THE MAGIC LABYRINTH by Philip Jose Farmer

Frigate said, “How’d you prevent this power drain from showing up on meters?”

“I made arrangements for it not to. To go back to the original question. If the engineers had removed the code box, I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the secret room into the corridor. The outer access door is activated by a signal going to another coder-decoder. It was very fortunate that the engineers didn’t work on that before they were killed. I lost the signal-generator when I had to abandon my aircraft. But the boats in the cave contain generators. These are automatically started when the sensors detect that the tower is near.”

“The door mechanisms wouldn’t have used much power. Why didn’t you use separate power generators for them?”

“I should have. But it was simpler and more economical to use the main power supply.”

He smiled slightly. “I wonder what the engineers made of the codeword. Ah Qaaq is Mayan. The Ah is the article defining the name as masculine. Qaaq means fire. Loga is Ghuurrkh for fire. Perhaps that was what identified me. They might’ve put the Mayan name into the computer for a search. If they did, they got an answer within a second after insertion of the question.

“I outclevered myself.”

He poised a finger over a button. “Gather around. I’ll explain the simple operation twice so that there won’t be any confusion. You’re able to read the markings. When I press this button, that small silvery inset disc will turn on. That indicates that the power is on.

“That larger inset disc by the ON light is a readout frequency meter.”

He pressed a button. The smaller disc glowed orange.

“Now…”

The light went out.

“Khatuuch! What is… ?”

Loga put his hand on the box for a second, then ran around to the front of the cabinet. He opened the door and looked in. Even at their distance from it, the others could feel the heat.

“Run!” Loga said, and he limped as fast as he could toward the exit.

When Burton had reached the exit he looked at the cabinet. The control box was melting, and a large cube inside the cabinet was glowing red.

Loga swore in Ghuurrkh and then said, “Those… those…! They fixed it so that when power came on it’d melt the converter!”

Except for Loga and Burton, who’d died so many times that they no longer feared the prospect of death, the others were relieved. Burton could see it in their faces. They knew they’d be resurrected with their wathans attached, but they still loathed the idea of dying.

Burton said, “We have the other resurrector.”

“It’ll be set up, too,” Loga said. He was ashen.

“Can’t you fix it so it won’t melt?”

“I’ll try.”

But he failed.

Burton, looking at the molten mass, thought it was time to tell Loga something he’d put off revealing because the resurrectors were more urgent business.

He said, “Loga, when we left your secret room to go after you, I put a bullet by the door to mark its location. The bullet is gone.”

There was a short silence. Frigate said, “A housekeeping robot probably picked it up.”

“No,” Loga said. “If the robots were programmed to do such work, they’d have disposed of the skeletons.”

“Then someone else has gotten in!”

SECTION 14

Three-Cornered Play: Carroll to Alice to Computer

54

THEY WENT TO A LABORATORY. LOGA SAT DOWN BEFORE A COMputer and worked furiously. Within a short time, all the cameras in the tower were operating. Two seconds later, the screen before him glowed with a display.

Burton whistled.

“Frato Fenikso! Hermann Goring!”

He was at a table eating a meal made by a grail-box. From his extreme thinness and the great black marks under his hollow eyes, he needed more than one meal.

“I can’t see how he caught up with us so quickly,” Loga said.

“The computer reports seeing no one else, but they may be out of camera range just now. And if they’re agents, one might have the codeword. Monat could’ve passed it on to them in The Valley.”

“Why don’t we ask Goring?” Burton said.

“Of course. First, though, I’ll ask the computer where he is.”