The Original and Complete Null-A Trilogy, page 9
Satisfied, Gosseyn stepped into the light. He had already noticed a great stairway to his right, cut out of the solid trunk. He walked up the steps to a terrace that led to a closed, ornate door.
He knocked, strongly.
A minute dragged by. At the end of it, the thought bad already come to Gosseyn that there might be no one at home, despite the blazing lights. His leveling off on a basis of unqualified boldness permitted no prolonged time gap. Once more he knocked, and then he tried the knob.
The door opened noiselessly, revealing a dimly lighted corridor. A corridor that had been cut out of the solid wood, highly polished, and then left in its natural state.
It shone with a dull luster. It had an intricate design, resembling mahogany centerwood, but its coloring was like dark walnut veneer.
One flashing glance Gosseyn took; and had the picture of it. He stood briefly hesitant. It would be silly if a man who intended to surrender was shot as a lawless intruder.
He knocked once more, on the inner side of the door this time. No answer. That settled it. He must, according to the laws governing null-A decisions, assume he had the house to himself, and act accordingly.
The decision made, he walked forward towards where a light came dazzling through an open door. He paused in the doorway for a moment, then went into a large, cozy living room which, like the corridor, had been carved out of the solid wood of the great tree.
It, too, was highly polished, but apparently a different finishing process had been used, for the wood was lighter. The effect was of richness, a magnificence accentuated by the furniture and by a rug that was at least ninety feet long by sixty wide. It was from here, obviously, that the light had come that he had seen outside. Massive, gleaming windows curved spaciously along one entire wall the full length of the room.
The room was empty of human beings.
It had five doors leading from it; and Gosseyn followed each one in turn. To a kitchen with pantries and cold rooms and breakfast nook leading off of it. To five bedrooms, each with private bath, and with a doorway leading into a dark room that seemed to be an immense garden inside the tree. And to a library which, except for its size, seemed to be quite ordinary: Books, electronic records, and pamphlets made up its contents.
As he passed through the library, Gosseyn glanced at a book lying on a table beside a chair. The title was: “Detective In A World Without Criminals.”
He picked it up with trembling fingers. A Venusian book. A genuine, Venusian, null-A book! With a wild surmise, he flung his gaze along the lines of shelves. In that swift examination, the library lost Its ordinariness, and came alive. With a great effort, he forced himself out of that room.
Later, he decided shakily, he would read his way through it.
It struck him sharply that he had no doubt there would be a later for him. The realization brought a new, intimate awareness of something that had been at the back of his mind for some minutes:
Suppose, as now seemed apparent, the owner of this magnificent apartment was out. Out hunting for him!
No doubt the man would return in due course, but his absence now posed a psychological problem.
Gilbert Gosseyn’s decision was postponed. He remained uncommitted. Until the last minute before “X” ’s agent came back, a change of mind was possible.
It left things unsettled. It would make for nerve wear, for unease, and for recurring doubts as to the advisability of staying here to be captured by an enemy, when a whole planetful of people had yet to be warned of danger.
In leaving the library, Gosseyn had emerged into a corridor that had two other doors leading from it. He ended his thought, and tried them in turn. As with all the doors in the place, they were unlocked. One opened into the kitchen; the other into darkness.
The light from the hallway he was in poured over his shoulder; and, after his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he saw that he was looking into a long corridor. After a hundred and fifty feet, the light melted into shadow, but Gosseyn had the impression that the hallway continued on into the depths of the tree bole.
He closed the door, and went slowly to one of the bedrooms. He removed his scanty clothing, washed each piece in turn, and then took a bath himself. Finally, refreshed and drowsy, he crawled under the thin sheets.
The silence around him was as complete as anything he had experienced during his sixteen days on Venus. His thoughts turned inward to the mystery of Gilbert Gosseyn, who had once been killed, and now lived again. Even the gods of old hadn’t done any better than that.
Who was he? Who? WHO? The devastating thing was that he had actually been told, and had forgotten. The reality of that forgetfulness wrenched his mind for the hundredth time. Because his lack of memory about that made everything shaky, in spite of what the roboplane had told him. It was too like a dream. In dreams you forgot what people told you, and you strained and strained to remember.
And also you did things like escaping from chains and captors, without any idea of how you had gotten away. Funny, he couldn’t remember anything about his identity, except that it was important.
What could it be?
There simply weren’t any special people in the null-A universe. In the old, romantic days, he could have turned out to be a prince of some great Imperium, or a special government agent, or the son or some super-rich glamor merchant.
But there was nothing like that possible now. True, there were rich men in great numbers, and presumably President Hardie’s agents could be called government agents of a sort. But values had changed. People were people, normally born equal, requiring the simple, straightforward, null-A training to integrate their intelligence.
There were no kings, no archdukes, no supermen, traveling incognito.
Who was he that he was so important?
He must have slept with that thought hard in his mind.
Somewhere in the dark of the room—a rustling sound. Gosseyn half wakened, then turned over as the sound resolved itself into whispers. Meaningless whispers, that grew loud, then faded. Something feathery whisked over his cheek. He brushed at the thing with one hand. And stirred, the clouds of sleep lifting. An insect! he thought.
He was starting to sink again into unconsciousness, when the wrongness of his epithet penetrated. Insects! He had seen no insects on Venus, no animal life of any kind.
The whisperings were loud once more. The detective must have come home, Gosseyn analyzed wearily. His brain seemed satisfied with that explanation in some curious, unanxious fashion. Because he relaxed then, and slept.
Gosseyn wakened with a start. The light of day shone through the open bedroom door from the corridor that led to the living room. He scarcely noticed. Books! he was thinking, excitedly. A Venusian library. In minutes he would be at it.
He sat up. And remembered the sounds of the night. Slowly, he settled back. He’d better forget the books. He lay, eyes wide, thinking with gathering shock of the easy way his mind had, during the night, accepted the return of the detective.
“Don’t shoot me,” he muttered sardonically, “until I’ve had a good night’s rest.”
That was the way he had reacted. And now, his problem was to bring his presence to the attention of an “X” agent. He climbed out of bed, determined on an intermediate tactic.
He washed noisily, whistling loudly and tunelessly the while. It was all just a little foolish. But not too much so. Theoretically, if the other man heard sounds, he would not fire on sight.
That was important.
Gosseyn whistled furiously as he strode into the kitchen. Nor was there anything quiet about the way he peered into drawers and cupboards. He rattled pans and pots. He brought a cup and saucer down from a shelf with a crash. He fried his bacon with a crackle and splash of fat. And he ate noisily: bacon, toast, tea and fresh Venusian fruit. The fruit went very nicely with cream and sugar.
He was eating the fruit, still with a tensed expectancy that he would be interrupted any second, when the first doubt penetrated.
“What on earth,” he wondered aloud, “gave me the idea someone came in last night.”
He sat remembering the whisperings. A chill crept over him. He finished the fruit, and swiftly explored the apartment. The living room was bright with the daylight that blazed in through the great windows. None of the bedrooms, except his own, had been slept in. But the door that led into the interior of the tree was wide open.
Gosseyn stared at it, then peered along the corridor. It was as dark as it had been the night before. Had he shut the door? Or hadn’t he?
He couldn’t remember for sure, but it seemed to him that he had. “I wouldn’t,” he decided, “have left it open except by purest accident.” He returned to the living room, his mind probing the possibilities. Since he had no real evidence, he slowly forced the unpleasantness out of his system. The windows drew his physical attention as well as his mental. And now he saw what he hadn’t noticed the night before:
The house in the tree looked out on a green, gorgeous meadow. Part of that meadow, as well as the shrubs in which he had briefly concealed himself during the night, formed a portion of a neatly arranged garden. The garden covered several acres, and was terraced up towards the tree to some connection with the tree that Gosseyn couldn’t see from the living room windows.
A flashing memory came to Gosseyn of the dark gardenlike space onto which doors from each of the bedrooms had led.
That was in the general direction of the outside terrace.
It required only a few seconds to get there. And it was exactly as he had so suddenly analyzed. The garden began inside the tree, about seventy feet inside. A mere chip that seventy feet was, out of such a mass of growing wood. But it made possible a dream of a garden for a human being:
Shrubs he hadn’t seen wild, aglow with flowers. Flowers as big as Earth trees, so blazing with color that they seemed to be giving off a light of their own. What an experimental paradise Venusian flora must have been, must be, for botanists.
He had seen a tiny portion of those results at the hospital in the mountains. But there was a greater naturalness about this home in a tree, with a garden that exhaled its perfume like an invisible spray, so thick was the scent.
Gosseyn turned away from the garden because—books. A minute later he was in the library.
As a starter, he took down four volumes: “The Aristotelian And Non-Aristotelian History of Venus,” “The Machine And Its Builders,” “The Solipsist On Non-Aristotelian Venus” and the volume he had noticed the evening before, titled: “Detectives In A World Without Criminals.”
Each volume had in its frontispiece the name “Eldred Crang”. Gosseyn deduced without feeling too brilliant that that was his host’s name.
So this was the home of the man whom “X” had claimed had helped him to corrupt the Gaines Machine.
Gosseyn read snatches. He read, dogged by the continual worry that he would be interrupted. He started with the history. It told the story, long-suppressed on Earth, of the first men to land on Venus. It told of the realization by the Institute of General Semantics just then, in 2018 A.D., entering its governmental phase, of the null-A potentialities of the bountiful planet. The Machine method of selecting colonists came a hundred years later; and the greatest selective emigration plan in the history of man began to gather momentum.
. . . Population of Venus as of 2560 A.D. . . . 119,000,038 males, 120,743,280 females.
Feverishly, Gosseyn turned to a chapter titled: “The Native Life of Venus.” It began:
Daniel Miller, the first man to step from the first spaceship to land on Venus, returned from a brief exploratory trip into the nearest forest of primeval Venus, and said to his men:
“We’ll have to be very careful. Every minute I was out I had the impression I was being followed, and watched by curious eyes. What worries me is, I saw nothing, not a movement nor a footprint. Whoever trailed me excels at camouflage; perhaps intelligent Venusians are naturally colored some variation of dark and light shade. In any event, if the inhabitants are so deliberately evasive, we’d better be on the alert day and night.”
The “inhabitants” of Venus have been equally evasive during the past four hundred years. They are neither dark in color nor light. Their methods of camouflage are so superlative that they have succeeded in convincing two hundred million human beings that animal life does not, in fact, exist on Venus.
The author went on to report and discuss various technological and anthropological finds, the discovery of which, from time to time, seemed to indicate that primitive beings had once lived on the second planet.
One by one he disposed of the “finds”. The most difficult to explain, certain hollowed trees, he attributed after a masterly analysis of the diseases of Venusian flora, to a species of dry rot. This rot, affecting trees at various stages, made for cavernous interiors as the tree grew larger. Interiors complete with chambers and antechambers.
The great basic behind his explanations, the reality which in a ponderous fashion made all his plausibilities respectable was the undoubted fact that, in four centuries, two human beings had ever reported having seen a Venusian insect, bird, reptile or animal.
The argument was not altogether convincing to a man who was actually sitting in such a hollowed-out tree. Gosseyn glanced grimly around the library with its polished walls, the completeness of the room as a room. This a product of dry rot? Never!
Of course, it must have been fixed up. Doors must have been added, the walls smoothed off and sanded but—
Gosseyn put aside the book, and sat thoughtful and self-critical. Had he heard something the night before? He had a pretty solid conviction that he had. But what? Whisperings?
His speculations exhausted themselves for want of additional evidence, and because there was no time. With a nervous speed, he put aside the history, passed over “The Machine And Its Builders”—after all, he knew something of the Machine—and snatched up “The Solipsist On Non-Aristotelian Venus,” by Lauren Kair, Ps.D.
There was a little note in the frontispiece to the effect that Dr. Kair was now practicing on Earth. It was on page 110 that he ran across something he had been wandering about for days, a paragraph that read:
The most difficult to isolate of all egotists is the man or woman who has been in an accident that has resulted in injuries which do not immediately cause after effects.
Gosseyn stopped there, tingling. There might be unhuman beings in all this. But here at least was a concrete logicality so far as “X” was concerned.
“X”, the frightfully injured. Why not, then. “X”. Venusian solipsist?
It seemed convincing.
The whisperings came out of the darkness of his bedroom. They were angrier than the night before, argumentative, dissatisfied. Gosseyn, half-asleep, gradually grew tense with the vague feeling that some of the whisperers were urging drastic action; others counseled delay, caution.
As the half dream, half conscious awareness dragged on and on, the angry whispers slowly transformed into grudging agreements. Silence settled upon the bedroom, an uneasy silence that merged gradually into a dream.
It was a story dream, strangely coherent, acted out against a background of space immensities. Great, blazing stars swam into his ken, and hurtled off into distance behind the shapes with which he was traveling. There was something wrong with the stars, something that was a product not of the sun itself, but of the eye that was seeing it.
It took a long time for Gosseyn to grasp even an inkling of what was wrong; to realize that the eye through which he was peering, was part of a nervous system that was not human, not of Earth, nor of Earth’s spawn. It was a nervous system that made radically different abstractions from the real world. It saw a plenum that was cruel and deadly, and the nerve system as a whole was so antihuman that Gosseyn felt a chill, and he woke up shivering as if cold hands had reached through his flesh and bones, and clutched at his heart.
Gosseyn sat up jerkily in the bed.
Silence flowed around him like a waveless sea. It was so quiet that his faint breathing was loud; and he could hear the uneven beating of his heart. He had turned out the living, room lights; and the darkness was like pitch.
He sat there, thinking about his dream, dismissed it finally as a vaporing out of his own subconscious, product of fear and secret imaginings. Not so easily dismissible were the things he had been told, and his own conviction that it was time he did something about it.
The Machine had said that here if anywhere the evidence of alien intelligence would be available. Where? Here, a few feet away.
Slowly, Gosseyn climbed out of bed, dressed. And walked the few feet. He stood, then, peering up the dim corridor that led into the depths of a tree that was an eighth of a mile thick and half a mile tall.
The fact that it was night didn’t matter. It was always night inside a tunnel. And besides he had noticed an atomic flashlight in the kitchen.
Gosseyn twisted on his heels, and got the flashlight. He left the tunnel door open behind him. He began to walk along the low-roofed corridor into the interior of the tree.
TO BE CONTINUED.
Synopsis
By the year 3560 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 Venus”. The lesser winners were awarded all the good jobs on Earth. The top winners were sent to glorious Venus, there to become citizens in an all Ā civilization.
Gilbert Gosseyn received his first great 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 him from his room.
Out in the night he rescues a young woman from marauders of the policeless period. He quickly suspects that she is not as she has stated, a poor working girl, because she flashes a twenty-five thousand dollar bejewelled cigarette case. He begins to realise that he has become involved in some tremendous intrigue when he discovers that she is Patricia Hardie, daughter of Michael Hardie, President of Earth.
