Once more she paused, then, “I’m sorry,” she said, and turned away. She did not look back. She walked off toward a distant door that opened before her touch. Momentarily it revealed a very bright anteroom, then the door closed. Anywhere from five to ten minutes went by. Finally, a hawk-nosed man sauntered over from another door, and looked in at Gosseyn. He said, with an unmistakable sneer, “So this is the dangerous man!”
It seemed a futile insult. Gosseyn started to carry on with his examination of the man’s physical characteristics, and then the import of the words penetrated. He had been expecting to be asked to get out of the car. Now he settled back in his seat. The idea that he was considered a dangerous man was absolutely new. It didn’t seem to have any structural relation to the facts. Gilbert Gosseyn was a trained null-A whose brain had been damaged by an amnesic calamity. He might prove worthy of Venus in the games, but he would simply be one of thousands of similarly successful contenders. He had yet to show a single quality of structural difference between himself and other human beings.
“Ah, silence,” drawled the big man. “The null-A pause, I suppose. Any moment now, your present predicament will have been integrated into control of your cortex, and semantically clever words will sound forth.”
Gosseyn studied the man curiously. The sneer on the other’s lips had relaxed. His expression was less cruel, his manner not so animalistically formidable. Gosseyn said pityingly, “I can only assume that you’re a man who has failed at the games and that is why you are sneering at them. You poor fool!”
The big man laughed. “Come along,” he said. “You’ve got some shocks coming. My name, by the by, is Thorson—Jim Thorson. I can tell you that without fear of its going any further.”
“Thorson!” Gosseyn echoed, and then he was silent. Without another word, he followed the hawk-nosed man through an ornate door and into the palace of the Machine, where President and Patricia Hardie lived.
He began to think of the necessity of making a determined effort to escape. But not yet. Funny, to feel that so strongly. To know that learning about himself was more important than anything else.
There was a long marble corridor that ended in an open oak door. Thorson held the door for Gosseyn, a smile twisting his long face. Then he came in and closed the door behind him, shutting out the guards who had been following Gosseyn.
Three people were waiting in the room, Patricia Hardie and two men. Of the latter, one was a fine-looking chap of about forty-five, who sat behind a desk. But it was the second man who snatched Gosseyn’s attention.
He had been in an accident. He was a patched monstrosity. He had a plastic arm and a plastic leg, and his back was in a plastic cage. His head looked as if it were made of opaque glass; it was earless. Two human eyes peered from under a glass-smooth dome of surgical plastic. He had been lucky in a limited fashion. From his eyes down, the lower part of his face was intact. He had a face. His nose, mouth, chin, and neck were human. Beyond that, his resemblance to anything normal depended partly upon the mental concessions of the observer. For the moment, Gosseyn was not prepared to make any concessions. He had decided on a course of action, a level of abstraction—boldness. He said, “What the devil is that?”
The creature chuckled in a bass amusement. His voice, when he spoke, was deep as a viol’s G string.
“Let us,” he said, “consider me as the ‘X’ quantity.”
Gosseyn glanced away from “X” to the girl. Her gaze held his coolly, though a shade of heightened color crept into her cheeks. She had made a quick change into another dress, an evening gown. It gave a tone to her appearance that Teresa Clark had never had.
It was curiously hard to turn his attention to the other man. Even to his trained brain, the reorientation necessary to acceptance of President Hardie of Earth as a plotter was a hurdle too big for easy surmounting. But in the end there could be no shrinking from the identification.
Illegal actions were being taken. People didn’t do what had been done to him, or say what Patricia and Thorson had said, unless it meant something. Even the Machine had hinted of imminent unpleasantness. And it had practically said in so many words that the Hardie family was involved.
The President, seen at this near distance, had the hard eyes of the disciplinarian and the smile of a man who must be tactful and pleasant to many people. His lips were thin. He looked as if he could cut an interview short or keep it firmly to the point. The man looked like an executive, alert, accustomed to the exercise of authority. He said now, “Gosseyn, we are men who would have been doomed to minor positions if we had accepted the rule of the Machine and the philosophy of null-A. We are highly intelligent and capable in every respect, but we have certain ruthless qualities in our natures that would normally bar us from great success. Ninety-nine per cent of the world’s history was made by our kind, and you may be sure it shall be so again.”
Gosseyn stared at him, a tightness gathering over his heart. He was being told too much. Either the plot was about to come into the open, or the vague threats that had already been leveled at him had the deadliest meanings. Hardie was continuing.
“I have told you this in order to emphasize the following instructions: Gosseyn, there are several guns pointing at you. You will accordingly without fuss walk over to that chair”—he motioned with his right hand—“and you will submit to manacles and other such minor indignities.”
His gaze traveled beyond Gosseyn. He said, “Thorson, bring over the necessary machines.”
Gosseyn knew better than to hope to escape from this room. He walked forward and allowed Thorson to handcuff his wrists to the arms of the chair. He watched with tense curiosity as the big man wheeled over a table with a number of small, delicate-looking machines on it.
Silently, Thorson attached a dozen cup-shaped devices on one of the machines to Gosseyn’s skin with adhesive—six of them to his head and face, the other six to his throat, shoulders, and the upper part of his back.
Gosseyn grew aware that he was not the only overwrought person in the room. The two men, Hardie and the monstrosity, leaned forward in their chairs. Blue eyes and yellow-brown eyes glowed moistly avid. The girl sat crouched in her chair, her legs drawn up, one hand rigidly holding a cigarette to her lips. She puffed at it automatically, but she didn’t inhale. She simply puffed the smoke into her mouth and then thrust it out again. She did that over and over.
Of the quartet, Thorson was the calmest. With steady fingers, he made some final adjustments on something in the machine that Gosseyn couldn’t see, then looked questioningly at Michael Hardie. But it was Gosseyn who broke the silence, who said thickly, “I think you ought to listen to me for a moment.”
He paused, not because he was finished but because suddenly he felt desperate. He thought, What in the name of reason is going on here? This can’t be happening to a law-abiding human being on the peaceful Earth of 2560 A. D.
“I feel,” he said, and his voice sounded husky in his own ears, “like a child in a madhouse. You want something from me. For logic’s sake, tell me what, and I’ll do my best for you.
“Naturally,” he went on, “I value my life more than any fact that you can possibly require of me. I can say that safely because in this world of null-A no individual matters to the extent that his ideas, his inventions, or his personality can be used to the detriment of mankind. Individual machines cannot sway the balance against the accumulated mass of science as employed by determined, courageous men in the defense of civilization. That has been proved. Unique science cannot win a war.” He gazed questioningly at Michael Hardie. “Is it anything like that? Any invention of my pre-amnesic days?”
“No.” The speaker was “X.” The cripple looked amused, and added, “You know, this is really interesting. Here is a man who knows neither his purpose nor his antecedents, and yet his appearance at this period cannot be quite accidental. The inability of the hotel lie detector to penetrate his true identity is an unheard-of phenomenon.”
“But he’s telling the truth.” Patricia Hardie lowered her feet to the floor, and let her cigarette hand dangle. She looked and sounded very earnest. “The lie detector at the hotel said that his mind was not aware of his identity.”
A plastic arm waved at her patronizingly. The bass voice was tolerant.
“My dear young lady, I’m not questioning that it said that. But I’m not forgetting that machines are corruptible. The brilliant Mr. Crang, and I”—his voice grew significant—“have proved that to the satisfaction of many men, including your father.”
He broke off. “I don’t think any statement Gosseyn makes, or that is made about him by ordinary brain- testing devices, can be accepted by us.”
