Alfred van Vogt - The Players of Null-A

'It was virtually impossible to know what to do. There were spies everywhere, and the overwhelming majority of the crews were for Enro. When he was war minister he had his opportunity to place his traitors in key positions everywhere.'

Captain Free shrugged. 'Very few of us dared show resistance. Men were being executed right and left; the dividing line seeming to be whether or not you made open comment. As a result of a lie detector test, I was listed as a doubtful person, and warned. But I was allowed to live because I had not resisted in any way.'

He finished, 'The rest was simple enough. I rather lost interest in my career. I was easily wearied. And when I realized what this trip to Yalerta meant, I'm afraid I let discipline go by the board. It seemed to me that the Predictors would insure an Enro victory. When you came along, I was shocked for a few minutes. I saw myself court-martialed and executed. And then I realized you might be able to protect me. That was all I needed. From that moment I was your man. Does that answer your question?'

It did indeed. Gosseyn held out his hand. 'It's an old custom of my planet,' he said, 'in its highest form a method of sealing friendships.'

They shook hands. Briskly, Gosseyn turned to Leej.

'What's on the time horizon?' he asked.

'Nothing.'

'No blurs?'

'None. The papers of the ship show that we are on a special mission. That mission is vaguely stated, and gives Captain Free considerable authority.'

‘That means we get out of the base without the slightest thing going wrong?'

She nodded, but her face was serious. 'Of course,' she said earnestly, 'I'm looking at a picture of the future that you could alter by some deliberate interference. For instance, you could try to make a blur just to prove me wrong. I really have no idea what would happen then. But my picture says there is no blur.'

Gosseyn was interested in experiments, but not at the moment. Still, there were other aspects of the situation.

The whole problem of prevision seemed to become more puzzling the further he looked into it. If Enro, the Predictors and Gilbert Gosseyn himself were all products of the same kind of training, then why couldn't he who had been in an 'incubator' thirty times as long as a Predictor, and more than a hundred times longer than Enro—why couldn't he see across distance as Enro did, and into the future like the Predictors?

Training, he thought. His. For they had received none. But he had been given flawed training, for a purpose which later had to be changed.

As soon as he had warned the Venusians, he'd have to consult Dr. Kair and the other scientists. And this time they'd work on the problem with a new understanding of its possibilities.

It was just a few minutes less than an hour after their arrival that they flashed out of the base. Ten jumps and ten thousand light-years brought them near Gela.

Next stop, Venus.

At Gosseyn's suggestion, Leej set the 'break' needles. Rather, she spent several seconds setting them. Then abruptly she leaned back, shook her head, and said, ‘There's something wrong.'

'It's beyond my range, but I have a feeling that we won't get as close to the planet as we did when we went into that base. I have a sense of interference.'

Gosseyn did not hesitate. 'We'll phone them,' he said.

But the videophone and plate were silent, lifeless.

That gave him pause, but not for long. There was really nothing to do but take the ship through to Venus.

As before, the similarity jump seemed instantaneous. Captain Free glanced at the distance calculators, and said to Leej:

'Good work. Only eight light-years from the Venusian base. Can't do much better than that.'

There was a clatter of sound, a bellowing voice: ‘This is the roboperator in charge of communications—an emergency!'

For the sake of sanity, be aware of SELF-REFLEXIVENESS. A statement can be about reality or it can be about a statement about a statement about reality.

Gosseyn took five quick steps toward the control board, and stood behind Captain Free, tense and alert. He shifted his gaze steadily from one to the other of the rear, side and front video plates. The roboperator spoke again in its 'emergency' voice.

'Voices in space,' it roared. 'Robots sending messages to each other.'

'Give us the messages,' Captain Free commanded loudly. He glanced around and up at Gosseyn. 'Do you think Enro's fleet is here already?'

Gosseyn wanted more evidence. I was released, he thought, from Ashargin's brain within a few minutes after Enro gave the order. It probably took about forty hours for me to get back to the destroyer, two hours more to get the ship moving, less than an hour at the base, and then just under eighty hours to get here to Venus—about a hundred and twenty-two hours, only three of which could be considered wasted.

Five days! The assigned fleet, of course, could have been detached from a base much nearer to Venus, in fact, probably had been. That was one trouble with his expectations. Similarity videophone communications involved the movement of electrons in a comparatively simple pattern. Electrons were naturally identical to eighteen decimal places, and so the 'margin of error' in transmission was only fourteen seconds for every four thousand light-years—as compared to ten hours for material objects for the same distance

Enro's fleet could be here ahead of them on the basis of time saved by the use of telephone orders. But attacks on planetary bases involved more than that. It would take time to load the equipment for the type of atomic destruction that was to be rained down on Earth and Venus.

And there was another point, even more important. Enro had plans of his own. Even now, he could be delaying his orders to destroy the people of the solar system in the hope that the threat of such an attack would force his sister to marry him.

The roboperator was bellowing again. ‘I am now,’ it shouted, ‘transmitting the robot message.’ Its tone grew quieter, more even. ‘A ship at CR-04-687-12…bzzz…similarize aboard…bzzz…zero 54 seconds…Capture ——— ’

Gosseyn spoke in a hushed voice:

'Why, we're being attacked by robot defenses.'

The relief that came had in it excitement and pride as well as caution. Scarcely more than two and a half months had passed since the death of Thorson. Yet here already were defenses against interstellar attacks.

The Null-A's must have sized up the situation, recognized that they were at the mercy of a neurotic dictator, and concentrated the productive resources of the system on defense. It could be titanic.

Gosseyn saw that Captain Free's fingers were quivering on the lever that would take them back to the star Gela, the base a thousand light-years behind them.

'Wait!' he said.

The commander was tense. 'You're not going to stay here?’

'I want to see this,' said Gosseyn, 'for just one moment.'

For the first time, Gosseyn glanced at Leej. 'What do you think?'

He saw that her face was tense. She said, ‘I can picture the attack, but I can’t see its nature. There’s a blur a moment after it starts. I think ——— '

She was interrupted. Every radar machine in the control room stammered into sound and light. There were so many pictures on the viewplates that Gosseyn could not even glance at them all.

Because, simultaneously, something tried to seize his mind.

His extra brain registered a massively complex energy network, and recorded that it was trying to short circuit the impulses that flowed to and from the motor centers of his brain. Trying? Succeeding.

He had a swift comprehension of the nature and limitations of this phase of the attack. Abruptly, he made the cortical-thalamic pause.