The World of Null-A (21 page)

…
what the radio calls “murderous elements” are beginning to sabotage “peaceful production” and they are to be “ruthlessly” put down by the forces of “law and order.”

You’ll find food all around you. I’ll be back at 12:30.

Dan Lyttle

After he had eaten, Gosseyn went into the living room and stared down at the Distorter, dissatisfied with his whole position. “I’m here,” he thought, “in a house where I could be captured in five minutes. There are at least two persons in the city who know I am in this house.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Patricia and Lyttle. He had made the assumption out of things that had happened, out of actual events, that they were on his side. But it was disquieting to be dependent again in any way upon the actions of other people. It wasn’t distrust. But suppose something had gone wrong. Suppose at this very minute information was being pressed out of Patricia about where he was, about the Distorter.

He couldn’t go out until dark. Which left the Distorter. Undecided, he knelt beside it, and, reaching out gingerly, he touched the corner tube nearest him. Just what he expected he wasn’t sure. But he was prepared for shock. The tube was vaguely warm against his fingers. Gosseyn caressed it for a moment, rueful, irritated at his caution. “If I decide to leave in a hurry,” he thought, “I’ll grab a handful of tubes and take them along with me.”

He stood up. “I’ll give her till dark.” He hesitated, frowning again. Maybe he’d better get those tubes now. They might not come out easily.

He was sitting examining the Distorter again through the scanner when the phone rang. It was Lyttle, his voice shaking with excitement.

“I’m calling from a pay phone. I’ve just seen the latest paper. It says that Patricia Hardie was arrested an hour and a half ago for-get this, it’s monstrous-the murder of her father. Mr. Wentworth”-Lyttle’s question was strangely timid-“how long does it take to make a null-A talk?”

“There is no set time,” said Gosseyn. He was cold, his mind like a steel bar that had been struck a mighty blow and was now vibrating strongly in response. Thorson was playing this game implacably. He found his voice again.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ll have to let you decide for yourself whether or not you stick to your job until midnight. If you know somewhere that you can go, go at once. If you feel that you have to come back here, come with care. I might or might not leave the Distorter here. I’m going to remove some tubes from it and go-well, never mind. Watch the ‘Careless’-‘Guest’ ads in the paper. And thanks for everything, Dan.”

He waited, but when there was no comment, he hung up. Straight for the Distorter he headed. The corner tube, like all the others, projected about an inch above the metal. He grasped it and pulled at it with a slowly increasing pressure. It wouldn’t come out.

He reversed his effort and pushed instead of pulled. There was probably a catch that needed releasing. The tube clicked down. There was a sudden, sharp strain on his eyes. The room wavered-his amazement was conscious, and the answer, the realization of what was happening was equally clear-wavered, vibrated, trembled in every molecule. Shook like an image in a crystal-clear pool into which a stone has been violently tossed.

His head began to ache. He fumbled with his fingers, searching for the tube, but it was hard to see. He closed his eyes briefly, but it made no difference. The tube was burning hot under the fingers with which he tried to pull it back into place. He must have been dazed because he swayed and fell forward, bumping against the Distorter. He had a strange sense of lightness.

He opened his eyes in surprise. He was lying on his side in utter darkness, and in his nostrils was the rich odor of growing wood. It was a familiar, heavy scent, but it took Gosseyn a long moment to make the enormous mental jump necessary to grasping the reality of it. The odor was the same as had assailed him on his futile journey into the tree tunnel behind Crang’s house on Venus.

Gosseyn scrambled to his feet, almost fell as he stumbled over something metallic, and then groped against first one upcurving wall, then the other. And there was no doubt. He was in a tunnel in the roots of a gigantic tree of Venus.

Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows

E.T.B.

The burst of energy that had galvanized him into verifying where he was subsided. Gosseyn sat down heavily. It was not altogether a voluntary action. His hands were shaking; his knees felt weak.

He had already noticed it was dark. Now he realized it with a new intensity. Darkness! Shadowless, unrelenting darkness. It pressed against his eyes and into his brain. He could feel his clothes against his skin, and the pressure of the wood floor. But in this night they could have been vagrant titillations experienced by a bodiless entity. In this unrelieved blackness, substance, human or unhuman, was almost a meaningless term.

“I can,” Gosseyn told himself, “last two weeks without food, three days without water.”

He recognized that he didn’t feel as hopeless as that, in spite of his memory of miles of black tunnels. Because they wouldn’t have focused a Distorter tube on just any part of this Venusian tree tunnel. It must be near some special point, easily accessible from where he was.

He was about to climb to his feet when he realized for the first time the magnitude of what had happened. A few minutes ago he had been on Earth. Now he was on Venus.

What was it Prescott had said? “If two energies can be attuned on a twenty-decimal approximation of similarity, the greater will bridge the gap of space between them just as if there were no gap, although the juncture is accomplished at finite speeds.”

The finite speeds involved had been infinite for all the practical purposes of solar distances. Gosseyn began to feel better. The Distorter had attuned the highly organized energy compound that was his body to this small section of tree tunnel, and the “greater” had bridged the gap of space to the “lesser.”

Gosseyn stood up and thought, “Why, I’m on Venus-where I wanted to be.” His spirits lifted higher. In spite of all his mistakes, he was still safe, still progressing. He knew many things, and even what he did not know suddenly seemed attainable. He had but to see more deeply, make a few more abstractions from reality, refine his observations another decimal place, and the veil would be torn aside, the mystery comprehended by his senses.

The thought in its implications was wide enough in scope to actuate the integration “pause” of his nervous system. He grew even calmer.

He remembered the metal on which he had stumbled when he had first tried to get to his feet. Even in that darkness, he found the object within seconds. It was the Distorter, as he had half anticipated. Cautiously his fingers touched each of the four corner tubes in turn. It was the fourth tube that was depressed,
still
depressed. Gosseyn hesitated. The Distorter had been “set” by people who had their own purposes and destinations. Some of the tubes were designed to “interfere” with the Games Machine, but a few surely could transport nun to other parts of the solar system, possibly to key centers of gang activity-military headquarters, the secret galactic base, storehouses of atomic torpedoes.

The potentialities startled him. But they weren’t for now. This was not the time to take risks or conduct experiments. The sooner he got away from here the better.

Gingerly, he picked up the Distorter and began to walk along in the darkness.

“I’ll walk a thousand steps in one direction,” he decided, “then come back and walk a thousand in the other direction.” That should bring him to the gang center near his point of “landing.” They wouldn’t have put it further away that that.

As he rounded a sharp bend in the tunnel, after approximately three hundred steps, he saw a glimmer of light. He rounded three more bends. Even then the glow, though bright now and dead ahead, was sourceless. But Gosseyn saw that there was a railing silhouetted against the light. He put down the Distorter.

Cautiously he moved forward. At the last moment, he dropped to his hands and knees. An instant later, he was staring between the bars of the fence. There was a metal pit below him. The metal gleamed dully from scores of atomic lights that blazed at set intervals from the enormous, down-curving walls. The pit was about two miles long, a mile wide, and half a mile deep. And, occupying one half of the far end, was a ship. It was a ship such as Earth men might have dreamed about in their wilder imaginative soarings. Spaceship engineers, plan-happy after weeks of poring over ninety-foot draft plans of normal solar spaceships, might have gone home and babbled to their wives, “Now I’m going to take off five hundred years and start a million draftsmen drawing plans for an interstellar ship two miles long.”

The ship in the pit was just under two miles long. Its ridged back reared up sharklike to within what seemed a hundred feet of the ceiling. Another ship of its own size could have lain beside it, but if it had, the two of them would have crowded the mile width of the pit.

Distance obscured details, but even so Gosseyn could see tiny figures swarming on the metal under the great belly of the ship. They seemed to have contact with something below the floor, for every little while great batches of little shapes scurried from a long line of humps that projected from the floor-as if elevators had come up loaded from floors lower down and disgorged their cargo. In the diagonal way Gosseyn was looking down at them, they must have been at least two-thirds of a mile away, little dark things crawling over the metal.

Gosseyn saw with a start that the ship was getting ready to leave. The minute figures below were clambering up steps into it. There were a hundred dark moving shapes-a dozen-none. A vague throb of sound had come from them, movements, a whisper of conversation. Now silence settled  over the  blazing vastness  of the pit.  Gosseyn waited.

It would be complete night outside. They’d need night for the movement of such ships. In a moment the ceiling would start opening. There’d be a meadow above, camouflage for the hangars below. It would be pushed up somehow.

As he watched, all the lights went out. That, also, fitted. They wouldn’t want a light shining up into the night. Sensitive detectors must be probing the skies, to make sure no roboplanes or other solar craft were passing overhead. But it was the ship that took on life, not the ceiling.

The ship began to glow. A weak, all-over radiance it was that outlined every square foot of its body; a vaguely green light, so dun that Earth’s moonlight would have been sun-bright beside it. It began to shimmer. Abruptly, it hurt his eyes.

Gosseyn recalled that the Distorter had affected him the same way. He thought, “The ship! It’s being attuned to a planetary base of some other star. There isn’t any ceiling opening.” As swiftly as it had started, the mental and visual strain ended. The green haze jerked and winked out

The great ship was gone.

Below, in the pit, four of the lights came back on. They were as bright as miniature suns, but their white fire was only a partial match for the normal darkness of the pit. Near them, everything was brilliantly illuminated. But the glare dimmed as the glow spread out through the cubic vastness of the hangar. Hundreds of acres in the center and between the wall lights were deep in shadow.

Gosseyn picked up the Distorter and began to follow the railing around the pit’s edge. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Certainly he had no desire to go down into the pit. Somewhere along here must be a way out of these tree roots. A stairway, an elevator,
something.

It turned out to be an elevator. Rather a row of elevator shafts with elevators in two of the shafts. Gosseyn tried the door catch of the first one. It slid open without a sound. He stepped in boldly and examined the control apparatus. It was more complicated than he had expected. There was bank of tubes, but no control lever. Gosseyn felt the blood drain from his face as he realized what it was. A Distorter-type elevator. It wouldn’t only go up and down. It would go to any one of-he counted the tubes-twelve destinations.

He groaned inwardly and bent to examine each tube carefully for markings. It was then he saw, with relief, that each tube was shaped to point in a different direction. Only one of them pointed straight up. Gosseyn did not hesitate. It might take him into instant captivity, but that was a danger he had to risk. His fingers touched the tube and pressed down.

This time he tried to watch the sensation. But the anesthesia that blurred his senses affected his brain. When his vision cleared, he saw that the scene outside the elevator had changed.

He was very definitely in a tree. Beyond the transparent door of the elevator was an unpolished, natural “room.” Light splashed down on it from a hole higher up. It was all very rough and uneven, and there were many dark corners.

It was in one of the dark corners that Gosseyn hid the Distorter, and then cautiously he climbed up toward the hole. The corridor mounted steeply ahead of him, narrowing steadily. Halfway up, he realized he wouldn’t be able to get the Distorter through. That was jarring, but he decided he couldn’t let it make any difference. He had to contact the Venusians. Later, with their help, he could come back for the Distorter.

During the final third of the climb, he had to use his hands and clutch at projecting edges of dry-rotted wood to pull himself up. He came out on a lower limb of a titanic Venusian tree, through a hole that was only about twice as big as his body. It was an unevenly shaped, natural-looking hole. It was probably one of hundreds of similar holes in this very tree, and therefore he would have to mark its location very carefully.

He had already noticed that there was a great meadow on one side of him-over the pit, perhaps. In the opposite direction was dense Venusian forest. Gosseyn picked out landmarks, and then started along the broad limb onto which he had emerged. About seventy-five yards from the bole it joined an equally massive limb of another tree. He felt a thrill as he saw it. There was a thalamic pleasure in tree running. The Venusians must indulge in it often for the sheer animal joy of it. He would remain aloft for about five miles, unless the forest ended first, and then-