This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question. – Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
A mathematician, an inventor, and a psychologist walk into a bar. It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but in this case it was more like the end of one. James, Richard and I were in no mood for jokes that evening as we ordered our drinks.
“Emily just called,” said James as he put away his cell phone. “They just got out of the corn maze, and they’re taking the kids home. We can stay here a while, but they want to hear the whole story.”
“They weren’t worried about us?”
“Of course not,” he replied, “We never expected to stay with them the entire time; they had to stay with the kids, and the kids went every which way. They never realized we weren’t somewhere in the maze with them.”
I had forgotten the arrangements we had made when we entered the maze; it seemed so long ago. James, Richard, and I didn’t talk much, but our wives and children were friends. When the kids had heard about the corn maze they had been eager to explore. My wife, Rebecca, had made plans with Emily and Sara, and before we knew it, Richard, James and I had found ourselves shanghaied into a three-family outing to “The Amazing Maize Maze”.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Since they had organized the trip, we shackled the mothers with child-watching duty, and the three of us lagged behind as the kids quickly disappeared from sight and gradually from hearing. James and Richard chatted, their related fields giving them a talking point. James is a mathematician and logician. He is a professor at a nearby university, and had published a couple of books as well. Richard is an inventor and engineer. He has a few patents, and currently works for an engineering company on moderately classified work. I’m a psychologist currently researching several topics.
I can’t remember which of us first realized that the path we were on was no longer walled by corn, but by tall hedges. We hadn’t been paying much attention to where we were going, but that brought us up short. The hedges were at least 8 feet tall, and they were dense with branches. Even the dirt was a subtly different shade of brown. This was not the corn maze we had entered. We tried to go back the way we came, but as we rounded the first corner, we came up short against a dead end.
“What? We just came from here!” exclaimed James.
“James. We’re in a hedge maze inside a corn maze that explicitly does not have a hedge maze in the center. How is this more illogical than that?” Richard retorted.
Despite his words, Richard was clearly startled by the cul-de-sac as much as James was. It took all three of us another moment to notice the large sign that was posted by the wall.
“Great,” muttered Richard, “a magic maze. Just what we needed.”
James pulled out his cell phone. “No bars,” he said, “but I’ll try anyway.” He dialed Emily’s number, but the phone didn’t even try to connect. A message came up on the screen: Call could not be completed while time is out of joint. Please try again later. James frowned at it. “Somehow, I don’t think that’s a common error message.” I checked my watch. The time was frozen at 4:37.
“Well, no way out but forward,” said Richard, trying to be cheerful. “Come on, we won’t get out of here by sitting at the entrance.”
We set off. I followed behind James and Richard, lost in thought. The maze was a common trope in stories, dating at least as far back as the Greek legend of Theseus and the Minotaur. It was popular because it represented a mental struggle. Strength did not help in a labyrinth; success was determined by cleverness and creativity. But the labyrinth was more than just a mental puzzle; it was a representation of the mind itself. Its twists and branches represented the path that the hero takes and the decisions that he must make in order to escape.
Speaking of branches, we had come to a split in the path. Nine paths branched off. Each had a sign in front of it, detailing a statement about which path was the right one, and which of the signs were telling the truth. They reminded me of the setup to some logic puzzles I had seen once. A solution might be gained from them, but for the life of me, I didn’t think I had a chance of figuring it out.
James studied the signs, a smile slowly spreading across his face. “Richard, do you have a pencil and paper I could borrow?”
“Of course. Here you go.” Richard pulled a notebook out of his back pocket and handed it, along with a pencil, to James. James got to work, making notes and muttering to himself. Richard began walking around, peering down the paths, and inspecting the signs. One of them was loose.
“James, do you need this sign?” Richard asked, gesturing to the loose sign.
“No, I’ve got the message written down already. You can take it,” James replied, without looking up from his notes.
Richard began pulling at the sign. He was having some difficulty, so I came over to help. Between the two of us, we were able to lift the thing out of its hole. I sat down against another sign, and watched the two of them. James was still scribbling away at his logic puzzle, happy as a clam. Richard was using the sign to poke around in the hedges, trying to find… I’m not sure what. Anything, probably.
Here, in a nutshell, was the difference between the two of them. James is a logician; give him an environment with a clearly defined set of rules, and he can probably find any solution in it. Richard, on the other hand, is an inventor; he doesn’t find solutions, he made them.
James was frowning. “I’ve double checked the logic, but there isn’t a solution. These signs don’t give us enough information to tell us the way out.”
Richard frowned. “That’s odd. Is there enough information to narrow our choices down at all?”
“Yes. It’s one of the last three on the far left end.”
Richard thought for a moment, and then replied, “Unless you have any better ideas, I say we just try one of them. The sign at the beginning didn’t imply any penalty for failure.”
Neither James nor I said anything. Then we shrugged, more or less in unison, and followed Richard onto the farthest path. The path was straight and long. We walked for what felt like several minutes, although with my watched stopped, there was no way to tell for certain. Eventually we saw the path open up again to another fork. Or more accurately, the same fork. I could see our footprints in the dirt, and one of the paths was missing its sign.
“What the – We were walking in a straight line!”
“James. We’re in a magical hedge maze that has stopped time and has no entrance, and this surprises you?”
James looked at Richard, and the shrugged. “I guess it shouldn’t.”
“Anyway, this makes our task pretty easy. We’ll just try the other two paths, and one of them will lead us out.”
Something about that seemed wrong to me, but it wasn’t until we had come back around the second time that I figured it out.
“We can try the third path,” I warned, “but I don’t think that it’s going to lead us out.”
“How do you figure?”
“The maze said that it wasn’t going to let us go until we completed the challenge. This is a logic puzzle – a guess and check answer isn’t a proper solution. I don’t think it will let us out until we have a logical proof of the answer.”
“But we don’t have enough information to get a logical solution!” James reminded me.
“Good point. Well, it can’t hurt to try the last path.”
We walked down the third of the possible paths. Sure enough, we returned to the fork, same as before. Now there were nine sets of footprints – three pairs going down each of the three paths.
“We could try the other six paths,” offered Richard. He sounded doubtful.
When nobody replied, Richard began to poke the hedges with his sign, looking for an alternative path, or another clue. I sat down and began thinking hard. Why had the maze presented us an unsolvable puzzle? It claimed to be testing our strengths; if the sign had been telling the truth, the challenge was solvable by one of our strengths. For this case, it was obviously James’s strength. He thrived on logic puzzles like this.
But what if the puzzle wasn’t just meant for James…
I stood up. “We need to split up,” I said.
“Why? How would that help?” asked Richard.
“The maze is trying to create a challenge that plays to our strengths. One challenge for all three of us. But it can’t, because we’re too different. James is a logician. He can solve any problem in a well-defined environment. You’re an inventor. You’ve spent all your time here looking for tools and loopholes. The maze has tried to compromise, but it can’t create a puzzle that has a solution within the rules, which requires breaking the rules to solve. If we split up, then it will be able to split up the challenges, and create tasks which are actually solvable in our separate paradigms.”
“That might work…” James was considering the idea. “If the maze does want us to stick together, we’ll be back together before too long. It can’t hurt to try.”
“Certainly it’s better than sticking around here,” agreed Richard. “Let’s try it.”
We each chose one of the three “good” paths, and started down them. James and Richard vanished from my hearing almost as soon as we entered. I walked and walked, until I came to... the fork that the three of us had just left.
Maybe the maze wants us together after all, I thought to myself. But there was no sign of James or Richard. Just me, nine paths, eight signs, and one hole. Was this my challenge? I wasn’t a logician, I had no hope of deducing the logic correctly. I was a psychologist.
It was then that I realized my error. My reasoning had been correct. The maze wanted us separate, so that it could tailor its challenges to our strengths. But my strength was psychology, and psychology required people. Now that I was alone, the maze couldn’t give me a challenge, because it had no people to challenge me with.
Unless…
There was still one person present. Me. The challenge could involve some aspect of my psychology that I had to unravel and understand. But what could it be? In many respects, psychology wasn’t about individuals. It was about how individuals reacted to their environment, and the choices that the environment presented.
Choices like the nine paths in front of me.
The eight signs were gone now. One larger sign stood in their place.
I studied the paths in front of me. At first glance, they all looked identical, but that was not so. The three on the left were the ones that Richard, James, and I had taken. Our footprints still lead into them, four pairs in each. Would having entered them already make them more appealing to me, or less appealing? They had already failed to lead me out, which was a strike against them, but James had qualified them as the only viable exits, which would incline me in their favor. After long thought, I decided that I would be more likely to choose them, and turned to look at the others. Of the other six, three of them went straight into the distance, one curved to the left, one curved to the right, and one split in into two directions. I immediately discounted the one that curved right. It was on the far right side, and it provided an obvious impression that it was the way out. The left curved path featured slightly shorter hedges, giving it a brighter, more cheerful feel, so it was out too. Of the three straight paths, one included much higher hedges which loomed ominously over a narrowed path, one sported hedges with long thorns which glinted wickedly in the late afternoon sun, and the third featured fog so thick I wasn’t entirely sure it was straight at all. And of course, there was the path which forked again just a few yards beyond where I stood. Which of these was the path that psychology would indicate was the least likely one for me to take?
I don’t know how long I stood there pondering the 4 paths. Each looked ominous in its own way. They represented some of the most common fears of mankind: fear of dark and enclosed spaces, fear of pain and danger, fear of the unknown, and fear of making decisions. Which of these was the greatest fear?
And yet… the sign did not ask about mankind’s greatest fear. It did not ask which path would scare a person the most. It asked which path was the least likely to be chosen.
Suddenly, I knew what the answer was. The path that someone would be least likely to take was the one that wasn’t given as an option. Smiling to myself, I turned around and walked briskly back towards the path I had come from.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Richard and James were waiting for me as I emerged from the maze. James was on his cell. The path had turned to corn in the last few feet, and I expected that if I looked behind me, I would not see any hedges.
“You did it!” exclaimed Richard as I drew close.
“So did you,” I replied with a grin, “What was your challenge?”
“I ended up back in the same spot. Only this time, all nine of the signs were loose. I managed to balance them into a ladder and get on top of the hedges. Once I was on top, it was easy to find a way out.”
“I also ended up in the clearing again,” James added, putting away his phone. “But this time, Richard’s sign had been replaced by one that made the puzzle solvable. Emily says that they’re all fine. They’re lost somewhere in the middle of the corn maze, but the kids are having a blast.”
“That’s good,” said Richard, relaxing visibly. “I don’t know about you guys, but I need a drink.”