The Magic Labyrinth (39 page)

“I’m not an ape! I’m a man, a human being!”

“You could be more than that,” Nur said.

They came to another bay. This, however, led not to a shaft but to an entrance, huge, arched. Beyond it was a chamber the enormity of which staggered them. It was at least half a mile long and wide. Within it were thousands of tables on each of which were devices the purposes of which were not obvious.

Skeletons by the hundreds lay on the floor and the upper parts of more hundreds were on the desks or tables. Thigh bones and pelvic bones lay on the seats of chairs, and beneath the seats were more leg bones. Death had struck instantly and en masse.

There wasn’t a single garment anywhere. The people working the experiments had been nude.

Burton said, “The Council of Twelve which interrogated me was clothed. Perhaps they donned their outfits so they wouldn’t offend my sense of modesty. If so, they didn’t know me well. Or perhaps they were required to wear garments when they were in session.”

Some of the equipment on the tables was still running. The nearest to Burton was a transparent sphere the size of his head. It was seemingly without an opening, yet large bubbles of different colors rose from its top, floated up to the ceiling, and burst. By the sphere was a transparent cube in which characters flashed as the bubbles ascended.

They walked on murmuring about the strangeness of the devices. When they’d gone a quarter of a mile, Frigate said, “Look at that!”

He pointed at a wheeled chair which sat in a broad aisle between tables. A jumble of bones, including a skull, lay on the seat, and leg and foot bones were at its base.

The chair was overstuffed and covered with a soft material marked with thin alternating pale-red and pale-green zigzagging lines. Burton brushed the bones from the seat with a callousness which drew a protest from Croomes. He sat down, noting aloud that the chair fitted itself to his body. On the top of each massive arm, near the end, was a wide metal circle. He gingerly pressed down on the back center of the white disc on his right. Nothing happened.

But when he pressed on the fingertip-thick center on the left, a long thin metal rod slid out.

“Aha!”

He pulled back slowly on the rod.

Nur said, “There’s a light coming from beneath the chair.”

The chair lifted soundlessly from the floor for a few inches.

“Press on the forward edge of the disc on your right,” Frigate said. “Maybe it controls the speed.”

Burton frowned because he did not like anyone telling him what to do. But he did use a fingertip to push the metal as suggested. The chair moved toward the ceiling at a very slow rate.

Ignoring the exclamations and several more suggestions, he pushed the lever to dead center. The chair straightened out at a horizontal level, continuing to move forward. He increased its speed, then moved the left-hand rod toward the right. The chair turned with the rod, maintaining its angle—no banking as in an airplane—and headed for the faraway wall. After making the chair go up to the ceiling and then down to the floor, whirling it a few times, and speeding it up to an estimated ten miles per hour, Burton landed the chair.

He was smiling; his black eyes were shiny with eagerness.

“We may have a vehicle to lift us up the shaft!” he cried.

Frigate and some of the others weren’t satisfied with the demonstration.

“It must be capable of even greater speed,” the American said. “What happens if you have to stop suddenly? Do you hurtle on out of the chair?”

“There’s one way of finding out,” Burton said. He made the chair lift a few inches, then accelerated it toward the wall, half a mile distant. When he was within twenty yards of the wall, he removed pressure from the right-hand disc. The chair at once slowed down but not so quickly that its passenger was in danger of being ejected. And when it was within five feet of the wall, it stopped.

When he returned, Burton said, “It must have built-in sensors. I tried to ram it into the wall, but it wouldn’t do it.”

“Fine,” Frigate said. “We can try to go through the shaft. But what if the Ethical is observing us now? What if he can cut off the power by remote control? We’d fall to our deaths or at least be stuck halfway between floors.”

“We’ll go one at a time. Each one will stop off at a floor before the next one goes. He won’t be able to catch more than one of us, and the others will be warned.”

Though Burton thought that Frigate was too cautious, he had to admit to himself that his speculations were well founded.

“Also,” Frigate said, “the two chairs must have been moving when their occupants died. What made the chair stop?”

“Obviously, the sensors in the chairs,” Burton drawled.

“Fine. Then we’ll each get a chair and find out how to get used to handling it. After that, what? Up or down?”

“We’ll go to the top floor first. I feel that the headquarters, the nerve center of these operations, must be there.”

“Then we should go down instead,” Frigate said, grinning. “Your predictions were always of the Moseilima type, you know. The opposite always happened.”

The fellow had his way of getting back at him. He knew too much about Burton’s Earthly life, knew all his faults and failings.

“No,” Burton said, “not true. I warned the British government two years before the Sepoy Mutiny happened that it was coming. I was ignored. I was Cassandra then, not Moseilima.”

“Touché!” Frigate said.

Gilgamesh pulled up his chair alongside Burton’s a few minutes later. He seemed troubled and not well.

“My head still hurts bad. I see things double now and then.”

“Can you make it? Or do you wish to stay here and rest?”

The Sumerian shook his massive taurine head.

“No. I wouldn’t be able to find you. I just wanted you to know that I’m sick.”

Alice must have struck him harder than she’d intended.

Tom Turpin called to Burton then. “Hey, I found out how they get their food here. Look!”

He’d been fiddling around with a big metal box which had many dials and buttons on it. It was set on a table and was connected by a black cable to a plug in the floor.

Turpin opened the glass-fronted door. Within were dishes and cups and cutlery, the dishes full of food and the cups full of liquid.

“This is their equivalent of the grail,” Tom said, his pale yellow face smiling. “I don’t know what any of the controls except this does, but I punched all the buttons and in a few seconds the whole meal formed before my eyes.”

He opened the door and removed the contents.

“Wow! Smell that beef! And that bread!”

Burton thought it would be best to eat now. There would probably be other devices like this elsewhere, but he couldn’t be sure. Besides, they were famished.

Turpin tried another combination of buttons and dials. This time, the meal was a mélange of French and Italian and Arabic cooking. All items were delicious, though some were undercooked, and the filet of camel’s hump was too highly spiced for most of them. They tried other combinations with some surprising results, not all delightful. By experimentation, Turpin found the dial which regulated the degree of cooking, and they were able to get the meal well-done, medium, medium-rare, or rare. All except Gilgamesh ate voraciously, drank some of the liquor, and lit up the cigarettes and cigars also provided by the box. There was no lack of water; faucets were all over the place.

Afterwards, they looked for toilets. These were in some nearby giant cabinets which they’d presumed had contained machinery. The toilets didn’t flush; they were holes into which the urine and excrement disappeared before they hit the bottom.

Gilgamesh ate some of the bread, then vomited it up.

“I can’t go with you,” he said. He wiped his chin and squirted water from his mouth into a sink. “I’m just too sick.”

Burton wondered if he were as ill as he said he was. He could be an agent and waiting until he could slip away.

“No, you go with us,” he said. “We might not be able to find our way back to you. You’ll be comfortable in your chair.”

He led the others to the shaft. When he took the chair out over the emptiness, he extended a foot to touch below it. His toes met no slight springiness as in the other shaft. Perhaps the presence of the chairs automatically removed the field.

He pulled the rod back and tipped the disc. The chair moved slowly upwards, then swiftly as Burton depressed the disc even more. At each bay he saw more corridors and some rooms. The latter were full of strange equipment, but there were no skeletons until he came to the tenth floor. The chamber he looked into was small compared to the one he’d left. It contained twelve large tables on each of which were twelve plates and twelve cups and some skulls and bones. Other bones lay on the chairs or at their feet.

A huge food-box was on a table in the corner.

Burton went on up, stopping now and then, until he arrived at the top of the shaft. The trip had taken fifteen minutes. On one side was another bay with a corridor outside. On his left was a small corridor which quickly opened into a giant one, at least one hundred feet square. After setting the chair down in the larger hallway, he leaned over the shaft and blinked his lantern three times. The answering flashes were tiny but sharp. Nur, the next one, would not make any stops and so would get to Burton in about twelve minutes.

Burton had never been patient except when it was absolutely necessary and often not then. He got back into the chair and moved down the hall. He’d take a six-minute tour and then return to the shaft.

He passed many open doors, all very large, giving him eye access to small and large rooms, some with equipment, some apparently for apartments. A number had many skeletons; some, a few; some, none. The corridor ran straight for at least two miles ahead of him. Just before it was time to return, he saw on his right an entrance with a closed door. He stopped the chair, got out, withdrew his pistol, and cautiously approached the door. Above it were thirteen symbols, twelve helices arranged in a circle with a sundisc in the center. There was no knob on the door. Instead, a metal facsimile of a human hand was attached to the door where a knob should have been. Its fingers were half closed as if about to seize another hand.

Burton turned it, and he pulled the door open.

The room was a very large, very pale-green semitransparent sphere surrounded by and intersected by other green bubbles. On the wall of the central sphere at one side was an oval of darker green, a moving picture of some sort. The odor of pine and dogwood rose from the trees in the background, and in the foreground a ghostly fox chased a ghostly rabbit. On the bottom of the largest sphere, or bubble, were twelve chairs in a circle. Ten contained parts of skeletons. Two were bare of anything, even dust.

Burton had to breathe deeply. This room brought back frightening memories. It was here that he had awakened after killing himself 777 times to escape the Ethicals. It was here that he had faced the Council.

Now those beings who had seemed so godlike to him were bones.

He put one foot beyond the threshold, poking it through the bubble with only a slight resistance. His body followed, feeling the same tiny push. Then his other foot came through, and he was standing on springy nothingness or what seemed to be nothingness.

He reholstered his pistol and passed through two bubbles, the surfaces closing behind him, but air moving past him, and then he was in the “Council room.” When he got near the insubstantial chairs, he saw that he’d been mistaken. One of the seemingly empty seats held a very thin circular convex lens. He picked it up and recognized the many-faceted “eye” of the man who’d seemed to be the chief of the Council, Thanabur.

This was no jewel, no artificial device to replace an eye, as he’d thought then. It was a lens which could be slipped over the eye. It felt greasy. Perhaps it was lubricated so it wouldn’t irritate the eyeball.

With some difficulty and revulsion, he inserted the lens under his eyelids.

The left eye saw the room through a distorting semi-opaqueness. Then he closed his right eye.

“Oooohhhh!”

He quickly opened the right eye.

He’d been floating in space, in a darkness in which distant stars and great gas sheets shone and there was the feeling, but not the direct effect, of unbelievable coldness. He’d been aware that he was not alone, though. He knew, without having seen them, that he was followed by uncountable souls, trillions upon trillions, perhaps far more. And then he was shooting toward a sun, and it became larger, and suddenly he saw that the flaming body was not a star but a vast collection of other souls, all flaming, yet burning not as in Hell but with an ecstasy that he’d never experienced and which the mystics had tried to describe but was indescribable.

Though shaken and afraid, he was also pulled fiercely by the ecstasy. Moreover, he could not allow his fear to overcome him, he who had boasted that he had never feared anything.

He closed his right eye and was again in space in the same “location.” Again, he was hurtling through space, far swifter than light, toward the sun. Again, he felt the innumerable presences behind him. The star swam up, grew larger, became vast, and he saw that the flames were composed of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of souls.

Then he heard a soundless cry, one of unutterable ecstasy and welcome, and he plunged headfirst into the sun, the swarm, and he was nothing and yet everything. Then, he wasn’t he anymore. He was something which had no parts and was not a part but was one with the ecstasy, with the others who were not others.

He gave a great cry and opened his eye. There were Alice and Nur and Frigate and his companions staring at him from the doorway. Trembling, he went to them through the bubbles. He was not so upset, however, that he did not notice that the Sumerian was missing nor that Alice was weeping.

He ignored their questions, saying, “Where’s Gilgamesh?”

“He died on the way up,” Alice said.

“We left him sitting in the chair in a room,” Nur said. “He must have had a brain concussion.”

“I killed him!” Alice said, and she sobbed.

“I’m sorry for that,” Burton said, “but it couldn’t be helped. If he was innocent, he shouldn’t have resisted. Perhaps he really was an agent.”

He put his arms around Alice and said, “You did what you had to do. If you hadn’t, he might’ve killed me.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve killed before, but those people were strangers attacking us. I liked Gilgamesh, and now…”

Burton thought it was best to allow her to weep out her guilt and grief. He released her and turned to the others. Nur asked him what he had been doing in the room. He told them of the lens.

“You must’ve been standing there for at least an hour,” Frigate said.

“Yes, I know, but the state seemed to last only a minute.”

“What about the aftereffects?” Nur said.

Burton hesitated, then said, “Apart from being shaken up, I feel…I feel…a tremendous closeness to all of you! Oh, I’ve been fond of some of you, but…now…I love all of you!”

“That must’ve been a shock,” Frigate murmured. Burton ignored him.

The Moor held up the multifaceted device and looked through it with his right eye closed.

“I see nothing. It has to be fitted next to the eye.”

Burton said, “I thought that the lens was something which only the chief of the twelve, Thanabur, would wear. I presumed that it was some sort of ritual token or emblem of leadership, something traditional. I may’ve been wrong. Perhaps everybody took a turn wearing it during the Council meetings. It may be that the lens gave all of them a feeling such as I had, a closeness and love for everybody in the room.”

“In which case, X was able to overcome that feeling,” Tai-Peng said.