The Players of Null-A

XVI NULL-ABSTRACTS

For the sake of sanity, learn to evaluate an event in terms of total response. Total response includes visceral and nervous changes, and emotional reaction, the thought about the event, the spoken statement, the action repressed, the action taken, et cetera.

As soon as he reached the bedroom, Gosseyn took off his shoes and lay down on top of the bed. He had been feeling the nausea coming on for more than an hour. The great effort of trapping the saboteur had been a strain almost too much for him to maintain.

He was anxious not to show weakness. And so it was pleasant to feel the strength flowing back into his body. After twenty minutes of lying with closed eyes, he stretched, yawned, and opened his eyes.

He sat up with a sigh. It was like a signal. Leej came in carrying another bowl of soup. The timing of it obviously indicated prevision. Gosseyn ate the soup thinking about that, and he was just finishing it when Captain Free came into the room.

'Well,' he said, 'we're all set. Give the signal and well start.'

Gosseyn glanced at Leej, but she shook her head. 'You can't expect anything from me,' she said. 'As far as I can see, there's nothing wrong, but I can't see as far as we're going.'

Captain Free said, 'We're lined up to go through the remainder of Decant Nine to the nearest marginal base in Decant Eight. There, of course, we have to stop.'

'Approach that base with a break,' Gosseyn said, 'and then we'll talk some more.'

Eighteen similarity jumps and slightly more than ten minutes later, according to the time that seemed to have passed, Captain Free came back into the cabin.

'We're six and three quarter light-years from the base,' he said. 'Not bad. That puts us within eleven thousand light-years of Venus.'

Gosseyn climbed off the bed and walked stiffly to the control room. He sank into the lounge in front of the transparent dome. The question in his mind was, should they flash straight into the base? Or should they make their approach overland? He glanced questioningly at Leej.

'Well?' he said.

The young woman walked over to the control board. She settled into the circular chair, turned, and said, 'We're going in.' She pulled the lever.

The next second they were inside the base.

There was dimness all around. As his eyes became accustomed to the lesser light, Gosseyn saw that the enormous metal cave was much larger than the base of the Greatest Empire on Venus.

Gosseyn turned his attention to Captain Free. The commander was giving instructions over the videophone. He came over to Gosseyn just as Leej also walked up. He said:

'An assistant of the port captain will come aboard in about half an hour Meanwhile I've given orders for the new equipment to be brought into the ship. They accept that as routine.'

Gosseyn nodded, but he was thoughtful as he studied the officer. He was not worried to any extent as to what Captain Free might be able to do against his interests. With Leej and himself coordinating to frustrate a threatening danger before it was scheduled to happen, risks from men and machines need scarcely be thought about.

Still, the man seemed to be co-operating not as a prisoner but as an open partner. He had no desire to call the other's attention to his neglect of duty as an officer of the military forces of the Greatest Empire, and yet, some understanding seemed essential.

He decided to be frank. After he had finished, he had to wait for nearly a minute. Finally, Captain Free said:

'Gosseyn, a man in your position, with your special power, can scarcely have any idea of what hundreds of thousands of officers in the Greatest Empire went through when Enro took over. It was very skillfully done, and if the others were like me, then they must have felt trapped.

'It was virtually impossible to know what to do. There were spies everywhere, and the overwhelming majority of the crews were for Enro. When he was war minister he had his opportunity to place his traitors in key positions everywhere.'

Captain Free shrugged. 'Very few of us dared show resistance. Men were being executed right and left; the dividing line seeming to be whether or not you made open comment. As a result of a lie detector test, I was listed as a doubtful person, and warned. But I was allowed to live because I had not resisted in any way.'

He finished, 'The rest was simple enough. I rather lost interest in my career. I was easily wearied. And when I realized what this trip to Yalerta meant, I'm afraid I let discipline go by the board. It seemed to me that the Predictors would insure an Enro victory. When you came along, I was shocked for a few minutes. I saw myself court-martialed and executed. And then I realized you might be able to protect me. That was all I needed. From that moment I was your man. Does that answer your question?'

It did indeed. Gosseyn held out his hand. 'It's an old custom of my planet,' he said, 'in its highest form a method of sealing friendships.'

They shook hands. Briskly, Gosseyn turned to Leej.

'What's on the time horizon?' he asked.

'Nothing.'

'No blurs?'

'None. The papers of the ship show that we are on a special mission. That mission is vaguely stated, and gives Captain Free considerable authority.'

‘That means we get out of the base without the slightest thing going wrong?'

She nodded, but her face was serious. 'Of course,' she said earnestly, 'I'm looking at a picture of the future that you could alter by some deliberate interference. For instance, you could try to make a blur just to prove me wrong. I really have no idea what would happen then. But my picture says there is no blur.'

Gosseyn was interested in experiments, but not at the moment. Still, there were other aspects of the situation.

The whole problem of prevision seemed to become more puzzling the further he looked into it. If Enro, the Predictors and Gilbert Gosseyn himself were all products of the same kind of training, then why couldn't he who had been in an 'incubator' thirty times as long as a Predictor, and more than a hundred times longer than Enro—why couldn't he see across distance as Enro did, and into the future like the Predictors?

Training, he thought. His. For they had received none. But he had been given flawed training, for a purpose which later had to be changed.

As soon as he had warned the Venusians, he'd have to consult Dr. Kair and the other scientists. And this time they'd work on the problem with a new understanding of its possibilities.

It was just a few minutes less than an hour after their arrival that they flashed out of the base. Ten jumps and ten thousand light-years brought them near Gela.

Next stop, Venus.

At Gosseyn's suggestion, Leej set the 'break' needles. Rather, she spent several seconds setting them. Then abruptly she leaned back, shook her head, and said, ‘There's something wrong.'

'It's beyond my range, but I have a feeling that we won't get as close to the planet as we did when we went into that base. I have a sense of interference.'

Gosseyn did not hesitate. 'We'll phone them,' he said.

But the videophone and plate were silent, lifeless.

That gave him pause, but not for long. There was really nothing to do but take the ship through to Venus.

As before, the similarity jump seemed instantaneous. Captain Free glanced at the distance calculators, and said to Leej:

'Good work. Only eight light-years from the Venusian base. Can't do much better than that.'

There was a clatter of sound, a bellowing voice: ‘This is the roboperator in charge of communications—an emergency!'