The World of Null-A n-1 Read online

  Gosseyn closed the directory and went out into the street. He felt at ease; his nerves were calm. Hope was surging in him. The very fact that he remembered Enright and his books in such detail showed how lightly the intruding amnesia rested on his memory. It shouldn’t take long once the famous man began to work on him. The reception clerk in the doctor’s office said, “Dr. Enright can be seen by appointment only. I can give you an hour three days from now; that is, Thursday at two P.M. You must, however, make a twenty-five-dollar deposit.”

  Gosseyn paid the money, accepted his receipt, and went out. He was disappointed, but not too much so. Good doctors were bound to be busy men in a world that was still far from having attained null-A perfection.

  On the street again, he watched one of the longest, most powerful cars he had ever seen slide past him and draw up at the curb a hundred feet away. The car gleamed in the afternoon sun. A liveried attendant leaped smartly from beside the driver and opened the door.

  Teresa Clark stepped out. She wore an afternoon dress of some dark, rich material. The ensemble did not make her appear less slim, but the dark coloring of the dress made her face seem a little fuller and, by contrast, not so heavily tanned. Teresa Clark! The name was meaningless in the face of this magnificence.

  “Who,” Gosseyn asked a man who had stopped beside him, “is that?”

  The stranger glanced at him in surprise and then he spoke the name Gosseyn had already guessed. “Why, that’s Patricia Hardie, daughter of President Hardie. Quite a neurotic, I understand. Look at that car, for instance. Like an oversize jewel, a sure sign of—”

  Gosseyn was turning away, turning his face from the car and its recent occupant. No sense in being recognized until he had thought this through. It seemed ridiculous that she would actually come again that very night to a dark lot to be alone with a strange man.

  But she was there.

  Gosseyn stood in the shadows staring thoughtfully at the shadow figure of the girl. He had come to the rendezvous very skillfully. Her back was to him and she seemed to be unaware of his presence. It was possible, in spite of his careful reconnoitering of the entire block, that he was already in a trap. But it was a risk he felt no hesitation in taking. Here, in this girl, was the only clue he had to the mystery of himself. He watched her curiously as well as he could in the developing darkness.

  She was sitting, in the beginning, with her left foot tucked under her right leg. In the course of ten minutes, she changed her position five times. Twice during the shifts, she half stood up. In between, she spent some time apparently tracing figures on the grass with her finger. She pulled out her cigarette case and put it away again without taking a cigarette. She jerked her head half a dozen times, as if in defiance of some thought. She shrugged her shoulders twice, folded her arms and shivered as if with a chill, sighed audibly three times, clicked her tongue impatiently, and for about one whole minute she sat intensely still.

  She hadn’t been so nervous the night before. She hadn’t, except for the little period when she was acting fearful of the men who were supposed to have been chasing her, seemed nervous at all. It was the waiting, Gosseyn decided. She was geared to meeting people, and to handling them. Alone, she had no resources of patience.

  What was it the man had said that afternoon? Neurotic. There was no doubt of it. As a child she must have been denied that early null-A training so necessary to the development of certain intelligences. Just how such training could have been neglected in the home of a superbly integrated man such as President Hardie was a puzzle. Whatever the reason, she was one human being whose thalamus was always in full control of her actions. He could imagine her having a nervous breakdown.

  He continued to watch her there in that almost darkness. After ten minutes, she stood up and stretched, then she sat down again. She took off her shoes, and, rolling over toward Gosseyn, lay down on the grass. She saw Gosseyn.

  “It’s all right,” Gosseyn assured her softly. “It’s only me. I guess you heard me coming.”

  He guessed nothing of the kind, but she had jerked to a sitting position, and it seemed the best way to soothe her.

  “You gave me a start,” she said. But her voice was calm and unstartled, properly subdued. She had suave thalamic reactions, this girl.

  He sank down on the grass near her and let the feel of the night creep upon him. The second policeless night! It seemed hard to believe. He could hear the noises of the city, faint, unexciting, quite unsuggestive. Where were the gangs and the thieves? They seemed unreal, examined from the safety of this dark hiding place. Perhaps the years and the great educational system had winnowed their numbers, leaving only the fearful legend and a few wretches who slunk through the night seeking the helpless. No, that couldn’t be right. Men were becoming more brave, not less, as their minds grew progressively integrated with the structure of the universe around them. Somewhere violence was being planned or performed. Somewhere? Perhaps here.

  Gosseyn looked at the girl. Then very softly he began to talk. He described his plight—the way he had been kicked out of the hotel, the amnesia that hid his memory, the curious delusion that he had been married to Patricia Hardie. “And then,” he finished ruefully, “she turned out to be the daughter of the president and very much alive.”

  Patricia Hardie said, “These psychologists, such as the one you’re going to—is it true that they’re all people who have won the trip to Venus in the games, and have come back to Earth to practice their profession? And that actually no one else can go in for psychiatry and the related sciences?”

  Gosseyn hadn’t thought of that. “Why, yes,” he said. “Others can train for it of course, but—”

  He was conscious of a sudden eagerness, a desire for the moment of the interview with Doctor Enright to arrive. How much he might learn from such a man! Caution came then, wonder as to why she had asked that question instead of commenting on his story as a whole. In the dark he stared at her searchingly. But her face, her expression, was nightwrapped. Her voice came again.

  “You mean, you haven’t the faintest idea who you are? How did you get to the hotel in the first place?”

  Gosseyn said soberly, “I have a memory of taking a bus from Cress Village to the airport at Nolendia. And I distinctly remember being on the plane.”

  “Did you have any meals aboard?”

  Gosseyn took his time remembering. It was an intensional world into which he strove to penetrate and as nonexistent as all such worlds. Memory never was the thing remembered, but at least with most people, when there was a memory, there normally had been a fact of similar structure. His mind held nothing that could be related to physical structure. He hadn’t eaten, definitely and unequivocally.

  The girl was speaking. “You really haven’t the faintest idea what this is all about? You have no purpose, no plan for dealing with it? You’re just moving along in a great dark?”

  Gosseyn said, “That’s right.” And waited.

  The silence was long. Too long. And the answer, when it came, did not come from the girl. Somebody jumped on him and held him down. Other figures swarmed out of the brush and grabbed at him. He was on his feet, shoving at the first man. A tight horror made him fight even after a tangle of strong hands held him beyond his capacity to escape.

  A man said, “O. K. Put ’em in the cars and let’s get out of here.”

  As he was bundled into the back seat of a roomy sedan, Gosseyn thought, Had these people come in response to a signal from the girl? Or were they a gang?

  A violent forward jerk of the car ended temporarily his tense speculation.

  IV

  Science is nothing but good sense and sound reasoning.

  Stanislaus Leszcynski,

  King of Poland, 1763

  As the cars raced north along deserted streets, Gosseyn saw that there were two ahead of him and three behind. He could see their black, moving shapes through the windshield and in the rear-view mirror. Patricia Hardie was in one of them, bu
t in spite of straining his eyes he could not make her out. Not that it mattered. He had looked over his captors and the suspicion that this was not a street gang was sharper now.

  He spoke to the man who sat at his right. No answer. He turned to the man at his left. Before Gosseyn could speak, the man said, “We are not authorized to talk to you.”

  “Authorized!” Street gangsters didn’t talk like that. Gosseyn sank back into his seat considerably relieved. The cars finally made a great curve and swooped into a tunnel. Minute by minute they raced forward on an upward slant through a dimly lighted cavern. After about five minutes, the tunnel ahead grew lighter. Abruptly the cars emerged into a circular, streamlined court. They slowed and then drew up before a doorway.

  Men began to climb out of them. Gosseyn had a glimpse of the girl as she emerged from the car ahead of his. She came back and peered in at him.

  “Just to keep the record straight,” she said, “I’m Patricia Hardie.”

  “Yes,” said Gosseyn, “I’ve known since this afternoon. Somebody pointed you out to me.”

  Her eyes grew brighter. “You damned fool,” she said, “why didn’t you beat it?”

  “Because I’ve got to know. I’ve got to know about myself.”

  There must have been a tone in his voice, something of the empty feeling of a man who had lost his identity.

  “You poor idiot,” said Patricia Hardie in a softer voice.

  “Just now, when they’re nerving themselves for the plunge, they have spies in every hotel. What the lie detector said about you was reported at once. And they simply won’t take any chances.”

  She hesitated. “Your hope,” she said drably, “is that Thorson remains uninterested. My father is trying to persuade him to examine you, but so far he regards you as unimportant.”

  Once more she paused, then, “I’m sorry,” she said, and turned away. She did not look back. She walked off toward a distant door that opened before her touch. Momentarily it revealed a very bright anteroom, then the door closed. Anywhere from five to ten minutes went by. Finally, a hawk-nosed man sauntered over from another door, and looked in at Gosseyn. He said, with an unmistakable sneer, “So this is the dangerous man!”

  It seemed a futile insult. Gosseyn started to carry on with his examination of the man’s physical characteristics, and then the import of the words penetrated. He had been expecting to be asked to get out of the car. Now he settled back in his seat. The idea that he was considered a dangerous man was absolutely new. It didn’t seem to have any structural relation to the facts. Gilbert Gosseyn was a trained null-A whose brain had been damaged by an amnesic calamity. He might prove worthy of Venus in the games, but he would simply be one of thousands of similarly successful contenders. He had yet to show a single quality of structural difference between himself and other human beings.

  “Ah, silence,” drawled the big man. “The null-A pause, I suppose. Any moment now, your present predicament will have been integrated into control of your cortex, and semantically clever words will sound forth.”

  Gosseyn studied the man curiously. The sneer on the other’s lips had relaxed. His expression was less cruel, his manner not so animalistically formidable. Gosseyn said pityingly, “I can only assume that you’re a man who has failed at the games and that is why you are sneering at them. You poor fool!”

  The big man laughed. “Come along,” he said. “You’ve got some shocks coming. My name, by the by, is Thorson—Jim Thorson. I can tell you that without fear of its going any further.”

  “Thorson!” Gosseyn echoed, and then he was silent. Without another word, he followed the hawk-nosed man through an ornate door and into the palace of the Machine, where President and Patricia Hardie lived.

  He began to think of the necessity of making a determined effort to escape. But not yet. Funny, to feel that so strongly. To know that learning about himself was more important than anything else.

  There was a long marble corridor that ended in an open oak door. Thorson held the door for Gosseyn, a smile twisting his long face. Then he came in and closed the door behind him, shutting out the guards who had been following Gosseyn.

  Three people were waiting in the room, Patricia Hardie and two men. Of the latter, one was a fine-looking chap of about forty-five, who sat behind a desk. But it was the second man who snatched Gosseyn’s attention.

  He had been in an accident. He was a patched monstrosity. He had a plastic arm and a plastic leg, and his back was in a plastic cage. His head looked as if it were made of opaque glass; it was earless. Two human eyes peered from under a glass-smooth dome of surgical plastic. He had been lucky in a limited fashion. From his eyes down, the lower part of his face was intact. He had a face. His nose, mouth, chin, and neck were human. Beyond that, his resemblance to anything normal depended partly upon the mental concessions of the observer. For the moment, Gosseyn was not prepared to make any concessions. He had decided on a course of action, a level of abstraction—boldness. He said, “What the devil is that?”

  The creature chuckled in a bass amusement. His voice, when he spoke, was deep as a viol’s G string.

  “Let us,” he said, “consider me as the ‘X’ quantity.”

  Gosseyn glanced away from “X” to the girl. Her gaze held his coolly, though a shade of heightened color crept into her cheeks. She had made a quick change into another dress, an evening gown. It gave a tone to her appearance that Teresa Clark had never had.

  It was curiously hard to turn his attention to the other man. Even to his trained brain, the reorientation necessary to acceptance of President Hardie of Earth as a plotter was a hurdle too big for easy surmounting. But in the end there could be no shrinking from the identification.

  Illegal actions were being taken. People didn’t do what had been done to him, or say what Patricia and Thorson had said, unless it meant something. Even the Machine had hinted of imminent unpleasantness. And it had practically said in so many words that the Hardie family was involved.

  The President, seen at this near distance, had the hard eyes of the disciplinarian and the smile of a man who must be tactful and pleasant to many people. His lips were thin. He looked as if he could cut an interview short or keep it firmly to the point. The man looked like an executive, alert, accustomed to the exercise of authority. He said now, “Gosseyn, we are men who would have been doomed to minor positions if we had accepted the rule of the Machine and the philosophy of null-A. We are highly intelligent and capable in every respect, but we have certain ruthless qualities in our natures that would normally bar us from great success. Ninety-nine per cent of the world’s history was made by our kind, and you may be sure it shall be so again.”

  Gosseyn stared at him, a tightness gathering over his heart. He was being told too much. Either the plot was about to come into the open, or the vague threats that had already been leveled at him had the deadliest meanings. Hardie was continuing.

  “I have told you this in order to emphasize the following instructions: Gosseyn, there are several guns pointing at you. You will accordingly without fuss walk over to that chair”—he motioned with his right hand—“and you will submit to manacles and other such minor indignities.”

  His gaze traveled beyond Gosseyn. He said, “Thorson, bring over the necessary machines.”

  Gosseyn knew better than to hope to escape from this room. He walked forward and allowed Thorson to handcuff his wrists to the arms of the chair. He watched with tense curiosity as the big man wheeled over a table with a number of small, delicate-looking machines on it.

  Silently, Thorson attached a dozen cup-shaped devices on one of the machines to Gosseyn’s skin with adhesive—six of them to his head and face, the other six to his throat, shoulders, and the upper part of his back.

  Gosseyn grew aware that he was not the only overwrought person in the room. The two men, Hardie and the monstrosity, leaned forward in their chairs. Blue eyes and yellow-brown eyes glowed moistly avid. The girl sat crouched in her chair
, her legs drawn up, one hand rigidly holding a cigarette to her lips. She puffed at it automatically, but she didn’t inhale. She simply puffed the smoke into her mouth and then thrust it out again. She did that over and over.

  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.”