The World of Null-A n-1

by Alfred Elton Van Vogt

  “You incredible fool!” Gosseyn shouted. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

  An hour later, when they abandoned their stolen car deep in the fog-bound city, and the night around them was like a pall of gray-black smoke, they heard the first roaring of the news from a public-address speaker.

  “Stand by for an important announcement from the President’s palace!”

  That was one voice. Another, sterner voice came on.

  “It is my sad duty to announce that President Michael Hardie was assassinated this evening by a man known as Gilbert Gosseyn, an agent of the Games Machine. The immensity of the plot against the people of Earth is only beginning to be apparent. Gosseyn, whose escape was assisted by so-called Venusian detectives, is tonight the object of the greatest manhunt in recent history. All law-abiding citizens are ordered to remain at home. Anyone found on the streets will have only himself to blame if he is roughly handled. Stay at home.”

  It was the mention of the Machine that brought to Gosseyn realization of the full implications of that hasty killing. The reference to him as its agent, and the attempt to tie in Venusian detectives—it was the first public attack against the sacred symbols of null-A that he had ever heard. Here was the declaration of war.

  The fog wisped around them as they stood there. It was so thick Gosseyn could see Prescott two feet away as a shadow only. Radar, of course, could penetrate the fog as if it did not exist, but that would require instruments and the machines to transport them. A radar searchlight could silhouette them instantly, but it would have to be pointed at them first. In such a fog on such a night, bad luck could destroy him; otherwise he was safe. For the first time since events had seized hold of him, he was free to cany out his own purposes. Free, that is, with one limitation.

  He turned to stare at Prescott, still the unknown factor. Recriminations for what had happened were, of course, useless. But even in this dark, miasmic night, it was difficult to know what to do with the man. Prescott had helped him to escape. Prescott knew much that could be valuable to him. Not now, not tonight. Now he had another, more urgent purpose. But in the long run Prescott might be very important to him.

  If possible, he must try to keep this galactic convert to null-A as a companion. Swiftly, Gosseyn explained what was in his mind.

  “A psychiatrist—and it can’t be anyone I’ve contacted before—is obviously the first man on my list. There just isn’t anything as important as finding out what in my brain has frightened everybody.”

  “But,” protested Prescott, “hell be under group protection.”

  Gosseyn smiled tolerantly into the night. He was physically and mentally at ease, conscious of his absolute superiority to his environment. “Prescott,” he said, “I’ve been in this jam quite a while now. I’ve been like a bewildered child, timidly following other people’s orders. I’ve told you, for instance, how I allowed the Machine to persuade me to be recaptured.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been trying,” Gosseyn went on, “to account for my easy acquiescence to such outside advice. And I think now it was because, way in the back of my mind, there’s been a desire to ease out from under all this and let somebody else take over the whole burden, or at least a part of it. I was so unwilling to recognize that I was in this affair as deep as I could go—so unwilling that the first thing I did was to get myself killed.

  “Frankly,” he finished, “I’m counting on that Drae powder of yours to disorganize any group protective system now organized. But first, I want you to buy a map of the city, then we’ll look up the home address of Dr. Lauren Kair. If he’s not available, I’ll accept anybody but Dr. David Lester Enright, with whom I once made an appointment.”

  Prescott said, “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  Gosseyn spoke without rancor. “Oh, no, you won’t.” He explained gently, “We’re in this together, each the guard of the other. I’ll go into the drugstore behind you and look up Dr. Kair’s address while you buy the map.”

  Doctor Kair’s house gleamed whitely in the light from a corner lamp and from two dim globes that cast a pale radiance around their base, presumably indicating that the family was home. They vaulted the fence like wraiths. As they paused in the shadows of shrubbery, Prescott whispered, “Are you sure Dr. Kair is the man you want to see?”

  “Yes,” said Gosseyn. He was about to leave it at that, when the thought came that the author of The Egotist on Non-Aristotelian Venus deserved better. He added, “He’s written some books.”

  It was a very Aristotelian way of putting it, but he was intent now. The house of Dr. Kair, and Dr. Kair himself, offered a unique problem. Here was a residence so protected against intruders by a group system that not even the most skillful gangs operating during the policeless period would dare to try to break in. The method of entry had to be aboveboard and not too involved, with a safe method of escape if the protective system was set in play. Gosseyn whispered, “This Drae powder you used—it affects the brain?”

  “Instantly. It works on the nerves in the upper nostril cavities, thus making a direct path to the brain. One whiff is usually enough.”

  Gosseyn nodded, then turned his attention back to Dr. Kair’s house. In minutes, if nothing went wrong, a great semanticist, specializing in the human brain, would be questioning, examining, and diagnosing his brain. His brain, the existence of which had drawn Hardie and “X” into a vortex of events and brought about their death. Nothing mattered so much as finding out the why and how of this strange brain of his.

  Gosseyn whispered his plan. Prescott would go to the door and identify himself as a Venusian. Undoubtedly, before admitting him, Dr. Kair would sound the group warning, placing his neighbors on the alert. But that was unimportant. The Drae powder would take care of an emergency.

  Gosseyn asked, “How much of the powder would you use?”

  “A pinch—one capsule. I put eight capsules into the air system at the palace, about a teaspoonful. It’s very potent, but the antidote we took will still protect us.” He added, “I’d better be ringing that doorbell.”

  Half a minute later, he was doing just that.

  The fog drifted in through the open door with them. By agreement, they left the door partly open. It brought the night, and the safety of the night, closer. For Gosseyn, who was satisfied now with nothing less than every thinkable precaution, that unclosed door was the difference between ease and unease.

  Dr. Kair was a tall, huskily built man of fifty, with a smooth, strongly jowled face. As Gosseyn came in, the doctor looked at him curiously with a pair of the most piercing gray eyes Gosseyn had ever seen. Gosseyn bore the scrutiny quietly. He knew better than to rush this early confidence-building stage. Minutes spent now might save hours later.

  The psychiatrist wasted no time. As soon as Gosseyn had explained his purpose, he disappeared into his den and emerged again almost immediately carrying a small lie detector.

  “Mr. Gosseyn,” he said, “no Venusian or advanced null-A will accept for a moment the astonishing press and radio statements issued this evening by the government information bureau about President Hardie’s assassination. In all my life I have never heard or seen anything so calculated to arouse the emotions of the ignorant and of the great mass of the half educated. Not since the dark ages of the mind has such an attempt been made to appeal to the mob spirit, and the final evidence of their venality is their accusation against Venusians and against the Machine. There is unquestionably an ulterior motive behind those statements, and that, in itself, entitles you to a hearing before all just men.” He broke off. “You are prepared to face a lie detector?”

  “Anything, sir,” Gosseyn said, “so long as I do not have to lose consciousness. I’m sure you can understand the reason for that.”

  The doctor could. And in all the tests that followed, there was not an instant when Gosseyn did not have his hands and his mind free. All the tests! There were dozens; there were scores. For those involving machines,
the doctor’s laboratory-den, just off the center hall, was ideally located. With two exceptions, all the instruments could be moved to a chair from which Gosseyn could look slantwise through the den door at the partly open outer door.

  Some of the machines glowed at him with hot electronic eyes that warmed his skin and dazzled him. Others were as bright as burnished metal, but cold and unfeelable. Still others showed no visible lights, yet buzzed or hummed or throbbed with power as their unhuman senses examined him. As test followed test, Gosseyn told his story.

  His account was interrupted three times, twice when he had to hold still while ultra-sensitive rays examined the nature of the cells in his extra brain, and finally when Dr. Kair exclaimed sharply, “Then you did not yourself kill any of these men?”

  Prescott looked up at the question. “No, I was the one who did that.” He laughed grimly. “As you’ve guessed from what Gosseyn has said, I’m a person who had to choose between null-A and my position. I’ll have to plead temporary insanity if I’m ever brought to trial.”

  Dr. Kair gazed at him soberly. “No plea of insanity,” he said, “has ever been accepted from a null-A. You’ll have to think of a better story than that.”

  “Story!” thought Gosseyn, and looked at Prescott—for the first time really looked at him.

  The man’s eyes were ever so slightly narrowed, watching him. One of his hands moved casually toward the gun in his right-hand coat pocket. It must have been an unconscious action; he couldn’t really have expected to succeed, because Gosseyn beat him easily to the draw.

  “I would say,” said Gosseyn quietly a moment later, after they had disarmed the man, “that the house is surrounded.”

  XVI

  The human nervous system is structurally of inconceivable complexity. It is estimated that there are in the human brain about twelve thousand millions of nerve cells or neurons, and more than half of these are in the cerebral cortex. Were we to consider a million cortical nerve cells connected with one another in groups of only two neurons each and compute the possible combinations, we would find the number of possible interneuronic connection-patterns to be represented by ten to the power of two million, seven hundred, and eighty-three thousand. For comparison . . . probably the whole sidereal universe does not contain more than ten to the power of sixty-six atoms.

  A. K.

  The light that poked through the long crack made by the partly open outer door must now temporarily be their shield. So long as the door remained as it was, the watchers outside would see a blurred shaft of brightness and all would seem well to them. There would, of course, be a limit to their patience and gullibility.

  They tied Prescott hand and foot, and they gagged him, all with a swiftness that did not shrink from rough handling. Then they talked over the limitations of their temporary safety.

  “He hasn’t been outside,” Gosseyn pointed out soberly. “But he must have established contact in some way.”

  Dr. Kair said, “I don’t think we should let that bother us just now.”

  “Eh?”

  The doctor’s face was calm, his eyes grave. “What I’ve discovered about you,” he said, “comes first.” His tone grew more urgent. “You don’t seem to realize, Gosseyn, that you’re the important person in all this. There just isn’t anything that matters so much, and we’ve got to take all the attendant risks.”

  It took time to really accept that, time to assemble his powers of concentration, and to lock the outside danger into a separate compartment of his mind and leave it there. It even took time to realize that he could listen to the most important information of his individual universe, and simultaneously carry on vital work.

  “What you have in your head,” the psychiatrist began, “is not an extra brain in the sense that you now have a higher intelligence potential. That isn’t possible. The human brain that created the Games Machine and similar electronic and mechanical organisms has not even theoretically an intellectual equal in the universe. People sometimes think that the electronic brain system of the Machine constitutes a development superior to that of man. They marvel at the Machine’s capacity to handle twenty-five thousand individuals at once, but actually it can do so only because twenty-five thousand electronic brains were set up in intricate series for just that purpose. And besides, these operations are all of a routine nature.

  “That is not to say that the Machine cannot think creatively. It is located over a multimetal mine, which is completely under its control. It has laboratories, where robots work under its direction. It is capable of manufacturing tools, and does all its own replacement and repair work. It has a virtually inexhaustible source of atomic energy. The Machine, in short, is self-sufficient and superlatively intelligent, but it has limitations. These limitations were implanted from the beginning, and consist of three broadly based directives.

  “It must operate the games fairly, within the framework of the laws laid down long ago by the Institute of General Semantics. It must protect the development of null-A in the broadest sense. It can kill human beings only when they directly attack it.”

  Gosseyn was searching Prescott. No detail of the man’s clothing escaped his probing fingers. The pockets yielded a pistol and two blasters, extra ammunition, a box of Drae powder capsules, a packet of antidote pills, and a pocket-book. He didn’t stop with the pockets, but examined the cloth itself. The material was plastic, of the kind that was worn a few times and then discarded.

  It was on the side of the heel of the right shoe that he found the printed instrument. It was an electronic locator device made of the same plastic as the shoe, and recognizable only by the pattern of wires that had been printed from a photographically reduced cut. Gosseyn sighed as he discovered it. It must have been by the use of such a device that Patricia Hardie had been able to run into his arms that first day, pretending she needed protection. He hadn’t had time, then, to find out how he had been located. It was good to know. Explanations made the mind easy, took a score of tiny strains off the nervous system, and released the body from the thrall of negative excitations for more positive activity. It was easier, suddenly, to listen to the psychologist.

  The doctor, too, had been combining activity with conversation. From his very first word, he had started packing the test material into a leather case. Photographs and notes went in the case. He opened machines and removed recording tubes, wires, screens, rolls of film, ribbons of autotype paper, and special sensitive sound and light tracks. Almost every item, before he packed it, was briefly interpreted.

  “This proves the new brain is not cortical material . . . and this . . . and this . . . and this . . . that the cells are not thalamic . . . memory . . . association. Here are some of the main channels by which it is connected to the rest of the brain. . . . No indication that any impulses have flowed to or from the new gray matter.”

  He looked up finally. “The evidence shows, Gosseyn, that what you have resembles not so much a brain as the great control systems in the solar plexus and the spine. Only it is the most compact setup of controls that I have ever seen. The number of cells involved is equal to about a third of the total now in your brain. You’ve got enough control apparatus in your head to direct atomic and electronic operations in the microcosm, and there just aren’t enough objects in the macrocosm to ever engage the full potential control power of the automatic switches and relays now in your brain.”

  Gosseyn hadn’t intended to interrupt. But he couldn’t help himself. “Is there any possibility,” he said in a strained voice, “that I can learn to integrate that new brain during the next hour?”

  The answer was a grave shake of the head. “Not in an hour, or a day, or a week. Have you ever heard of George, the boy who lived with the animals?

  “George, a two-year-old baby boy, wandered off into the wilderness of foothills and brush behind his parents’ farm. Somehow, he fumbled his way into the lair of a renegade female dog which had just given birth to a litter of pups. Most of the pups die
d, and the wretched bitch, heavy with milk, its ferocity restrained by dimly remembered human training, permitted the child to feed.

  “Later, it hunted food for him, but hunger must have come often, because ants, worms, beetles, anything that moved and had life, were found to be part of the boy’s diet when he was captured at the age of eleven, a sullen, ferocious animal, as wild as the pack of dogs whose leader he had become. His early history was pieced together from his actions and habits.

  “Grunts, snarls, growls, and a very passable bark—that was his language. Sociologists and psychologists realized the opportunity he represented, and failed hopelessly in their efforts to educate him. Five years after his capture, he had been taught to set up alphabet blocks, spelling out his name and the names of a few other objects. His aspect at this stage remained bestial. His eyes glowed with easy hatred. He descended frequently and with great agility to all fours, and, even after half a decade, his forest lore was astounding. The tracks of animals, even if hours old, could set him into such a state of excitement that he would jump up and down and whine with eagerness.

  “He died at the age of twenty-three, still an animal, a wizened creature-boy looking hardly human in the bed of his padded cell. A post mortem revealed that his cortex had not developed fully, but that it existed in sufficient size to have justified belief that it might have been made to function.”

  Dr. Kair ended, “We could have made George human now with what we know about the brain, but you will agree, I think, that your case and his are similar, with one difference—your start as a human being.”

  Gosseyn was silent. For the first time, the problem of his extra brain had been clearly defined in the only possible rational way—by analysis and comparison. Until this moment his picture of it had been vague and idealistic, disturbing only because the new brain had shown no activity, no reactions whatever. But always, through the blur of his visualizations, hope had blazed. It had given him a measure of arrogance and of strength in the harder moments of his brief career as a potential savior of civilization. And somewhere inside his skin, permeating possibly his entire nervous system, he had felt pride that he was more than a man. That would remain, of course. It was human to be proud of physical or mental attributes that had come by chance. But as for the rest, as far as further development was concerned, it would undoubtedly take time.