The Brain Trust car which took Lee out of Cephalon was a normal-looking
limousine, a rear-engined teardrop like all the "60" models, slotted for
the insertion of wings which most of the garages now kept in stock and
rented at a small charge for cross-country hops. The only non-standard
feature seemed to be the polaroid glass windows which were provided all
around and not only in front.
"That's a good idea," Lee said adjusting the nearest ones, "they ought
to have that on every car, all-round protection to the eyes."
"Think so, sir? Must be the first time you're driving out there," the
young chauffeur said.
The car left the outskirts and the desert started to fly by as the
speedometer needle climbed above the 100 mark. Lee sank back into his
seat; the desert had no novelty for him and since the chauffer appeared
not inclined to small talk he abandoned himself to thought.
His visit to his father had not been much of a success....
_Time_ magazine had carried an item in its personal column, briefly
stating that General Jefferson E. Lee, "the Old Lion of Guadalcanal,"
had retired from the Marines to Phoenix, Ariz.... Phoenix, the hotel
desk had informed him, was only some 300 miles away and there was hourly
service by Greyhound helicopter-bus.
So he had taken the ride, a taxi had brought him to the small neat
bungalow, and there he had seen his father for the first time in years.
It had been very strange to see him aged, the nut brown face a little
shrunk. He had anticipated that much. But somehow he had failed to
imagine the most obvious change; to see his father in civvies and even
less to see him trimming roses with a pair of garden shears. It looked
such an incongruous picture for a "Marines' Marine."
As he had come up the little path his father had looked up.
"So it's you, Semper." Slowly he had peeled off the old parade kid
gloves without a change in his face. "Nice to see you," he had said.
"Didn't expect to before I start pushing up the daisies from below.
Where's your butterfly net?"
No, in character his father hadn't changed a bit. He still was the old
"blood and guts" to whom an entomologist was sort of a human
grass-hopper wielding a butterfly net, and a son indulging in such
antics a bit of a freak, a reproach to his father, a failure of his
life.
Even so, he had led the way into the house and things had been just as
he remembered them: the old furniture, pictures crowding one another all
over the walls, on the unused grand piano--Marines in Vera Cruz, Marines
in China, Marines in Alaska, in the Marianas, in Japan, at the Panama
canal; Marines, Marines, Marines, wherever one looked, in ghostly
parade. No, nothing had changed. It had been mainly jealously which had
caused him to rebel against becoming another Marine, the first wedge
which had driven him and his father apart.
"What are you doing now, padre?" he had asked.
"You've seen it. Nothing. Just puttering around. They've made me
commander of the National Guard over here," and with a contemptuous
snort, "--a sinecure; might as well have given me a bunch of tin
soldiers to play with. What brought you here?"
Glad to change the subject Lee had told about Australia, had mentioned
The Brain and the possibility of joining it. His father had not been
pleased.
"Heard of it," he had grumbled. "Shows how the country is going to the
dogs. Now they need machines to do their thinking with. If their own
brains were gas they couldn't back a car out of the garage. So you're
mixed up with that outfit; well--how about a drink?"
"Rather," he had answered, feeling the need for washing down a
bitterness; thinking, too, that it might break the ice between him and
his father.
And then there was that painful moment when they had stood, glasses in
hand and remembered....
The selfsame situation fifteen years ago as the Bomb fell upon
Hiroshima. He had been on convalescence furlough. They had been alone
when the news came and there had been a drink between them just as now.
And after the announcer stopped he had cried out hysterically like a
child in a nightmare.
"Those fools, that's the end of civilization, that's no longer war."
"Shut up," his father had shouted, "how dare you insult the Commander in
Chief to my face. Get out of here and _stay_ out."
A highball glass had crashed against the floor. And that had been the
end. He hadn't returned after the war.
Yes, it was most unfortunate that now, after so many years, they should
read that memory in their faces; that it was only the glasses and not
the minds which clicked.
They had put them down awkwardly with frozen smiles on their lips and
his father had said:
"Sorry. But an old dog won't learn new tricks. Guess it's too late in
the day for me and you to get together, son."
"It's never too late, Dad," he had wanted to say, but the words died on
his lips.
So it had been the failure of a mission; but then it closed an old and
painful chapter with finality and he was free to open a new leaf.
* * * * *
Lee looked ahead again. The speedometer needle trembled around the 150
mark. The sun drenched sand shot by, Joshua trees gesticulating wildly
in the tricky perspectives of the speed, out-crops of rocks getting
bigger now and more numerous, the road ahead starting to coil into a
maze of natural fortresses, giant pillars and bizarre pyramids looking
like the works of a titan race from another planet shone in unearthly
color schemes of black and purple and amber and green. With the winding
of the road and the waftings of the heat it was hard to make out a
course, but the Sierra Mountains now were towering almost up to the
zenith; like a giant surf they seemed to race against the car.
"Mind if I close the windows, sir?"
The chauffeur's question was rhetoric; he had already pushed a button,
the glass went up and within the next second the inside of the car
turned completely dark.
"Man," Lee shouted, gripping the front seat, "are you crazy?"
There suddenly was light again, but it was only the electric light
inside the car. The blackout of the world without remained complete, and
the speedometer needle still edged over the 150 mark.
"Crazy? I hope not." The chauffeur said it coolly; leaning comfortably
back he turned around for a better look at his fare.
With mounting horror Lee noticed that he even took his hands off the
wheel. Nonchalantly he lit a cigarette while the unguided wheel milled
crazily from side to side and the tires screeched through what seemed to
be a sharp S-curve. Still with his back to the wheel and in between
satisfying puffs of his smoke he continued:
"It's quite O.K. sir; it's only that we're on the guidebeam now. This
here car doesn't need a driver no more; it's on the beam."
"What beam?" Lee relaxed a little; it was the unexpectedness which had
bowled him over. "What beam? And why the blackout?"
"Just orders," the young man said. "The Brain's orders and it's the
Brain's beam. Seems to be new to you, sir; to me it's like an old story;
read about it when I was a kid: how they blindfolded people who entered
a beleaguered fortress. "The Count of Monte Cristo," it was called; ever
heard about it? Pretty soon now we'll be stopped for examination before
we enter the secret passage underground. Romantic isn't it?"
"Very much so," Lee dryly remarked. He continued to watch the behavior
of the car with some misgivings. The controls appeared to be functioning
smoothly enough and after a minute or so the brake pedal came down all
by itself. Lee, with a breath of relief, saw the speedometer recede to
zero.
But the doors would not open from the inside and as he tried them he
found that they were locked. "What's the idea," he asked, "I thought you
said we would be examined at this spot?"
"Bet they're at it right now," the chauffeur grinned. "I wouldn't know
how they do it, but they get us photographed inside and outside, what we
have in our pockets, what we had for breakfast this morning and the very
bones of our skeletons. I pass through here maybe half a dozen times a
day, still they will do it every time: take my likeness. Makes me feel
like I was some darned movie star."
To Lee it felt uncanny to sit trapped and blindfolded in this "Black
Maria" of a car while unseen rays and cameras went over him. He could
hear a faint noise of steps, and muffled voices.
"Who are they?" he asked.
"Oh, that's only some boys from Intelligence or whatnot; that's nothing,
that isn't The Brain. It will be all over in a moment--see--there we go
again. Now we're entering the Labyrinth."
"The Labyrinth?"
Reticent as he had been in the beginning, the chauffeur now seemed to
like Lee; he was proud to explain. "Queer, isn't it? They've got the
damnedest names for things down here. Take them from anatomy, I
understand. The Labyrinth is supposed to be inside the ear; it leads
inside in a roundabout way; it's the same here, it's a tunnel--see--down
we go."
The soft swoosh of the gas-turbine turned into a muffled roar. The car
accelerated at a terrific rate and from the way it swayed and dived it
was clear that the tunnel spiralled downwards in steep serpentines. Lee
gripped the holding straps; his every nerve was on edge and those edges
were sharpened by the ominous fact that all the instruments on the
dashboard had stopped functioning so that he couldn't even read the
speed.
As if to make things still worse, the chauffeur had abandoned his post
altogether. Stretching his legs across the front seat he reclined as if
enjoying his easy chair at home by the fire place.
"It beats a roller coaster, doesn't it?" the chauffeur said. "Got me
scared the first few times before I found out it was safe. Nothing to
worry about, never you fear."
With his stomach throttling his throat, Lee asked, "How deep are we
going underground?"
"That we are not supposed to know; that's why all the instruments are
cut off. The other day I had a passenger, one of those weathermen, a
professor. He laughed when I told him I didn't know how deep it was. Got
a little doodad out of his pocket; aneroid barometer, or something, he
said it was. But he got a surprise; in the first place the thing didn't
work, so he said the whole tunnel was probably pressurized. In the
second place he never got where he wanted to go. They stopped the car at
the next control and shot him right back whence he came."
"But why?"
The chauffeur looked mysterious. "Seems The Brain doesn't like people
with doodads in their pockets even if they mean no harm. The Brain is
most particular about such things; maybe somehow it peers into this car
this moment, maybe it records every word we say. How do we know?" He
shrugged his shoulders. "Not that I give a damn. I've got nothing to
conceal. The hours are right and the pay's right; that's good enough for
me."
* * * * *
Lee experienced an old, familiar sensation: that creepy feeling one got
on jungle patrol, knowing that there were Jap snipers up in the trees,
invisible with the devilish green on their faces and uniforms.
"Strange," he thought, "that in the very center of civilization one
should feel as haunted as in the jungle hell."
Then, just as he began to wonder whether the dizzy spiralling plunge as
if in the belly of a shark would ever end, the tunnel levelled. Now the
car shot straight as a bullet and just as fast it seemed.
As his stomach returned to something like normal position, the feeling
of oppression changed into one of flying through space, of being
dynamically at rest. Again just as the duration of this dynamic flight
evoked the feel of infinity, the motion changed. So fast did it recede
that the momentum of his body almost hurled Lee from the back seat into
the front.
Doors snapped open and as Lee staggered out somewhat benumbed in limb
and head, his eyes grew big as they met the most unexpected sight. The
car rested on the concrete apron of what appeared to be a super-duper
bus terminal plus service station and streamlined restaurant. Beyond
this elevated terrace yawned a vaulted dome, excavated from the solid
rock and at least twice the size of St. Peter's giant cupola. Its walls
were covered with murals. Both huge and beautiful they depicted the
history of the human race, Man's evolution. From where he stood they
started out with scenes of primeval huntings of the mammoth, went on to
fire making, fire adoration, then to the primitive crafts and from there
through the stages of science evolution and technology until they ended
on Lee's right hand side with an awesome scene from the Bikini test. The
gorgeous mushroom cloud of the atomic explosion looked alive and
threatening like those Djinni once banned by Solomon.
But then, all these murals looked more alive than any work of art Lee
had ever seen and he discovered that this was due to a new technique
which had been added and commingled with one of the oldest.
The pictures were built up from myriad layers of Painted Desert sands
and these were made translucent or illuminated by what Lee thought must
be phosphoric salts turned radiant under the stimulants of hidden
lights. Whatever it was, the esoteric beauty of this jewel-like
luminosity surpassed even that of the stained glass windows in the great
cathedrals of France.
"Pretty isn't it? The chauffeur's words came as an anticlimax to what
Lee felt. "That fellow over there in the middle; he's supposed to have
it all thought out." He pointed to a collossal bronze statue which
towered in the center of the cupola to a height of better than a hundred
feet.
Raising his eyes to the head of this giant, Lee discovered that the
figure was that of "The Thinker" by Rodin though it was cast in
proportion its creator would not have deemed possible.
Completely overwhelmed and overawed by the grandeur of it all, Lee
barely managed to stammer, "What--what is this place; what is it
called?"
"It's kind of an assembly hall; the staff of The Brain have meetings
over here at times. Besides it's sort of a Grand Central; transportation
starts here at times throughout the Brain. But listen, they are already
paging you."
Out of nowhere as it seemed there came a brisk, pleasant female voice.
"Dr. Lee, calling Dr. Semper F. Lee from Canberra University, please
answer Dr. Lee."
* * * * *
The chauffeur nudged Lee in the ribs.
"Say something, she hears you all right."
"Yes, this is Lee speaking," he said in a startled voice.
The voice appeared delighted.
"Good morning, Dr. Lee: I'm Vivian Leahy of Apperception Center 27; I'm
to be your guide on the way up. Now, Dr. Lee, will you please step over
to the glideways. They're to your right. Take glideway T, do just as you
would in a department store--" she giggled, "--stand on it and it will
get you right to the occipital cortex area. I'll be waiting for you over
there. I would have loved to come down and conduct you personally, but
it's against regulations; I'll explain to you the reasons why in a
little while. And if you have any questions while en route, just call
out. So long, Dr. Lee; I'll be seeing you...."
Greatly bewildered by this gushing reception Lee found it hard to follow
instructions, simple as they were. The array of escalators which he
found in a side wing was a formidable one and confusing with movements
in all directions, crisscrossing and overlapping one another. Despite
the very clear illuminated signs Lee almost stepped upon glideway "P"
when "the voice" warned him:
"Oh no, Dr. Lee; just a little to your left--that's fine, that's the
one--there."
Obviously his loquacious guardian angel could not only hear him but
watch his steps as well. Apart from being uncanny, this was
embarrassing; feeling reduced to the mental age of the nursery, he
gripped the rails of "T" which went with him into a smooth and noiseless
upward slide. The shaft was narrow, there was little light at the start
and it grew dimmer as he went. After a minute or so the darkness had
turned almost complete and became oppressive. Simultaneously there was a
disquieting change from the accepted normal manner in which escalators
are supposed to move. Its rise gradually turned perpendicular and in
doing so the steps drew apart. Before long Lee felt squeezed into some
interminable cylinder, standing on top of a piston as it were, a piston
which moved with fair rapidity along transparent walls. That these walls
were either glass or transparent plastics he could perceive from objects
which came streaking by with faint luminosity. They looked like columns
of amber colored liquids in which were suspended what looked like giant
snakes, indistinct shapes, but radiant in the mysterious manner of deep
sea fishes. They almost encircled the transparent cylinder shaft in
which Lee moved; there were many of them; how many Lee couldn't even
attempt to guess. The swiftness of his ascent through these floating,
waving radiances for which he had no name was nightmarish, like falling
into some bottomless well. With great relief he heard the voice of his
guide breaking the spell.
"I'm terribly sorry, Dr. Lee, I shouldn't have deserted you, there was
some little interruption--" palpably the voice was tickled to death
"--my boy friend called from another department and so ... you know how
it is. Let's see, where are you? Good lord, already near the end of the
Medulla Oblongata with the Cerebellum coming and I haven't told you a
_thing_. Goody, where should I begin; I'm all in a dither: Well, Dr.
Lee; most people seem to expect The Brain to be like a great big
telephone exchange, but it really isn't that kind of a mechanism _at
all_. We have found--" she sounded important as if it were her very own
discovery "--that the best pattern for The Brain would actually be the
human brain. So The Brain is organized in nearly identical manner,
likewise our whole terminology is taken from anatomy rather than from
technology. The glideways for instance, travel along the natural
fissures between the convolutions of the various lobes; that's why they
are so very winding as you will see as you enter The Brain proper. Those
columns you see are filled with liquid insulators for the nerve cables
to vibrate in; for they _do_ vibrate, Dr. Lee, as they transmit their
messages.
"You have noticed the narrowness of the glideways, the terrible
confinement of space. I know it's horrible--many of our visitors suffer
claustrophobia, but they just must be built that way. You see even
fractions of a millionth of one second count in the coordination of the
association bundles and nerve circuits, that's why everything is built
as compact as possible, worse than in a submarine.
"Then, too, you must have wondered why everything is so dark inside.
That's another thing wherein The Brain is like the human brain; its
nerve cells are so extremely sensitive that they are distributed by
light. We use black light almost exclusively or activated phosphorous
such as on the sheaths of the nerve cables. For the same reason we of
the personnel are normally not permitted to pass through the interior of
The Brain during operations-time. Exceptions are only made in the case
of very important persons such as you are. Normally one travels to one's
stations through the ducts elevator shafts in the bone matter or rather
the rock outside. Those are _so_ much faster and more comfortable Dr.
Lee; oh I feel _so_ bad about you, poor man, traveling all alone through
this _horrible_ maze without a human soul in sight."
* * * * *
Lee grinned. He wouldn't have liked to be married to this chatterbox no
matter how beautiful she might turn out to be; but at the moment her
exceeding femininity was most comforting in the weirdness which
surrounded him.
The little platform under his feet started acting up again in the
queerest manner. It pushed him forward and the wall at the rear kicked
him in the back; his nose flattened against the sliding cylinder in
front as the contraption reverted from the perpendicular course to
something like the undulations of a traveling wave. Lee darkly perceived
group after group of luminous cables coiling away into cavernous pits
filled with what looked like eyes of cats, faintly aglow and twinkling
at him from the dark. They reminded him of the fireflies of the green
hells he had been in during the war.
"You are now skirting the convolutions of the cerebellum," his guardian
angel told him. "They are electronic tubes which receive sensory
impressions and translate them into impulses for cerebration. Here in
the cerebellum the bulk of the associations is being evoked; these are
then distributed throughout the hemispheres of the cortex or higher
brain. Oh I _do_ wish you wouldn't get seasick, Dr. Lee; _some_ of our
visitors do, you know; it's those wavy, wavy movements."
The sympathetic Vivian came much too close to the truth for Lee to think
her funny. With a sense of approaching disaster he stared at the sliding
cylinder walls; from time to time the passing lights reflected his face,
distorted and decidedly greenish in tint. Trouble was that seemingly
nowhere there was any fixed point on which to stabilize the eye. He
seemed to be carried on the back of a galloping boa constrictor with a
couple of others streaking away under his armpits.
Some of the caves which he had skirted were alive with ruby electronic
eyes and some were green and again there were others in which all the
colors of the rainbow mixed. There was no end to them, nor could he
gauge their depths. After an interminable time of this the glideway went
into a flying upward leap. Again the perspective changed completely; now
the thing seemed to be suspended from the ceiling with slanting views
opening toward the scene below through its transparent sides.
"You are now passing across the commissures into the cerebrum," came
Vivian's voice just as Lee thought that nausea was getting the better of
him. "You'll now ascend along one of the main gyri through the mid-brain
between the hemispheres. Those masses of ganglions below and coming from
all sides as they go over the pass of the ridge are association bundles.
Beyond they disperse again over the cortex mantle to all the centers of
coordination, higher cerebration and higher psychic activities. Things
will be a little easier now for you, Dr. Lee; physically I mean. There
_will_ be some gyrations but not quite so _violent_. Oh you're holding
out fine, like a real _He_-man, you're looking _swell_ in my television
screen."
Certain as he was that he looked rather like a scarecrow in a snowstorm
Lee felt grateful for the praise. Besides she was right; the boa
constrictor which he rode calmed down a little, marching with a dignity
more in accordance with its size. Momentarily the luminous nerve cables,
flying as they did toward him, threatened sudden death, however, they
merely brushed the transparent cylinder, wrapping it up in a rainbow and
then winged away again. Below acres of space streamed by, seed beds one
could imagine to be young typewriters, millions of them, all ticking
away with dainty precision, sparkling with myriads of tiny lights as
they did.
* * * * *
Then there came more acres teeming with fractional horsepower motors; he
could hear their beehive hummings even through the plexiglass. The
things they drove Lee couldn't make out because the adjoining acres of
this underground hothouse for mushrooming machines were again shrouded
in darkness except for sparks which crossed the unfathomable expanse
like tracer bullets. Struck with a sort of word blindness caused by the
sensory impressions barrage, Lee could no longer grasp the meaning of
Vivian's voice as it went on and on explaining things like "crystal
cells," "selenoid cells," "grey matter pyramidal cells," powered somehow
by atomic fission, "nerve loops" and "synthesis gates" which were not to
be confused with "analysis gates" while they looked exactly the same....
Apart from this at least one half of his mental and physical energy had
to be expanded in suppressing nausea and bracing himself against the
gyrations which still jerked his feet from under him and made friction
disks of his shoulders as his body swayed from side to side. All of a
sudden he felt that he was being derailed. There was an opening in the
plastics wall of the cylinder; a curved metal shield like the blade of a
bulldozer jumped into his path, caught him, slowed down his momentum and
delivered him safely at a door marked "Apperception-Center 24." It
opened and within its frame there stood an angel neatly dressed in the
uniform of a registered nurse.
"_There_," said the angel, "at _last_. How did you like your little
Odyssey through The Brain, Dr. Lee?"
Lee pushed a hand through the mane of his hair; it felt moist and much
tangled up.
"Thanks," he said. "It was quite an experience. I enjoyed it; Ulysses,
too, probably enjoyed his trip between Scylla and Charybdis--after it
was over! It's Miss Leahy, I presume."
The reception room where he had landed, the long white corridor, the
instruments gleaming in built-in recesses behind crystal glass, the
nurse's uniform; all spelled clinic, a private one rather for the
well-to-do. Since the procedure was routine he might as well submit to
it, Lee thought. He felt the familiar taste of disinfectant as a
thermometer was stuck into his mouth and then the rubber tube around his
arm throbbing with the vigorous pumpings of the efficient Vivian.
"L. F. Mellish, M.D.--I. C. Bondy, M.D." was painted on the frosted
glass door where she led him afterward. The two medics received Lee with
a show of respect mixed with professional cordiality. Both Bondy, the
dark and oriental looking chap, and Mellish, blond and florid, were in
their middle twenties and both wore tweeds which depressed Lee with the
perfection of their cut. Seeing the professional table at the center of
the office, Lee frowned but started to undress; he wanted this thing
done and over with as soon as possible.
"No, no--that won't be necessary, Dr. Lee," they stopped him laughingly,
"We have already a complete medical report on you. Came in this morning
from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Canberra on our request. You're an
old malaria man, Dr. Lee; your first attack occured in '42 during the
Pacific campaign. Pity you refused to return to the States for a
complete cure right then. As it is it's turned recurrent; left you a bit
anemic, liver's slightly affected. But in all other respects you're
sound of limb and wind; we've gone over the report pretty carefully."
"Then why bother with me at all?" Lee said irritably. He had been in
doctors' hands too often and had become a little impatient of them.
The freckled hand of Mellish patted his arm. "We do things different
over here," he said and Bondy chimed in. "Or rather The Brain does. Just
lie down on that table, Dr. Lee, and relax. We're going to enjoy a
little movie together, that's all."
* * * * *
Lee did as he was bidden, but hesitant and suspiciously. He hated
medical exams, especially those where parts of one's body were hooked up
to a lot of impressive machinery. Of this there obviously was a good
deal. The two medics seemed determined literally to wall him in with
gadgetry. From the ceiling they lowered a huge, heavy-looking disk; not
lights, but more like an electro-magnet beset with protruding needles.
Lee couldn't see the cables but hoped they were strong, for the thing
weighed at least a ton and, overhanging him, looked much more ominous
than the sword of Damocles. They wheeled a silver screen to the foot of
the table and batteries of what appeared to be thermo-therapeutic
equipment to both sides. He wasn't being hooked up to anything, but
there was much activity with testing of circuits, button-pushings and
shiftings of relay-levers. And then all of a sudden lights went out in
the room.
"Say, what is the meaning of all this?" Lee raised his head uneasily
from the hard cushion. All he could see now were arrays of luminous
dials and the faint radiations from electronic tubes filtering through
metal screens inside the apparatus which fenced him in. From behind his
head a suave voice--was it Bondy's or Mellish's answered out of the
dark.
"This is a subconscious analysis and mental reactions test, Dr. Lee.
It's an entirely new method made possible only by The Brain. It has
tremendous possibilities; they might include your own work as well."
"Oh Lord," Lee moaned. "Something like psychoanalysis? Have you got it
mechanized by now? How terrible."
There was a low chuckle from the other side of his head; they both
appeared to have drawn up chairs beyond his field of vision. Lee didn't
like it; he liked none of it, in fact. He felt trapped.
"No, Dr. Lee," said the chuckling voice. "This isn't psychoanalysis in
the old sense at all. You are not exposed to any fanciful human
interpretation, and it isn't wholly mechanical either as you seem to
think. The Brain is going to show you certain images and by way of
spontaneous psychosomatic reaction you are going to produce certain
images in response. Results are visual, immediate and as convincing as a
reflection in a mirror; that's the new beauty of it. And now,
concentrate your mind upon your body. Do you feel anything touching
you?"
"Y-e-s," Lee said, "I think I do--it's--it's uncanny: it's like spiders'
feet--millions of them. It's running all over my skin. What is it?"
"I think he's warming up," whispered the second voice; then came the
first again.
"It's feeler rays, Dr. Lee; the first wave, low penetration surface
rays."
"Where do they come from?"
"From overhead; that is, from the teletactile centers of The Brain."
"What do they do to me?"
There was the low chuckle again. "They excite the surface nerves of your
body, open up the path for the deep-penetration rays; they proceed from
the lower organs to the higher ones; in the end they reach the conscious
levels of your brain. It's the tune-in as we call it, Dr. Lee."
A small movie projector began to purr; a bright rectangle was thrown
upon the silver screen and then, Lee stirred. Hands, soothing but firm
held him down. "Where did you get _those_." he exclaimed.
"From many sources," a calm answer came, "The papers, the newsreels, the
War-Department, old friends of yours...."
* * * * *
What was unrolled on the silver screen were chapters from Lee's own
life. They were incomplete, they were hastily thrown together, they were
like leaves which a child tears from its picturebook. But knowing the
book of his life, every picture acted as a key unlocking the treasures
and the horrors amassed in the vaults of memory. It began with the old
homestead in Virginia. Mother had taken that reel of the new mechanical
cotton picker at work. There it was, a great big thing with the darkies
standing around scratching their heads. There he was himself, aged
twelve, with his .22 cal. rifle in hand and Musha, the coon dog, by his
side; Musha, how he had loved that dog--and how he had cried when it got
killed.
Pictures of the Alexander Hamilton Military Academy. Some of the worst
years of his life he had spent behind the walls of that imitation
castle.
The bombs upon Pearl Harbor.... He had enlisted the following day. On
his return from the induction center mother had said.... Her figure, her
movements, her voice loomed enormous in his memory.... But now the
pictures of the Pacific War flicked across the screen.... They were
picked from campaigns in which he, Lee had participated. They were also
picked from documentaries which the government had never dared to let
the public see ... close-ups of a torpedoed troop carrier, capsizing,
coming down upon the struggling survivors in the shark-infested sea. It
had been his own ship, the _Monticello_, but he had never known that an
automatic camera had operated in the nose of the plane which had circled
the scene....
Port Darwin--Guadacanal--Iwo Jima: close-ups of flame throwing tanks
advancing up a ridge. He had commanded one of them.... Antlike human
figures of fleeing Japs and the flames leaping at them.... So vivid was
the memory that the smell returned to his nostrils, the sickening stench
of burning human flesh. It tortured him. His voice was husky with
revulsion as he said:
"What's the good of all this; take it away."
"Oh, no," one of the medics answered. "We couldn't think of that. We've
got to see this to the end. What are your physical sensations now, Dr.
Lee?"
"It's fingers now--soft fingers. They are tapping me from all sides
like--like a vibration massage. It's strange though--they're tapping
from the inside--little pneumatic hammers at a furious pace. They seem
to work upon my diaphragm for a drum. But it doesn't pain."
"Good, very good; that was a fine description, Lee. That burning city
was Manilla wasn't it, when MacArthur returned? You were in that second
Philippine campaign too weren't you, Lee? That was when you won the
Congressional Medal of Honor."
Yes, it was Manila all right, and there was Mindanao where the Japs had
put up that suicide defence of the caves.
Lee's battalion had been in the attack; steeply uphill with no cover, it
had been murder.... And seeing his best men mowed down, he had turned
berserk. He had used a bulldozer for a battering ram, had driven it
single handed directly into the fire-spitting mouth of the objective,
raising its blade like a battle-axe. An avalanche of rocks and dirt had
come down from the top of the cave under the artillery barrage and he
had rammed the stuff down into the throat of the fiery dragon, again and
again. He never rightly knew he did it. It had all ended in a blackout
from loss of blood. It had been in a hospital that they pinned that
medal on him which he felt was undeserved....
Now the reel showed him what at the time he hadn't seen; the end of the
battle for the Philippines: Pulverised volcanic rock seen from the air,
battle planes swooping down upon little fumaroles, the ventilator shafts
of caves defeated but still unsurrendered. Big, plump canisters
plummeted from the bellies of the planes. And then the jellied gasoline
ignited, turning those thousands of lives trapped in the deep into one
vast funeral pyre.... For over fifteen years he had tried to forget, to
bury the war, to keep it jailed up in the dungeon of the subconscious.
Now those accursed medics had unleashed the monster of war and as it
stared at him from the screen it had that blood-freezing, that hypnotic
effect which the Greeks once ascribed to the monstrous Gorgon.
Mellish's voice--or was it Bondy's?--seemed to come through a fog and
over a vast distance as it asked: "What seems to be the matter, Lee?
You're sweating, your body shakes; what do you feel?"
"It's those rays," he tried to defend himself. "It's the vibrations--the
fingers. They are gripping the heart; it's like the whole body was
turned into a heart. It's like another life invading mine--it's ghostly.
Stop it, for heaven's sake."
"Not yet, Lee, not yet. Everything's under control, you're reacting
beautifully; you're really feeling fine, Lee, just fine."
"If only I could get at his throat," Lee thought. "I would squeeze the
oil of that voice and never be sorry I did." He tried to stir and found
that it couldn't be done; every muscle seemed tied in a cataleptic
state. Then he heard the other medic speak.
"You were shown this little movie Lee in order to stimulate your mind
into the production of a movie of its own. You have responded, you have
answered the call. While you saw the first, the sensory tactile rays
working in five layers of penetration have recorded and have carried
your every reaction to The Brain. The Brain, in a very real sense has
read your mind and it has retranslated these readings into visual
images. We are now going to watch the shapes of your own thoughts. Here
we go...."
* * * * *
The projector which had stopped for a minute began to purr again. As the
first thought-image jumped upon the screen there was a low moan of
amazement mixed with acute pain. It escaped Lee's mouth, uncontrollably
as the abyss of the subconscious opened and he saw:
A monstrous animal shaped like an octopus crawling across a cotton
field. Nearer and nearer it crept, enormous, threatening; and suddenly
there was a sharp excited bark and a spotted coon dog raced across the
field toward the monster. He heard the voice of a small boy whimpering:
"Musha, oh Musha, don't, _please_ don't." But the dog wouldn't hear and
the monster flashed an enormous evil eye, just once and then it gripped
the dog with its tentacle arms tearing its body apart, chewing it up
between horrible sabre teeth.... As through an ether mask he heard the
two medics say: "That must have been a considerable shock to him," and
"With a sensitive nature like that, and at that sensitive age, such an
impression becomes permanent."
The Alexander Hamilton Military Academy appeared, not real, yet more
than real. It was a narrow court yard surrounded by huge walls slanting
toward the inside; it was huge and forbidding, fortress-towers standing
guard, it was enormous gates forever barred, it was the figure of a huge
Marine pacing fiercely back and forth in front of those gates, the same
ghostly Marine watching all gates so that nobody could escape....
"That's probably his father," the voices whispered behind his ears.
"Yes; the archetype. He'll bring up the Mother, too, I'll bet...."
As in those paintings of the primitives where kings and queens are very
tall and common folks are very small, Lee saw her now: Mother. That had
been just after induction when he had brought her what he thought was
joyous news. Her face filled the whole screen. It looked as if composed
from jagged ectoplasms, quite transparent except for the eyes. Deep and
burning with pain they were, boring into his own. And there was smoke
coming out of her mouth and it formed words: "But, Semper, you are still
a child. One mustn't use children for this sort of thing; one mustn't."
Every letter of these smoke-written words seemed to be flying toward him
on wings....
"Terrific," the voices murmured at Lee's back. "Remember the case
history? She died of cancer six months after he went overseas." "Yes, I
remember; he's never seen her again. He's probably built up a strong
complex out of that one, too."
On the screen now danced images almost totally abstracted from the
realities of the filmed documentaries from the war.
They were whirling columns of smoke; they were like the vast, dark
interior of a huge thunderhead cloud through which a glider soars,
illuminated only by the flashes of lightning as for split seconds they
revealed a fraction of some horrible reality: A burning ocean with
screaming human faces bobbing in the flames. The whirling tracks of a
tank going across some writhing human body and leaving it flat in its
tracks, sprawling like an empty coat dyed red. And then the swirling,
howling darkness closing in again....
"Interesting eh?" A voice broke through his cataleptic trance and the
other answered: "Beautiful; almost a classical case. Great plasticity of
imagination." "Yes; that's exactly what sets me wondering; the fellow
should have cracked up by all the rules of the game." "How do we know
that he hasn't? Maybe he was psycho and they didn't notice; they had
some godawful asses for psychiatrists in war medicine. It's quite a
possibility; well, his image production is ebbing now; I don't expect
anything new of significance, what do you think?" "Now; we've got what
we wanted anyway. Let's take him out of it; but go easy on the
rheostats."
The projector stopped. The masterful, the ghostly fingers which had been
playing on the keyboard of his mind very slowly receded from a furious
fortissimo to a pianissimo. At first only the flutterings of the
diaphragm eased, then the violent palpitations of a foreign pulse
slipped off the heart; the liberated lungs expanded; tremors were
running through the body as through the ice of a frozen river at spring;
and then at last the mind escaped from its captivity.
* * * * *
Gradually as in a cinema after the show the lights reappeared. Blinking,
Lee stared at the man who stood over him taking his pulse; it was Bondy.
Mellish stood at the foot of the table with his back to Lee; he seemed
to watch some apparatus which made noises like a teletype machine.
Swinging his legs off the table Lee said:
"I'm okay; you needn't hold my hand."
But then he noticed that he wasn't. His head spun, his whole body was
wet with perspiration, he felt very weak and limp. He swayed and buried
his face in his hands trying to gain his balance, trying to shake off
the trance. "Excuse me," he said. "I'm a bit dizzy."
As he opened his eyes again the two medics were standing right in front
of him and smiling down on him with their bland, professional smiles.
Lee felt the upsurge of intense dislike. He had seen those smiles
before, often--too often: they seemed to be standard equipment with the
medical profession whenever a fellow was about to be dispatched to the
"table", or worse, to the psychopathic ward. Instinct told him that
there was something in the air and also that his best bet would be a
brave show of normalcy:
"This test, these new methods of psychoanalysis, they are extremely
interesting," he said with an effort.
"Thank you, Dr. Lee," it was Mellish who spoke. "We knew you would find
the experience worthwhile even if we put you under a considerable
strain. A complete analysis in those olden days of Dr. Freud took three
years; now thanks to The Brain we get approximately the same results
within as many hours; that's some progress, isn't it?"
"Enormous," Lee said dryly while his eyes wandered over to Bondy; he
knew the pattern, it would be Bondy's turn now to have a shot at him.
There it came; and how he loathed the false heartiness of that voice.
"Dr. Lee, I'm afraid we have a bit of bad news for you--your test--the
results have been negative. You have failed."
"Failed?" For a fraction of a second Lee's heart stopped beating. "In
what sense? And what does that mean?"
Now it was Mellish's turn. "Dr. Lee, there must be frankness amongst
colleagues and as a fellow scientist you'll understand. In the first
place the decision isn't ours; we merely conduct the test on behalf of
The Brain. The Brain, as you know, is the most highly developed machine
in all the world. Its functions, its whole existence depend entirely
upon the human skills and the human loyalties amongst its staff. A
three-billion-dollar investment, plus the vital role of The Brain in our
national defence, justify the extreme precautions which we are forced to
take for its protection."
"What exactly are you driving at?"
"Please don't take it as an insult," now it was Bondy again. "There's
nothing personal in this. It's merely that your emotional-reaction chart
definitely shows a certain antagonism which from childhood-experience
and war-experience you have built up against technology. It's nothing
but a potential; it is confined to your subconscious. But even a
potential danger of subconscious revolt is more than The Brain can risk
amongst its associates. We fully appreciate the wish of our Dr. Scriven
to enlist your very valuable aid, but...."
"I see" Lee interrupted, "but you would feel safer if I were to return
to Australia by the next plane."
His head bent under the blow. A short 24 hours ago The Brain had been a
nebulous, almost a non-existent thing. Since then a whole new world had
been opened to him in revelations blinding and magnetic with infinite
possibilities. His work--the efforts of a lifetime--would not equal what
he could do in days with the aid of The Brain. His love--he would never
see Oona Dahlborg again as he left under a shadow, rejected by The
Brain.
"Sorry I wasted so much of your time," he said aloud. "I do not believe
in this analysis; I cannot disprove it though. That's all, I guess; I
better be going now."
"Here's your pass, Dr. Lee." He took mechanically the yellow slip which
Bondy handed him....
He had already opened the door when somebody sharply called: "Dr. Lee,
one moment please."
He whirled around. "Yes?"
"Will you please read what's written on your slip?"
Suspiciously he looked at the yellow paper; what more torture were these
fellows going to inflict? Then his eyes popped as he read: "Lee, Semper
Fidelis, 39: Cortex capacity 119%, Sensitivity 208%, Personality
integration 95%, Service qualification 100%...." There were more data,
but he didn't read them as wide-eyed he stared at the medics. With their
faces beaming they looked like identical twins to him; Lee never knew
who said the words:
"Congratulations Lee. That has been your last test. We just had to find
out how you would take a serious frustration. You've passed it with
flying colors. Shake."