The World of Null-A Read online

  A knock on the door ended the thought. He opened it and looked at the boy who stood there. The boy said, “I’ve been sent, sir, to tell you that all the rest of the guests on this floor are in the sitting room.”

  Gosseyn felt blank. “So what?” he asked.

  “They’re discussing the protection of the people on this floor, sir, during the games.”

  “Oh!” said Gosseyn.

  He was shocked that he had forgotten. The earlier announcement coming over the hotel communicators about such protection had intrigued him. But it had been hard to believe that the world’s greatest city would be entirely without police or court protection during the period of the games. In outlying cities, in all other towns, villages, and communities, the continuity of law went on. Here, in the city of the Machine, for a month there would be no law except the negative defensive law of the groups.

  “They asked me to tell you,” the boy said, “that those who don’t come are not protected in any way during the period of the games.”

  “I’ll be right there,” smiled Gosseyn. “Tell them I’m a newcomer and forgot. And thank you.”

  He handed the boy a quarter and waved him off. He closed the door, fastened the three plasto windows, and put a tracer on his videophone. Then, carefully locking the door behind him, he went out along the hall.

  As he entered the sitting room, he noticed a man from his own town, a store proprietor named Nordegg, standing near the door. Gosseyn nodded and smiled a greeting. The man glanced at him curiously, but did not return either the smile or the nod. Briefly, that seemed odd. The unusualness of it faded from Gosseyn’s mind as he saw that others of the large group present were looking at him.

  Bright, friendly eyes, curious, friendly faces with just a hint of calculation in them-that was the impression Gosseyn had. He suppressed a smile. Everybody was sizing up everybody else, striving to determine what chance his neighbors had of winning in the games. He saw that an old man at a desk beside the door was beckoning to him. Gosseyn walked over. The man said, “I’ve got to have your name and such for our book here.”

  “Gosseyn,” said Gosseyn. “Gilbert Gosseyn, Cress Village, Florida, age thirty-four, height six feet one inch, weight one hundred eighty-five, no special distinguishing marks.”

  The old man smiled up at him, his eyes twinkling. “That’s what you think,” he said. “If your mind matches your appearance, you’ll go far in the games.” He finished, “I notice you didn’t say you were married.”

  Gosseyn hesitated, thinking of a dead woman. “No,” he said finally, quietly, “not married.”

  “Well, you’re a smart-looking man. May the games prove you worthy of Venus, Mr. Gosseyn.”

  “Thanks,” said Gosseyn.

  As he turned to walk away, Nordegg, the other man from Cress Village, brushed past him and bent over the ledger on the desk. When Gosseyn looked back a minute later, Nordegg was talking with animation to the old man, who seemed to be protesting. Gosseyn watched them, puzzled, then forgot them as a small, jolly-looking man walked to an open space in the crowded room and held up his hand.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “I would say that we should now begin our discussions. Everybody interested in group protection has had ample time to come here. And therefore, as soon as the challenging period is over, I will move that the doors be locked and we start.

  “For the benefit,” he went on, “of those new to the games who do not know what I mean by challenging period, I will explain the procedure. As you know, everybody here present will be required to repeat into the lie detector the information he or she gave to the doorkeeper. But before we begin with that, if you have any doubts about the legitimacy of anybody’s presence, please state them now. You have the right to challenge anybody present. Please voice any suspicions you have, even though you possess no specific evidence. Remember, however, that the group meets every week and that challenges can be made at each meeting. But now, any challenges?”

  “Yes,” said a voice behind Gosseyn. “I challenge the presence here of a man calling himself Gilbert Gosseyn.”

  “Eh?” said Gosseyn. He whirled and stared incredulously at Nordegg.

  The man looked at him steadily, then his gaze went out to the faces beyond Gosseyn. He said, “When Gosseyn first came in, he nodded to me as if he knew me, and so I went over to the book to find out his name, thinking it might recall him to me. To my amazement I heard him give his address as Cress Village, Florida, which is where I come from. Cress Village, ladies and gentlemen, is a rather famous little place, but it has a population of only three hundred. I own one of the three stores, and I know everybody, absolutely everybody, in the village and in the surrounding countryside. There is no person residing in or near Cress Village by the name of Gilbert Gosseyn.”

  For Gosseyn, the first tremendous shock had come and gone while Nordegg was still speaking. The after-feeling that came was that he was being made ridiculous in some obscure way. The larger accusation seemed otherwise quite meaningless.

  He said, “This all seems very silly, Mr. Nordegg.” He paused. “That is your name, is it not?”

  “That’s right,” Nordegg nodded, “though I’m wondering how you found it out.”

  “Your store in Cress Village,” Gosseyn persisted, “stands at the end of a row of nine houses, where four roads come together.”

  “There is no doubt,” said Nordegg, “that you have been through Cress Village, either personally or by means of a photograph.”

  The man’s smugness irritated Gosseyn. He fought his anger as he said, “About a mile westward from your store is a rather curiously shaped house.”

  ” ‘House,’ he calls it!” said Nordegg. “The world-famous Florida home of the Hardie family.”

  “Hardie,” said Gosseyn, “was the maiden name of my late wife. She died about a month ago. Patricia Hardie. Does that strike any chord in your memory?”

  He saw that Nordegg was grinning gleefully at the intent faces surrounding them.

  “Well, ladies and gentlemen, you can judge for yourselves. He says that Patricia Hardie was his wife. That’s a marriage I think we would all have heard about if it had ever taken place. And as for her being the late Patricia Hardie, or Patricia Gosseyn, well”-he smiled-“all I can say is, I saw her yesterday morning, and she was very, very much alive, and looking extremely proud and beautiful on her favorite horse, a white Arabian.”

  It wasn’t ridiculous any more. None of this fitted. Patricia didn’t own a horse, white or colored. They had been poor, working their small fruit farm in the daytime, studying at night. Nor was Cress Village world-famous as the country home of the Hardies. The Hardies were nobodies. Who the devil were they supposed to be?

  The question flashed by. With a simple clarity he saw the means that would end the deadlock.

  “I can only suggest,” he said, “that the lie detector will readily verify my statement.”

  But the he detector said, “No, you are not Gilbert Gosseyn, nor have you ever been a resident of Cress Village. You are-” It stopped. The dozens of tiny electronic tubes in it flickered uncertainly.

  “Yes, yes,” urged the pudgy man. “Who is he?”

  There was a long pause, then: “No knowledge about that is available in his mind,” said the detector. “There is an aura of unique strength about him. But he himself seems to be unaware of his true identity. Under the circumstances, no identification is possible.”

  “And under the circumstances,” said the pudgy man with finality, “I can only suggest an early visit to a psychiatrist, Mr. Gosseyn. Certainly you cannot remain here.”

  A minute later, Gosseyn was out in the corridor. A thought, a purpose, lay on his brain like a cake of ice. He reached his room and put through a call on the videophone. It took two minutes to make the connection with Cress Village. A strange woman’s face came onto the plate. It was a rather severe face, but distinctive and young.

  “I’m Miss Treechers, Miss Patricia Ha
rdie’s Florida secretary. What is it you wish to speak to Miss Hardie about?”

  For a moment the existence of such a person as Miss Treechers was staggering. Then: “It’s private,” said Gosseyn, recovering. “And it’s important that I speak to her personally. Please connect me at once.”

  He must have sounded or looked or acted authoritative. The young woman said hesitantly, “I’m not supposed to do this, but you can reach Miss Hardie at the palace of the Machine.”

  Gosseyn said explosively, “She’s here, in the great city!”

  He was not aware of hanging up. But suddenly the woman’s face was gone. The video was dark. He was alone with his realization: Patricia was alive!

  He had known, of course. His brain, educated in accepting things as they were, had already adjusted to the fact that a lie detector didn’t lie. Sitting there, he felt strangely satiated with information. He had no impulse to call the palace, to talk to her, to see her. Tomorrow, of course, he would have to go there, but that seemed far away in space-time. He grew aware that someone was knocking loudly at his door. He opened it to four men, the foremost of whom, a tall young man, said, “I’m the assistant manager. Sorry, but you’ll have to leave. We’ll check your baggage downstairs. During the policeless month, we can take no chances with suspicious individuals.”

  It took about twenty minutes for Gosseyn to be ejected from the hotel. Night was falling as he walked slowly along the almost deserted street.

  II

  The gifted … Aristotle … affected perhaps the largest number of people ever influenced by a single man … . Our tragedies began when the “intensional” biologist Aristotle took the lead over the “extensional” mathematical philosopher Plato, and formulated all the primitive identifications, subject-predictivism… into an imposing system, which for more than two thousand years we were not allowed to revise under penalty of persecution… . Because of this, his name has been used for the two-valued doctrines of Aristotelianism, and, conversely, the many-valued realities of modern science are given the name non-Aristotelianism… .

  A.K.

  It was too early for grave danger. The night, though already arrived, was but beginning. The prowlers and the gangs, the murderers and the thieves, who would soon emerge into the open, were still waiting for the deeper darkness. Gosseyn came to a sign that flashed on and off, repeating tantalizingly:

  ROOMS FOR THE UNPROTECTED

  $20 a night

  Gosseyn hesitated. He couldn’t afford that price for the full thirty days of the games, but it might do for a few nights. Reluctantly, he rejected the possibility. There were ugly stories connected with such places. He preferred to risk the night in the open.

  He walked on. As the planetary darkness deepened, more and more lights flashed on in their automatic fashion. The city of the Machine glowed and sparkled. For miles and miles along one street he crossed, he could see two lines of street lamps like shining sentinels striding in geometric progression toward a distant blaze point of illusory meeting. It was all suddenly depressing.

  He was apparently suffering from semi-amnesia, and he must try to comprehend that in the largest sense of meaning. Only thus would he be able to free himself from the emotional effects of his condition. Gosseyn attempted to visualize the freeing as an event in the null-A interpretation. The event that was himself, as he was, his body and mind as a whole, amnesia and all, as of this moment on this day and in this city.

  Behind that conscious integration were thousands of hours of personal training. Behind the training was the non-Aristotelian technique of automatic extensional thinking, the unique development of the twentieth century which, after four hundred years, had become the dynamic philosophy of the human race. “The map is not the territory… . The word is not the thing itself… .” The belief that he had been married did not make it fact. The hallucinations which his unconscious mind had inflicted on his nervous system had to be counteracted.

  As always, it worked. Like water draining from an overturned basin, the doubts and fears spilled out of him. The weight of false grief, false because it had so obviously been imposed on his mind for someone else’s purpose, lifted. He was free.

  He started forward again. As he walked, his gaze darted from side to side, seeking to penetrate the shadows of doorways. Street corners he approached alertly, his hand on his gun. In spite of his caution, he did not see the girl who came racing from a side street until an instant before she bumped into him with a violence that unbalanced them both.

  The swiftness of the happening did not prevent precautions. With his left arm, Gosseyn snatched at the young woman. He caught her body just below the shoulders, imprisoning both of her arms in a viselike grip. With his right hand, he drew his gun. All in an instant. There followed a longer moment while he fought to recover from the imbalance her speed and weight had imposed on them both. He succeeded. He straightened. He half carried, half dragged her into the shadowed archway of a door. As he reached its shelter, the girl began to wriggle and to moan softly. Gosseyn brought his gun hand up and put it, gun and all, over her mouth.

  “Sh-sh!” he whispered. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  She ceased wriggling. She stopped her whimpering. He allowed her to free her mouth. She said breathlessly, “They were right behind me. Two men. They must have seen you and run off.”

  Gosseyn considered that. Like all the happenings in spacetime, this one was packed with unseen and unseeable factors. A young woman, different from all the other young women in the universe, had come running in terror from a side street. Her terror was either real or it was assumed. Gosseyn’s mind skipped the harmless possibility and fastened upon the probability that her appearance was a trick. He pictured a small group waiting around the corner, anxious to share in the spoils of a policeless city, yet not willing to take the risk of a direct assault. He felt coldly, unsympathetically suspicious. Because if she was harmless, what was she doing out alone on such a night? He muttered the question savagely.

  “I’m unprotected,” came the husky answer. “I lost my job last week because I wouldn’t go out with the boss. And I had no savings. My landlady put me out this morning when I couldn’t pay my rent.”

  Gosseyn said nothing. Her explanation was so feeble that he couldn’t have spoken without effort. After a moment, he wasn’t so sure. His own story wouldn’t sound any too plausible if he should ever make the mistake of putting it into words. Before committing himself to the possibility that she was telling the truth, he tried one question. “There’s absolutely no place you can go?”

  “None,” she said. And that was that. She was his charge for the duration of the games. He led her unresisting out onto the sidewalk, and, carefully avoiding the corner, into the road.

  “We’ll walk on the center white line,” he said. “That way we can watch the corners better.”

  The road had its own dangers, but he decided not to mention them.

  “Now, look,” Gosseyn went on earnestly, “don’t be afraid of me. I’m in a mess, too, but I’m honest. So far as

  I am concerned, we’re in the same predicament, and our only purpose right now is to find a place where we can spend the night.”

  She made a sound. To Gosseyn it seemed like a muffled laugh, but when he whirled on her, her face was averted from the nearest street light and he couldn’t be sure. She turned a moment later to face him, and he had his first real look at her. She was young, with thin but heavily tanned cheeks. Her eyes were dark pools, her lips parted. She wore makeup, but it wasn’t a good job and added nothing to her beauty. She didn’t look as if she had laughed at anything or anybody for a long time. Gosseyn’s suspicion faded. But he was aware that he was back where he had started, protector of a girl whose individuality had not yet shown itself in any tangible form.

  The vacant lot, when they came opposite it, made Gosseyn pause thoughtfully. It was dark, and there was brush scattered over it. It was an ideal hiding place for marauders of the night. But, loo
ked at from another angle, it was also a possible shelter for an honest man and his protegee, provided they could approach it without being seen. He noticed after a brief survey that there was a back alley leading to the rear of the vacant lot, and a space between two stores through which they could get to the alley.

  It took ten minutes to locate a satisfactory patch of grass under a low, spreading shrub.

  “We’ll sleep here,” Gosseyn whispered.

  She sank down. And it was the wordlessness of her acquiescence that brought the sudden realization that she had come with him too easily. He lay thoughtful, eyes narrowed, pondering the possible dangers.

  There was no moon, and the darkness under the overhanging bush was intense. After a while, a long while, Gosseyn could see the shadowlike figure of her in a splash of dim light reflections from a distant street lamp. She was more than five feet from him, and all those first minutes that he watched her she didn’t move perceptibly. Studying the shadow shape of her, Gosseyn grew increasingly conscious of the unknown factor she represented. She was at least as unknown as he himself. His speculation ended as the young woman said softly, “My name is Teresa Clark. What’s yours?”

  What indeed? Gosseyn wondered. Before he could speak, the girl added, “Are you here for the games?”

  “That’s right,” said Gosseyn.

  He hesitated. It was he who ought to be asking the questions.

  “And you?” he said. “Are you here for the games, too?”

  It took a moment to realize that he had propounded a leading question. Her answer was bitter-voiced. “Don’t be funny. I don’t even know what null-A stands for.”

  Gosseyn was silent. There was a humility here that embarrassed him. The girl’s personality was suddenly clearer: a twisted ego that would shortly reveal a complete satisfaction with itself. A car raced past on the near-by street, ending the need for comment. It was followed rapidly by four more. The night was briefly alive with the thrum of tires on pavement. The sound faded. But vague echoes remained, distant throbbing noises which must have been there all the time but which now that his attention had been aroused became apparent.