A Maze of Death (19 page)

Lying on the table, Seth Morley managed to make out the sight of Babble’s tranquilizer gun. Will that protect us? he wondered. Or will Thugg make his way back here and kill all of us or possibly just kill me as I lie here helpless. “Belsnor,” he gasped, “don’t let Thugg come back here tonight and kill me.”

“I’ll stay here with you,” Belsnor said; he gave him a thump with the edge of his hand. “And we’ll be armed with this.” He held Babble’s tranquilizing gun, scrutinizing it. He seemed more confident, now. So did the others.

“Did you give Morley any Demerol?” Russell asked Dr. Babble.

“I don’t have time,” Babble said, and continued working.

“I’ll give it to him,” Frazer said, “if you’ll tell me where it is and where the hypos are.”

“You aren’t qualified to do that,” Babble said.

Frazer said, “And you’re not qualified to do surgery.”

“I have to,” Babble said. “If I don’t he’ll die. But he can get by without an analgesic.”

Mary Morley, crouching down so that her head was close to her husband’s, said, “Can you stand the pain?”

“Yes,” Seth Morley said tightly.

The operation continued.

He lay in semi-darkness. Anyhow the bullet is out of me, he thought drowsily. And I’ve had Demerol both intravenously and intermuscularly … and I feel nothing. Did he manage to stitch the artery properly? he wondered.

A complex machine monitored his internal activity: it kept note of his blood pressure, his heart rate, his temperature and his respiratory apparatus. But where’s Babble? he wondered. And Belsnor, where is he?

“Belsnor!” he said as loudly as he could. “Where are you? You said you’d be here with me all the time.”

A dark shape materialized. Belsnor, carrying the tranquilizer gun with both hands. “I’m here. Calm down.”

“Where are the others?”

“Burying the dead,” Belsnor said. “Tony Dunkelwelt, old Bert, Maggie Walsh … they’re using some heavy digging equipment left over from the building of the settlement. And Tallchief. We’re burying him, too. The first one to die. And Susie. Poor, dumb Susie.”

“Anyhow he didn’t get me,” Seth Morley said.

“He wanted to. He did his best.”

“We shouldn’t have tried to get the gun away from you,” Seth Morley said. He knew that, now. For what it was worth.

“You should have listened to Russell,” Belsnor said. “He knew.”

“Hindsight is cheap,” Seth Morley said. But Belsnor was patently right; Russell had tried to show them the way and they, from panic, had failed to listen. “No sign of Mrs. Rockingham?”

“None. We’ve searched throughout the settlement. She’s gone; Thugg’s gone. But we know he’s alive. And armed and dangerous and psychopathically oriented.”

Seth Morley said, “We don’t know he’s alive. He may have killed himself. Or what got Tallchief and Susie may have gotten him too.”

“Maybe. But we can’t count on it,” Belsnor examined his wristwatch. “I’ll be outside; from there I can see the digging operation and still watch over you. I’ll see you.” He thumped Morley on his left shoulder, then walked silently from the room and disappeared at once from sight.

Seth Morley wearily shut his eyes. The smell of death, he thought, is everywhere. We are inundated with it. How many people have we lost? he asked himself. Tallchief, Susie, Roberta Rockingham, Betty Jo Berm, Tony Dunkelwelt, Maggie Walsh, old Bert Kosler. Seven dead. Seven of us left. They’ve gotten half of us in less than twenty-four hours.

And for this, he thought, we left Tekel Upharsin. There is a macabre irony about it; we all came here because we wanted to live more fully. We wanted to be useful. Everyone in this colony had a dream. Maybe that’s what was wrong with us, he thought. We have been lodged too deeply in our respective dream worlds. We don’t seem able to come out of them; that’s why we can’t function as a group. And some of us, such as Thugg and Dunkelwelt—there are some of us who are functionally, outright insane.

A gun muzzle jutted against the side of his head. A voice said, “Be quiet.”

A second man, wearing black leather, strode toward the front of the infirmary, an erggun held ready. “Belsnor is outside,” he said to the man holding the gun against Seth Morley’s head. “I’ll take care of him.” Aiming his weapon he fired an arc of electricity; emerging from the anode coil of the gun it connected with Belsnor, turning him momentarily into a cathode terminal. Belsnor shivered, then slid down onto his knees. He fell over on one side and lay, the tranquilizer gun resting beside him.

“The others,” the man squatting next to Seth Morley said.

“They’re burying their dead. They won’t notice. Even his wife isn’t here.” He came over to Seth Morley; the man beside him rose and both of them stood together for a moment, surveying Seth Morley. Both wore black leather and he wondered who or what they were.

“Morley,” the first man said, “we’re taking you out of here.”

“Why?” Morley said.

“To save your life,” the second man said. Swiftly they produced a stretcher and laid it beside Morley’s bed.

Parked behind the infirmary a small squib-ship glistened moistly in the moon-laden night. The two men in black leather uniforms carried Morley in his stretcher to the hatch of the squib; there they set the stretcher down. One of them opened the hatch. They again picked up the stretcher and carried him carefully inside.

“Is Belsnor dead?” he asked.

The first man said, “Stunned.”

“Where are we going?” Morley said.

“To a place you’d like to go to.” The second leather-clad man seated himself at the control board; he threw several switches to “on,” adjusted dials and meters. The squib rose up and hurled itself into the nocturnal sky. “Are you comfortable, Mr. Morley? I’m sorry we had to put you on the floor, but this will not be a very long trip.”

“Can you tell me who you are?” Morley said.

“Just tell us,” the first man said, “if you’re comfortable.”

Morley said, “I’m comfortable.” He could distinguish the viewscreen of the squib; on it, as if this were daylight, he saw trees and smaller flora: shrubs, lichens, and then a flash of illumination: a river.

And then, on the viewscreen, he saw the Building.

The squib prepared to land. On the Building’s roof.

“Isn’t that right?” the first man in black leather said.

“Yes,” Morley nodded.

“Do you still want to go there?”

He said, “No.”

“You don’t remember this place,” the first man said. “Do you?”

“No,” Morley said. He lay breathing shallowly, trying to conserve his strength. “I saw it today for the first time,” he said.

“Oh no,” the second man said. “You’ve seen it before.”

Warning lights on the Building’s roof glinted as the squib bounced to an unskilled landing.

“Damn that R.K. beam,” the first man said. “It’s erratic again. I was right; we should have come in on manual.”

“I couldn’t land on this roof,” the second man said. “It’s too irregular. I’d hit one of those hydro-towers.”

“I don’t think I want to work with you any more,” the first man said, “if you can’t land a size-B ship on a roof this large.”

“It has nothing to do with the size. What I’m complaining about is the random obstructions. There’re too many of them.” He went to the hatch and manually cranked it open. Night air smelling of violets drifted in … and, with it, the dull, moaning roar of the Building.

Seth Morley scrambled to his feet; at the same time he strained to get his fingers on the erggun held loosely by the man at the hatch.

The man was slow to react; he had looked away from Seth Morley for a moment, asking the man at the control board something—in any case he did not see Seth Morley in time. His companion had already shouted a warning before he reacted.

In Seth Morley’s grip the erggun slithered and escaped from him; he fell on it deliberately, struggling to get hold of it once again.

A high-frequency electrical impulse, released by the man
at the control board, shimmered past him. The man had missed. Seth Morley flopped back onto his good shoulder, dragged himself to a quasi-sitting position, and fired back.

The beam touched the man at the control board; it caught him above the right ear. At the same time, Seth Morley swiveled the gun barrel; he shot the man tumbling vainly over him. At such close range the impact of the beam was enormous; the man convulsed, fell backward, tumbled with a loud crash into a complex of instrumentation mounted against the far wall of the squib.

Morley slammed the hatch, turned it to lock, then sank down onto the floor. Blood seeped through the bandage on his shoulder, befouling the area adjacent to him. His head hummed and he knew that he would, in a moment or two, pass entirely out.

A speaker mounted above the control board clicked on. “Mr. Morley,” it said, “we know that you have taken control of the squib. We know that both our men are unconscious. Please do not take off. Your shoulder was not operated on properly; the junction of torn pieces of artery was unsuccessful. If you do not open the hatch of the squib and let us render you major and immediate medical assistance, then you probably will not live another hour.”

The hell with you, Seth Morley thought. He crept toward the control board, reached one of its two seats; with his good arm he hoisted himself up, groped to steady himself and, gradually, pulled himself into place.

“You are not trained to pilot a high-speed squib,” the speaker said. Evidently monitors of some sort, within the squib, were telling them what he was doing.

“I can fly it,” he said, snorting for breath; his chest seemed weighted down and he had immense difficulty inhaling. On the dashboard a group of switches were marked as being tape-programmed flight patterns. Eight in all. He selected one at random, pressed the switch shut.

Nothing happened.

It’s still on the incoming beam, he realized. I have to release the beam lock.

He found the lock, clicked it off. The squib quivered and then, by degrees, rose up into the night sky.

Something is wrong, he said to himself. The squib isn’t handling right. The flaps must still be in a landing position.

By now he could barely see. The cab of the vehicle had begun to dim around him; he shut his eyes, shuddered, opened his eyes once more. Christ, he thought; I’m passing out. Will this thing crash without me? Or will it go somewhere, and if so, where?

He fell, then, toppling from the seat and onto the floor of the squib. Blackness collected around him and included him within itself.

As he lay on the floor unconscious the squib flew on and on.

Baleful white light dinned into his face; he felt the scorching brilliance, squeezed his eyes shut again—but he could not suppress it. “Stop,” he said; he tried to put up his arms, but they did not move. At that, he managed to open his eyes; he gazed around, trembling with weakness.

The two men in black leather uniforms lay quietly … exactly as he had last seen them. He did not have to examine them to know that they were dead.
Belsnor, then, was dead;
the weapon did not stun—it killed.

Where am I now? he wondered.

The viewscreen of the squib was still on, but its lens fed directly into an obstruction of some sort; on it he saw only a flat, white surface.

Rotating the ball which controlled the sweep of the viewscreen he said to himself,
A lot of time has passed.
He touched his injured shoulder cautiously. The bleeding had stopped. Perhaps they had lied to him; perhaps Babble had done an adequate job after all.

Now the viewscreen showed—

A great dead city. Under him. The squib had come to rest at a field up in the higher spires of the city’s building-web.

No movement. No life. No one lived in the city; he saw in the viewscreen decay and absolute, endless collapse. As if, he thought, this is the city of the Form Destroyer.

The speaker mounted above the control board made no sound. He would get no help from
them.

Where the hell can I be? he asked himself. Where in the galaxy is there a city of this size which has been abandoned, allowed to die? Left to erode and rot away. It has been dead for a century! he said to himself, appalled.

Rising unsteadily to his feet he crept to the hatch of the squib. Opening it electrically—he did not have enough strength to operate the quicker manual crank—he peered out.

The air smelled stale and cold. He listened. No sound.

Summoning his strength he lurched haltingly out of the squib, onto the roof top.

There is no one here, he said to himself.

Am I still on Delmak-O?
he wondered.

He thought.
There is no place like this on Delmak-O.
Because Delmak-O is a new world to us; we never colonized it. Except for our one small settlement of fourteen people.

And this is old!

He clambered unstably back into the squib, stumbled to the control board and awkwardly reseated himself. There he sat for a time, meditating. What should I do? he asked himself. I’ve got to find my way back to Delmak-O, he decided. He examined his watch. Fifteen hours had passed—roughly—since the two men in black leather uniforms had kidnapped him. Are the others in the group still alive? he wondered. Or did
they
get all of them?

The automatic pilot; it had a voice-control box.

He snapped it on and said into the microphone, “Take me to Delmak-O. At once.” He shut the microphone off, leaned back to rest himself, waited.

The ship did nothing.

“Do you know where Delmak-O is?” he said into the microphone. “Can you take me there? You were there fifteen hours ago; you remember, don’t you?” Nothing. No response, no movement. No sound of its ion-propulsion engine cackling into activity. There is no Delmak-O flight pattern engrammed into it, he realized. The two leather-clad men had taken the squib there on manual, evidently. Or else he was operating the equipment incorrectly.

Gathering his faculties, he inspected the control board. He read everything printed on its switches, dials, knobs, control-ball … every written declaration. No clue. He could learn nothing from it—least of all how to operate it manually. I can’t go anywhere, he said to himself, because I don’t know where I am. All I could do would be fly at random. Which presupposes that I figure out how to operate this thing manually.