It was a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces, Burke decided. No matter how he tried to analyze it, he always came out with a vital fragment or two left over. Take the Minotaur. Did such a creature actually exist? Or was the thing simply a figment of imagination? Assuming its existence, what about the strange mental powers with which it had tried to probe his brain? Alien powers. Yet if it were alien, what was King Minos' relation to it? Why would a human join hands with anything that radiated such malevolence and hate? Or, for that matter, what was the relation between the sea-king and his own daughter, Ariadne? Freudians would have a field day with that business of the mind-thing's holding her within the palace at her father's behest. Finally, staying on the personal level, where did Pasiphae fit in? What lay behind the legend of her having bribed Daedalus the Smith to build her a wooden cow so that she could be joined with the sacred bull? Could she actually have given birth to the Minotaur, or was that tale merely symbolic? Then, looking at the larger elements, the questions that had brought him here to start with, what was the origin of the radiation traces on the site of Knossos? And how had the city so mysteriously fallen in a single night? Questions without answers, so far. All of them. Further--Burke checked his watch--it was past four now, and that meant he had only eight hours more before the palace met its doom. Yet he couldn't take Ariadne out till he'd somehow immobilized the Minotaur. Cursing under his breath, he wondered what had become of Pasiphae; why she wasn't where she belonged, in the Queen's Megaron. Now two maids appeared, an older woman between them. Hastily, Burke flattened himself on the high ledge where he was hiding and waited to see what would happen. Leading the woman to one of the low benches along the wall, the maids spread a tapestry-like cloth for their charge to sit upon, then withdrew. The door closed behind them. Burke frowned. There was a strangeness about the whole procedure that puzzled him. Not a word had been spoken. And, once seated, the woman hadn't moved. Warily, he moved a fraction closer to the edge of his ledge, so that he could see the woman better. She was richly dressed, with skirts that fell in bright folds ornamented with lotus-blossom designs. Her bodice was the most ornate that Burke had seen. Yet it was her face, rather than her garments, that held the largest part of Burke's attention. That this was Pasiphae, he could have no doubt. The resemblance between her and Ariadne was that marked. The points of difference puzzled him, though. He tried to analyze them. And then, all at once, he knew. For where Ariadne's face was alive and expressive and animated, this woman's features sagged passive and loose. Her greying hair had the neatness of the maids' attention, but none of the flair that bespoke personal interest. Her eyes stared out vacuous and blank upon the room.