The World of Null-A

Machine.

All through that day he was a man torn by a mixture of amazement and despair. By evening the high fever of restlessness was beginning to recede. He felt tired and unhappy, but also much more thoughtful. The Machine had not even suggested that he try to get the Distorter, perhaps because it could not imagine him succeeding.

As he ate dinner he visualized how it might be done. Phone Patricia and make an appointment with her in her apartment. Surely he could persuade her to see him some time during the following day, without any of the others knowing about it. The attempt had to be made.

He phoned her as soon as he had eaten. There was a slight delay after he gave his name, and then her face came on the video plate. Her face lighted, but she said hurriedly, “I can’t talk to you more than a minute. Where can we meet?”

When he told her she frowned at him, started to shake her head, and then stared at him thoughtfully. She said finally, slowly, “This sounds awfully risky to me, but I’m willing to take the chance if you are. One o’clock tomorrow, and the important thing is, don’t run into Prescott or Thorson or Mr. Crang as you come in.”

Gosseyn told her gravely that he would be careful, said good-by, and hung up. It was Prescott that he met.

XXI

A famous Victorian-era physicist said, “There’s nothing for the next generation of physicists to do except measure the next decimal place.” In the next generation . . . Planck developed the quantum theory that led to Bohr’s atomic structure work. . . . Einstein’s mathematics were proven out by some extremely delicate decimal place measuring. . . . Obviously, the next question is going to involve the next set of decimal places. Gravity is too little understood. So are magnetic field phenomena. . . . Sooner or later somebody will slip in another decimal place, and the problem will be solved.

J. W. C., Jr.

Gosseyn walked up to the main entrance a few minutes before one o’clock. He was not alone. Men and women moved in and out of the great doors, and their presence threw a sort of fog around him, hiding nun from close observation. There was, of course, the necessity of passing the guard office inside the entrance. Gosseyn peered into the glass wicket at the chunky individual who sat there.

“My name is Gosseyn. I have an appointment with Miss Patricia Hardie for one o’clock.”

The man ran his finger down a list of names. Then he pressed a button. A long young man in uniform popped out of a door near the wicket. He took Gosseyn’s brief case and led the way to an elevator, the doors of which were just opening. One of the three people who came out was Prescott. He stared at Gosseyn in surprise. His face darkened.

“What brings you back here?” he asked.

Gosseyn braced himself. There was nothing to do but make the best of the fantastically bad luck. He had a vague plan for such a meeting as this, but his heart sank like a lead weight as he said the words he had prepared: “I have an appointment with Crang.”

“Eh? Why, I just left Crang. He didn’t mention that he was seeing you.”

Gosseyn remembered that Prescott didn’t know that Crang was a null-A supporter. All things considered, that was very fortunate.

“He’s giving me a few minutes,” he said. “But maybe you’ve got some ideas on what I have to say.”

Prescott stood, cold, watchful, suspicious, as Gosseyn described his visit to the Machine and how the Machine wanted him to kill himself so that a third Gosseyn might appear. He omitted what the Machine had told him of the attack on Venus, and finished darkly, “I’ve got to see that third body. I’m just enough of a null-A not to believe in the triplicate even after I’ve seen the duplicate. Imagine anybody expecting a person of my sanity training to blow out his brains.” He shuddered involuntarily. “I’m looking for clues,” he said. “I even thought of coming to talk with Thorson. Somehow”—he looked hard at the other—“after last night, I didn’t think of you.”

Prescott’s countenance showed no hint of his reaction to the night before. He turned, started to walk away, then came back. He stood staring at Gosseyn. His manner remained coldly hostile, but his eyes were curious.

“As you’ve probably guessed,” he said, “we’re looking for other bodies of yours.”

Gosseyn’s impulse had been to get away from Prescott. Now he felt a chill. “Where have you looked?” he asked.

Prescott laughed harshly. “At first we had some pretty wild ideas. We made soundings from the air for caves, and we searched in out-of-way places. But now we’ve grown a little smarter.”

“What do you mean?”

“The problem,” Prescott continued, frowning, “is greatly complicated by a law of nature, of which you have probably never heard. The law is this: If two energies can be attuned on a twenty-decimal approximation of similarity, the greater will bridge the gap of space between them just as if there were no gap, although the juncture is accomplished at finite speeds.”

“That,” said Gosseyn, “sounds like pure Greek.”

Prescott laughed, louder this time. “Think of it this way, then,” he said. “How do you explain the fact that you have in your mind the details of what Gosseyn I did and thought? You must have been attuned, you and he; in fact, it is the only theoretically sure method of thought transmission—you have to do it with yourself. Anyway, it didn’t matter where you were; his thoughts, being alive, would have been the stronger, and would have flashed to you wherever you were within the limits of reachable space. I won’t define those limits.”

He broke off. “We’ve even examined meteorites as far away as the rings of Saturn in the apparently mistaken belief that some of them might have been hollowed out and fitted up as incubators with Gilbert Gosseyns in various stages of growth. That will show you how seriously we—”

There was an interruption from a man in military uniform.

“Our car is waiting, Mr. Prescott. The ship leaves for Venus on the half hour.”

“Be right with you, General.”

He turned and started to follow the officer. Then he paused and came back. He said, “In a way we’re curious to see this Gosseyn III. Since you will already have had cautious thoughts in that connection, I am not giving anything away when I say that we shall kill him, and that then there will be no reason for not killing you. I suggest, furthermore, that there must be an end somewhere to the total number of Gilbert Gosseyns.”

He twisted away and, without looking back, walked to the door. There was a car waiting at the foot of the steps. Gosseyn saw him climb into it. In a few moments, Prescott would be thinking over the meeting. And somewhere along the line he would phone Crang, who would then have to take action.

Gosseyn could hardly stand still in the elevator. His plan to get hold of the Distorter intact was shattered by the accidental meeting, but he wasted no time after Patricia Hardie let him into her apartment. Even as she was murmuring something about how dangerous it was for him to come to the palace, he was tugging a cord out of the bottom of his brief case.

She was amazed when he started to tie her. She had a little automatic up the voluminous sleeve of her dress that she tried to get at. Gosseyn took it and shoved it in his pocket. When he had carried her, bound and gagged, into the bedroom and laid her on the bed, he said, “I’m sorry. But this is for your own good, in case somebody interrupts us.”

He wasn’t sorry. He was only in a hurry. He hurried into the living room for his brief case. The tools in it he tumbled onto the bed beside the girl. From the pile he snatched an atomic cutter and ran for the wall he had decided the previous night was the only one the Distorter could possibly be in.