The World of Null-A

“You mean, you haven’t the faintest idea who you are? How did you get to the hotel in the first place?”

Gosseyn said soberly, “I have a memory of taking a bus from Cress Village to the airport at Nolendia. And I distinctly remember being on the plane.”

“Did you have any meals aboard?”

Gosseyn took his time remembering. It was an intensional world into which he strove to penetrate and as nonexistent as all such worlds. Memory never was the thing remembered, but at least with most people, when there was a memory, there normally had been a fact of similar structure. His mind held nothing that could be related to physical structure. He hadn’t eaten, definitely and unequivocally.

The girl was speaking. “You really haven’t the faintest idea what this is all about? You have no purpose, no plan for dealing with it? You’re just moving along in a great dark?”

Gosseyn said, “That’s right.” And waited.

The silence was long. Too long. And the answer, when it came, did not come from the girl. Somebody jumped on him and held him down. Other figures swarmed out of the brush and grabbed at him. He was on his feet, shoving at the first man. A tight horror made him fight even after a tangle of strong hands held him beyond his capacity to escape.

A man said, “O. K. Put ’em in the cars and let’s get out of here.”

As he was bundled into the back seat of a roomy sedan, Gosseyn thought, Had these people come in response to a signal from the girl? Or were they a gang?

A violent forward jerk of the car ended temporarily his tense speculation.

IV

Science is nothing but good sense and sound reasoning.

As the cars raced north along deserted streets, Gosseyn saw that there were two ahead of him and three behind. He could see their black, moving shapes through the windshield and in the rear-view mirror. Patricia Hardie was in one of them, but in spite of straining his eyes he could not make her out. Not that it mattered. He had looked over his captors and the suspicion that this was not a street gang was sharper now.

He spoke to the man who sat at his right. No answer. He turned to the man at his left. Before Gosseyn could speak, the man said, “We are not authorized to talk to you.”

“Authorized!” Street gangsters didn’t talk like that. Gosseyn sank back into his seat considerably relieved. The cars finally made a great curve and swooped into a tu

Men began to climb out of them. Gosseyn had a glimpse of the girl as she emerged from the car ahead of his. She came back and peered in at him.

“Just to keep the record straight,” she said, “I’m Patricia Hardie.”

“Yes,” said Gosseyn, “I’ve known since this afternoon. Somebody pointed you out to me.”

Her eyes grew brighter. “You damned fool,” she said, “why didn’t you beat it?”

“Because I’ve got to know. I’ve got to know about myself.”

There must have been a tone in his voice, something of the empty feeling of a man who had lost his identity.

“You poor idiot,” said Patricia Hardie in a softer voice.

“Just now, when they’re nerving themselves for the plunge, they have spies in every hotel. What the lie detector said about you was reported at once. And they simply won’t take any chances.”

She hesitated. “Your hope,” she said drably, “is that Thorson remains uninterested. My father is trying to persuade him to examine you, but so far he regards you as unimportant.”

Once more she paused, then, “I’m sorry,” she said, and turned away. She did not look back. She walked off toward a distant door that opened before her touch. Momentarily it revealed a very bright anteroom, then the door closed. Anywhere from five to ten minutes went by. Finally, a hawk-nosed man sauntered over from another door, and looked in at Gosseyn. He said, with an unmistakable sneer, “So this is the dangerous man!”

It seemed a futile insult. Gosseyn started to carry on with his examination of the man’s physical characteristics, and then the import of the words penetrated. He had been expecting to be asked to get out of the car. Now he settled back in his seat. The idea that he was considered a dangerous man was absolutely new. It didn’t seem to have any structural relation to the facts. Gilbert Gosseyn was a trained null-A whose brain had been damaged by an amnesic calamity. He might prove worthy of Venus in the games, but he would simply be one of thousands of similarly successful contenders. He had yet to show a single quality of structural difference between himself and other human beings.

“Ah, silence,” drawled the big man. “The null-A pause, I suppose. Any moment now, your present predicament will have been integrated into control of your cortex, and semantically clever words will sound forth.”

Gosseyn studied the man curiously. The sneer on the other’s lips had relaxed. His expression was less cruel, his ma

The big man laughed. “Come along,” he said. “You’ve got some shocks coming. My name, by the by, is Thorson—Jim Thorson. I can tell you that without fear of its going any further.”

“Thorson!” Gosseyn echoed, and then he was silent. Without another word, he followed the hawk-nosed man through an ornate door and into the palace of the Machine, where President and Patricia Hardie lived.

He began to think of the necessity of making a determined effort to escape. But not yet. Fu

There was a long marble corridor that ended in an open oak door. Thorson held the door for Gosseyn, a smile twisting his long face. Then he came in and closed the door behind him, shutting out the guards who had been following Gosseyn.

Three people were waiting in the room, Patricia Hardie and two men. Of the latter, one was a fine-looking chap of about forty-five, who sat behind a desk. But it was the second man who snatched Gosseyn’s attention.

He had been in an accident. He was a patched monstrosity. He had a plastic arm and a plastic leg, and his back was in a plastic cage. His head looked as if it were made of opaque glass; it was earless. Two human eyes peered from under a glass-smooth dome of surgical plastic. He had been lucky in a limited fashion. From his eyes down, the lower part of his face was intact. He had a face. His nose, mouth, chin, and neck were human. Beyond that, his resemblance to anything normal depended partly upon the mental concessions of the observer. For the moment, Gosseyn was not prepared to make any concessions. He had decided on a course of action, a level of abstraction—boldness. He said, “What the devil is that?”

The creature chuckled in a bass amusement. His voice, when he spoke, was deep as a viol’s G string.

“Let us,” he said, “consider me as the ‘X’ quantity.”

Gosseyn glanced away from “X” to the girl. Her gaze held his coolly, though a shade of heightened color crept into her cheeks. She had made a quick change into another dress, an evening gown. It gave a tone to her appearance that Teresa Clark had never had.

It was curiously hard to turn his attention to the other man. Even to his trained brain, the reorientation necessary to acceptance of President Hardie of Earth as a plotter was a hurdle too big for easy surmounting. But in the end there could be no shrinking from the identification.