THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

"Did you deactivate the bombs when you came here?" Burton said. He was thinking of the control room with the open door they'd passed before arriving at the apartments.

"I did in this room."

Loga continued his narrative. He had made a wathan distorter to enter the tower and also to deceive the sca

"That's why you were able to kill yourself so many times and still elude the Council. But Monat sent word via an agent to inspect the place where your preresurrection duplicate would be made so that your fatal wounds could be repaired. The circuits were traced back to the inhibit I'd installed. That's why, the last time you committed suicide, you were caught."

In the frantic search to find out the identity of the renegade, the Council had agreed to submit themselves to the memory sca

"You understand that I couldn't do this for my entire track by any means. Only those memory sections for the times when we had to account for our absences were sca

The time came which Loga dreaded so much and hoped would not come. He had arranged for that, but he did not want to have to carry out his arrangements. It hurt him severely to do it.

"Monat decided that he would be picked up at night soon and return to the tower. At the same time, you, Burton, would be taken along for a complete scan of your time in The Valley. I think that Monat suspected that the renegade, I, had fixed it so that your memory of your questioning by the Council had not been removed. Also, the violence around him in The Valley was increasingly sickening him. He needed a vacation."

51

LOGA WAS FLYING TO THE TOWER, HAVING JUST COMPLETED A legitimate mission, when the two hidden resurrectors were found. At the same time, the engineers had discovered more evidence of Loga's tampering with the computer.

Monat, Thanabur, and Siggen were in The Valley then. The other Councilors sent out aircraft to pick them up and to give them the news. However, the Council had made an error in judgment. Instead of waiting until Loga arrived and then confronting him, they sent a message to him. He was told to expect arrest when he got home.

"It took me half an hour to work up my nerve to do what I'd long pla

He'd sent out a signal which had activated the codeword in the little black balls in the brains of those in the tower and the sea around it. They had made a mistake when they used one code instead of individual codes.

"But I also made a mistake when I didn't send the code down into The Valley. I'd thought of it, but I didn't want to kill any more than I had to. Also, I thought that those Ethicals in The Valley would be helpless. They couldn't get out to the tower, since I'd fixed it so that the signal also deactivated the aircraft. Those left in The Valley would have to try to get to the tower the hard way. By boat until they got to the headwaters and on foot over the mountains. Long before then, I'd have done what I had to do."

"But what if the aircraft had fallen into The Valley?" Nur said.

"They wouldn't. Before they hit the surface they'd have burned up. Those parked on top of the mountains along The Valley would have burned, too. I'd arranged that."

"How did their pilots get down the mountain and back up to the parked vehicles?" Nur said.

"The ships could be directed by remote control. They'd drop the pilots off in the foothills during a storm or hard rain and return to the mountain top. The pilot would bury the control if he was going to stay in the area or he'd carry it in his grail. It looked just like one of the cups found in all the grails."

There was nothing to stop Loga then from flying to the tower. But he'd underestimated the wiliness of Monat.

"At least, I believe it was he who took those countermeasures. He must have put into the computer all that had happened and had gotten a list of probabilities. The computer didn't betray me; it was inhibited. But it did all that Monat asked it to do. I think it did. Possibly Monat thought of it himself."

Loga was silent for so long that Burton had to jog him along.

"Thought of what?"

"Of their planting a device in my personal aircraft. When I sent out that signal, everybody in the tower and the sea area dropped dead, all other aircraft in flight were burned up, and the general resurrection machinery was shut down. It wouldn't start again until I signaled it to do so.

"But my own vessel had had a device installed in it. I found that out when I could no longer control it. It was flying automatically. It headed toward the top of the mountain range no matter what I did. At the same time, a recorded voice told me to wait there until I'd be picked up.

"Monat's voice!

"He'd had the stop-devices installed before he went into The Valley to accompany you, Burton. Of course, he must've had the devices put into every ship. If he'd suspected me only, he would've had me put under a completely exhaustive examination.

"What Monat hadn't reckoned on, though, was that there would be no aircraft or pilots to come to my rescue. That meant that I'd be stranded on the mountain top and would starve to death unless I could trace down the device and remove it.

"Though Monat had expected an aircraft from the tower to get to the guilty person's craft swiftly, he had also made sure that the culprit wouldn't be able to remove the device or cut it off. A few minutes before my machine would land, a recording told me that the device would burn up the moment contact with the ground was made and so would the motor."

Loga had cursed and raved. He briefly visualized what would happen. He'd die and so couldn't send false messages to the Gardenplanet. In one hundred and sixty years, the Gardeners would expect the automatically operated ship with the latest report. When it hadn't arrived after a reasonable time, the Gardeners would send people to investigate. They would arrive at the tower over three hundred and twenty years after the message-ship should have been launched.

"In one way," Loga said, "that was good. I had wanted the project to run far past the one hundred and twenty years allotted, though I hadn't dared say so. My colleagues said that that was more than long enough to weed out the people who would never get to the stage necessary to Go On. Now the project would run far longer than pla

Burton said, "What?"

Tears flowed down Loga's cheeks. He spoke in a strangled voice.

"It was strictly forbidden for anyone to locate any relatives resurrected in The Valley. The formulators of this policy were Monat's people. They said that experience had shown that Ethicals who found their loved ones among the lazari were too emotionally upset if these were evidently not going to make it. They'd interfere, they'd be tempted to reveal what was happening before the time was ripe for that. In a previous project, a woman had put her parents in a special place in the underground chambers and tried to force-feed, as it were, their ethical advancement.

"I was taught that when I was a young adult on the Gardenworld. I believed in the policy then. But later I couldn't endure not seeing my family. Nor could I endure the agonizing idea that they might not Go On. So, long before we left the Gardenworld, I had made my plans. Still, I wasn't sure that I could carry them out. But I did track down my relatives through the computer—that took a long long time, believe me—and I visited them in The Valley. I was in disguise, of course. They had no chance of recognizing me. I'd arranged it so that they'd all be resurrected in the same place. Also, if any moved away from there or was killed, I'd know where they were.