“… If they stayed, I’d have to take on a lower profile, and cease to be a target for bomb throwers—”
Perhaps, he could move out to the middle west of earth, buy a little farm, and live there with Enin and Queen Mother Strala?
Gosseyn found himself smiling again, as he visualized that improbable outcome of what he had got himself into. Not easy to realize that Gosseyn One had originally arrived in the City of the Games Machine with the hypnotically-implanted belief that he had been a farmer living just outside a little town called Crest City, and had been married to Patricia Hardie.
What a confusion that had been—for a while.
The train of thought evoked from him another communication with his alter ego: “How is Queen Mother Strala?”
An instant smile impression came through. “She’s waiting for Enin to show up. That’s the only thing on her mind. I think she’s still mad at you.”
There was abruptly no time to consider that. The beautiful machine was pulling over to the curb in front of a familiar large, white bungalow.
… Dr. Lester Kair turned away from the viewing device, walked over to a chair, and sat down. Those piercing gray eyes of his were wide, and seemed to stare at the opposite wall.
There was silence, as they all looked at him expectantly. Even though he radiated a special inner excitement, he seemed unchanged from what the joint Gosseyn memory recalled: Long body, strongly built, face still smooth, the overall impression of an intelligent man in his early fifties.
Awareness of his audience came suddenly into his face. With that, he gulped, and spoke.
“That damaged nerve complex seems to have been only partly disconnected, and so it did get minimal support from the energy source to which, of course, it should have been firmly attached, but wasn’t. The result of that partial connection looks fantastic.”
“How do you mean?” Eldred Crang sounded puzzled, as he asked the question. “A damaged nerve end, as I visualize it, is merely a minute gray extension, which only an expert would be able to identify as being unnormal; but that word ‘fantastic’ is too dramatic.” Long pause. The tall man in the white doctorial over-cloak, so common in laboratory work, climbed to his feet. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I refuse to apologize for my reaction. I thought I had learned to accept the Gilbert Gosseyn extra-brain philosophically; but what I found myself looking at brought new awareness that we have here a neural interconnection with something basic in the universe. And, somehow, the damaged nerve group is in a state of over-stimulation.” He swallowed, and then finished the thought: “It’s like an actual light in there. If we opened his head, a brightness would pour forth.”
He beckoned Crang. “Come and take a look.” Gosseyn was still firmly held in the special chair; his head was virtually embedded in machinery, as Crang walked over, and out of his line of sight. He assumed that the Venusian detective was peering into the viewing lens.
Silence. Then there was the sound, and a feel of someone carefully backing away. Off to one side, Dr. Kair said, “Mr. Prescott, would you care to look, also?” Prescott’s answer was in his gentlest voice. “I have no medical qualifications; so, I think, one of us peering in is a sufficient witness for your statement.”
Crang walked into Gosseyn’s line of sight. “Well, Doctor,” he said, “how do we deal with this situation?” The psychiatrist, who had, on their arrival been given a detailed account of everything, said, “I think we’d better get the other special people over here; and then get Gosseyn Two.”
As Crang phoned Leej, and Prescott went out and dispatched the limousine to pick her up, Gosseyn said to Dr. Kair, “I deduce that by the special people you mean the persons who participated in the collective attempt to reach that other galaxy. And that, therefore, I should bring Enro here.”
“Yes.”
Since there had been agreement on that point with Yona, the Troog leader, Gosseyn took his extra-brain photograph of a floor area in one corner of the physician laboratory, and did his transfer. Moments later, a huge figure was lying there. Enro the Red picked himself up, looked around, said nothing; but he was presently briefed on what was about to happen.
“You’re going to send those Troogs home?”
In spite of his earlier argument with himself, Gosseyn Three said, “I’m sure you’ll agree it’s the best solution: get them out of the Milky Way galaxy as soon as possible.”
“True. So now what?”
Gosseyn told him of the meeting that would now take place between two Gosseyn bodies, as a preliminary to the finale.
The war lord’s face twisted into a frown. “You’re sure the place won’t just blow up?”
Gosseyn Three replied, “We’re already different in many ways.”
“But you’re still connected mentally?”
“Yes. Thought-wise. But I would guess—” he continued—“if there’s ever going to be mental telepathy between the average people of the universe, it will merely be a scientifically similarized portion of some part of the brain that the individual gives his or her permission to have aligned.”
The big man was shrugging. “I think I’d like to be in the next room.”
It was interesting, then, to Gosseyn that the others, also, retreated through the door. When they had gone, Gosseyn Three wasted no time, but immediately addressed Gosseyn Two:
“Well, alter ego, it looks as if our big moment is here.”
“It sure does,” was the reply.
“Do you need any help?”
“No, I think I have the location where Enro arrived in the necessary exact extra-brain imprint. Hold still! Keep your thoughts neutral!”
Holding still consisted of blanking out of his own extra-brain. He was still doing that moments later when there was a small noise. Gosseyn Three, who had his eyes closed, was aware of the door opening; and then came the voice of Leej, sounding as if she had not actually entered the room.
“It’s all right,” she said, “I see no problems during the next fifteen minutes, at least.”
Gosseyn opened his eyes, and saw that the man who had arrived had his back turned. He was fully dressed, and, when he slowly turned, he had the appearance of a tanned, lean-faced, strong-looking man in his middle thirties. But it was himself in another suit.
Dr. Kair entered, and without a word released Gosseyn Three from the examining chair. He remained seated, with the thought that even a different position might be of value.
And so, there they were together—gazing at each other; one standing, one sitting down. Two human beings, duplicates of each other.
Twins? No.
Some similarity, of course, existed between twins. But the diversity that began immediately after conception, and the variation of experience after birth, quickly created innumerable differences, first, on a minute level but finally they were merely look alikes, with their own personalities.
The similarities between Gilbert Gosseyn Two and Gilbert Gosseyn Three as they faced each other in the office of Dr. Lester Kair, included a whole series of interacting energy flows. Brain to brain, body to body.
They were not twins in any ordinary meaning of the term. They were the same person in ten thousand times ten thousand ways.
Gosseyn Three realized that he was almost unconsciously bracing himself against an interflow that tended to tug him out of the chair and toward the other body.