Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 54 — page 60: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MAN IN A MAZE keys—I suppose you'll not be satisfied until you’ve got human beings penned in your damned mazes. Well, I anti- cipated that. I put you in a maze first—the biter bit. Now I can claim to have discovered that the same methods will drive: human beings to attempt suicide. Maybe my name will go down in scientific history.” “What did I ever do to you?” Tyler asked again. Sweet ignored the question. He went on, spitefully: “I baited you with your dream laboratory. That was your food, the sustenance you needed for your kind of life. For your work is your life, whatever it means to other people’s lives. Then I made it useless to you, until you were frightened to move— you’d learn to distrust every tool of your trade, including your own senses. “You were living in a real maze here, little man, full of secret ways and spy-holes. I could watch you in every room. I could roll up and replace lengths of carpet when you were asleep or wrapped up in your idiotic experiments. 59 And switch the water pipes and gas pipes behind the wainscoting where you couldn’t trace them. Switch the wiring, too. Best of ail, switch the rooms. Ingenious, this house. Cylindrical, so that all the rooms can slide round the stationary pivot of this lab. But they’re also separate units which can be made to glide, elevate, and interlock as smoothly and indetectably as the parts of a puzzle box. Almost indetec- tably, anyhow. Sometimes the rollers rumble a bit. You probably put it down to head noises.” Tyler remained silent, star- ing at him, “Oh, I thought up scores of tricks. For instance, your chemical weights. They’re copper, but they each sheathe a steel ball bearing. Under this bench top’ —Sweet tapped it—“‘there’s fitted an electro- magnet, remotely controlled. Need I elucidate further? Behind the walls here—a refrigerating plant. I could turn this whole room into a deep freeze—inconvenient if you’re dealing with relative - temperatures, huh? That wall coniicbooks.com