Complete Short Fiction, page 196
He was a man who claimed not merely similarity of structure, but identification with a dead man. The root logic of A was at stake.
What you say a thing is, it is not.
In effect, he was maintaining that because he had the memory and general physical appearance of Gilbert Gosseyn I, he was Gilbert Gosseyn I.
What you say a thing is, it is not.
There were subtle meanings to that, of course. 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. A flaw that could not be dismissed by an elementalistic refusal to face it squarely. Prescott was speaking:
“What you have stated,” he said, “about a gang that has somehow got around the Machine on Earth, nullifying its control of the games, and its relation to the victors of the games, sounds like a romance straight out of some neurotic brain. As a story it is comparable to the maunderings of the old style village idiot, who believed any tall yam, so long as it didn’t happen in front of his own eyes. And, even if he did see, his verbal picture of it would become more fantastic by the hour. All this, and yet—”
He stopped. He gave Gosseyn a measured look.
“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 head. He began to feel dizzy; his vision blurred.
He sat cold.
“It would be interesting,” the doctor went on inexorably, “to find out for certain if there really was another body.”
“Yes,” said Gosseyn at last, blankly, “yes, it would be interesting.
He couldn’t imagine it. Now that the words had been used, the picture presented to him this way, he didn’t believe the story himself.
He was reluctant to test it, so violently reluctant that it was like a fire inside him. But all the time, 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.”
“Your story is true according to your knowledge,” said the detector. “You are right in believing that you and the person who called himself Gilbert Gosseyn I are not the same individuals. There is nothing in your mind that explains why you have a portion of his memory, and no clue at all as to your true identity.”
It was a moment for decisions. Without a word, Gosseyn unbound the two doctors, first the woman, then the man. He watched them while they rubbed the circulation back into their numbed members. He said at last:
“Well?”
The man and the woman looked at each other. And it was the woman who spoke:
“I think,” she said, “you had better be on your way. I’ll make up a package for you, and we will pass your story on to Detective Registry. What they will do, of course, is out of our hands.”
Gosseyn said: “you wouldn’t advise me to remain here?”
“No!” It was the man who answered that. “Detectives have the authority to kill people in your position on sight. And in recent years, I’ve noticed, they’ve been using their various powers rather freely. It would be better to let your story sink in for a few days before exposing yourself. You can scarcely imagine how poor your legal position is. I’d say, wait till you’re captured.”
An hour later, Gosseyn was heading “west” along the valley, following a mighty river towards its source.
VII.
“To be acceptable as scientific knowledge, a truth must be a deduction from other truths.”
Aristotle
The Nicomachean Ethics
circa 340 B.C.
The grass was soft beneath Gosseyn’s feet; and at first there was a sort of a 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 lingering there, sweetly, deliciously there. The scent of growing greens was a thick perfume headily intermixed with the feel of imminent rain; yet the air was not stuffy, not too humid. Gosseyn had the exhilarating conviction of an adventure begun in paradise.
Even though he was still in sight of the hospital, his anxiety diminished minute by minute.
At first, too, there was the hissing swish of the river, nearby now. But that faded as he entered the shadows under the titan trees.
Shadows? It was like a witch’s night, like coming into a cave from bright day. There was light of a sort for a considerable distance; then it began to fade sharply. It became a dim twilight. Gosseyn looked up but there was no sky visible. To the left and to the right and ahead, the twilight world pressed in upon him.
He walked on, strongly, but unalarmed. Twilight had no terrors for his null-A mind. He visualized himself threading this Venusian jungle, under a mighty canopy of foliage. And, so long as he kept his thoughts away from his personal background, the feeling was good. He had a superb sense of security, of being orientated to his physical universe.
It was, he thought some time later, as if he was on the lower floor of an enormous building, following a corridor that kept twisting, changing, curving, now opening up into great antechambers, now narrowing down to a pathless tangle of tall, spreading shrubbery, the equivalent of a doorway, but always with a roof overhead, holding off the sky.
He had a grim conviction that it would be harder to sustain his sense of direction among the trees than in any conceivable building. But he had a compass. Which should keep him on his general course; and he could hope for no more than that.
A curious heavy sound impinged suddenly upon Gosseyn’s attention. It came from above, far above. It grew louder rapidly, became a continuous sound, like the roar of many smoothly operating machines.
Gosseyn stopped, and stared blankly upwards into the shadows. He walked on finally still puzzled. An hour later, the sound began to fade. It ended; and the hush of the great woods pressed instantly back into place around him.
It was half an hour after that that there was a whoosh! above Gosseyn. He looked up instinctively, and was struck in the face by a gush of water. The water poured down his back and front. It drenched him with its cool freshness. After it had stopped, Gosseyn estimated that about a barrel of it had debouched down upon him.
That first gush was like a signal. All around him, as he walked, water began to come down. He could hear the splashing in the shadows on every side; and twice more he was partially caught in the engulfing wet folds. Like a gigantic sprinkling system, the branches above were sending down torrents of water; and there was no longer any doubt what had happened.
It had rained. Gigantic leaves had taken the entire load of rain in their ample, up-curved green bosoms. But now here, now there, the water was overweighing leaf after leaf, and tumbling down into the depths, frequently into other leaves; but always the process must have continued until some small portion of the greater bulk of water actually reached the ground.
The rain must have been on a colossal scale. Just as well to be in a forest whose leaves could almost support a river.
Gosseyn pictured that, mentally enlivened by the vision. A man who had already been killed once, who had no memory, no identity—walking to escape death in a forest of trees three thousand feet high.
He was still walking along in the apparently interminable forest when he noticed that the shadows around him were darkening.
In ten minutes there was no question but that night was falling.
Peaceful was that night, but dark. Gosseyn had had an indeterminate plan to climb a tree, with the purpose of avoiding any Venusian animals that might be about. Incredibly, he had forgotten to ask about animals; and though he had seen none that was no proof that there weren’t any.
Swiftly, it was too dark to climb a tree. It was too dark to see the lower branches, too dark even to see the nature of the cool earth on which he cautiously settled himself.
There was no grass within reach of his fumbling fingers, but there seemed to be something—moss, he decided, frowning. But he couldn’t be sure.
The problem of sleeping, he pondered for a long time, ruefully. He had taken a compass from the hospital, but without examining it beyond verifying by means of the lie detector that it was a compass.
It was important that he make a wide circling move, always under cover, and eventually head “east.”
In the darkness, he fumbled around for a stick, a branch. Finding it, he drew several lines in the ground, lines running roughly east and west. He laid the stick in one of the little ruts, for good measure: and finally, as an additional precaution, stretched himself parallel to the stick, his head pointing west.
In that position, still worried about the animals, he fell asleep.
He wakened with a start to realize that it must be day. The darkness was again of a twilight variety: and there was a special brightness to the northwest that made him hurry in that direction.
It grew lighter and lighter. After about twenty minutes, the trees began to thin, to straggle; and then he came to a treeless meadow.
A brook raced noisily over stones and pebbles, and swished more softly but with a sinister sound around the sharp curves. Its banks were lined with huge shrubs, and he could follow the wavy bed of it in the general direction of the dark river he had seen earlier, but which was not now in sight.
The water was surprisingly cool considering the unchanging-mildness of the climate. Gosseyn drank, ate sparingly out of his pack, sampled some of the sweet purple berries the doctor had described. And then began to follow the general course of the creek.
He came to the river in about two hours. Ugly, dark, dangerous river, wider than he had thought; not two hundred but three hundred yards. At least.
It was disturbing, not because he intended even an attempt at fording, but because the plan he did have in mind might not be possible if the width was too great.
He followed the river “west.” He came to where two trees, one on either side of the surging water, joined branches a thousand feet above the ground. He began to climb.
The actual process of climbing was not hard. The gigantic trunk was massively rough, providing a thousand hand and footholds. And there were plenty of monster branches upon which to rest.
But after an hour he still had distance to go; and there was unpleasant depth below him. Besides, the very continuity of the process of climbing, easy though each separate movement was, grew onerous, and seemed endless.
There was a little jump, too, that he had to take, to make his connection with the other tree. It was only five feet, and there was plenty of bole at either end to insure safety. But his muscles wouldn’t relax until he was over the gap, and down on the ground again.
Another hour later, that was.
He struck out strongly toward the northeast.
There were other meadows during the days that followed, other glimpses of a sky, the clouds in which were too high to be visible through the haze of height. At the end of a week, the reluctant thought came to Gosseyn that even a null-A brain might be strained by prolonged journeyings in a dim, spectral world of gigantic forest.
Or perhaps—the possibility interested and sustained him during the second week—the very enormousness of everything, the almost continuous twilight, the hushed and magnificent peacefulness might conceivably make for a mental orientation to a grander environment; and so strengthen every brain affected.
During the second week, he let himself swing gradually south, following a valley that curved gently downward in that direction. On the eleventh day, he crossed a ridge and began his down-the-mountain trek with determination’. On the sixteenth day, he emerged from a belt of trees just as dusk was falling.
He found a grassy nook, and he was settling himself for the night when the plane winged silently over the edge of a nearby hill, and settled down fifty feet away from him.
It rolled to a stop; and a light flashed on in its nose. It swung around with an easy assurance, and caught Gosseyn in a blaze of sunlike brilliance. Automatic light that would never let him out of focus.
Out of that dazzling brightness, a great voice came:
“GOSSEYN, GILBERT GOSSEYN, GET INTO THIS PLANE. A DOZEN GUNS ARE POINTING AT YOU, AND THERE IS NO ESCAPE.”
Gosseyn saw the guns, snouted barrel ends that poked out of the fuselage—and followed his movements.
The sight slowed him, shocked him. With all the swift cunning of a natural fighter, he had walked straight towards his enemy, acutely conscious of the disadvantages that distance placed him under, anxious for the close contact that made resistance possible.
Now, near or far made no difference. So long as he was outside that plane, it had him at its mercy. Useless to argue with an inanimate object, acting under orders.
There remained the vital question: Could it control him inside?
Without a word Gosseyn went around to the side of the plane, pulled open the door, and climbed in. There were two rows of plush seats, glowingly green in color. He had barely time to slip into the nearest. The plane raced irresistibly forward, and became air-borne.
All the lights blinked out. Steeply, the machine climbed into the night sky.
He watched the dark ground become formless. In a minute, the world of giant trees and the land were at one with the night. A uniform black enveloped the hurtling plane.
Anywhere from three to five minutes ticked by; and then slowly the machine began to level off. At first it was merely a lessening of vertical pressure, then the angle of ascent shifted, and kept on shifting until the roboplane was speeding along, still at enormous velocity, horizontally to the planetary surface.
The lights flashed on, as they finally came level. Instantly, Gosseyn’s gaze flashed to the control board. The controls were in a box mounted on the usual balancers, and there was nothing else in the nose of the plane. No guns pointing into the interior. No guns!
A burr of excitement moved up Gosseyn’s spine. But he waited, puzzled. It seemed hardly plausible that the plane was really at his mercy. He looked hard at the vaguely glowing tubes and cells that did all the automatic things. But he couldn’t decide if one of them operated some hidden inside defense.
One blow, he thought shakily, one crushing blow with the whole weight of his body would topple the carefully balanced structure.
The plane might reel and dive to a crash before he could get at the emergency controls. But he was already in danger. The machine’s every action—the stealthy capture of him, the complete shut-off of its lights as it darted into the sky—had a sinister quality. Some of these roboplanes were almost human in their capacity to cater to the will of their masters.
If its purposes had been legal, if for instance it was the agent of a detective, it would have done everything openly. And, for one thing, it would have spoken before this.
Gosseyn hesitated, then said in a steady tone:
“I suppose you know that roboplanes caught exceeding their authority are subjected to heavy penalties.”
A chuckle answered him. It came from a series of circular perforations in the ceiling, a loud speaker.
“I’m sure,” said a mild baritone voice, “that catching a wanted man will never be held against me.”
So it had an alibi. Gosseyn had little doubt now. Somebody—he could only think of “X” and the great Hardie gang—had beaten out the Venusian detectives.
He felt his first terrible chill.
“I won’t explain,” the voice was saying, “how I used the science of unstraight lines to locate you. The details are too involved, and besides we are working under a time limitation.”
It didn’t explain the limitation. But it wasn’t that that momentarily stopped Gosseyn’s gathering tenseness, slowed the contraction of his muscles, readying for assault.
It was the reference to how he had been located. He began to see the picture. A, straight line in the extensional world was a series of curves, whose radii were so remote that the human mind could not distinguish the curve. None of these curves was exactly the same as any of the others, though structurally they were all similar. The mathematics involved was that heady concoction known as the differential calculus, and up to a point the rate of change of the curves could be accurately predicted.
Like all mortals, he had followed the easiest course of the routes he had chosen. He had climbed hills instead of mountains, ridges instead of hills. He had followed valleys and defiles, and finally he had gone down the mountain. The differential calculus had simply—they must have taken radar maps of the terrain—predicted several score points where he would be each day. And the roboplane had finally found him at one of those points.
He grew aware that the roboplane was speaking again:
“There has been for some minutes,” it said, “a threat of imminent violence in your attitude. I must warn you that the entire forward part of the floor is electrified beyond human endurance.”
“Oh!” said Gosseyn, sagging a little in his seat.
He was really caught then, outside and in.
“And now,” said the plane, “I have given you all the time you need to adjust. If you will listen without interruption, we can get down to business.”
As much as any human being with an ever-interpreting brain can listen, Gosseyn listened.
