The World of Null-A

XXIV

Left to his own resources, Gosseyn ordered food sent up to his room. By the time it arrived, he was planning his evening. He looked up a telephone number. “I want a visual connection,” he said into the mouthpiece, “with the nearest phonolibrary. The number is–”

To the robot in charge at the library he explained his general wants. Within a minute, a picture was forming on the reconnected videoplate. Gosseyn sat then, eating and looking and listening. He knew what he wanted-a suggestion as to how he should begin training his extra brain. Whether or not the subject matter selected by the librarian had any relevancy to that desire was not clear. He forced himself to be patient. When the voice began with an account of the positive and negative neural excitations experienced by the simple life forms of the sea, Gosseyn settled down determinedly. He had an evening to pass.

Phrases came to him, clung as he turned them over in his mind, and then faded out of his consciousness as he discarded them. As the voice traced the growth of the nervous system on Earth, the pictures on the video changed, showing ever more complex neural interconnections until finally the comparatively high forms of life were reached, complex creatures that could learn lessons from experience. A worm bumped two hundred times against an electric current before it finally turned aside, and then, when put to the test again, turned aside after sixty shocks. A pike separated from a minnow by an almost invisible screen nearly killed itself trying to get through, and when it was finally convinced that it couldn't, not even the removal of the screen made any difference; it continued to ignore the minnow as something unobtainable. A pig went insane when confronted with a complicated path to its food.

All the experiments were shown. First the worm, then the pike actually threshing against the screen, the pig squealing madly, and, later on, a cat, a dog, a coyote, and a monkey put through their experiments. And still there was nothing that Gosseyn could use-no suggestion, no comparison that seemed to have anything to do with what he wanted.

“Now,” said the voice, “before we turn to the human brain, it is worth while to note that in all these animals one limitation has again and again and again revealed itself. Without exception they identify their surroundings on a too narrow basis. The pike, after the screen was removed, continued to identify its environment on the basis of the pain it Had experienced when the screen was in place. The coyote failed to distinguish between the man with the gun and the man with the camera.

“In each case, a similarity that did not exist was assumed. The story of the dark ages of the human mind is the story of man's dim comprehension that he was more than an animal, but it is a story told against a background of mass animal actions, rooted in a pattern of narrow animal identifications. The story of null-A, on the other hand, is the story of man's fight to train his brain to distinguish between similar yet different object-events in space-time. Curiously, the scientific experiments of this enlightened period show a progressive tendency to attain refinements of similarity in method, in tuning, and in the structure of the materials used. It might indeed be said that science is striving to force similarity because only thus–”

Gosseyn had been listening impatiently, waiting for the discussion on the human brain to being. Now, abruptly, he thought, “What was that? What was that?”

He had to hold himself in his chair, to relax, to remember. And then, and not till then, did he climb to his feet and pace the floor in the burning excitement of an immeasurably great discovery made. To force a greater approximation of similarity. What else could it be? And the method of forcing would have to be through memory.

Perfect memory was, literally, a replay in the mind of an event exactly as it had originally been recorded. The brain, obviously, could only repeat its own perceptions. What it failed to retain of the process level in Nature, it would-naturally-fail to similarize. The abstraction principle of General Semantics applied. Abstraction of perceptions.

So that, basically, what was involved was a greater awareness of that which made up a person's identity: the memory stored in the brain and elsewhere in the body. The more he strove for perfect memory, the more clearly demarcated an individual he would be.

. . . What else could it be? There just wasn't any other possibility that offered as logical a continuity of the developing of the null-A idea. But what good would it be when he finally achieved it?

He grew aware that somewhere a clock was striking. Gosseyn glanced at his watch, and sighed with excitement at the realization that the time for action had come.

Midnight.