The World of Null-A Read online

  Hardie was thoughtful. “I see your point. And I can’t clear that up for you. Crang dominates Thorson these days, and I am in the dark on many things. I’m afraid”-he smiled ruefully-“I’m being relegated.”

  So that was why he was here, offering facts on an equal exchange basis. Gosseyn had a sudden vivid picture of these Earthmen beginning to realize that they had been pawns. Before he could speak, Hardie said harshly, “I regret nothing, if that’s what you’re thinking. The Machine denied me the right to further advancement, and I refused to accept any such limitation.”

  “Why did it deny you?”

  “Because it saw in me a potential dictator, so it said. The damned thing was set to weed out people like me at a time when there was still legitimate fear of such an eventuality.”

  “So you proceeded to prove that it was right?”

  “The opportunity came, and I took it. I’d do the same thing again, under the same circumstances. There’ll be a place for me in the galactic hierarchy. Thorson is just playing safe now, in this crisis.”

  The grim expression faded from his face. He smiled. “We’re getting away from our subject and-“

  There was an interruption. The door opened, and a man in uniform entered hastily and shut the door behind him.

  “Sir,” he said to Hardie, “Mr. Thorson is climbing the stairs. I just received the signal.”

  President Hardie stood up. He looked annoyed but calm. “Well, that ends that. But I think I’ve learned what I wanted to know. I’ve been trying to make up my mind about you. It’s clear to me that you are not the final Gosseyn. Good-by, and remember what I said. For the present, make compromises. Stay alive.”

  He and the guard went out the door through which Patricia had disappeared fifteen minutes earlier. They were gone only a few seconds when there was a knock on the main corridor door. Then the door was pushed open, and Thorson came in.

  XIII

  The big man paused on the threshold, and he was as Gosseyn remembered him, heavy-faced, hawk-nosed and strong. From the beginning, Thorson’s position had been unmistakable-the man everyone feared, agent of Enro. Now his somber eyes surveyed Gosseyn.

  “Not dressed yet!” he said sharply.

  His gaze darted over the room. His eyes were suspicious. And in that mood, Gosseyn saw the man suddenly in another light. From the stars he had come into a strange sun system. Here on Earth, surrounded by people he did not know, acting under a directive from a remote authority, he was trying to carry out his instructions. The strain was transparently terrific. At no time could he be certain of the loyalty of the people with whom he had to co-operate.

  He sniffed the air now. “Interesting perfume you use,” he commented.

  “I hadn’t noticed,” said Gosseyn. His attention having been called to it, he detected a faint scent. He wondered if it belonged to Patricia. She’d have to watch out for little things like that. He stared at the big man stonily. “What do you want?”

  Thorson made no effort to come further into the room, nor did he shut the door. He studied Gosseyn thoughtfully.

  “I just wanted to have a look at you,” he said. “Just look at you.” He shrugged finally. “Well, that’s that.”

  He turned and went out. The door closed behind him. Gosseyn blinked. He had been tensing for a verbal clash and he felt let down. He continued his dressing, puzzled by the man’s action. He forgot it as he saw by the bedroom clock that it was almost time for Crang to come back. A moment later he heard the outer door open.

  “Be right with you,” he called.

  There was no answer and no sound. A shadow darkened the door. Gosseyn looked up with a start. John Prescott came into the bedroom.

  “I’ve only got a minute,” he said.

  In spite of his surprise, Gosseyn sighed. The uniform haste of his visitors was becoming tiresome. But he said nothing, simply climbed to his feet and looked at the man questioningly.

  “You’ll be wondering about me,” said Prescott.

  Gosseyn nodded, but his mind was almost blank. He listened silently to the rapid explanation that followed. It was all there. Galactic agent. Secret supporter of null-A. “Naturally,” said Prescott, “I wasn’t going to tell you that unless I had to. I recognized you from photographs when you were attacking me that afternoon, and, frankly, I reported your presence on Venus, taking it for granted that you would be able to get away. I was startled when you turned up at Crang’s tree house.”

  He paused for breath and Gosseyn had time to feel disappointment. His one advantage over the group, that he knew about Prescott, was gone. It seemed silly in retrospect that he had ever counted on it to help him, but he had. The only question that remained was, what was the purpose of a confession at this hour?

  “It’s Amelia,” Prescott said anxiously. “She’s innocent in all this. I submitted to that farce of being a fellow captive with her, thinking they would merely hold her until the attack on Venus was made. But Crang told me a few minutes ago that ‘X’ and Thorson have something in mind for her in connection with you.”

  He stopped. With fingers that trembled ever so slightly, he drew a little metal box from his pocket, opened it, and, walking over, held the box out to Gosseyn. Gosseyn stared down curiously at the twelve white pills that were in it.

  “Take one,” said Prescott.

  Gosseyn had a suspicion of what was coming, but he reached dutifully into the box and lifted out one of the pills.

  “Swallow it!”

  Gosseyn shook his head. He was annoyed. “I don’t swallow strange pills.”

  “It’s for your own protection. I swear it. An antidote.”

  “I haven’t taken any poison,” said Gosseyn patiently.

  Prescott closed the box in his hand with a snap. He slipped it into one pocket, backed away, and simultaneously drew a blaster with his other hand. “Gosseyn,” he said quietly, “I’m a desperate man. You swallow that pill or I’ll burn you.”

  The danger was unreal. Gosseyn looked down at the pill, then at Prescott. He said mildly, “I noticed a lie detector in the next room. That would settle this very quickly.”

  It did. Prescott said to the lie detector, “This pill is an antidote, a protection for Gosseyn in case I take certain action. Will you verify that one point?”

  The answer was prompt. “That’s right,” said the instrument.

  Gosseyn swallowed the pill, stood for a moment waiting for effects. When none occurred, he said, “I hope everything will be all right with your wife.”

  “Thanks,” was all Prescott said. He departed hastily by the door that led to the main corridor. Gosseyn finished dressing and then sat down to wait for Crang. He was more disturbed than he cared to admit. The people who had come to see him had been intent each in his own purpose. But one thing they had in common-an earnest belief that a crisis was imminent.

  Venus was to be attacked-by whom was not clear. A great galactic military power? It was strangely easy to picture, because this was the way it would be. This was the way that a race bound to its own sun and planets would be subjugated. Mysterious agents, meaningless actions, infiltration, and finally an irresistible attack from nowhere. The various references to a league of galactic powers opposed to the assault seemed vague and insubstantial beside the fact of the presence of Thorson and the steps that had already been taken. Murder. Betrayal. Seizure of power on Earth.

  “And I’m supposed to stop it?” said Gosseyn aloud.

  He laughed curtly, feeling ridiculous. Fortunately, the problem of himself was slowly untangling. For him, one of the most dangerous periods had been his partial acceptance of the propaganda that he had come to life again in a second Gosseyn body. At least his logic was slowly disposing of that. He could face the evening with his mind closer to sanity.

  A knock on the door drew -him out of his uneasy reverie. To his relief it was Crang.

  “Ready?” the man asked.

  Gosseyn nodded.

  “Then come along.”


  They went down several flights of stairs and along a narrow corridor to a locked door. Crang unlocked it and pushed it open. Through it, Gosseyn had a glimpse of a marble floor and of machines.

  “You’re to go in alone and look at the body.”

  “Body?” said Gosseyn curiously. Then he got it. Body!

  He forgot Crang. He went in. The larger view of the room disclosed more machines, some tables, wall cabinets lined with bottles and beakers, and in one corner a longish shape lying on a table, covered by a white sheet. Gosseyn stared at the sheeted figure and a considerable portion of his remaining calm began to slip from him. For many days he had heard talk of this other body of his, and, while the verbal picture he had conjured so often had affected him, there was a difference.

  It was the difference between a thought and an event, between words and reality, between death and life. So mighty was that difference that his organs experienced a profound metabolic change, and his nerves, unable to integrate the new reactions, began to register wildly.

  Bodily sanity came back with a rush. He grew aware of the floor pressing against his feet, and of the air of the room, cool and dry as ashes, in his lungs and in his mouth. His vision blurred. Slowly, conscious again of his human-ness but still not normal, he let his mind float out toward that still, dead form. And though he had no consciousness of any movement, he walked to the body, reached forward, and, with the tips of his fingers, lifted the sheet and dragged it off the body onto the floor.

  XIV

  Gosseyn had expected to see a hopelessly charred body. In some respects, the corpse that sprawled rigidly on its back on the marble table was horribly damaged, but it was the body, not the face that had suffered. They must have had orders, the men who had fired at him, not to injure the brain. The body had been ripped almost in two by machine-gun bullets. The chest and abdomen were little more than tattered flesh and bone, and every ragged strip, every square inch of flesh above the knees was burned so terribly that there was no human resemblance. The face was intact.

  It was a serene countenance, untouched by the fear and unendurable anguish that had racked it in those moments before death came. There was even a touch of color in the cheeks, and, if it hadn’t been for the blasted body, it might have been himself sleeping there, so lifelike was the face. Undoubtedly precautions had been taken to prevent the brain from deteriorating. After a moment, he noticed that the top of the head was not actually attached to the skull. It was there, but it had been neatly sawed off and temporarily replaced. Whether the brain was still inside, Gosseyn did not attempt to find out.

  A sound behind him made him straighten slowly. He did not turn immediately, but his mind began to lift clear of the dead body and to recognize in greater detail his general situation. It took several seconds before he identified the sound with a memory of other similar sounds. Rubber wheels on marble. “X.” He looked around with the cold determination of a man who has braced himself for anything.

  He stared icily at the plastic monstrosity. Then he turned his attention to the people who had followed “X” into the laboratory. Bleakly he looked straight into the eyes of the handsome Hardie. His gaze passed on to meet the cynical smile of the giant, Thorson, and finally to where Patricia Hardie, cool and interested, half-hidden behind the two men, watched him with her bright eyes.

  “Well!” It was “X,” bass-voiced and without humor. “I have an idea, Gosseyn, that you haven’t the faintest plan for stopping us from laying you out cold beside your other body.”

  It was not a brilliant analysis, but it had one very important quality about it from the viewpoint of a man who had no belief at all that the essence of his personality would recur in a third body if this second one was destroyed. The important quality was that, word for word, it was the truth. “X” was waving his plastic arm with a gesture that suggested impatience. His next words confirmed it.

  “Enough of this tomfoolery. Bring in the Prescott woman and hold Gosseyn.”

  Four men held Gosseyn as the woman was brought in by three huge guards. They looked as if they had been in a fight. Amelia Prescott’s hair was down and her face flushed. Her hands were tied behind her back and “she was breathing heavily. There must have been a transparent plastic gag inside her mouth, because her lips worked frantically in futile effort when she saw Gosseyn. She subsided finally, shrugging. She smiled at him a little sadly, but there was pride in her manner too.

  “X” faced Gosseyn, peering at him from under the dome that covered his head. He said, “Gosseyn, you’ve put us into a dilemma. We’re geared for action on a scale not seen since the third world war. We have been assigned nine thousand spaceships, forty million men, gigantic munitions factories, yet this is but a fraction of the military power of the greatest empire that ever was. Gosseyn, we can’t lose.”

  He paused, then went on, “Nevertheless, we prefer to play safe. We’d like to invite you, the unknown quantity, to join us as one of the top leaders in the solar system.” He shrugged. “But you can understand that it would be useless even to begin such a relationship if you turned out to be unwilling to accept the realities of our position. We have to kill, Gosseyn. We have to be ruthless. Killing convinces people as nothing else will.”

  For a moment, Gosseyn thought he meant to kill Amelia Prescott. A faintness seized him. And then he realized that he had misunderstood.

  “Kill!” he said blankly. “Kill whom?”

  “About twenty million Venusians,” answered “X.” Sitting there in his wheel chair, he looked like a plastic nightmare beetle. “As you must know,” he went on, “the only difference between extinguishing the life in twenty human nervous systems and twenty million is the effect on the emotions of the survivors. Good propaganda should take care of that.”

  Gosseyn felt as though he were standing at the bottom of a well and sinking, sulking. “And what,” he heard his voice say hollowly out of the depths, “about the other two hundred and twenty million inhabitants of Venus?”

  “Terror!” said “X” in his G-string bass voice. “Merciless terror against those who resist. History teaches that it has never been difficult to control the mass of a nation once its head has been cut off. The head of Venus is a very collective one, hence the large number of necessary executions.” He waved his plastic arm in an impatient gesture. “All right, Gosseyn,” he said curtly, “make up your mind. We’ll let you do a lot of the reorganizing, but you must let us create the environment for it. Well, do we make a deal?”

  The question startled Gosseyn. He hadn’t realized that he was being given an argument which was supposed to persuade him. It was a case of levels of abstraction in the best null-A sense. These people were immured to the idea of mass executions. He wasn’t. The gap was unbridgeable because each side regarded the viewpoint of the other as illogical. He felt the rigidity of his refusal creep through his nervous system, through his body, until finally there was only utter, complete, ultimate positivity. He said in a quiet yet ringing voice, “No, Mr. ‘X’. No deal. And may all of you burn in an early Christian hell for even thinking of such murder.”

  “Thorson,” said “X” steadily, “kill her!”

  Gosseyn said blankly, “What?”

  Then he dragged his four guards half a dozen feet before they held him. When he could see again, Amelia Prescott was still smiling. She did not struggle as Thorson jabbed a syringe into her arm just above the elbow, but she fell like a stone. The giant caught her easily. “X” said, “You see, Gosseyn, we have an advantage over non-Aristotelians. They’re disturbed by scruples. We merely want to win. Now, that little incident was designed to-“

  He stopped. A surprised look twisted his face. He tumbled slowly forward to the floor. The hard plastic of his leg, arm, and body made a thumping sound on the marble as he sprawled full length on the floor. Behind him, Hardie, an equally bewildered look on his classic features, slumped to his knees, then sideways to the floor. The guards were falling, two of them tugging at th
eir guns, then yielding limply to unconsciousness.

  Thorson lowered the body of Amelia Prescott to the floor, and sank down beside it. Near them, Patricia Hardie dropped down to the floor with a thud. In every part of the room, his enemies lay around Gosseyn, looking very dead.

  It was all quite incomprehensible.

  XV

  The feeling of paralysis slid from Gosseyn. He dived jerkily for the nearest guard, and came up gun in hand. He stood then, holding the gun tensely, watching for movement in any of the bodies. There was none. Everybody lay very still.

  Gosseyn began hurriedly to disarm the guards. Whatever the reason for the opportunity that had come to him, there was no time to waste. The job finished, he paused, and once more stared at the strange scene. There were nine guards. They slumped on the floor, their bodies forming an odd pattern as if, like so many ninepins, they had all been tumbled with one shove. Gosseyn noted, without thinking about it, that Eldred Crang was not among those present. His gaze wandered swiftly over the remaining bodies, the two women and the three men. He thought, almost blankly, “I’m not grasping this as I ought. I’ve got to get out of here. Somebody may come.”

  He didn’t budge. There was another, a mighty thought in his mind: Were they really dead? That thought sent him plunging beside “X.” Unthinking, he placed a hand on the plastic cage that supported “X”s middle. The fleshless smoothness of it made him jerk his hand away in abrupt repulsion. It was hard to think of the fellow as human. He forced himself to bend near the face and listen. A slow, rhythmic warmth bathed his ear. Gosseyn straightened. “X” was alive. They must all be alive.

  He was about to climb to his feet when a sound at one of the doors froze him briefly where he was. Then, gun pointed, he flattened himself to the floor. As he lay there, eyes slitted, he cursed himself for having delayed. He could have been hundreds of feet away by this time.