The World of Null-A

President Hardie nodded. “He’s right, Pat. Normally a man who falsely believed himself married to my daughter would be simply another psychoneurotic. However, the very appearance of such a man at this time would have to be investigated. But the inability of the hotel lie detector to identify him is so unnormal that, as you see”—he motioned—“even Thorson has become interested. My idea is that the Galactic League agents tossed him out for us to look at. Well, we’re going to look. What are your plans, Jim?”

Thorson shrugged. “I want to break through the memory blocks and find out who he is.”

“X” said, “I don’t think that the information we gain should be too widely known. Miss Hardie, leave the room.”

The girls lips tightened. “I prefer to stay,” she said. She tossed her head defiantly. “After all, I took risks.”

Nobody said anything. The half-man looked at her with eyes that, to Gosseyn, seemed implacable. Patricia Hardie stirred uneasily, then looked at her father as if for support. The great man evaded her gaze, twisting uncomfortably in his chair.

She got up, her lip curling. “So he’s got you buffaloed, too,” she said with a sneer. “Well, don’t think he scares me. I’ll put a bullet into him one of these days that no surgeon will be able to put a plasto over.”

She went out, slamming the door behind her. Hardie said, “I don’t believe we need waste any time.”

There were no objections. Gosseyn saw that Thorson’s fingers were hovering over the power switch of the machine on the table. The moving fingers twisted powerfully. There was a click and a hum.

At first nothing happened. He was tensed to resist energy flows. And there weren’t any. Blankly he watched the machine. It hummed and throbbed. Like so many devices, it had its own special electron tubes. Whether they were used for controlling the speed of unseen motors or for amplifying some obscure sound in his body or converting energy or timing changes in an invisible process, or for any one of a hundred other tasks, it was impossible for Gosseyn to decide.

Some of the tubes peeped brightly out of holes in an opaque, curving plastic instrument box. Others, he knew, were too sensitive to be exposed to anything so violent as the normal temperature and brightness of a room. They would be hidden deep in their little enclosures with only a minute fraction of their easily irritated glass-smooth forms connected with the outside.

Watching hurt his eyes. He kept blinking and the tears that resulted blurred his vision. With an effort, Gosseyn looked away from the table and its machines. The movement must have been too sudden for his strained nerves. Something banged inside his head and a violent headache began. He realized with a start that this was what the machine was doing to him.

It was as if he had sunk to the bottom of a pool of water. There seemed to be heavy pressure on him from every side, inside included. As from a great distance, he heard Thorson’s calm voice lecturing his hearers.

“This is an interesting machine. It manufactures a variation of nervous energy. The energy is absorbed through the dozen nodes I have placed on Gosseyn’s head and shoulders, and flows evenly along all the nerve paths that have been previously established in his body. It does not itself establish any new patterns. You must think of it as an impulse that rejects instantly the slightest difficulty. It recoils from obstacles that vary by approximately one per cent from what to it is normal. It is a supreme adherent of the school of energies that follow the path of least resistance.”

It was hard, thinking against the sound of the voice. Gosseyn’s mind couldn’t form a complete thought. He strained against the blurring power of the voice and against the energy that was flowing through him. Nothing came but spasms of ideas and Thorson’s voice.

“The medically interesting characteristic of this artificial flow of nervous energy is that it is photographable. In a few moments, as soon as the movement of artificial energy has penetrated the remotest easy paths, I’ll obtain several negatives and make some positive prints. When enlarged in segments through a projector, the prints will show us in what parts of his brain his memory is concentrated. Since science has long known the nature of the memory stored in every cell group, we can then decide where to concentrate the pressures that will force the particular memory we want onto the verbal level.

“A further use of this machine, using more power and combined with a complicated word-association system-formula, will perform the actual operation.” He shut off the machine and pulled some film out of the camera. He said, “Watch him!” He disappeared through the nearest door.

Watching wasn’t necessary. Gosseyn couldn’t have stood steadily on his feet. His brain was turning rapidly in an illusion of spinning. Like a child that has whirled around and around too often, he had to unwind. Thorson was back before he could see straight.

He entered slowly, and, ignoring both “X” and Hardie, walked over to Gosseyn. He had two prints in his hand, and he paused with them directly in front of his prisoner and stared at him.

“What have you found?” said Hardie from Gosseyn’s left.

Thorson waved at him, an impatient command to be silent. It was a startlingly discourteous gesture and, what was more, he seemed to be unaware that he had made it. He stood there, and suddenly his personality was not just that of one more individual. He had been holding it in. Underneath the cold exterior was a blaze of nervous energy, a supremely potent human being. Gosseyn saw that his manner was not one of the deference to superiors. It was command, assured, final, unequivocal. When he agreed with the others, it was because he wanted to. When he disagreed, his way was decisive.

“X” wheeled over and gently removed the prints from Thorson’s fingers. He handed one to Hardie. The two men examined the photographs with two distinct and separate emotions.

“X” half climbed out of his chair. The movement revealed several things about his semi-plastic body. It showed his height. He was taller than Gosseyn had thought, at least five feet ten or eleven. It showed how his plastic arm was fastened to the plastic cage around the middle of his body. It showed that his face could look startled. He half whispered, “It’s a good thing we didn’t let him go to see that psychiatrist. We struck at the right moment, at the beginning.”

Michael Hardie looked irritated. “What are you babbling about? Don’t forget that I’m in my present position entirely because of your ability to control the games of the Machine. I never could get all this null-A stuff about the human brain into my head. All I see is a solid core of brightness. I presume that those are the lines of nerve patterns, and that they will untangle when enlarged on a screen.”

This time Thorson heard. He walked over, pointed at something on the print, and whispered an explanation that slowly drained the color from Hardie’s face.

“We’ll have to kill him,” he said grayly. “At once.”

Thorson shook his head irritably. “Whatever for? What can he do? Warn the world?” He grew more intent. “Notice there are no bright lines near it.”

“But suppose he finds out how to use it?” That was Hardie again.

“It would take months!” exclaimed “X.” “You can’t even make your little finger flexible in twenty-four hours.”

There were more whispers, to which Thorson responded furiously, “Surely, you don’t expect him to escape from that dungeon. Or have you been reading Aristotelian fiction, where the hero always wins?”

There was no question finally of who was going to have his way. Men came and carried Gosseyn, chair, manacles, and all, down four flights of stairs into a solid-steel dungeon. The final stairs led down into the dungeon, and when the men had climbed back to the floor above, a motor lifted the whole staircase through a hole in the ceiling twenty feet above. A steel door clanged down over the hole, and heavy bars were slammed shut. There was silence.

V

Gosseyn sat still in the steel chair. His heart hammered, his temples throbbed, and every few moments he felt faint and ill with reaction. There seemed no end to the perspiration that poured from him.

“I’m afraid,” he thought. “Horribly, wretchedly afraid.”