  A homothetic, static, spherically symmetric solution to the massless
Einstein- Klein-Gordon equations is described. There is a curvature singularity
which is central, null, bifurcate and marginally trapped. The space-time is
therefore extreme in the sense of lying at the threshold between black holes
and naked singularities, just avoiding both. A linear perturbation analysis
reveals two types of dominant mode. One breaks the continuous self-similarity
by periodic terms reminiscent of discrete self-similarity, with echoing period
within a few percent of the value observed numerically in near-critical
gravitational collapse. The other dominant mode explicitly produces a black
hole, white hole, eternally naked singularity or regular dispersal, the latter
indicating that the background is critical. The black hole is not static but
has constant area, the corresponding mass being linear in the perturbation
amplitudes, explicitly determining a unit critical exponent. It is argued that
a central null singularity may be a feature of critical gravitational collapse.
