Alfred van Vogt - The Players of Null-A

The final paragraph on Ashargin said:

‘The forced marriage of the Prince and Princess Ashargin seems to have developed into a relationship of fact as well as name. The change in this man calls for an urgent inquiry, although Enro is coming around to the idea that a cooperative Ashargin will be valuable even after the war. The Predictors find his conduct exemplary during the next three weeks.'

There was no indication as to when the three weeks had begun, no mention of the trip to Venus on which Gosseyn-Ashargin had started, nor any definite statement that he was back at the palace.

Gosseyn put the file back in its drawer, and continued his examination of the room. He found a narrow door skillfully built into the Distorter panels. It led into a tiny bedroom that contained one piece of furniture, a neatly made up bed.

There was no clothes closet, but there was a very small bathroom with toilet and wash basin. A dozen towels hung on a plain metal towel rack.

The Follower, if this was indeed his inner sanctum, did not coddle himself.

It took most of the day to explore the Retreat. The building had no unusual features. There were servants' quarters, several entire sections devoted to a busy clerical staff, the power plant in the basement, and a wing made up of prison cells.

The clerks and power attendants lived in cottages along the coast line farthest from the main building. Yanar and five other Predictors had apartments on one corridor. There was a hangar in the rear of the structure large enough to house a dozen skytrailers. When Gosseyn looked into it, there were seven large machines and three small planes. The latter were of the type that had attacked him during his escape from the prison.

No one interfered with him. He moved at will through the buildings and around the island. Not a single person seemed to have the authority or the inclination to bother him. Such a situation had probably never existed before on the island, and apparently they were all waiting for the Follower to come to do something about it.

Gosseyn waited also, not without some doubts, but with a strong determination not to depart. He had a will to action, a sense that events were moving to a head much faster than his almost passive existence at the Retreat indicated.

His plans were made, and it was only a matter of waiting till the battleship arrived.

He slept the first night in the little bedroom adjoining the Follower's office. He slept peacefully with his extra brain cued to respond to any operation of the Distorter equipment. He had not yet established that the Follower manipulated his curious shadow-shape by means of Distorter relays, but the available evidence pointed in that direction.

And he knew just what he intended to do to prove or disprove the theory.

The next morning he similarized to Leej's skytrailer, ate breakfast with three waitresses hovering around him, anxious to do his slightest bidding. They seemed puzzled by his politeness. Gosseyn didn't have time to train them in self-respect. He finished his meal and set to work.

First, he laboriously rolled up the drawing room rug. And then he began to cut free the metal floor plates as near as he could remember to the point where the Follower had materialized on the ship.

He found the Distorter within inches of where he expected it to be.

That was fairly convincing. But he had another verification in the cell where he had been imprisoned when he first arrived on Yalerta. A wild-eyed Yanar watched him through the bars as he broke open the seemingly solid metal cot, and there, also, found a Distorter.

Surely, the picture was becoming clearer, sharper. And the crises must be near.

The second night passed as uneventfully as the first. Gosseyn spent the third day going through the files. There were two pages on Secoh that interested him, because the information in them had not been a part of Ashargin's memory.

The forty-seven pages on Enro were divided into sections, but they merely confirmed what he had already heard, with many added details. Madrisol was listed as a dangerous and ambitious man. Grand Admiral Paleol was depicted as a killer. ‘An implacable character,' the Follower had written, which was quite a tribute from a person who had some fairly implacable characteristics himself.

He investigated only names that he knew, and a few cross references. It would take a staff of experts to go through the tens of thousands of files and make a comprehensive report.

On the fourth day he left the files alone, and worked out a plan for himself and the battleship to follow. It was uneconomical in terms of time wasted for the ship to trail him over the galaxy, when his purpose, as well as the purpose of Elliott and the others, was to get through to Gorgzid.

He wrote, 'Enro has safeguarded his home planet by a system of doling out matrixes for the Gorgzid base under such a strict system that it is highly improbable that any could be secured by normal methods.

'But a man with an extra brain should be able to secure a matrix. . . .'

He reached that early point in his summing up when the long expected relay closed in his brain, and he knew that the battleship had similarized to a break halt near the base eleven hundred light-years away.

Gosseyn made the jump back to the Venus instantly.

'You must have similarized yourself from the ship to Yalerta in a little over an hour,' Dr. Kair estimated.

They couldn't figure it out exactly. But the speed was so much greater, the margin of error so very small compared to the ninety-odd hours the battleship had required for the journey, that the time involved scarcely mattered.

One hour plus. Awed, he walked a hundred feet to the towering transparent dome of the battleship's control room. He was not exactly a man who had to have the vastness of space explained to him, and that made the new potential of his extra brain seem even more impressive.

The blackness pressed against the glass. He had no particular sense of distance with the stars that he could see. They were tiny bright points a few hundred yards away. That was the illusion. Nearness. And, now, for him they were near. In five and a half hours he could similarize himself across the hundred thousand light-year span of this spinning galaxy of two hundred thousand million suns—if he had a memorized area to which he could go.

Elliott came up beside him. He held out a matrix which Gosseyn took.

'I'd better be going,' he said. 'I won't feel right until those filing cabinets are aboard the Venus .'

He checked to make sure the matrix was in the sheath, and then similarized himself to the Follower's office.

He took the matrix out of its protective sheath, and carefully laid it on the desk. It would be too bad if the battleship actually similarized to the matrix, but Leej was aboard to make sure that the ship's break toward Yalerta fell short of a complete jump.

As he had expected, the Venus arrived successfully above the island just under three hours later. Study units were landed, and Gosseyn went aboard for a conference.

To his surprise, Dr. Kair planned no experiments and no training.

'We're going to use a work therapy,' the psychiatrist explained. 'You will train yourself by doing.'

He amplified briefly. 'Frankly, Gosseyn, training would take time, and you're doing all right. The advantage that you appear to have had over Lavoisseur is that you found out that there were other things that could be done, and you tried to do them. It seems certain that he knew nothing of the Predictors, or he would have mentioned them to Crang. Accordingly, he never had any reason to believe that he could train himself to foresee the future.'

Gosseyn said, 'That means I go back immediately and go through the Distorter in the Follower's office.'