Alfred Van Vogt - Null–A Three

At very least, going out—for anything—would require Gorrold to put on a coat.

But the smoldering gray eyes merely stared at him from a grim, heavy face. “I have drinks right here.” However, the man made no move to get the “drinks.” Simply sat there behind his gleaming desk in his shirt sleeves, smiling sarcastically. It was an expensive looking shirt, but not warm enough for icy weather.

“I’m going to deduce,” Gosseyn continued, “that you will understand when I say that it’s to be a private conversation; not to be held in someone’s office where we might be overheard.”

“If,” replied Gorrold, “the president wants to give me special instructions, he can just pick up the phone, as he’s done a hundred times; and when I recognize his voice, I’ll say, ‘Yes, Mr. President, consider the job done.’ ”

With that, the face lost any semblance of a smile. “So I don’t get this private message, with the messenger being someone I’ve never seen before.”

Gosseyn’s seeking gaze had suddenly spied the man’s coat—at least it had the same cloth color as the trousers he wore. The coat lay across what he guessed was the private bar table of this office in the far corner.

With that discovery made, he felt better, and stood up. “Evidently, you don’t appreciate what I’ve just said: that conversations might be overheard. So I’ll simply report back to the president that you would rather not hear his private communication, and he can take it from there. All right?”

Gorrold accompanied him to the door, opened it, and called to his secretary, “Miss Drees, let this gentleman out.”

The way Gosseyn passed him to go through required Gorrold to step back partly out of sight behind the door. At that exact instant Gosseyn transmitted him to the ice world.

Gosseyn grasped the door knob firmly, and said as if speaking to Gorrold: “See you again, sir.” Almost simultaneously, his gaze flicked over to the coat lying on the bar. With his extra-brain he made his special mental photographic copy. And moments later transmitted it also to the location on that distant world of ice.

Whereupon, he closed the door gently behind him. And, moments later, walked past the secretary to and through the partly open outer door.

As he headed for the distant exit, he was unwarily thinking something to which he should not have given a moment’s attention: it was a vague hope that Mr. Gorrold had his help so well trained that there would be no chance of Miss Drees entering her boss’ office without being called.

His vague feeling was that it would be better for the re-building of the Institute of General Semantics if there was never any connection suspected between the visit of Gilbert Gosseyn and the disappearance of Gorrold.

Unwary moment. At that exact instant the sensation in his head became a whirling blackness.

Gosseyn opened his eyes in pitch darkness.

Remembering what had happened—the whirling sensation—he lay still. And it actually took at least a dozen seconds before the thought came that… Could it be, was it possible?—

His sudden startled realization was that this was exactly the way the Gosseyn Three body had awakened after the space capsule had been taken aboard the Dzan battleship.

… I’m lying here naked (that was the feeling), covered by a thin sheet—

He moved his hands and arms slightly. And there was no question: it was a sheet, and it was cloth-like and not heavy; and, except for it, he seemed not to be wearing any clothes. His fingers touched warm skin.

Slowly; carefully, he pulled at the sheet; drew it down, and away from, the upper part of his body. Then, equally slowly, he raised his hands upward, probing.

He touched a flat surface. Less than a dozen inches above his chest, he estimated. And when he braced himself, and pushed against it, it turned out to be a smooth, solid substance with no give in it.

… Exactly as when he had come to in the capsule … only a couple of days ago in terms of how long he had been conscious since then.

He sank back to a relaxed position, and wondered:

… are my actions being observed here, also?—

… Or am I cut off from the outside?—

With that sudden feeling of uncertainty, it was definitely time for a test.

“Alter!—” It was a directed mental call—“do you have any idea what happened to me? Was that—he hesitated, shaken by the possibility—“another death in our group?”

There was a pause. A sense of emptiness… out there. And then, abruptly, contact, almost as if a door had been opened. “All these seconds,” came the thought of Gosseyn Two, “I’ve been only vaguely aware of you. Even your thought just now was dim. So it could be that someone is letting this communication happen. Everything is suddenly clearer.”

It did not seem to be the moment for analyzing who that someone might be. And in his next “words the alter ego seemed to have had the same thought; it was an answer to Three’s question:

“I don’t think—” said that faraway mental voice—“that you, Gosseyn Three, were killed. So this is not another Gosseyn body awakening.”

The statement had its relieving aspect, but there was also a chilling quality. Because what had happened and was happening implied that the someone who was performing these remarkable technological miracles knew about the earlier awakening.

Because it was a similar type of capsule he was in. Which triggered a sudden additional thought: That first time—all those connectors?

He could feel none of the physical sensations of rubber tubing or penetrating needles, of which he had so swiftly become aware on his first awakening. And, as he now probed cautiously with his fingers and hands, and with arms reaching all the way down to his lower extremities, there was only the bare skin.

He called out mentally to Gosseyn Two: “It looks as if you got it right. This is not Gosseyn Four coming to consciousness. As you, apparently correctly, analyzed, it has the look of a captured Gosseyn Three.”

For some reason, he felt relieved. And many moments went by, then, before the realization came that proof that here was, in fact, a captured Gosseyn body, was not exactly a reason for he who was the captured one, feeling better.

Suddenly unhappy again, he resumed his thought communication with the safe Gosseyn… out there: “It would seem these aliens were able to reach across tens of thousands of light-years, grab me, and take me somewhere.”

“Wel-l-l-ll!” There was reluctance in the reply from the faraway alter ego, with overtones of unhappiness rather than rejection—“remember, they got some sort of hold on you, electronically before you left the Dzan ship. And evidently they finally worked out the problem of distance control, and took action.”

Lying there in the darkness, Gosseyn Three agreed that it was very evident indeed.

“After all,” Gosseyn Two concluded, “we have to remember that the Gosseyn extra-brain has proved that at some level of reality, distance has no meaning.”

It was true. But it was not a happy thing to realize that somebody else had now used a similar method to capture a Gosseyn body. Since the alien-controlled ship had not hesitated to attack the Dzan battlecraft, the question was: why hadn’t they simply killed Gosseyn Three?

Gosseyn Two’s answering thought came through at that point in an odd, matter-of-fact fashion:

“I think we can finally analyze the situation. They’re probably studying you. They’d like to reconstruct what happened to them. Here they are in another galaxy; and they have now got the villain responsible for causing the disaster. So any minute be prepared to go on trial for the crime of illegal alien transportation.”