The World of Null-A

“I suppose,” the man said, “you realize your story has a basic flaw.”

The man seemed to have forgotten his long silence, and Gosseyn accepted casually his entry into the conversation.

“My story,” he said, “is true according to my memory. And any lie detector will bear out every word of it. That is, unless—” He paused, smiled bleakly.

“Yes?” Prescott urged. “Unless what?”

“Unless all the memory I now have is of the same category as my earlier belief that I had been married to Patricia Hardie, but that she had died, leaving me grief-stricken.” He broke off sharply. “What is this flaw you have detected?”

The answer was thalamically prompt. “Your identification of your present self with the Gosseyn who was killed. Your complete memory of that death, the way the bullets and the energy struck you and hurt you. Think about that. And then think of the underlying credo of null-A, that no two objects of the universe can be identical.”

Gosseyn was silent. Through the window, trees taller than the tallest skyscrapers towered toward a blue haze of sky, and a swift river flowed through an evergreen world. Strange and tremendous setting for a conversation about the structural nature of things organic and inorganic, things molecular, atomic, electronic, neural, and physico-chemical, things as they were. He felt a deep wonder. Because he didn’t seem to fit into that universe. A score of times since his awakening, he had thought of the very objection that Prescott was now making.

He was a man who claimed not merely similarity of structure but identification with a dead man. In effect, he was maintaining that because he had the memory and general physical appearance of Gilbert Gosseyn I, he was Gilbert Gosseyn I.

Any student of philosophy, even in the olden days, knew that two apparently identical chairs were different in ten thousand times ten thousand ways, none of them necessarily visible to the naked eye. In the human brain, the number of possible paths that a single nerve impulse could take was of the nature of ten to the twenty-seven-thousandth power. The intricate patterns set up by a lifetime of individual experience could not ever be duplicated. It explained beyond all argument why never in the history of Earth had one animal, one snowflake, one stone, one atom ever been exactly the same as another.

Unquestionably, the doctor had discovered a basic flaw in his story. But it was a flaw that, in itself, required weighty explanations. It was a flaw that could not be dismissed by a refusal to face it squarely.

Prescott was watching him narrowly. “I suppose,” he said, “you realize that there is a lie detector in the room.”

Gosseyn stared at him as a hypnotized bird might gaze at a snake. There was silence, except for a queer drumming sound at the back of Gosseyn’s mind. He began to feel dizzy. His vision blurred. He sat cold and tense.

“It would be interesting,” Prescott went on inexorably, “To find out if there really was another body.”

“Yes,” said Gosseyn at last, blankly. “Yes, it would be interesting.”

Now that the words had been used, the picture presented to him this way, he didn’t believe his story himself. He felt reluctant to put it to the test. Yet long before Prescott had mentioned the detector, he had known there could be no evading its use. He went over to it. He put his hands on the metal contacts and waited while the sensitive energy-conducting lights played over his face.

“You’ve heard what we’ve been saying,” he said. “What is your verdict?”

“It is impossible for me to prove or disprove your story. My judgments are based on memory flow. You have the memory of Gilbert Gosseyn I. That includes a memory of having been killed so realistically that I hesitate to say it couldn’t have been death. There is still no clue as to your real identity.”

For better or worse it was a moment for decision. Gosseyn bent down and untied the woman’s feet though not her hands. He helped her stand up.

“My plan,” he said, “is to take you with me for about a mile, then let you come back and release your husband.”

He had another reason for taking her along. He intended to tell her what the situation was and what he had heard about her husband (though not that Patricia had said it), and so he would leave the problem of what to do with Prescott up to her.

He told her during the final quarter of a mile before untying her hands. When he had finished, she was silent for so long that he added finally, “Your husband may decide to prevent you from passing on the facts I’ve given you. On the other hand, his belief in null-A may be stronger than his loyalty to his government. You’ll have to make up your mind about that from your own knowledge of him.”

The woman sighed. But all she said was, “I understand.”

“This hospital,” said Gosseyn, “how does it work?” It was a point he wanted to clear up.

“It’s all volunteer, of course,” she said. “We’re on Hospital Exchange. When somebody gets hurt or wants hospitalization, the robot exchange calls the nearest suitable unit. Then we accept or refuse the patient. Lately, I have been turning them down because—” She stopped. She looked at Gosseyn earnestly. “Thank you for everything. Thank you very much.” She hesitated. “I intend to trust him,” she said, “but I’ll let you have a good start first.”

“Good luck!” said Gosseyn.

He watched her as she started on the return journey. Woman the nurturer, he thought, woman the healer, the teacher, the understanding spirit, the lover. Woman! Not merely an imitation of man. In everything that he had seen her do and heard her say, she was a woman’s woman in the fullest null-A sense—under terrific pressure now and accordingly low in energy, but even that could not conceal the warm-hearted human being underneath.

He came out of his reverie, and, turning on his heel, continued on his way toward the forest. The grass was soft beneath his feet, and there was still a sort of path, as if others less earnestly bent had walked this way, lightly, airily, and left an imprint of happy strolls through the dusk of warm and fragrant evenings.

The fragrance was lingeringly there, sweetly, deliriously there. The scent of growing greens was a thick perfume headily intermixed with the fresh feel of the afternoon rain. Gosseyn had the exhilarating conviction of an adventure begun in paradise. For a while there was the hissing swish of the river, near by now. But that faded as he entered the shadows under the titan trees.

Shadows. It was like coming into a cave from bright day. It was like a corridor that kept twisting, changing, curving, now opening up into great antechambers, now narrowing down to a pathless tangle of tall, spreading shrubbery, but always with a roof overhead to hide the sky. He realized it would be hard to sustain his sense of direction among the trees. But he had a compass, which should keep him on his general course. He could hope for no more than that.

He was still walking along in the apparently interminable forest when he noticed that the shadows around him were darkening. There was no question finally but that night was falling. He was just begi

He found a grassy nook and he was settling himself when a plane winged silently over the edge of a near-by hill. It came down fifty feet away from him, and rolled to a stop. A light flashed on in its nose. It swung around with an easy gliding movement, and caught Gosseyn in a blaze of sunlike brilliance. Out of the brightness a voice came.

“Gilbert Gosseyn, I am not an enemy, but I ca