The World of Null-A

XXXIV

The city of the Machine was changed. There had been fighting, and smashed buildings were everywhere. When they came to the palace, Gosseyn was no longer surprised that Thorson had spent the previous few days on Venus.

The palace was a shattered, empty husk. Gosseyn wandered with the others along it? bare corridors and through its smashed rooms with a nostalgic sense of a civilization going down and down. The firing in the distant streets was a throbbing background to his movements, a continuous, unpleasant mutter, irritating, polysonal. Thorson answered his question curtly. “They're just as bad here as on Venus. They fight like mindless fiends.”

“It's a level of abstraction in the null-A sense,” Gosseyn said matter of factly. “Complete adjustment to the necessities of the situation.”

Thorson said, “Aaaaaa!” in any annoyed tone, then changed the subject. “Do you feel anything?”

Gosseyn shook his head truthfully. “Nothing.”

They came to Patricia's room. The wall where the Distorter had been gaped at them. The French windows lay shattered on the floor. Through the empty frames, Gosseyn stared out toward where the Games Machine had once towered like a jewel crowning the green Earth. .Where it had been, thousands and thousands of truckloads of soil had been dumped, perhaps with the intention of leveling all traces of the symbol of a World's struggle for sanity. Only, no leveler was at work. The unsightly earth lay multitudinously humped and seemingly forgotten.

They could find no clue in the palace, and presently the whole mass of men and machines headed for Dan Lyttle's house. It stood untouched. Automatics had kept it spic and span; the rooms smelled as fresh and clean as he had left them. The crate that had contained the Distorter stood in one corner of the living room. The address, “The Semantics Institute,” to which the Games Machine had intended it to be sent, was huge on the side that faced the room. Gosseyn motioned toward it, as if suddenly struck by a thought.

“Why not there?”

An armored army moved along the streets of what had been the city of the Machine. Fleets of roboplanes rode the skies. Above them spaceships hovered, ready for anything. Robotanks and fast cars swarmed along all near-by streets. They raced in silent processions into the famous square, and then men and machines poured into the buildings through the doors from every direction. At the many-doored ornamental entrance, Thorson indicated the letters carved in the marble. Somberly, Gosseyn paused, and read the ancient inscription:

THE NEGATIVE JUDGMENT

IS THE PEAK OF MENTALITY

Itwas like a sigh across the centuries. Some of the reality of meaning, as it affected the human nervous system, was in that phrase. Countless billions of people had lived and died without ever suspecting that their positive beliefs had helped to create the disordered brains with which they confronted the realities of their worlds.

Men in uniforms emerged from the nearest entrance. One of them spoke to Thorson in a language heavy with consonants. The big man turned to Gosseyn.

“It's deserted,” he said.

Gosseyn did not answer. Deserted. The word echoed along the corridors of his mind. The Semantics building deserted. He might have guessed, of course, that it would be. The men in charge were only human, and they could not be expected to live in the no man's land between two fighting forces. But still he hadn't expected it.

He grew aware that Thorson was speaking to the men operating the vibrator. Its pulsations, which had been briefly silent, crept in upon him. Thorson turned to him again.

“We'll turn the vibrator off again when we get inside. I'm not taking any chances with you.”

Gosseyn roused himself. “We're going inside?”

“We'll tear the place apart,” said Thorson. “There may be hidden rooms.”

He began to shout orders. There was a period of confusion. Men kept coming out of the building and reporting to the big man. They spoke in the same incomprehensible, guttural language, and it was not until Thorson turned to him with a grim smile that he had any inkling of what was happening.

“They've found an old man working in one of the laboratories. They can't understand how they missed him before but”–he waved an arm impatiently–“that doesn't matter. I told them to leave him alone while I figure this out.”

Gosseyn did not doubt the translation. Thorson was pale. For more than a minute, the big man stood with a black frown on his face. At last:

“This is one chance I'm not taking,” he said. “We'll go inside, but . . .”

They climbed the fourteen-carat gold steps and passed the jewel-inlaid platinum doors and into the massive anteroom, with its millions of diamonds set into every square inch of the high walls and domed ceiling. The effect was so dazzling that it struck Gosseyn the original builders had overreached themselves. The structure had been put up at a time when a great campaign was on to convince people that the so-called jewels and precious metals, so long regarded as the very essence of wealth, were actually no more valuable than other scarce materials. Even after hundreds of years, the propaganda was unconvincing.

They walked along a corridor of matched rubies, and climbed an emerald stairway that shimmered with green iridescence. The anteroom at the head of the stairs was solid, untarnishable silver, and beyond that was a corridor of the famous and colorful plastic opalescent. The hallway swarmed with men, and Gosseyn had a sinking sensation. Thorson stopped and indicated a doorway a hundred feet ahead.

“He's in there.”

Gosseyn stood in a mental mist. His lips parted to ask for a description of the old man who had been discovered. “Does he have a beard?” he wanted to say. But he couldn't utter a sound.

He thought in agony, “What am I supposed to do?”

Thorson nodded at Gosseyn. “I've put a blaster company in with him. They're there now, watching him. So now it's up to you. Go on in and tell him this building is surrounded, and that our instruments show no source of radioactive energies, so there is nothing he can do against us.”

He raised himself to his great height, and stood half a head above his prisoner. “Gosseyn,” he roared, “I warn you, make no false moves. I'll destroy Earth and Venus if anything goes wrong now.”

The sheer savagery of the threat struck an answering fire from Gosseyn. They glared at each other like two beasts of prey. It was Thorson who broke the tension with a laugh.

“All right, all right,” he snapped, “so we're both on edge. Let's forget it. But remember, this is life or death.”

His teeth clamped together with a click. “Move!” he said.

Gosseyn was cold with the cold which derives from the nervous system. Slowly he stiffened. He began to walk forward.

“Gosseyn, when you come to the alcove near the door, step into it. You'll be safe there.”

Gosseyn jumped as if he had been struck. No words had been spoken, yet the thought had come into his mind as clearly as if it were his own.

“Gosseyn, every meted case along the corridors and in every room has an energy cup in it wired for thousands of volts.”

There was no doubt of it now. In spite of what Prescott had once said about the necessity of establishing twenty-decimal similarity with another brain before there could be telepathy, he was receiving someone else's thoughts.

The climax had come so abruptly, so differently than he had expected, that he froze where he was. He remembered thinking, “I've got to get going! Get going!”

“Gosseyn, get into the alcove –and nullify the vibrator!”

He was already moving toward the door when that thought came. He could see the alcove ten feet away, then five; and then there was a roar from Thorson.

“Get out of that alcove! What are you trying to do?”

“Nullify the vibrator!”

He was trying. His body pulsed with silent energy as it became attuned to the vibrator. His vision blurred, then cleared as a bolt of artificial lightning sizzled past the alcove, straight at Thorson. The big man went down, his head nearly burned off, and the great fire coruscated past him down the corridor. Men screamed in agony. A fireball floated from the ceiling and engulfed the circular vibrator. It blew up in a cloud of flame, tearing to shreds the men who had been manning it and protecting it.

Instantly, the weight of vibratory pulsations cleared from Gosseyn's nerves.

“Gosseyn, hurry! Don't let them recover. Don't give them a chance to advise the planes above to bomb. I can't do it. I've been burned by a blaster. Clear the building, then come back here. Hurry! I'm badly hurt.”

Hurt! In an agony of anxiety Gosseyn pictured the man dying before he could get any information from him. He snatched for a source of power-and in ten minutes wrecked the building and the square. Corridors were seared with the murderous fire he poured along them. Walls caved in on shouting men. Tanks smoldered and burned like fury. “No one”–almost like fire itself was the thought–“no one of this special guard can be allowed to get away.”

Not one did. A regiment of men and machines had swarmed into the square. Torn, blackened bodies and smashed metal was all that remained. Gosseyn looked up from one of the doorways. The planes hovered at a thousand feet. Without orders from Thorson they would hesitate to bomb. Perhaps already Crang had taken them over.

He couldn't wait to make sure. Back into the building he raced, along a smoldering corridor. As he entered the laboratory, Gosseyn stopped short. The corpses of Thorson's guards sprawled in every direction. Slumped in an easy chair beside a desk was an old, bearded man. He looked up at Gosseyn with glazed eyes, mustered a smile and said, “Well, we did it!”

His voice was deep and strong and familiar. Gosseyn stared at him, remembering where he had heard that bass voice before. The shock of recognition held his own reaction down to a single word.

“ 'X!' ” he said loudly.