The World of Null-A (7 page)

“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.

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 added, “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?”

Gosseyn was trembling. “This is silly,” he thought angrily. “I was never married to her. I can’t let a false belief disturb me emotionally.” But the feeling was unmistakable. The kiss shocked him. The emotion might be false, but it would require more than one null-A therapy to break its hold on him.

The sound of the door chimes ended the thought. He heard the man and the girl go into the living room. Then the door opened and a man said, “Miss Patricia, we have orders to search this apartment for an escaped prisoner. … I beg your pardon, Mr. Crang. I didn’t see you there.”

“It’s all right.” It was the voice of the man who had kissed Patricia Hardie. “Complete your search and then depart.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gosseyn waited for no more. The balcony that led from the dressing-room window was tree-sheltered. He reached the ground without incident, and edged along the wall on his hands and knees. Not once, in those first few hundred yards, was he out of the shelter of a shrub or a tree.

He was a hundred feet from the almost deserted base of the Machine when a dozen cars careened from behind a line of trees, where they had been waiting, and guns opened fire at him. Gosseyn gave one wild shout at the Machine:

“Help me! Help!”

Aloof and unheeding, the Machine towered above him. If it was true, as legend said, that it was able to defend itself and its grounds, then there apparently was no reason for action. Not by a flicker of a tube did it show awareness of the outrage that was being done in its presence.

Gosseyn was crawling frantically along the grass when the first bullet actually struck him. It hit one shoulder and sent him spinning into the path of a burning energy beam. His clothes and flesh flared in an insanity of flame; and then he had rolled over and the bullets were focused again. They began to rip him apart as he burned with an incandescent fury.

The unbearable part was that he clung to consciousness. He could feel the unrelenting fire and the bullets searching through his writhing body. The blows and the flame tore at his vital organs, at his legs, his heart, and his lungs even after he had stopped moving. His last dim thought was the infinitely  sad,  hopeless realization  that  now he would never see Venus and its unfathomed mysteries.

Somewhere along there, death came.

A curious, heavy sound impinged upon Gosseyn’s attention. It seemed to come from above him. It grew louder rapidly and became a continuous noise, like the roar of many smoothly operating machines.

Gosseyn opened his eyes. He was lying in half darkness beside the trunk of a titanic tree. He could see two more trunks dimly in the near distance, but their size was so improbable that he closed his eyes and lay quiet, listening. He had no other immediate awareness. His brain was a composite of ears and what the ears were hearing. Nothing else. He was an inanimate object with the ability to detect sounds.

Further awareness crept in upon him. He could feel his body lying on the ground. No visual image was involved, but gradually the impression in his mind extended. Himself being held up by the soil of Venus, solidly, strongly supported by the impregnable planetary base that was Venus.

The slow flow of thoughts changed. Venus! But he wasn’t on Venus. He was on Earth. Memory awakened in a remoter section of his mind. The trickle of impulse-patterns became a stream, then a wide, dark river rushing toward a great sea.

“I died,” he told himself. “I was shot and burned to death.”

He cringed with the remembrance of hideous pain. His body pressed hard against the ground. Slowly his mind opened out again. The fact that he was alive with the memory of having been killed became less a thing of remembered agony, more a puzzle, a paradox that had no apparent explanation in the null-A world.

The fear that the pain would resume dimmed with the passing of the uneventful minutes. His thought, in that curious semiconscious world in which he had his momentary being, began to concentrate on different aspects of his situation.

He remembered Patricia Hardie and her father. He remembered “X” and the implacable Thorson, and that there was a plot against null-A.

The memory had an enormous, purely physical effect on him. He sat up. He opened his eyes and found himself in the same half darkness as before; it had not been a dream then.

He saw the monstrous trees again. This time he accepted them for what they were. It was they that must have given him his automatic knowledge that he was on Venus. Everybody knew about the trees on Venus.

He was definitely on Venus.

Gosseyn climbed to his feet. He felt his body. He seemed to be all right. There were no scars, no sense of having been wounded. His body was whole, well, undamaged. He was in perfect health.

He was wearing a pair of shorts, an open-necked shirt, and sandals. That astonished him, momentarily. He had been wearing trousers, with matching coat, the sober dress of the contestants in the games. He shrugged. It did not matter. Nothing else mattered, except that whoever had repaired his shattered body must have placed him here in this Gargantuan forest with a purpose. Gosseyn looked around him, as tense suddenly as he had been excited.

The trunks of the three trees that he could see were as thick as skyscraper buildings. He remembered that the famous Venusian trees were reputed to grow as high as three thousand feet. He looked up, but the foliage was unpenetrable. Standing there, gazing upward, he grew aware that the sound which had awakened him had stopped.

He shook his head in puzzlement and he was turning away when there was a
whoosh
above him. A gush of water struck his head and poured over him.