The World of Null-A Read Free Page B

about?”
    For a moment the existence of such a person as Miss Treechers was staggering. Then: “It’s private,” said Gosseyn, recovering. “And it’s important that I speak to her personally. Please connect me at once.”
    He must have sounded or looked or acted authoritative. The young woman said hesitantly, “I’m not supposed to do this, but you can reach Miss Hardie at the palace of the Machine.”
    Gosseyn said explosively, “She’s here, in the great city!”
    He was not aware of hanging up. But suddenly the woman’s face was gone. The video was dark. He was alone with his realization: Patricia was alive!
    He had known, of course. His brain, educated in accepting things as they were, had already adjusted to the fact that a lie detector didn’t lie. Sitting there, he felt strangely satiated with information. He had no impulse to call the palace, to talk to her, to see her. Tomorrow, of course, he would have to go there, but that seemed far away in space-time. He grew aware that someone was knocking loudly at his door. He opened it to four men, the foremost of whom, a tall young man, said, “I’m the assistant manager. Sorry, but you’ll have to leave. We’ll check your baggage downstairs. During the policeless month, we can take no chances with suspicious individuals.”
    It took about twenty minutes for Gosseyn to be ejected from the hotel. Night was falling as he walked slowly along the almost deserted street.

II
     
    The gifted … Aristotle … affected perhaps the largest number of people ever influenced by a single man … . Our tragedies began when the “intensional” biologist Aristotle took the lead over the “extensional” mathematical philosopher Plato, and formulated all the primitive identifications, subject-predictivism… into an imposing system, which for more than two thousand years we were not allowed to revise under penalty of persecution… . Because of this, his name has been used for the two-valued doctrines of Aristotelianism, and, conversely, the many-valued realities of modern science are given the name non-Aristotelianism… .
    A.K.
     
    It was too early for grave danger. The night, though already arrived, was but beginning. The prowlers and the gangs, the murderers and the thieves, who would soon emerge into the open, were still waiting for the deeper darkness. Gosseyn came to a sign that flashed on and off, repeating tantalizingly:
     
    ROOMS FOR THE UNPROTECTED
    $20 a night
     
    Gosseyn hesitated. He couldn’t afford that price for the full thirty days of the games, but it might do for a few nights. Reluctantly, he rejected the possibility. There were ugly stories connected with such places. He preferred to risk the night in the open.
    He walked on. As the planetary darkness deepened, more and more lights flashed on in their automatic fashion. The city of the Machine glowed and sparkled. For miles and miles along one street he crossed, he could see two lines of street lamps like shining sentinels striding in geometric progression toward a distant blaze point of illusory meeting. It was all suddenly depressing.
    He was apparently suffering from semi-amnesia, and he must try to comprehend that in the largest sense of meaning. Only thus would he be able to free himself from the emotional effects of his condition. Gosseyn attempted to visualize the freeing as an event in the null-A interpretation. The event that was himself, as he was, his body and mind as a whole, amnesia and all, as of this moment on this day and in this city.
    Behind that conscious integration were thousands of hours of personal training. Behind the training was the non-Aristotelian technique of automatic extensional thinking, the unique development of the twentieth century which, after four hundred years, had become the dynamic philosophy of the human race. “The map is not the territory… . The word is not the thing itself… .” The belief that he had been married did not make it fact. The