squeezed past the table again and returned to her chair. “And what have you concluded?”
“I’ve concluded that Mondor once took a college course in which mazes were mentioned. He passed it by learning to say ‘alley’ instead of ‘corridor.’ I don’t know what he’s concluded. He hasn’t been his obnoxious self since he got duped by that nonexistent computer.”
“There isn’t any way out,” Mondor said gloomily. “That’s what I’ve concluded. On the side where we landed, the alleys lead directly to this place. The only exit would be through the ceiling, which we have no way of reaching, and we probably couldn’t find the traps if we did. The other side is a labyrinth. There’s no way out there, either.”
“Don’t labyrinths have exits?” Adelle asked.
“Only when the builder wants them to,” Mondor said.
Dolan set his beer can down with a thump. “As our mathematician has already pointed out, we have three bedrooms, three chairs, three everything, with food supplied for three people. Therefore Madam and her goons intend to keep us down here at least until after breakfast tomorrow. Since they’ve already made that decision, and gone to considerable trouble and expense to implement it, Mondor thinks it unlikely that they’d absent-mindedly leave us a running escalator marked ‘Exit.’ He reached that abstruse conclusion all by himself. Aren’t we lucky he can count to three?”
“Crap on your counting!” Mondor exploded. “The moment I realized I’d been dropped into some kind of psychological hell, I knew I’d find Dolan here.”
Adelle got up, squeezed past the table again, and began opening cupboards. A large bowl was filled with foil and paper containers of the type dispensed by airlines and fast-food restaurants. There was coffee, sugar, tea bags, chocolate, powdered non-dairy creamer, salt, pepper, mustard, ketchup, steak sauce. There was a small box of dehydrated potatoes and a foil container of gravy mix—enough of each, she reflected, for about three people. There were three individually boxed servings of breakfast cereal.
In a lower cabinet, behind a roll of paper towels and a plastic container of dish washing detergent, she saw a box of sanitary napkins. Someone certainly was planning on their staying and had thought of everything.
But the scantness of the food seemed puzzling. She turned to examine the contents of the refrigerator. In the freezer compartment, she found a package of mixed vegetables and a fruit pie. Presumably the steaks had been in the meat container, which now held only a pound of bacon. The other items were a quart carton of milk, a dozen eggs, and numerous cans of beer and pop. They had adequate food for dinner and breakfast but virtually nothing for subsequent meals.
In the cabinet under the sink there was an enormous reserve of beer and soft drinks along with more kinds of alcoholic beverages than Adelle had ever seen outside a liquor store.
She entered the end bedroom, the one farthest from the toilet, and hung her coat on one of the hooks. She tossed her purse onto the bed. Then she returned to the kitchen and sat down.
She remarked, “Kevin is right. Someone planned this carefully and invested a lot of time and money on it. Why? What do they want with us?”
Dolan spoke to Mondor. “You’ve been saying there’s something loony or sinister about Z-R Publications. Did you suspect anything like this?”
“Would I have hung around if I did?”
“No,” Dolan agreed. “It was a silly question. Adelle’s was better. What do they want with us? What’s the point? In a sense, all three of us have been kidnapped. Surely they aren’t holding me for ransom. The only money I have is what’s left of the salary they’ve been paying me, and why pay it in the first place if they want it that badly?”
Mondor gestured at their surroundings. “Whoever arranged this setup had an unlimited budget. Even if the sub-basement was part of the original building, installing an automated maze with a fancy complication like that psychological testing room was a huge expense. If they had to dig the basement under another basement without disturbing the building’s foundations and supports, it cost a fortune.”
“I think the sub-basement was part of the original building,” Dolan reflected. “The excavation for it, anyway. It’d be difficult to surreptitiously put a basement under a basement, especially one this big. I mean, what do you do with the dirt? There’d be truck loads and truck loads of it. If Mondor had his pocket calculator, he’d tell us how many cubic yards they’d have to remove. Sooner or later someone would get curious about where it was coming from, and whoever is responsible for this caper certainly didn’t want to arouse anyone’s curiosity. The bartender at Barney’s says there are old rumors about secret rooms and passageways and stairways in this place, so a secret basement is no surprise, but they probably added the maze themselves. I mean—if you’re building a cage to keep kidnap victims in, you don’t hire your work force out of the Yellow Pages or use union labor.”
“The goons?” Mondor suggested.
“Why not? They’re certainly in on it. But it took more than five people to do all this work, and most if not all of it was done long before we were hired. Question. If, for some extremely subtle reason I can’t comprehend, they went to all this trouble just for the three of us, why didn’t they sucker us Adelle’s first day on the job and save the three weeks’ salary they’ve paid us since then? Or—to take a better question—why didn’t they do it my first day, with the typist they had when I came here? Or on Mondor’s first day, with the typist and writer they had then? Was it because this setup wasn’t finished? In that case, why hire anyone at all until they were ready? Nothing about this makes sense.”
“The writer they had when they hired me had been here one week,” Mondor said. “They fired him at the end of his second week and hired another. They hired a word processor when they hired me, and the two of us replaced people they fired. There may have been others before them. Why didn’t they kidnap three of them? You’re right—this makes no sense from any angle. But nothing about Z-R Publications has ever made any sense.”
“I wonder,” Adelle said.
“You wonder what?” Dolan demanded.
“I wonder if this doesn’t make sense. I think Madam’s flea-brained mannerisms were carefully calculated to cover up a frighteningly cold logic, and everything about Z-R Publications has had a purpose.”
“I suppose Madam had a perfectly sensible reason for giving us those ridiculous jobs and paying us inflated wages,” Dolan said.
“Of course she did. Just because we don’t know what it was doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.”
Dolan turned to Mondor. “We’re fortunate to have such a brilliant Researcher/Word Processor. Now listen carefully, and she’ll explain what we’re doing down here.”
“Obviously Madam wanted people who met certain requirements,” Adelle said impatiently. “She kept hiring and firing until she found them, and she didn’t sucker us my first day on the job because she wanted to make certain I was the person—all three of us were the persons—who met her requirements. Now she’s certain, and here we are. What other reason could there be? As for what the requirements were, and why they put us down here—I wouldn’t want to solve all the problems and leave you two sitting there with your brilliant minds running in neutral.”
Dolan sipped his beer and carefully preened his beard. Mondor hunched over his can of pop and
