The Original and Complete Null-A Trilogy, page 44
The commander identified him as an assistant to the communications engineer. And verified that the “matrix” the fellow had put into the similarity slot was for the base four hundred light-years away.
There was time, then, for explanations. Gosseyn offered the main points of his rationalization that had led Kim to set his trap.
“If it was an agent of the Follower, then he must still be aboard. Why? Well, because no one was missing. How did I know that? You, Captain Free, kept in touch with the noncommissioned officers in charge of dormitories, and they would surely have reported it if a man was missing.
So he was still aboard. And for a whole month he waited in the lower part of the ship, cut off from the control room. You can imagine the ferment he was in, for he surely hadn’t planned on waiting so long before making his escape. Why would he have a way of escape? I think it’d be because a man would always include a way of escape when making his plans, and would only accept the idea of death if he felt himself trapped.
“With all those pressures working on him, he wasted no time getting upstairs when the doors opened.
“Of course, the new ‘matrix’ would also have a wrecking circuit in it that would operate the moment he used it to escape. But there’s one little point about that which puzzles me. Captain Free tells me we’ll have to stop at a base about eighteen thousand light-years from here, and pick up the ‘matrices’ that will take us to Venus at r36000 theta 272 Z1400—and when we get there we’re going to have to have our papers in order.
“My little point is this, how did a mechanic expect to turn up at base without release papers of some kind? You might say the Follower would protect him, but that isn’t really logical. I don’t think the Follower would care to have Enro know that he was responsible for cutting off Predictors from the fighting fleets for a whole month.”
He looked up. “As soon as you’ve fixed up that circuit, captain, come and see me. I’ll be in my room.”
XVI.
Ābstracts
For the sake of sanity, learn to evaluate an event in terms of total response. Total response includes visceral and nervous changes, the emotional reaction, the thought about the event, the spoken statement, the action repressed, the action taken, et cetera.
As soon as he reached the bedroom, Gosseyn took off his shoes and lay down on top of the bed. He had been feeling the nausea coming on for more than an hour. And the great effort of trapping the saboteur had been a strain almost too much for him to maintain.
He was anxious not to show weakness. And so it was pleasant to feel the strength flowing back into his body. After twenty minutes of lying with closed eyes, he stretched, yawned, and opened his eyes.
He sat up with a sigh. It was like a signal. Leej came in carrying another bowl of soup. The timing of it obviously indicated prevision. Gosseyn ate the soup thinking about. that, and he was just finishing it when Captain Free came into the room.
“Well,” he said, “we’re all set. Give the signal and we’ll start.”
Gosseyn glanced at Leej, but she shook her head. “You can’t expect anything from me,” she said. “As far as I can see, there’s nothing wrong, but I can’t see as far as we’re going.”
Captain Free said: “We’re lined up to go through the remainder of Decant Nine to the nearest marginal base in Decant Eight. There, of course, we have to stop.”
“Approach that base with a ‘break’,” Gosseyn said, “and then we’ll talk some more.”
Eighteen similarity jumps and slightly more than ten minutes later, according to the time that seemed to have passed, Captain Free came back into the cabin.
“We’re six and three quarter light-years from the base,” he said. “Not bad. That puts us within eleven thousand light-years of Venus.”
Gosseyn climbed off the bed, and walked stiffly to the control room. He sank into the lounge in front of the transparent dome. The question in his mind was, should they flash straight into the base? Or should they make their approach overland? He glanced questioningly at Leej.
“Well?” he said.
The young woman walked over to the control board. She settled into the circular chair, turned, and said: “We’re going in,” She pulled the lever.
The next second they were inside the base.
There was dimness all around. As his eyes became accustomed to the lesser, light, Gosseyn saw that the enormous metal cave was much larger than the base of the Greatest Empire on Venus.
Gosseyn turned his attention to Captain Free. The commander was giving instructions over the videophone. He came presently over to Gosseyn, just as Leej also walked up. He said:
“An assistant of the port captain will come aboard in about half an hour. Meanwhile I’ve given orders for the new equipment to be brought into the ship. They accept that as routine.”
Gosseyn nodded, but he was thoughtful as he studied the officer. He was not worried to any extent as to what Captain Free might be able to do against his interests. With Leej and himself co-ordinating to frustrate a threatening danger before it was scheduled to happen, risks from men and machines need scarcely be thought about.
Still, the man seemed to be cooperating not as a prisoner but as an open partner. He had no desire to call the other’s attention to his neglect of duty as an officer of the military forces of the Greatest Empire, and yet, some understanding seemed essential.
He decided to be frank. After he had finished, he had to wait for nearly a minute. Finally, Captain Free said:
“Gosseyn, a man in your position, with your special power, can scarcely have any idea of what hundreds of thousands of officers in the Greatest Empire went through when Enro took over. It was very skillfully done, and if the others were like me, then they must have felt trapped.
“It was virtually impossible to know what to do. There were spies everywhere, and the overwhelming majority of the crews were for Enro. When he was war minister he had his opportunity to place his traitors in key positions everywhere.”
Captain Free shrugged. “Very few of us dared show resistance. Men were being executed right and left, the dividing line seeming to be whether or not you made open comment. As a result of a lie detector test, I was listed as a doubtful person, and warned. But I was allowed to live because I had not resisted in any way.”
He finished, “The rest was simple enough. I rather lost interest in my career, I was easily wearied. And when I realized what this trip to Yalerta meant, I’m afraid I let discipline go by the board. It seemed to me that the Predictors would insure an Enro victory. When you came along, I was shocked for a few minutes. I saw myself court-martialed and executed. And then I realized you might be able to protect me. That was all I needed. From that moment I was your man. Does that answer your question?”
It did indeed. Gosseyn held out his hand, “It’s an old custom of my planet,” he said, “in its highest form a method of sealing friendships.”
They shook. Briskly, Gosseyn turned to Leej.
“What’s on the time horizon?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“No blurs?”
“None. The papers of the ship Show that we are on a special mission. That mission is vaguely stated, and gives Captain Free considerable authority.”
“That means we get out of the base without the slightest thing going wrong?”
She nodded, but her face was serious. “Of course,” she said earnestly, “I’m looking at a picture of the future that you could alter by some deliberate interference. For instance, you could try to make a blur just to prove me wrong. I really have no idea what would happen then. But my picture says there is no blur.” Gosseyn was interested in experiments, but not at the moment. Still, there were other aspects of the situation.
The whole problem of prevision seemed to become more puzzling the further he looked into it. If Enro, the Predictors and Gilbert Gosseyn himself, were all products of the same kind of training, then why couldn’t he who had been in an “incubator” thirty times as long as a Predictor, and more than a hundred times longer than Enro—why couldn’t he see across distance as Enro did, and into the future like the Predictors?”
Training, he thought. His. For they had received none. But he had been given flawed training, for a purpose which later had to be changed.
As soon as he had warned the Venusians, he’d have to consult Dr. Kair and other scientists. And this time they’d work on the problem with a new understanding of its possibilities.
It was just a few minutes less than an hour after their arrival that they flashed out of the base. Ten jumps and ten thousand light-years brought them near Gela.
Next stop, Venus.
At Gosseyn’s suggestion, Leej set the “break” needles. Rather, she spent several seconds setting them. Then abruptly she leaned back, shook her head, and said: “There’s something wrong.”
“It’s beyond my range, but I have a feeling that we won’t get as close to the planet as we did when we went into that base. I have a sense of—interference.”
Gosseyn did not hesitate. “We’ll phone them,” he said.
But the videophone and plate were silent, lifeless.
That gave him pause, but not for long. There was really nothing to do but take the ship through to Venus.
As before, the similarity jump seemed instantaneous. Captain Free glanced at the distance calculators, and said to Leej;
“Good work. Only eight light-years from the Venusian base. Can’t do much better than that.”
There was a clatter of sound, a bellowing voice: “This is the robopoerator in charge of communications—an emergency!”
TO BE CONCLUDED
Non-aristotelian Venus was saved from conquest by the fortitude of its semantically trained inhabitants, and by the extra brain of Gilbert Gosseyn. After the defeat of the galactic forces that attacked the solar system, as chronicled in “The World of Ā”—August, September, October, 1945, Astounding Science Fiction; Simon and Schuster, 1948,—Gosseyn discovers that the Follower, a being who seems to be made of shadow substance, has developed a sinister interest in him.
In spite of his precautions, he is caught in a trap which the Follower sets for him, and is “instantaneously” transported by similarity means to the planet, Valeria, where the Predictors live. The Predictors have been forced by the Follower to enter the service of Enro the Red, who has launched a great battle in the Sixth Decant of the galaxy for the control of all galactic systems. It seems to Gosseyn that Enro cannot possibly lose the war so long as he has the help of people who can foretell every move of the enemy, unless a method is discovered to counteract the prophecies.
He discovers that whenever he uses his extra brain his own future cannot be foretold by a Predictor. This is personally valuable but it seems of little importance against thousands of Predictors.
He succeeds in escaping from the Follower with the help of Leej, a woman Predictor. But the Follower comes aboard Leej’s sky trailer, and attacks him. Although the result of the struggle that follows is a draw, Gosseyn realises that the shadow-man could defeat him under proper circumstances, and that he is not ready for a decisive battle.
He escapes from the planet Yalerta by capturing the galactic warship that is stationed there for the purpose of similarizing Predictors to the fighting fleets of Enro in the Sixth Decant. For a second time, then, his “mind” is transferred into the body of Prince Ashargin.
The first time that such a transfer took place, Gosseyn had found himself in Ashargin’s body, just as Ashargin, heir to the Greatest Empire, was taken to the fortress palace of Enro the Red, usurper, on the planet Gorgzid. The prince has been a prisoner attached to the work camp of the Temple of the Sleeping God, a prisoner so badly used that he has become unbalanced. Since this unbalance is on the unconscious level, Gosseyn realizes that the man will have to have semantic training.
Before he can give the prince the necessary training, he is back in his own body, apparently returned there by a mysterious “player” whose motives he cannot fathom.
When Gosseyn’s “mind” is similarized for a second time into the prince’s body, he discovers that Ashargin is still with Enro’s fleet, and that these forces, with the help of Predictors, are sweeping all before them.
He decides that only the Venusian As can possibly turn the tide of battle, and they are cut off in the remote solar system because they have no means of galactic transport. Somehow, he must contact them, or get back to Venus-personally. By Enro’s orders he returns to Gorgzid, and there, because he has a definite purpose, he immediately sets out to flout the dictator’s commands. He discovers that, in his absence, he has been married by decree to Nirene, a member of the former nobility of the Greatest Empire. He starts to train Ashargin semantically, and, anxious for the safety of the body of Gilbert Gosseyn, sends orders to the destroyer that Gosseyn and Leej are to be brought to Gorgzid but treated with consideration.
This order, and his other defiances, arouse the suspicions of Enro, who forces a showdown in the presence of Eldred Crang and Patricia Hardie, and also in the presence of Secoh, Lord Guardian of the Sleeping God. This crisis ends in a partial victory for Gosseyn-Ashargin. He confuses a lie detector with his double identity, and persuades Enro that he will be more valuable to him alive than dead. He agrees to co-operate to prevent revolutions within the Greatest Empire. He realises that Enro will kill Ashargin the moment the war is over.
He learns one disturbing fact from Enro. The destroyer on which his body is lying unconscious cannot be contacted, and his orders to Captain Free were not transmitted for that reason.
Boldly, he contacts Madrisol, secretary of the League, but again is frustrated in his attempt to establish communication of some kind with Venus. The League secretary admits that it is impossible for League ships to get near the solar system. The only bases are those of the Greatest Empire.
He continues to train Ashargin semantically. He establishes a basis of co-operation with Eldred Crang, a secret Ā, who is ostensibly married to Patricia Hardie—who has turned at to be the sister of Enro. He persuades Secoh, the Lord Guardian of the Sleeping God, to let him have a look at the god. Somehow, he has come to believe that the god is one of the other bodies of Gilbert Gosseyn. He discovers that the Sleeping God is a stranger with the face of a moron, and that the Temple of the Sleeping God seems to be a globular spaceship.
Pondering this puzzle, as well as his continued inability to contact the long lost destroyer with his unconscious body aboard, he returns to the palace—and discovers that the crisis is upon him. Enro has decided to send a fleet to destroy Venus.
As soon as possible after hearing this information, Gosseyn-Ashargin heads for a Distorter, with the intention of similarizing himself to a base near Venus, and then somehow going from there to Venus. The moment he has similarized himself, he is transferred by the mysterious “player” back into his own body.
He learns why the destroyer has been lost for so long. Its “Distorter” has been sabotaged, and cannot function. It takes Gosseyn only a few hours to bring the ship back into repair, and they set out for Venus. As they approach the solar system, the destroyer’s alarm system is set off, and they are attacked.
Gosseyn’s purpose—to warn Venus of the arrival of Enro’s fleet—is thus threatened by the highly efficient defense system which the Venusians have organized.
XVII.
Ābstracts
For the sake-of sanity, be aware of SELF-REFLEXIVENESS. A statement can be about reality or it can be about a statement about a statement about reality.
Gosseyn took five quick steps toward the control board, and stood behind Captain Free, tense, and alert. He shifted his gaze steadily from one to the other of the rear, side and front video plates. The roboperator spoke again in its “emergency” voice:
“Voices in space,” it roared. “Robots sending messages to each other.”
“Give us the messages,” Captain Free commanded loudly. He glanced around and up at Gosseyn. “Do you think Enro’s fleet is here already?”
Gosseyn wanted more evidence. “I was released,” he thought, “from Ashargin’s brain within a few minutes after Enro gave the order. It probably took about forty hours for me to get back to the destroyer, two hours more to get the ship moving, less than an hour at the base, and then just under eighty hours to get here to Venus—about a hundred and twenty-two hours, only three of which could be considered wasted.”
Five days! The assigned fleet, of no course, could have been detached from a base much nearer to Venus, in fact, probably had been. That was one trouble with his expectations. Similarity videophone communications involved the movement of electrons in a comparatively simple pattern. Electrons were naturally identical to eighteen decimal places, and so the “margin of error” in transmission was only fourteen seconds for every four thousand light-years—as compared to ten hours for material objects for the same distance.
Enro’s fleet could be here ahead of them on the basis of time saved by the use of telephonic orders. But attacks on planetary bases involved more than that. It would take time to load the equipment for the type of atomic destruction that was to be rained down on Earth and Venus.
And there was another point, even more important. Enro had plans of his own. Even now, he could be delaying his orders to destroy the people of the solar system in the hope that the threat of such an attack would force his sister to marry him.
The roboperator was bellowing again. “I am now,” it shouted, “transmitting the robot messages.” Its tone grew quieter, more even. “A ship at CR-94-687-12. . . bzzzz . . . similarize . . . Converge and attack . . . five hundred human beings aboard . . . bzzzz . . . zero 54 seconds . . . Capture—”
Gosseyn spoke in a hushed voice: “Why, we’re being attacked by robot defenses.”
