A Maze of Death (23 page)

Sue Smart, her long hair tangled, her right breast peeping
slyly from between the buttons of her blouse, gingerly touched the back of her head and winced.

“They got you with a rock,” Belsnor told her.

“But why?” Sue asked. She seemed dazed, still. “What did I do wrong?”

Belsnor said, “It wasn’t your fault. This one turned out to be a hostile one; we were venting our long-term, pent-up aggressiveness. Evidently.” He could remember, but only with effort, how he had shot Tony Dunkelwelt, the youngest member of the crew. I hope he won’t be too angry, Captain Belsnor said to himself. He shouldn’t be. After all, in venting his own hostility, Dunkelwelt had killed Bert Kosler, the cook of Persus 9.

We snuffed ourselves virtually out of existence, Captain Belsnor noted to himself. I hope—I pray!—the next one is different. It should be; as in previous times we probably managed to get rid of the bulk of our hostilities in that one fusion, that (what was it?) Delmak-O episode.

To Babble, who stood unsteadily fooling with his disarranged clothing, Belsnor said, “Get moving, doctor. See who needs what. Painkiller, tranquilizers, stimulants … they need you. But—” He leaned close to Babble. “Don’t give them anything we’re low on, as I’ve told you before, and as you ignore.”

Leaning over Betty Jo Berm, Babble said, “Do you need some chemical-therapy help, Miss Berm?”

“I—I think I’ll be okay,” Betty Jo Berm said as she sat painstakingly up. “If I can just sit here and rest …” She managed a brief, cheerless smile. “I drowned,” she said. “Ugh.” She made a weary, but now somewhat relieved, face.

Speaking to all of them, Belsnor said quietly but with firm insistence, “I’m reluctantly writing off that particular construct as too unpleasant to try for again.”

“But,” Frazer pointed out, lighting his pipe with shaking fingers, “it’s highly therapeutic. From a psychiatric standpoint.”

“It got out of hand,” Sue Smart said.

“It was supposed to,” Babble said as he worked with the others, rousing them, finding out what they wanted. “It was what we call a total catharsis. Now we’ll have less free-floating hostility surging back and forth between everyone here on the ship.”

Ben Tallchief said, “Babble, I hope your hostility toward me is over.” He added, “And for what you did to me—” He glared.

“‘The ship,’” Seth Morley murmured.

“Yes,” Captain Belsnor said, slightly, sardonically, amused. “And what else have you forgotten this time? Do you want to be briefed?” He waited, but Seth Morley said nothing. Morley seemed still to be entranced. “Give him some kind of amphetamine,” Belsnor said to Dr. Babble. “To get him into a lucid state.” It usually came to this with Seth Morley; his ability to adapt to the abrupt transition between the ship and the polyencephalically-determined worlds was negligible.

“I’ll be okay,” Seth Morley said. And shut his weary eyes.

Clambering to her feet, Mary Morley came over to him, sank down beside him and put her lean hand on his shoulder. He started to slide away from her, remembering the injury to his shoulder … and then he discovered that, strangely, the pain had gone. Cautiously, he patted his shoulder. No injury. No blood-seeping wound. Weird, he thought. But—I guess it’s always this way. As I seem to recall.

“Can I get you anything?” his wife asked him.

“Are you okay?” he asked her. She nodded. “Why did you kill Sue Smart?” he said. “Never mind,” he said, seeing the strong, wild expression on her face. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but this one really bothered me. All the killing. We’ve never had so much of it before; it was dreadful. We should have been yanked out of this one by the psychocircuit-breaker as soon as the first murder took place.”

“You heard what Frazer said,” Mary said. “It was necessary; we were building too many tensions here on the ship.”

Morley thought, I see now why the tench exploded. When we asked it, What does Persus 9 mean? No wonder it blew up … and, with it, took the entire construct. Piece by piece.

The large, far-too-familiar cabin of the ship forced itself onto his attention. He felt a kind of dismal horror, seeing it again. To him the reality of the ship was far more unpleasant than—what had it been called?—Delmak-O, he recalled. That’s right. We arranged random letters, provided us by the ship’s computer … we made it up and then we were stuck with what we made up. An exciting adventure turned into gross murder. Of all of us, by the time it had finished.

He examined his calendar wristwatch. Twelve days had passed. In real time, twelve whole, overly long days; in polyencephalic time, only a little over twenty-four hours. Unless he counted the “eight years” at Tekel Upharsin, which he could not really do: it had been a manufactured recall-datum, implanted in his mind during fusion, to add the semblance of authenticity in the polyencephalic venture.

What did we make up? he asked himself blearily. The entire theology, he realized. They had fed into the ship’s computer all the data they had in their possession concerning advanced religions. Into T.E.N.C.H. 889B had gone elaborated information dealing with Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Zoroastrianism, Tibetan Buddhism … a complex mass, out of which T.E.N.C.H. 889B was to distill a composite religion, a synthesis of every factor involved.
We made it up
, Seth Morley thought, bewildered; memory of Specktowsky’s Book still filled his mind. The Intercessor, the Mentufacturer, the Walker-on-Earth—even the ferocity of the Form Destroyer. Distillate of man’s total experience with God—a tremendous logical system, a comforting web deduced by the computer from the postulates given it—in particular the postulate that God existed.

And Specktowsky … he shut his eyes, remembering.

Egon Specktowsky had been the original captain of the ship. He had died during the accident which had disabled them. A nice touch by T.E.N.C.H. 889B, to make their dear
former captain the author of the galaxy-wide worship which had acted as the base of this, their latest world. The awe and near-worship which they all felt for Egon Specktowsky had been neatly carried over to their episode on Delmak-O because for them, in a sense, he was a god—functioned, in their lives, as a god would. This touch had given the created world a more plausible air; it fitted in perfectly with their preconceptions.

The polyencephalic mind, he thought. Originally an escape toy to amuse us during our twenty-year voyage. But the voyage had not lasted twenty years; it would continue until they died, one by one, in some indefinably remote epoch, which none of them could imagine. And for good reason: everything, especially the infinitude of the voyage, had become an endless nightmare to them.

We could have survived the twenty years, Seth Morley said to himself,
Knowing it would end;
that would have kept us sane and alive. But the accident had come and now they circled, forever, a dead star. Their transmitter, because of the accident, functioned no longer, and so an escape toy, typical of those generally used in long, interstellar flights, had become the support for their sanity.

That’s what really worries us, Morley realized. The dread that one by one we will slip into psychosis, leaving the others even more alone. More isolated from man and everything associated with man.

God, he thought, how I wish we could go back to Alpha Centaurus. If only—

But there was no use thinking about that.

Ben Tallchief, the ship’s maintenance man, said, “I can’t believe that we made up Specktowsky’s theology by ourselves. It seemed so real. So—airtight.”

Belsnor said, “The computer did most of it; of course it’s airtight.”

“But the basic idea was ours,” Tony Dunkelwelt said. He had fixed his attention on Captain Belsnor. “You killed me in that one,” he said.

“We hate one another,” Belsnor said. “I hate you; you hate me. Or at least we did before the Delmak-O episode.” Turning to Wade Frazer he said, “Maybe you’re right; I don’t feel so irritated now.” Gloomily, he said, “But it’ll come back, give or take a week or so.”

“Do we really hate one another that much?” Sue Smart asked.

“Yes,” Wade Frazer said.

Ignatz Thugg and Dr. Babble helped elderly Mrs. Rockingham to her feet. “Oh dear,” she gasped, her withered and ancient face red, “that was just simply dreadful! What a terrible, terrible place; I hope we never go there again.” Coming over, she plucked at Captain Belsnor’s sleeve. “We won’t have to live through that again, will we? I do think, in all honesty, that life aboard the ship is far preferable to that wicked, uncivilized little place.”

“We won’t be going back to Delmak-O,” Belsnor said.

“Thank heavens,” Mrs. Rockingham seated herself; again Thugg and Dr. Babble assisted her. “Thank you,” she said to them. “How kind of you. Could I have some coffee, Mr. Morley?”

“‘Coffee’?” he echoed and then he remembered; he was the ship’s cook. All the precious food supplies, including coffee, tea and milk, were in his possession. “I’ll start a pot going,” he told them all.

In the kitchen he spooned heaping tablespoonfuls of good black ground coffee into the top of the pot. He noticed, then, as he had noticed many times before, that their store of coffee had begun to run low. In another few months, they would be out entirely.

But this is a time at which coffee is needed, he decided, and continued to spoon the coffee into the pot. We are all shaken up, he realized. As never before.

His wife Mary entered the galley. “What was the Building?”

“The Building.” He filled the coffee pot with reprocessed water. “That was the Boeing plant on Proxima 10. Where
the ship was built. Where we boarded it, remember? We were sixteen months at Boeing, getting trained, testing the ship, getting everything aboard and straightened out. Getting Persus 9 spaceworthy.”

Mary shivered and said, “Those men in black leather uniforms.”

“I don’t know,” Seth Morley said.

Ned Russell, the ship’s M.P., entered the galley. “I can tell you what they were. The black leather guards were indications of our attempt to break it up and start again—they were directed by the thoughts of those who had ‘died.’ ”

“You would know,” Mary said shortly.

“Easy,” Seth Morley said, putting his arm around her shoulder. From the start, many of them had not gotten along well with Russell. Which, considering his job, could have been anticipated.

“Someday, Russell,” Mary said, “you’re going to try to take over the ship … take it away from Captain Belsnor.”

“No,” Russell said mildly. “All I’m interested in is keeping the peace. That’s why I was sent here; that’s what I intend to do. Whether anyone else wants me to or not.”

“I wish to God,” Seth Morley said, “that there was really an Intercessor.” He still had trouble believing that they had made up Specktowsky’s theology. “At Tekel Upharsin,” he said, “when the Walker-on-Earth came to me, it was so real. Even now it seems real. I can’t shake it off.”

“That’s why we created it,” Russell pointed out. “Because we wanted it; because we didn’t have it and needed to have it. Now we’re back to reality, Morley; once again we have to face things as they are. It doesn’t feel too good, does it?”

“No,” Seth Morley said.

Russell said, “Do you wish you were back on Delmak-O?”

After a pause he said, “Yes.”

“So do I,” Mary said, at last.

“I’m afraid,” Russell said, “that I have to agree with you. As bad as it was, as bad as we acted … at least there was
hope. And back here on the ship—” He made a convulsive, savage, slashing motion. “No hope. Nothing! Until we grow old like Mrs. Rockingham and die.”

“Mrs. Rockingham is lucky,” Mary said bitterly.

“Very lucky,” Russell said, and his face became swollen with impotence and bleak anger. And suffering.

After dinner that “night” they gathered in the ship’s control cabin. The time had come to plot out another polyencephalic world. To make it function it had to be a joint projection from all of them; otherwise, as in the final stages of the Delmak-O world, it would rapidly disintegrate.

In fifteen years they had become very skilled.

Especially Tony Dunkelwelt. Of his eighteen years, almost all had been spent aboard Persus 9. For him, the procession of polyencephalic worlds had become a normal way of life.

Captain Belsnor said, “We didn’t do so bad, in a way; we got rid of almost two weeks.”

“What about an aquatic world this time?” Maggie Walsh said. “We could be dolphin-like mammals living in warm seas.”

“We did that,” Russell said. “About eight months ago. Don’t you remember it? Let’s see … yes; we called it Aquasoma 3 and we stayed there three months of real time. A very successful world, I would say, and one of the most durable. Of course, back then we were less hostile.”

Seth Morley said, “Excuse me.” He rose and walked from the ship’s cabin into the narrow passageway.

There he stood, alone, rubbing his shoulder. A purely psychosomatic pain remained in it, a memory of Delmak-O which he would probably carry for a week. And that’s all, he thought, that we have left of that particular world. Just a pain, a rapidly-fading memory.

How about a world, he thought, in which we lie good and dead, buried in our coffins?
That’s what we really want.

There had been no suicides aboard the ship for the last four years. Their population had become stabilized, at least temporarily.

Until Mrs. Rockingham dies, he said to himself.

I wish I could go with her, he thought. How long, really, can we keep on? Not much longer. Thugg’s wits are scrambled; so are Frazer’s and Babble’s. And me, too, he thought. Maybe I’m gradually breaking down, too. Wade Frazer is right; the murders on Delmak-O show how much derangement and hostility exists in all of us.

In that case, he thought suddenly, each escape world will be more feral … Russell is right.
It is a pattern.

He thought, We will miss Roberta Rockingham when she dies; of us, she is the most benign and stable.

Because, he realized, she knows she is soon going to die.

Our only comfort. Death.

I could open vents here and there, he realized, and our atmosphere would be gone. Sucked out into the void. And then, more or less painlessly, we could all die. In one single, brief instant.