A Maze of Death (17 page)

They were both silent for a time.

“Four dead now,” Babble said. “Maybe more.”

“Why do you say ‘maybe more’?”

Babble said, “I’m thinking of those who left the settlement this morning. Maggie, the new man Russell, Seth and Mary Morley—”

“They’re probably all right.” But he did not believe his own words. “No,” he say savagely, “they’re probably all dead. Maybe all seven of them.”

“Try to calm down,” Babble said; he seemed a little afraid. “Is that gun of yours still loaded?”

“Yes.” Glen Belsnor picked it up, emptied it, handed the shells to Babble. “You can keep them. No matter what happens I’m not going to shoot anyone else. Not even to save one of the rest of us or all of the rest of us.” He made his way to a chair, seated himself, clumsily got out a cigarette and lit up.

“If there’s a court of inquiry,” Babble said, “I’ll be glad to testify that Tony Dunkelwelt was psychiatrically insane. But I can’t testify to his killing old Bert, or attacking you. I mean to say, I have only your verbal report for that.” He added quickly, “But of course I believe you.”

“There won’t be any inquiry.” He knew it was an absolute
verity; there was no doubt in him on that score. “Except,” he said, “a posthumous one. Which won’t matter to us.”

“Are you keeping a log of some sort?” Babble asked.

“No.”

“You should.”

“Okay,” he snarled, “I will. But just leave me alone, goddam it!” He glared at Babble, panting with anger. “Lay off!”

“Sorry,” Babble said in a small voice, and shrank perceptibly away.

Glen Belsnor said, “You and I and Mrs. Rockingham may be the only ones alive.” He felt it intuitively, in a rush of comprehension.

“Perhaps we should round her up and stay with her. So that nothing happens to her.” Babble cringed his way to the door.

“Okay.” He nodded irritably. “You know what I’m going to do? You go stay with Mrs. Rockingham; I’m going to go over Russell’s possessions and his noser. Ever since you and Morley brought him around last night I’ve been wondering about him. He seems odd. Did you get that impression?”

“It’s just that he’s new here.”

“I didn’t feel that way about Ben Tallchief. Or the Morleys.” He got abruptly to his feet. “You know what occurred to me?
Maybe he picked up the aborted signal from the satellite.
I want to get a good look at his transmitter and receiver.” Back to what I know, he pondered. Where I don’t feel so alone.

Leaving Babble, he made his way toward the area in which all the nosers lay parked. He did not look back.

The signal from the satellite, he reasoned, short as it was, may have brought him here. He may have been already in the area, not on his way here but preparing a flyby. And yet he had transfer papers. The hell with it, he thought, and began taking apart the radio equipment of Russell’s noser.

Fifteen minutes later he knew the answer. Standard receiver
and transmitter, exactly like the others in all their other nosers. Russell would not have been able to pick up the satellite’s signal because it was a flea-signal. Only the big receiver on Delmak-O could have monitored it. Russell had come in on the automatic pilot, like everybody else. And in the way that everybody else arrived.

So much for that, he said to himself.

Most of Russell’s possessions remained aboard the noser; he had only carried his personal articles from the noser to his living quarters. A big box of books. Everybody had books. Glen Belsnor idly tossed the books about, prowling deep in the carton. Textbook after textbook on economics; that figured. Microtapes of several of the great classics, including Tolkien, Milton, Virgil, Homer. All the epics, he realized. Plus
War and Peace
, as well as tapes of John Dos Passos’
U.S.A.
I always meant to read that, he said to himself.

Nothing about the books and tapes struck him as odd. Except—

No copy of Specktowsky’s Book.

Maybe Russell, like Maggie Walsh, had memorized it.

Maybe not.

There was one class of people who did not carry a copy of Specktowsky’s Book—did not carry it because they were not allowed to read it. The ostriches shut up in the planetwide aviary at Terra: those who lived in the sandpile because they had crumbled under the enormous psychological pressure suffered while emigrating. Since all the other planets of the Sol System were uninhabitable, emigration meant a trip to another star system … and the insidious beginning, for many, of the space illness of loneliness and uprootedness.

Maybe he recovered, Glen Belsnor reflected, and they let him loose. But they then would have made sure he owned a copy of Specktowsky’s Book; that would be the time when one really needed it.

He got away
, he said to himself.

But why would he come here?

And then he thought, The Interplan West base, where
General Treaton operates, is on Terra, tangent to the aviary. What a coincidence. The place, evidently, where all the non-living organisms on Delmak-O had been constructed. As witness the inscription in the tiny replica of the Building.

In a sense it fits together, he decided. But in another sense it adds up to zero. Plain, flat zero.

These deaths, he said to himself, they’re making me insane, too. Like they did poor nutty Tony Dunkelwelt. But suppose: a psychological lab, operated by Interplan West, needing aviary patients as subjects. They recruit a batch—those bastards would, too—and one of them is Ned Russell. He’s still insane, but they can teach him; the insane can learn, too. They give him a job and send him out to do it—send him here.

And then a gross, vivid, terrifying thought came to him.
Suppose we’re all ostriches from the aviary
, he said to himself. Suppose we don’t know; Interplan West cut a memory conduit in our friggin’ brains. That would explain our inability to function as a group. That’s why we can’t really even talk clearly to one another. The insane can learn, but one thing they can’t do is to function collectively … except, perhaps, as a mob. But that is not really functioning in the sane sense; that is merely mass insanity.

So we
are
an experiment, then, he thought. I now know what we wanted to know. And it might explain why I have that tattoo stuck away on my right instep, that Persus 9.

But all this was a great deal to base on one slim datum: the fact that Russell did not possess a copy of Specktowsky’s Book.

Maybe it’s in his goddam living quarters, he thought all at once. Christ, of course; it’s
there.

He departed from the assembly of nosers; ten minutes later he reached the common and found himself stepping up onto the porch. The porch where Susie Smart had died—opposite to the porch where Tony Dunkelwelt and old Bert had died.

We must bury them! he realized.—And shrank from it.

But first: I’ll look at Russell’s remaining stuff.

The door was locked.

With a prybar—taken from his rolypoly aggregate of worldly goods, his great black crowish conglomeration of junk and treasures—he forced open the door.

There, in plain sight, on the rumpled bed, lay Russell’s wallet and papers. His transfer, his everything else, back to his birth certificate; Glen Belsnor pawed through them, conscious that here he had something. The chaos attendant on Susie’s death had confused them all; undoubtedly Russell had not meant to leave these here. Unless he was not accustomed to carrying them … and the ostriches at the aviary did not carry identification of any sort.

At the door appeared Dr. Babble. In a voice shrill with panic he said, “I—can’t find Mrs. Rockingham.”

“The briefing room? The cafeteria?” She may have gone off for a walk, he thought. But he knew better. Roberta Rockingham could scarcely walk; her cane was essential to her, due to a long-term circulatory ailment. “I’ll help look,” he grunted; he and Babble hurried from the porch and across the common, hiking aimlessly; Glen Belsnor stopped, realizing that they were simply running in fear. “We have to think,” he gasped. “Wait a minute.” Where the hell might she be? he asked himself. “That fine old woman,” he said in frenzy and in despair. “She never did any harm to anyone in her life. Goddam them, whoever they are.”

Babble nodded glumly.

She had been reading. Hearing a noise, she glanced up. And saw a man, unfamiliar to her, standing in the entrance-way of her small, neatly-arranged room.

“Yes?” she said, politely lowering her microtape scanner. “Are you a new member of the settlement? I haven’t seen you before, have I?”

“No, Mrs. Rockingham,” he said. His voice was kind and very pleasant, and he wore a leather uniform, complete with huge leather gloves. His face gave off a near radiance … or perhaps her glasses had steamed up, she wasn’t sure. His
hair, cut short, did gleam a little, she was positive of that. What a nice expression he has, she declared to herself. So thoughtful, as if he has thought and done many wonderful things.

“Would you like a little bourbon and water?” she asked. Toward afternoon she generally had one drink; it eased the perpetual ache in her legs. Today, however, they could enjoy the Old Crow bourbon a little earlier.

“Thank you,” the man said. Tall, and very slender, he stood at the doorway, not coming fully in. It was as if he were in some way attached to the outside; he could not fully leave it and would soon go back to it entirely. I wonder, she thought, could he be a Manifestation, as the theological people of this enclave call it? She peered at him in an effort to distinguish him more clearly, but the dust on her glasses—or whatever it was—obscured him; she could not get a really clear view.

“I wonder if you might get it,” she said, pointing. “There’a a drawer in that somewhat shabby little table by the bed. You’ll find the bottle of Old Crow in there, and three glasses. Oh dear; I don’t have any soda. Can you enjoy it with just bottled tapwater? And no ice?”

“Yes,” he said, and walked lightly across her room. He had on tall boots, she observed. How very attractive.

“What is your name?” she inquired.

“Sergeant Ely Nichols.” He opened the table drawer, got out the bourbon and two of the glasses. “Your colony has been relieved. I was sent here to pick you up and fly you home. From the start they were aware of the malfunctioning of the satellite’s tape-transmission.”

“Then it’s over?” she said, filled with joy.

“All over,” he said. He filled the two glasses with bourbon and water, brought her hers, seated himself in a straight-backed chair facing her. He was smiling.

Glen Belsnor, searching futilely for Roberta Rockingham, saw a small number of people trudging toward the settlement. Those who had gone off: Frazer and Thugg, Maggie Walsh, the new man Russell, Mary and Seth Morley … they were all there. Or were they?

His heart laboring, Belsnor said. “I don’t see Betty Jo Berm. Is she injured? You left her, you bastards?” He stared at them, feeling his jaw tremble with impotent anger. “Is that correct?”

“She’s dead,” Seth Morley said.

“How?” he said. Dr. Babble came up beside him; the two of them waited together as the four men and two women approached.

Seth Morley said, “She drowned herself.” He looked around. “Where’s that kid, that Dunkelwold?”

“Dead,” Dr. Babble said.

Maggie Walsh said, “And Bert Kosler?”

Neither Babble nor Belsnor answered.

“Then he’s dead, too,” Russell said.

“That’s right.” Belsnor nodded. “There’re eight of us left.
Roberta Rockingham—she’s gone. So possibly she’s dead, too. I think we’ll have to assume she is.”

“Didn’t you stay together?” Russell said.

“Did you?” Glen Belsnor answered.

Again there was silence. Somewhere, far off, a warm wind blew dust and infirm lichens about; a swirl lifted above the main buildings of the settlement and then writhed off and gone. The air, as Glen Belsnor sucked it in noisily, smelled bad. As if, he thought, the skins of dead dogs are drying somewhere on a line.

Death, he thought. That’s all I can think of now. And it’s easy to see why. Death for us has blotted everything else out; it has become, in less than twenty-four hours, the mainstay of our life.

“You couldn’t bring her body back?” he said to them.

“It drifted downstream,” Seth Morley said. “And it was on fire.” He came up beside Belsnor and said. “How did Bert Kosler die?”

“Tony stabbed him.”

“What about Tony?”

Glen Belsnor said, “I shot him. Before he could kill me.” “What about Roberta Rockingham? Did you shoot her, too?” “No,” Belsnor said shortly.

“I think,” Frazer said, “we’re going to have to pick a new leader.”

Belsnor said woodenly. “I had to shoot him. He would have killed all the rest of us. Ask Babble, he’ll back me up.”

“I can’t back you up,” Babble said. “I have nothing more to go on than they do. I have only your oral statement.”

Seth Morley said. “What was Tony using as a weapon?”

“A sword,” Belsnor said. “You can see that; it’s still there with him in his room.”

“Where did you get the gun you shot him with?” Russell said.

“I had it,” Belsnor said. He felt sick and weak. “I did what I could,” he said. “I did what I had to.”

“So ‘they’ aren’t responsible for all the deaths,” Seth Morley said. “You are responsible for Tony Dunkelwold’s death and he’s responsible for Bert’s.”

“Dunkelwelt,” Belsnor corrected, aimlessly.

“And we don’t know if Mrs. Rockingham is dead; she may just have roamed off. Possibly out of fear.”

“She couldn’t,” Belsnor said. “She was too ill.”

“I think,” Seth Morley said, “that Frazer is right. We need a different leader.” To Babble he said, “Where’s his gun?”

“He left it in Tony’s room,” Babble said.

Belsnor slid away from them, in the direction of Tony Dunkelwelt’s living quarters.

“Stop him,” Babble said.

Ignatz Thugg, Wade Frazer, Seth Morley and Babble hurried past Belsnor; in a group they trotted up the steps and onto the porch and then into Tony’s quarters. Russell stood aloof; he remained with Belsnor and Maggie Walsh.

Coming out of Tony’s doorway, Seth Morley held the gun in his hand and said, “Russell, don’t you think we’re doing the right thing?”