The World of Null-A

VI

A curious, heavy sound impinged upon Gosseyn's attention. It seemed to come from above him. It grew louder rapidly and became a continuous noise, like the roar of many smoothly operating machines.

Gosseyn opened his eyes. He was lying in half darkness beside the trunk of a titanic tree. He could see two more trunks dimly in the near distance, but their size was so improbable that he closed his eyes and lay quiet, listening. He had no other immediate awareness. His brain was a composite of ears and what the ears were hearing. Nothing else. He was an inanimate object with the ability to detect sounds.

Further awareness crept in upon him. He could feel his body lying on the ground. No visual image was involved, but gradually the impression in his mind extended. Himself being held up by the soil of Venus, solidly, strongly supported by the impregnable planetary base that was Venus.

The slow flow of thoughts changed. Venus! But he wasn't on Venus. He was on Earth. Memory awakened in a remoter section of his mind. The trickle of impulse-patterns became a stream, then a wide, dark river rushing toward a great sea.

“I died,” he told himself. “I was shot and burned to death.”

He cringed with the remembrance of hideous pain. His body pressed hard against the ground. Slowly his mind opened out again. The fact that he was alive with the memory of having been killed became less a thing of remembered agony, more a puzzle, a paradox that had no apparent explanation in the null-A world.

The fear that the pain would resume dimmed with the passing of the uneventful minutes. His thought, in that curious semiconscious world in which he had his momentary being, began to concentrate on different aspects of his situation.

He remembered Patricia Hardie and her father. He remembered “X” and the implacable Thorson, and that there was a plot against null-A.

The memory had an enormous, purely physical effect on him. He sat up. He opened his eyes and found himself in the same half darkness as before; it had not been a dream then.

He saw the monstrous trees again. This time he accepted them for what they were. It was they that must have given him his automatic knowledge that he was on Venus. Everybody knew about the trees on Venus.

He was definitely on Venus.

Gosseyn climbed to his feet. He felt his body. He seemed to be all right. There were no scars, no sense of having been wounded. His body was whole, well, undamaged. He was in perfect health.

He was wearing a pair of shorts, an open-necked shirt, and sandals. That astonished him, momentarily. He had been wearing trousers, with matching coat, the sober dress of the contestants in the games. He shrugged. It did not matter. Nothing else mattered, except that whoever had repaired his shattered body must have placed him here in this Gargantuan forest with a purpose. Gosseyn looked around him, as tense suddenly as he had been excited.

The trunks of the three trees that he could see were as thick as skyscraper buildings. He remembered that the famous Venusian trees were reputed to grow as high as three thousand feet. He looked up, but the foliage was unpenetrable. Standing there, gazing upward, he grew aware that the sound which had awakened him had stopped.

He shook his head in puzzlement and he was turning away when there was a whoosh above him. A gush of water struck his head and poured over him.

The first gush was like a signal. All around him, water rushed down. He could hear the splashing in the shadows on every side, and twice more he was partially engulfed. Like a gigantic sprinkler system, the branches above were sending down torrents of water, and there was no longer any doubt what had happened.

It had rained. Enormous leaves had taken the load in their ample, up-curved, green bosoms. But now here, now there, the water was overweighing leaf after leaf and tumbling down into the depths, frequently into other leaves. But always the process must have continued until some small portion of the great bulk of water actually reached the ground. The ram must have been on a colossal scale. He was lucky to be in a forest the leaves of which could almost support a river.

Gosseyn peered around the bole of the tree near which he was standing. It was hard to see in the dim light, but it seemed to him finally that there was a greater brightness not far ahead. He walked toward it, and in two minutes he came to an open meadow. A valley spread before him. To his left he could see a wide, badly discolored river. To his right, perched on the rim of a hill, almost hidden by gigantic flowering shrubs, was a building.

A Venusian house! It nestled in its green environment. It seemed to be made of stone, and, what was more important, there was concealing shrubbery all the way from where he stood right up to its walls. He'd be able to approach it without being seen. This isolated house must be the reason that he had been left in this particular part of the forest.

The intervening brush fulfilled his expectations. Not once did he have to cross open ground. He reached a shrub that was ablaze with purple flowers, and from its shelter he surveyed the stone steps that led up through the terraced garden to the veranda of the house. There was lettering engraved on the bottom step. It was so sharply outlined that he could read it without difficulty.

JOHN AND AMELIA PRESCOTT

Gosseyn drew back. Prescott . He remembered the name. Patricia Hardie and Crang had used it in her apartment. “If Thorson ever suspected,” the girl had said, “that Eldred Crang and John Prescott, commander and vice-commander, respectively, of the local galactic base, had become believers in null-A, then–” And then Crang had said, “I've been intending to tell you. I no longer trust Prescott absolutely. He's been shifting and squirming ever since Thorson's arrival on Earth.” That was the meaning of what they had said.

There it was. He knew who lived in the house. John Prescott, who had adopted the null-A philosophy intellectually, but had not yet made it an integral part of his nervous system. So he was wavering in the crisis.

It was something to know. It shaped his own attitude toward the man and woman up there. He began to edge upward through the mud of the terraced garden. He felt remorseless now. He himself had been handled without mercy and he would give none. He wanted information. About himself. About the things he needed to know about Venus. He would get it.

As he drew nearer the house, Gosseyn heard a woman's contralto voice. He paused behind a bushy shrub ten feet from the open veranda and peered around it cautiously.

A man with blond hair was sitting on the veranda steps making notations on a hand recorder. The woman stood in the doorway of the house. She was saying, “Well, I suppose I'll be able to manage alone. No patients are due until the day after tomorrow.” She hesitated, then: “I don't wish to seem critical, John, but you're away so often that I hardly feel married any more. It's less than a month since you returned from Earth, yet now you want to be off again.”

The man shrugged and, without looking up from his recorder, said, “I'm restless, Amelia. You know I have a high energy index. Until the mood passes, I've got to be on the move or build up silly frustrations.”

Gosseyn waited. The conversation seemed to be over. The woman turned back into the house. The man sat several minutes longer on the steps, then stood up and yawned. He looked at ease, apparently unworried by what the woman had said. He was about five feet, ten inches tall. He seemed husky, but the appearance of strength wouldn't matter if he had never taken null-A muscular training. People who were not conditioned had difficulty understanding how strong human muscles could be when they were temporarily cut off from the fatigue center of the brain.

Gosseyn's decision was made. The woman had called the man John. And no patients were due for several days.

That was identification enough. This was John Prescott, galactic agent, pretending to be a doctor.

The woman's statement that nearly a month had passed since Prescott's return from Earth staggered Gosseyn. Patricia Hardie had said to Crang, “Is Prescott going with you?” She must have meant to Venus, for here he was. But the shortness of the time elapsed was confusing. Had it taken his body only a few weeks to recuperate from its desperate wounds? Or had Prescott made several trips to Earth?

Not, he realized, that it made any difference. What mattered right now was his attack. It must be made now, while Prescott stood unsuspecting here in this garden of his Venusian home.

Now!

The mud hindered Gosseyn's forward dash. Prescott had time to turn, time to see his assailant, time for his eyes to widen and for shock to register on his face. He even managed to launch the first blow. If Gosseyn had been a smaller man, less superbly muscled, it might have stopped him. But he wasn't. And Prescott did not get in a second blow. Gosseyn hit him three times on the jaw, and caught his limp body as he fell.

Swiftly he carried the unconscious man up the veranda steps, and paused beside the door. There had been scuffling sounds. The woman might come out to investigate. But there was no movement from inside the house. Prescott stirred against his arm and moaned slightly. Gosseyn silenced him with another blow and stepped through the open door.

He found himself in a very large living room. The room did not have a rear wall. It opened, instead, onto a broad terrace. There was a garden beyond, and then what seemed to be another valley almost lost in mist.

To his right was a staircase leading to the upper floor, and to his left another stairway descended to the basement. On either side were doors that opened into rooms. Gosseyn heard pans rattling in one of the rooms, and there was the tantalizing odor of food cooking.

He headed upstairs. At the top he found himself in a corridor with many doors leading from it. He pushed open the nearest one. It was a spacious bedroom, with a great curving window facing toward a grove of Cyclopean trees. Gosseyn lowered Prescott' to the floor beside the bed, quickly tore a sheet into strips, and bound and gagged the unconscious man.

Tiptoeing cautiously, Gosseyn went down the stairs and into the living room. The continuing rattle of kitchen utensils relaxed his tensed nerves. Apparently the woman had heard nothing. Gosseyn crossed the living room, paused briefly while he decided what to do with her, and then he stepped boldly across the threshold into the kitchen.

The woman was serving food out of a series of electronic cookers. Gosseyn had a glimpse of a daintily set table in a little alcove, and then the woman saw him out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head in mild surprise. Her gaze jumped from his face to his muddy feet. “Oh, my gosh!” she said.

She set down the plate and faced him. Gosseyn hit her once and caught her as she sagged toward him. He felt without compunction. She might be innocent. She might know nothing of her husband's activities. But it was too dangerous to risk a struggle with her. If she was null-A and he gave her an opportunity, she would have enough physical stamina to break away from him and set off an alarm.

She began to writhe in his arms as he carried her up the stairs, but before she was fully awake, he had her bound and gagged and stretched out beside her husband. He left the two of them lying there and went out to explore the house. Before he could be sure that his victory was complete, he had to verify that no one else was around.