Alfred van Vogt: The Players of Null-A

‘The galaxy, ‘he said, ‘swarms with anarchistic ideas, but I’ve never before heard of them working. I’ve been trying to figure out how this non-artist…to…to——‘

'Call it Null-A,' said Gosseyn.

' this Null-A stuff operates, but it seems to depend on

people being sensible, and that I refuse to believe.'

Gosseyn said nothing more. For this was sanity itself that was being discussed, and that could not be explained with words alone. If Janasen was interested, let him go to the elementary schools. The other must have realized his mood, for he shrugged again.

'Read the card yet?' he asked.

Gosseyn did not answer immediately. It was chemically active but not harmfully so. He had the impression that it was an absorbing material. Still, it was a strange thing, obviously some development of galactic science, and he had no intention of being, rash with it. .

‘This Follower,' he said finally, 'actually predicted that I would go into that elevator about 9:28 a.m.'

It was hard to credit. Because the Follower was not of Earth, not of the solar system. Somewhere out in the far reaches of the galaxy, this being had turned his attention to Gilbert Gosseyn. And pictured him doing a particular thing at a particular time. That was what Janasen's account implied.

The intricacy of prophecy involved was staggering. It made the 'card' valuable. From where he sat he could see that there was print on it, but the words were unreadable. He leaned closer. Still the print was too small.

Janasen shoved a magnifying glass towards him. 'I had to get this so I could read it myself,' he said.

Gosseyn hesitated, but presently he picked up the card and examined it. He tried to think of it as a switch that might activate a larger mechanism. But what?

He looked around the room. At the moment of entering he had memorized the nearest electric sockets and traced live wires. Some ran to the table at which he sat, and supplied power to the built-in compact electronic cooking machine. Gosseyn looked up finally.

'You and I are going to stick together for a while, Mr. Janasen,' he said. 'I have an idea that you're going to be removed from Venus either by a ship or a Distorter transporter. I intend to go with you.'

Janasen's gaze was curious. 'Don't you think that might be dangerous?’

'Yes,' said Gosseyn with a smile. 'Yes, it might be.'

There was silence.

Gosseyn attuned the card to one of his memorized areas, and simultaneously, he made the action cue a simple fear-doubt. If the emotion of fear and doubt should enter his mind, the card would instantly be similarized out of the room. The precaution was not altogether adequate, but it seemed to him he had to take the chance. He focused his glass on the card, and read:

Gosseyn:

A Distorter has a fascinating quality. It is electrically powered, but shows no unusual characteristics even when it is on. Such an instrument is built into the table at which you are sitting. If you have read this far, you are now caught in the most intricate trap ever devised for one individual.

If the emotion of fear came, he did not recall it then or afterwards. For there was night.

A child's mind, lacking a developed cortex, is virtually incapable of discrimination. The child inevitably makes many false evaluations of the world. Many of these false-to-facts judgments are conditioned into the nervous system on the 'unconscious' level, and can be carried over to adulthood. Hence, we have a 'well educated' man or woman who reacts in an infantile fashion.

The wheel glinted as it turned. Gosseyn watched it idly, as he lay in the cart. His gaze lifted finally from the gleaming metal wheel, and took in the near horizon, where a building spread itself. It was a wide structure which curved up from the ground like a huge ball, only a small part of which was exposed to view.

Gosseyn allowed the picture to seep into his consciousness, and at first did not feel either puzzled or concerned. He found himself making a comparison between the scene before him and the hotel room where he had been talking to Janasen. And then he thought: I am Ashargin.

The idea was nonverbal, an automatic awareness of self, a simple identification that squeezed up out of the organs and glands of his body and was taken for granted by his nervous system. Not quite for granted. Gilbert Gosseyn rejected the identification with amazement that yielded to a thrill of alarm and then a sense of confusion.

A summer breeze blew into his face. There were other buildings beside the great one, outbuildings scattered here and there inside a pattern of trees. The trees seemed to form a kind of fence. Beyond them, a backdrop of unsurpassed splendor, reared a majestic, snowcapped mountain.

'Ashargin!'

Gosseyn jumped as that baritone yell sounded no more than a foot from his ear. He jerked around, but in the middle of the action caught a glimpse of his fingers. That stopped him. He forgot the man, forgot even to look at the man. Thunderstruck, he examined his hands. They were slender, delicate, different from the stronger, firmer, larger hands of Gilbert Gosseyn. He looked down at himself. His body was slim, boyish.

He felt the difference, suddenly, inside, a sense of weakness, a dimmer life force, a mix-up-edness of other thoughts. No, not thoughts. Feelings. Expressions out of organs that had once been under the control of a different mind.

His own mind drew back in dismay, and once again on a nonverbal level came up against a fantastic piece of information: 'I am Ashargin.'

Not Gosseyn? His reason tottered, for he was remembering what the Follower had written on the 'card'. You are now caught . . . in the most intricate trap . . . ever devised. The feeling of disaster that came was like nothing else that he had ever experienced

'Ashargin, you lazy good for nothing, get out and adjust the harness on the drull.'

He was out of the cart like a flash. With eager fingers he tightened the loosened cinch on the collar of the husky, ox like beast. All this before he could think. The job done, he crawled back into the cart. The driver, a priest in work garb, applied the whip. The cart jogged on, and turned presently into the yard itself.

Gosseyn was fighting for understanding of the servile obedience that had sent him scurrying like an automaton. It was hard to think. There was so much confusion. But at last a measure of comprehension came.

Another mind had once controlled this body—the mind of Ashargin. It had been an unintegrated, insecure mind, dominated by fears and uncontrollable emotions that were imprinted on the nervous system and muscles of the body. The deadly part of that domination was that the living flesh of Ashargin would react to all that internal imbalance on the unconscious level. Even Gilbert Gosseyn, knowing what was wrong, would have scarcely any influence over those violent physical compulsions—until he could train the body of Ashargin to the cortical-thalamic sanity of Null-A.

Until he could train it . . . 'Is that it?' Gilbert Gosseyn asked himself. 'Is that why I am here? To train this body?'

Faster than his own questions, the flood of organic thought squeezed up into his brain—memories of that other mind. Ashargin. The Ashargin heir. The immense meaning of that came slowly, came dimly, came sketchily because there was so much that had happened. When he was fourteen, Enro's forces had come to the school he was attending. On that tense day he had expected death from the creatures of the usurper. But instead of killing him, they brought him back to Enro's home planet of Gorgzid, and placed him in the care of the priests of the Sleeping God.

There he labored in the fields, and hungered. They fed him in the morning, like an animal. Each night he slept with a shuddering uneasiness, longing for the morning that would bring the one meal a day that kept him alive. His identity as the Ashargin heir was not forgotten, but it was pointed out that old ruling families tended to thin away and become weak and decadent. In such periods the greatest empires had a habit of falling by default into the possession of masterful men like Enro the Red.