Alfred van Vogt - The World of Null-A

Hurt! In an agony of anxiety Gosseyn pictured the man dying before he could get any information from him. He snatched for a source of power-and in ten minutes wrecked the building and the square. Corridors were seared with the murderous fire he poured along them. Walls caved in on shouting men. Tanks smoldered and burned like fury. “No one”–almost like fire itself was the thought–“no one of this special guard can be allowed to get away.”

Not one did. A regiment of men and machines had swarmed into the square. Torn, blackened bodies and smashed metal was all that remained. Gosseyn looked up from one of the doorways. The planes hovered at a thousand feet. Without orders from Thorson they would hesitate to bomb. Perhaps already Crang had taken them over.

He couldn't wait to make sure. Back into the building he raced, along a smoldering corridor. As he entered the laboratory, Gosseyn stopped short. The corpses of Thorson's guards sprawled in every direction. Slumped in an easy chair beside a desk was an old, bearded man. He looked up at Gosseyn with glazed eyes, mustered a smile and said, “Well, we did it!”

His voice was deep and strong and familiar. Gosseyn stared at him, remembering where he had heard that bass voice before. The shock of recognition held his own reaction down to a single word.

“ 'X!' ” he said loudly.

The old man coughed. It was not a pleasant sound, for he twisted in agony. The movement brushed aside a fold of scorched cloth and showed the blistered flesh underneath. There was a gap in his right side, high up, as big as a fist. Thick threads of blood dangled from it.

“It's all right,” he mumbled. “I can pretty well hold off the pain except when I'm coughing. Self-hypnosis, you know.”

He straightened stiffly. “ 'X,' ” he said then. “Well, yes, I suppose I am, if you want to put it that way. I put 'X' out to be my personal spy in the highest circles. But of course he didn't know it. That's the beauty of the system of immortality which I perfected. All the thoughts of the active body are telepathically received by other passive bodies of the same, uh, culture. Naturally, I had to disappear from the scene when he came on stage. Couldn't have two Lavoisseurs around, you know.” He leaned back wearily, then with a sigh: “In 'X's case I wanted someone whose thoughts would come back to me while I was conscious, so I damaged him and speeded up his life processes. That was cruel, but it made him the 'greater' and me the 'lesser'-that way I received his thoughts. Except for that he was independent. He actually was the rogue he thought he was.”

His head drooped, his eyes closed, and Gosseyn thought he had lapsed into a coma. He felt despair, for there was nothing he could do here. The player was dying, and still Gilbert Gosseyn knew nothing about himself. He thought in anguish, “I've got to force information out of him.” He bent down and shook the man.

“Wake up!” he shouted.

The body stirred. The tired eyes opened, and looked at him thoughtfully. “I was trying,” said the bass voice, “to operate an energy cup to kill this body. Couldn't do it. . . . You understand, it was always my intention to die the moment Thorson was dead. . . . Expected to be killed instantly when I opened my defenses. . . . Soldiers did a poor job.” He shook his head. “Logical, of course. The body's the first thing that weakens, next the cortex, and then–” His eyes brightened. “Will you bring me a weapon from one of those soldiers? I'm finding it hard to fight off the pain.”

Gosseyn secured a blaster, but his brain was working furiously. “Am I going to force a desperately wounded man to stay alive and suffer while I ask questions?” The conflict upset him physically, but in the end, grimly, he knew that he was. He shook his head when Lavoisseur held out his hand. The old man looked at him sharply.

“Want information, eh?” he mumbled. He laughed, a curious, amused laugh. “All right, what do you want?”

“My bodies. How–”

He was cut off. “The secret of immortality,” said the old man, “involves the isolation in an individual of the duplicate potentials he inherited from his parents. Like twins, or brothers who look alike. Theoretically, similarity could be achieved in a normal birth. But actually, only under laboratory conditions, with the bodies kept unconscious by automatic hypno drugs in an electronic incubator, can a proper environment be maintained. There, without any thoughts of their own, massaged by machines, fed a liquid diet, their bodies change slightly from the original, but their minds change only according to the thoughts they receive from their alter ego, who is out in the world. In practice, a Distorter is necessary to the process, and a lie-detector type of instrument is set to cut off certain unnecessary thoughts-in your case nearly all thoughts were blotted out, so– that you wouldn't know too much. But because of this thought similarity, while death actually strikes body after body, the same personality goes on.”

The leonine head sagged. “That's it. That's practically all. Crang has given you most of the reasons, directly or indirectly. We had to divert that attack.”

Gosseyn said, “The extra brain?”

The old man sighed but did not lift his head. “It exists in embryo in every normal human brain. But it can't develop under the tensions of conscious life. Just as the cortex of George the animal boy wouldn't develop under the abnormal conditions of living with a dog, so the mere strain of active existence is too much for the extra brain in the early stages. . . . It becomes very strong, of course. . . .”

He was silent, and Gosseyn gave him a moment of rest while his mind flashed over what he had been told. Duplicate potentials. It would have to be a culture of such male spermatozoa; the science involved was hundreds of years old. The development of life in incubators was even older. The rest was detail. The important thing was to find out where the bodies were kept.

He asked the question in a tensed tone, and when there was no answer, caught the old man's shoulder. At his touch the body fell limply forward. Startled, he lowered it gently to the floor. With a jerky movement, Gosseyn knelt and listened over the still heart. Slowly he climbed to his feet. And he was thinking, and his lips were forming the unspoken words: “But you didn't tell me enough. I'm in the dark about all the main points.”

The thought quieted reluctantly. He realized that this was life itself he was experiencing. Life in which nothing was ever finally explained. He was free, and this was victory.

He knelt down and began to search the old man's pockets. They were empty. He was about to stand up again when:

“My God, man, give me that gun!”

Gosseyn froze, and then with a gasp realized that he had heard no sound and that he had received the thought of a dead man. Indecisively at first, then with greater determination, he began to shake the body gently. The cells of the human brain were extremely mortal, but they didn't die immediately after the heart stopped beating. If one thought had come, then others should be available. The minutes fled. It was the intricate process of dying, Gosseyn thought, that was causing the delay. It had already partially destroyed some of the similarity that Lavoisseur had established between them.

“Might as well stay alive for a while, Gosseyn. The next group of bodies are around eighteen years old. Wait till they're thirty-that's it, thirty. . . .”