Instantly he was back at the elevator shaft.
The sense of triumph that leaped through him was like nothing else he had ever experienced. He darted back into the elevator and pressed a third tube. The key words on that corridor were “2” and “B,” respectively. . . . As he stepped out of the elevator on the fourth corridor, a man was just coming out of the elevator in the next shaft. Remorselessly, Gosseyn opened up on him with his arsenal of weapons. He shoved the smoldering, twitching thing back into the elevator from which it had emerged a moment before.
That was the only incident of his swift progression. And yet, in spite of his speed, though he did not pause once to so much as glance inside a door, he estimated that half an hour had gone by when he finally reached the goal he had set himself: Nine pattern keys and as far as “I” in the alphabet of alternative patterns. And every electric socket on the way was “memorized” by a system of mathematical symbols.
He stepped back into the elevator and pressed the tube that took him to the corridor that led to Patricia’s and his apartment. It too showed no sign that his break had yet been discovered. Gosseyn paused before the closed door, and made another brief survey of his situation. It was not absolutely perfect, but he had eighteen places to which he could retreat, and forty-one sources of energy on which his extra brain could draw. He saw that his hands were trembling the slightest bit, and he felt as if he had been perspiring. A natural tension, he decided. He was keyed up. In less than thirty minutes, he would be launched on the greatest military campaign ever attempted by one man, at least in his knowledge. In an hour he would be victorious or he would be dead forever.
His mental summation completed, he turned the knob and opened the door. Patricia Hardie leaped out of a chair and raced across the rug toward him. “For heavens sake,” she breathed, “where have you been?”
She broke off. “But never mind that. Eldred was here.”
There was nothing in her voice to indicate that she knew what had happened. Yet her words shocked Gosseyn. He had his first inkling of what she was going to say.
“Crang!” He spoke the name as if it were a bomb he was handling.
“He brought final instructions.”
“My God!” said Gosseyn.
He felt weak. He had waited and waited for some word. He had deliberately delayed until the last possible hour before he acted. And now this. The woman seemed unaware of his reaction.
“He said”—her voice sank to a whisper—“he said for you to pretend to be drawn to the Semantics building, and there co-operate with—with—” She swayed as if she were about to faint.
Gosseyn caught her, held her up. “Yes. Yes. With whom?”
“A bearded man!” It was a sigh. She straightened slowly, but she was trembling. “It’s hard to imagine that Eldred has known about—him all this time.”
“But who is he?”
“Eldred didn’t say.”
The anger that came to Gosseyn was all the more violent because what she was saying meant nothing after the irrevocable things he had done. But with all his strength and all his will he held that fury down. Patricia mustn’t suspect yet what had happened, not until she had given him every bit of information that she had.
“What’s the plan?” he said, and this time it was he who whispered.
“Death for Thorson.”
That was obvious. “Yes, yes?” Gosseyn urged.
“Then Eldred will have control of the army that Thorson brought with him. That’s been the difficulty.” She spoke hurriedly. “Thorson commands a hundred million men in this sector of the galaxy. If those men can be gotten from Enro, it will take a year or more to organize another attack on Venus.”
Gosseyn let go of the girl and sagged into a near-by chair. The logic was dazzling. His own plan had been simply to try to kill Thorson, but failing that—and he expected to fail—he intended trying to destroy the base. It was a good stopgap scheme, but it was a tiny hope compared to the vaster scheme of Crang. No wonder the man had compromised with murder if this was the ending he had in mind. Patricia was speaking again.
“Eldred says Thorson cannot be killed here in the base. There are too many protective devices. He’s got to be led out where he is not so well protected.”
Gosseyn nodded warily. In its own way it sounded as dangerous as what he had done. And as vague. He was to co-operate with a bearded man. He looked up.
“Is that all Crang said—co-operation?”
“That’s all.”
They expected a great deal, Gosseyn thought bitterly. Once more he was supposed to follow blindly the ideas of another person. If he surrendered now, or pretended to be captured—he could see how he might do that with a certain cunning—it would mean giving up every gain, submitting to even closer supervision, and accepting the hope that some unknown plan of the bearded man would work. If only he knew the identity of even one of the people whose instructions he was following. The thought gave him pause.
“Patricia, who is Crang?”
She looked at him. “Don’t you know? Haven’t you guessed?”
“Twice,” Gosseyn said, “a suspicion has jumped into my mind, but I couldn’t see how he would have worked it. It seems fairly clear that if the galactic civilization can produce a man like that, then we’d better give up null-A and adopt their educational system.”
“It’s really very simple,” the woman said quietly. “Five years ago, in the course of his practice on Venus, he grew suspicious of the null-A pretensions of a man who worked on a case with him. The man, as you might guess, was an agent of Prescott. That was his first inkling of the galactic plot. Even at that time, a warning would only have forced Enro to make a quick decision, and of course Eldred had no idea just what was being planned. He took it for granted others would discover what he had learned, and so he merely tried to cover his own trail. He spent the next few years out in space working his way up in the service of the Greatest Empire. Naturally, he adjusted to every necessity of the situation. He told me he had to kill a hundred and thirty-seven men to get to the top. He regards what he is doing as in the normal line of duty, and quite average—”
“Average!” Gosseyn exploded. And then he subsided. He had his answer. Eldred Crang, an average Venusian null-A detective, had suggested a course of action. His method was not necessarily the best one, but it was undoubtedly based on more information than was possessed by Gilbert Gosseyn. Part of its purpose—to bring the mysterious player out into the open-would compensate to some extent for the sorry ending of what he had started with such boldness.
He’d pretend to fight, but would permit a quick capture. There’d probably be some bad moments, particularly if they questioned him with a lie detector. But that was a chance he had to take. Fortunately, lie detectors never volunteered information. Still, if the wrong question were asked, then Crang might have to act fast.
During the battle that followed, Gosseyn retreated in turn to the nine numbered patterns, leaving the lettered ones as a reserve in case the wrong questions were asked. There was just enough confusion involved—a numbered and a lettered pattern on each floor—to justify the hope that he could keep his secrets. He ended up on the corridor of pattern “7.” There, pretending he had come to the end of his resources, he burned out a wall by short-circuiting the electricity, and then let himself be captured.
He had to tense every muscle in his body to restrain his relief when he saw that the questioner before whom he was taken was Eldred Crang. The interview that followed seemed thorough. But so carefully were the questions worded that not once did the lie detector give away any vital fact. When it was finally over, Crang turned to a wall receiver and said, “I think, Mr. Thorson, you can safely take him to Earth. Everything here will be taken care of.”
Gosseyn had been wondering where Thorson was. It was clear that the man was taking no unnecessary chances—and yet Thorson had to go to Earth personally. That was the beauty of all this. The search for the secret of immort
ality could not be delegated to subordinates whose life-hunger might cause them, also, to forget their duty.
The big man was standing beside a row of elevators when Gosseyn was brought up. His manner was condescending.
“It’s as I thought,” he said. “This extra brain of yours has its limitations. After all, if it was able to oppose a major invasion by itself, then the third Gosseyn would have been brought out without preliminaries. The truth is, one man is always vulnerable. Even with a limited immortality, and a few bodies to play around with, he can do very little more than any bold man. His enemies need merely suspect his whereabouts and an atomic bomb could wipe out everything in that vicinity before he could so much as think.”
He waved his hand. “We’ll forget about Prescott. Fact is, I’m rather pleased that this happened. It puts things in their proper perspective. The fact that you tried it, though, shows that you’ve thoroughly misunderstood my motives.” He shrugged. “We’re not going to kill this player, Gosseyn. We merely want to participate in what he’s got.”
Gosseyn said nothing, but he knew better. It was the nature of Aristotelian man that he did not share willingly. All through history the struggle for power, murder of rivals, and exploitation of the defenseless had been the reality of unintegrated man’s nature. Julius Caesar and Pompey refusing to share the Roman Empire, Napoleon, first an honest defender of his country then a restless conqueror—such men were the spiritual forebears of Enro, who would not share the galaxy. Even now, as Thorson sat here denying ambition, his brain must be roiling with schemes and visions of colossal destiny. Gosseyn was glad when the giant said, “And now let’s go. We’ve wasted enough time.”
It was something to be up and going toward the crisis.
XXXIV
“What you say a thing is, it is not” . . . It is much more. It is a compound in the largest sense. A chair is not just a chair. It is a structure of inconceivable complexity, chemically, atomically, electronically, etc. Therefore, to think of it simply as a chair is to confine the nervous system to what Korzybski calls an identification. It is the totality of such identifications that create the neurotic, the unsane, and the insane individual.
Anonymous
The city of the Machine was changed. There had been fighting, and smashed buildings were everywhere. When they came to the palace, Gosseyn was no longer surprised that Thorson had spent the previous few days on Venus.
The palace was a shattered, empty husk. Gosseyn wandered with the others along it? bare corridors and through its smashed rooms with a nostalgic sense of a civilization going down and down. The firing in the distant streets was a throbbing background to his movements, a continuous, unpleasant mutter, irritating, polysonal. Thorson answered his question curtly. “They’re just as bad here as on Venus. They fight like mindless fiends.”
“It’s a level of abstraction in the null-A sense,” Gosseyn said matter of factly. “Complete adjustment to the necessities of the situation.”
Thorson said, “Aaaaaa!” in any annoyed tone, then changed the subject. “Do you feel anything?”
Gosseyn shook his head truthfully. “Nothing.”
They came to Patricia’s room. The wall where the Distorter had been gaped at them. The French windows lay shattered on the floor. Through the empty frames, Gosseyn stared out toward where the Games Machine had once towered like a jewel crowning the green Earth. Where it had been, thousands and thousands of truckloads of soil had been dumped, perhaps with the intention of leveling all traces of the symbol of a World’s struggle for sanity. Only, no leveler was at work. The unsightly earth lay multitudinously humped and seemingly forgotten.
They could find no clue in the palace, and presently the whole mass of men and machines headed for Dan Lyttle’s house. It stood untouched. Automatics had kept it spic and span; the rooms smelled as fresh and clean as he had left them. The crate that had contained the Distorter stood in one corner of the living room. The address, “The Semantics Institute,” to which the Games Machine had intended it to be sent, was huge on the side that faced the room. Gosseyn motioned toward it, as if suddenly struck by a thought.
“Why not there?”
An armored army moved along the streets of what had been the city of the Machine. Fleets of roboplanes rode the skies. Above them spaceships hovered, ready for anything. Robotanks and fast cars swarmed along all near-by streets. They raced in silent processions into the famous square, and then men and machines poured into the buildings through the doors from every direction. At the many-doored ornamental entrance, Thorson indicated the letters carved in the marble. Somberly, Gosseyn paused, and read the ancient inscription:
THE NEGATIVE JUDGMENT
IS THE PEAK OF MENTALITY
It was like a sigh across the centuries. Some of the reality of meaning, as it affected the human nervous system, was in that phrase. Countless billions of people had lived and died without ever suspecting that their positive beliefs had helped to create the disordered brains with which they confronted the realities of their worlds.
Men in uniforms emerged from the nearest entrance. One of them spoke to Thorson in a language heavy with consonants. The big man turned to Gosseyn.
“It’s deserted,” he said.
Gosseyn did not answer. Deserted. The word echoed along the corridors of his mind. The Semantics building deserted. He might have guessed, of course, that it would be. The men in charge were only human, and they could not be expected to live in the no man’s land between two fighting forces. But still he hadn’t expected it.
He grew aware that Thorson was speaking to the men operating the vibrator. Its pulsations, which had been briefly silent, crept in upon him. Thorson turned to him again.
“We’ll turn the vibrator off again when we get inside. I’m not taking any chances with you.”
Gosseyn roused himself. “We’re going inside?”
“We’ll tear the place apart,” said Thorson. “There may be hidden rooms.”
He began to shout orders. There was a period of confusion. Men kept coming out of the building and reporting to the big man. They spoke in the same incomprehensible, guttural language, and it was not until Thorson turned to him with a grim smile that he had any inkling of what was happening.
“They’ve found an old man working in one of the laboratories. They can’t understand how they missed him before but”—he waved an arm impatiently—“that doesn’t matter. I told them to leave him alone while I figure this out.”
Gosseyn did not doubt the translation. Thorson was pale. For more than a minute, the big man stood with a black frown on his face. At last:
“This is one chance I’m not taking,” he said. “We’ll go inside, but . . .”
They climbed the fourteen-carat gold steps and passed the jewel-inlaid platinum doors and into the massive anteroom, with its millions of diamonds set into every square inch of the high walls and domed ceiling. The effect was so dazzling that it struck Gosseyn the original builders had overreached themselves. The structure had been put up at a time when a great campaign was on to convince people that the so-called jewels and precious metals, so long regarded as the very essence of wealth, were actually no more valuable than other scarce materials. Even after hundreds of years, the propaganda was unconvincing.
They walked along a corridor of matched rubies, and climbed an emerald stairway that shimmered with green iridescence. The anteroom at the head of the stairs was solid, untarnishable silver, and beyond that was a corridor of the famous and colorful plastic opalescent. The hallway swarmed with men, and Gosseyn had a sinking sensation. Thorson stopped and indicated a doorway a hundred feet ahead.
“He’s in there.”
Gosseyn stood in a mental mist. His lips parted to ask for a description of the old man who had been discovered. “Does he have a beard?” he wanted to say. But he couldn’t utter a sound.
He thought in agony, “What am I supposed to do?”
Thorson nodded at Gosseyn. “I’ve put
a blaster company in with him. They’re there now, watching him. So now it’s up to you. Go on in and tell him this building is surrounded, and that our instruments show no source of radioactive energies, so there is nothing he can do against us.”
He raised himself to his great height, and stood half a head above his prisoner. “Gosseyn,” he roared, “I warn you, make no false moves. I’ll destroy Earth and Venus if anything goes wrong now.”
The sheer savagery of the threat struck an answering fire from Gosseyn. They glared at each other like two beasts of prey. It was Thorson who broke the tension with a laugh.
“All right, all right,” he snapped, “so we’re both on edge. Let’s forget it. But remember, this is life or death.”
His teeth clamped together with a click. “Move!” he said.
Gosseyn was cold with the cold which derives from the nervous system. Slowly he stiffened. He began to walk forward.
“Gosseyn, when you come to the alcove near the door, step into it. You’ll be safe there.”
Gosseyn jumped as if he had been struck. No words had been spoken, yet the thought had come into his mind as clearly as if it were his own.
“Gosseyn, every meted case along the corridors and in every room has an energy cup in it wired for thousands of volts.”
There was no doubt of it now. In spite of what Prescott had once said about the necessity of establishing twenty-decimal similarity with another brain before there could be telepathy, he was receiving someone else’s thoughts.
The climax had come so abruptly, so differently than he had expected, that he froze where he was. He remembered thinking, “I’ve got to get going! Get going!”
“Gosseyn, get into the alcove—and nullify the vibrator!”
He was already moving toward the door when that thought came. He could see the alcove ten feet away, then five; and then there was a roar from Thorson.
“Get out of that alcove! What are you trying to do?”
The World of Null-A n-1 Page 20
