Mind Webs - The Maze

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1:03when flown by one of their providers. And right now when you join, you'll get an eGift card with code GiftCard at checkout. Protect your family before an emergency strikes. Go to airmedcarenetwork.com to sign up now. region Okay? Mine win. This is Michael Hanson. The mind web story this half-hour is by Stuart

2:09Diebeck. It's called The Maze, and appeared in the Orbit 17, a collection edited by Damon Knight. He gives her a starched white gaune and surgeon's mask and leads her down-tiled corridors past caged rats through wards of muzzle dogs, cats with electrodes in their brains, convalescing baboons, drafted tables. Red arrows point the way through the tunnels to the employee's cafeteria. Each noon she hurries along enormous pipes insulated in asbestos. When the generators kick in, the light bulbs dim. At intersections the arrows are almost scuffed away. She's grateful when he begins bringing her lunch in the laboratory. Every noon she eats it off the corner of the stainless steel table, grilled cheese, lice and pickle, black coffee. It's not The Maze itself that's important. The Maze is only one component of his experiment. Through a combination of radioactive-learned mutation and the chemical alteration of DNA, he intends

3:12to expand intelligence. The Maze will afford controlled problems of survival, a method of testing, measuring, and finally selecting out subjects that have been successfully altered. The subjects will be MICE. They never discuss correlations with other species. Still, sometimes she feels the air so charged that excitement seems to crackle, like currently between electrodes and old horror films. It's the year of constant zero now, the year of the 28-day blizzard. He shows her in article in Scientific American that claims a new ice age is beginning. She doesn't really mind being stranded. After working late, it's easier not to worry about getting home to simply curl up on the operating table and rest one's eyes after days close work translating ancient Mendo and Blueprints. There are always clean sheets and each morning a fresh uniform waiting. At night she dreams of unmapped subterranean rivers of bolting black rapids on a sheet of ice. From

4:16the start her task has been Maze research. The years have carried her through the fabled labyrinth, the catacombs, secret passageways, of Borges Castle, fantasy-co-fun houses, the Paris sewer system, the Pentagon. Now, finding man's intricacy simple besides nature's, she delves into the seashells plumbing, mysteries of Moewell and Earthworm. Enteres the anthole, down pulsing corridors past pupa and nurseries, mammoth cave, curls bad caverns. There are so many dead ends. How many lives would be needed to travel them all and back? Also beautiful, she says, ablaze with shifting angles like a gem turning under a spotlight. Stainless steel, magnesium fiberglass incorporating all shapes, curving back on itself like space. Yes, he says. Yes, now the real work can begin.

5:19And now she wanders back on herself through all those years of preparation, remembering the first walk down the tiled corridors, pacing the red arrows backward till they are erased by footsteps leaving only a snow-blimping dazzle like the landscape one morning when the blizzard fell from her eyes like gauze. Her eyes are always tired now, staring back bloodshot from the shining plains of steel. Sometimes she catches a glimpse of her reflection, a pale contour of cheek, the drained curve, chewed lips, gray roots at the hairline. She watches the generations of mice come and go, watches the maize digest them. Sometimes in the late afternoon she switches off the machines computing their progress, unable to concentrate on the constantly oscillating lines of their anxiety, the zigzagging pan scratching across revolving draft papers the mice go mad. She leaves it to him now to focus in on them with a tiny TVI's implanted in each tunnel to observe them as they nose helplessly up interconnected

6:22corridors starving the prived water, driving on desperate for reproduction. He keeps scrupulous records of their progress. When one advances beyond the rest he's removed to breathe a new generation of more brilliant mice. Sometimes at night she wakes to their small screens, at least which she can strolls to be screens. Squeaking that is echoed and re-echoed down the tubes amplified by a system of microphones and speakers, she unlatches the tiny gaze and puts her ear to the entrance. It's like a music box of squeals, mones, whispers, strange, mouse whispers of generation still circulating, recorded on tapes and played continually throughout the maize where any clues they might provide the current batch of mice. An almost familiar afluvium floats down from the tunnels of excretia, of disinfectant of decomposing corpses of the maize itself. She puts her eye to the opening and peers down the gleaming corridor. It leads to a wide-shaped

7:27intersection. She rolls her eye bearing first down one wing and the other. They both diverge into honeycombed passageways all empty. The mice are far beyond. She goes to the monitor, turns the dial scanning the corridors littered with dried pellets shriveled claws and cannibalized skeletons trying to pick up their trails. He's seldom there now at night as he once was pouring over genetic files. It's lonely when she wakes like this, though the sleeping pill is always there beside the dixie cup of water. She has begun to recognize the mice as distinct from one another. It seems the longer the experiment continues the less they look alike. Perhaps that's because they're larger easily the size of rats except they don't look like rats. They've changed gradually so no matter what they look like she still thinks of them as mice. Mice with swollen misshapen heads mice nearly erect like kangaroos mice that stare back into your

8:29eyes. It was the females in the nursery. She first came to know something in their eyes as they stared back at her when she'd watch them nursing their litter. The baby mice bald pink and sucking resembling piglets. She gave the mama's names sweet rosalie, fang, monkey Jane, tillie the thumb. She saves pieces from her grilled cheese sandwiches even though she knows feeding them those little crumbs interferes with a carefully programmed nutrients of their control groups. He's never there to catch her anyway. Nobody's there. They don't even remember she's in here. They've stopped bringing in a change of uniforms. Her clothes are turning gray. They don't lower their voices when they talk outside the door. She's heard rumors. Unbelievable snatches of conversation about experiments that go on at night. She recognizes the names of those involved. His friends, the famous one who works in radioactive mutation, and the other the bio chemist from Taiwan. It didn't matter feeding them the cheese bits after a while

9:34they wouldn't eat them anyway and they left the pieces lying at the bottom of the cage and he found them and doesn't even bring the cheese sandwich anymore. That's punishment and all the work and all those years. Where's the reward? Now that new mice are brought into the laboratory every day the differences between them and the maize mice are staggering. Were their ancestors really that tiny and mindless? The maize mice had evolved metabolism that require the corrupting flesh of other mice so that's what he brings in. Bushal baskets full of dead mice crawling with maggots. They have to sit on the radiators and rot. You had the lab insulated so the smell wouldn't escape and comes to work wearing the gas mask, surgical gloves and waiters. You were used to the stench, she tells her. One gets used to anything if they have to, she thinks. Like the maize mice eating each other's bodies in order to survive their maize treks. Till now they relish it.

10:37Leaping up and snapping their huge tusks as he dangles a rotting carcass above them by the tail his gas mask somehow suggesting a heartless smile. The rumors were true she finally checked the other night. It was as much boredom as curiosity driving her to it and hunger more than either. Ever since he stopped bringing her lunch her only meal she's had a scavenged at night for food. Luckily they left the grain which the mice used to eat. That in a occasional mouse plated on the pipette and roasted over a bunsen burner one of the freshly dead ones before they're too rotten hardly enough to keep body and soul together. A few dried kernels and a mouse but never amazed mouse to close account on those. Not the cheaty to the anyway. One doesn't eat one's friends. Why go on living if they drive you to that? Sometimes she feels she can actually communicate with them and they keep each other from going insane. Watching them on

11:42the TV during the day is better than a lot of women sitting home watching actors on soap operas. They have their problems and conflicting personalities just like people once you know what to look for. Besides she couldn't catch them if she wanted to. They're too smart and quick for the likes of her. Still slick from birth and already crawling toward the maze like they were born to it. Reminding her of a movie she saw once about baby turtles trying to get to the seas as soon as they broke out of their eggs. There she was sneaking through the corridors following the sounds, strange sounds for this place. Music and laughter and swearing. One of the orderlies was mopping and when he saw her he fainted. She crept down past brain surgery. They had a dog in there with his brain floating in an illuminated bubbling jar still attached to his empty skull by wires and when she passed the jar his head began to whimper. They were in the operating room

12:44behind locked doors but they had forgotten to cover the little windows just like the rumors had it. They had crossed some kind of big monkey maybe in a rangatán with an arcelot and God knows what else. There were five of them in there, strange creatures with hypnotic gold green eyes. So beautiful that even her old heart began to race like a hamster inside a wheel. They were almost the size of women but more delicate like two-bessened girls but girls don't have curves like that and covered with a fine golden fur. But their eyes and their hands with long nails tapering out of their fingers and their graceful long tails like feathered fans. They were using the stroke over their bodies and the men's bodies to curl around their necks, poke in their ears, brush across their faces and all of them sitting there with wine bottles drinking and laughing. And he was there too. At first she didn't recognize him without his clothes on but it was him all right. Another winter or

13:48last year still not ended, icicles like stalactites. The generation seemed to change faster than the seasons. This latest group won't eat the rotten flesh, all they'll take is bones. It's evolved of course, evolved from maze conditions. They're so deep now that by the time one generation comes upon the remains of its forebears bones are all its left. He's given her the job of boiling the meat off the bones. All the soup she can eat. Huge vats always bubbling and boiling steaming up the windows and her stirring away with a big wooden spoon. Just when she thought he was making up giving her little tasks again, he kicks her out of her stupor yelling, what have you done to the video? What have you done to the video? But she hadn't done it. The mice had figured out how to interfere with the video transmission. Some mutation they hadn't even conceived of had occurred, giving the mice the ability to use the electro waves of their brains

14:50to jam the frequency. Not that it wasn't possible to predict once they inexplicably developed a sonar like beep akin to a bat. Instead of having to go down each passageway, they beep and if it bounces back off at that end they avoid it. They use a variation of the beep to communicate with each other too like a school of porpuses chattering away, squeaking and beeping and whistling. Ever since the beep they haven't been burning their lives out going berserk either. Some of them have been around quite a while actually and grown quite large. It's fortunate that tunnels were designed to expand. She could almost climb in there herself now. Perhaps she allows herself to hope the little buggers will solve it after all. She thinks of them as little buggers because of what's going on in there. She saw it on the TV before they knocked it out. It's a result of his being partial to mails from the start using them as explorers and keeping the females back to breed. He wanted the mails driven on with horning this battering down blind alleys and then in the old days when they

15:55did have litters in there a few times the others ate the babies. Oh certainly that wouldn't happen now the younger well taken care of. After reaching a certain point in the mails they're welcomed initiated into the group an actual right of passage rather than mission and character. Probably that's why they blocked the transmission. There are things they don't want to be spied on doing. Things he doesn't know about and she's not going to tell her neither. Bastard, dirty son of a bitch. She almost says it but it's been so long since she's used her voice all she can do is croak. Just when the mice looked like they had the maize beat thanks to their sonar. He hooks up a device to recondition them. It's a sonar detector that triggers an electro shock whenever one of them beeps the waves activate the current electrifying the entire maze. Not enough of a joke to kill them but enough to have them writhing and jerking. With the sonar they're back to nosing up blind

16:57alleys going nuts again in corners. It wasn't part of the original concept to match wits with the subjects. The idea was to build the most complex maize mankind had ever devised and if they solved it fine that was a measure of their evolution but it wasn't supposed to have become a contest. This isn't the first time he's done it either. The mice would have defeated the maize years ago if he hadn't kept enlarging it constantly. He's added over a hundred stories since the original and spokes of quarters winding off in all directions. She wonders what they think in the city when they see it sprouting out of the dome of the institute and twisting off toward the horizon like some runaway roller coaster. Some of the new passageways go straight up with stainless steel sides and others plunge you suddenly like elevator shafts. They have to sprout wings to solve those and there are exits with doors like safes with intricate combination locks on them and when they finally solve the locks

17:59in the door opens a wall of waters waiting on the other side to flood the passages and there are other doors booby-trap with explosives or emitting cyanide and passages lined with razor blades and stretches with a floor heats red hot wind tunnels and miles that twist through a deep freeze. He's losing his hair now and reeks like he hasn't bathed in months the stink of nervous sweats mangled with a peculiar musk those golden creatures spray him with. Maybe they're little too much for a man his age she chuckles. What does he see through the greasy lenses of those glasses? The hair is sprouting out of that mole by his nose. He's turned white as crickly beards clotted with bits of food and snot he doesn't bother wiping away when he comes in huffing and stamping his galoshes from the cold. It doubles her over thinking about it him. Dr. Fastidius with his gas mask, rubber gloves and whaiters, slaubring as he mumbles to himself spitting into the receivers he foams all over the world.

19:04Each conversation ending the same with him beat faced and raving, cursing his colleagues and in between trying to explain how the mice have nearly evolved the ultimate mutation, the ability to determine future mutations by harnessing the collective energy of their brains. At night when he goes to his golden paramour she opens the maize door and crawls inside, sits right in the doorway where their legs bunched up against the wall. The sounds well up from deep inside here. She's come to understand how a rooster crows a coyote hows. She cups her hands over her mouth. Her thumbs jammed up her nose to produce the right nasal accent and calls out the new plans he spent a day concocting against them. Her warnings were verborating down the shining hallways echo after echo of their oval-like language. Screens from the nursery. The biochemist with a meat cleaver, the famous mutation expert wearing a welder's mask and blasting with a blowtorch

20:06and him with a German luger firing point blank furry wedges of skulls splattered against the walls. She wakes. The lab empty and dark only the machines humming the computer winking through its circuits. Inside the nursery everything is quiet. The mom is sleeping in their caged steel cribs, a little one's cradled in glass incubators. Without hesitation she raises the lid off her favorite cooling mouth sounds and a zeal lift seem gently out. He clutches her shriveled breast with a small leathery hands. She can feel his heart beating and what seems like twice the rate of hers and hers is pounding. She shuts the door to the nursery without looking back and they huddle together on the floor beneath the vivisection table. They close their eyes. He's trembling. The lab door bursts open cursing and shouting the three of them stumble past into the screaming nursery.

21:06To say love correctly is to make a sound that comes from deep inside like a cat's purr aduffs cool. She can't really make it only approximated. Nor does it really mean love in the way man uses it. It means being together and knowing that wherever you are will lead somewhere else. He lived like a prisoner in this cramped storeroom no bigger than a closet. She named him Thesis. Explained his name to him told and re-told the old myths. But after a while she got to calling him feel. Once he asked her what her old name was. What her life was like before she came here was she a child. But when she tried to think back her mind got lost in the coils of her brain she felt her blood staggering around in the darkness. Blind trying to distinguish memories from nightmares by their feel. He helped her sit down,

22:08held her until the disease passed and brushed away her tears. And he said, I'll just keep calling you mother. How long was he here she wonders. Times been gone for a long time. It disappears before space leaving endless rooms filling even the smallest covered with eternity. She tried to make his room homey as if such a place could be home with death always compressing further. It's enormous weight always just the other side of the door. She tries to count the years but it's all become one winter. She sits alone in the closet now just a fewly old minutes pass. The same room they'd stored all the materials from the original mazans along a go rolls of blueprints, stacks of manuscripts, files partially disassembled scale models of field played with it to kill the town of his childhood. He slept through the days at night they'd prowl the hallways,

23:08planning and escape. But quite a dawn she'd always find in transfixed before the entrance of the mazans and tenny perked up. He wasn't a happy child and now he's gone leaving only a little poet behind she'd sweep away except it helps her to believe he was really here. The second quake in the last few days. This one cracked the ceiling and buckled the walls. She's heard rumors that part of the east wing has collapsed allowing packs of half-starred dogs to escape into the city. Now the three of them wearing hard hats and football helmets are in the lab squabbling on how to program the computer. It's the mazans, easy-elling. Don't you see they're extending the mazans themselves building it from inside out? Look here. He's arranged a series of backpages, clippings from obscure newspapers into a pattern connected by red lines and super imposed against a wall map. She reads through the clippings reports of miners in west Virginia and

24:12Montana refusing to enter haunted mines. Fisherman off the Carolina coast complaining about nets snagged on underwater obstructions. Almost identical articles from several different states regarding the mysterious disappearance of sewer workers. They're probably linked up with a natural system of underground caves, he says. I think we did research on that once. Before she can intercept him, he's opened the door to the closet standing there gaping at Theo's burlap bed, the books, the little decorations she's fixed up and had not been able to discard. He picks up the last dried pallets shriveled and darkened now in his handkerchief holding it out his eyes narrowed with suspicion and then mugging out in rage. What's this? He shots waving it in their face. What's this? What in the hell is this? Light. Who opened the door? She squints. Is it you? She mumbles. All she can see at those bloodshot lenses, eyebrows like white spiders, a close-up of gums gnashing in her face.

25:17Ah, I can't hear you're blathering, she giggles. Ever since you've jammed those quarks in my ears, but the next second she's grovelling at his shoes. Don't beat me, don't beat me again, I can't talk if I wanted to. My tongue is shriveled to a raisin. Don't, please don't use the acid or God, no, not the mouth stretcher. The door opens again. She pretends to be unconscious. He drags her out by her hair across the cold laboratory floor. She thought it was just the closet that felt like a refrigerator, another punishment, but the entire lab is freezing. He's wearing a parken now, fringed in wolves fur. Wake up, you crazy old bitch. I want you to see how it ends. She can see his breath as he talks, gesticulating wildly, explaining how he set the computer the task of destructing the maze. An atomic chain reaction blasting it out of the entire country. The entire hemisphere, perhaps the entire planet like a takeworm. He's laughing as the clock counts down. 30, 29,

26:2028. Turns to see her staggering to her feet and moves to knock her down, still laughing. She smashes her foot down on his toes, the foot with a Spanish boot. While he's hopping and yelping, she tries to finish him off with a cast iron kick to the groin, but can't swing her leg high enough. It cracks into his kneecap, carrying her off balance and they both go down. He drags himself toward her across the floor and she tries to crawl away. He rips her rags off, breathing hard eyes magnified behind his lenses. An expression she's never seen before. He drops his trousers and rolls on top of her grunting and biting, looking her ear. Their face is staring into each other's, draining only inches apart and then suddenly, his jaw unhinging in the screen. She sees his eyes roll up into his head as he's lifted off her, Theo pumping into him from behind like a piston and him screaming again and again with each thrust. She can hear Theo's antennae sending her thought waves as he drives it in over and over. Mother, mother, are you all right? The computer, she thinks. The computer,

27:25and Theo has already dumped him and is lunging for the control panel. She watches as he rolls over and trousers still around his ankles, a stream of blood running down his legs and then realizes his arms are stretched and shaking because of the weight of the luger he's holding with both hands, taking kerfilane that feels back. And before she can scream, the golden tails lash around his wrists and cinch mercilessly around his throat. She watches the golden mutants file into the maze. A long line, she had no idea there was so many, smiles bouting their lips, their exotic flashing eyes. The last two at her, the ones who say Theo one of them obviously pregnant. My mate, he says, as they disappear into the maze. Theo, we can escape now. They call to in through the east wing. Theo, bring your wife. Your children will be able to walk the earth free to know the fields, flowers,

28:25sun, stars. He's smiling. The words sound all wrong to her. He steps into the entrance and extends his hand. She looks at the laboratory and is scattered files. The shattered beakers buzzing video screens snow drifting in, blowing through the cracks in the walls, coating everything like dust. His body on the floor, already a little mound of snow. And out the window the icicles like bars across the land, escaped white, bewned like a desert. She steps in and he slams the door. It fuses behind them. The last instructions I gave the computer, he says. The corridors are warm. Silver tinged with a faint infrared glow. The tunnel so streamlined she seems to glide by their volition, clanking softly with their Spanish boot. They come to the first intersection. Turn left, he says.

29:57You've heard the maze, a story by Stuart Dybeck that appears in Orbit 17, a collection edited by Damon Knight. This is Michael Hanson, technical production for this program by Steve Gordon. Mindwebs is a production of WHA Radio and Madison, a service of University of Wisconsin Extension.