The World of Null-A Read Online Free PDF

of atomic light, brighter than the noonday sun above.
    The sight of it so near shocked Gosseyn. He hadn’t thought of it before, but he realized suddenly that the Machine would never accept his false identity. He felt a constriction, and stood there shaken and depressed. He saw that Teresa Clark had paused and was looking back at him.
    “This is your first time to see it close?” she said sympathetically. “It does get you, doesn’t it?”
    There was a hint of superiority in her manner that brought a wan smile to Gosseyn’s lips. These city slickers! he thought wryly. He felt better and, taking her arm, started forward again. His confidence grew slowly. Surely the Machine would not judge him on such a high abstraction as nominal identity, when even the lie detector in the hotel had recognized that he was not purposely misrepresenting himself.
    The crowds became unwieldy as they approached the base of the Machine, and the bigness of the Machine itself was more apparent. Its roundness and its size gave a sleek, streamlined appearance that was not canceled by the tiers of individual game rooms which ornamented and broke up its gigantic base. Right around the base the rooms extended. The entire first floor consisted of game rooms and corridors leading to them. Broad outside staircases led to the second, third, and fourth floors and down into three basements, a total of seven floors entirely devoted to game rooms for individual competitors.
    “Now that I’m here,” said Teresa Clark, “I’m no longer so sure of myself. These people look darned intelligent.”
    Gosseyn laughed at the expression on her face, but he said nothing. He felt supremely positive that he could compete right through to the thirtieth day. His problem was not would he win, but would he be allowed to try.
    Aloof and impregnable, the Machine towered above the human beings it was about to sort according to their semantic training. No one now living knew exactly in what part of its structure its electron-magnetic brain was located. Like many men before him, Gosseyn speculated about that. “Where would I have put it?” he wondered, “if I had been one of the scientist-architects?” It didn’t matter, of course. The Machine was already older than any known living human being. Self-renewing, conscious of its life and of its purpose, it remained greater than any individual, immune to bribery and corruption and theoretically capable of preventing its own destruction.
    “Juggernaut!” emotional men had screamed when it was being built. “No,” said the builders, “not a destroyer, but an immobile, mechanical brain with creative functions and a capacity to add to itself in certain sane directions.” In three hundred years, people had come to accept its decisions as to who should rule them.
    Gosseyn grew aware of a conversation between a man and a woman who were walking near by.
    “It’s the policeless part,” the woman was saying. “It frightens me.”
    The man said, “Don’t you see, that shows what Venus must be like, where no police are necessary. If we prove worthy of Venus, we go to a planet where everyone is sane. The policeless period gives us a chance to measure progress down here. At one time it was a nightmare, but I’ve noticed a change even in my lifetime. It’s necessary, all right.”
    “I guess here’s where we separate,” said Teresa Clark. “The C’s are down on the second basement, the G’s just above them. Meet me tonight at the vacant lot. Any objections?”
    “None.”
    Gosseyn waited till she was out of sight down a stairway that led to the second basement. Then he followed. He caught a glimpse of her as he reached the bottom of the steps. She was pushing toward an exit at the end of a far corridor. He was halfway along the corridor when she ran up a staircase that led outside. By the time Gosseyn shoved his way up the stairs, she was nowhere to be seen. He turned back thoughtfully. The possibility that she would