The World of Null-A

XIV

Gosseyn had expected to see a hopelessly charred body. In some respects, the corpse that sprawled rigidly on its back on the marble table was horribly damaged, but it was the body, not the face that had suffered. They must have had orders, the men who had fired at him, not to injure the brain. The body had been ripped almost in two by machine-gun bullets. The chest and abdomen were little more than tattered flesh and bone, and every ragged strip, every square inch of flesh above the knees was burned so terribly that there was no human resemblance. The face was intact.

It was a serene countenance, untouched by the fear and unendurable anguish that had racked it in those moments before death came. There was even a touch of color in the cheeks, and, if it hadn't been for the blasted body, it might have been himself sleeping there, so lifelike was the face. Undoubtedly precautions had been taken to prevent the brain from deteriorating. After a moment, he noticed that the top of the head was not actually attached to the skull. It was there, but it had been neatly sawed off and temporarily replaced. Whether the brain was still inside, Gosseyn did not attempt to find out.

A sound behind him made him straighten slowly. He did not turn immediately, but his mind began to lift clear of the dead body and to recognize in greater detail his general situation. It took several seconds before he identified the sound with a memory of other similar sounds. Rubber wheels on marble. “X.” He looked around with the cold determination of a man who has braced himself for anything.

He stared icily at the plastic monstrosity. Then he turned his attention to the people who had followed “X” into the laboratory. Bleakly he looked straight into the eyes of the handsome Hardie. His gaze passed on to meet the cynical smile of the giant, Thorson, and finally to where Patricia Hardie, cool and interested, half-hidden behind the two men, watched him with her bright eyes.

“Well!” It was “X,” bass-voiced and without humor. “I have an idea, Gosseyn, that you haven't the faintest plan for stopping us from laying you out cold beside your other body.”

It was not a brilliant analysis, but it had one very important quality about it from the viewpoint of a man who had no belief at all that the essence of his personality would recur in a third body if this second one was destroyed. The important quality was that, word for word, it was the truth. “X” was waving his plastic arm with a gesture that suggested impatience. His next words confirmed it.

“Enough of this tomfoolery. Bring in the Prescott woman and hold Gosseyn.”

Four men held Gosseyn as the woman was brought in by three huge guards. They looked as if they had been in a fight. Amelia Prescott's hair was down and her face flushed. Her hands were tied behind her back and “she was breathing heavily. There must have been a transparent plastic gag inside her mouth, because her lips worked frantically in futile effort when she saw Gosseyn. She subsided finally, shrugging. She smiled at him a little sadly, but there was pride in her manner too.

“X” faced Gosseyn, peering at him from under the dome that covered his head. He said, “Gosseyn, you've put us into a dilemma. We're geared for action on a scale not seen since the third world war. We have been assigned nine thousand spaceships, forty million men, gigantic munitions factories, yet this is but a fraction of the military power of the greatest empire that ever was. Gosseyn, we can't lose.”

He paused, then went on, “Nevertheless, we prefer to play safe. We'd like to invite you, the unknown quantity, to join us as one of the top leaders in the solar system.” He shrugged. “But you can understand that it would be useless even to begin such a relationship if you turned out to be unwilling to accept the realities of our position. We have to kill, Gosseyn. We have to be ruthless. Killing convinces people as nothing else will.”

For a moment, Gosseyn thought he meant to kill Amelia Prescott. A faintness seized him. And then he realized that he had misunderstood.

“Kill!” he said blankly. “Kill whom?”

“About twenty million Venusians,” answered “X.” Sitting there in his wheel chair, he looked like a plastic nightmare beetle. “As you must know,” he went on, “the only difference between extinguishing the life in twenty human nervous systems and twenty million is the effect on the emotions of the survivors. Good propaganda should take care of that.”

Gosseyn felt as though he were standing at the bottom of a well and sinking, sulking. “And what,” he heard his voice say hollowly out of the depths, “about the other two hundred and twenty million inhabitants of Venus?”

“Terror!” said “X” in his G-string bass voice. “Merciless terror against those who resist. History teaches that it has never been difficult to control the mass of a nation once its head has been cut off. The head of Venus is a very collective one, hence the large number of necessary executions.” He waved his plastic arm in an impatient gesture. “All right, Gosseyn,” he said curtly, “make up your mind. We'll let you do a lot of the reorganizing, but you must let us create the environment for it. Well, do we make a deal?”

The question startled Gosseyn. He hadn't realized that he was being given an argument which was supposed to persuade him. It was a case of levels of abstraction in the best null-A sense. These people were mured to the idea of mass executions. He wasn't. The gap was unbridgeable because each side regarded the viewpoint of the other as illogical. He felt the rigidity of his refusal creep through his nervous system, through his body, until finally there was only utter, complete, ultimate positivity. He said in a quiet yet ringing voice, “No, Mr. 'X'. No deal. And may all of you burn in an early Christian hell for even thinking of such murder.”

“Thorson,” said “X” steadily, “kill her!”

Gosseyn said blankly, “What?”

Then he dragged his four guards half a dozen feet before they held him. When he could see again, Amelia Prescott was still smiling. She did not struggle as Thorson jabbed a syringe into her arm just above the elbow, but she fell like a stone. The giant caught her easily. “X” said, “You see, Gosseyn, we have an advantage over non-Aristotelians. They're disturbed by scruples. We merely want to win. Now, that little incident was designed to–”

He stopped. A surprised look twisted his face. He tumbled slowly forward to the floor. The hard plastic of his leg, arm, and body made a thumping sound on the marble as he sprawled full length on the floor. Behind him, Hardie, an equally bewildered look on his classic features, slumped to his knees, then sideways to the floor. The guards were falling, two of them tugging at their guns, then yielding limply to unconsciousness.

Thorson lowered the body of Amelia Prescott to the floor, and sank down beside it. Near them, Patricia Hardie dropped down to the floor with a thud. In every part of the room, his enemies lay around Gosseyn, looking very dead.

It was all quite incomprehensible.