As his car approached he could see the long tall outer wall. He smiled to himself. It looked like something the Chinese would put up to keep out the invaders. They started driving past it and his smile kept getting bigger.

The thing stretched for nearly three miles and it was fifteen feet tall. At first, he had been bothered by something when he looked at it. It didn’t look quite…right. All at once he’d realized that it didn’t have any towers on the corners. The whole thing looked like an unfinished castle! He’d toyed with the idea of adding something, but decided against it. Maybe that would come later.

The amount of brick and stone that they were using was already enormous. The Labyrinth was a full three miles across and the same amount long. The space between each row was a good fifteen feet. That meant that the maze had over 1000 walls on both the horizontal and vertical sides.

They’d done some back of the envelope math when they started to develop this monster. If you lined up all of the walls you’d get something over 6000 miles long. Something that would reach from New York to L.A. and back without any trouble. Rex wanted to awe people and this would certainly do that.

It wasn’t just a huge brick pile though. They’d found about fifty good spots within where they could leave an open place. These were for picnics and other gatherings. The center was left open and an aid station was built there. The average distance from one of the openings to the middle was about four miles. A moderate hike. If you knew the way.

That was the trick to the entire thing, not knowing the way. Rex had worked hard on that one issue. Keeping the mystery in place was his top priority. He impressed this on his workers and the construction staff.

The way he saw it, there was two things that could eventually ruin the secret. The first was high tech. Anyone who could access an internet map would get a straight birds-eye view of the place. Throw in a printer and they’d have a map of the whole thing.

This had to be countered. A few well placed words to the right people (and a nice gift or two) and he was able to control when they would update his little stretch of heaven. That was only a temporary solution though.

To add camouflage, they also put planters on the tops of many walls and planted ivy. When this grew out it would be harder to tell what was a wall and what was grass. It wasn’t something that would fool an expert at orbital reconnaissance but it would make it harder for the average tourist.

The second method to crack a maze was much lower tech and much harder to defeat. Anyone with sufficient time on their hands could simply go in there with a pencil and some graph paper. If they were careful they could develop a map. As long as the walls stayed in the same spots, this would work just fine.

Rex’s solution? Let some of the walls move around.

Not all of them. That wouldn’t be economical. Just a couple hundred key sections. That ought to do nicely.

This required some heavy duty engineering. Rex worked his people hard but they found some nice solutions for him. In fact, they did such a nice job that they gave him a new problem. He really wanted to brag up this part of the Wonder but he couldn’t!

The better way, far better, was to manipulate the maze every so often and never admit that you’d done it. Someone would notice eventually, but so what? As long as he didn’t confirm it, they wouldn’t be believed. And if he didn’t sound trustworthy? That would only add to they mystique.

He could picture it easily. Smart guys out there making maps and comparing notes. Would there be internet sites devoted to laying out the whole plan? He thought there would be. Another idea came to him. If nothing happened spontaneously, they could create their own sites and feed them misinformation!

Rex loved this idea. He’d been a prankster all of his life. The biomedical field didn’t do much to feed this part of him. He suddenly felt like life had handed him a whole gag shop worth of tricks. It should be illegal to have this much fun.