The World of Null-A

XXI

Gosseyn walked up to the main entrance a few minutes before one o'clock. He was not alone. Men and women moved in and out of the great doors, and their presence threw a sort of fog around him, hiding nun from close observation. There was, of course, the necessity of passing the guard office inside the entrance. Gosseyn peered into the glass wicket at the chunky individual who sat there.

“My name is Gosseyn. I have an appointment with Miss Patricia Hardie for one o'clock.”

The man ran his finger down a list of names. Then he pressed a button. A long young man in uniform popped out of a door near the wicket. He took Gosseyn's brief case and led the way to an elevator, the doors of which were just opening. One of the three people who came out was Prescott. He stared at Gosseyn in surprise. His face darkened.

“What brings you back here?” he asked.

Gosseyn braced himself. There was nothing to do but make the best of the fantastically bad luck. He had a vague plan for such a meeting as this, but his heart sank like a lead weight as he said the words he had prepared: “I have an appointment with Crang.”

“Eh? Why, I just left Crang. He didn't mention that he was seeing you.”

Gosseyn remembered that Prescott didn't know that Crang was a null-A supporter. All things considered, that was very fortunate.

“He's giving me a few minutes,” he said. “But maybe you've got some ideas on what I have to say.”

Prescott stood, cold, watchful, suspicious, as Gosseyn described his visit to the Machine and how the Machine wanted him to kill himself so that a third Gosseyn might appear. He omitted what the Machine had told him of the attack on Venus, and finished darkly, “I've got to see that third body. I'm just enough of a null-A not to believe in the triplicate even after I've seen the duplicate. Imagine anybody expecting a person of my sanity training to blow out his brains.” He shuddered involuntarily. “I'm looking for clues,” he said. “I even thought of coming to talk with Thorson. Somehow”–he looked hard at the other–“after last night, I didn't think of you.”

Prescott's countenance showed no hint of his reaction to the night before. He turned, started to walk away, then came back. He stood staring at Gosseyn. His manner remained coldly hostile, but his eyes were curious.

“As you've probably guessed,” he said, “we're looking for other bodies of yours.”

Gosseyn's impulse had been to get away from Prescott. Now he felt a chill. “Where have you looked?” he asked.

Prescott laughed harshly. “At first we had some pretty wild ideas. We made soundings from the air for caves, and we searched in out-of-way places. But now we've grown a little smarter.”

“What do you mean?”

“The problem,” Prescott continued, frowning, “is greatly complicated by a law of nature, of which you have probably never heard. The law is this: If two energies can be attuned on a twenty-decimal approximation of similarity, the greater will bridge the gap of space between them just as if there were no gap, although the juncture is accomplished at finite speeds.”

“That,” said Gosseyn, “sounds like pure Greek.”

Prescott laughed, louder this time. “Think of it this way, then,” he said. “How do you explain the fact that you have in your mind the details of what Gosseyn I did and thought? You must have been attuned, you and he; in fact, it is the only theoretically sure method of thought transmission-you have to do it with yourself. Anyway, it didn't matter where you were; his thoughts, being alive, would have been the stronger, and would have flashed to you wherever you were within the limits of reachable space. I won't define those limits.”

He broke off. “We've even examined meteorites as far away as the rings of Saturn in the apparently mistaken belief that some of them might have been hollowed out and fitted up as incubators with Gilbert Gosseyns in various stages of growth. That will show you how seriously we–”

There was an interruption from a man in military uniform.

“Our car is waiting, Mr. Prescott. The ship leaves for Venus on the half hour.”

“Be right with you, General.”

He turned and started to follow the officer. Then he paused and came back. He said, “In a way we're curious to see this Gosseyn III. Since you will already have had cautious thoughts in that connection, I am not giving anything away when I say that we shall kill him, and that then there will be no reason for not killing you. I suggest, furthermore, that there must be an end somewhere to the total number of Gilbert Gosseyns.”

He twisted away and, without looking back, walked to the door. There was a car waiting at the foot of the steps. Gosseyn saw him climb into it. In a few moments, Prescott would be thinking over the meeting. And somewhere along the line he would phone Crang, who would then have to take action.

Gosseyn could hardly stand still in the elevator. His plan to get hold of the Distorter intact was shattered by the accidental meeting, but he wasted no time after Patricia Hardie let him into her apartment. Even as she was murmuring something about how dangerous it was for him to come to the palace, he was tugging a cord out of the bottom of his brief case.

She was amazed when he started to tie her. She had a little automatic up the voluminous sleeve of her dress that she tried to get at. Gosseyn took it and shoved it in his pocket. When he had carried her, bound and gagged, into the bedroom and laid her on the bed, he said, “I'm sorry. But this is for your own good, in case somebody interrupts us.”

He wasn't sorry. He was only in a hurry. He hurried into the living room for his brief case. The tools in it he tumbled onto the bed beside the girl. From the pile he snatched an atomic cutter and ran for the wall he had decided the previous night was the only one the Distorter could possibly be in.

The Distorter must be facing the Games Machine a third of a mile away. And whatever its form, it couldn't be too tiny. At six hundred yards, even a searchlight had to have power and size behind it to shine brightly. Gosseyn adjusted the atomic cutter to penetrate the wire which was underneath the plaster. He sheared an eight-foot square and with a jerk pulled the wall down. Trailing a shower of fine dust, he carried it and set it against the alcove wall. When he came back, there was the Distorter. It was about six feet high by four feet wide by one and a half thick. It was smaller than he had expected and it had no visible wires running from it. Gosseyn caught it between his hands and gave a tentative tug. It came up in his hands lightly. About fifty pounds, he estimated, as he carried it over near the bed and laid it, face upward, on the rug. He stared down at a mass of tiny protruding, glasslike tubes. Obviously an electronic device of some kind, one of the quantity of developments on an intricate variational theme that had begun several hundred years before. He snatched the atomic cutter from the bed and, whirling toward the Distorter, prepared to cut it into bits. As he bent over it, he paused, frowning, and looked at his watch. It was twenty-five minutes to two.

The fever of his urgency abated. Prescott's ship had departed for Venus and nothing had happened. He went over and gazed out of the French windows. The great sweep of lawn that led toward the Machine, spaced here and there with shrubs, was almost deserted. At uneven intervals, gardeners were stooping over flowers, performing the tasks of their profession. Beyond was the Machine, an enormous glittering mass surmounted by its quadrillion-candlepower beacon. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes to get the Distorter over there.

With abrupt decision, Gosseyn picked up Patricia Hardie's bedside phone and, when a girl's voice answered, said, “Give me the chief carpenter, please.”

“I'll connect you with the Palace Works Superintendent,” the operator said.

A moment later, a gruff voice muttered at Gosseyn, who explained what he wanted and hung up. He was quivering with excitement.

“It's got to work,” he thought tautly. “Things like this always work when put through with boldness.”

He hurriedly carried the Distorter into the living room. Then he closed the bedroom door. A short time later there was a pounding at the corridor door. Gosseyn unlocked the door and five men trooped in, three of them carrying lumber. Without pause these three fell to work and crated the Distorter. They had silent cutting machines, automatic screwdriving devices; in seven minutes, by Gosseyn's watch, they were finished. The two truckmen, who had so far done nothing, picked up the crate. One of them said, “We'll have this delivered in five minutes, mister.”

Gosseyn closed and locked the door behind him, and then went into the bedroom. He didn't glance at the girl, but hurried to the French windows. In two minutes a truck with a narrow crate on it wheeled into view on the paved road a quarter of a mile away. It drove straight up to the Machine and disappeared into an overlapping fold of metal. Two minutes later it reappeared, empty.

Without a word, Gosseyn walked over and ungagged and unbound the girl. He was conscious of a vague dissatisfaction, an inexplicable sense of frustration.