The Original and Complete Null-A Trilogy, page 6
Her father nodded, more nervous now. “Send in some guards from the anteroom. I don’t feel safe while that fellow is abroad.”
She got to her feet, humming noisily though musically. The sound muffled Gosseyn’s movements. He followed her directions to the letter; and every word was so. The door to the right led to a hall; and there was a hall closet with a narrow staircase leading to the second floor. He reached the girl’s room without seeing a single person.
A subtle aroma of perfume identified the bedroom suite. From the French windows near the canopied bed, the atomic beacon of the Machine blazed so close that it almost seemed to Gosseyn he could put forth his hand, and grasp the light.
He wasted no time. Patricia Hardie’s action had two explanations; Gosseyn thought of them both, vaguely but effectively:
She had changed her changeable mind about him. Or else had pretended to help in order to get him out of the room where she and her father were alone, briefly without protection. Out of the room, and toward some definite area, where he could be surrounded.
He couldn’t take the chance. The French windows opened onto a tree-screened balcony. Below, was a garden inclosed only by shrubs and flowers; and beyond, the smooth lawns and boulevards that led to the Machine.
Gosseyn was a hundred feet from the base, the almost deserted base of the Machine, when a dozen cars careened from behind a line of trees, where they had been hiding; and guns opened fire on him.
One wild shout Gosseyn uttered at the Machine: “Help me! Help!”
Aloof and unheeding, the Machine towered above him. If it was true, as legend said, that it was able to defend itself and its grounds, then here apparently was no reason for action. Not by a flicker of a tube did it show awareness of the outrage that was being done in its presence.
Gosseyn was crawling frantically along the grass, when the first bullet actually struck him. It hit his shoulder and sent him spinning half a dozen feet into the path of a burning energy beam. His clothes and flesh flared in an insanity of flame; and then he had rolled over; and the bullets were focused again. They began to rip him apart, as he burned with an incandescent fury.
Even as his consciousness sank into night, he could feel the unrelenting fire, and the bullets searching through his writhing body. The blows and the flame tore at every vital organ in his body, at his legs, his heart, his lungs, everything, even after he had stopped moving. His last dim thought was the infinitely sad, hopeless realization that now he would never see Venus and its unfathomed mysteries.
Somewhere along there, death came.
VI.
“To one who finds no sense in the universe
And doubts survival, my advice would be—
Set your affairs in order, hire a hearse,
Choose some snug cemetery, and wait and see.”
B.M.
“Where was he found?” said a man’s voice.
“Lying near the Machine!” The reply was by a woman, contralto-toned.
“And he doesn’t belong on Venus?”
“No, there is no record of him in Registry. He is to be questioned as to how he got to Venus, then killed. I’m sorry you weren’t here. But then, you’re away so often. You would have had him taken straight back, wouldn’t you?”
“I imagine so; there’s nothing wrong with him that I can see. But, of course, you couldn’t know.”
A pause; then the man again: “Poor chap!” His voice was sympathetic. “Amazingly fine physical specimen. Well”—he must have shrugged—“it’s the law, and a proper one, I think.”
They went away, closing a door quietly. Gosseyn lay in the bed like a stone. For the minute or so that the voices had sounded in his presence, his brain had been a composite of cars and the simple impression of what the ears were hearing.
Nothing else! The words penetrated to no other part of his mind. They had no meaning connected with him. He was an inanimate object possessed of the capacity for accurately absorbing sounds.
Just when another thought came, Gosseyn had no clear awareness afterwards. Actually the first part of the developments that followed were not really thoughts.
There was a period when he could feel his body lying on the bed, could feel the pressure of the sheets, held up by the springs—pressing him.
No mental image of the bed was involved, what it looked like, the materials composing it. But gradually the impression in his mind extended: Himself being held up by the bed, the bed by the floor, the floor by metal and concrete foundations—
It was a normal null-A unfolding of thought continuity, the instinctive attempt of a high trained mind to orientate itself to its environment as a whole. He let the thought flow on:
. . . The foundations by the soil of Venus, solidly, strongly supported bed on the impregnable planetary base that was Venus.
Venus? The slow flow of impressions ceased. Venus!! But he wasn’t on Venus, he thought astounded. He was on Earth.
Something of memory awakened in a remoter section of his mind. The trickle of impulse-patterns became a stream, then a great, “dark river rushing towards a wide sea.
“I died,” he told himself. “ I was shot and burned to death.”
He cringed with the tensed remembrance of hideous pain. His body pressed hard against the bed—then slowly his mind opened out again; and the fact that he was alive with the memory of having been killed became less a thing of remembered agony, more a puzzle, a paradox that had no apparent explanation in a null-A world.
The fear that the pain would resume dimmed with the passing of the uneventful minutes. His thought, in that curious semiconscious world in which he had his momentary being, began to concentrate on different aspects of his situation.
He remembered Patricia Hardie and her father. He remembered “X” and the implacable Thorson. There was some curious method of escape that he had used. And something they had told him—They had told him who he was.
Gosseyn’s brain poised, stunned.
Who was he?
There was nothing in his memory about that, nor about his escape. He had forgotten. Or else the knowledge had been extirpated from his brain—a new deliberately created semi-amnesia, as inexplicable as the earlier attempt to conceal from him his identity.
The realization had an enormous purely physical effect on him. He started up in the bed, jerked his eyes open—and half fell, half climbed to the floor.
He lay there face downwards, his knees drawn upwards, partly supporting him. He was aware that it was very dark, both inside and outside his skin. The inside darkness, the dizziness, went out of him slowly. Awareness remained that he had strained his muscles by that spasmodic movement, but that otherwise he was all right.
He probed for the edge of the bed with one hand. Then, using the bed for support, lifted himself, climbed back under the thin sheets, and looked around him.
There was nothing to see. The room was pitch dark; obviously the plasto-windows were electronically darkened after the manner of all hospital rooms. Somewhere on the bed would be a control board to operate such devices. As soon as he found it, he could carefully investigate his extensional environment; and, since remaining in the room would mean death—
Gosseyn’s brain made a whirlwind stop. The clear-cut memory of the words he had heard in the remote period when he first began to regain consciousness, shivered into him with all its potent import.
. . . A law that people who were on Venus illegally had to be killed . . . He felt a mental anguish.
Before he could think about it, the door opened softly. There was a flare of light. A man and a woman came in.
Bright, bright light! Gosseyn closed his eyes; and so unconsciously made the pause of thalamic-cortical integration. His brain, trained to produce that very integration, did so now, automatically. When he opened his eyes, he was fully sane and adjusted to organized thought. All his dreamlike fears were gone, as if they had never existed. Cool and thoughtful, though tensed and alert, he looked out at the small, hostile world of his room.
He glanced at the man and the woman, then at the room, and then out through the plasto-windows. One look there; and the room couldn’t hold his attention!
The room became an inclosing fullness of bright walls and scant though shining furniture, a base from which his gaze could soar. It and the people in it were overshadowed, dwarfed by the scene outside.
The building, the bedroom, seemed to be on a hillside overlooking a valley. Not too high a hillside, because through the lower edge of the window he could see a wide, badly discolored river. It was beyond the river that the giant trees began.
There was instantly no question but that he was not on Earth. Cyclopean were those trees! One, two, three thousand feet they towered into the misty heavens. They started about a mile away; and each tree was as thick at the base as a normal city block. The branches began low down; and the trees tangled with each other in a fantastic intertwining of gigantic limbs and endless foliage.
It was impossible to see for sure, but Gosseyn had the impression that the forest of titans stretched away into the remote and verdant wilderness.
“This is surprising,” said the man, “he seems startled by the trees, as if he hasn’t seen them before.”
Very carefully, Gosseyn drew his mind and his gaze back into the room. He was, he discovered, sitting bolt upright in the bed.
He let himself sink back onto the pillow; and from that prostrate position he surveyed the two people, the man and the woman, his captors, his keepers. The man was a fine-looking blond-haired chap, the woman was small and dark and good-looking in a healthy, intelligent fashion. Knowing that they had either won the trip to Venus in the games, or that they were descendants of past victors, helped to fill Gosseyn’s swift appraisal. But even that was not enough to etch them in his mind as personalities.
Two people, a man and a woman—Venusians! The man said: “Don’t be alarmed. You are on Venus. I am a doctor.”
“Venus!” said Gosseyn.
He made it sound incredulous. He put fear and wonder into it. He put all his determination that they should not suspect that he had overheard their discussion of the legal necessity of killing him.
He saw that they were unarmed; the man did not wear an energy defensive belt around the waist of his shorts. And the woman’s brief skirt and brassiere couldn’t possibly have hidden a weapon or a defensive device of any known design.
Now! Gosseyn thought tensely. Now was the time to act, before they made plans to imprison him. Before they could get out of the room.
Could he do it? He lay there, cold and calculating, but conscious of an intense hot spot starting in the pit of his stomach, spreading slowly. Did he have the strength, the physical co-ordination necessary to violent action? He who a few minutes before had collapsed dizzily from the slightest movement!
He realized that he had to have the strength.
He swung his legs from under the quilt, and out over the edge of the bed. It was a little startling, in the presence of a woman, to discover at that ultimate moment, for the first time, that he was stark naked.
But there was no stopping for modesty’s sake.
“Venus!” he said.
He needed the exclamation, to make it look as if he was merely reacting physically in surprise. It gave him time to launch himself at the man.
The doctor struck at him. It was a weak blow, the blow of a surprised man, reacting swiftly. It struck Gosseyn on the shoulder; and if he had been a smaller man, less superbly muscled, it might have stopped him even then.
But he wasn’t. And the man had no time for a second blow. He was down, hit three times by Gosseyn’s fists. Hit so hard that he fell hard like a dropped sack.
Gosseyn whirled on the woman. She had made no attempt to escape, or to help the doctor. She stood, a little wide-eyed, staring at the man, where he lay, writhing now, on the floor. She looked up. She said simply:
“You heard us before?”
“I heard,” said Gosseyn.
She expected no mercy. And she received none. Almost pacifistic non-Aristotelianism might be. But it taught the inner meaning of positivities, and, in its higher techniques, trained individuals how to level off consciously on any plane of certainty.
Such a leveling was called for now. There must be other people in the hospital. Any instant, the woman might level off, herself, on the very natural defensive level of screaming for help.
Gosseyn struck her hard on the jaw. He caught her as she fell, and laid her on the bed. He put on the man’s shorts and shoes, tore a sheet into strips, and bound and gagged, first the man, then the woman.
In five minutes he was ready for the next phase of his escape.
It was a hospital all right with thirty beds, all empty. Downstairs were the living quarters, the laboratory and the surgery, similarly empty of human beings.
Gosseyn made a second, more careful search, examining clothes closets, smashing three teleradio communicators; and then, satisfied that he was safe so far as the inside of the building was concerned, went out onto an enormous veranda.
The splendid vista of the trees and the river, greatly enlarged now that it was no longer confined to a window view, spread before him. To the left and the right, the valley extended, briefly visible, but cut off by the Cyclopean groves—a shadowed universe of wondrous, godlike trees.
A hush lay over all, a silence so intense that it was startling—but not frightening. There was a grandeur here, a peace unequaled by anything in his experience.
Gosseyn drew a deep, slow, exhilarated breath. The air was fresh, as if it had been recently washed by an invigorating rain. It braced him, yet the day was beautifully mild; all the sweetness of a summer afternoon tingled upon and through his body.
Impossible to tell whether it was afternoon. There was no sun. The vast height of the sky was cut off by clouds that were almost hidden in a blue haze of distance.
Being a null-A, it was necessary for him, within the limits of the human nervous system, to attempt an accurate visualization of the reality of that sky. Gosseyn estimated an atmosphere twice as thick as Earth’s, a thousand miles or more of air—the clouds of Venus that made the second planet the dazzling spectacle of Earth’s night sky.
Thinking about it, he felt more alive, excited. Felt himself in a timeless world.
Gosseyn descended the stately steps to a green velvety soil; and, turning, looked at the building. It stood alone in a natural-looking, gardenlike setting. It was constructed entirely of a shiny gray stone. Behind it, a hill rose steeply, as much as four hundred feet in places, a long, wavy green ridge, thick with gigantic shrubs and flowering plants.
Gosseyn walked briskly around the building; and, as he had halfexpected, there was a series of stone steps leading up to the top of the hill.
It took him about ten minutes to climb the four hundred feet to the top, but the effort was worth it.
He looked down, down, down into distance. Gray-blue haze of distance. The hill on which the hospital was built was not really a hill at all, but a lower peak of a mountain, dipping down behind him past the hospital into a smaller valley before curving past the titan trees towards the higher peaks beyond.
Now that he was four hundred feet above the building, Gosseyn could see the peaks. They rose above the trees; they were snowcapped; they must be miles higher to be visible at all beyond that barrier of trees.
There were more trees in the greater valley down which Gosseyn gazed. But even they were dwarfed by the appalling depths to which the mountainside receded. Far down in that depth, Gosseyn caught a gleam of water, and, shocked, remembered the discolored river.
He turned to stare at it. And now that he was looking for it, he could see the sharp tilt of the water. No wonder it looked dark and ugly; no wonder it was so silent in its course: it was racing down a mountainside with an oily velocity that long ago had worn a smooth bed.
Somewhere farther along must be cataracts that would make Niagara tiny so far as height of fall was concerned; only thus could this swollen river hope to get down so swiftly to the deeper reaches of the great valley, where its gleam was so faintly visible.
It was saddening to think that he wouldn’t see those many waterfalls. But there was little possibility; his whole strength and purpose must be bent towards making an escape down the mountainside; and he couldn’t pause for scenic tours.
The first hard worry struck at Gosseyn. Escape! Down that mountain! Where to?
He stared with a more calculating intensity into the gulf of distance below him. He could see where the valley down there leveled off. For several miles it seemed to be a flat plain; and then the mists of remoteness closed in, and hid what lay beyond.
At least, there seemed to be no mountains in that direction. Though he’d have to ask questions about that. Detailed, pressing questions.
Thought of all the information he had yet to obtain brought a surge of anxiety. Was he actually out here admiring scenery, when every natural urge of self-preservation required him to leave at the earliest possible moment. Why, any hour, any second, a roboplane might come winging into view, out of the distance of an immense sky.
The pang of alarm that thought brought sent Gosseyn hurrying down the stone steps, back into the building.
The man and the woman lay where he had left them. They were both conscious, and their eyes looked up at him with just a shade of anxiety. So they were human after all, Gosseyn thought grimly. Beginning to be afraid.
He had no intention of harming them, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep them jittery. He removed the gags from their mouths, and said: “Where do you keep your maps of Venus?”
There was no. immediate reply. Then the man rolled his head sideways, and flashed a reassuring grin at the woman, who smiled back. The man said:
“He thinks he’s going to escape.” He glanced again at Gosseyn. “Knowing,” he said earnestly, “that you have no chance of getting away, I am quite prepared to give you all the information you want. To begin with, the maps are in a cupboard in the laboratory in—”
