The Original and Complete Null-A Trilogy, page 21
Gosseyn frowned at the palpable fear in the man’s voice. He had been afraid in his time, but not like this. He felt repelled by the terror that was here. It was like an unclean thing. He began to regret his mercy. Before he could speak, the man gasped:
“Look, Gosseyn, just go away, and I won’t say I saw you or anything. Honestly, I won’t. I’ve been wanting to meet you again, because I want some advice from you. That’s proof.”
“Advice?”
Who was this fellow?
“Maybe you can give me just a word now.” Desperately. “Don’t let me go the way you said I’d go—scared, I mean. Scared of my own shadow. Honestly, when I heard you analyze me in Crang’s house, I felt kind of empty, Gosseyn, Empty. Because it was true what you said; every word. Man, I’m sorry for hitting you that time, but I’ll do anything if you’ll help me.”
It was the mention of location that brought back the full memory of Blayney, one of Crang’s bodyguards, a once recklessly brave man who had started to lose his nerve, after the manner of certain unintegrates.
Gosseyn didn’t reply right away. He felt an abrupt depression, a weariness; and a picture came of millions of poor devils like this, ruined by life before they could even realize the meaning of mind organization. It was terrible to look down from his height of superb integration, his prospects of universe power, down into the depths where this human driftwood was struggling in the darkness.
There was hope for Blayney, of course. No brain, however tangled, was ever quite lost. But there was a terrible obstacle in his way: his belief that somebody could help him.
It was the ancient cry of the slave-mind. “You help me!” The refusal, the inability to recognize that every man saved his own soul. Nobody, absolutely nobody could save it for him.
There were places to go of course, that could give him the orderly knowledge he needed. Earth had swarmed, and would again, with free null-A schools. But he would have to take the exercises. He would have to follow the instructions, and discover his own aptitudes, learn the individual characteristics of his mind until—
There shall be magic seeming With far stars nearer gleaming; And, lo, the clodlike human thing Shall stand, complete revealed—a king!
Gosseyn said: “Blayney, if I let you go, what will you report to your superiors?”
“That we were attacked in the dark.” The man spoke eagerly.
Gosseyn scowled into the night. He felt dissatisfied, not with Blayney’s intention. But he frankly doubted the man’s ability to put it over.
He realized abruptly there was nothing he could do, being what he was. He had hesitated; and now he couldn’t possibly kill the wretch in cold blood.
He said in an even voice: “Leave your guns! And beat it fast!”
When the swift footsteps had faded into the darkness, Gosseyn stripped the uniform from the dead man, took his machine gun, his flashlight, his packsack, and started forth.
He was striding swiftly across the open meadow he had observed in daylight, when an indefinable change in the texture of the darkness and of the silence made him raise his machine gun, and snatch for his flashlight.
He had time only for the movement.
Hands grabbed his gun, his arms, his legs, his head, his body. His struggles were instantly vain.
On a cliff of metal on the planet of beasts, the league ambassador landed. He walked slowly over to the parapet of that vast building, and stared uneasily down at the jungle four miles below.
“I suppose,” he thought, “I’ll be expected to go hunting with the”—he paused, searched for the right word, then grimly—“extroverts who build hunting lodges as big as this.”
A voice murmured behind him. “This way, your excellency. The hunting party will leave in an hour, and Enro the Red will confer with you en route.”
“Tell his excellency, the foreign minister of the greatest Empire,” the ambassador began firmly, “that I have just arrived, and that—”
He stopped, the refusal unspoken. No one, least of all league agents, turned down the invitations of the reigning big shots of an Empire of sixty thousand star systems, especially when one’s purpose required considerable tact.
The ambassador finished quietly: “—and that I will be ready in time.”
It was a bloodthirsty business. There were guns for each type of beast, carried by noiseless machines, one machine for each hunter. The robots were always to hand, holding out just the right weapon, yet they never got in the way. The most dangerous animals were held off by palpable forces, while the hunters maneuvered for firing position.
There was one long sleek powerful hoofed animal, gray in color, which Realized after one burst of effort that it was trapped. It sat down on its haunches, and began to cry. Literally cry. Enro the Red, himself, put a bullet through its nearest eye. It pitched over, and lay sobbing and writhing for a minute, then grew still.
Afterwards, on the way back to that gigantic combination hunting lodge and alternate foreign office, the red-haired giant came over to the league ambassador.
“Great sport, eh?’” he growled, “though I noticed you didn’t shoot much.”
“This is my first time,” apologized the other. “I was fascinated.”
That was true enough, if you thought of it in a certain way. Fascinated, horrified, shocked, disgusted.
He saw that the great man was staring at him sardonically.
“You league men are all the same,” he said. “A bunch of coward!—” He stopped. He seemed to think better of his harsh indictment. “Peaceable!” he said.
“You must remember,” the ambassador said coolly, “that the league was organized by the nineteen galactic empires at a time when they were destroying each other in futile and indecisive wars. Peace is the trade of the league; and, like all institutions, it has gradually created men who actually think peace.”
“Sometimes,” said Enro proudly, “I believe I prefer war, however destructive.”
The league officer said nothing, but he thought: “This . . . this is the type of man we have to keep in line.”
He waited, and presently Enro ceased chewing on his lower lip and said curtly:
“Well, what is it you wish?”
The ambassador began diplomatically: “We have recently discovered that your transportation ministry has been over-zealous.”
“In what way?”
“The case to which I refer is that of a sun system, called Sol by its dominant inhabitants.”
“The name does not strike a memory chord.”
The other man bowed. “It will undoubtedly be on record in your department, and the problem is very simple. A transit base was established there by your transport department about five hundred years ago without permission from the league. Sol is one of the systems discovered after the agreements were signed respecting the exploration and exploitation of new-found stars.”
“Hm-m-m!” The red one’s gaze was even more sardonic; and the ambassador thought: By space, Enro did know about Sol! Enro said: “And are you going to give us permission to keep the base there?”
“It must be dismantled and removed,” the league man said firmly, “as prescribed by the articles of the league charter.”
“It seems a very minor affair,” said Enro thoughtfully. “Leave a memorandum with my transport secretary, and I will have it looked into.”
“But the base will be dismantled?” Determinedly.
Enro was cool. “Not necessarily. After all, if it’s been there a long time, it might cause considerable dislocation to the transport department to have it removed. If that is so, we would take the matter up with the league, and seek confirmation of our position there. Such incidents are bound to happen in vast stellar organizations. They must be handled in a progressive and elastic fashion.”
It was the smaller man’s turn to be sardonic. “I’m sure your excellency would be the first to protest if some other empire accidentally added a star system to its possessions. The league attitude is very clear: Those who make the mistake must rectify it.”
Enro was scowling. “We will take the matter up at the next league session.”
“But that’s a year away.”
The foreign minister seemed not to hear. “I seem to remember something about this system now. Very bloodthirsty inhabitants if my memory serves me correctly. Disorder or war of some kind going on there right now.”
He smiled grimly. “We shall ask permission to re-establish order. I’m sure that the league delegates will not object to that.”
XIX.
“In the elder days of Art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part
For the Gods see everywhere.”
L.
A stranglingly strong hand was clamped tight across Gosseyn’s mouth; it was that that made it necessary for him to go on fighting with everything he had.
The very first clutch of their implacable strength had identified his captors as Venusians. But Gosseyn knew with a desperate consciousness that he must let them get the measure of his Ā strength too.
Without taking an instant for analysis, the realization had already struck him like a fire that this patrol would not be taking prisoners. Even as the thought came, a voice said quietly from the near night:
“O.K., we’ve got his weapons. Put a knife into him, spray him, and let’s go!”
The black possibility that he might actually be killed at this ultimate moment made Gosseyn intensify his struggle. But even as be fought, all the hands let go of him.
For a moment, it was dazzling; and then: “Thanks!” Gosseyn breathed.
“What’s the matter?” said the voice that had ordered his death. Sharply.
The answer came from beside Gosseyn: “His muscles are Ā.”
“Oh!”
A pause; then:
“O.K., stranger, start talking—”
For long, as the party headed deeper into the hills, the darkness continued impenetrable. But after about two hours, signals began to drift to Gosseyn’s senses. A large camp. There were stirrings and movements, an occasional faint cry that came out of some depth of a child’s dream. There was the sound of many people breathing. Suddenly, one of the men whispered in Gosseyn’s ear:
“A bomb trench ten feet to your right. Sleep! You’re to be sent farther into the mountains, so you’ll need all the rest you can get. G’night!”
“We’ll have to go back for the Distorter,” Gosseyn said.
“Not you,” was the reply. “We’re taking no risks with you.” The tone of the words amused Gosseyn. But he said nothing. It was just possible they were right although—
He frowned thoughtfully. They’d have a hard time finding the right hole in the right tree. For a long time, after he had lain down on a bed of great leaves, Gosseyn lay awake, thinking over what had happened:
Blayney? More and more he regretted his mercy. It might lose them the Distorter, he realized in an agony of regret. Patricia Hardie—Lyttle—the invisible chess player—
He slept at last, uneasily, conscious of the many, many things he had to do.
Voices! The pleasing murmur of a multitude of different voices—that was the music to which Gosseyn awakened. Somewhere, children were playing; and there was the smell of food in the air. He sat up, and stared lazily at the scene. Men, women, walking, moving, working. A stream he hadn’t been aware of the night before attracted his wandering, fascinated gaze.
He washed himself in the thrillingly cool, clear mountain water. As he stood shaking his hands in the air, to dry them, a dozen men came down the embankment to him. Swiftly, Gosseyn was introduced to James Armour, a dark-haired, slim young man of noble countenance; Peter Clayton, mathematician, small and wiry; Karl Mahren, big and blond, a physicist.
His introducer, one of the voices of the night before, a tall, leanfaced individual, paused at that point, smiling:
“The other names don’t matter. Armour, Clayton and Mahren are to be your guides. As soon as you’ve had breakfast, we’d like you to record a very detailed account of your story on an energy sphere, for transmission, and naturally you must now swear to your story on a lie detector.
“But first, breakfast!”
Breakfast was an abundant combination of fruit, cooked vegetables and meat, bread and butter and a hot drink. Gosseyn commented, as a smiling young woman brought it to him:
“You seem to be doing very well in the way of food. Can you keep this up?”
There was laughter, the natural good-humored laughter of men at ease and in high spirits. It startled Gosseyn. He looked up.
“You know,” he said, “you don’t act like people who have just been driven from their homes. Have you had some great success that you’re keeping from me?”
Mahren, the blond giant, answered that:
“Gosseyn, in less than three days the groups in this area have captured nine hundred machine-guns, four hundred flame guns, eight hundred knives, forty-three roboplanes, one spaceship and several tons of odds and ends including ammunition. In that time we have also killed six hundred forty-eight men.
“We realize the gang will react violently. Bombs, flame, atomic energy—they’ll be merciless.”
He paused, his face hardening. He straightened perceptibly; he said in a steely voice:
“Many will die. But I assure you, Gosseyn, we shall live through it. And now that the people of Earth know what is going on, the death-defying strength of the Ā system is going to start showing itself. As you yourself have told us, the gang is already having trouble on Earth. It will increase: Supply and factory trouble, transportation trouble—People who try to carry out the will of the gang will be found dead. Agents of the gang, all gang members will be searched out, and exterminated. There will be many exceptions, but only towards the end.
“The fools!” His voice was stinging. “They have nothing that we can’t take from them. And what we have—integration, superiority, consciousness of right—cannot be seized by force of arms.”
“I presume,” said Gosseyn, “that you are referring to what you can do against human beings. “Have you any solution against the aliens?”
There was silence. Mahren stared thoughtfully at the ground. Finally, one of the men who had not been introduced said:
“No real plans are possible about them until we know what it is they’re after in the Solar System. However, you may be interested in the deductions that have been made by our experts:
“First, the word ‘alien’ seems all wrong. There are too many human beings involved. Gosseyn, human beings would not co-operate with nonhumans. That isn’t even doubtful. They just wouldn’t, that’s all.
“Contrariwise, it seems fantastic that the plenum is inhabited by human beings only. We’ll have to let that contradiction remain for the time being.”
He went on: “The pit, of course, is a base, a police or military base, or a commercial transit port, a halfway mark to some system too remote to reach easily or at all in one jump by their method of transportation. The secrecy surrounding it suggests other galactic powers who might disapprove of their possession. The word, evidence, fits that explanation. Evidence, obviously, to prove to the other powers what is going on.
“However, we mustn’t count on that helping us. The very nature of the game that is being played here suggests unintegration on a galactic scale. In a crisis, great powers of that type have a habit of giving away things that don’t belong to them, in order to avoid war. Nevertheless—”
For a moment, Gosseyn heard no more. Because this was the way it would be. This was the way that the intrigue of galactic powers would appear to a race bound to its own sun and planets: mysterious agents, meaningless actions, irresistible weapons briefly unleashed.
His brain paused there, distracted: Would they really disorganize the Solar System? The answer came inexorably out of the history of Earth itself:
“The method of the old imperial systems,” he thought bleakly, “was . . . to set one group within the country against another, and then set up a resident agent or, if possible, a government. To accomplish this purpose, no crime was too great. Ruthlessness was but a facet of policy, individuals and nations pawns to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency.”
“As for the destruction of the Games Machine,” the speaker went on. “that we cannot regret. Gosseyn, it was not built by human beings. About fifty years ago, a Venusian plan to build something like the Machine for encyclopedic purposes, ended when we discovered that we didn’t have enough scientific knowledge to do it.
“The most logical assumption is that your so-called invisible chess player has been around a long time. Undoubtedly, it was a good thing for a while, but in the long run we want no outsider’s mold pressing us into his designs.”
In a peaceful glade of Venus, two men fenced with swords. They were very evenly matched; and the flashing of their blades was accompanied by the bright clang of metal repeatedly striking metal. Time after time, each foiled the thrusts of the other. They paused at last, and stood breathing deeply, grinning at each other.
“You did very well, Gosseyn,” said the smaller, lighter man. “The grace of your movements was a pleasure to behold. If this repetition of early Ā training for body integration does lead more easily to control of your extra-mind, then the first step has been completely successful. Now, let’s try the breathing.”
They tried the breathing, then the gymnastic, then the rhythmic gymnastics, and the classical and interpretive dancing. The dancing was a little ridiculous away from a stage setting. But its purpose was too important for Gosseyn to worry about that. When they had finished, after more than an hour, James Armour said:
“In view of your, shall we say, curious upbringing, you may be interested in knowing that for generations before Ā, what you have just done was part of the early training of actors. Did you know that?”
Frowning, Gosseyn examined his knowledge on the subject. “Yes, I know it, Jim,” he said finally. “But when I look back to discover how I learned it, I find the source of my information is missing.”
