Mazes are a fiendish torture device. The purpose of a maze is to lose people. Do not be one of those people. The loss of intergalactic population due to the action of mazes is a closely guarded secret but there are some precautions one can take to avoid adding to this statistic:

• If someone tells you a maze is harmless fun, do not believe them. Give them some examples of fun which do not involve rushing around pointlessly in a small space getting lost. This may not be a good time to explain that you prefer to rush around pointlessly in outer space getting lost on backwater planets.

• Prepare some excuses in advance. Say that you are claustrophobic, you are allergic to hedges or are just not goal oriented. The last one of those has the advantage that it may take them a while to work out. This is your opportunity to escape.

• If the maze operators try to charge you money in order to convince you that it is something you want to do, then pretend you have none. It may not be necessary to pretend if you have taken the precaution of spending any money beforehand.

• If someone says they know the route, offer to hold their stuff while they demonstrate. There should be plenty of time to write a novel or calculate some new hyperspatial vectors before they return.

If all else fails and you somehow find yourself inside a maze, here are the best ways to get out:

• In a turf maze simply sidle towards the edge when no-one is looking. It helps if you have an SEP field.

• On a tile maze (or paper one) you can develop a wider girth than normal and accidentally find yourself on an adjacent path closer to the exit. Repeat until out.

• In a hedge maze you will need your towel. Find a reason to be out of sight of anyone else, put your towel over your head to protect your hair, antennae or eye-stalks, choose a direction and push through any hedges blocking your way until you are out.

• Some people recommend the bottom first method of escaping from hedge mazes. This may have major disadvantages with clothing etc but those are compensated for by the slight advantage that, if you happen to meet someone else in the next aisle, you can say you were just looking for your *** which had rolled/run into the hedge. Going backwards is so silly that they will believe you. It helps to have prepared the excuse by holding your *** in your hand before commencing the bottom first procedure.

• A more radical approach to solving hedge mazes involves a chainsaw. However, this is unlikely to go unnoticed.

If you have still not been discouraged, try some thread mazes or read more about mazes.