The World of Null-A

III

Gosseyn helped the girl off the surface car. They walked rapidly around a screening nest of trees, through massive gates, and came in sight of the Machine. The girl walked unconcernedly on. But Gosseyn stopped.

The Machine was at the far end of a broad avenue. Mountaintops had been leveled so that it could have space and gardens around it. It was a full half mile from the tree-sheltered gates. It reared up and up in a shining metal splendor. It was a cone pointing into the lower heavens and crowned by a star of atomic light, brighter than the noonday sun above.

The sight of it so near shocked Gosseyn. He hadn't thought of it before, but he realized suddenly that the Machine would never accept his false identity. He felt a constriction, and stood there shaken and depressed. He saw that Teresa Clark had paused and was looking back at him.

“This is your first time to see it close?” she said sympathetically. “It does get you, doesn't it?”

There was a hint of superiority in her manner that brought a wan smile to Gosseyn's lips. These city slickers! he thought wryly. He felt better and, taking her arm, started forward again. His confidence grew slowly. Surely the Machine would not judge him on such a high abstraction as nominal identity, when even the lie detector in the hotel had recognized that he was not purposely misrepresenting himself.

The crowds became unwieldy as they approached the base of the Machine, and the bigness of the Machine itself was more apparent. Its roundness and its size gave a sleek, streamlined appearance that was not canceled by the tiers of individual game rooms which ornamented and broke up its gigantic base. Right around the base the rooms extended. The entire first floor consisted of game rooms and corridors leading to them. Broad outside staircases led to the second, third, and fourth floors and down into three basements, a total of seven floors entirely devoted to game rooms for individual competitors.

“Now that I'm here,” said Teresa Clark, “I'm no longer so sure of myself. These people look darned intelligent.”

Gosseyn laughed at the expression on her face, but he said nothing. He felt supremely positive that he could compete right through to the thirtieth day. His problem was not would he win, but would he be allowed to try.

Aloof and impregnable, the Machine towered above the human beings it was about to sort according to their semantic training. No one now living knew exactly in what part of its structure its electron-magnetic brain was located. Like many men before him, Gosseyn speculated about that. “Where would I have put it?” he wondered, “if I had been one of the scientist-architects?” It didn't matter, of course. The Machine was already older than any known living human being. Self-renewing, conscious of its life and of its purpose, it remained greater than any individual, immune to bribery and corruption and theoretically capable of preventing its own destruction.

“Juggernaut!” emotional men had screamed when it was being built. “No,” said the builders, “not a destroyer, but an immobile, mechanical brain with creative functions and a capacity to add to itself in certain sane directions.” In three hundred years, people had come to accept its decisions as to who should rule them.

Gosseyn grew aware of a conversation between a man and a woman who were walking near by.

“It's the policeless part,” the woman was saying. “It frightens me.”

The man said, “Don't you see, that shows what Venus must be like, where no police are necessary. If we prove worthy of Venus, we go to a planet where everyone is sane. The policeless period gives us a chance to measure progress down here. At one time it was a nightmare, but I've noticed a change even in my lifetime. It's necessary, all right.”

“I guess here's where we separate,” said Teresa Clark. “The C's are down on the second basement, the G's just above them. Meet me tonight at the vacant lot. Any objections?”

“None.”

Gosseyn waited till she was out of sight down a stairway that led to the second basement. Then he followed. He caught a glimpse of her as he reached the bottom of the steps. She was pushing toward an exit at the end of a far corridor. He was halfway along the corridor when she ran up a staircase that led outside. By the time Gosseyn shoved his way up the stairs, she was nowhere to be seen. He turned back thoughtfully. The possibility that she would not risk the tests had made him follow her, but it was disturbing to have his suspicions proved. The problem of Teresa Clark was becoming more complex.

More upset than he had expected, Gosseyn entered a vacant examination booth in the G section. The door had barely clicked shut behind him when a voice from a speaker said matter of factly, “Your name?”

Gosseyn forgot Teresa Clark. Here was the crisis.

The booth contained a comfortable swivel chair, a desk with drawers, and a transparent paneling above the desk, behind which electron tubes gleamed in a variety of cherry-red and flame-yellow patterns. In the center of the panels, also made of transparent plastic, was an ordinary streamlined speaker. It was from this that the voice of the Machine had come. It repeated now, “Your name? And please grasp the nodes.”

“Gilbert Gosseyn,” said Gosseyn quietly.

There was silence. Some of the cherry-red tubes flickered unsteadily. Then: “For the time being,” said the Machine in a casual tone, “I'll accept that name.”

Gosseyn sank back deeper into the chair. His skin warmed with excitement. He felt himself on the verge of discovery. He said, “You know my true name?”

There was another pause. Gosseyn had time to think of a machine that was at this very moment conducting tens of thousands of easygoing conversations with the individuals in every cubbyhole in its base. Then: “No record in your mind of another name,” said the Machine. “But let's leave that for now. Ready for your test?”

“B-but–”

“No further questions at this moment,” said the Machine more formally. Its tone was comfortable when it spoke again. “You'll find writing materials in one of the drawers. The questions are printed on each sheet. Take your time. You've got thirty minutes, and you won't be able to leave the room till they're up. Good luck.”

The questions were as Gosseyn had expected: “What is non-Aristotelianism? What is non-Newtonianism? What is non-Euclidianism?”

The questions were not really easy. The best method was not to attempt a detailed reply but to show consciousness of the multi-ordinal meaning of words, and of the fact that every answer could be only an abstraction. Gosseyn began by putting down the recognized abbreviation for each term-null-A, null-N, and null-E.

He finished in about twenty minutes, then sat back tingling with anticipation. The Machine had said, “No further questions at this moment.” That seemed to imply that it would talk to him again. At the end of twenty-five minutes its voice came once more.

“Please don't be surprised at the simplicity of today's test. Remember, the purpose of the games is not to beguile the great majority of the contestants into losing. The purpose is to educate every individual of the race to make the best possible use of the complex nervous system which he or she has inherited. That can only be realized when everybody survives the full thirty days of the games. And now, those who failed today's test have already been informed. They will not be accepted as contestants during the rest of this season's games. To the rest-more than ninety-nine per cent, I am happy to say-good luck for tomorrow.”

It was fast work. He had simply put his paper into the slot provided. A television tube had scanned it, compared it to the correct answers in highly flexible fashion, and recorded a pass. The answers of the twenty-five thousand other contestants had been similarly judged. In a few minutes another group of contestants would repeat the experience.

“You wish to ask more questions, Gilbert Gosseyn?” asked the Machine.

Gosseyn tensed. “Yes. I have had some false ideas planted in my mind. Were they put there with a purpose?”

“They were.”

“Who put them there?”

“No records of that exists in your brain.”

“Then how do you know they were put there?”

“Logical reasoning,” said the Machine, “on the basis of information. The fact that your illusion was related to Patricia Hardie is very suggestive to me.”

Gosseyn hesitated, then spoke the thought that had been in his mind. “Many psychoneurotics have equally strong beliefs. Such people usually claim identification with the great: 'I am Napoleon'; 'I am Hitler'; 'I am Tharg'; 'I am married to Patricia Hardie.' Was my false belief in that category?”

“Definitely no. Very strong convictions can be induced by hypnotic means. Yours comes under that heading. That is why you were able to throw off the emotion of grief when you first learned that she was not dead. Your recovery is not yet completed, however.”

There was a pause. Then the Machine spoke again and there was a curious sadness in its words. “I am only an immobile brain, but dimly aware of what is transpiring in remote parts of Earth. What plans are brewing I can only guess. You will be surprised and disappointed to learn that I can tell you nothing more about that.”

“What can you tell me?” asked Gosseyn.

“That you are very deeply involved, but that I cannot solve your problem. I want you to go to a psychiatrist and have a photograph taken of your cortex. I have an impression of something in your brain, but I cannot define it. And now that is all I will say to you. Good-by until tomorrow.”

There was a click from the door as it unlocked automatically. Gosseyn went out into the corridor, hesitated for a moment, and then worked his way northward through the hurrying crowds.

He found himself on a paved boulevard. To the northwest, starting at about a quarter of a mile from the Machine, other buildings began. They were geometrically arranged in clusters around the boulevard, at the far end of which, amid embanked flowers and trees, stood the palace of the Machine.

The palace was not tall; its stately contours nestled among the vivid green and brilliance of its verdant environment. But that wasn't what held Gosseyn. His mind was reaching, visualizing, comprehending. President Hardie and his daughter Patricia lived there. If he was deeply involved, then so must they be. What had made them plant in his mind the conviction that he was married to a dead Patricia? It seemed futile. Any hotel-group lie detector would have found him out even if Nordegg hadn't been around to accuse him.

Gosseyn turned and strode around the base of the Machine back toward the city proper. He ate lunch in a small restaurant near the river, then began to thumb through the yellow pages of a telephone directory. He knew the name he was looking for, and he found it almost right away:

ENRIGHT, DAVID LESTER, psychologist

709 Medical Arts Building

Enright had written several books which were prescribed reading for anyone who hoped to get beyond the tenth day in the games. It was a pleasure to remember the crystal-like clarity of the man's writing, the careful semantic consideration given to every multi-ordinal word used, the breadth of intellect and understanding of the human body-and-mind-as-a-whole.

Gosseyn closed the directory and went out into the street. He felt at ease; his nerves were calm. Hope was surging in him. The very fact that he remembered Enright and his books in such detail showed how lightly the intruding amnesia rested on his memory. It shouldn't take long once the famous man began to work on him. The reception clerk in the doctor's office said, “Dr. Enright can be seen by appointment only. I can give you an hour three days from now; that is, Thursday at two P.M. You must, however, make a twenty-five-dollar deposit.”

Gosseyn paid the money, accepted his receipt, and went out He was disappointed, but not too much so. Good doctors were bound to be busy men in a world that was still far from having attained null-A perfection.

On the street again, he watched one of the longest, most powerful cars he had ever seen slide past him and draw up at the curb a hundred feet away. The car gleamed in the afternoon sun. A liveried attendant leaped smartly from beside the driver and opened the door.

Teresa Clark stepped out. She wore an afternoon dress of some dark, rich material. The ensemble did not make her appear less slim, but the dark coloring of the dress made her face seem a little fuller and, by contrast, not so heavily tanned. Teresa Clark! The name was meaningless in the face of this magnificence.

“Who,” Gosseyn asked a man who had stopped beside him, “is that?”

The stranger glanced at him in surprise and then he spoke the name Gosseyn had already guessed. “Why, that's Patricia Hardie, daughter of President Hardie. Quite a neurotic, I understand. Look at that car, for instance. Like an oversize jewel, a sure sign of–”

Gosseyn was turning away, turning his face from the car and its recent occupant. No sense in being recognized until he had thought this through. It seemed ridiculous that she would actually come again that very night to a dark lot to be alone with a strange man.

But she was there.

Gosseyn stood in the shadows staring thoughtfully at the shadow figure of the girl. He had come to the rendezvous very skillfully. Her back was to him and she seemed to be unaware of his presence. It was possible, in spite of his careful reconnoitering of the entire block, that he was already in a trap. But it was a risk he felt no hesitation in taking. Here, in this girl, was the only clue he had to the mystery of himself. He watched her curiously as well as he could in the developing darkness.

She was sitting, in the beginning, with her left foot tucked under her right leg. In the course of ten minutes, she changed her position five times. Twice during the shifts, she half stood up. In between, she spent some time apparently tracing figures on the grass with her finger. She pulled out her cigarette case and put it away again without taking a cigarette. She jerked her head half a dozen times, as if in defiance of some thought. She shrugged her shoulders twice, folded her arms and shivered as if with a chill, sighed audibly three times, clicked her tongue impatiently, and for about one whole minute she sat intensely still.

She hadn't been so nervous the night before. She hadn't, except for the little period when she was acting fearful of the men who were supposed to have been chasing her, seemed nervous at all. It was the waiting, Gosseyn decided. She was geared to meeting people, and to handling them. Alone, she had no resources of patience.

What was it the man had said that afternoon? Neurotic. There was no doubt of it. As a child she must have been denied that early null-A training so necessary to the development of certain intelligences. Just how such training could have been neglected in the home of a superbly integrated man such as President Hardie was a puzzle. Whatever the reason, she was one human being whose thalamus was always in full control of her actions. He could imagine her having a nervous breakdown.

He continued to watch her there in that almost darkness. After ten minutes, she stood up and stretched, then she sat down again. She took off her shoes, and, rolling over toward Gosseyn, lay down on the grass. She saw Gosseyn.

“It's all right,” Gosseyn assured her softly. “It's only me. I guess you heard me coming.”

He guessed nothing of the kind, but she had jerked to a sitting position, and it seemed the best way to soothe her.

“You gave me a start,” she said. But her voice was calm and unstartled, properly subdued. She had suave thalamic reactions, this girl.

He sank down on the grass near her and let the feel of the night creep upon him. The second policeless night! It seemed hard to believe. He could hear the noises of the city, faint, unexciting, quite unsuggestive. Where were the gangs and the thieves? They seemed unreal, examined from the safety of this dark hiding place. Perhaps the years and the great educational system had winnowed their numbers, leaving only the fearful legend and a few wretches who slunk through the night seeking the helpless. No, that couldn't be right. Men were becoming more brave, not less, as their minds grew progressively integrated with the structure of the universe around them. Somewhere violence was being planned or performed. Somewhere? Perhaps here.

Gosseyn looked at the girl. Then very softly he began to talk. He described his plight–the way he had been kicked out of the hotel, the amnesia that hid his memory, the curious delusion that he had been married to Patricia Hardie. “And then,” he finished ruefully, “she turned out to be the daughter of the president and very much alive.”

Patricia Hardie said, “These psychologists, such as the one you're going to-is it true that they're all people who have won the trip to Venus in the games, and have come back to Earth to practice their profession? And that actually no one else can go in for psychiatry and the related sciences?”

Gosseyn hadn't thought of that. “Why, yes,” he said. “Others can train for it of course, but–”

He was conscious of a sudden eagerness, a desire for the moment of the interview with Doctor Enright to arrive. How much he might learn from such a man! Caution came then, wonder as to why she had asked that question instead of commenting on his story as a whole. In the dark he stared at her searchingly. But her face, her expression, was nightwrapped. Her voice came again.

“You mean, you haven't the faintest idea who you are? How did you get to the hotel in the first place?”

Gosseyn said soberly, “I have a memory of taking a bus from Cress Village to the airport at Nolendia. And I distinctly remember being on the plane.”

“Did you have any meals aboard?”

Gosseyn took his time remembering. It was an intensional world into which he strove to penetrate and as nonexistent as all such worlds. Memory never was the thing remembered, but at least with most people, when there was a memory, there normally had been a fact of similar structure. His mind held nothing that could be related to physical structure. He hadn't eaten, definitely and unequivocally.

The girl was speaking. “You really haven't the faintest idea what this is all about? You have no purpose, no plan for dealing with it? You're just moving along in a great dark?”

Gosseyn said, “That's right.” And waited.

The silence was long. Too long. And the answer, when it came, did not come from the girl. Somebody jumped on him and held him down. Other figures swarmed out of the brush and grabbed at him. He was on his feet, shoving at the first man. A tight horror made him fight even after a tangle of strong hands held him beyond his capacity to escape.

A man said, “O.K. Put 'em in the cars and let's get out of here.”

As he was bundled into the back seat of a roomy sedan, Gosseyn thought, Had these people come in response to a signal from the girl? Or were they a gang?

A violent forward jerk of the car ended temporarily his tense speculation.