A Maze of Death (2 page)

“…Legolas is right. We may not shoot an old man so, at unawares and unchallenged, whatever fear or doubt be on us. Watch and wait!”

The bracing words of the old epic restored his perspective; he returned to his desk, reseated himself and got out the document which his supervisor had given him. Frowning, he studied the coded information, trying to decipher it. In numbers, punch-holes and letters it spelled out his new life, his world to come.

“…You speak as one that knows Fangorn well. Is that so?” The visrecord played on, but he no longer heard it; he had begun to get the gist of the encoded messsage.

“What have you to say that you did not say at our last
meeting?” a sharp and powerful voice said. He glanced up and found himself confronted by the gray-clad figure of Gandalf. It was as if Gandalf were speaking to him, to Ben Tailchief. Calling him to account. “Or, perhaps, you have things to unsay?” Gandalf said.

Ben rose, went over to the phonograph and shut it off. I do not feel able at this time to answer you, Gandalf, he said to himself. There are things to be done, real things; I can’t indulge myself in a mysterious, unreal conversation with a mythological character who probably never existed. The old values, for me, are suddenly gone; I have to work out what these damn punch-holes, letters and numbers mean.

He was beginning to get the drift of it. Carefully, he replaced the lid on the bottle of scotch, twisting is tight. He would go in a noser, alone; at the colony he would join roughly a dozen others, recruited from a variety of sources. Range 5 of skills: a class C operation, on a K-4 pay scale. Maximum time: two years of operation. Full pension and medical benefits, starting as soon as he arrived. An override for any instructions he had already received, hence he could go at once. He did not have to terminate his work here before leaving.

And I have the three silver dollars for the noser, he said to himself. So that is that; nothing else to worry about. Except—

He could not discover what his job would consist of. The letters, numbers and punch-holes failed to say, or perhaps it was more correct to say that he could not get them to divulge this one piece of information—a piece he would much have wanted.

But still it looked good. I like it, he said to himself. I want it. Gandalf, he thought, I have nothing to unsay; prayers are not often answered and I will take this. Aloud he said, “Gandalf, you no longer exist except in men’s minds, and what I have here comes from the One, True and Living Deity, who is completely real. What more can I hope for?” The silence
of the room confronted him; he did not see Gadalf now because he had shut the record off. “Maybe someday,” he continued. “I will unsay this. But not yet; not now. You understand?” He waited, experiencing the silence, knowing that he could begin it or end it by a mere touch of the phonograph’s switch.

Seth Morley neatly divided the Gruyère cheese lying before him with a plastic-handled knife and said, “I’m leaving.” He cut himself a giant wedge of cheese, lifted it to his lips via the knife. “Late tomorrow night. Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz has seen the last of me.” He grinned, but Fred Gossim, the settlement’s chief engineer, failed to return the message of triumph; instead Gossim frowned even more strongly. His disapproving presence pervaded the office.

Mary Morley said quietly, “My husband applied for this transfer eight years ago. We never intended to stay here. You knew that.”

“And we’re going with them,” Michael Niemand stammered in excitement. “That’s what you get for bringing a top-flight marine biologist here and then setting him to work hauling blocks of stone from the goddam quarry. We’re sick of it.” He nudged his undersized wife, Clair. “Isn’t that right?”

“Since there is no body of water on this planet,” Gossim said gratingly, “we could hardly put a marine biologist to use in his stated profession.”

“But you advertised, eight years ago, for a marine biologist,”
Mary Morley pointed out. This made Gossim scowl even more profoundly. “The mistake was yours.”

“But,” Gossim said, “this is your home. All of you—” He gestured at the group of kibbutz officials crowded around the entrance of the office. “We all built this.”

“And the cheese,” Seth Morley said, “is terrible, here. Those quakkip, those goat-like suborganisms that smell like the Form Destroyer’s last year’s underwear—I want very much to have seen the last of them and it. The quakkip and the cheese both.” He cut himself a second slice of the expensive, imported Gruyère cheese. To Niemand he said, “You can’t come with us. Our instructions are to make the flight by noser. Point A. A noser holds only two people; in this case my wife and me. Point B. You and your wife are two more people, ergo you won’t fit. Ergo you can’t come.”

“We’ll take our own noser,” Niemand said.

“You have no instructions and/or permission to transfer to Delmak-O,” Seth Morley said from within his mouthful of cheese.

“You don’t want us,” Niemand said.

“Nobody wants you,” Gossim grumbled. “As far as I’m concerned without you we would do better. It’s the Morleys that I don’t want to see go down the drain.”

Eying him, Seth Morley said tartly, “And this assignment is, a priori, ‘down the drain.’ ”

“It’s some kind of experimental work,” Gossim said, “As far as I can discern. On a small scale. Thirteen, fourteen people. It would be for you turning the clock back to the early days of Tekel Upharsin. You want to build up from that all over again? Look how long it’s taken for us to get up to a hundred efficient, well-intentioned members. You mention the Form Destroyer. Aren’t you by your actions decaying back the form of Tekel Upharsin?”

“And my own form too,” Morley said, half to himself. He felt grim, now; Gossim had gotten to him. Gossin had always been good with words, amazing in an engineer. It had been Gossim’s silver-tongued words which had kept them all at
their tasks throughout the years. But those words, to a good extent, had become vapid as far as the Morleys were concerned. The words did not work as they once had. And yet a glimmer of their past glory remained. He could just not quite shake off the bulky, dark-eyed engineer.

But we’re leaving, Morley thought. As in Goethe’s
Faust
, “In the beginning was the deed.” The deed and not the word, as Goethe, anticipating the twentieth century existentialists, had pointed out.

“You’ll want to come back,” Gossim opined.

“Hmm,” Seth Morley said.

“And you know what I’ll say to that?” Gossim said loudly. “If I get a request from you—both of you Morleys—to come back here to Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz, I’ll say, ‘We don’t have any need of a marine biologist; we don’t even have an ocean. And we’re not going to build so much as a puddle so that you can have a legitimate reason for working here.’ ”

“I never asked for a puddle,” Morley said.

“But you’d like one.”

“I’d like
any
kind of body of water,” Morley said. “That’s the whole point; that’s why we’re leaving and that’s why we won’t be coming back.”

“You’re sure Delmak-O has a body of water?” Gossim inquired.

“I assume—” Morley began, but Gossim cut him off.

“That,” Gossim said, “is what you assumed about Tekel Upharsin. That’s how your trouble began.”

“I assumed,” Morley said, “that if you advertised for a marine biologist—” He sighed, feeling weary. There was no point trying to influence Gossim; the engineer—and chief officer of the kibbutz—had a closed mind. “Just let me eat my cheese,” Morley said, and tried an additional slice. But he had grown tired of the taste; he had eaten too much. “The hell with it,” he said, tossing his knife down. He felt irritable and he did not like Gossim; he felt no desire to continue the conversation. What mattered was the fact that no matter how he felt, Gossim could not revoke the transfer. It carried an
override, and that was the long and the short of it … to quote William S. Gilbert.

“I hate your bloody guts,” Gossim said.

Morley said, “I hate yours, too.”

“A Mexican standoff,” Niemand said. “You see, Mr. Gossim, you can’t make us stay; all you can do is yell.”

Making an obscene gesture toward Morley and Niemand Gossim strode off, parting the group gathered there, and disappeared somewhere on the far side. The office was quiet, now. Seth Morley immediately began to feel better.

“Arguments wear you out,” his wife said.

“Yes,” he agreed. “And Gossim wears me out. I’m tired just from this one interchange, forgetting the eight full years of it which preceded today. I’m going to go select a noser.” He rose, made his way from the office and into the midday sun.

A noser is a strange craft, he said to himself as he stood at the edge of the parking field surveying the lines of inert vessels. First of all, they were incredibly cheap; he could gain possession of one of these for less than four silver dollars. Secondly, they could go but never return; nosers were strictly one-way ships. The reason, of course, was simple: a noser was too small to carry fuel for a return trip. All the noser could do was kick off from a larger ship or a planetary surface, head for its destination, and quietly expire there. But—they did their job. Sentient races, human and otherwise, flocked throughout the galaxy aboard the little pod-like ships.

Goodbye, Tekel Upharsin, Morley said to himself, and made a brief, silent salute to the rows of orange bushes growing beyond the noser parking lot.

Which one should we take? he asked himself. They all looked alike: rusty, discarded. Like the contents of a used car lot back on Terra. I’ll choose the first one with a name on it beginning with M, he decided, and began reading the individual names.

The
Morbid Chicken.
Well, that was it. Not very transcendental,
but fitting; people, including Mary, were always telling him that he had a morbid streak. What I have, he said to himself, is a mordant wit. People confuse the two terms because they sound similar.

Looking at his wristwatch he saw that he had time to make a trip to the packaging department of the citrus products factory. So he made off in that direction.

“Ten pint jars of class AA marmalade,” he said to the shipping clerk. It was either get them now or not at all.

“Are you sure you’re entitled to ten more pints?” The clerk eyed him dubiously, having had dealings with him before.

“You can check on my marmalade standing with Joe Perser,” Morley said. “Go ahead, pick up the phone and give him a call.”

“I’m too busy,” the clerk said. He counted out ten pint jars of the kibbutz’s main product and passed them to Morley in a bag, rather than in a cardboard carton.

“No carton?” Morley said.

“Scram,” the clerk said.

Morley got one of the jars out, making sure that they were indeed class AA. They were. “Marmalade from Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz!” the label declared. “Made from genuine Seville oranges (group 3-B mutational subdivision). Take a pot of sunny Spain into your kitchen or cooking cubicle!” “Fine,” Morley said. “And thanks.” He lugged the bulky paper bag from the building and out once more into the bright sun of midday.

Back again at the noser parking area he began getting the pints of marmalade stored away in the
Morbid Chicken.
The one good thing this kibbutz produces, he said to himself as he placed the jars one by one within the magnetic grip-field of the storage compartment. I am afraid this is one thing I’ll miss.

He called Mary on his neck radio. “I’ve picked out a noser,” he informed her. “Come on down to the parking area and I’ll show it to you.”

“Are you sure it’s a good one?”

“You know you can take my mechanical ability for granted,” Morley said testily. “I’ve examined the rocket engine, wiring, controls, every life-protect system, everything, completely.” He pushed the last jar of marmalade away in the storage area and shut the door firmly.

She arrived a few minutes later, slender and tanned in her khaki shirt, shorts and sandals. “Well,” she said, surveying the
Morbid Chicken
, “it looks rundown to me. But if you say it’s okay it is, I guess.”

“I’ve already begun loading,” Morley said.

“With what?”

Opening the door of the storage compartment he showed her the ten jars of marmalade.

After a long pause Mary said, “Christ.”

“What’s the matter?”

“You haven’t been checking the wiring and the engine. You’ve been out scrounging up all the goddam marmalade you could talk them out of.” She slammed the storage area door shut with venomous ire. “Sometimes I think you’re insane. Our lives depend on this goddam noser working. Suppose the oxygen system fails or the heat circuit fails or there’re microscopic leaks in the hull. Or—”

“Get your brother to look at it,” he interrupted. “Since you have so much more trust in him than you do in me.”

“He’s busy. You know that.”

“Or he’d be here,” Morley said, “picking out which noser for us to take. Rather than me.”

His wife eyed him intently, her spare body drawn up in a vigorous posture of defiance. Then, all at once, she sagged in what appeared to be half-amused resignation. “The strange thing is,” she said, “that you have such good luck—I mean in relation to your talents. This probably
is
the best noser here. But not because you can tell the difference but because of your mutant-like luck.”

“It’s not luck. It’s judgment.”

“No,” Mary said, shaking her head. “That’s the last thing
it is. You have no judgment—not in the usual sense, anyhow. But what the hell. We’ll take this noser and hope your luck is holding as well as usual. But how can you live like this, Seth?” She gazed up plaintively into his face. “It’s not fair to me.”

“I’ve kept us going so far.”

“You’ve kept us here at this—kibbutz,” Mary said. “For eight years.”

“But now I’ve gotten us off.”

“To something worse, probably. What do we know about this new assignment? Nothing, except what Gossim knows—and he knows because he makes it his business to read over everyone else’s communications. He read your original prayer … I didn’t want to tell you because I knew it would make you so—”

“That bastard.” He felt red, huge fury well up inside him, spiked with impotence. “It’s a moral violation to read another person’s prayers.”