The World of Null-A Read online

  Of the quartet, Thorson was the calmest. With steady fingers, he made some final adjustments on something in the machine that Gosseyn couldn’t see, then looked questioningly at Michael Hardie. But it was Gosseyn who broke the silence, who said thickly, “I think you ought to listen to me for a moment.”

  He paused, not because he was finished but because suddenly he felt desperate. He thought, What in the name of reason is going on here? This can’t be happening to a law-abiding human being on the peaceful Earth of 2560 A.D.

  “I feel,” he said, and his voice sounded husky in his own ears, “like a child in a madhouse. You want something from me. For logic’s sake, tell me what, and I’ll do my best for you.

  “Naturally,” he went on, “I value my life more than any fact that you can possibly require of me. I can say that safely because in this world of null-A no individual matters to the extent that his ideas, his inventions, or his personality can be used to the detriment of mankind. Individual machines cannot sway the balance against the accumulated mass of science as employed by determined, courageous men in the defense of civilization. That has been proved. Unique science cannot win a war.” He gazed questioningly at Michael Hardie. “Is it anything like that? Any invention of my pre-amnesic days?”

  “No.” The speaker was “X.” The cripple looked amused, and added, “You know, this is really interesting. Here is a man who knows neither his purpose nor his antecedents, and yet his appearance at this period cannot be quite accidental. The inability of the hotel lie detector to penetrate his true identity is an unheard-of phenomenon.”

  “But he’s telling the truth.” Patricia Hardie lowered her feet to the floor, and let her cigarette hand dangle. She looked and sounded very earnest. “The lie detector at the hotel said that his mind was not aware of his identity.”

  A plastic arm waved at her patronizingly. The bass voice was tolerant.

  “My dear young lady, I’m not questioning that it said that. But I’m not forgetting that machines are corruptible. The brilliant Mr. Crang, and I “-his voice grew significant-“have proved that to the satisfaction of many men, including your father.”

  He broke off. “I don’t think any statement Gosseyn makes, or that is made about him by ordinary brain-testing devices, can be accepted by us.”

  President Hardie nodded. “He’s right, Pat. Normally a man who falsely believed himself married to my daughter would be simply another psychoneurotic. However, the very appearance of such a man at this time would have to be investigated. But the inability of the hotel lie detector to identify him is so unnormal that, as you see”-he motioned-“even Thorson has become interested. My idea is that the Galactic League agents tossed him out for us to look at. Well, we’re going to look. What are your plans, Jim?”

  Thorson shrugged. “I want to break through the memory blocks and find out who he is.”

  “X” said, “I don’t think that the information we gain should be too widely known. Miss Hardie, leave the room.”

  The girls lips tightened. “I prefer to stay,” she said. She tossed her head defiantly. “After all, I took risks.”

  Nobody said anything. The half-man looked at her with eyes that, to Gosseyn, seemed implacable. Patricia Hardie stirred uneasily, then looked at her father as if for support. The great man evaded her gaze, twisting uncomfortably in his chair.

  She got up, her lip curling. “So he’s got you buffaloed, too,” she said with a sneer. “Well, don’t think he scares me. I’ll put a bullet into him one of these days that no surgeon will be able to put a plasto over.”

  She went out, slamming the door behind her. Hardie said, “I don’t believe we need waste any time.”

  There were no objections. Gosseyn saw that Thorson’s fingers were hovering over the power switch of the machine on the table. The moving fingers twisted powerfully. There was a click and a hum.

  At first nothing happened. He was tensed to resist energy flows. And there weren’t any. Blankly he watched the machine. It hummed and throbbed. Like so many devices, it had its own special electron tubes. Whether they were used for controlling the speed of unseen motors or for amplifying some obscure sound in his body or converting energy or timing changes in an invisible process, or for any one of a hundred other tasks, it was impossible for Gosseyn to decide.

  Some of the tubes peeped brightly out of holes in an opaque, curving plastic instrument box. Others, he knew, were too sensitive to be exposed to anything so violent as the normal temperature and brightness of a room. They would be hidden deep in their little enclosures with only a minute fraction of their easily irritated glass-smooth forms connected with the outside.

  Watching hurt his eyes. He kept blinking and the tears that resulted blurred his vision. With an effort, Gosseyn looked away from the table and its machines. The movement must have been too sudden for his strained nerves. Something banged inside his head and a violent headache began. He realized with a start that this was what the machine was doing to him.

  It was as if he had sunk to the bottom of a pool of water. There seemed to be heavy pressure on him from every side, inside included. As from a great distance, he heard Thorson’s calm voice lecturing his hearers.

  “This is an interesting machine. It manufactures a variation of nervous energy. The energy is absorbed through the dozen nodes I have placed on Gosseyn’s head and shoulders, and flows evenly along all the nerve paths that have been previously established in his body. It does not itself establish any new patterns. You must think of it as an impulse that rejects instantly the slightest difficulty. It- recoils from obstacles that vary by approximately one per cent from what to it is normal. It is a supreme adherent of the school of energies that follow the path of least resistance.”

  It was hard, thinking against the sound of the voice. Gosseyn’s mind couldn’t form a complete thought. He strained against the blurring power of the voice and against the energy that was flowing through him. Nothing came but spasms of ideas and Thorson’s voice.

  “The medically interesting characteristic of this artificial flow of nervous energy is that it is photographable. In a few moments, as soon as the movement of artificial energy has penetrated the remotest easy paths, I’ll obtain several negatives and make some positive prints. When enlarged in segments through a projector, the prints will show us in what parts of his brain his memory is concentrated. Since science has long known the nature of the memory stored in every cell group, we can then decide where to concentrate the pressures that will force the particular memory we want onto the verbal level.

  “A further use of this machine, using more power and combined with a complicated word-association system-formula, will perform the actual operation.” He shut off the machine and pulled some film out of the camera. He said, “Watch him!” He disappeared through the nearest door.

  Watching wasn’t necessary. Gosseyn couldn’t have stood steadily on his feet. His brain was turning rapidly in an illusion of spinning. Like a child that has whirled around and around too often, he had to unwind. Thorson was back before he could see straight.

  He entered slowly, and, ignoring both “X” and Hardie, walked over to Gosseyn. He had two prints in his hand, and he paused with them directly in front of his prisoner and stared at him.

  “What have you found?” said Hardie from Gosseyn’s left.

  Thorson waved at him, an impatient command to be silent. It was a startlingly discourteous gesture and, what was more, he seemed to be unaware that he had made it. He stood there, and suddenly his personality was not just that of one more individual. He had been holding it in. Underneath the cold exterior was a blaze of nervous energy, a supremely potent human being. Gosseyn saw that his manner was not one of the deference to superiors. It was command, assured, final, unequivocal. When he agreed with the others, it was because he wanted to. When he disagreed, his way was decisive.

  “X” wheeled over and gently removed the prints from Thorson’s fingers. He handed one to Hardie. The two me
n examined the photographs with two distinct and separate emotions.

  “X” half climbed out of his chair. The movement revealed several things about his semi-plastic body. It showed his height. He was taller than Gosseyn had thought, at least five feet ten or eleven. It showed how his plastic arm was fastened to the plastic cage around the middle of his body. It showed that his face could look startled. He half whispered, “It’s a good thing we didn’t let him go to see that psychiatrist. We struck at the right moment, at the beginning.”

  Michael Hardie looked irritated. “What are you babbling about? Don’t forget that I’m in my present position entirely because of your ability to control the games of the Machine. I never could get all this null-A stuff about the human brain into my head. All I see is a solid core of brightness. I presume that those are the lines of nerve patterns, and that they will untangle when enlarged on a screen.”

  This time Thorson heard. He walked over, pointed .at something on the print, and whispered an explanation that slowly drained the color from Hardie’s face.

  “We’ll have to kill him,” he said grayly. “At once.”

  Thorson shook his head irritably. “Whatever for? What can he do? Warn the world?” He grew more intent. “Notice there are no bright lines near it.”

  “But suppose he finds out how to use it?” That was Hardie again.

  “It would take months!” exclaimed “X.” “You can’t even make your little finger flexible in twenty-four hours.”

  There were more whispers, to which Thorson responded furiously, “Surely, you don’t expect him to ex-cape from that dungeon. Or have you been reading Aristotelian fiction, where the hero always wins?”

  There was no question finally of who was going to have his way. Men came and carried Gosseyn, chair, manacles, and all, down four flights of stairs into a solid-steel dungeon. The final stairs led down into the dungeon, and when the men had climbed back to the floor above, a motor lifted the whole staircase through a hole in the ceiling twenty feet above. A steel door clanged down over the hole, and heavy bars were slammed shut. There was silence.

  V

  Gosseyn sat still in the steel chair. His heart hammered, his temples throbbed, and every few moments he felt faint and ill with reaction. There seemed no end to the perspiration that poured from him.

  “I’m afraid,” he thought. “Horribly, wretchedly afraid.”

  Fear must derive from the very colloids of a substance. A flower closing its petals for the night was showing fear of the dark, but it had no nervous system to transmit the impulse and no thalamus to receive and translate the electric message into an emotion. A human being was a physico-chemical structure whose awareness of life was derived from an intricate nervous system. After death, the body disintegrated; the personality survived as a series of distorted impulse-memories in other people’s nervous systems. As the years flew by, those memories would grow dimmer. At most, Gilbert Gosseyn would survive as a nerve impulse in other human beings for half a century; as an emulsion on a film negative for several score years; as an electronic pattern in a series of cathode-ray cells for perhaps two centuries. None of the potentialities diminished even fractionally the flow of perspiration from his body in that hot, almost airless room.

  “I’m as good as dead,” he thought in agony. “I’m going to die. I’m going to die.” And even as he thought the words, he realized that his nerve was breaking.

  A light flashed into brilliance on the ceiling; a metal slot was shoved open. A voice said, “Yes, tell Mr. Thorson he’s doing fine.”

  Minutes passed, and then the stairway came rushing down. Its lower end clanged on the floor. Workmen began to edge down the stairs carrying a table. In quick succession the machine that had already been used on Gosseyn, and several others of different shape and purpose, were carted down and bolted to the table. The workmen retreated quickly up the stairs.

  Two hard-faced men came down gingerly. They examined Gosseyn’s hands and wrists. They went away, finally, and there was silence.

  Then once more the door slid open metallically. Gosseyn shrank, expecting Thorson. Instead, Patricia Hardie came racing down the steps. As she unlocked the manacles, she said in a low, urgent tone, “Follow the hallway outside to the right for a hundred feet. Under the main staircase at that point you will see a door. Inside that door is a narrower stairway which leads up two flights to within twenty feet of my apartment. Perhaps you can hide there safely; I don’t know. From this moment, you are on your own. Good luck.”

  Having freed him, she ran up the stairway ahead of him. Gosseyn’s muscles were so cramped that he stumbled awkwardly on every step. But her directions had been sound. And by the time he reached the girl’s bedroom, his circulation was back to normal.

  A subtle aroma of perfume identified the bedroom suite. From the French windows, near the canopied bed, Gosseyn gazed at the atomic beacon of the Machine. It blazed so close that it almost seemed to him he could put forth his hand and grasp the light.

  Gosseyn did not share Patricia Hardie’s hope that he could hide safely in her bedroom. And besides, now before his escape was. discovered, was the time to make the break. He started forward, and then drew back hastily as a half-dozen men with guns passed under the balcony in single file. When he peeked out a moment later, two of the men were crouching behind a line of shrubbery less than a hundred feet away.

  Gosseyn retreated into the bedroom. It required no more than a minute to glance in at the four rooms that made up the girl’s apartment. He chose the dressing room as his best vantage point. It had a window and a small balcony that opened on an alcove away from the main grounds. At worst, he could swing down and slip from shrub to shrub. “He sat down heavily on the long bench before the huge, full-length mirror. Sitting there, he had time to wonder about Patricia Hardie’s action.

  She had taken a grave risk. The reason was obscure, but it seemed apparent that she regretted her participation in the plot against him.

  The thought ended as a distant door clicked faintly. Gosseyn climbed to his feet. It might be the girl. It was. Her voice came softly a moment later at the dressing-room door.

  “Are you in there, Mr. Gosseyn?”

  Gosseyn unlocked the door without a word, and they stood facing each other across the threshold. It was the girl who spoke first.

  “What are your plans?”

  “To get to the Machine.”

  “Why?”

  Gosseyn hesitated. Patricia Hardie had helped him, and so deserved his confidence. But he had better remember that she was a neurotic who had probably acted on impulse. She might not yet realize the full implications what she had done. He saw that she was smiling grimly.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, “and try to save the world. You can’t do anything. This plot is bigger than Earth, bigger than the solar system. We’re pawns in a game being played by men from the stars.”

  Gosseyn stared at her. “Are you crazy?” he said.

  The moment he had spoken, he had a sense of blankness, a feeling of having heard words with too much meaning. He parted his lips to speak again, and then closed them. He recalled a word that Hardie had used earlier, “galactic.” Then he had been too intent for it to penetrate. Now-His mind began to retreat from the vastness of what was here. It grew smaller and smaller, and fastened finally on one thing the girl had said.

  “Men?” he echoed.

  The girl nodded. “But don’t ask me how they got there. I don’t even know how men got to Earth. The monkey theory seems plausible only when you don’t examine it too closely. But let’s not go into that, please. I’m glad they’re men, and not alien monsters. I assure you the Machine can do nothing.”

  “It might protect me.”

  She frowned over that, then said slowly, “It might at that.” She studied him again with her bright eyes. “I don’t understand where you fit into this. What did they find out about you?”

  Gosseyn described succinctly what had been said, and adde
d, “There must be something. The Machine also advised me to get my cortex photographed.”

  Patricia Hardie was silent. “By God,” she said finally, “maybe they’ve got a right to be scared of you.” She broke off. “Sh-sh, somebody’s at the outer door.”

  Gosseyn had heard the musical chimes. He glanced back at the window. The girl said quickly, “No, don’t go yet. Lock the door after me, and leave only if there’s a search.”

  He heard her footsteps going away. When they came back, they were accompanied by heavier ones. A man’s voice said, “I wish I’d seen the man. Why didn’t you tell me what you were up to? Even Thorson is scared now.”

  The girl was calm. “How was I supposed to know he was different, Eldred? I talked to a person who had no memory of his past.”

  Eldred, Gosseyn thought. He’d have to remember the name. It sounded more like a Christian than a family name. The man was speaking again.

  “If it were anyone but you, Pat, I’d believe that. But I always have the feeling that you’re playing a private game of your own. For heaven’s sake, don’t be too clever.”

  The girl laughed. “My dear,” she said, “if Thorson ever suspects that Eldred Crang, commander of the local galactic base, and John Prescott, the vice-commander, have both been converted to null-A, then you’ll have a reason to talk about private games.”

  The man’s voice sounded startled, hushed. “Pat, are you mad, even mentioning that? … But I’ve been intending to warn you. I no longer trust Prescott absolutely. He’s been shifting and squirming ever since Thorson’s arrival. Fortunately, I never let him find out about my feelings for null-A.”

  The girl said something Gosseyn did not catch. There was silence, followed by the unmistakable sound of a kiss, and then her voice. “Is Prescott going with you?”