The World of Null-A Page 3

  The young woman’s voice intruded; she had a nice voice, though there was a plaintive note of self-pity in it that was not pleasant. “What is all this games stuff, anyway? In a way, it’s easy enough to see what happens to winners who stay on Earth. They get all the juicy jobs; they become judges, governors, and such. But what about the thousands who every year win the right to go to Venus? What do they do when they get there?”

  Gosseyn was noncommittal. “Personally,” he said, “I think I’ll be satisfied with the presidency.”

  The girl laughed. “You’ll have to go some,” she said, “to beat the Hardie gang.”

  Gosseyn sat up. “To beat whom?” he asked.

  “Why, Michael Hardie, president of Earth.”

  Slowly, Gosseyn sank back to the ground. So that was what Nordegg and the others at the hotel had meant. His story must have sounded like the ravings of a lunatic. President Hardie, Patricia Hardie, a palatial summer home at Cress Village-and every bit of information in his brain about that absolutely untrue.

  Who could have planted it there? The Hardies?

  “Could you,” came Teresa Clark’s voice slowly, “teach me how to win some minor job through the games?”

  “What’s that?” In the darkness Gosseyn stared at her. His astonishment yielded to a kindlier impulse. “I don’t see how it could be done,” he said. “The games require knowledge and skill integrated over a long period. During the last fifteen days, they require such flexibility of understanding that only the keenest and most highly developed brains in the world can hope to compete.”

  “I’m not interested in the last fifteen days. If you reach the seventh day, you get a job. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “The lowest job competed for in the games,” Gosseyn explained gently, “pays ten thousand a year. The competition, I understand, is slightly terrific.”

  “I’m pretty quick,” said Teresa Clark. “And I’m desperate. That should help.”

  Gosseyn doubted it, but he felt sorry for her.

  “If you wish,” he said, “I’ll give you a very brief resume.”

  He paused. She said quickly, “Please go on.”

  Gosseyn hesitated. He felt foolish again at the thought of talking to her on the subject. He began reluctantly, “The human brain is roughly divided into two sections, the cortex and the thalamus. The cortex is the center of discrimination, the thalamus the center of the emotional reactions of the nervous system.” He broke off. “Ever been to the Semantics building?”

  “It was wonderful,” said Teresa Clark. “All those jewels and precious metals.”

  Gosseyn bit his lip. “I don’t mean that. I mean the picture story on the walls. Did you see that?”

  “I don’t remember.” She seemed to realize she was not pleasing him. “But I saw the bearded man-what’s his name?-the director?”

  “Lavoisseur?” Gosseyn frowned into the darkness. “I thought he was killed in an accident a few years ago. When did you see him?”

  “Last year. He was in a wheel chair.”

  Gosseyn frowned. Just for a moment he had thought his memory was going to play him false again. It seemed odd, though, that whoever had tampered with his mind had not wanted him to know that the almost legendary Lavoisseur was still alive. He hesitated, then returned to what he had been saying earlier.

  “Both the cortex and the thalamus have wonderful potentialities. Both should be trained to the highest degree, but particularly they should be organized so that they will work in co-ordination. Wherever such co-ordination, or integration, does not occur, you have a tangled personality-over-emotionalism and, in fact, all variations of neuroticism. On the other hand, where cortical-thalamic integration has been established, the nervous system can withstand almost any shock.”

  Gosseyn stopped, recalling the shock his own brain had suffered a short time before. The girl said quickly, “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” Gruffly. “We can can talk about it again in the morning.”

  He was suddenly weary. He lay back. His last thought before he drifted into sleep was wonder as to what the lie detector had meant when it said, “There is an aura of unique strength about him.”

  When he wakened, the sun was shining. Of Teresa Clark there was no sign.

  Gosseyn verified her absence by a quick search through the brush. Then he walked to the sidewalk a hundred feet away, and glanced along the street, first north, then south.

  The sidewalks and the road were alive with traffic. Men and women, gaily dressed, hurried along past where Gosseyn stood. The sound of many voices and many machines made a buzz and a roar and a hum. It was suddenly exciting. To Gosseyn there came exhilaration and, stronger now, the realization that he was free. Even the girl’s departure proved that she was not the second step in some fantastic plan that had begun with the attack on his memory. It was a relief to have her off his hands.

  A familiar face detached itself from the human countenances that had been flashing past him. Teresa Clark, carrying two brown paper bags, hailed him.

  “I’ve brought some breakfast,” she said. “I thought you’d prefer to picnic out among the ants, rather than try to get into a packed restaurant.”

  They ate in silence. Gosseyn noted that the food she had brought had been daintily put up in boxes and plasto containers for outside service. There was reinforced orange juice, cereal, with cream in a separate plasto, hot kidneys on toast, and coffee, also with its separate cream.

  Five dollars, he estimated. Which was pure luxury for a couple who had to live for thirty days on a very small amount of money. And, besides, a girl who possessed five dollars would surely have paid it to her landlady for another night’s lodging. Furthermore, she must have had a good job to think in terms of such a breakfast. That brought a new thought. Gosseyn frowned over it a moment, then said, “This boss of yours who made the passes at you-what’s his name?”

  “Huh?” said Teresa Clark. She had finished her kidneys and was searching for her purse. Now she looked up, startled. Then her face cleared. “Oh, him!” she said.

  There was a pause.

  “Yes,” Gosseyn urged. “What’s his name?”

  She was completely recovered. “I’d prefer to forget about him,” said Teresa Clark. “It’s not pleasant.” She changed the subject. “Will I have to know much for the first day?”

  Gosseyn hesitated, half inclined to pursue further the subject of her boss. He decided not to. He said, “No. Fortunately, the first day has never been more than a perfunctory affair. It consists primarily of registrations and of being assigned to the cubbyhole where you take your early tests. I’ve studied the published records of the games of the last twenty years, which is the furthest back the Machine’ll ever release, and I’ve noticed that there is never any change in the first day. You are required to define what null-A, null-N, and null-E stand for.

  “Whether you realize it or not, you cannot have lived on Earth without picking up some of the essence of null-A. It’s been a growing part of our common mental environment for several hundred years.” He finished, “People, of course, have a tendency to forget definitions, but if you’re really in earnest about this-“

  “You bet I am,” said the girl.

  She drew a cigarette case out of her purse. “Have a cigarette.”

  The cigarette case glittered in the sun. Diamonds, emeralds, and rubies sparkled on its intricately wrought gold surface. A cigarette, already lighted in some automatic fashion inside the case, protruded from its projector. The gems could have been plastic, the gold imitation. But it looked handmade, and its apparent genuineness was staggering. Gosseyn put its value at twenty-five thousand dollars.

  He found his voice. “No, thanks,” he said. “I don’t smoke.”

  “It’s a special brand,” said the young woman insistently. “Deliciously mild.”

  Gosseyn shook his head. And this time she accepted the refusal. She removed the cigarette from the case, put it to her lips, and
inhaled with a deep satisfaction, then plunged the case back into her purse. She seemed unconscious of the sensation it had caused. She said, “Let’s get busy with my studies. Then we can separate and meet here again tonight. Is that all right?”

  She was a very dominating young woman, and Gosseyn wasn’t sure that he could even learn to like her. His suspicion that she had come into his life with a purpose was stronger. She Was possibly a connecting link between himself and whoever had tampered with his brain. He couldn’t let her get away.

  “All right,” he said. “But there isn’t any time to waste.”

  III

  To be is to be related.

  C.J.K.

  Gosseyn helped the girl off the surface car. They walked rapidly around a screening nest of trees, through massive gates, and came in sight of the Machine. The girl walked unconcernedly on. But Gosseyn stopped.

  The Machine was at the far end of a broad avenue. Mountaintops had been leveled so that it could have space and gardens around it. It was a full half mile from the tree-sheltered gates. It reared up and up in a shining metal splendor. It was a cone pointing into the lower heavens and crowned by a star of atomic light, brighter than the noonday sun above.

  The sight of it so near shocked Gosseyn. He hadn’t thought of it before, but he realized suddenly that the Machine would never accept his false identity. He felt a constriction, and stood there shaken and depressed. He saw that Teresa Clark had paused and was looking back at him.

  “This is your first time to see it close?” she said sympathetically. “It does get you, doesn’t it?”

  There was a hint of superiority in her manner that brought a wan smile to Gosseyn’s lips. These city slickers! he thought wryly. He felt better and, taking her arm, started forward again. His confidence grew slowly. Surely the Machine would not judge him on such a high abstraction as nominal identity, when even the lie detector in the hotel had recognized that he was not purposely misrepresenting himself.

  The crowds became unwieldy as they approached the base of the Machine, and the bigness of the Machine itself was more apparent. Its roundness and its size gave a sleek, streamlined appearance that was not canceled by the tiers of individual game rooms which ornamented and broke up its gigantic base. Right around the base the rooms extended. The entire first floor consisted of game rooms and corridors leading to them. Broad outside staircases led to the second, third, and fourth floors and down into three basements, a total of seven floors entirely devoted to game rooms for individual competitors.

  “Now that I’m here,” said Teresa Clark, “I’m no longer so sure of myself. These people look darned intelligent.”

  Gosseyn laughed at the expression on her face, but he said nothing. He felt supremely positive that he could compete right through to the thirtieth day. His problem was not would he win, but would he be allowed to try.

  Aloof and impregnable, the Machine towered above the human beings it was about to sort according to their semantic training. No one now living knew exactly in what part of its structure its electron-magnetic brain was located. Like many men before him, Gosseyn speculated about that. “Where would I have put it?” he wondered, “if I had been one of the scientist-architects?” It didn’t matter, of course. The Machine was already older than any known living human being. Self-renewing, conscious of its life and of its purpose, it remained greater than any individual, immune to bribery and corruption and theoretically capable of preventing its own destruction.

  “Juggernaut!” emotional men had screamed when it was being built. “No,” said the builders, “not a destroyer, but an immobile, mechanical brain with creative functions and a capacity to add to itself in certain sane directions.” In three hundred years, people had come to accept its decisions as to who should rule them.

  Gosseyn grew aware of a conversation between a man and a woman who were walking near by.

  “It’s the policeless part,” the woman was saying. “It frightens me.”

  The man said, “Don’t you see, that shows what Venus must be like, where no police are necessary. If we prove worthy of Venus, we go to a planet where everyone is sane. The policeless period gives us a chance to measure progress down here. At one time it was a nightmare, but I’ve noticed a change even in my lifetime. It’s necessary, all right.”

  “I guess here’s where we separate,” said Teresa Clark. “The C’s are down on the second basement, the G’s just above them. Meet me tonight at the vacant lot. Any objections?”

  “None.”

  Gosseyn waited till she was out of sight down a stairway that led to the second basement. Then he followed. He caught a glimpse of her as he reached the bottom of the steps. She was pushing toward an exit at the end of a far corridor. He was halfway along the corridor when she ran up a staircase that led outside. By the time Gosseyn shoved his way up the stairs, she was nowhere to be seen. He turned back thoughtfully. The possibility that she would not risk the tests had made him follow her, but it was disturbing to have his suspicions proved. The problem of Teresa Clark was becoming more complex.

  More upset than he had expected, Gosseyn entered a vacant examination booth in the G section. The door had barely clicked shut behind him when a voice from a speaker said matter of factly, “Your name?”

  Gosseyn forgot Teresa Clark. Here was the crisis.

  The booth contained a comfortable swivel chair, a desk with drawers, and a transparent paneling above the desk, behind which electron tubes gleamed in a variety of cherry-red and flame-yellow patterns. In the center of the panels, also made of transparent plastic, was an ordinary streamlined speaker. It was from this that the voice of the Machine had come. It repeated now, “Your name? And please grasp the nodes.”

  “Gilbert Gosseyn,” said Gosseyn quietly.

  There was silence. Some of the cherry-red tubes flickered unsteadily. Then: “For the time being,” said the Machine in a casual tone, “I’ll accept that name.”

  Gosseyn sank back deeper into the chair. His skin warmed with excitement. He felt himself on the verge of discovery. He said, “You know my true name?”

  There was another pause. Gosseyn had time to think of a machine that was at this very moment conducting tens of thousands of easygoing conversations with the individuals in every cubbyhole in its base. Then: “No record in your mind of another name,” said the Machine. “But let’s leave that for now. Ready for your test?”

  “B-but-“

  “No further questions at this moment,” said the Machine more formally. Its tone was comfortable when it spoke again. “You’ll find writing materials in one of the drawers. The questions are printed on each sheet. Take your time. You’ve got thirty minutes, and you won’t be able to leave the room till they’re up. Good luck.”

  The questions were as Gosseyn had expected: “What is non-Aristotelianism? What is non-Newtonianism? What is non-Euclidianism?”

  The questions were not really easy. The best method was not to attempt a detailed reply but to show consciousness of the multi-ordinal meaning of words, and of the fact that every answer could be only an abstraction. Gosseyn began by putting down the recognized abbreviation for each term-null-A, null-N, and null-E.

  He finished in about twenty minutes, then sat back tingling with anticipation. The Machine had said, “No further questions at this moment.” That seemed to imply that it would talk to him again. At the end of twenty-five minutes its voice came once more.

  “Please don’t be surprised at the simplicity of today’s test. Remember, the purpose of the games is not to beguile the great majority of the contestants into losing. The purpose is to educate every individual of the race to make the best possible use of the complex nervous system which he or she has inherited. That can only be realized when everybody survives the full thirty days of the games. And now, those who failed today’s test have already been informed. They will not be accepted as contestants during the rest of this season’s games. To the rest-more than ninety-nine per cent, I am happy
to say-good luck for tomorrow.”

  It was fast work. He had simply put his paper into the slot provided. A television tube had scanned it, compared it to the correct answers in highly flexible fashion, and recorded a pass. The answers of the twenty-five thousand other contestants had been similarly judged. In a few minutes another group of contestants would repeat the experience.

  “You wish to ask more questions, Gilbert Gosseyn?” asked the Machine.

  Gosseyn tensed. “Yes. I have had some false ideas planted in my mind. Were they put there with a purpose?”

  “They were.”

  “Who put them there?”

  “No records of that exists in your brain.”

  “Then how do you know they were put there?”

  “Logical reasoning,” said the Machine, “on the basis of information. The fact that your illusion was related to Patricia Hardie is very suggestive to me.”

  Gosseyn hesitated, then spoke the thought that had been in his mind. “Many psychoneurotics have equally strong beliefs. Such people usually claim identification with the great: ‘I am Napoleon’; ‘I am Hitler’; ‘I am Tharg’; ‘I am married to Patricia Hardie.’ Was my false belief in that category?”

  “Definitely no. Very strong convictions can be induced by hypnotic means. Yours comes under that heading. That is why you were able to throw off the emotion of grief when you first learned that she was not dead. Your recovery is not yet completed, however.”

  There was a pause. Then the Machine spoke again and there was a curious sadness in its words. “I am only an immobile brain, but dimly aware of what is transpiring in remote parts of Earth. What plans are brewing I can only guess. You will be surprised and disappointed to learn that I can tell you nothing more about that.”

  “What can you tell me?” asked Gosseyn.