03. The Maze in the Mirror (25 page)

"Essentially. When it was discovered it was probably smaller than the size of a common garden pea. The whole
universe
compressed into that. The only such one ever discovered. There's no Labyrinth opening to it-it can be accessed only in ways that would require you to get a doctorate or two in the correct fields of theoretical physics to
begin to understand. As to understanding exactly what it is-I doubt if anyone does. But it's not necessary to understand it to use it any more than it's necessary to understand gravity before you fall down. It is true that it is an unexploded universe, but that's not quite true. It is terribly unstable, and it does give off incredible amounts of energy. What the ancestors of today's Company race did was to recognize what it was and find a way to trap and harness that energy-limitless energy for all practical purposes, although I have just assured you that it is finite. There is even a school of thought that believes that the Zero universe will eventually explode, that it's in the pre-explosive stage. You know how each universe differs a bit, and all differ temporally-only most close to each other differ only minutely."

I nodded. "There are worlds where a year there can be just weeks here. I got trapped in one of those once." It suddenly hit me what he was saying. "You mean that this thing is just on a different clock? That it might go off on its own any second?"

"A universe is self-contained. It knows no clock until it creates one. I mean just that."

"Holy shit! Then by tapping into this thing, they took a chance that it wouldn't go. They're still taking that chance."

He nodded. "It's not such an awful chance. About the same chance as the sun going suddenly nova or a giant meteor smacking the Earth out of orbit. The odds are that we could go millions or even billions of years before it happened. And if it did, the regulators simply would disengage at the shock and power would be lost, which is what we
are trying to achieve by different means. But, you see, they only
think
that will happen-or, rather, the Company folk take it as a matter of faith by this point. Nobody really knows, since it has never happened. And if it did, it would still not destroy the other universes, just the other Earths and perhaps the basic solar system."

I felt a rock in my stomach. "And what's the odds of that happening with your project? The best educated guess." I really didn't care if Mars survived if all the Earths blew up.

He threw up his hands. "No idea. Best guess? Five percent, maybe."

Five percent.
Maybe!
Or maybe ten. What were the A-bomb odds? Like one in several hundred thousand or maybe a million. Would they have gone through with that test if the odds had been five percent? Or maybe ten? Or maybe
maybe?

"And you're willing to bet that it won't happen."

"I am willing to gamble when the odds are better than eighty percent in my favor, yes. I can see that you are shocked. Cutler and Tang had the same problems with it, but I am pretty confident." He leaned forward and stared straight into my eyes. "You see, Mister Horowitz, it has given me the first true excitement I have felt in twenty years. They made us walking dead, but now we are alive again-
I
am alive again. The knowledge and understanding we will gain from this will be incalculable. We will know things about the nature of energy and matter such as no one could ever dream to understand, possibly the very key to creation itself."

"If it works," I put in.

"Yes. If it works. If not, we will all die and,
therefore, it will be irrelevant to me, but I shall not feel a thing."

I looked over at Maria to see how she was following or taking this, and she looked confused. I was following this in a loose way-the same way I could understand the consequences of a hydrogen bomb dropped on my home town even if I didn't know exactly how it worked or what it was doing in scientific terms. I kind of figured her education might be a little less broad than mine, and I wondered how she was following this.

She wasn't, well, but she asked a good question in the pause. "If this-universe-is needed for all the power," she said, unsure of whether or not she was making a fool of herself but really curious, "how did your own people punch through long ago? And how did the Company reach the place in the first place?"

Mancini chuckled. "Oh, one can do a progressive punch through the weak points with very little energy-a medium fusion reactor would do it. And then you build another in the next world, or find other means, and so forth. Of course, this is quite limiting, as it takes years to build a decent fusion reactor and sometimes the natives might object. They had to basically conquer and subjugate the worlds progressively. It took generations, of course, but the Company folk are old enough from the point of view of most of human history on worlds like the ones that produced us that we don't realize how long this all took. Until, about four hundred years ago in roughly our time, they hit upon the Zero and figured out how to use it. That began the age of Labyrinth expansion and growth which lasted over a century more, then the consolidation, the present full system which was still rooted in imperialism and colonialism, and the resultant dry rot of the present-day Company folk."

"Sounds like they got stuck and lapsed into decadence pretty quickly," I noted.

"Not really. Consider where
your
ancestors were three hundred years ago, and what they knew. It is plenty of time. In my own world, a vibrant, brilliant Roman Empire decayed into a long age of stratification and darkness for almost a thousand years until it fell apart from its own dry rot. The Company folk did not have that luxury. Their standard of living and technological level and near infinite reach of whatever they needed and their automatic feeding of all the energy they would ever need has kept them there. They cannot collapse of their own weight. We once thought that there was a chance that they could be induced to collapse from within but we have determined that it is against their basic culture to do so. The most that might ever be expected is an exchange of places within a culturally identical society. Nor can they be brought down from outside. We tried that several ways and I am not certain even now that even if we had succeeded that it would have worked in the end. Those whom we controlled would not be sophisticated enough to be able to conceal their dependencies and would be eliminated by those below."

"The perfect empire," I noted. "So long as you're an Imperial citizen."

"Indeed. But it is fed by the umbilical cord of the Labyrinth and the limitless energy it supplies as well. Cut that cord, and they die. Pull that plug, as
it were, and they die. We believe that even the greatest risks are preferable to eternal domination."

I looked at him squarely. "How did Pandross react to the plan? Was he for it, against it, or what?"

Mancini shrugged. "It was impossible to know Pandross. He had thousands of operatives yet in all the years we knew him, going back to the old days and the Company schools, no one really knew him. He was, you might say, a total loner. Humorless, colorless, neutral even socially. Now that you mention it, I can not recall a single initiative on his part in all the plotting and planning. He simply sat there, making comments when his area of expertise was touched upon, and went with whatever we decided." He got suddenly very reflective. "Yes, you know-it is odd. We all lost a great deal back then, and it changed us, but Pandross . . . One never had the impression that he ever had anything
to
lose."

I nodded and rose from my chair and Maria, after being a little startled, did the same.

"Well, that's all I need for now. Thank you for the time, Doctor. I hope we can get back into the Labyrinth with less trouble than we had getting from there up to here."

"By now my men will have swept the entire place. I will guarantee your safe exit, as I intend to leave the same way."

I nodded, and turned to go, then stopped. "This is a very good local security setup," I noted, pointing to the door frame. Only a pro would ever even notice what was embedded within it. "Who installed it? It doesn't look like Company work."

"It's not," Mancini replied. "Pandross designed it and his people put it in. He and they did all the security for our network."

"Have you had somebody of his caliber but not one of his staff come in to your installations here and elsewhere and modify or install additional guards since Pandross died?" I asked him.

"Uh-no. There seemed no need, since it is keyed to my own coding systems which even Pandross did not know."

I sighed. "Amateurs. There's always an override, Doctor, known only to the installer. Some nasty little work-around that only a top expert could ever know or detect, different for each installation. Otherwise if one of these went bad you could be trapped inside here indefinitely, or locked out of important installations." I turned and looked back at Mancini, who seemed very startled by that news.

"There is? I had never thought of that. . . . But, surely it makes no difference unless it really goes bad, I should think. After all, Pandross is dead." He paused, looking suddenly nervous. "It
doesn't
make any difference, does it?"

"I would change the system, Doctor, starting with wherever you wanted protected most. Good day."

And, leaving him off-balance, we walked out, through the control room, and down into the warehouse. The floor rumbled a bit, and there was the sound of distant but powerful machines, and as we stood there we watched the Labyrinth form in the center of the warehouse floor.

Maria was nervous and looking around, but I calmed her. "We'll get out. If he wanted to kill me he'd have killed me.''

"Who? Pandross?"

"No, of course not. Mancini. Honey, nobody, not even Pandross, gets this close with this many security men around, the control room staffed, and the big boss in attendance. With an army, maybe, but not one guy. Not even a rat. And if, somehow, they did, since nothing is absolutely impossible, there is no way such a one could get away and no way somebody smart enough to get inside here would depend on a few lousy record cartons."

"Unless these security men were still working for Pandross," she responded.

"I'm impressed. You're starting to think like a detective. But, no, not in this case. These guys would be hand-picked by Mancini and be regularly put through a brain laundry just to make sure of them. Besides, he wasn't upset, nervous, or in any kind of hurry. There was no sense of danger coming from him at all. For a guy in his own element and laying low for fear of a possible assassin, the idea of somebody getting in would give the toughest man fits. Uh uh. And the security guys were far too unconcerned for an offense that would under real circumstances get them a very slow and unpleasant death. No, they rigged it up to impress me."

"But-why? The only one who might want to scare you off would be the killer or his accomplice, and you said they'd never show themselves in their own element."

"Yeah, but this isn't Mancini's usual element and there's a lot of excuses here. But it might be simpler than you think. It might just be that he doesn't approve of me, from the opposition,
snooping around and learning their best secrets. He was just putting me on notice, that's all. Not a word of this from this point on, though- remember."

"Not even at the-office?"

"Especially
not at the office. That place and even the computer is bugged three ways from Sunday by all and sundry."

"Then where are we going now?"

"We've only killed a couple of hours on this one. We check back in and try and get the next appointment."

Voorhes wasn't in when we got back, and the computer showed no new data on possible duplicates, nor were there any messages from anyone else saying how delighted they would be to talk to me, so there wasn't much to do but eat and relax.

I already had a fair amount of information, and when I had the data on the duplicates of the big boys I probably would have enough to solve their own little mystery more or less to their satisfaction, but I had a far greater interest in seeing the other five and in solving the other two problems before me that none of the eight were interested in me solving. And a third, very personal problem of remaining alive and safeguarding me and mine when I had all I needed.

Maria, who by Voorhes' own acquiescence to my controls over her proved she wasn't along primarily as a spy but as my executioner given certain preset conditions, was frustrated by not being able to discuss the case or ask me many questions while in the office.

"No matter what you say or do, I can not totally
accept your limits," she told me, "if only because of my own functions. For example, I must tell you that we were followed in the Labyrinth."

"Huh?" I was getting too damned cock-sure of myself while looking down my nose at the others for committing the same sin if that were true. "Who?"

"No way to tell. The figure was always three cubes back, and dressed in very dark, nondescript clothing. I thought nothing of it on the way to Mancini's, since we were on the main line and many people would be going in that direction farther than we, but he was there again on the way back. That is when I knew."

"And you didn't tell me until now?"

"You said to not speak of anything in here," she reminded me.

"Yeah, well, I expect some common sense with that as well. Wait a minute. I'm going to get the security scanner from the kit over there."

Since I'd insisted on rigging my own extra system for the office, I had a fair amount of equipment and for the first time this was going to come in handy. I didn't have anything full blown like I'd have on a Company project, but the handheld and the hoop scanner would do. I was pretty sure that if it was there it wouldn't be all that sophisticated.

Maria set the things off like New Year's Eve, and I didn't fare much better. I ordered Maria to strip-ah! Man! What power, only it didn't count for much here-and had her go through again and there was only a low reading. Then I did the same, enduring Maria's criticisms of my exotic pear shape and other sags, and got the same results. The
clothing was saturated with radiation-a kind harmless to humans or animals or most living things, but easy to pick up if you had the right equipment, especially inside the Labyrinth.