Null-A Continuum (35 page)

The voice of the machine was replaced by that of an orator, who alternated between a hypnotic singsong voice and shouts of elemental fury: “Death to Gosseyn! … This man is an agent of Enro the Red, and he is utterly ruthless … burning helpless women and children … devilish powers of his mutant extra brain … part of the ongoing effort by off-world forces to destroy Petrino … off-world scum! … report any suspicious activity…. only total loyalty, absolute devotion to your group-leaders and thought-conformity monitors, can save the world…. Remember Corthid! … All who refuse to be slaves of Enro the Red must unite! Unite!”

Gosseyn snapped off the radio. “Like Corthid, this world has been set up to lure me here. I suspect X means to destroy me and this world at one blow, ridding himself of one more major planet opposing the Greatest Empire. I had not considered the possibility that the delegation of Predictors of Yalerta, which Venus put at the disposal of the Interstellar League toward the conclusion of the last galactic war, has already been infiltrated by Enro and he uses their powers to misguide the League into a future that favors his plans.”

Anslark said, “Then you should leave the planet immediately.”

“I don't have any other leads on Enro's location.”

“But the secret police here have leads on your location: Those soldiers back there had radios. If the Predictors can track your actions … one Predictor in each
military base or other sensitive spot, with orders to turn in an alarm as soon as he sees the future blur … Enro will destroy this planet with the Shadow Effect as he did Corthid, unless you leave!”

Gosseyn said, “Enro is restricted by an uncertainty: He does not know at what range I can create a block against his Predictors. Meanwhile we are restricted by an uncertainty: Unless you are closer to the Loyalty Machine, you will not be able to trace the signal to its origin point. The real ruler of this planet is the mechanic-psychiatrist programming the machine, Enro's agent. We must identify this agent's location before Enro identifies mine.”

“You're sure there's an agent? Why couldn't they build a crazy machine and let it run on automatic?”

Gosseyn shook his head. “This history of my planet shows it cannot be done, not reliably. One reason why Null-A slowly won out over rival political-social systems was that lie detectors and other psychiatric machinery cooperated with its growth. You see, neurosis is simplistic opposition to reality, and reality is complex. Machines automatically attempt to adjust themselves to their incoming data whenever a self-repair or self-examination cycle is triggered. So for the Loyalty Machine, there would have to be a human overseer standing by, to keep it adjusted to the pattern of the neurosis, rather than adapting the pattern of reality. And the overseer would have to have some advanced psychiatric training, perhaps Null-A. If it is Null-A, chances are that means X or someone trained by him. I assume he will be dominating the brain of some victim by remote control, but this time, I plan to synchronize my extra brain with his before he is aware of me, and get a distorter fix on his origin point.”

Anslark stared at him, and his lifelike mask held an expression of disbelief. “Is this the madness men get when they think they are immortal? If Enro has Predictors standing by, X will know the hour and minute of
your approach: Either their visions will show you walking up, or, if you close the distance by distorter, they will see a blind spot approaching as the time of your arrival approaches.”

Gosseyn said, “The prediction power is limited by the perceptual ‘set' of the Predictor. And while I cannot see past a blur I cause, neither can they. Think of the psychological ramifications of that on an otherwise untrained nervous system. Yalertans rely on their power for their safety, and to reassure themselves of their superiority to other men: Both their pride-anxiety and fear are triggered when they go blind. Anxiety produces fatigue.”

And so Gosseyn spent the next few hours revisiting every memorized spot he had visited on the planet, back along their route of travel, near the now-empty cave where the space-boat had rested, and, finally, into his cabin in the space liner. Once in the spaceport, it was relatively simple to sneak, in shadow-form, aboard a space liner preparing for departure.

As the great liner rose on silent beams of force to the edge of the atmosphere, Gosseyn, still wearing the mask Anslark had given him, stood on the promenade deck, where there were a number of other tourists looking through highly magnified plates, focused on the various cities, high mountains, and other noticeable landmarks on the bright side of the planet, the one facing the Pistol Star. The magnifications were sufficient to allow him to memorize the landmarks, scores of them, over a hundred, widely scattered across the two continents of Petrino. He concentrated particularly on the isthmus connecting the two, where the oldest and largest cities were clustered. A moment later, grains of sand from the cave were distorted to those locations, and Gosseyn established an automatic sequence in his double brain to shift the grains of sand back and forth every few minutes.

Any Predictor in this hemisphere was going blind every ten minutes or so. The human nervous system
sought patterns in events, and so Gosseyn made sure his shifts occurred at irregularly spaced intervals and lasted erratic lengths of time. No Predictor could see past the blind spots to know if it would be the last or if hours, days, or months of this blindness lay ahead.

By the time he rejoined Anslark in the truck, it was dawn in that latitude of the planet and Anslark was approaching the City of the Loyalty Machine, Munremar.

Anslark helped Gosseyn put on a false face, and they passed the security checkpoints to enter the city without incident.

To Anslark's surprise, Gosseyn drove them to a boardinghouse, not toward the shining pyramid-shape of the Loyalty Machine looming over the skyscrapers of this metropolis. Gosseyn said, “We need to wait at least several hours, before anxiety fatigue makes the Predictors lose their alertness. By tonight, many of them will be grappling with the anxiety that their powers are permanently gone. I don't think they will notice one more blind spot among the irregular pattern I established, if I am forced to use my extra brain.”

“If? You don't know?”

Gosseyn would have smiled, but his extra brain could not manipulate the web of electrical muscles in the mask lining as expertly as Anslark: Instead he shrugged. “I can't see the future, either, not as long as I keep this up.”

“But it does not bother you?”

“No one in this hemisphere is able to predict my actions, not at the moment.” His voice was confident, even though the expression on his loose-muscled mask was dull and blank.

That night, they made their way down darkened streets. A curfew was in effect, but even without predictions to guide them, Gosseyn and Anslark could detect the electrical signatures of approaching patrol cars, or of armed soldiers afoot. They avoided all patrols.

The two decided to enter the city power plant first, so that Anslark and Gosseyn would have potent nuclear and
electrical energy flows to draw upon in case they needed a weapon or in case it might prove advantageous to interrupt all the municipal power. It was Gosseyn's habit to gain control of such installations when he could. The building did not seem to be guarded or even locked. Perhaps no one in this city was psychologically capable of being disloyal enough to enter without permission.

The dynamo room was a large chamber, lit only by a few dim orange backup lights. In the gloom, Anslark was standing on the concrete floor below, keeping watch for guards, while Gosseyn was on the catwalk, facing row upon row of round energy-cells. Each one was the antenna of an invisible beam of broadcast power reaching to some other receiving station or power-using unit somewhere in the city, and Gosseyn was tracing the flows with his extra brain, trying to see which led into the atomic pile he sensed buried far below.

A soft voice from a few feet to his left called out, “Don't move! My pistol is shielded. You can't distort the shot!”

It was a woman's voice. Gosseyn turned with his hands up. He could see, on the catwalk, dimly outlined against the backup lights behind her, a slender silhouette in what seemed a long jacket. In one hand there was the glint of something metallic, pointed at him. Gosseyn was not sure if it was a weapon: His extra brain detected no energy signature. But neither did he sense nerve-activity from the woman. Something was blocking his perception.

He did not even try to memorize the woman or her pistol. Instead, he memorized one of the large square plates of high-voltage insulation fixed to the machine and similarized it into his hands. It would have been too heavy for an ordinary man to lift, but Gosseyn's Null-A training allowed him to momentarily cut off his muscles from all fatigue signals from his brain.

The sudden sight of the slab snapping into existence provoked or startled the woman: A beam of white-hot
energy, dazzlingly bright, drilled into the slab, sending molten droplets flying. The scream of the weapon was louder than thunder.

In the sudden light, the woman was visible: young, very pretty, with blue eyes and blond ringlets tucked into a helmet with a transparent faceplate. She wore a long jacket of metallic fibers molded to her shapely form. The helmet was the same material and connected to the suit. It was all one piece. Even in the dazzling light, however, there was a flicker of shadow, of dark smoke, floating through the substance of the weave and gathered around the glinting barrel of her energy-pistol.

Gosseyn had no remorse, no hesitation. The girl's beam had been aimed at his heart! He rushed forward, dashing the heavy insulated plate into the woman with all his strength. Darkness fell when the solid blow landed, the metal plate ringing. Gosseyn glimpsed the pistol spinning off into the darkness, its beam extinguished.

The blow would have stunned or killed a tall and well-knit man, not to mention a short and slender young woman: Unexpectedly, the silhouette of the woman merely staggered a moment under the force of the massive blow and then gripped the heavy metal slab in her slender hands and tore it from Gosseyn's grip!

Before he could recover, the slim girl darted forward, a swift shape in the gloom, and landed a blow that numbed the arm he only barely raised in time to block. Gosseyn backpedaled, dodging the swift, furious fists. The strength behind the punches was immense. He memorized the structure of the catwalk floor beneath both their feet.

As he backed up, a pair of shapely arms seized him from behind, pinning his arms to his side. The helmet of the woman who had surprised him from behind was only as high as his broad shoulders, but, nonetheless, her grip was stronger than a bear's, and he found his feet being pulled up off the catwalk. Meanwhile, the blond girl facing him had ripped a length of heavy iron railing from
the catwalk, casually snapping inch-thick metal crossbeams, and came for Gosseyn with this metal club held high.

He sent the catwalk elsewhere. Both women fell. He assumed his shadow-form so that the superstrong fingers of the girl behind him merely slid through his smoky substance. He adjusted his gravitational relation to the planetary field, so that he hovered in midair.

The first girl, the blonde, uttered a high-pitched cry of rage as she fell. The second—he saw in the sudden blaze of her drawn weapon that she was an attractive redhead—sent a white-hot beam through his shadow-body to scrape molten drops from the dynamo equipment behind him. She stopped firing before she hit the ground fifteen or twenty feet below: There were groans and gasps of pain from both women, which meant they had survived. One of them started sobbing and crying. Gosseyn noted how strangely girlish the crying seemed, and he wondered if an emotion of regret should be his proper response.

Four beams of white-hot energy transfixed his body, aimed steadily toward the center of his shadowy mass. The output of the beams was adjusted so that while some heat was blackening the dangerous power circuits behind him, the weapons were not drilling into the shielded dynamo.

Gosseyn's vision was dim when he was in his shadow-form, but he could make out the figure of Prince Anslark towering above the two shapely Amazons to either side of him who held him helpless. There were a dozen other curvaceous figures in metallic jackets and helmets. Four of them were pinning Gosseyn in their weapon-beams, so that he could not solidify and use his extra brain. The others were spaced here and there about the chamber, their weapons covering the corners, and three were running to give their fallen comrades aid.

A woman's voice rang out like a bell. “Gilbert! That is enough. You don't need to prove to everyone how stubborn you are.”

Gosseyn said in astonishment, “Patricia …? Is that you …?”

“Of course. You blinded all my brother's Predictors, but I knew where you'd come first. I know how you think.”

Emotion, like all neural “identification” actions, operates by means of approximations. In simpler animals, the approximations are cruder: An amoeba need only distinguish between food-objects and threat-objects. The purpose of Null-A training is to refine simplistic animal identifications.

Gosseyn adjusted the gravity gradient so his shadow-body descended to hover just above the concrete floor. He was in the midst of the squad of women, so they risked hitting each other. Darkness fell when Patricia snapped out the order to cease fire.

A halo of ball-lightning appeared above Prince Anslark's head, illuminating the scene in a colorless, flickering glare. Anslark said in a voice of strained nonchalance, “I can kill everyone in the chamber, even if I cannot target them by similarization. I have formed a seventeen-point similarity link to the atomic pile buried here. Gosseyn, are these enemies?” Two attractive women were clutching his arms, and a third held the muzzle of her energy-pistol under his chin.