The Players of Null-A n-2

by Alfred Elton Van Vogt

  He would have liked to talk to Leej, but to bring her down by similarity would be too startling. And, besides, there wasn't time. He said something about being right back, stepped out into the corridor, crouched down, and in that position similarized himself behind the captain's desk in the control room.

  Cautiously, he peered over the top of the desk, but for a while he made no effort to move, simply knelt there and watched. The man was removing the panel of the Distorter board directly over the similarity slots. He worked swiftly, and every little while looked over his shoulder toward one or the other of the two entrances. And yet Gosseyn had no impression of frantic haste. It was not surprising; traitors such as this always had some extra quality of nerve or boldness that set them apart from their fellows. Such a man would have to be handled very carefully.

  As he watched, the other lifted down one of the metal panels. Swiftly, he drew out the matrix in the slot, laid it on the floor, and came up immediately with a curved, glowing shape. Because of its shininess, it was so different from the other that a moment passed before Gosseyn recognized it. A Distorter matrix, not dead, but energized.

  He stepped out of his hiding place, and walked toward the control board. He was about ten feet from it when the man must have heard him coming. He stiffened and then slowly turned.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘but I was sent up here to do some work on this ——— ’ He stopped the lie. Relief

  flooded his face. He said, 'I thought you were one of the officers.'

  He seemed about to turn back to the board when Gosseyn's expression must have warned him. Or perhaps he was taking no chances. His hand moved convulsively, and a blaster appeared in it.

  Gosseyn similarized him thirty feet from the control board. He heard the hiss of the blaster, and then a cry of amazement, behind him. He turned swiftly, and saw that the other man was poised rigid in every muscle, facing away. In the man's tense hand he caught the glint of the blaster's stock. Swiftly, he photographed it, and as the other swung jerkily around, he similarized the weapon into his own hand. He was deliberate now.

  He got the maniacal terror he wanted, but he got something more also. Snarling like an animal, the man made an attempt to reach the Distorter switches. Three times Gosseyn similarized him back to his starting point. The third time, abruptly, the other ceased his mad effort. He stopped. He snatched a knife from an inner pocket, and before Gosseyn could realize his intention, plunged the blade into his own left breast.

  There were sounds of running footsteps. Captain Free, followed an instant later by Leej, came darting into the control room. 'What happened?' Captain Free asked breathlessly.

  He stopped short, and he stood by wordlessly as the traitor grimaced at them, shuddered—and died.

  The commander identified him as an assistant to the communications engineer. He verified that the matrix the fellow had put into the similarity slot was for the base four hundred light-years away.

  There was time, then, for explanations. Gosseyn offered the main points of his rationalization that had led him to set his trap.

  'If it was an agent of the Follower, then he must still be aboard. Why? Well, because no one was missing. How did I know that? You, Captain Free, kept in touch with the noncommissioned officers in charge of dormitories, and they would surely have reported it if a man were missing.

  'So he was still aboard. And for a whole month he waited in the lower part of the ship, cut off from the control room. You can imagine the ferment he was in, for he surely hadn't planned on waiting so long before making his escape. Why would he have a way of escape? I think it'd be because a man would always include a way of escape when making his plans, and would only accept the idea of death if he felt himself trapped.

  'With all those pressures working on him, he wasted no time getting upstairs when the doors opened.

  'Of course, the new matrix would also have a wrecking circuit in it, which would operate the moment he used it to escape. But there's one little point about that which puzzles me. Captain Free tells me we'll have to stop at a base about eighteen thousand light-years from here, and pick up the matrixes that will take us to Venus at r36000 theta 272 Z1400, and when we get there, we're going to have to have our papers in order.

  'My little point is this: How did a mechanic expect to turn up at base without release papers of some kind? Crew members of warships usually have to explain why they are not with their ships. You might say the Follower would protect him, but that isn't really logical. I don't think the Follower would care to have Enro know that he was responsible for cutting off Predictors from the fighting fleets for a whole month.’

  He looked up. 'As soon as you've fixed up that circuit, Captain, come and see me. I'll be in my room.'

  XVI

  NULL-ABSTRACTS

  For the sake of sanity, learn to evaluate an event in terms of total response. Total response includes visceral and nervous changes, and emotional reaction, the thought about the event, the spoken statement, the action repressed, the action taken, et cetera.

  As soon as he reached the bedroom, Gosseyn took off his shoes and lay down on top of the bed. He had been feeling the nausea coming on for more than an hour. The great effort of trapping the saboteur had been a strain almost too much for him to maintain.

  He was anxious not to show weakness. And so it was pleasant to feel the strength flowing back into his body. After twenty minutes of lying with closed eyes, he stretched, yawned, and opened his eyes.

  He sat up with a sigh. It was like a signal. Leej came in carrying another bowl of soup. The timing of it obviously indicated prevision. Gosseyn ate the soup thinking about that, and he was just finishing it when Captain Free came into the room.

  'Well,' he said, 'we're all set. Give the signal and well start.'

  Gosseyn glanced at Leej, but she shook her head. 'You can't expect anything from me,' she said. 'As far as I can see, there's nothing wrong, but I can't see as far as we're going.'

  Captain Free said, 'We're lined up to go through the remainder of Decant Nine to the nearest marginal base in Decant Eight. There, of course, we have to stop.'

  'Approach that base with a break,' Gosseyn said, 'and then we'll talk some more.'

  Eighteen similarity jumps and slightly more than ten minutes later, according to the time that seemed to have passed, Captain Free came back into the cabin.

  'We're six and three quarter light-years from the base,' he said. 'Not bad. That puts us within eleven thousand light-years of Venus.'

  Gosseyn climbed off the bed and walked stiffly to the control room. He sank into the lounge in front of the transparent dome. The question in his mind was, should they flash straight into the base? Or should they make their approach overland? He glanced questioningly at Leej.

  'Well?' he said.

  The young woman walked over to the control board. She settled into the circular chair, turned, and said, 'We're going in.' She pulled the lever.

  The next second they were inside the base.

  There was dimness all around. As his eyes became accustomed to the lesser light, Gosseyn saw that the enormous metal cave was much larger than the base of the Greatest Empire on Venus.

  Gosseyn turned his attention to Captain Free. The commander was giving instructions over the videophone. He came over to Gosseyn just as Leej also walked up. He said:

  'An assistant of the port captain will come aboard in about half an hour Meanwhile I've given orders for the new equipment to be brought into the ship. They accept that as routine.'

  Gosseyn nodded, but he was thoughtful as he studied the officer. He was not worried to any extent as to what Captain Free might be able to do against his interests. With Leej and himself coordinating to frustrate a threatening danger before it was scheduled to happen, risks from men and machines need scarcely be thought about.

  Still, the man seemed to be co-operating not as a prisoner but as an open partner. He had no desire to call the other's attention to his neg
lect of duty as an officer of the military forces of the Greatest Empire, and yet, some understanding seemed essential.

  He decided to be frank. After he had finished, he had to wait for nearly a minute. Finally, Captain Free said:

  'Gosseyn, a man in your position, with your special power, can scarcely have any idea of what hundreds of thousands of officers in the Greatest Empire went through when Enro took over. It was very skillfully done, and if the others were like me, then they must have felt trapped.

  'It was virtually impossible to know what to do. There were spies everywhere, and the overwhelming majority of the crews were for Enro. When he was war minister he had his opportunity to place his traitors in key positions everywhere.'

  Captain Free shrugged. 'Very few of us dared show resistance. Men were being executed right and left; the dividing line seeming to be whether or not you made open comment. As a result of a lie detector test, I was listed as a doubtful person, and warned. But I was allowed to live because I had not resisted in any way.'

  He finished, 'The rest was simple enough. I rather lost interest in my career. I was easily wearied. And when I realized what this trip to Yalerta meant, I'm afraid I let discipline go by the board. It seemed to me that the Predictors would insure an Enro victory. When you came along, I was shocked for a few minutes. I saw myself court-martialed and executed. And then I realized you might be able to protect me. That was all I needed. From that moment I was your man. Does that answer your question?'

  It did indeed. Gosseyn held out his hand. 'It's an old custom of my planet,' he said, 'in its highest form a method of sealing friendships.'

  They shook hands. Briskly, Gosseyn turned to Leej.

  'What's on the time horizon?' he asked.

  'Nothing.'

  'No blurs?'

  'None. The papers of the ship show that we are on a special mission. That mission is vaguely stated, and gives Captain Free considerable authority.'

  ‘That means we get out of the base without the slightest thing going wrong?'

  She nodded, but her face was serious. 'Of course,' she said earnestly, 'I'm looking at a picture of the future that you could alter by some deliberate interference. For instance, you could try to make a blur just to prove me wrong. I really have no idea what would happen then. But my picture says there is no blur.'

  Gosseyn was interested in experiments, but not at the moment. Still, there were other aspects of the situation.

  The whole problem of prevision seemed to become more puzzling the further he looked into it. If Enro, the Predictors and Gilbert Gosseyn himself were all products of the same kind of training, then why couldn't he who had been in an 'incubator' thirty times as long as a Predictor, and more than a hundred times longer than Enro—why couldn't he see across distance as Enro did, and into the future like the Predictors?

  Training, he thought. His. For they had received none. But he had been given flawed training, for a purpose which later had to be changed.

  As soon as he had warned the Venusians, he'd have to consult Dr. Kair and the other scientists. And this time they'd work on the problem with a new understanding of its possibilities.

  It was just a few minutes less than an hour after their arrival that they flashed out of the base. Ten jumps and ten thousand light-years brought them near Gela.

  Next stop, Venus.

  At Gosseyn's suggestion, Leej set the 'break' needles. Rather, she spent several seconds setting them. Then abruptly she leaned back, shook her head, and said, ‘There's something wrong.'

  'It's beyond my range, but I have a feeling that we won't get as close to the planet as we did when we went into that base. I have a sense of interference.'

  Gosseyn did not hesitate. 'We'll phone them,' he said.

  But the videophone and plate were silent, lifeless.

  That gave him pause, but not for long. There was really nothing to do but take the ship through to Venus.

  As before, the similarity jump seemed instantaneous. Captain Free glanced at the distance calculators, and said to Leej:

  'Good work. Only eight light-years from the Venusian base. Can't do much better than that.'

  There was a clatter of sound, a bellowing voice: ‘This is the roboperator in charge of communications—an emergency!'

  XVII

  NULL-ABSTRACTS

  For the sake of sanity, be aware of SELF-REFLEXIVENESS. A statement can be about reality or it can be about a statement about a statement about reality.

  Gosseyn took five quick steps toward the control board, and stood behind Captain Free, tense and alert. He shifted his gaze steadily from one to the other of the rear, side and front video plates. The roboperator spoke again in its 'emergency' voice.

  'Voices in space,' it roared. 'Robots sending messages to each other.'

  'Give us the messages,' Captain Free commanded loudly. He glanced around and up at Gosseyn. 'Do you think Enro's fleet is here already?'

  Gosseyn wanted more evidence. I was released, he thought, from Ashargin's brain within a few minutes after Enro gave the order. It probably took about forty hours for me to get back to the destroyer, two hours more to get the ship moving, less than an hour at the base, and then just under eighty hours to get here to Venus—about a hundred and twenty-two hours, only three of which could be considered wasted.

  Five days! The assigned fleet, of course, could have been detached from a base much nearer to Venus, in fact, probably had been. That was one trouble with his expectations. Similarity videophone communications involved the movement of electrons in a comparatively simple pattern. Electrons were naturally identical to eighteen decimal places, and so the 'margin of error' in transmission was only fourteen seconds for every four thousand light-years—as compared to ten hours for material objects for the same distance

  Enro's fleet could be here ahead of them on the basis of time saved by the use of telephone orders. But attacks on planetary bases involved more than that. It would take time to load the equipment for the type of atomic destruction that was to be rained down on Earth and Venus.

  And there was another point, even more important. Enro had plans of his own. Even now, he could be delaying his orders to destroy the people of the solar system in the hope that the threat of such an attack would force his sister to marry him.

  The roboperator was bellowing again. ‘I am now,’ it shouted, ‘transmitting the robot message.’ Its tone grew quieter, more even. ‘A ship at CR-04-687-12…bzzz…similarize aboard…bzzz…zero 54 seconds…Capture ——— ’

  Gosseyn spoke in a hushed voice:

  'Why, we're being attacked by robot defenses.'

  The relief that came had in it excitement and pride as well as caution. Scarcely more than two and a half months had passed since the death of Thorson. Yet here already were defenses against interstellar attacks.

  The Null-A's must have sized up the situation, recognized that they were at the mercy of a neurotic dictator, and concentrated the productive resources of the system on defense. It could be titanic.

  Gosseyn saw that Captain Free's fingers were quivering on the lever that would take them back to the star Gela, the base a thousand light-years behind them.

  'Wait!' he said.

  The commander was tense. 'You're not going to stay here?’

  'I want to see this,' said Gosseyn, 'for just one moment.'

  For the first time, Gosseyn glanced at Leej. 'What do you think?'

  He saw that her face was tense. She said, ‘I can picture the attack, but I can’t see its nature. There’s a blur a moment after it starts. I think ——— '

  She was interrupted. Every radar machine in the control room stammered into sound and light. There were so many pictures on the viewplates that Gosseyn could not even glance at them all.

  Because, simultaneously, something tried to seize his mind.

  His extra brain registered a massively complex energy network, and recorded that it was trying to short circuit the impulses that flowed to an
d from the motor centers of his brain. Trying? Succeeding.

  He had a swift comprehension of the nature and limitations of this phase of the attack. Abruptly, he made the cortical-thalamic pause.

  The pressure on his mind ended instantly.

  Out of the corners of his eyes, he saw that Leej was standing stiffly, a distorted expression on her face. In front of him Captain Free sat rigid, his fingers contracted like marble claws less than an inch from the lever that would take them back to Gela.

  Above him, the roboperator transmitted: ‘Unit Cr…bbzzzz…incapacitated. All personnel aboard but one seized—concentrate on the recalcitrant '

  With one flick of his finger, Gosseyn pushed the lever which was set to break near the base a thousand light-years away.

  There was blackness.

  The destroyer Y-381907 poised in space, safe, slightly more than eight hundred light-years from Venus. In the control chair Captain Free began to lose that abnormal rigidity.

  Gosseyn whirled, and raced for Leej. He reached her just in time. The stiffness that had held her on her feet let go. He caught her as she fell, limply.

  As he carried her to the lounge in front of the transparent dome, he visualized the happenings elsewhere on the ship. Men by the hundreds must be falling or had already fallen to the floor. Or if they had been lying down throughout the crisis, then now they were sagging, loose muscled, as if every tension in their bodies had suddenly let go.

  Leej's heart was beating. She had hung so lax in his arms that for a moment the thought had come that she was dead. As Gosseyn straightened, her eyelids flickered and tried to open. But it was nearly three minutes before she was able to sit up and say, wanly, 'Surely, you're not going back?'

  'Just a minute,' said Gosseyn.

  Captain Free was stirring, and Gosseyn had a vision of the commander convulsively tugging at switches, levers and dials in a frantic belief that the ship was still in danger. Hurriedly, he lifted him out of the control chair.