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There was no doubt of it now. In spite of what Prescott had once said about the necessity of establishing twenty-decimal similarity with another brain before there could be telepathy, he was receiving someone else’s thoughts.
The climax had come so abruptly, so differently than he had expected, that he froze where he was. He remembered thinking, “I’ve got to get going! Get going!”
“Gosseyn, get into the alcove—and nullify the vibrator!”
He was already moving toward the door when that thought came. He could see the alcove ten feet away, then five; and then there was a roar from Thorson.
“Get out of that alcove! What are you trying to do?”
“Nullify the vibrator!”
He was trying. His body pulsed with silent energy as it became attuned to the vibrator. His vision blurred, then cleared as a bolt of artificial lightning sizzled past the alcove, straight at Thorson. The big man went down, his head nearly burned off, and the great fire coruscated past him down the corridor. Men screamed in agony. A fireball floated from the ceiling and engulfed the circular vibrator. It blew up in a cloud of flame, tearing to shreds the men who had been ma
Instantly, the weight of vibratory pulsations cleared from Gosseyn’s nerves.
“Gosseyn, hurry! Don’t let them recover. Don’t give them a chance to advise the planes above to bomb. I can’t do it. I’ve been burned by a blaster. Clear the building, then come back here. Hurry! I’m badly hurt.”
Hurt! In an agony of anxiety Gosseyn pictured the man dying before he could get any information from him. He snatched for a source of power—and in ten minutes wrecked the building and the square. Corridors were seared with the murderous fire he poured along them. Walls caved in on shouting men. Tanks smoldered and burned like fury. “No one”—almost like fire itself was the thought—“no one of this special guard can be allowed to get away.”
Not one did. A regiment of men and machines had swarmed into the square. Torn, blackened bodies and smashed metal was all that remained. Gosseyn looked up from one of the doorways. The planes hovered at a thousand feet. Without orders from Thorson they would hesitate to bomb. Perhaps already Crang had taken them over.
He couldn’t wait to make sure. Back into the building he raced, along a smoldering corridor. As he entered the laboratory, Gosseyn stopped short. The corpses of Thorson’s guards sprawled in every direction. Slumped in an easy chair beside a desk was an old, bearded man. He looked up at Gosseyn with glazed eyes, mustered a smile and said, “Well, we did it!”
His voice was deep and strong and familiar. Gosseyn stared at him, remembering where he had heard that bass voice before. The shock of recognition held his own reaction down to a single word.
“ ‘X!’ ” he said loudly.
XXXV
The old man coughed. It was not a pleasant sound, for he twisted in agony. The movement brushed aside a fold of scorched cloth and showed the blistered flesh underneath. There was a gap in his right side, high up, as big as a fist. Thick threads of blood dangled from it.
“It’s all right,” he mumbled. “I can pretty well hold off the pain except when I’m coughing. Self-hypnosis, you know.”
He straightened stiffly. “ ‘X,’ ” he said then. “Well, yes, I suppose I am, if you want to put it that way. I put ‘X’ out to be my personal spy in the highest circles. But of course he didn’t know it. That’s the beauty of the system of immortality which I perfected. All the thoughts of the active body are telepathically received by other passive bodies of the same, uh, culture. Naturally, I had to disappear from the scene when he came on stage. Couldn’t have two Lavoisseurs around, you know.” He leaned back wearily, then with a sigh: “In ‘X’s case I wanted someone whose thoughts would come back to me while I was conscious, so I damaged him and speeded up his life processes. That was cruel, but it made him the ‘greater’ and me the ‘lesser’—that way I received his thoughts. Except for that he was independent. He actually was the rogue he thought he was.”
His head drooped, his eyes closed, and Gosseyn thought he had lapsed into a coma. He felt despair, for there was nothing he could do here. The player was dying, and still Gilbert Gosseyn knew nothing about himself. He thought in anguish, “I’ve got to force information out of him.” He bent down and shook the man.
“Wake up!” he shouted.
The body stirred. The tired eyes opened, and looked at him thoughtfully. “I was trying,” said the bass voice, “to operate an energy cup to kill this body. Couldn’t do it. . . . You understand, it was always my intention to die the moment Thorson was dead. . . . Expected to be killed instantly when I opened my defenses. . . . Soldiers did a poor job.” He shook his head. “Logical, of course. The body’s the first thing that weakens, next the cortex, and then—” His eyes brightened. “Will you bring me a weapon from one of those soldiers? I’m finding it hard to fight off the pain.”
Gosseyn secured a blaster, but his brain was working furiously. “Am I going to force a desperately wounded man to stay alive and suffer while I ask questions?” The conflict upset him physically, but in the end, grimly, he knew that he was. He shook his head when Lavoisseur held out his hand. The old man looked at him sharply.
“Want information, eh?” he mumbled. He laughed, a curious, amused laugh. “All right, what do you want?”
“My bodies. How—”
He was cut off. “The secret of immortality,” said the old man, “involves the isolation in an individual of the duplicate potentials he inherited from his parents. Like twins, or brothers who look alike. Theoretically, similarity could be achieved in a normal birth. But actually, only under laboratory conditions, with the bodies kept unconscious by automatic hypno drugs in an electronic incubator, can a proper environment be maintained. There, without any thoughts of their own, massaged by machines, fed a liquid diet, their bodies change slightly from the original, but their minds change only according to the thoughts they receive from their alter ego, who is out in the world. In practice, a Distorter is necessary to the process, and a lie-detector type of instrument is set to cut off certain u
The leonine head sagged. “That’s it. That’s practically all. Crang has given you most of the reasons, directly or indirectly. We had to divert that attack.”
Gosseyn said, “The extra brain?”
The old man sighed but did not lift his head. “It exists in embryo in every normal human brain. But it can’t develop under the tensions of conscious life. Just as the cortex of George the animal boy wouldn’t develop under the abnormal conditions of living with a dog, so the mere strain of active existence is too much for the extra brain in the early stages. . . . It becomes very strong, of course. . . .”
He was silent, and Gosseyn gave him a moment of rest while his mind flashed over what he had been told. Duplicate potentials. It would have to be a culture of such male spermatozoa; the science involved was hundreds of years old. The development of life in incubators was even older. The rest was detail. The important thing was to find out where the bodies were kept.