fast.
During the battle that followed, Gosseyn retreated in turn to the nine
He had to tense every muscle in his body to restrain his relief when he saw that the questioner before whom he was taken was Eldred Crang. The interview that followed seemed thorough. But so carefully were the questions worded that not once did the lie detector give away any vital fact. When it was finally over, Crang turned to a wall receiver and said, “I think, Mr. Thorson, you can safely take him to Earth. Everything here will be taken care of.”
Gosseyn had been wondering where Thorson was. It was clear that the man was taking no unnecessary chances—and yet Thorson had to go to Earth personally. That was the beauty of all this. The search for the secret of immortality could not be delegated to subordinates whose life-hunger might cause them, also, to forget their duty.
The big man was standing beside a row of elevators when Gosseyn was brought up. His manner was condescending.
“It’s as I thought,” he said. “This extra brain of yours has its limitations. After all, if it was able to oppose a major invasion by itself, then the third Gosseyn would have been brought out without preliminaries. The truth is, one man is always vulnerable. Even with a limited immortality, and a few bodies to play around with, he can do very little more than any bold man. His enemies need merely suspect his whereabouts and an atomic bomb could wipe out everything in that vicinity before he could so much as think.”
He waved his hand. “We’ll forget about Prescott. Fact is, I’m rather pleased that this happened. It puts things in their proper perspective. The fact that you tried it, though, shows that you’ve thoroughly misunderstood my motives.” He shrugged. “We’re not going to kill this player, Gosseyn. We merely want to participate in what he’s got.”
Gosseyn said nothing, but he knew better. It was the nature of Aristotelian man that he did not share willingly. All through history the struggle for power, murder of rivals, and exploitation of the defenseless had been the reality of unintegrated man’s nature. Julius Caesar and Pompey refusing to share the Roman Empire, Napoleon, first an honest defender of his country then a restless conqueror—such men were the spiritual forebears of Enro, who would not share the galaxy. Even now, as Thorson sat here denying ambition, his brain must be roiling with schemes and visions of colossal destiny. Gosseyn was glad when the giant said, “And now let’s go. We’ve wasted enough time.”
It was something to be up and going toward the crisis.
XXXIV
“What you say a thing is, it is not” . . . It is much more. It is a compound in the largest sense. A chair is not just a chair. It is a structure of inconceivable complexity, chemically, atomically, electronically, etc. Therefore, to think of it simply as a chair is to confine the nervous system to what Korzybski calls an identification. It is the totality of such identifications that create the neurotic, the unsane, and the insane individual.
The city of the Machine was changed. There had been fighting, and smashed buildings were everywhere. When they came to the palace, Gosseyn was no longer surprised that Thorson had spent the previous few days on Venus.
The palace was a shattered, empty husk. Gosseyn wandered with the others along it? bare corridors and through its smashed rooms with a nostalgic sense of a civilization going down and down. The firing in the distant streets was a throbbing background to his movements, a continuous, unpleasant mutter, irritating, polysonal. Thorson answered his question curtly. “They’re just as bad here as on Venus. They fight like mindless fiends.”
“It’s a level of abstraction in the null-A sense,” Gosseyn said matter of factly. “Complete adjustment to the necessities of the situation.”
Thorson said, “Aaaaaa!” in any annoyed tone, then changed the subject. “Do you feel anything?”
Gosseyn shook his head truthfully. “Nothing.”
They came to Patricia’s room. The wall where the Distorter had been gaped at them. The French windows lay shattered on the floor. Through the empty frames, Gosseyn stared out toward where the Games Machine had once towered like a jewel crowning the green Earth. Where it had been, thousands and thousands of truckloads of soil had been dumped, perhaps with the intention of leveling all traces of the symbol of a World’s struggle for sanity. Only, no leveler was at work. The unsightly earth lay multitudinously humped and seemingly forgotten.
They could find no clue in the palace, and presently the whole mass of men and machines headed for Dan Lyttle’s house. It stood untouched. Automatics had kept it spic and span; the rooms smelled as fresh and clean as he had left them. The crate that had contained the Distorter stood in one corner of the living room. The address, “The Semantics Institute,” to which the Games Machine had intended it to be sent, was huge on the side that faced the room. Gosseyn motioned toward it, as if suddenly struck by a thought.
“Why not there?”
An armored army moved along the streets of what had been the city of the Machine. Fleets of roboplanes rode the skies. Above them spaceships hovered, ready for anything. Robotanks and fast cars swarmed along all near-by streets. They raced in silent processions into the famous square, and then men and machines poured into the buildings through the doors from every direction. At the many-doored ornamental entrance, Thorson indicated the letters carved in the marble. Somberly, Gosseyn paused, and read the ancient inscription:
THE NEGATIVE JUDGMENT
IS THE PEAK OF MENTALITY
It was like a sigh across the centuries. Some of the reality of meaning, as it affected the human nervous system, was in that phrase. Countless billions of people had lived and died without ever suspecting that their positive beliefs had helped to create the disordered brains with which they confronted the realities of their worlds.
Men in uniforms emerged from the nearest entrance. One of them spoke to Thorson in a language heavy with consonants. The big man turned to Gosseyn.
“It’s deserted,” he said.
Gosseyn did not answer. Deserted. The word echoed along the corridors of his mind. The Semantics building deserted. He might have guessed, of course, that it would be. The men in charge were only human, and they could not be expected to live in the no man’s land between two fighting forces. But still he hadn’t expected it.
He grew aware that Thorson was speaking to the men operating the vibrator. Its pulsations, which had been briefly silent, crept in upon him. Thorson turned to him again.
“We’ll turn the vibrator off again when we get inside. I’m not taking any chances with you.”
Gosseyn roused himself. “We’re going inside?”
“We’ll tear the place apart,” said Thorson. “There may be hidden rooms.”
He began to shout orders. There was a period of confusion. Men kept coming out of the building and reporting to the big man. They spoke in the same incomprehensible, guttural language, and it was not until Thorson turned to him with a grim smile that he had any inkling of what was happening.
