Null-A Continuum Read online

  Even with the Games Machine of Venus compromised, real Null-A detectives had discovered the imposture and deduced the existence of the extraterrestrial civilization that had sent agents among them, made tentative guesses about its scope, socioeconomics, and technology. With the careful cooperation of all Venusians, especially wives married to galactic gang members, they had prepared an in-depth defense to resist the attack months and years before it came, including a plan to evacuate all the major cities at a moment’s notice. One detective, Eldred Crang, had penetrated even to the Imperial Court of Gorgzid by that time.

  The defense preparations were carried out with such secrecy that the Greatest Empire troopers, when they came, assumed the Null-A Venusian counterattacks were all spontaneous impromptu affairs and that the Venusians were supermen. Outnumbered and outfought, facing a vastly superior technology, the Venusians won a crushing psychological victory.

  Gazing down at the immense trees of the garden-world, Gosseyn saw very few of the burns or scars that high explosives or atomic-powered beams had left after the war still marking the bark. Even a powerful cannon could do little to harm such colossal volumes of wood. Most of the crater damage to the living cities of Venus had already grown over.

  THE robocab flew toward a tree-bole so large that the branches were as broad as highways. A brown and rugged wall of bark rose up in view: A massive door opened in the wood and slid aside, revealing a car park where many sleek green air vehicles were already cradled. Through the window panels set in the wall of living wood surrounding the buried car park, Gosseyn could see the shining instruments and winking electron tubes of several laboratories, including an entire wall of linked electronic brains, emitters and transmitters of various designs.

  Gosseyn realized suddenly where he was: “Is this …?”

  Clayton nodded. “This is the lab for Dr. Hayakawa’s design team. That man there is Dr. Reed, of the Neurolinguistic Research Institute.”

  No one knew more about the workings of the mind, human or electronic, than the people gathered here: The various Games Machine circuits Venus had been shipping out to expatriate Null-A’s on other worlds were made in these labs. This team had invented the special designs to resist the kind of distorter paralysis the Hardie gang once used to corrupt the Machines of Earth and Venus, to put Hardie in a position of power there, or to prevent agents of the gang, present under false pretenses, from being extradited.

  Gosseyn saw the faces of the men and women who watched him land. The sight filled him with confidence.

  Introductions were brief, as Dr. Hayakawa rushed him into an insulated signal-nullification chamber. Technicians in full-body radiation armor began helping Gosseyn to strip and to attach medical and recording appliances to his head, spine, and upper body.

  The scientists and their technical crew fled from the room, and motorized hinges swung shut a valve thicker than a bank vault door. Gosseyn did not blame them: The moment Gosseyn’s nervous system established a connection with a distant point in space-time, any reactions X might have programmed into his own extra brain might be triggered. X could similarize an atomic force into the chamber, or worse.

  Over the intercom, Dr. Reed was saying, “Once we take the imprint of Lavoisseur’s brain from the tube fragments of the lie detector, we expect to be able to mechanically force enough similarity to provoke a reaction.”

  “What kind of reaction?”

  Clayton’s voice answered with a hint of humor, “Of course that depends on the energy-matter conditions of Lavoisseur and the area of space-time around him. If he is not in his shadow-form, and if he has taken no precautions, it is possible that we might have a sufficient connection to establish a mental connection, and draw vital information from his brain into yours. Naturally, we will have a thought-sensitive electron tube arrangement set to record the results.”

  Gosseyn realized why Clayton was making a point of calling the enemy version of Gosseyn by the name Lavoisseur rather than something else: That name drove home the point that they were dealing with an individual of rare genius, the leader of the Semantics Institute. If X’s tale was to be believed, it had been merely an offshoot of his memory chain, a discarded duplicate, who, under the now-legendary name of Walter S. de Lany, had possessed the supreme knowledge to found and build the first Games Machine on Earth.

  The solitary survivor of the Primordial Humans of the long-dead Shadow Galaxy. Who was he, really? Xenius of Mars. Ysvid of Forever Isle. Ur-ath-Vir the First-of-Living. X the Unknown.

  This supremely dangerous individual knew more about the intricate energy-relationships of the similarity and distortion effects than Venusian or galactic science knew.

  Dr. Reed’s voice came over the intercom: “No matter what precautions he takes, Lavoisseur cannot change the laws of nature. Once two bodies exceed twenty degrees of similarity, the greater bridges the gap to the lesser as if there is no gap. The armored suit you see before you there contains both a sensory-deprivation capacity as well as a molecular-refrigeration field to slow Brownian motions. By placing you in a passive, hypnotic state, similar to what your ‘empty’ bodies hidden in their medical coffins experience, we hope to make your nervous system the ‘lesser’ of the two poles, once the connection is forced. You can memorize the interior workings of the suit with that transparency bar.”

  Gosseyn took several moments to “photograph” the various suit components and energy systems into his double brain and attached each to a complex set of cues that would operate faster than any mechanical switch. Since he would be unconscious during the actual moment of forced contact, he set the cues to react to specific patterns in the suit’s electronic brain, which had been pre-set to recognize a variety of threat scenarios.

  Padded robot arms now helped Gosseyn, together with his medical packages, slide into the armored suit. It was more like entering a vehicle than it was like donning armor: The suit was fifteen feet tall, with amplifying motors at the joints. The robotic hands wired the appliances taped to Gosseyn’s skull into the inner surface of the wide, domelike helmet.

  There were mouth tubes for food and water up above and a catheter-recycler arrangement down below. The meaning of this was not lost on Gosseyn.

  Over the suit radio, Gosseyn said, “You are assuming that, seventeen-year-old or not, Lavoisseur would not make such a mistake as leaving the lie detector behind, even damaged.”

  Clayton answered, “We are talking about the foremost Null-A psychiatrist in the universe. He allowed a machine to make a verification model of his thought-patterns. He could have similarized it out of the room with him when he departed.”

  “So it is a trap.”

  Dr. Hayakawa’s voice answered: “We did not bother mounting weapons on the suit, since our electronic brain calculated that your thought-patterns could direct nucleonic and electronic forces more precisely and with more deliberate effect than any aiming and delivery system we have. The suit’s atomic pile is roughly equal to the output of a battleship, and you can concentrate your fire into a smaller area than any weapon by using the electron-microscope attachment. There is also a distorter-brake built in the suit, so that if you are physically pulled toward Lavoisseur, you will land not where he wants but some place nineteen-point-nine degrees of similarity off-target: In the metric of undistorted space, that works out to something around six billion miles.”

  As it turned out, when Gosseyn woke and checked his altimeter he found the nearest gravitating body was only two hundred forty thousand miles away, not the six billion it might have been.

  The instruments in his helmet detected two smaller bodies, airless and waterless; after an hour of tracking their motions against the starry background, the onboard electronic brain was able to confirm the two dots of light were moons, the slim, rust-red crescent was a planet. The planet held atmosphere and water: There were also extensive atomic and electromagnetic power sources webbing the planet, signs of an advanced technological system.

  Gosseyn point
ed his gyroscope at the red crescent, set the onboard electronic brain to calculate an orbit, and switched on his suit drivers. There was a slight sensation of pressure, as if he weighed an eighth of a pound and were lying on his back. That was all. There was no other sign of motion, except for the slow crawl of numbers in his suit dials.

  15

  It is important to remember that there is a wide, perhaps limitless, number of mechanisms, social and psychological, the human nervous system can adopt when dealing with the surrounding universe.

  The planet was a visible disk the size of his palm at arm’s length when it was blotted from sight. Gosseyn was alarmed at first, but his suit instruments and his extra brain continued to register the powerful gravitic and electromagnetic fields of the planet. There was some dark and solid body occluding it, not the Shadow Effect.

  The patrol ship was a dark torpedo-shaped machine some four hundred feet long, which became visible when it focused a searchlight on Gosseyn. The ship was close enough that Gosseyn could sense the atomic energy in its drive core. Gosseyn was expecting a radio message, and so he opened his suit antennas to several bands and listened. Nothing.

  He also expected the ship to undergo a period of maneuvering to match orbital elements with him, in case it wanted to narrow the distance: To his surprise, Gosseyn saw that, according to his suit instruments, the ship happened to be on the same course as his, with a slightly higher speed. To the instruments’ limits of detection, the numbers were an exact match.

  More and more stars were blotted out as the ship came closer. A circle of light appeared in the middle of the black hull: It was a large open airlock.

  The hull loomed in his vision. So far, Gosseyn had detected no maneuvering thrust—the ship was coasting to this exact point in orbit, rotating at the correct rate to bring its airlock ring through the precise point in space occupied by his body at this exact time.

  Then the airlock swooped up around him. Only now did he sense the electrical crackle of maneuvering jets firing, a short, controlled burst. The airlock valve shut out the stars. He was in a large, cylinder-shaped chamber. The far wall was moving toward him slowly, and then more slowly, and then the ship around him came to “rest” relative to his motion. Neither line nor grappling field had been used to make any last-minute fine adjustments: It was the most precise bit of space piloting Gosseyn had ever seen. He assumed it was done to impress him.

  His suit dials registered an increasing air pressure around him.

  An artificial gravity field, mild at first, pulled him toward one surface. He oriented the huge armored columns of his motorized legs toward it and landed lightly. He saw now that the airlock cylinder was not circular in cross section but octagonal: He landed on a flat surface rather than a curve. After a moment, weight increased, till it was roughly half Earth-normal.

  The bulkhead above and perpendicular to him turned transparent. There on the deck above, in an austere-looking control chamber, looking down at him, were a group of six men. All were dressed in military-style uniform, in identical postures: hands clasped behind the back, legs spread, heads nodded slightly forward. The men were so similar of face, build, and expression that they might have been brothers. All were pale of skin, and their eyes were large and dark. Gosseyn noticed how dim the lighting was kept.

  Despite their stiff postures, Gosseyn could see an eager glitter in their eyes, a foxlike avarice, which they could only partly hide. These men were keyed up.

  The one on the far left pointed through the transparent wall at a section of the airlock floor near Gosseyn. At this gesture, a small hatch slid back and a machine in the niche beyond focused its lenses on Gosseyn. Gosseyn recognized it as a language imprinter.

  Rather than remove his helmet to expose his brain for the imprinter, Gosseyn turned on his external loudspeaker: “Can we converse in the language of Accolon or Nirene?”

  The second from the left replied, “Welcome to Corthid, central planet of the Interstellar League. We represent the Unit Vathirid of Organization Vathir, and, by extension, we represent the interests of the Corthidian Unity. Right now, we are examining how to exploit you. We have already rejected the option of executing you and taking your extraordinary battle-suit as salvage as being an option of limited imagination. What have you to offer us?”

  Gosseyn, who had been expecting some terrific struggle with soldiers of the Greatest Empire, said in surprise, “The planet below us is Corthid? I was assuming it to be a base of Enro’s.”

  The six exchanged wry glances. Another man, the third from the left, now spoke: “What is the empirical basis of that assumption?”

  Gosseyn decided on a policy of openness. “I was brought into your area of space by a mutual enemy, whom I call X, an agent of Enro’s. He attempted to similarize me to a location nearby, but the circuits in this suit automatically interrupted the distorter pattern involved before the transmission was complete.”

  Again the six men exchanged rapid glances. Gosseyn wondered if they were communicating by some silent method.

  “You have piqued our curiosity,” said the fourth man. “Obviously, whatever interests us can interest other members of our larger group organization. There may be exploitation value here as news or entertainment. On what basis did you come here, a single person, to engage a military base of Enro?”

  Gosseyn said, “If you are seeking some personal advantage from this situation, put the safety of yourself and your planet first! Are there military authorities here?”

  There was a flicker of smiles among the sly-faced men gathered there. “We are all members of the militia,” said the fifth man, shrugging. “The government, in peacetime, only acts as the umpire to see that we settle our wagers as promised.”

  “Our organizations each police themselves,” said the sixth man, the one on the far right. “We would take it as a sign of your peaceful intent if you would put off your armor. Come now! The six of us have staked our lives on the wager that you will not open fire or force us to open fire. We could have hammered you with torpedoes from a distance: The cousin unit in our organization, Vathnogrod, wagered that we would come to regret not doing exactly that. Surely you want to see their wager lost! Cooperate with Unit Vathirid and we can share the profit with you. Our unit will be raised in value, and their unit will be depressed.”

  Gosseyn decided there was no use trying to hide his identity. He selected a spot of hull next to where the speaker was standing, made a mental “photograph” of it to the depth of several molecules, and similarized himself to it, leaving the armor standing empty.

  Rather than appearing startled or alarmed, the six men merely seemed amused. The sixth man said, “An interesting method: no need to open the suit.” He turned to the others and said, “Clearly his weapons can operate across space regardless of intermediary objects, barriers, or distances.”

  At that moment, a door opened near Gosseyn. Two women, as alike as twin sisters, dressed in white, stepped out. They were pale skinned and dark haired, with large, night-adapted eyes. Without a word, they stepped close to Gosseyn and began removing the medical appliances and recording boxes taped to his skull and spine. The two nurses (so Gosseyn assumed them to be) placed the instruments carefully on a table nearby.

  He noticed that the women had the proper tools, calibrated to the proper standard-Venus fittings, to remove the surgical probes without any difficulty.

  Gosseyn said, “I am trying to imagine how you run a society where everyone is lucky. Your callidetic sciences apparently enable you to launch ships on perfect trajectories to match the course and speed of tiny moving bodies at remote distances and to be prepared to meet with potentially dangerous visitors from other stars. I have heard it described as a type of observation system, but my own hunch is that it is a time-energy effect, perhaps like what a Predictor of Yalerta does, but on an unconscious level.”

  The man on the far left spoke: “Because of the cultivation of the callidetic talent among our peoples, we are quick
to recognize, in the pattern of events, opportunities for advancement and exploitation. The group-surety system acts as a check, if you will, on what otherwise would be dangerous ambitions among us.”

  “Group-surety?”

  “The whole unit is punished if one of us oversteps the social norms.”

  Gosseyn said, “The system would seem to discourage individual initiative.”

  The man on the far left smiled wryly, a very foxlike expression. “That is precisely its purpose. Individualism leaves the society incapable of coherent group action, and vulnerable to ambitious individuals using clever misinformation systems.”

  One of the women Gosseyn had thought to be a nurse stepped in front of the man talking and spoke: “The Corthid culture has risen to galactic predominance because of what outworlders call our luck, which is actually no more than a talent for recognizing significant patterns in apparently chaotic events.”

  Gosseyn noticed that the woman’s eyes glittered with energetic personality: cunning and excited. He now recognized that look: the intensity of someone addicted to risk.

  By speaking to him the woman was engaged in some dangerous gamble.

  Meanwhile, the second woman had opened the medical cases and was examining Gosseyn’s brain recordings. Gosseyn was startled at the casual invasion of his privacy. But this second woman spoke without looking up: “You can see why we must organize ourselves into a flexible yet coherent social structure: We must exploit advantages when they appear, acting as a team, quickly and without friction.”

  She looked up, exchanging glances with the men. Gosseyn suspected how the callidetic talent could allow them to exchange silent messages: She was sizing up her allies, predicting how the rest of the unit would react, relying on her “luck” to tell what the others would do if she seized the initiative. All the members of the group were using this method, keeping each other in view, trying to guess which way they would jump.