Null-A Continuum Page 29

  “Safety Authority!” said Gosseyn blankly.

  So had been named Illverton’s organization on the doomed planet of Corthid.

  Gosseyn stepped into the visitors’ lounge. There were couches and chairs, and a robot-operated phone in a booth at the wall. In the center was a low table of the automatic sort that could make coffee and snacks. On the opposite wall was a television set with both one-way and two-way channels.

  He stepped over to the television and said, “Find me information about that gas giant which is passing near Accolon.”

  “I have a public-service announcement by the Safety Authority in my film library. Shall I run it?”

  “Can you summarize it for me?”

  “Certainly. The gas giant was once the eighth world in this system. Superships of the Planetary Engineering Corps blasted the gas giant into a hyperbolic orbit, which will carry the planet, over the next eighty days, into a very close apogee to our sun. Even at this distance, the solar winds are stripping it of its light outer layers of methane and hydrogen gas. After apogee, a lump of molten material, a slurry of heavier elements, will remain. By that time, its hyperbolic orbit will carry it to a farther orbit once again, and construction can begin on a second Space-time Stability Sphere.”

  “A second Sphere?”

  “Here is the image of the first. The seventh planet of the Accolon system was used. The Safety Authority copied many of the best practices of the Corthidians, to take advantage of their methods of rapid and efficient large-scale work. The Sphere machine being built from the remains of the seventh planet has some two thousand forty-three cities on its surface, for its population of robot-workers. No human could survive the gravity for long, of course, considering the mass of the Sphere machine. Most of the supervision of robot-workers is by radio remote control. At the moment, work on the primary equatorial magnetic-accelerator is complete. The rotation of superheavy masses around the core of the machine will cause an effect called frame-dragging, which, in conjunction with the continent-sized matrix arrays, will stabilize the—”

  “Stop. Is there a system of distorters being prepared to spread the range of the stabilization effect?”

  “Yes. Orbital stations, acting as antennas and relay stations for the tremendous energies generated by the Stability Sphere, have already been constructed in great numbers, using the elements in the ring systems of the gas giants. Each orbital station has thousands of electronic brains controlling millions of distorter towers, and there is some hope that they can hinder the spread of the Shadow Effect until more Spheres are operational.”

  Gosseyn noticed, when the television showed him a view of the orbital stations, civilian and military vessels were also in orbit around Accolon. He saw the silvery, streamlined silhouettes of The Star of the Morning and The Queen of Love, two spaceships from Venus, recognizable because their engine nacelles were carried on long shafts far from their main hulls.

  The Null-A engineers familiar with the information Gosseyn had brought back from Corthid had of course selected Accolon as the primary industrial power to cooperate with.

  Gosseyn similarized himself to the second of his three memorized locations on this world: the Terrestrial ambassador’s office. The secretary was startled to see him materialize. She rose from her seat with a shriek of alarm. The other visitors in the anteroom, persons waiting to see the ambassador, were likewise startled.

  The marine guard, however, was the same man Gosseyn had noticed previously, at least partially trained in Null-A. When the ambassador’s voice came bellowing over the phone, it was the guard who said promptly, “It’s Gilbert Gosseyn, sir. Or one of him.”

  The telephone swiveled its lens to cover Gosseyn’s still-masked face. “It doesn’t look like his photographs.”

  “I didn’t say it looked like him, sir. But look at the size of his skull, and look at where he appeared.”

  “Send him in immediately,” came the reply.

  As Gosseyn stepped past the secretary, she nodded at something behind him, whispering, “Better make it quick.” Gosseyn did not turn his head, but with his double brain he could detect how two of the visitors, their nervous systems in a state of uneasy excitement, were departing hastily through the main doors. While the secret police of Accolon might respect the sovereignty of the Earth embassy, certainly their presence would prove a complication.

  Gosseyn noticed the silence as the door slid shut behind him. He was in the dim interior of the ambassador’s office: a chamber of plush carpet and dark walls, tastefully furnished. He probed the door behind him with his double brain: It was as thick as a bank vault door, and reinforced with energy fields.

  He detected other energy sources in the room: a weapons array in the ceiling worthy of a battleship, and a series of projectors, on standby, ready to erect powerful screens around the ambassador and his desk.

  The man stood as Gosseyn entered. He was a handsome fellow in a rugged way, with some gray frosting otherwise black hair. “Mr. Gosseyn,” he said, gesturing to a chair before his desk. “Please be seated. My name is Craft. I am here to replace—”

  If the man was startled when Gosseyn launched himself in a low tackle across the desk, it did not slow his reactions. Craft landed two powerful uppercuts with both fists on Gosseyn’s face before Gosseyn’s muscular arms closed about his waist. His momentum carried both men backward into the ambassador’s wingback chair, and they toppled, chair and all, rolling up against the wall panels behind the desk.

  What was unexpected was that Ambassador Craft fought with the all-out strength and blinding reflexes of a trained Null-A. Even in their grapple, Craft managed to deal Gosseyn two more severe blows to the abdomen and throat before Gosseyn half-electrocuted him with a near brush from beams of positive and negative energy. Gosseyn focused the main force of the beams on wall panels behind them, blasting the wall into twisted metal shards.

  The secret door thus exposed led to a small room and an escape tunnel. Gosseyn dragged the ambassador’s body into the small room and out of range of the weapons in his office, which had swung down from ceiling panels when the fight started.

  The atomic lights in the little hidden room came on automatically when Gosseyn stumbled in. One wall was communication equipment, both radio and distorter type. Against another was a complex of electron tubes, wired into an electronic brain and lie-detector setup. Against the third wall was a padded chair with a neural helmet for sleep training.

  Gosseyn said, “You are a Loyalty Machine?”

  The machine said in a calm, dispassionate tone, “I am unable to calculate how to destroy you without harming the ambassador, who is a valuable asset to the Safety Authority. However, the moment I deduce the danger you pose to exceed the value he possesses I will release the magnetic seals of my fusion core and flood the area with deadly radiation.”

  Gosseyn said, “Why not call the marine guard outside?”

  The machine said wryly, “Obviously, there are certain limitations to my behavior.”

  Which meant that the other personnel in this building had not been exposed to the warped Null-A training that had been imprinted on the thinking of Ambassador Craft. Gosseyn winced ruefully at his bruises as he heaved the ambassador into the chair. The warped version of Null-A was still effective at giving the practitioner a high degree of nerve-muscle coordination and integration.

  Gosseyn now turned his attention to the machine, which had already activated its lie-detector circuits and was trying to induce a set of rhythms in Gosseyn’s brain to induce a somnolent and compliant state of mind. Gosseyn deflected the nerve-energies being directed at him and countered by stimulating the self-examination cycle of the brain’s thought-hierarchy. There were thousands of circuits involved in the machine and he could not possibly trace them all, but he could compare a gestalt picture of the activity before and after its cycle ran. He could find and paralyze the circuits involved with overriding its normal self-correcting behavior once he saw them triggered.
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  The machine attempted a more severe and crude attack, this time using the distorter communication array in the room to similarize a powerful electric surge into his nervous system. Gosseyn redirected the electron flows so that, somewhere on the rooftop where he’d first landed, a lightning bolt leaped unexpectedly to the sky.

  But that was the last attempt: Gosseyn saw which circuits were the crucial ones and built up a similarity between their “open” and “shut” contacts, so that the electronic brain could not disengage them. The machine was paralyzed.

  Gosseyn disconnected one of the lie detectors from the array and used it to probe the ambassador’s unconscious mind. Gosseyn could tell this much: There was no trace that the brain patterns of X had ever been present in this man. There was some evidence of cortical-thalamic nerve channels built up in his midbrain but also an extensive structure of nerve-trigger relationships to areas in his lower brain: Perhaps he had been just beginning real Null-A training on Earth before somehow falling prey to this neurosis-inducing machine.

  The ambassador came slowly to consciousness, groaning.

  Gosseyn said harshly, “What were the cues? What threat or what promise did they use to get you to betray Earth?”

  Craft stared at him without fear, his eyes narrowed in calculation. “Tell me how you knew and I’ll answer.”

  The lie detector confirmed he was being straightforward.

  Gosseyn said, “The local Earth ambassador is the first person Enro would think of to act as a check to stop Venusian curiosity, which was sure to be aroused once they saw the technology from the Shadow Galaxy involved here. I was not sure until I came into the room and sensed the warped Null-A-style lie detectors built into the chair, the mind-control robots from Petrino hidden behind the walls. Why betray the Earth?”

  Craft said softly, “I was saving Earth! The shadow would swallow the solar system if I told what I discovered. My wife, my children, everything the human race has ever done or dreamed….”

  Gosseyn said to the lie detector in his hands, “I am assuming that the neural associations imprinted in him are tied to the most basic instincts in the human mind: survival, sexual drive, paternal instinct.”

  “That’s right,” said the lie detector. “And more. There is also a strong link to the death instinct, and links to altruism, group-loyalty, and the charismatic overlord-underling reaction. The training here is complex and complete, and, like many false-to-facts world-views, is self-correcting and self-sustaining. His mind will edit out facts contrary to his current world-view. He can be aware of them, but deep down he will dismiss them as unimportant.”

  “How could those links be related to this?”

  The lie detector said, “At a subconscious level, this subject has an almost religious awe toward the vivid mental image of his home world being destroyed by the Shadow Effect, so that he does not regard it simply as a threat but as all-powerful. Each human being has a death instinct that makes him passive in the face of overwhelming threats, a holdover from days when predators could be deceived by motionlessness and lack of fear-smell. And so, irrationally, he wishes to bargain with the shadow. The charisma reaction comes from the fact that he is convinced the Shadow Effect spoke to him in person.”

  Ambassador Craft said, “I met Enro. You cannot defeat him, Gosseyn. You don’t even know who you are.”

  “Who am I?”

  Craft compressed his lips to a thin line and shook his head.

  Gosseyn said to the lie detector, “What is his state of mind?”

  “The subject regards it as so futile to oppose Enro that he takes your defeat for granted; hence he will not bother to stop you.”

  Craft uttered a bark of bitter laughter. “That’s true enough! You fool, Enro has surpassed all human limitations: He is a god! The Security Council could not stop him, and the No-men of Accolon, whose intuitions might have noticed the pattern of his behavior and warned the populace, have been arrested on charges of espionage, and sent to the orbital prison colony at L-5.”

  Gosseyn put down the lie detector and stepped over to the commutations wall. He noticed immediately that the narrow-beam equipment was tuned with arc seconds, eccentricity, inclination, longitude of the ascending node, longitude of perihelion: the elements describing the position of a body in orbit. Gosseyn assumed these were the orbital stations focusing the power from the Sphere of Accolon.

  Gosseyn asked, “Why did Enro give you access to this equipment?”

  Craft said, “He knew I was loyal. The machine is sitting right there that can measure my devotion.”

  Gosseyn said to the Loyalty Machine, “Will you keep him asleep, brain functions somnolent, for about twelve hours?”

  The machine answered “no” several times. Each time, Gosseyn traced the circuit causing the negative response and nullified it. Eventually he got a configuration inside the electronic brain that would answer “yes.”

  Once Craft was snoring, Gosseyn asked the no-longer-loyal Loyalty Machine, “Do you have any information on who he thinks I am?”

  “Enro led Mr. Craft to believe that you were a rogue copy of Lavoisseur, created and sent out merely to infiltrate the counsels of the opposition on Earth and Venus, whose brain information would be returned to the main chain of memories known as X once your spare bodies were used up. You were created to be unaware of your true mission in order to deceive the lie detectors. No matter what you do, or how you delay it, you will eventually die, and your brain information will automatically be transmitted to one of the nervous systems X has established to receive it.”

  That did not seem possible, given the reluctance of X to receive Gosseyn’s memories. Unless that previous reluctance had been conditional, not absolute: X had not wanted to receive Gosseyn’s personality into his own main personality until the mission was done?

  Aloud Gosseyn said, “Is Craft correct?”

  The machine said, “I can only report on the subjective state of the belief of Mr. Craft. He believes Enro told this to him, and believes Enro did not mislead him on any substantial issue. The conversation was not within my hearing.”

  “How does he contact Enro?”

  “Through me, or so I assume.”

  “You assume?”

  “There are gaps in my thought-records. I conclude I am programmed to forget certain information, or not to be able to remember buried memories unless certain circumstances trigger them.”

  Without any further word, Gosseyn activated one of the distorter communicators set to correspond with the orbital stations around Accolon. Then he picked up a spare electron tube from the cabinet, identified the static charge with his extra brain, and sent electrons flowing back and forth across it to produce a weak radio wave: He memorized the electronic signal with his extra brain. When the signal was sent through the distorter connection, he maintained twenty-decimal-point contact with it. He was holding a “memorized” pattern of electrons at a point in nearby space. He repeated the process, building up the electrical charge until it was powerful enough to be greater than the mass-energy value of his body. Then he triggered a similarity between the two.

  The results were mildly terrific: He materialized in the middle of a smoking crater, as if from a bomb-burst, the electronic circuits and instrumentation for yards in every direction of him were charred, cracked, and melted. There was a high-pitched whistling, like the hiss of a steam kettle, which told him that the air pressure integrity on the space station had been breached.

  He assumed his shadow-form and floated up through yard after yard of wreckage and then through more yards of solid electronic circuits and distorter matrices until he found a wide interior space. Here he solidified and probed surrounding space with his extra brain. He found no living nervous system within his range: only the soft, steady regular rhythms of complex electromechanical systems, the unwavering primordial blaze of nuclear forces, the strange space-tension of artificial gravity. Then, relaxing, he allowed images of the future to flit through hi
s consciousness.

  The clear, tiny mental images ended in a blur roughly ten minutes from now, when he activated the major distorter array. The images showed robotic tools rushing to the damaged area, carrying replacement parts and carting away wreckage. But no people lay in his immediate future.

  The satellite was deserted.

  30

  The test of the accuracy of approximations about reality is simply the lack of surprise in the nervous system trained to assume them.

  Gosseyn watched the machines, some small, some large, and some gigantic, pulling out twisted metal fragments and burnt components from the area he had damaged. Here was a busy line, like an ant-trail through a forest, of robot-trucks floating on antigravity plates. He followed them back to the factory floor. The factory occupied several acres of two decks, entirely automatic. The units Gosseyn followed were hauling the damaged equipment and scrap metal to sorting stations: Components were separated and fed into various factory intake bins.

  The factory was based on the same highly efficient design he had seen back on Corthid. It took him only a short time to find the electronic brain assembly line and dominate the simple control system and feed in new instructions. The robot-workers followed instructions from the factory without question. By the time Gosseyn returned to the section of machinery he had damaged, the electronic brains he had ordered built, as well as nerveinterface electron tubes and amplification matrices, were completed.

  He focused the instruments at a spot six inches off the floor. He had no sensory-deprivation tank, or even a comfortable chair to sit on, so he pushed a packing crate to the proper spot on the floor, climbed in, and lay down on the soft packing material. Gosseyn closed his eyes and began his nerve-muscle relaxation technique.

  He felt the orbital station around him, as if it were an extension of his nervous system: He was aware of the ebb and flow of a million pulsing messages of the robotic brains communicating with each other, sending out and balancing distorter-type flows. Carefully, like a spider stepping from thread to thread of a web without touching any of the alarm-strands, Gosseyn found and dominated, using an imposed set of rhythms, those robotic thought-flows concerned with reporting breaches in security to human operators. That done, he reached with his brain toward the distorter towers. These towers, hundreds on each station, were connected with distant points in space, connections that Gosseyn perceived like shining threads of energy.