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“Accordingly, we have decided to release you unconditionally, in the belief that you will protect yourself from harm.”
He hadn’t expected that. Just what he should hope for he couldn’t decide. Not freedom. He had been trying to gauge the limitations of Crang’s position, and even to wonder why Crang, a null-A supporter, would oppose the coming of Gosseyn III. The abrupt a
“You’re going to what?” said Gosseyn.
“The charges against you,” said Crang in a precise voice, “are being dropped. All police stations are being notified to that effect. At this moment you are free. Nothing that you, with your undeveloped brain, can do matters to us. It is too late to interfere with our plans. You may tell anybody you please anything you please.”
He turned. His ma
Gosseyn allowed himself to be led away. He dared not speak to Patricia and dared not thank Crang for fear that Thorson might be listening in. Day was bright though still misty over the city of the Machine as Gosseyn emerged into the open shortly after nine o’clock.
XX
Excitation rather than inhibition is important in correlation because from what has been said it appears that so far as is known, inhibition is not transmitted as such. The existence of inhibitory nervous correlation is, of course, a familiar fact, but in such cases the inhibitory effect is apparently produced not by transmission of an inhibitory change but by transmission of an excitation, and the mechanism of the final inhibitory effect is obscure.
Out on the street, Gosseyn said softly to himself, “Somebody will be following me. Thorson won’t just let me wander off into remoteness.”
He was the only person who got on the bus at the head of the street. He watched the gray pavement slide away behind the machine. About two blocks to the rear was either a black or blue coupe; he couldn’t be sure of the color. He sighed as it turned into a side street and disappeared from sight. A very fast car came from the far distance beyond the palace and raced past the bus, which was stopping for a woman. She paid him no attention, but he kept his surreptitious gaze on her until she got off after twenty blocks or so.
“Maybe,” he decided, “they’ve guessed where I’m going—first the hotel, then the Games Machine.”
At the hotel, where the first Gosseyn had left his possessions, including some two hundred dollars in paper money, the clerk said, “Sign here, please.”
Gosseyn hadn’t thought of that. He took the pen, a vision of jail looming up. He signed with a flourish, and then smiled to himself as he realized what an almost nerveless person he had become.
He watched the clerk disappear into a back room. Half a minute later the man emerged with a key.
“You know the way to the vault,” he said.
Gosseyn did. But he was thinking, “Even my signature’s the same, an automatic sameness.” The explanation for such identity had better be good.
He spent ten minutes rummaging through the suitcases. It was the three suits he was interested in. He had, he remembered, set the thermostat on one of them at 66° Fahrenheit, whereas normal for him was 72.
As he had recalled, two of the readings were 72, one was 66. He took off the clothes that had been given him at the palace and put on one of his own suits. It fitted perfectly. Gosseyn sighed. In spite of everything, it was hard to accept the similarity between himself and a dead man.
He found his money where he had laid it, between the leaves of one of his books. He counted off seventy-five dollars in tens and fives, put the suitcases back in the vault, and returned the keys to the desk. Out on the street, a shout from an automatic newspaper dispenser brought remembrance of the wild a
“. . . Gosseyn exonerated. . . . A thorough investigation being made. . . . Administration officers admit many foolish statements given out immediately after murder. . . . Jim Thorson, leading presidential candidate in the games, asks . . . due process of law.”
It was backing down with a vengeance. But it was clever, too—the easy cleverness of men with unlimited strength behind them. The seed of suspicion of Venus and the Machine had been planted. At the proper time it would be made to sprout.
There was a tiny item on the first page of the second section which interested Gosseyn. It read:
NO NEWS FROM VENUS
The Radio Exchange reports that no contact could be established this morning with Venus.
The report depressed Gosseyn. It drove home a reality that had been nibbling at the outer ramparts of his mind ever since he had left the palace. He was back in the depths, back with the five billion people who knew nothing except what they were told, back in darkness. Worse than that, he who had been keyed up by danger to actions that smacked of sheer melodrama in retrospect had had the danger taken from him. Imagine dropping on the palace on the night of the assassination of President Hardie. It was the act of a madman, certainly beyond the capacity of an ordinary law-abiding individual like Gilbert Gosseyn. Surely they would prevent him from getting in to see the Machine.
But nobody stopped him. The great avenues leading to the Machine were almost deserted, which was not surprising on the twenty-ninth day of the games. More than ninety per cent of the competitors must have been eliminated by now, and their absence showed. Inside a cubbyhole of the type used for the early part of the games, Gosseyn picked up the metal contacts necessary to establishing rapport and waited. After about half a minute, a voice spoke from the wall speaker in front of him.
“So that’s the situation, is it? What are your plans?”
The question shocked Gosseyn. He had come for advice, even—he was loath to admit it—instructions. His own ideas about his future were so obscure that it was improper to call them plans.
“I’ve been caught off balance,” he confessed. “After living on danger, the fear of death, and a sense of harrowing urgency, I have suddenly had the whole load lifted from my shoulders. I’m back in purgatory, with rooms to locate, a living to make, and all the wretched details of a low-income existence to attend to. My only plan is to talk to some of the professors at the Semantics Institute, and get in touch with Dr. Kair. Somehow, the Venusians have to be warned of their danger.”
“The Venusians know,” the Machine said. “They were attacked sixteen hours ago by five thousand spaceships and twenty-five million men. They—”
Gosseyn said, “What?”
“At this moment,” said the Machine, “the great cities of Venus are in the hands of the conquerors. The first phase of the battle is accordingly over.”
Limply, Gosseyn let go of the metal contact. There was dismay in him that completely overrode the enormous respect he had always had for the Machine.
“And you didn’t warn them!” he raved. “Why, you incredible monster!”
“You have, I believe,” said the Machine coolly, “heard of the Distorter. I can make no public statements while that instrument is focused on me.”
Gosseyn, whose lips had been parted for another tirade, closed them and sat silent, as the Machine went on:
“An electronic system of brains is a very curious and limited structure. It works by a process of intermittent power flow. In this process the denial of power at the proper split instants is as important as the flow during other split instants. The Distorter permits only movement of energy, not the hindrances or the variances. When it is focused on any part of me, the particular function to which it is attuned ceases to have inhibitions. In photo-electric cells, thyratrons, amplifiers, and in every part of my structure, the flow of energy becomes uniform and meaningless. My system of public communicators is constantly under this baneful influence.”