The World of Null-A (25 page)

Two days after that, he bent two light beams together in the dark room without the aid of the Distorter. He felt the action. Felt it as a sensation like-he tried to describe it afterward to the others-like “the first time you get a floating arm in hypnosis.” Distinct, unmistakable attunement. It was a new awareness of-and addition to-his nervous system.

As the days passed, the tingles in his body grew more insistent, sharper, and more controllable. He felt energies, movements, things, and reached the point where he could identify them instantly. The presence of the other men was a warm fire along his nerves. He responded to the most delicate impulses, and by the sixth day he could distinguish Dr. Kair from the others by a “friendliness” that effused from the man. There was an overtone of anxiety in the psychologist’s feeling, but that only accentuated the friendliness.

Gosseyn was interested in distinguishing between the emotions felt about him by Crang, Prescott, and Thorson. It was Prescott who disliked him violently. “He’s never forgotten,” Gosseyn thought, “the scare I gave him, and the way I fooled him again when I went to the palace to get the Distorter.” Thorson was a Machiavellian; he neither liked nor disliked his prisoner. He was both cautious and resolute. Crang was neutral. It was a curious emotion to receive from the man. Neutral, intent, preoccupied, playing a game so intricate that no dear-cut reaction would come through.

But it was Patricia who provided the startling state. Nothing. Again and again, when he reached the point where he could identify the individual emotions of the men, Gosseyn strained to make contact with Patricia’s nervous system. In the end he had to conclude that a man could not tune in on a woman.

During those days his plan grew sharper in his mind. He saw with a developing comprehension that the picture of this situation had come to him through Aristotelian minds-almost literally. Even Crang, he mustn’t forget, was only a fine example of how man could organize himself without having had knowledge of the null-A system since childhood. He was a null-A convert, and not a null-A proper.

There were gaps in that reasoning, but it brought the scene down to the level of a human nervous system. The mysterious player, seen in that light, no longer seemed so important. He was a concept of Thorson’s Aristotelian mind. The reality would probably turn out to be some one who had discovered a method of immortality, and who was attempting without adequate resources to oppose the plans of an irresistible military power. He had already proved that he cared little about what happened to any one body of Gilbert Gosseyn, and it seemed clear that if Gosseyn II was killed, then the player would accept the defeat of that phase of his plans and turn to other prospects of the situation.

To hell with him!

On the afternoon of the experiment with the piece of wood, Gosseyn made a prolonged attempt to counteract the vibrator. Its intricacy startled him. It was a thing of many subtly different energies. Pulsations poured from it on a multitude of wave lengths. He succeeded in controlling it because it was a small machine, its various parts close together in space-time. The time difference between the innumerable functions was not a factor.

And that was why his control of it meant nothing so far as his escape was concerned. The time factor
was
important when, holding the vibrator, he tried simultaneously to memorize the structure of a section of the floor. He couldn’t dominate both. That situation continued. He could control the vibrator
or
the floor, never the two of them together. The gang knew its Similarity science; that was finally clear.

On the nineteenth day he was given a metal rod with a concave cup made of electron steel, the metal used for atomic energy. Gingerly, Gosseyn reached with his mind for the small electric power source that had been brought into the room. The sparkling force coruscated in the energy cup and spat with a hazy violence against the floor, the wall, the transparent shield behind which the observers waited. Shuddering, Gosseyn broke the twenty-decimal similarity between the rod and the energy source. He surrendered the rod to a soldier who was sent out to take it from him. Not till then did Thorson come out. The big man was genial.

“Well, Mr. Gosseyn,” he said, almost respectfully, “we’d be foolish to give you any more training than that. It isn’t that I don’t trust you-” He laughed. “I don’t. But I think you’ve got enough stuff to find our man.”

He broke off. “I’m having some extra clothing sent up to your apartment. Pack what you want, and be ready in an hour.”

Gosseyn nodded absently. A few moments later he watched the three guards ease the vibrator into the elevator, and then Prescott motioned him to enter. The men crowded in behind him. Prescott stepped to the controls, and Gosseyn, in a single, convulsive movement, grabbed him and smashed his head against the metal wall of the elevator. Even as he snatched at the blaster in the holster strapped to the man’s hip, he let go of the body, reached for the nearest tube, and pressed it.

There was a blur of movement; that ended. By that time the blaster was glaring its white fire, and there were four dying men writhing on the floor.

The tremendous, desperate first act was a complete success.

Gosseyn tugged open the zippers and peeled off his suit. He suspected that electronic instruments were woven into its cloth, and there was at least one such device by which the wearer could be stunned by remote control. Stripped, he began to feel better, but it was not until he had hastily donned Prescott’s suit and shoes that he considered himself ready for the next move.

He opened the elevator door and glanced along the unfamiliar corridor onto which it opened. He wondered briefly just where his chance pressure on the control tube had brought him. It didn’t matter where he was, of course. This first stop had one purpose only-to get rid of the vibrator.

He shoved it unceremoniously out, and bundled the four bodies after it pitilessly. There was a door a score of feet along the hallway, but he had no time for exploration. This was one level that he must not come back to, for here the vibrator could nullify all his hopes; he just didn’t have the time to examine it and shut off its interfering pulsations. Back in the elevator, he pressed a tube that took him to another unfamiliar corridor. Like the first one, it was empty. Gosseyn “memorized” the pattern of part of the floor near the elevator shafts and gave to its pattern the key number, one. At top speed he raced a hundred yards along the corridor, and paused when he came to a turn in the corridor. Just around the corner, he “memorized” a pattern of a small section of the floor, and gave it the key letter, A. Standing there, he thought, “One!”

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.