The World of Null-A (3 page)

“And under the circumstances,” said the pudgy man with finality, “I can only suggest an early visit to a psychiatrist, Mr. Gosseyn. Certainly you cannot remain here.”

A minute later, Gosseyn was out in the corridor. A thought, a purpose, lay on his brain like a cake of ice. He reached his room and put through a call on the videophone. It took two minutes to make the connection with Cress Village. A strange woman’s face came onto the plate. It was a rather severe face, but distinctive and young.

“I’m Miss Treechers, Miss Patricia Hardie’s Florida secretary. What is it you wish to speak to Miss Hardie about?”

For a moment the existence of such a person as Miss Treechers was staggering. Then: “It’s private,” said Gosseyn, recovering. “And it’s important that I speak to her personally. Please connect me at once.”

He must have sounded or looked or acted authoritative. The young woman said hesitantly, “I’m not supposed to do this, but you can reach Miss Hardie at the palace of the Machine.”

Gosseyn said explosively, “She’s
here,
in the great city!”

He was not aware of hanging up. But suddenly the woman’s face was gone. The video was dark. He was alone with his realization: Patricia was alive!

He had known, of course. His brain, educated in accepting things as they were, had already adjusted to the fact that a lie detector didn’t lie. Sitting there, he felt strangely satiated with information. He had no impulse to call the palace, to talk to her, to see her. Tomorrow, of course, he would have to go there, but that seemed far away in space-time. He grew aware that someone was knocking loudly at his door. He opened it to four men, the foremost of whom, a tall young man, said, “I’m the assistant manager. Sorry, but you’ll have to leave. We’ll check your baggage downstairs. During the policeless month, we can take no chances with suspicious individuals.”

It took about twenty minutes for Gosseyn to be ejected from the hotel. Night was falling as he walked slowly along the almost deserted street.

The gifted … Aristotle … affected perhaps the largest number of people ever influenced by a single man … . Our tragedies began when the “intensional” biologist Aristotle took the lead over the “extensional” mathematical philosopher Plato, and formulated all the primitive identifications, subject-predictivism… into an imposing system, which for more than two thousand years we were not allowed to revise under penalty of persecution… . Because of this, his name has been used for the two-valued doctrines of Aristotelianism, and, conversely, the many-valued realities of modern science are given the name non-Aristotelianism… .

A.K.

It was too early for grave danger. The night, though already arrived, was but beginning. The prowlers and the gangs, the murderers and the thieves, who would soon emerge into the open, were still waiting for the deeper darkness. Gosseyn came to a sign that flashed on and off, repeating tantalizingly:

ROOMS FOR THE UNPROTECTED

$20 a night

Gosseyn hesitated. He couldn’t afford that price for the full thirty days of the games, but it might do for a few nights. Reluctantly, he rejected the possibility. There were ugly stories connected with such places. He preferred to risk the night in the open.

He walked on. As the planetary darkness deepened, more and more lights flashed on in their automatic fashion. The city of the Machine glowed and sparkled. For miles and miles along one street he crossed, he could see two lines of street lamps like shining sentinels striding in geometric progression toward a distant blaze point of illusory meeting. It was all suddenly depressing.

He was apparently suffering from semi-amnesia, and he must try to comprehend that in the largest sense of meaning. Only thus would he be able to free himself from the emotional effects of his condition. Gosseyn attempted to visualize the freeing as an
event
in the null-A interpretation. The event that was himself, as he was, his body and mind as a whole, amnesia and all, as of this moment on this day and in this city.

Behind that conscious integration were thousands of hours of personal training. Behind the training was the non-Aristotelian technique of automatic extensional thinking, the unique development of the twentieth century which, after four hundred years, had become the dynamic philosophy of the human race. “The map is not the territory… . The word is not the thing itself… .” The belief that he had been married did not make it fact. The hallucinations which his unconscious mind had inflicted on his nervous system had to be counteracted.

As always, it worked. Like water draining from an overturned basin, the doubts and fears spilled out of him. The weight of false grief, false because it had so obviously been imposed on his mind for someone else’s purpose, lifted. He was free.

He started forward again. As he walked, his gaze darted from side to side, seeking to penetrate the shadows of doorways. Street corners he approached alertly, his hand on his gun. In spite of his caution, he did not see the girl who came racing from a side street until an instant before she bumped into him with a violence that unbalanced them both.

The swiftness of the happening did not prevent precautions. With his left arm, Gosseyn snatched at the young woman. He caught her body just below the shoulders, imprisoning both of her arms in a viselike grip. With his right hand, he drew his gun. All in an instant. There followed a longer moment while he fought to recover from the imbalance her speed and weight had imposed on them both. He succeeded. He straightened. He half carried, half dragged her into the shadowed archway of a door. As he reached its shelter, the girl began to wriggle and to moan softly. Gosseyn brought his gun hand up and put it, gun and all, over her mouth.

“Sh-sh!” he whispered. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

She ceased wriggling. She stopped her whimpering. He allowed her to free her mouth. She said breathlessly, “They were right behind me. Two men. They must have seen you and run off.”

Gosseyn considered that. Like all the happenings in spacetime, this one was packed with unseen and unseeable factors. A young woman, different from all the other young women in the universe, had come running in terror from a side street. Her terror was either real or it was assumed. Gosseyn’s mind skipped the harmless possibility and fastened upon the probability that her appearance was a trick. He pictured a small group waiting around the corner, anxious to share in the spoils of a policeless city, yet not willing to take the risk of a direct assault. He felt coldly, unsympathetically suspicious. Because if she was harmless, what was she doing out alone on such a night? He muttered the question savagely.

“I’m unprotected,” came the husky answer. “I lost my job last week because I wouldn’t go out with the boss. And I had no savings. My landlady put me out this morning when I couldn’t pay my rent.”

Gosseyn said nothing. Her explanation was so feeble that he couldn’t have spoken without effort. After a moment, he wasn’t so sure. His own story wouldn’t sound any too plausible if he should ever make the mistake of putting it into words. Before committing himself to the possibility that she was telling the truth, he tried one question. “There’s absolutely no place you can go?”

“None,” she said. And that was that. She was his charge for the duration of the games. He led her unresisting out onto the sidewalk, and, carefully avoiding the corner, into the road.

“We’ll walk on the center white line,” he said. “That way we can watch the corners better.”

The road had its own dangers, but he decided not to mention them.

“Now, look,” Gosseyn went on earnestly, “don’t be afraid of me. I’m in a mess, too, but I’m honest. So far as

I am concerned, we’re in the same predicament, and our only purpose right now is to find a place where we can spend the night.”

She made a sound. To Gosseyn it seemed like a muffled laugh, but when he whirled on her, her face was averted from the nearest street light and he couldn’t be sure. She turned a moment later to face him, and he had his first real look at her. She was young, with thin but heavily tanned cheeks. Her eyes were dark pools, her lips parted. She wore makeup, but it wasn’t a good job and added nothing to her beauty. She didn’t look as if she had laughed at anything or anybody for a long time. Gosseyn’s suspicion faded. But he was aware that he was back where he had started, protector of a girl whose individuality had not yet shown itself in any tangible form.

The vacant lot, when they came opposite it, made Gosseyn pause thoughtfully. It was dark, and there was brush scattered over it. It was an ideal hiding place for marauders of the night. But, looked at from another angle, it was also a possible shelter for an honest man and his protegee, provided they could approach it without being seen. He noticed after a brief survey that there was a back alley leading to the rear of the vacant lot, and a space between two stores through which they could get to the alley.

It took ten minutes to locate a satisfactory patch of grass under a low, spreading shrub.

“We’ll sleep here,” Gosseyn whispered.

She sank down. And it was the wordlessness of her acquiescence that brought the sudden realization that she had come with him too easily. He lay thoughtful, eyes narrowed, pondering the possible dangers.

There was no moon, and the darkness under the overhanging bush was intense. After a while, a long while, Gosseyn could see the shadowlike figure of her in a splash of dim light reflections from a distant street lamp. She was more than five feet from him, and all those first minutes that he watched her she didn’t move perceptibly. Studying the shadow shape of her, Gosseyn grew increasingly conscious of the unknown factor she represented. She was at least as unknown as he himself. His speculation ended as the young woman said softly, “My name is Teresa Clark. What’s yours?”

What indeed? Gosseyn wondered. Before he could speak, the girl added, “Are you here for the games?”

“That’s right,” said Gosseyn.

He hesitated. It was he who ought to be asking the questions.

“And you?” he said. “Are you here for the games, too?”

It took a moment to realize that he had propounded a leading question. Her answer was bitter-voiced. “Don’t be funny. I don’t even know what null-A stands for.”

Gosseyn was silent. There was a humility here that embarrassed him. The girl’s personality was suddenly clearer: a twisted ego that would shortly reveal a complete satisfaction with itself. A car raced past on the near-by street, ending the need for comment. It was followed rapidly by four more. The night was briefly alive with the thrum of tires on pavement. The sound faded. But vague echoes remained, distant throbbing noises which must have been there all the time but which now that his attention had been aroused became apparent.

The young woman’s voice intruded; she had a nice voice, though there was a plaintive note of self-pity in it that was not pleasant. “What is all this games stuff, anyway? In a way, it’s easy enough to see what happens to winners who stay on Earth. They get all the juicy jobs; they become judges, governors, and such. But what about the thousands who every year win the right to go to Venus? What do they do when they get there?”

Gosseyn was noncommittal. “Personally,” he said, “I think I’ll be satisfied with the presidency.”

The girl laughed. “You’ll have to go some,” she said, “to beat the Hardie gang.”

Gosseyn sat up. “To beat
whom?”
he asked.

“Why, Michael Hardie, president of Earth.”

Slowly, Gosseyn sank back to the ground. So that was what Nordegg and the others at the hotel had meant. His story must have sounded like the ravings of a lunatic. President Hardie, Patricia Hardie, a palatial summer home at Cress Village-and every bit of information in his brain about that absolutely untrue.

Who could have planted it there? The Hardies?

“Could you,” came Teresa Clark’s voice slowly, “teach me how to win some minor job through the games?”

“What’s that?” In the darkness Gosseyn stared at her. His astonishment yielded to a kindlier impulse. “I don’t see how it could be done,” he said. “The games require knowledge and skill integrated over a long period. During the last fifteen days, they require such flexibility of understanding that only the keenest and most highly developed brains in the world can hope to compete.”

“I’m not interested in the last fifteen days. If you reach the seventh day, you get a job. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“The lowest job competed for in the games,” Gosseyn explained gently, “pays ten thousand a year. The competition, I understand, is slightly terrific.”

“I’m pretty quick,” said Teresa Clark. “And I’m desperate. That should help.”

Gosseyn doubted it, but he felt sorry for her.

“If you wish,” he said, “I’ll give you a very brief resume.”

He paused. She said quickly, “Please go on.”

Gosseyn hesitated. He felt foolish again at the thought of talking to her on the subject. He began reluctantly, “The human brain is roughly divided into two sections, the cortex and the thalamus. The cortex is the center of discrimination, the thalamus the center of the emotional reactions of the nervous system.” He broke off. “Ever been to the Semantics building?”

“It was wonderful,” said Teresa Clark. “All those jewels and precious metals.”

Gosseyn bit his lip. “I don’t mean that. I mean the picture story on the walls. Did you see that?”

“I don’t remember.” She seemed to realize she was not pleasing him. “But I saw the bearded man-what’s his name?-the director?”

“Lavoisseur?” Gosseyn frowned into the darkness. “I thought he was killed in an accident a few years ago. When did you see him?”

“Last year. He was in a wheel chair.”

Gosseyn frowned. Just for a moment he had thought his memory was going to play him false again. It seemed odd, though, that whoever had tampered with his mind had not wanted him to know that the almost legendary Lavoisseur was still alive. He hesitated, then returned to what he had been saying earlier.