all said, “We did not know Mr. Tallchief too well.”

  “But he seemed to be a fine man.”

  They all said, “But he seemed to be a fine man.”

  Maggie hesitated, reflected, then said, “Remove him from time and thereby make him immortal.”

  “Remove him from time and thereby make him immortal.”

  “Restore his form to that which he possessed before the Form Destroyer went to work on him.”

  They all said, “Restore his form to that—” They broke off. Dr. Milton Babble had come into the briefing room, looking ruffled.

  “We must finish the prayer,” Maggie said.

  “You can finish it some other time,” D
r. Babble said. “I’ve been able to determine the cause of death.” He consulted several sheets of paper which he had brought along. “Cause of death: vast inflammation of the bronchial passages, due to an unnatural amount of histamine in the blood, resulting in a stricture of the trachea; exact cause of death was suffocation as reaction to a heterogenic allergen. He must have been stung by an insect or brushed against a plant while he was unloading his noser. An insect or plant containing a substance to which he was violently allergic. Remember how sick Susie Smart was her first week here, from brushing against one of the nettle-like bushes? And Kosler.” He gestured in the direction of the elderly custodian. “If he hadn’t gotten to me as quick as he did he would be dead, too. With Tallchief the situation was against us; he had gone out by himself, at night, and there was no one around to react to his plight. He died alone, but if we had been there he could have been saved.”

  After a pause Roberta Rockingham, seated, with a huge rug over her lap, said, “Why, I think that’s ever so much more encouraging than our own speculation. It would appear that no one is trying to kill us … which is really quite wonderful, don’t you think?” She gazed around at them, straining to hear if any had spoken.

  “Evidently,” Wade Frazer said remotely, with a private grimace.

  “Babble,” Ignatz Thugg said, “we voted without you.”

  “Good grief,” Betty Jo Berm said. “That’s so. We’ll have to vote again.”

  “You selected one of us as a leader?” Babble said. “Without letting me exercise my own personal involvement? Who did you decide on?”

  “On me,” Glen Belsnor said.

  Babble consulted with himself. “It’s all right as far as I’m concerned,” he said at last, “to have Glen as our leader.”

  “He won by three votes,” Susie Smart said.

  Babble nodded. “In any case I’m satisfied.”

  Seth Morley walked over to Babble, faced him and said, “You’re sure that was the cause of death?”

  “Beyond doubt. I have equipment which can determine—”