The Players of Null-A

IX NULL-ABSTRACTS

Semantics has to do with the meaning of meaning, or the meaning of words. General Semantics has to do with the relationship of the human nervous system to the world around it, and therefore it includes semantics. It provides an integrating system for all human thought and experience.

There was silence. The Follower seemed to be regarding him, for the shadowy mass was holding steady now. Gosseyn's brief, intense anxiety began to fade. He stared at his enemy alertly, and, swiftly, his attitude changed.

Actually, what could the Follower do against him?

Cautiously, Gosseyn shifted his gaze for a flickering moment to take in the rest of the scene before him. If there was going to be a battle, he wanted to be in the best possible position for it.

Leej was standing where she had paused. Her body was rigid, her eyes still unusually wide open. During the fleeting instant that his attention lingered upon her, he noted that the neural sensations that flowed from her showed an unvarying anxiety. It could be an alarm for her own safety exclusively, but Gosseyn thought not. Her fate was too closely bound up with his. He dismissed all thought of danger from her.

His eyes shifted toward the door of the corridor that led to the control room. For the barest .moment, then, he lost sight of the Follower. He twisted back immediately, but he had his fact. The door was too far to the right. He had to turn his head too sharply in order to see it.

Gosseyn began to back toward the wall behind him. He moved slowly. There were several thoughts in his mind, several possibilities of danger. Yanar. The Predictor, he discovered with a swift probe of his extra brain, was still in the control room. Unfriendly vibrations flowed from him.

Gosseyn smiled grimly. He could just imagine how the older man might do him great damage in a critical moment. From memory, he visualized the wall behind him, and it had the air conditioning slits that he wanted for his purpose. He twisted slightly to one side, until the soft breeze was blowing directly against his back, and there, one heel pressed against the wall, he took up his position.

Having done what he could, he studied his enemy with appraising eyes.

A man? It was hard to believe that a human form could become so shadowy, so insubstantial. The structure of darkness had no form. Gosseyn saw, now that he was looking at it sharply, that it wavered ever so slightly. As he watched, fascinated, it changed and grew fuzzy at the edges, only to fill in again as if a pressure was behind it pushing the foggy stuff forward.

Cautiously, Gosseyn probed into that gas like thickness. He held himself ready to nullify potent energies.

But there was nothing.

He took his usual prolonged moment to photograph an object. And still there was nothing. No image formed.

No normal image, that is. His extra brain registered the presence of air. But the darkness itself came out blank.

He remembered what Leej had said, that the Follower was a being out of phase. He had assumed from other comments that the man had found a way of being out of phase in time. Somehow, not in this time. Here, but not now.

Suddenly, now, he realized that he had a more far-reaching assumption than that. He had assumed that Leej knew what she was talking about.

Where would she have gained the idea that the Follower was out of phase? Why, from the propaganda of the Follower! Neither she nor the Predictors had any critical ability, at least not in a scientific sense. These Predictors stole their science from the islands. And so, in their innocence, they had accepted the Follower's own picture.

'Leej!' Gosseyn spoke without looking at her.

'Yes?' shakily.

'Have you ever seen the Follower as a man, without '

he paused, finished sardonically, 'his make-up on?'

'No.'

'Do you know anybody who has?'

'Oh, yes. Yanar. And, oh, many others. He grew up from childhood, you know.'

For a tense moment Gosseyn toyed with the idea that Yanar was the Shadow. Yanar standing in the control room manipulating the shadow puppet. He rejected the notion. The man's reactions under questioning, both inward and outward, had been on a provincial level. The Follower was a great man.

The question of how the Follower did what he did was not something about which he could make up his mind on the available evidence. But it was just as well to clear away the assumptions of people who didn't really know the truth.

Gosseyn waited.

A mental finger in his brain quivered on a nerve trigger that would bring the power from the forty thousand kilowatt dynamo in the Follower's Retreat across the gap of space, and straight into the shadow stuff.

He didn't pull the trigger. This was one time he had no intention of forcing the issue.

He had not long to wait. A deep, resonant voice came out of the shadow emptiness.

'Gilbert Gosseyn, I offer you—partnership.'

For a man who had been nerving himself for deadly conflict, the words came with almost the force of a bombshell.

His mind adjusted swiftly. He remained puzzled but his skepticism faded. Actually, Leej had indicated something like this might happen. In describing the Follower's visit to his cell while he still lay unconscious, she had reported the Follower as saying that he preferred to use people rather than kill them.

It was interesting, but not convincing, that he had now decided on equal status. Gosseyn waited to be convinced.

'Between us,' said the shadow-thing in his strong voice, 'you and I can dominate the galaxy.'

Gosseyn had to smile at that, but it was an unpleasant smile. The word 'dominate' was not calculated to win the good will of a person trained as he had been.

Still he made no reply. He wanted to hear every word of the offer without any more comment than was necessary.

'I warn you, of course,' said the Shadow, 'that if you should prove to be less strong than I suspect, you will eventually have to take a subordinate role. But for the moment I offer full partnership, without conditions.'

Gosseyn grew sardonic. This was thalamic talk. Without conditions, indeed! He did not doubt but that he was expected to co-operate with the purposes of the Follower. People tended to project their own hopes and desires, and so a plan for personal aggrandizement became the plan.

Next move: bloodthirsty threats.

'If you refuse,' said the resonant voice, 'then you and I are enemies, and you will be destroyed without mercy.'

And that, Gosseyn presumed cynically, was that The pattern of the neurosis was complete.

His analysis must have been correct. Silence settled over the room, and once more for a little time there was only the movement of the ship as it raced through the night sky on wings of magnetic power.

It was clear that he was now expected to make an answer.

Well, what ought he to say?

From the corner of his eyes, Gosseyn saw that Leej was edging cautiously toward a chair. She made it, and sighed audibly as she sank into it. That brought a bleak amusement to Gosseyn, which passed as the Follower said in his steeliest tone, 'Well?'

There was the beginning of purpose in Gosseyn now, a half determination to test the strength of the other. Test it now. But first, as much information as he could get.

'What's the war situation?' he temporized.

'I predict unqualified victory for Enro in three months,' was the reply.

Gosseyn hid his shock. 'You actually see the moment of victory?'

The pause, then, was so slight that Gosseyn wondered afterwards if it had occurred, or if he imagined it.

'I do,' was the firm reply.

He couldn't accept that, since it failed to take his extra brain into account. The strong possibility that he was being lied to made him sardonic again.

'No blurs?' he said.

'None.'

There was an interruption, a movement from Leej. She sat up.

'That,' she said in a clear voice, 'is a lie. I can foresee everything that anyone else can. And it is difficult to prophesy in detail for more than three weeks. Even that is always within certain limits.'

'Woman, hold your tongue!'

Leej's color was high. 'Follower,' she said, 'if you can't win with the power you really have, then you are as good as lost. And don't think for an instant that I feel myself bound to obey your orders. I do not desire, and never have desired, your victory.'

'Good girl,' said Gosseyn.

But he frowned, and noted a point for future reference. There was in her words a veiled implication of previous collaboration with the Follower.

'Leej,' he said without looking at her, 'are there any blurs in the next few weeks?'

There is no picture at all,' was the answer. 'It's as if everything is cut off. The future is a blank.'

'Perhaps,' said the Follower softly but resonantly, 'that is because Gosseyn is about to die.'

He added quickly, 'My friend, you have five seconds to make up your mind.'

The five seconds passed in silence.

Gosseyn had expected, if an attack came, it would be one of three types. First, the Follower might try to utilize the magnetic power of Leej's ship against him. He'd quickly discover that that wouldn't work.

Second, and most likely, he'd use a source of power in the Retreat, since that was his base of operations. He'd quickly discover that that wouldn't work either. Third, he would use an outside source of power. If it was the latter, Gosseyn's hope was that it operated across space and not by mechanical similarity.

If it came by space, the tubes he had set up would detect it and his extra brain could then similarize electric energy onto the carrier beam of the tubes.

It turned out to be a combination. A Distorter and an electric power source in the Retreat. Gosseyn felt the abrupt redirection of the current from the forty thousand kilowatt dynamo. It was what he had been waiting for, was ready for. There were 'switches' in his extra brain which, once set to cues, operated faster than any electric switch.

The problem, with his special method of controlling matter and energy, was that in a comparative sense it took a long time to 'set' the initial pattern.

The cue was automatic.

All the power of the dynamo flowed, not as the Follower directed, into a blaster, but according to the extra brain pattern. At first Gosseyn let it churn harmlessly into the ground at one of his memorized areas on the island. He wanted the Follower to realize that the attack was not proceeding according to plan.

'One, two, three,' he counted deliberately, and then without further pause similarized it into the air directly in front of the shadow shape.

There was a flash of flame, brighter than the sun.

The shadowy stuff absorbed it, and held. It took every volt and watt, wavering as it did so, but it held.

Presently the Follower said, 'We seem to be at an impasse.'

It was a reality that had already struck home to Gosseyn. He was all too keenly aware of his own shortcomings. It was not apparent, but Gilbert Gosseyn was ridiculously vulnerable. A surprise blast from a source of power over which he had not previously established control, and he would be dead.

The fact that his memory would go on in the body of an eighteen year old, and that there would be an apparent life continuity did not alter the meaning of the defeat. No youth of eighteen would ever save a galaxy. And if such an individual, or even several such individuals interfered too much, they also could be removed from the scene by older and more powerful individuals like the Follower.

The perspiration stood out on his face. Just for a moment, there was a plan in his mind, to attempt something he had never tried before. But he rejected it almost instantly. Atomic energy was simply one more power that he could control with his extra mind. But to know that he could do it, and actually to do it, were entirely different aspects of the problem.

In this confined space, atomic radiation could be as deadly to the user as to the person it was used against.

'I think,' the Follower's voice cut across his thoughts, 'we'd better come to an agreement. I warn you I have not used all my resources.'

Gosseyn could well believe that. The Follower need merely turn to an outside source of power, and instantly he would be the victor in this tense and deadly battle. At best, Gilbert Gosseyn could retreat to the Follower's island. The possibility of an ignominious recapture was as close as that.

And still he dared not use the atomic energy from the pile in the Retreat.

He made the famous thalamo-cortical pause, and consciously said to himself, 'There is more to this situation than is apparent. No individual can take the output of a forty thousand kilowatt dynamo. Therefore, I am making an identification. There must be an explanation for the shadow shape which is beyond my own understanding of physics.'

But whose physics? The Follower had confessed that he knew little of such things. Whose vast knowledge was he using?

The mystery seemed as great as that posed by the existence of such a being as the Follower.

The shadow shape broke the silence. 'I admit,' he said, that you've caught me by surprise. Next time I'll operate on a different basis.' He broke off. Gosseyn, will you consider any kind of partnership?'

'Yes, but on my conditions.'

'What are they?' After a brief hesitation.

'First, that you turn the Predictors against Enro.'

'Impossible.' The Follower's voice was curt. 'The League must go down, civilization briefly lose its cohesion. I have a very special reason for requiring the makings of a universal state.'

Gosseyn remembered wryly where he had heard that before. He stiffened. 'At a cost of a hundred billion dead,' he said. 'No, thank you.'

'I suppose you're a Null-A.' Grimly.

There was no point in denying that. The Follower knew that Venus existed, knew where it was, and could presumably order its destruction at any time. 'I'm a Null-A,' Gosseyn admitted.

The Follower said: 'Suppose I told you I was prepared to have a Null-A universal state.'

'I'd hesitate to accept that as a fact.'

'And yet, I might consider it. I haven't had time to examine this non-Aristotelian philosophy in detail, but as I see it, it's a method of scientific thinking. Is that correct?'

'It's a way of thinking,' said Gosseyn cautiously.

The Follower's voice bad a musing tone when he spoke again. 'I've never yet,' he said, 'had reason to fear science in any of its branches. I don't think I need to begin now. Let me put it like this: Let us both give this matter further consideration. But next time we meet you must have made up your mind. Meanwhile, I shall try to prevent you from making any more use of power on this planet.'

Gosseyn said nothing, and this time the silence continued. Slowly, the shadow shape began to withdraw.

Even in that bright light it was difficult to decide when the last wisp of it faded out of sight.

There was a pause. And then the dynamo in the Follower's Retreat began to give off less power. In thirty seconds the power was off.

Another pause. And then the pile went dead. Almost at the same instant, the magnetic power in the Retreat faded off into nothingness.

The Follower had made a shrewd guess as to what had happened. Even if he didn't suspect the full truth, he had now taken action that had all the effect of a complete and accurate analysis.

Only the magnetic power of a small ship remained in the control of Gilbert Gosseyn.