THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

Did they hold the keys to the mysteries? Not all mysteries, of course. The mystery of being itself, of creation, of space and infinity, time and eternity would never be solved.

Or would they?

Was there somewhere, in the tower or deep underground, machine which convered the metaphysical into the physical? Man could handle the physical, and if he didn't know the true nature of the beyond-matter, what of it? He didn't know the true nature of electricity, either, but he had enslaved.it for his own purposes.

He shook his fist at the north, and he went to bed.

SECTION 6

On the Not For Hire: The Thread of Reason

16

AT FIRST, SAMUEL CLEMENS HAD TENDED TO AVOID CYRANO De Bergerac as much as possible. The very perceptive Frenchman quickly detected that but seemed not to resent it. If he did, he was successfully hiding his reaction. He was always smiling and laughing, always polite but not cold. He acted as if Clemens liked him and had no reason not to.

After a while—several years—Sam began to warm up to the man who'd been Sam's Terrestrial wife's lover. They had much in common: a keen interest in people and in mechanical devices, a taste for literature, an abiding devotion to the study of history, a hatred for hypocrisy and self-righteousness, a loathing for the malevolent aspects of religions, and a deep agnosticism. Though Cyrano was not, like Sam, from Missouri, he shared with him a "show me" attitude.

Moreover, Cyrano was an adornment at any party but did not try to dominate the conversation.

So it was that one day Sam talked to his other self, Mark Twain, about his feelings for de Bergerac in the privacy of his suite. The result was that Sam now saw—though he'd always known deep within him—that he'd been very unfair to Cyrano. It wasn't the fellow's fault that Livy had fallen in love with him and had -refused to leave him for her ex-husband after she'd found him. Nor, really, was it Livy's fault. She could only do what her inborn temperament and predetermined circumstances forced her to do. And Sam had been acting as his inborn character, his "watermark," and circumstances forced him to do. Now, as a result of another aspect of his character rising from the depths, plus the inevitable push of events, he had changed his attitude toward Cyrano. After all, he was a good fellow, and he'd learned to shower regularly, to keep his fingernails clean, and to quit urinating in corners at the end of corridors.

Whether Sam really believed that he was an automaton whose acts were programmed, Sam did not know himself. Sometimes, he thought that his belief in determinism was only an excuse to escape his guilt about certain matters. If this were true, then he was exercising free will in making up the explanation that he wasn't responsible for anything, good or bad, that he did. On the other hand, one aspect of determinism was that it gave humans the illusion that they had free will.

In either case, Sam welcomed Cyrano into his company and forgave him for what really didn't need forgiving.

So now, today, Cyrano was one of the group invited by Sam to talk about some puzzling features of what Sam called "The Case of X." The others were Gwenafra (Sam's cabin-mate), Joe Miller, de Marbot, and John Johnston. The latter was huge, over six feet two and weighing 260 pounds without an ounce of excess fat. His head and chest were auburn-haired; he had extraordinarily long arms and hands that looked as large as the paws of a grizzly bear. The blue-gray eyes were often cold or dreamy but they could be warm enough when he was with trusted friends. Born about 1828 in New Jersey and of Scotch descent, he had gone to the West to trap the mountains in 1843. There he had become a legend even among the legendary mountain men, though it took some years before he became famous. When a wandering party of young unblooded Crow braves killed his Flathead Indian wife and unborn baby, Johnston swore a vendetta against the Crows. He killed so many of them that the Crows sent out twenty young men to track him down and kill him, and they were not to return to their tribe until the deed was done. One after the other got to him but were instead slain by Johnston. He cut out their livers and ate them raw, the blood dripping onto his red beard. It was these exploits that earned him the sobriquets of "Liver Eater" and "Crow Killer." But the Crows were a fine tribe, dignified, honorable, and mighty warriors. So one day Johnston decided to call off the feud, and, having informed them of his decision, became their good friend. He was also a chief of the Shoshoni.

He died in 1900 at the Veterans' Hospital in Los Angeles and was buried in the crowded cemetery there. But in the 1970s, a group who knew that he could never rest there, not the man who became vexed if his nearest neighbor was within fifty miles, had his bones taken to a mountainside in Colorado and reburied there.

"Liver Eating" Johnston had mentioned several times on the boat that he'd never been forced to kill a white man (while on Earth), not even a Frenchy. This remark had made de Marbot and Cyrano a little uneasy at first, but they had come to like and admire the huge mountaineer.

After they'd had a few drinks and some cigarettes and cigars and chatted idly, Sam brought up the subject he most wanted to talk about.

"I've been doing some thinking about the man who called himself Odysseus," he said. "You remember what I said about him? He came to our help when we were battling von Radowitz, and it was his archery that killed off the general and his officers. He claimed to be the historical Odysseus, the real man to whom the legends and fairy tales were attached later and whose exploits furnished Homer with the materials for his Odyssey."

"I never knew him," Johnston said, "but I'll take yer word fur it."

"Yes. Well, he said that he also had been contacted by an Ethical and sent down-River to help us. After the battle he hung around for a while, but when he went up-River on a trading expedition, he disappeared. Dropped out of sight like he'd fallen through a trapdoor.

"What makes him particularly important is that he had a strange tale to tell about the Ethical. Now, the one that talked to me, X, the Mysterious Stranger, was a man. At least, his voice was certainly a male's, though I suppose it could have been disguised. Anyway. Odysseus told me that his Ethical was a woman!"

Sam puffed out green smoke1 and looked at the brass arabesques on the ceiling as if they were hieroglyphs that held answers to his questions.

"Now, what could that mean?"

Gwenafra said, "That he was either telling the truth or lying."

"Right! Give that pretty woman there a big cigar! Either there are two Ethicals who have become renegades or the self-named Odysseus was a liar. If a liar, then he would have to be my Ethical, X. Personally, I think he was mine, yours, too, Cyrano and John, and I think he was lying. Otherwise, why didn't X tell us that there were two of his kind and that one was a woman? That would have been very important. I know he didn't have much time to talk to us because the other Ethicals were hot on his trail, breathing down his neck. But surely that item of information was one he wouldn't have neglected to impart."

"Why would he lie?" de Marbot said.

"Because..." Here Sam pointed his cigar at the arabesques. "He knew that we might get caught by the other Ethicals. And they might get from us this false information. Then they'd be confused and even more alarmed. What? Two traitors in their midst? Holy smoke! And if they put us to some sort of lie-detector, they'd see that we weren't lying. After all, we believed what Qdysseus told us. What X told us, I should say. It was just his way of confusing the issue still further! There! What do you think of that?"