Arrest on sight . . .
As he read, Gosseyn remembered second by second what the Games Machine had said over the radio. Now, swallowing hard, he looked at the photographic reproduction, it was a head view only, and it was his face all right. But there was something wrong with it. Seconds passed before he realized what it was. They had taken a photograph of the corpse of Gilbert Gosseyn I.
The amusement that came was grim. He laid the paper down and staggered over to a chair. He felt sick with reaction and with rage. He had nearly killed himself. It was so close that it was as if he had died, and this was resurrection. What did the Machine mean, ordering him to commit suicide, and then calling it off because “your third body has been destroyed!” Of all the organic matter in the world, that body of Gilbert Gosseyn III should have been protected against discovery.
His fury died slowly. Soberly he analyzed his situation. “The first move,” he thought, “is to get the Distorter. Then learn how to use my extra brain.”
Or was that last possible? Could he ever do that alone—he who had thought and thought about it without once producing the slightest apparent effect on that special part of his mind? He mustered an ironic smile. “I am not,” he thought decisively, “going to get lost in those depths just now.”
There were a number of things to do first. He disconnected the videoplate of the phone—another clerk might be on duty—and then called the desk. A pleasant voice answered. Gosseyn said, “This is John Wentworth.”
There was silence at the other end, then, “Yes, sir. How are things? Dan Lyttle at this end. I’ll be right up, sir.”
Gosseyn waited expectantly. He remembered the clerk who had registered him as a slim, tall chap with nice features and dark hair. Lyttle in the flesh was somewhat thinner than Gosseyn’s memory of him, rather weak- looking for the tough job Patricia Hardie had assigned him. He showed, however, many characteristics of null-A training, particularly in the firmness of his jaw and in the way he held himself.
“I’ll have to hurry,” he said.
Gosseyn frowned at that. “I’m afraid,” he said, “the time has come for special risks. I have an idea an effort will be made to dismantle the destroyed Games Machine as swiftly as possible. If I were confronted with such a job and wanted it done fast, I would publish a notice to the effect that anybody could have what he wanted so long as he carted it away immediately.”
He saw that Dan Lyttle was staring at him wide-eyed. The young man said breathlessly, “Why, that’s exactly what’s been done. They’re stringing up masses of lights. They say an eighth of the Machine is already gone, and that— What’s the matter?”
Gosseyn was experiencing mental anguish. The Machine was gone, and hour by hour all that it stood for was going with it. Like the cathedrals and temples of far-gone days, it was a product of a creative impulse, a will to perfection which, though not dead, would never repeat itself in the same fashion. At one blow centuries of irreplaceable memories had been blotted out. It cost an effort to force the picture and the emotion out of his mind.
“There’s no time to waste,” he said swiftly. “If the Distorter is still inside the Machine, we have to get it. We’ll have to go after it at once.”
“I can’t possibly leave until twelve,” Lyttle protested. “We’ve all been ordered to remain on duty, and every hotel is being watched.”
“What about your robocar—if you’ve got one?”
“It’s parked on the roof, but I beg you not to”—his tone was earnest—“not to go up there and try to get it. I’m sure you’d be arrested immediately.”
Gosseyn hesitated. He recognized consciously that he was not easily turned aside these days. At last, reluctantly, he nodded acceptance of defeat.
“You’d better get back to work,” he said quietly. “We’ve got five hours to pass.”
As silently as he had come, Lyttle slipped out and was gone.
XXIV
Left to his own resources, Gosseyn ordered food sent up to his room. By the time it arrived, he was planning his evening. He looked up a telephone number. “I want a visual connection,” he said into the mouthpiece, “with the nearest phonolibrary. The number is—”
To the robot in charge at the library he explained his general wants. Within a minute, a picture was forming on the reconnected videoplate. Gosseyn sat then, eating and looking and listening. He knew what he wanted—a suggestion as to how he should begin training his extra brain. Whether or not the subject matter selected by the librarian had any relevancy to that desire was not clear. He forced himself to be patient. When the voice began with an account of the positive and negative neural excitations experienced by the simple life forms of the sea, Gosseyn settled down determinedly. He had an evening to pass.
Phrases came to him, clung as he turned them over in his mind, and then faded out of his consciousness as he discarded them. As the voice traced the growth of the nervous system on Earth, the pictures on the video changed, showing ever more complex neural interconnections until finally the comparatively high forms of life were reached, complex creatures that could learn lessons from experience. A worm bumped two hundred times against an electric current before it finally turned aside, and then, when put to the test again, turned aside after sixty shocks. A pike separated from a minnow by an almost invisible screen nearly killed itself trying to get through, and when it was finally convinced that it couldn’t, not even the removal of the screen made any difference; it continued to ignore the minnow as something unobtainable. A pig went insane when confronted with a complicated path to its food.
All the experiments were shown. First the worm, then the pike actually threshing against the screen, the pig squealing madly, and, later on, a cat, a dog, a coyote, and a monkey put through their experiments. And still there was nothing that Gosseyn could use—no suggestion, no comparison that seemed to have anything to do with what he wanted.
“Now,” said the voice, “before we turn to the human brain, it is worth while to note that in all these animals one limitation has again and again and again revealed itself. Without exception they identify their surroundings on a too narrow basis. The pike, after the screen was removed, continued to identify its environment on the basis of the pain it had experienced when the screen was in place. The coyote failed to distinguish between the man with the gun and the man with the camera.
“In each case, a similarity that did not exist was assumed. The story of the dark ages of the human mind is the story of man’s dim comprehension that he was more than an animal, but it is a story told against a background of mass animal actions, rooted in a pattern of narrow animal identifications. The story of null-A, on the other hand, is the story of man’s fight to train his brain to distinguish between similar yet different object-events in space-time. Curiously, the scientific experiments of this enlightened period show a progressive tendency to attain refinements of similarity in method, in tuning, and in the structure of the materials used. It might indeed be said that science is striving to force similarity because only thus—”
Gosseyn had been listening impatiently, waiting for the discussion on the human brain to being. Now, abruptly, he thought, “What was that?
He had to hold himself in his chair, to relax, to remember. And then, and not till then, did he climb to his feet and pace the floor in the burning excitement of an immeasurably great discovery made. To force a greater approximation of similarity. What else could it be? And the method of forcing would have to be through memory.
Perfect memory was, literally, a replay in the mind of an event exactly as it had originally been recorded. The brain, obviously, could only repeat its own perceptions. What it failed to retain of the process level in Nature, it would—naturally—fail to similarize. The abstraction principle of General Semantics applied. Abstraction of perceptions.
