personality was not just that of one more individual. He had been holding it in. Underneath the cold exterior was a blaze of nervous energy, a supremely potent human being. Gosseyn saw that his manner was not one of the deference to superiors. It was command, assured, final, unequivocal. When he agreed with the others, it was because he wanted to. When he disagreed, his way was decisive.
“X” wheeled over and gently removed the prints from Thorson’s fingers. He handed one to Hardie. The two men examined the photographs with two distinct and separate emotions.
“X” half climbed out of his chair. The movement revealed several things about his semi-plastic body. It showed his height. He was taller than Gosseyn had thought, at least five feet ten or eleven. It showed how his plastic arm was fastened to the plastic cage around the middle of his body. It showed that his face could look startled. He half whispered, “It’s a good thing we didn’t let him go to see that psychiatrist. We struck at the right moment, at the beginning.”
Michael Hardie looked irritated. “What are you babbling about? Don’t forget that I’m in my present position entirely because of your ability to control the games of the Machine. I never could get all this null-A stuff about the human brain into my head. All I see is a solid core of brightness. I presume that those are the lines of nerve patterns, and that they will untangle when enlarged on a screen.”
This time Thorson heard. He walked over, pointed .at something on the print, and whispered an explanation that slowly drained the color from Hardie’s face.
“We’ll have to kill him,” he said grayly. “At once.”
Thorson shook his head irritably. “Whatever for? What can he do? Warn the world?” He grew more intent. “Notice there are no bright lines near it.”
“But suppose he finds out how to use it?” That was Hardie again.
“It would take months!” exclaimed “X.” “You can’t even make your little finger flexible in twenty-four hours.”
There were more whispers, to which Thorson responded furiously, “Surely, you don’t expect him to ex-cape from that dungeon. Or have you been reading Aristotelian fiction, where the hero always wins?”
There was no question finally of who was going to have his way. Men came and carried Gosseyn, chair, manacles, and all, down four flights of stairs into a solid-steel dungeon. The final stairs led down into the dungeon, and when the men had climbed back to the floor above, a motor lifted the whole staircase through a hole in the ceiling twenty feet above. A steel door clanged down over the hole, and heavy bars were slammed shut. There was silence.
V
Gosseyn sat still in the steel chair. His heart hammered, his temples throbbed, and every few moments he felt faint and ill with reaction. There seemed no end to the perspiration that poured from him.
“I’m afraid,” he thought. “Horribly, wretchedly afraid.”
Fear must derive from the very colloids of a substance. A flower closing its petals for the night was showing fear of the dark, but it had no nervous system to transmit the impulse and no thalamus to receive and translate the electric message into an emotion. A human being was a physico-chemical structure whose awareness of life was derived from an intricate nervous system. After death, the body disintegrated; the personality survived as a series of distorted impulse-memories in other people’s nervous systems. As the years flew by, those memories would grow dimmer. At most, Gilbert Gosseyn would survive as a nerve impulse in other human beings for half a century; as an emulsion on a film negative for several score years; as an electronic pattern in a series of cathode-ray cells for perhaps two centuries. None of the potentialities diminished even fractionally the flow of perspiration from his body in that hot, almost airless room.
“I’m as good as dead,” he thought in agony. “I’m going to
“X” wheeled over and gently removed the prints from Thorson’s fingers. He handed one to Hardie. The two men examined the photographs with two distinct and separate emotions.
“X” half climbed out of his chair. The movement revealed several things about his semi-plastic body. It showed his height. He was taller than Gosseyn had thought, at least five feet ten or eleven. It showed how his plastic arm was fastened to the plastic cage around the middle of his body. It showed that his face could look startled. He half whispered, “It’s a good thing we didn’t let him go to see that psychiatrist. We struck at the right moment, at the beginning.”
Michael Hardie looked irritated. “What are you babbling about? Don’t forget that I’m in my present position entirely because of your ability to control the games of the Machine. I never could get all this null-A stuff about the human brain into my head. All I see is a solid core of brightness. I presume that those are the lines of nerve patterns, and that they will untangle when enlarged on a screen.”
This time Thorson heard. He walked over, pointed .at something on the print, and whispered an explanation that slowly drained the color from Hardie’s face.
“We’ll have to kill him,” he said grayly. “At once.”
Thorson shook his head irritably. “Whatever for? What can he do? Warn the world?” He grew more intent. “Notice there are no bright lines near it.”
“But suppose he finds out how to use it?” That was Hardie again.
“It would take months!” exclaimed “X.” “You can’t even make your little finger flexible in twenty-four hours.”
There were more whispers, to which Thorson responded furiously, “Surely, you don’t expect him to ex-cape from that dungeon. Or have you been reading Aristotelian fiction, where the hero always wins?”
There was no question finally of who was going to have his way. Men came and carried Gosseyn, chair, manacles, and all, down four flights of stairs into a solid-steel dungeon. The final stairs led down into the dungeon, and when the men had climbed back to the floor above, a motor lifted the whole staircase through a hole in the ceiling twenty feet above. A steel door clanged down over the hole, and heavy bars were slammed shut. There was silence.
V
Gosseyn sat still in the steel chair. His heart hammered, his temples throbbed, and every few moments he felt faint and ill with reaction. There seemed no end to the perspiration that poured from him.
“I’m afraid,” he thought. “Horribly, wretchedly afraid.”
Fear must derive from the very colloids of a substance. A flower closing its petals for the night was showing fear of the dark, but it had no nervous system to transmit the impulse and no thalamus to receive and translate the electric message into an emotion. A human being was a physico-chemical structure whose awareness of life was derived from an intricate nervous system. After death, the body disintegrated; the personality survived as a series of distorted impulse-memories in other people’s nervous systems. As the years flew by, those memories would grow dimmer. At most, Gilbert Gosseyn would survive as a nerve impulse in other human beings for half a century; as an emulsion on a film negative for several score years; as an electronic pattern in a series of cathode-ray cells for perhaps two centuries. None of the potentialities diminished even fractionally the flow of perspiration from his body in that hot, almost airless room.
“I’m as good as dead,” he thought in agony. “I’m going to
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