Alfred van Vogt: The World of Null-A

A familiar face detached itself from the human countenances that had been flashing past him. Teresa Clark, carrying two brown paper bags, hailed him.

“I've brought some breakfast,” she said. “I thought you'd prefer to picnic out among the ants, rather than try to get into a packed restaurant.”

They ate in silence. Gosseyn noted that the food she had brought had been daintily put up in boxes and plasto containers for outside service. There was reinforced orange juice, cereal, with cream in a separate plasto, hot kidneys on toast, and coffee, also with its separate cream.

Five dollars, he estimated. Which was pure luxury for a couple who had to live for thirty days on a very small amount of money. And, besides, a girl who possessed five dollars would surely have paid it to her landlady for another night's lodging. Furthermore, she must have had a good job to think in terms of such a breakfast. That brought a new thought. Gosseyn frowned over it a moment, then said, “This boss of yours who made the passes at you-what's his name?”

“Huh?” said Teresa Clark. She had finished her kidneys and was searching for her purse. Now she looked up, startled. Then her face cleared. “Oh, him!” she said.

There was a pause.

“Yes,” Gosseyn urged. “What's his name?”

She was completely recovered. “I'd prefer to forget about him,” said Teresa Clark. “It's not pleasant.” She changed the subject. “Will I have to know much for the first day?”

Gosseyn hesitated, half inclined to pursue further the subject of her boss. He decided not to. He said, “No. Fortunately, the first day has never been more than a perfunctory affair. It consists primarily of registrations and of being assigned to the cubbyhole where you take your early tests. I've studied the published records of the games of the last twenty years, which is the furthest back the Machine'll ever release, and I've noticed that there is never any change in the first day. You are required to define what null-A, null-N, and null-E stand for.

“Whether you realize it or not, you cannot have lived on Earth without picking up some of the essence of null-A. It's been a growing part of our common mental environment for several hundred years.” He finished, “People, of course, have a tendency to forget definitions, but if you're really in earnest about this–”

“You bet I am,” said the girl.

She drew a cigarette case out of her purse. “Have a cigarette.”

The cigarette case glittered in the sun. Diamonds, emeralds, and rubies sparkled on its intricately wrought gold surface. A cigarette, already lighted in some automatic fashion inside the case, protruded from its projector. The gems could have been plastic, the gold imitation. But it looked handmade, and its apparent genuineness was staggering. Gosseyn put its value at twenty-five thousand dollars.

He found his voice. “No, thanks,” he said. “I don't smoke.”

“It's a special brand,” said the young woman insistently. “Deliciously mild.”

Gosseyn shook his head. And this time she accepted the refusal. She removed the cigarette from the case, put it to her lips, and inhaled with a deep satisfaction, then plunged the case back into her purse. She seemed unconscious of the sensation it had caused. She said, “Let's get busy with my studies. Then we can separate and meet here again tonight. Is that all right?”

She was a very dominating young woman, and Gosseyn wasn't sure that he could even learn to like her. His suspicion that she had come into his life with a purpose was stronger. She Was possibly a connecting link between himself and whoever had tampered with his brain. He couldn't let her get away.

“All right,” he said. “But there isn't any time to waste.”

Gosseyn helped the girl off the surface car. They walked rapidly around a screening nest of trees, through massive gates, and came in sight of the Machine. The girl walked unconcernedly on. But Gosseyn stopped.

The Machine was at the far end of a broad avenue. Mountaintops had been leveled so that it could have space and gardens around it. It was a full half mile from the tree-sheltered gates. It reared up and up in a shining metal splendor. It was a cone pointing into the lower heavens and crowned by a star of atomic light, brighter than the noonday sun above.

The sight of it so near shocked Gosseyn. He hadn't thought of it before, but he realized suddenly that the Machine would never accept his false identity. He felt a constriction, and stood there shaken and depressed. He saw that Teresa Clark had paused and was looking back at him.

“This is your first time to see it close?” she said sympathetically. “It does get you, doesn't it?”

There was a hint of superiority in her manner that brought a wan smile to Gosseyn's lips. These city slickers! he thought wryly. He felt better and, taking her arm, started forward again. His confidence grew slowly. Surely the Machine would not judge him on such a high abstraction as nominal identity, when even the lie detector in the hotel had recognized that he was not purposely misrepresenting himself.

The crowds became unwieldy as they approached the base of the Machine, and the bigness of the Machine itself was more apparent. Its roundness and its size gave a sleek, streamlined appearance that was not canceled by the tiers of individual game rooms which ornamented and broke up its gigantic base. Right around the base the rooms extended. The entire first floor consisted of game rooms and corridors leading to them. Broad outside staircases led to the second, third, and fourth floors and down into three basements, a total of seven floors entirely devoted to game rooms for individual competitors.

“Now that I'm here,” said Teresa Clark, “I'm no longer so sure of myself. These people look darned intelligent.”

Gosseyn laughed at the expression on her face, but he said nothing. He felt supremely positive that he could compete right through to the thirtieth day. His problem was not would he win, but would he be allowed to try.

Aloof and impregnable, the Machine towered above the human beings it was about to sort according to their semantic training. No one now living knew exactly in what part of its structure its electron-magnetic brain was located. Like many men before him, Gosseyn speculated about that. “Where would I have put it?” he wondered, “if I had been one of the scientist-architects?” It didn't matter, of course. The Machine was already older than any known living human being. Self-renewing, conscious of its life and of its purpose, it remained greater than any individual, immune to bribery and corruption and theoretically capable of preventing its own destruction.

“Juggernaut!” emotional men had screamed when it was being built. “No,” said the builders, “not a destroyer, but an immobile, mechanical brain with creative functions and a capacity to add to itself in certain sane directions.” In three hundred years, people had come to accept its decisions as to who should rule them.

Gosseyn grew aware of a conversation between a man and a woman who were walking near by.

“It's the policeless part,” the woman was saying. “It frightens me.”

The man said, “Don't you see, that shows what Venus must be like, where no police are necessary. If we prove worthy of Venus, we go to a planet where everyone is sane. The policeless period gives us a chance to measure progress down here. At one time it was a nightmare, but I've noticed a change even in my lifetime. It's necessary, all right.”

“I guess here's where we separate,” said Teresa Clark. “The C's are down on the second basement, the G's just above them. Meet me tonight at the vacant lot. Any objections?”