Null-A Continuum (18 page)

“Null-A archeologists are already scouring the galaxy for relics of other Primordial ships like the one Enro stole. We are looking on any world with monkeys. But, at the moment, this is only a backup plan. The technique of long-range mechanical prediction-similarization needed to transmit planets intact between galaxies is not feasible, until and unless we can locate all the Gosseyn bodies Lavoisseur hid.”

“Backup plan?”

Clayton said, “Think about it. Enro's main weakness is psychological. We can bypass his entire complex structure of military, political, religious, and psionic power, if we find the weakness inherent in his mind. Lavoisseur, including the version you call X the Unknown, is a trained Null-A observer and the founder of the Semantics Institute. If he is working with Enro, he observed Enro more closely than you or Eldred Crang were able to. X knows how to make Enro defeat himself.”

Gosseyn said, “How is it possible that X can be driven by such an insane idea as creating a universal government by force of arms when he is such an advanced non-Aristotelian thinker? His training, his neurolinguistic integration, must be more complete than yours or mine.”

“It would seem an impossibility,” Clayton said with a sudden boyish smile. “And so some assumption we are making is false-to-facts. Don't you love puzzles? I do.”

Gosseyn, for the first time in days, felt himself relaxing in the glow of confidence, of competence, this man naturally gave off.

“So you are just going to ignore the police of Accolon and Gorgzid seeking me, Mr. Clayton?”

“These galactics don't know what to make of us, Mr. Gosseyn. They keep asking who our leader is, and directing all their inquiries to the President of Earth, Janet Wake.”

Gosseyn was amused. “Someone once asked me why there are detectives in a world without criminals.”

Peter Clayton laughed aloud. “To keep it that way, of course!”

GOSSEYN remembered his first time on this planet, a few days before the invasion by the Greatest Empire. Gosseyn had been a hunted fugitive. Captured by Enro's agents, Gosseyn met a native-born henchman named Blayney, who was posing as a Null-A detective, a man so overwrought that he betrayed an inner cortical-thalamic confusion by his every word. At the time, not knowing about the distorter-imposed interference to the Games Machine of Venus, Gosseyn had wondered how the man roamed free in a sane world.

Even with the Games Machine of Venus compromised, real Null-A detectives had discovered the imposture and deduced the existence of the extraterrestrial civilization that had sent agents among them, made tentative guesses about its scope, socioeconomics, and technology. With the careful cooperation of all Venusians, especially wives married to galactic gang members, they had prepared an in-depth defense to resist the attack months and years before it came, including a plan to evacuate all the major cities at a moment's notice. One detective, Eldred Crang, had penetrated even to the Imperial Court of Gorgzid by that time.

The defense preparations were carried out with such secrecy that the Greatest Empire troopers, when they came, assumed the Null-A Venusian counterattacks were all spontaneous impromptu affairs and that the Venusians
were supermen. Outnumbered and outfought, facing a vastly superior technology, the Venusians won a crushing psychological victory.

Gazing down at the immense trees of the garden-world, Gosseyn saw very few of the burns or scars that high explosives or atomic-powered beams had left after the war still marking the bark. Even a powerful cannon could do little to harm such colossal volumes of wood. Most of the crater damage to the living cities of Venus had already grown over.

THE robocab flew toward a tree-bole so large that the branches were as broad as highways. A brown and rugged wall of bark rose up in view: A massive door opened in the wood and slid aside, revealing a car park where many sleek green air vehicles were already cradled. Through the window panels set in the wall of living wood surrounding the buried car park, Gosseyn could see the shining instruments and winking electron tubes of several laboratories, including an entire wall of linked electronic brains, emitters and transmitters of various designs.

Gosseyn realized suddenly where he was: “Is this …?”

Clayton nodded. “This is the lab for Dr. Hayakawa's design team. That man there is Dr. Reed, of the Neurolinguistic Research Institute.”

No one knew more about the workings of the mind, human or electronic, than the people gathered here: The various Games Machine circuits Venus had been shipping out to expatriate Null-A's on other worlds were made in these labs. This team had invented the special designs to resist the kind of distorter paralysis the Hardie gang once used to corrupt the Machines of Earth and Venus, to put Hardie in a position of power there, or to prevent agents of the gang, present under false pretenses, from being extradited.

Gosseyn saw the faces of the men and women who watched him land. The sight filled him with confidence.

Introductions were brief, as Dr. Hayakawa rushed him into an insulated signal-nullification chamber. Technicians in full-body radiation armor began helping Gosseyn to strip and to attach medical and recording appliances to his head, spine, and upper body.

The scientists and their technical crew fled from the room, and motorized hinges swung shut a valve thicker than a bank vault door. Gosseyn did not blame them: The moment Gosseyn's nervous system established a connection with a distant point in space-time, any reactions X might have programmed into his own extra brain might be triggered. X could similarize an atomic force into the chamber, or worse.

Over the intercom, Dr. Reed was saying, “Once we take the imprint of Lavoisseur's brain from the tube fragments of the lie detector, we expect to be able to mechanically force enough similarity to provoke a reaction.”

“What kind of reaction?”

Clayton's voice answered with a hint of humor, “Of course that depends on the energy-matter conditions of Lavoisseur and the area of space-time around him. If he is not in his shadow-form, and if he has taken no precautions, it is possible that we might have a sufficient connection to establish a mental connection, and draw vital information from his brain into yours. Naturally, we will have a thought-sensitive electron tube arrangement set to record the results.”

Gosseyn realized why Clayton was making a point of calling the enemy version of Gosseyn by the name Lavoisseur rather than something else: That name drove home the point that they were dealing with an individual of rare genius, the leader of the Semantics Institute. If X's tale was to be believed, it had been merely an offshoot of his memory chain, a discarded duplicate, who, under the now-legendary name of Walter S. de Lany, had possessed the supreme knowledge to found and build the first Games Machine on Earth.

The solitary survivor of the Primordial Humans of the
long-dead Shadow Galaxy. Who was he, really? Xenius of Mars. Ysvid of Forever Isle. Ur-ath-Vir the First-of-Living. X the Unknown.

This supremely dangerous individual knew more about the intricate energy-relationships of the similarity and distortion effects than Venusian or galactic science knew.

Dr. Reed's voice came over the intercom: “No matter what precautions he takes, Lavoisseur cannot change the laws of nature. Once two bodies exceed twenty degrees of similarity, the greater bridges the gap to the lesser as if there is no gap. The armored suit you see before you there contains both a sensory-deprivation capacity as well as a molecular-refrigeration field to slow Brownian motions. By placing you in a passive, hypnotic state, similar to what your ‘empty' bodies hidden in their medical coffins experience, we hope to make your nervous system the ‘lesser' of the two poles, once the connection is forced. You can memorize the interior workings of the suit with that transparency bar.”

Gosseyn took several moments to “photograph” the various suit components and energy systems into his double brain and attached each to a complex set of cues that would operate faster than any mechanical switch. Since he would be unconscious during the actual moment of forced contact, he set the cues to react to specific patterns in the suit's electronic brain, which had been pre-set to recognize a variety of threat scenarios.

Padded robot arms now helped Gosseyn, together with his medical packages, slide into the armored suit. It was more like entering a vehicle than it was like donning armor: The suit was fifteen feet tall, with amplifying motors at the joints. The robotic hands wired the appliances taped to Gosseyn's skull into the inner surface of the wide, domelike helmet.

There were mouth tubes for food and water up above and a catheter-recycler arrangement down below. The meaning of this was not lost on Gosseyn.

Over the suit radio, Gosseyn said, “You are assuming
that, seventeen-year-old or not, Lavoisseur would not make such a mistake as leaving the lie detector behind, even damaged.”

Clayton answered, “We are talking about the foremost Null-A psychiatrist in the universe. He allowed a machine to make a verification model of his thought-patterns. He could have similarized it out of the room with him when he departed.”

“So it is a trap.”

Dr. Hayakawa's voice answered: “We did not bother mounting weapons on the suit, since our electronic brain calculated that your thought-patterns could direct nucleonic and electronic forces more precisely and with more deliberate effect than any aiming and delivery system we have. The suit's atomic pile is roughly equal to the output of a battleship, and you can concentrate your fire into a smaller area than any weapon by using the electron-microscope attachment. There is also a distorter-brake built in the suit, so that if you are physically pulled toward Lavoisseur, you will land not where he wants but some place nineteen-point-nine degrees of similarity off-target: In the metric of undistorted space, that works out to something around six billion miles.”

As it turned out, when Gosseyn woke and checked his altimeter he found the nearest gravitating body was only two hundred forty thousand miles away, not the six billion it might have been.

The instruments in his helmet detected two smaller bodies, airless and waterless; after an hour of tracking their motions against the starry background, the onboard electronic brain was able to confirm the two dots of light were moons, the slim, rust-red crescent was a planet. The planet held atmosphere and water: There were also extensive atomic and electromagnetic power sources webbing the planet, signs of an advanced technological system.

Gosseyn pointed his gyroscope at the red crescent, set
the onboard electronic brain to calculate an orbit, and switched on his suit drivers. There was a slight sensation of pressure, as if he weighed an eighth of a pound and were lying on his back. That was all. There was no other sign of motion, except for the slow crawl of numbers in his suit dials.

It is important to remember that there is a wide, perhaps limitless, number of mechanisms, social and psychological, the human nervous system can adopt when dealing with the surrounding universe.

The planet was a visible disk the size of his palm at arm's length when it was blotted from sight. Gosseyn was alarmed at first, but his suit instruments and his extra brain continued to register the powerful gravitic and electromagnetic fields of the planet. There was some dark and solid body occluding it, not the Shadow Effect.

The patrol ship was a dark torpedo-shaped machine some four hundred feet long, which became visible when it focused a searchlight on Gosseyn. The ship was close enough that Gosseyn could sense the atomic energy in its drive core. Gosseyn was expecting a radio message, and so he opened his suit antennas to several bands and listened. Nothing.

He also expected the ship to undergo a period of maneuvering to match orbital elements with him, in case it wanted to narrow the distance: To his surprise, Gosseyn saw that, according to his suit instruments, the ship happened to be on the same course as his, with a slightly higher speed. To the instruments' limits of detection, the numbers were an exact match.

More and more stars were blotted out as the ship came closer. A circle of light appeared in the middle of the black hull: It was a large open airlock.

The hull loomed in his vision. So far, Gosseyn had detected no maneuvering thrust—the ship was coasting to this exact point in orbit, rotating at the correct rate to bring its airlock ring through the precise point in space occupied by his body at this exact time.

Then the airlock swooped up around him. Only now did he sense the electrical crackle of maneuvering jets firing, a short, controlled burst. The airlock valve shut out the stars. He was in a large, cylinder-shaped chamber. The far wall was moving toward him slowly, and then more slowly, and then the ship around him came to “rest” relative to his motion. Neither line nor grappling field had been used to make any last-minute fine adjustments: It was the most precise bit of space piloting Gosseyn had ever seen. He assumed it was done to impress him.

His suit dials registered an increasing air pressure around him.

An artificial gravity field, mild at first, pulled him toward one surface. He oriented the huge armored columns of his motorized legs toward it and landed lightly. He saw now that the airlock cylinder was not circular in cross section but octagonal: He landed on a flat surface rather than a curve. After a moment, weight increased, till it was roughly half Earth-normal.

The bulkhead above and perpendicular to him turned transparent. There on the deck above, in an austere-looking control chamber, looking down at him, were a group of six men. All were dressed in military-style uniform, in identical postures: hands clasped behind the back, legs spread, heads nodded slightly forward. The men were so similar of face, build, and expression that they might have been brothers. All were pale of skin, and their eyes were large and dark. Gosseyn noticed how dim the lighting was kept.