THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

They returned to their chairs and flew slowly down the curving corridor. Burton was begi

What else could they do? There were no directories on the walls, and they couldn't read them if there were. It was frustrating and futile to proceed in this ma

On the other hand, they had been fortunate in locating the residences of the twelve and of Monat Grrautut and the dome entrance. Perhaps, the place where X did his experiments or a control center he used might be near his apartment.

They came to a closed door and passed it. There would be many thousands of such in this vast place. They couldn't afford the time to open every one.

But when he was thirty feet beyond it, Burton raised his hand to signal a halt.

"What is it?" Alice said.

"I've a certain feeling, a strong hunch."

He lowered the chair to the floor.

"I'll just take a moment to check this out."

He pressed a button on the wall by the door, and the door slid soundlessly into a recess. Beyond was a cavernous room with much varied equipment on tables and, against the walls, many cabinets. There was only one skeleton. A violent explosion had evidently caught someone as he was passing by a cabinet or doing something with it. The top of the cabinet had been blown off, judging from the outwardly twisted metal, the pieces of some glassy substance on the floor, and metal pieces inside the skeleton. It lay twenty feet out from the wreck, and under the bones were dark bloodstains.

Just beyond the skeleton }he blast had knocked a star-shaped metal construction from the top of a table. It lay on the floor emitting what looked like many-colored heat waves.

Straight ahead of Burton and near the center of the room was a flying chair. It was on the floor and tenantless, one side to him, and fresh bloodstains on the arm.

Just beyond the chair was a great revolving disc on a cylinder about two feet high. Cabinets and consoles were on its perimeter. In the center was a fixed platform. A man sat on a chair of some semitransparent stuff in the middle of the fixed platform. Before him was a console with a sloping instrument panel and several live screens. He was adjusting a dial, his eyes fixed on the largest oscilloscope. His profile was to Burton.

Burton put a finger to his lips and with the other hand gestured at his companions to get off their chairs. Then he unholstered his revolver and indicated that the others should do the same.

The operator had long fox-red hair, a pale white skin, and the eye presented to Burton lacked an epicanthic fold. If the man hadn't been so fat, Burton might not have identified him. Fat, however, couldn't be removed in such a short time.

Burton walked slowly through the door and toward the man. The others were fa

When they were within sixty feet of him, the man saw them. He reared up out of the chair, grimaced, and sat back down. His hand shot out, dived into a recess under the panel, and came out holding a strange-looking device. It had a pistollike butt for gripping, a barrel about a foot long and three inches in diameter, and a sphere at its end the size of a large apple.

Burton cried out, "Loga!"

He ran forward.

49

THE ETHICAL ROSE AGAIN AND SHOUTED, "STOP! OR I'LL FIRE!"

They kept on ru

They halted. Anything that could melt that metal was very impressive.

"I can cut you all into two with a single sweep of this," Loga said. "I don't want to. There's been far too much violence, and I'm sick of it. But I will kill you if I must. Now... all of you turn around in unison and throw your weapons as far as you can toward the door."

Burton said, "There are nine guns trained on you. You might get one or two of us, but you'll be blown to bits."

The Ethical smiled grimly.

"It looks like a Mexican standoff, doesn't it?"

He paused. "But it isn't, believe me!"

Croomes shouted, "No, it isn't! You Satan, you fiend from Hell!"

Her pistol boomed. The scarlet beam flashed out from Loga's weapon at the same time that eight other guns exploded.

Loga fell backwards. Burton ran, leaped upon the revolving disc, darted over it to the fixed platform, and pointed his revolver at the prostrate Ethical. The others crowded around him.

While Turpin and Tai-Peng picked up the bleeding and ashen-ski

Loga looked around as if he couldn't believe what had happened, then said, "There are three boxes in the upper-right-hand drawer in the console. Bring them to me, and I'll be all right in a few minutes."

"This isn't a trick?" Burton said.

"No! I swear! I've had enough of tricks and murder! I meant you no harm! I just wanted you to be disarmed so that I could explain without worrying about you. You're such a violent breed!"

"Look who's talking," Burton said.

"I didn't do it because I loved it!"

"Neither did we," Burton said, but he wasn't so sure that he was wholly truthful.

They brought out three silver boxes set with green emeralds. Burton opened each one slowly and inspected the contents. As the Ethical had said, each contained a bottle. Two held liquid; one, some pink stuff.

"How do I know they won't release some sort of gas?" Burton said. "Or that they aren't poison?"

"They won't be," Nur said. "He does not want to die now."

"That's right," Loga said. "Something terrible may happen soon, and only I know how to stop it. I may need your help."

"You could have had it all along," Burton said, "if only you'd told us the truth in the begi

"I had my reasons for not doing so," Loga said. "Very good reasons. And then things got out of hand."

He squeezed one of the bottles, and a clear liquid spurted out onto his hand. After rubbing it over the wound on his shoulder, wincing at the pain, he drank from the second bottle. From the third he poured out a pink gooey substance into his left hand and then pressed it over the wound.

"The first was to sterilize the wound," he said. "The second was to cancel the shock and give me strength. The third will heal the wound in a very short time. Three days."

Burton said, "Where did we wound you the first time?"

"The only bad wound was in my left thigh."

His grayness of skin had been replaced by a normal color within a minute. He asked for some water, which Frigate brought to him. Burton lit a cigarette. His questions were a logjam in his throat. Which one should be spit out first?

Before the inquisition, though, certain things had to be done. Burton held his revolver on Loga while the others brought their chairs in and Frigate made an extra trip to get Burton's. These were placed on the floor on the side of the disc where they'd be out of sight of Croomes' body. While this was being done, Loga was allowed to lift his bloodstained chair to a designated spot. The other chairs were then arranged closely in a semicircle facing the Ethical.

"I think we could all stand a little drink," Burton said. Loga told them how to set the controls of a grail box to get their orders filled. His own was a yellow wine which the others had never found in their grails. Burton duplicated Loga's request and tasted the wine. It was comparable to nothing he'd ever had before, delicate yet pungent. For some reason it evoked a slowly receding tide of dark green waters above which flew giant white birds with crimson beaks.