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.