The Original and Complete Null-A Trilogy, page 17
“Everybody hates me . . . hates me . . . hates me—”
There were millions of unintegrated people who thought and thought things like that, without ever reaching the point of suicide. It was a matter of sustained intensity and of the awful unbalance that came to men who had tumbled from a height of integration into the depth of despair.
“What’s the good of being alive . . . What’s the good . . . no hope . . . kill myself!”
During the first hour, he had many intruding thoughts of his own. “This is silly! My brain is too stable for it ever to be affected by—No hope . . . Everybody hates me . . . I’m not worthy—”
It was towards the end of the second hour when a thunderous roar began far away. It kept on and on, frequently rising to such crescendo that the whining voice beside the bed was drowned out. At last, the violent persistence of it wrung a dull, surprised recognition from Gosseyn:
“Guns! Artillery fire! Have they started to attack Earth?”
He was conscious of horror.
After a long time, without having any memory of deciding to get up, he was up. How tired he was—“I’m not worthy . . . ruined . . . no hope . . . kill myself—”
He was aware of himself crawling across the floor to the window. He peered out—at another building. But the thunder of the guns was louder here, and more furious sounding.
He had his first realization of the direction from which it was coming: The Machine!
For a moment of terrible fear, that lifted the pressing veil of daze from his mind: The Machine! the Machine was being attacked!
“I’m nobody . . . Kill myself . . . Everybody hates me . . . What’s the good of being alive?”
The Machine, finding itself free of the control of the Distorter, must have started broadcasting warnings about the attack on Venus! And the gang was trying to destroy it.
Broadcasting? The hotel room radio! Crawl towards it. How tired he was—“Kill myself. No hope!”
He must have succeeded in switching on the radio because: “Blasted . . . murderous . . . incredible . . . criminal—”
Even in spite of his torpor, Gosseyn jumped. And then frowned in dim. understanding: The propaganda war also was on.
Everywhere he laboriously turned the dial, voices were roaring their threats and accusations: The Machine! the dastardly Machine! Mechanical monstrosity, treacherous, inhuman; and the Venusian plotters who had foisted its poisonous alien will upon men. Strait jacket . . . assassin . . . massacre—And all the time, as a background to the lying voices, came the thunder of the guns, the muffled, unceasing thunder of the guns.
Gosseyn began to doze. Better get to bed. Tired. So tired. “GOSSEYN!”
All the other voices blotted out. Radio talking direct to him. Funny.
“GOSSEYN, THIS IS THE MACHINE TALKING. DON’T KILL YOURSELF.”
“Kill myself! I’m nobody. Everybody hates me. What’s the good of being alive.”
“GOSSEYN, DON’T KILL YOURSELF. YOUR THIRD BODY HAS BEEN ACCIDENTALLY DESTROYED.
“GOSSEYN, I’M SORRY TO HAVE TO TELL YOU PUBLICLY LIKE THIS, BUT THERE’S NO OTHER WAY, NO TIME . . . GOSSEYN, I CAN’T LAST MUCH LONGER. DURING THE FIRST HALF HOUR, NORMAL SHELLS WERE FIRED AT ME. BUT AT INTERVALS NOW, SOMETHING ABSOLUTELY DEVASTATING HAS STRUCK AT MY DEFENSES.
“I HAVE A NINETY-FOOT STEEL OUTER BARRIER. GOSSEYN, IT’S BEEN PENETRATED FIVE TIMES BY SHOTS THAT CAME FROM THE DIRECTION OF VENUS.
“GOSSEYN, DON’T KILL YOURSELF. YOUR THIRD BODY HAS BEEN ACCIDENTALLY DESTROYED. YOU MUST LEARN TO USE YOUR EXTRA-BRAIN. I CAN GIVE YOU NO ADVICE ABOUT THAT, NO INKLING OF ITS NATURE BECAUSE . . . C-R-A-S-H-!”
There was a pause; then: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Games Machine has just been destroyed by a direct hit. Its malicious, treacherous attack on the palace has been—” Click!
He had been intending to turn it off for some minutes. Nuisance . . . Telling him something about—something—what?
Back on the bed, he lay puzzling about that. Something about—about—How tired he was. “Kill myself. Everybody hates me. I’m ruined. What’s the good of being alive. Kill myself—”
TO BE CONCLUDED.
Synopsis
By the year of 2560 A.D., the semantic philosophy of Ā dominated human existence. Annually, in the games of the Machine, hundreds of thousands of young men and women competed during the policeless month, and tried to become “worthy of yen us”. The lesser winners were awarded ail the good jobs on Earth. The top winners, many thousands each year, were sent to glorious Venus, there to become citizens in an all Ā civilisation.
Gilbert Gosseyn received, his first shock on the eve of the first day of the games. He was barred from the mutual protective group of the hotel in which he was staying, because a lie detector stated that he was not Gilbert Gosseyn. The hotel management promptly expelled hint from his room.
Out in the night, a young woman, who turns out to be Patricia Hardie, daughter of the president of Earth, lures him into a trap. This results in his discovery that her father and a mysterious cripple called “X”, together with a sardonic giant named Thorson, are plotting the destruction of Ā. They are using an instrument called the Distorter to get their men through the games of the Machine, and so into key positions.
The three plotters become very excited when they discover that Gosseyn has an extra-human section in his brain. He is killed in a sensational effort to escape.
Gosseyn returns to consciousness in the hospital of John and Amelia Prescott on Venus. He has full memory of having been killed, and he realises that somehow, someway, his personality has been preserved in another duplicate body. It is the only possible explanation.
He swiftly discovers that he is illegally on Venus, and accordingly is automatically subject to death. He escapes into the Venusian wilderness, pursued by Venusian detectives.
Venus turns out to be a fantastic land with trees three thousand feet tall and hundreds of feet in diameter. It abounds with natural fruits and vegetables, and the climate is perpetually, marvelously mild. It is a land of dreams, the heaven of the Solar System.
On the sixteenth day, a roboplane agent of the Games Machine temporarily rescues him. It warns him, however, that he cannot escape capture, and persuades him to go to the forest home of a Venusian detective named Crang. It tells him that fully half the detectives on Venus are agents of the gang, and, at the last minute, as he is getting out of the plane, it explains that there is an unknown alien factor in the affair. But that whatever evidence is available, he will find it in Crang’s tree home.
Nobody is home when Gosseyn first arrives at the tree home. He spends a couple of nights there availing for Crang to return. Strange dreams afflict his sleep, dreams about beings and ships that have come from remote interstellar space. He has previously noticed a tunnel at the back of the apartment, a tunnel into the depth of the tree.
He decides to explore the tunnel, but it turns out to be very long, intertwining through the roots of the colossal trees, so he returns to the tree house for food. He is captured and taken to Earth.
There he sees the body of Gosseyn, and realises that he IS in a second duplicate body. He is invited to join the gang, and has just refused when John Prescott, the Venusian kills President Hardie and “X”, and drugs the other men in the room. Gosseyn and Prescott escape, and Gosseyn seeks out a psychologist to find out what it is in his brain that has made him the center of intrigue, and actually held up the gang’s plan to invade Venus.
The psychologist, Dr. Kair, examines his extra-brain, and far the first time he learns the difficulties in the way of training that part of his mind. In the midst of the investigation, they discover that Prescott is really an agent of the inner group of the gang, and that he killed Hardie and “X” with double purpose of convincing Gosseyn of his bona fides, and of using the hunt for the assassins as a means of whipping up the population of Earth against tire Machine and Venus.
Kair and Gosseyn escape in a plane, after learning from Prescott that the Distorter is in the wall of Patricia Hardie’s bedroom. Kair plans to take Gosseyn to a lakeshore cabin which he owns, but after the psychologist falls asleep, Gosseyn realises there is no time to waste. He carefully turns the plane around, and jumps in an antigravity parachute down onto the palace balcony that leads into Patricia Hardie’s apartment.
He is captured by Crang—and turned loose. After what Prescott overheard Kair discover about Gosseyn’s brain, the gang no longer fear him. Indeed, they are convinced that they are expected to kill Gosseyn. They refuse.
Free, Gosseyn doesn’t know what to do with himself. He goes to the Games Machine. And it tells him that Crang was right: He has served his purpose. He was used, first to startle the gang leaders, then to show them that their secret hiding place on Venus was known. It was all part of an immense political maneuvering, and it is up to him now to make way for Gosseyn III, whose extra-brain is already trained.
The Machine also tells him that Venus has been invaded and all its cities captured, and that therefore he must waste no time in killing himself. Gosseyn refuses to do so, but later after boldly entering the palace, and sending the Distorter to the Machine, he realises that he has no alternative.
He rents a room in a hotel, drugs himself with Coue hypnotic drug, sets a gramophone record to repeating endlessly that he must kill himself; and he is lying there half unconscious when he hears heavy gunfire. He drags himself out of bed. turns on the radio, and hears the Games Machine tell him not to kill himself because the body of Gosseyn III has been accidentally destroyed, and so it is up to him to escape and train his extra-brain.
Vaguely, Gosseyn hears the announcer say finally that the Machine has been destroyed. Tie returns to the bed, and slowly forgets what he has been told by the Machine. There is only the whining voice of the record repeating: “Kill yourself, kill yourself—”
Part Three
XVI.
“To the biochemist, biophysicist, biologist, and physiological psychologist, however, life and mind are so amazingly complex and comprise so many heterogeneous processes that their blanket designation as two emergent levels cannot seem very illuminating . . . to the observer who contemplates the profuse and unabated emergence of idiots, morons, lunatics, criminals and parasites.”
W.M.W
Gosseyn’s first conscious effort was to move his hands. He couldn’t. He seemed to be lying on top of them.
“Funny position,” he thought.
A vague annoyance swept him, and an awareness that he’d have to emerge further out of his hypnotic sleep, to free himself.
He was about to struggle into awakedness, when a memory came as to why he had come to this hotel room. All through his body, his muscles began to grow tense. Eyes closed, he waited for the will-to-death to surge through him. The best method, it seemed to his taut mind, was to snatch the automatic he had put on the table beside the bed. And fire into his brain, in one synchronized movement.
That brought him back to the problem of his imprisoned hands. He decided meticulously that the act of reaching for the gun would serve to release at least one of his arms.
The idea pleased some instinct in him for economy of muscular activity. He waited.
But the dark impulse of suicide did not come. Instead, out of the depths of him welled a cheerful confidence, a buoyant sense of certain victory, a conviction that nothing could stop him.
Realization penetrated that the whining voice of the record had stopped. Stopped? But he had set it to play endlessly.
For the first time, he tried to open his eyes. And couldn’t.
“It’s that Coue hypnotic drug,” he thought in agony. “Like dope.”
But the fact that the drug still had such a hold upon him only made queerer his high spirits. He must have listened for hours to mind-destroying words. He ought to be in a bad way mentally.
There had been an interruption, he remembered uneasily. Loud sounds. The connection was obscure, but he had seemed to get out of bed. Had he shut off the record player at that time?
Such an interruption would have prevented his getting the full effect of the word barrage. It would probably by itself have stopped him from killing himself. But that didn’t explain this . . . this health feeling.
“I’m sure,” said a woman’s voice persuasively from his left, “that you can manage now. The drug is not all-powerful.”
The unexpected words did it. Gosseyn opened his eyes, and tried to free his arms. Two awarenesses flashed upon him almost simultaneously:
He was lying on his arms, but that wasn’t the reason he couldn’t use them. They were handcuffed together.
And sitting in a chair beside the bed, smoking a cigarette, looking at him from under mascaraed eyelids, was Patricia Hardie.
Slowly, Gosseyn, who had half sat up, sank back onto his pillow. The girl took a long puff at her cigarette. Not until she had blown a lazy streamer of smoke at the ceiling did she speak. She said:
“I chained you up because you’re a rather dominating person with a very strong will to know things.” She laughed. It was a quiet, relaxed, wonderfully musical laugh, it startled Gosseyn.
He noticed, suddenly, that she looked—different. The pettish expression, that attribute of neuroticism, was gone from her. All the pleasing features of her good-looking face remained, but they were changed in a subtle fashion.
Her beauty, that had been weak though bright, was revealed now in strength. Vivid as fire, her personality streamed at him.
She had always been cool, sure of herself. Enhanced by her new maturity, those qualities showed magnificent. In some indefinable fashion, the pretty, headstrong girl had overnight become a glowingly alive beautiful woman, who said:
“I had better get down to business. I took the risk of coming here, because your action in Sending the Distorter to the Games Machine has backfired. And something will have to be done about it tonight.” She leaned forward tensely to go on. But even as she parted her lips, she seemed to realize that he wasn’t ready. She drew back. And waited.
For Gosseyn, it was a welcome pause. His mind was still wrapped around what §he had said earlier: “You have . . . a will to know about things.” He had indeed, but where did she fit into that?
He was not, he realized, grasping the meaning of her presence here. Patricia Hardie, who had sworn on a lie detector that she knew just so much and no more—acting now as if she knew more.
He remembered his false memory about her, when he had first come to the city of the Machine, his belief that he had been married to Patricia Hardie, but that she was dead and he a widower. And then there was the debt he owed her for having tried to help the first Gilbert Gosseyn escape.
Her various attempts to help him had been at least partly explained by her story the night she tried to kill him. But that was the trouble, that lie detector-verified story!
She studied him for a moment after he had asked the question. Then she sighed. She said:
“I see I’m going to be here a lot longer than is safe for me. Very well, you may regard it as fact that lie detectors can be nullified. It would take too long to explain the details.”
“Then if you’re not what you said, who are you?”
She drew a deep breath, “I’m not going to tell you. There isn’t time.”
“Oh, there isn’t!” Gosseyn gazed at her in exasperation. He had heard too many phrases like that to be interested in the reasons for them. He realized he was finally coming fully awake, as he went on curtly: “I’m afraid we’ll just have to make time.
“Let me see,” he continued, “last time you said you had been ordered to play the role of President Hardie’s daughter, but that you were afflicted with the same amnesia as I so far as anything else was concerned. Let’s begin there. Who told you that you had to be the president’s daughter?”
The young woman sat for a moment with eyes closed. Without opening them, she began to speak:
“I’m going to be very patient with you,” she said. “I’m going to tell you that the Distorter is still in the Games Machine, where you sent it. And that we must have it. It is one of the few alien devices within our reach. We need it for evidence.”
“My opinion,” said Gosseyn, “of a group that has permitted two planets to be taken over without once issuing a general warning, is so low that it can hardly be put into words.”
He stopped there. “Evidence!” he said.
She seemed not to hear the final word. “You mustn’t be too harsh,” she said in a low voice. “It was intended to issue warnings, but their use of a forbidden instrument, the Distorter, prevented.”
“Forbidden!” Gosseyn echoed blankly. “Forbidden by whom?” She looked at him, and then slowly shook her head. She said quietly:
“None of that matters now. Later, when you have rescued the Distorter, I’ll tell you much more. But now, listen:
“There is a young man here in the hotel, who will help you. He is no agent of mine, but you will find out all about him when you read his note, after I leave.
“He, not I, was the one who saved you from the hypno. Mind you, I got here in time to have saved you from the worst effect. But he did something that I couldn’t have done. Because of him, no one knows that you are in this hotel.
“And Gilbert!” She leaned forward. She seemed unaware that she had used his first name. Her eyes were a soft blue. “Don’t be too impatient. I admit you’re being used roughly. But that’s because you’re out in the open. We don’t dare let you have information that they might obtain from you—” She broke off: “Think of it this way: You were brought out when the crisis was near. They were startled, but they killed you, and waited for the next move. You reappeared in a second body. They immediately got hold of you, but we introduced a slight variation in their plan for you, by having you turn up at the key point, so far as they were concerned, in the entire Solar System.
“Gilbert, you can’t imagine what a shock that was to them. They grew immensely cautious. Discovering the untrained nature of your extra-brain, they decided to release you.
