Mondor shook his head. “This isn’t going to be like a Sunday stroll in the park. For one thing, we’re without food and water. For another, the word ‘experiment’ has connotations I don’t like. Arranging this setup and suckering us into it was enormous trouble and expense. It wasn’t done to watch us wisecrack our way up and down alleys. There’ll be plenty of surprises for us, and the last one may be a trap door that drops us into a vat of acid. We’ll be better able to meet danger if we stick together, and surely all three of us would rather have company in our misery, even if we decide later to sit and rot.” He got to his feet.
“One moment,” Dolan said. He stooped and carefully gouged their names under the arrow he had just carved. “There. I’ll do that throughout the whole damned maze. Even repainting won’t obliterate it completely—they’ll have to sandblast the metal first. In the meantime, we’ll have left our names all over the place, and names are evidence. That’s one in the eye for your mad scientist. Okay—let’s go.”
* * * *
It was five o’clock in the evening and long hours later when Adelle slumped wearily to the floor and announced, “If a fairy godmother had given me the option of shortening my life by one day, this is the day I would have skipped.”
They had enlarged their knowledge of mazes enormously in the interim, but their newly acquired experience helped them not a jot. They continued to stumble into blind alleys, retrace their steps, march the length of long alleys that had no exit, and pass up apparent cul-de-sacs only to have to return to them later. An hour after they set out, their senses of direction were totally obliterated. Dolan stopped carving arrows because he had no notion of where to point them, but he stubbornly continued to vandalize the walls with their names and the date and time.
As he commenced his latest assault on the smooth gray paint, Dolan asked Mondor, “Is this scientist really mad, or is he merely stupid. Translation: What’s the point of our wandering around in a maze like this and not getting anywhere?”
“Some scientists believe rats have the ability to acquire a cognitive map of a maze,” Mondor said. “Once they’ve done so, they can think their way through it.”
“Good idea,” Dolan told him. “Go ahead and demonstrate.”
“The mazes they use for rats are designed for scientific tests. God knows what this one was designed for.”
Dolan got to his feet and shouldered the bed rails. “I can tell you what it wasn’t designed for. Aesthetic purposes. This battleship gray is getting on my nerves. ‘Water, water everything, and all the boards did shrink.’ Sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned water. Gray, gray everywhere—” He kicked a wall viciously. “I wonder if they chose gray because it’s psychologically depressing.” He started off.
“Hold it!” Mondor snapped.
Dolan turned, scowling.
“Don’t forget—they can bring a wall out of the floor wherever a black strip crosses the alley. If one of us gets too far ahead or lags behind, they can separate us.”
“Right,” Dolan agreed. “We’ll stick together and make them work for whatever they think they’re trying to prove. Now if you don’t mind—we aren’t likely to acquire that cognitive map by transcendental meditation.”
Mondor and Adelle picked up the remainder of the bed and hurried after him.
Shortly before six o’clock, they turned into a new alley and suddenly came upon a test room that seemed identical to the room or rooms all of them had arrived in. They made no move to enter it. Dolan exclaimed, “Ah!” and began to assemble the bed.
This time they wedged the bed’s feet against the wall. Dolan, with Mondor’s clasped hands providing a step, hopped onto the bed, lifted a ceiling panel, and peered through. He jumped for a better look. Then he announced disgustedly, “Nothing.”
“I suppose there could be more than three test rooms, though I don’t know why they’d need so many,” Mondor mused. “One should be sufficient. Maybe there are doors on all four sides, and we entered the same room on chutes coming from different directions.”
“That’s possible, but I see no sign of a trap door from here,” Dolan said. He stood on tiptoe, and then he jumped again for a better look. “Nothing. Of course I can only see this one side. The test room’s walls go all the way up to the plywood.”
“Aren’t there any seams?” Mondor asked.
“Sure. The plywood panels are four by eight feet, and their edges make seams, but they’re very thoroughly nailed.”
“Can you reach the edge of a panel?”
“Yes. And I’ve broken two fingernails on it already.”
Mondor thought for a moment. “In that case, we might as well go through the test room and try again where we come out.”
“Just a moment,” Adelle said as Dolan swung down. “Those chutes were long. At least, mine was. It gave me quite a ride. Maybe we’re too close to the room.”
“Point,” Dolan agreed. “We’ll back up and try again.”
They moved the bed twice, but every panel Dolan tested seemed like a solidly nailed piece of plywood. “All right,” he said finally. “We’ll take their dratted test and see what’s on the other side.”
He paused to carve their names on the wall by the door.
“Don’t forget to wind that thing,” he said as he got the time from Adelle’s watch. “If you do, we easily could get confused about what day it is. We may anyway. Too bad you didn’t have the foresight to buy a watch with a calendar.”
“Too bad you were too cheap to even buy a sundial.”
Dolan grinned. “That’d really be useful down here. Mondor could use your watch to calculate where the sun ought to be, and then he could check your watch by the sundial.”
Carrying the disassembled bed, they marched into the test room. The opening closed after them with an almost inaudible hiss, leaving them in the dim glow of the recessed ceiling light. Numerals began flashing on the three walls where the inverted score boards were located.
The series was longer than before, and it flashed only once.
“The degenerate fiends!” Dolan exclaimed. “Now that we know how the thing works, they figure once is enough. Did either of you catch it?”
“I missed the beginning,” Mondor said.
“Six, seven, nine, one, zero, four, five,” Adelle recited. She punched the appropriate buttons as she spoke. With the same quiet hiss a door dropped open on the side opposite to the one they had entered.
Dolan gouged a “1” on a test room wall. He circled it. “Eventually we’ll find out how many there are. How’d you manage to remember that number so easily?”
“I’ve been typing numbers for three weeks,” Adelle said. “I couldn’t help it.”
They picked up the bed parts and marched out. The door swished shut behind them. Again they assembled the bed, and Dolan investigated the ceiling with the same futile result.
“They could have fastened the thing shut,” he called down to them when the third check failed to find anything. “It wouldn’t take much effort to bolt the trap’s frame to the joists when the trap isn’t in use. That’d keep us from climbing out and prevent the goons from falling through it accidentally. If they’ve done that, we couldn’t pry it down with a crowbar.”
He swung to the floor and began to carve their names on the wall.
Mondor watched him with a frown. “I should have drawn a map,” he said.
“You’d need a sheet of paper twelve feet square, and the end result would look like a warren