Alfred van Vogt - The World of Null-A

Gosseyn paid the money, accepted his receipt, and went out He was disappointed, but not too much so. Good doctors were bound to be busy men in a world that was still far from having attained null-A perfection.

On the street again, he watched one of the longest, most powerful cars he had ever seen slide past him and draw up at the curb a hundred feet away. The car gleamed in the afternoon sun. A liveried attendant leaped smartly from beside the driver and opened the door.

Teresa Clark stepped out. She wore an afternoon dress of some dark, rich material. The ensemble did not make her appear less slim, but the dark coloring of the dress made her face seem a little fuller and, by contrast, not so heavily tanned. Teresa Clark! The name was meaningless in the face of this magnificence.

“Who,” Gosseyn asked a man who had stopped beside him, “is that?”

The stranger glanced at him in surprise and then he spoke the name Gosseyn had already guessed. “Why, that's Patricia Hardie, daughter of President Hardie. Quite a neurotic, I understand. Look at that car, for instance. Like an oversize jewel, a sure sign of–”

Gosseyn was turning away, turning his face from the car and its recent occupant. No sense in being recognized until he had thought this through. It seemed ridiculous that she would actually come again that very night to a dark lot to be alone with a strange man.

But she was there.

Gosseyn stood in the shadows staring thoughtfully at the shadow figure of the girl. He had come to the rendezvous very skillfully. Her back was to him and she seemed to be unaware of his presence. It was possible, in spite of his careful reconnoitering of the entire block, that he was already in a trap. But it was a risk he felt no hesitation in taking. Here, in this girl, was the only clue he had to the mystery of himself. He watched her curiously as well as he could in the developing darkness.

She was sitting, in the beginning, with her left foot tucked under her right leg. In the course of ten minutes, she changed her position five times. Twice during the shifts, she half stood up. In between, she spent some time apparently tracing figures on the grass with her finger. She pulled out her cigarette case and put it away again without taking a cigarette. She jerked her head half a dozen times, as if in defiance of some thought. She shrugged her shoulders twice, folded her arms and shivered as if with a chill, sighed audibly three times, clicked her tongue impatiently, and for about one whole minute she sat intensely still.

She hadn't been so nervous the night before. She hadn't, except for the little period when she was acting fearful of the men who were supposed to have been chasing her, seemed nervous at all. It was the waiting, Gosseyn decided. She was geared to meeting people, and to handling them. Alone, she had no resources of patience.

What was it the man had said that afternoon? Neurotic. There was no doubt of it. As a child she must have been denied that early null-A training so necessary to the development of certain intelligences. Just how such training could have been neglected in the home of a superbly integrated man such as President Hardie was a puzzle. Whatever the reason, she was one human being whose thalamus was always in full control of her actions. He could imagine her having a nervous breakdown.

He continued to watch her there in that almost darkness. After ten minutes, she stood up and stretched, then she sat down again. She took off her shoes, and, rolling over toward Gosseyn, lay down on the grass. She saw Gosseyn.

“It's all right,” Gosseyn assured her softly. “It's only me. I guess you heard me coming.”

He guessed nothing of the kind, but she had jerked to a sitting position, and it seemed the best way to soothe her.

“You gave me a start,” she said. But her voice was calm and unstartled, properly subdued. She had suave thalamic reactions, this girl.

He sank down on the grass near her and let the feel of the night creep upon him. The second policeless night! It seemed hard to believe. He could hear the noises of the city, faint, unexciting, quite unsuggestive. Where were the gangs and the thieves? They seemed unreal, examined from the safety of this dark hiding place. Perhaps the years and the great educational system had winnowed their numbers, leaving only the fearful legend and a few wretches who slunk through the night seeking the helpless. No, that couldn't be right. Men were becoming more brave, not less, as their minds grew progressively integrated with the structure of the universe around them. Somewhere violence was being planned or performed. Somewhere? Perhaps here.

Gosseyn looked at the girl. Then very softly he began to talk. He described his plight–the way he had been kicked out of the hotel, the amnesia that hid his memory, the curious delusion that he had been married to Patricia Hardie. “And then,” he finished ruefully, “she turned out to be the daughter of the president and very much alive.”

Patricia Hardie said, “These psychologists, such as the one you're going to-is it true that they're all people who have won the trip to Venus in the games, and have come back to Earth to practice their profession? And that actually no one else can go in for psychiatry and the related sciences?”

Gosseyn hadn't thought of that. “Why, yes,” he said. “Others can train for it of course, but–”

He was conscious of a sudden eagerness, a desire for the moment of the interview with Doctor Enright to arrive. How much he might learn from such a man! Caution came then, wonder as to why she had asked that question instead of commenting on his story as a whole. In the dark he stared at her searchingly. But her face, her expression, was nightwrapped. Her voice came again.

“You mean, you haven't the faintest idea who you are? How did you get to the hotel in the first place?”

Gosseyn said soberly, “I have a memory of taking a bus from Cress Village to the airport at Nolendia. And I distinctly remember being on the plane.”

“Did you have any meals aboard?”

Gosseyn took his time remembering. It was an intensional world into which he strove to penetrate and as nonexistent as all such worlds. Memory never was the thing remembered, but at least with most people, when there was a memory, there normally had been a fact of similar structure. His mind held nothing that could be related to physical structure. He hadn't eaten, definitely and unequivocally.

The girl was speaking. “You really haven't the faintest idea what this is all about? You have no purpose, no plan for dealing with it? You're just moving along in a great dark?”

Gosseyn said, “That's right.” And waited.

The silence was long. Too long. And the answer, when it came, did not come from the girl. Somebody jumped on him and held him down. Other figures swarmed out of the brush and grabbed at him. He was on his feet, shoving at the first man. A tight horror made him fight even after a tangle of strong hands held him beyond his capacity to escape.

A man said, “O.K. Put 'em in the cars and let's get out of here.”

As he was bundled into the back seat of a roomy sedan, Gosseyn thought, Had these people come in response to a signal from the girl? Or were they a gang?

A violent forward jerk of the car ended temporarily his tense speculation.

As the cars raced north along deserted streets, Gosseyn saw that there were two ahead of him and three behind. He could see their black, moving shapes through the windshield and in the rear-view mirror. Patricia Hardie was in one of them, but in spite of straining his eyes he could not make her out. Not that it mattered. He had looked over his captors and the suspicion that this was not a street gang was sharper now.