The World of Null-A

by A. E. van Vogt

  “I’ll leave you three to talk over the details at your leisure. Crang tells me there’s a major revolution started on Earth, so I’ve got to get back to the palace to direct the fighting.”

  The door closed behind him.

  XXX

  In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part, For the Gods see everywhere.

  W.W.L.

  “It will be,” said Dr. Kair, “a battle of wits. And I’ll bet on the extra brain.”

  They had been talking for more than an hour, with Crang interjecting only an occasional remark. Gosseyn watched the hazel-eyed man from the corner of his eyes, puzzled and uncertain. According to Kair, it was Crang who had found and arrested him. The man, of course, had to appear to be a Thorson man, but he was acting out his role the hard way. Gosseyn decided not to ask him about Patricia Hardie. Not yet, anyway. He saw that Kair was standing up.

  “No use wasting time,” the psychiatrist said. “I understand that galactic technicians have been rigging up a special room for you. The training should not be difficult with all the equipment they have here.” He shook his head wonderingly. “It’s still hard for me to grasp that they’ve got several square miles of underground buildings here, with only Crang’s tree house as a front. But to get back to what I was saying.” He frowned thoughtfully. “The main point is, if we’re right, your extra brain is an organic Distorter, and all that that implies. With the help of the mechanical Distorter, you should be able to similarize two small blocks of wood in three or four days, and that will be the beginning.”

  But it took only two days.

  Afterward, alone in the dark room, where the test had taken place, Gosseyn sat and stared down at the blocks. They had been three centimeters apart. He had seen no movement, but now they were touching. The single beam of light that focused on the two blocks marked their changed positions unmistakably. In some way, though he had had no sensation, thought waves had reached out from his extra brain and controlled matter.

  The ascendancy of mind over matter-age-old dream of man. Not that he had done it without assistance. Every effort had been made to make the two blocks similar. And yet they would have changed slightly since then. So slightly. His body heat in the confined room would have affected them. Both the light beam and the surrounding darkness would have had a different influence on each block, despite the absorber tubes that lined the walls, despite the most delicate electron thermostat. Without the Distorter, of course, he wouldn’t have succeeded this first time. It had similarized the blocks to nineteen decimal places. It quieted the molecular movement of the air, partially similarized the table on which the blocks rested, Gosseyn’s chair, and Gosseyn himself.

  And yet the final impulse had come from him. It was the beginning.

  Gosseyn emerged from the training room, and Thorson came by transporter from Earth to assist Kair with the tests. The photographs showed thousands of tiny impulse lines that had reached up into the extra brain.

  The tests were prolonged, and it was an exhausted Gosseyn who finally set out for his apartment. As he walked toward the “elevator” he noticed that, in addition to his usual guards, a small metal ball bristling with electronic tubes floated in the air behind him. Prescott, in charge of the guards, caught his glance.

  “It contains a vibrator,” he explained coolly. “Crang reported Kair’s statement that this would be a battle of wits and we’re taking no chances. It will be used to make tiny changes in the atomic structure of the walls, ceilings, floors, ground, everything-wherever you’ve been. It will follow you from now on right to your apartment door.”

  His voice grew louder. “It is a precaution against the time when you will be able to transport yourself from your apartment to any piece of matter, the structure of which you have previously ‘memorized.’ “

  Gosseyn did not answer. He had never bothered to conceal his dislike of Prescott, and now he merely gazed at him with steady eyes. The man shrugged, but there was a significant note in his voice as he looked at his watch and said with a twisted smile, “It is our purpose, Gosseyn, to tie you down with every means available to us. To that end we have prepared a little surprise for you.”

  Gosseyn was still wondering about the surprise a few minutes later when he switched on the lights of his living room. He put on his pajamas and headed for the dark alcove where the beds were. A movement on one of the en-shadowed pillows stopped him. A pair of sleepy eyes stared at him. Even in that dimness Gosseyn recognized the face instantly. The girl sat up with an indolent grace, and yawned.

  “You and I do get around, don’t we?” said Patricia Hardie.

  XXXI

  Gosseyn sat down on the other bed with an abrupt movement. His relief was tremendous, but when his excitement faded he recalled what Prescott had said. He said slowly, “I suppose if I try to escape, you get killed.”

  She nodded, more seriously. “Something like that.” She added, “It was Mr. Crang’s idea.”

  Gosseyn lay down on his bed and stared silently up at the ceiling. Crang again. His doubts about the man began to dissolve. He wondered if Thorson had wanted to kill Patricia and if this was Crang’s compromise suggestion for saving her life without having to come out into the open himself. He could almost visualize the man pointing out to Thorson that Gilbert Gosseyn had once believed himself to be married to Patricia Hardie and that some of the emotion might have remained. It could be one more tie to hold him to his bargain. So Crang might have argued.

  Brilliant Eldred Crang, thought Gosseyn. The one man in all this affair who had so far not made a personal mistake. From the corner of his eye, he glanced at Patricia. She was yawning and stretching like a relaxed kitten. She turned her head and caught his gaze.

  “Haven’t you any questions to ask?” she said.

  He pondered that. He couldn’t ask about Crang, of course. And he had no idea how much she had confessed to Thorson. It wouldn’t do to talk about things of which Thorson knew nothing. Gosseyn said cautiously, “I think I know the whole situation fairly well. We on Earth and Venus have witnessed a greedy interstellar empire trying to take over another planetary system, in spite of the disapproval of a purely Aristotelian league. It’s all very childish and murderous, an extreme example of how neurotic a civilization can become when it fails to develop a method for integrating the human part of man’s mind with the animal part. All their thousands of years of additional scientific development have been wasted in the effort to achieve size and power when all they needed was to learn how to co-operate. Yes, I have a fairly good over-all picture. The status of certain individuals still puzzles me. You.”

  “I’m your wife,” said the woman. And Gosseyn was irritated that she should joke at such a time.

  “Don’t you think,” he said reproachfully, “it’s unwise to make vital admissions? Eavesdroppers might-well, you know.”

  She laughed softly, then said earnestly, “My friend, Thorson is being led around by the nose by the sharpest-brained man I’ve ever met. Eldred Crang. I assure you Eldred has seen to it that we can talk freely.”

  Gosseyn let that go. There was no doubt about her admiration for her lover. The woman went on slowly, “I don’t know just how long Eldred can go on as he has been, or how long he can protect us. Thorson will kill us when it suits his purpose, as casually and callously as he did my father and ‘X.’ If the person behind you fails us, then we are all as good as dead right now.”

  Her conviction upset Gosseyn for an odd reason. She clearly had no faith in anything he might do. Was it possible that they were all depending on an individual who had not once come into the open? Didn’t Crang have any solution for the day when the extra brain was finally trained? He asked the question.

  “Eldred has no plans,” said Patricia Hardie. “At that point you go on your own.”

  Gosseyn turned out the light. “Patricia,” he said into the darkness, “do you think I’ve made a mistake in agreeing to Thorson’s plan?”


  “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll find this mysterious person, I’m pretty sure.”

  She hesitated, then, “Eldred thinks so too.”

  Eldred again. Damn Eldred.

  “Why didn’t Crang warn your father?”

  “He didn’t know what was being planned.”

  “You mean, Thorson suspects him?”

  “No. But ‘X’ was a Crang man. Thorson obviously thought Crang would oppose his elimination, and so he worked the assassination through Prescott.”

  Gosseyn said softly, ” ‘X’ was a Crang man?”

  “Yes.”

  It was hard to imagine that, much easier to believe the monstrosity had been turned into an egocentric by his injuries. And yet even Thorson had been suspicious of “X.”

  “It seems to me,” Gosseyn said at last sourly, “that the entire structure of the opposition to Enro is built on the machinations of Eldred Crang.” He stopped. Putting the thought into words made the man seem bigger than life. Gosseyn’s mind made a tremendous leap. “Is he the cosmic chess player?”

  Patricia’s answer came instantly. “Definitely not.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He has pictures of himself when he was a child.”

  “Pictures could be faked.” Swiftly.

  She didn’t reply to that, and after a moment Gosseyn abandoned the subject of Crang. “What about your father?”

  “My father,” she said quietly, “believed the Machine had wrongly denied him advancement in spite of his qualifications. When I was a child, I shared his resentment. I refused to have anything to do with null-A. But he went too far for me. When I began to realize that behind his wonderful personality-and you must admit he had it-was a man who felt careless of the consequences of his acts, I secretly rebelled. When Eldred came on the scene a year and a half ago, after a meteoric rise in the diplomatic service of the Greatest Empire, I had my first contact with the Galactic League.”

  “He’s a galactic agent?”

  “No.” There was pride in her voice. “Eldred Crang is Eldred Crang, unique individual. He put me in touch with the League.”

  “And you became a League agent?”

  “In my own way.”

  There was a tone to her voice that made Gosseyn say quickly, “What do you mean by that?”

  “The League,” said Patricia, “suffers from many shortcomings. It’s only as determined as its member nations. It’s so easy, so awfully easy, to sacrifice one star system for the good of the whole. I always kept that in mind, and so worked for Earth through the League. The permanent League personnel,” she added, “has long been aware of null-A, but has been unable to promote it anywhere else in the galaxy. The various governments associate it with pacifism, which it is not. They cannot imagine a state where the people adjust instantly to the requirements of any situation, including extreme militarism.”

  Gosseyn nodded, remembering what Thorson had told him. He ceased wondering why Enro had chosen an obscure planetary system in which to provoke his war. An attack on the only unarmed planet in the galaxy would be the most brazen method of flouting the League treaties.

  “It was Eldred,” said Patricia, “who discovered that the injuries suffered by old Lavoisseur in the explosion at the Semantics Institute a few years ago had turned that great scientist into the bloodthirsty maniac whom you knew as ‘X.’ He thought the man would recover, and so become useful, but that didn’t happen.”

  Back to Eldred. Gosseyn sighed.

  The silence between them lengthened. With each passing minute, Gosseyn grew more determined, grimmer. He had no illusions. This was the calm before the storm. A rapacious Thorson had been drawn from the purpose for which he had come to the solar system. So the world of null-A had a chance to arm itself, and the League had a few additional weeks to realize that Enro meant war. Thorson would play his private game as long as he dared, but if he ever felt himself threatened, he would carry on with the war of extermination.

  Gosseyn could see his hopes narrowing down to one lone being working, with the help of a few uncomprehending assistants like himself, against the colossal might of a violently unsane, all-embracing galactic civilization.

  “It’s not enough,” he thought with sudden insight. “I’m counting too much on somebody else to perform the final miracle.”

  In that moment, with that realization, the first germ of desperate action was born.

  XXXII

  Two days after that, he bent two light beams together in the dark room without the aid of the Distorter. He felt the action. Felt it as a sensation like-he tried to describe it afterward to the others-like “the first time you get a floating arm in hypnosis.” Distinct, unmistakable attunement. It was a new awareness of-and addition to-his nervous system.

  As the days passed, the tingles in his body grew more insistent, sharper, and more controllable. He felt energies, movements, things, and reached the point where he could identify them instantly. The presence of the other men was a warm fire along his nerves. He responded to the most delicate impulses, and by the sixth day he could distinguish Dr. Kair from the others by a “friendliness” that effused from the man. There was an overtone of anxiety in the psychologist’s feeling, but that only accentuated the friendliness.

  Gosseyn was interested in distinguishing between the emotions felt about him by Crang, Prescott, and Thorson. It was Prescott who disliked him violently. “He’s never forgotten,” Gosseyn thought, “the scare I gave him, and the way I fooled him again when I went to the palace to get the Distorter.” Thorson was a Machiavellian; he neither liked nor disliked his prisoner. He was both cautious and resolute. Crang was neutral. It was a curious emotion to receive from the man. Neutral, intent, preoccupied, playing a game so intricate that no dear-cut reaction would come through.

  But it was Patricia who provided the startling state. Nothing. Again and again, when he reached the point where he could identify the individual emotions of the men, Gosseyn strained to make contact with Patricia’s nervous system. In the end he had to conclude that a man could not tune in on a woman.

  During those days his plan grew sharper in his mind. He saw with a developing comprehension that the picture of this situation had come to him through Aristotelian minds-almost literally. Even Crang, he mustn’t forget, was only a fine example of how man could organize himself without having had knowledge of the null-A system since childhood. He was a null-A convert, and not a null-A proper.

  There were gaps in that reasoning, but it brought the scene down to the level of a human nervous system. The mysterious player, seen in that light, no longer seemed so important. He was a concept of Thorson’s Aristotelian mind. The reality would probably turn out to be some one who had discovered a method of immortality, and who was attempting without adequate resources to oppose the plans of an irresistible military power. He had already proved that he cared little about what happened to any one body of Gilbert Gosseyn, and it seemed clear that if Gosseyn II was killed, then the player would accept the defeat of that phase of his plans and turn to other prospects of the situation.

  To hell with him!

  On the afternoon of the experiment with the piece of wood, Gosseyn made a prolonged attempt to counteract the vibrator. Its intricacy startled him. It was a thing of many subtly different energies. Pulsations poured from it on a multitude of wave lengths. He succeeded in controlling it because it was a small machine, its various parts close together in space-time. The time difference between the innumerable functions was not a factor.

  And that was why his control of it meant nothing so far as his escape was concerned. The time factor was important when, holding the vibrator, he tried simultaneously to memorize the structure of a section of the floor. He couldn’t dominate both. That situation continued. He could control the vibrator or the floor, never the two of them together. The gang knew its Similarity science; that was finally clear.

  On the nineteenth day he was given
a metal rod with a concave cup made of electron steel, the metal used for atomic energy. Gingerly, Gosseyn reached with his mind for the small electric power source that had been brought into the room. The sparkling force coruscated in the energy cup and spat with a hazy violence against the floor, the wall, the transparent shield behind which the observers waited. Shuddering, Gosseyn broke the twenty-decimal similarity between the rod and the energy source. He surrendered the rod to a soldier who was sent out to take it from him. Not till then did Thorson come out. The big man was genial.

  “Well, Mr. Gosseyn,” he said, almost respectfully, “we’d be foolish to give you any more training than that. It isn’t that I don’t trust you-” He laughed. “I don’t. But I think you’ve got enough stuff to find our man.”

  He broke off. “I’m having some extra clothing sent up to your apartment. Pack what you want, and be ready in an hour.”

  Gosseyn nodded absently. A few moments later he watched the three guards ease the vibrator into the elevator, and then Prescott motioned him to enter. The men crowded in behind him. Prescott stepped to the controls, and Gosseyn, in a single, convulsive movement, grabbed him and smashed his head against the metal wall of the elevator. Even as he snatched at the blaster in the holster strapped to the man’s hip, he let go of the body, reached for the nearest tube, and pressed it.

  There was a blur of movement; that ended. By that time the blaster was glaring its white fire, and there were four dying men writhing on the floor.

  The tremendous, desperate first act was a complete success.

  XXXIII

  Gosseyn tugged open the zippers and peeled off his suit. He suspected that electronic instruments were woven into its cloth, and there was at least one such device by which the wearer could be stunned by remote control. Stripped, he began to feel better, but it was not until he had hastily donned Prescott’s suit and shoes that he considered himself ready for the next move.