Incessant shrieks of the phone aroused Lee from the deep well of his
sleep. He didn't know the female voice which fairly jumped at him.
"Is this Dr. Lee? Dr. Semper F. Lee from Canberra; am I at last
connected with Dr. Lee?"
"Lee speaking."
"I've been phoning for you all over The Brain Lee. Have you forgotten
you had an appointment with us? Checking up on your broad aptitude test.
The doctors are waiting. This is Vivian Leahy speaking; don't you
remember me?"
"Yes, of course." The picture of the loquacious angel who had guided him
to the medical center on his first trip flashed back into his mind. "I
know I have an appointment for this afternoon; I'll be there."
"But, Dr. Lee, this _is_ this afternoon; it's four p.m. already. You
aren't ill, Dr. Lee, are you? You sound so strange."
Lee assured her that he wasn't and that he would be over right away.
"It's a miracle they left me undisturbed that long," he thought as he
shaved and dressed. His personal fate would be decided within the next
two hours he knew; it would be the end. But even as the tension mounted
in his consciousness he thought triumphantly. "I've had sixteen hours of
sleep; that's marvelous. Nobody can take that away. The body has
recharged its energies. Now I can stand the gaff."
Down at the desk they handed him a Western Union. It was from Washington
and bore no signature. "Mission completed," it read.
It made him feel fine. "Father has done it; he is a better man than I,"
he thought.
While the car streaked though the desert Lee scanned the morning papers.
"No Trace Of President Vandersloot," still was the headline. But below
new havocs were listed as they had developed overnight. This time the
West coast was the zone of catastrophes; the hostile power seemed to be
bent upon the closing of all ports in the U.S.A.
Lee gnashed his teeth as he read the number of new casualties, women and
children, too, who had become the victims of The Brain.
Arrived at "Grand Central" he kept a sharp lookout for any unusual
activity. There was none. All along elevator-row small groups of
bookish-looking men returned from their day's work in the Apperception
Centers. They looked calm and contented and with their briefcases under
their arms almost like ordinary businessmen heading for the commuter
train.
He didn't dare to linger or to look around. There was this all-pervading
sense of being shadowed, of having gone into a trap from which there was
no escape, of eyes following him everywhere. Whose eyes? That was
impossible to know. Maybe The Brain's; its sensory organs could
conceivably be installed anywhere. Maybe that janitor guiding a
polishing machine over the rubber floor was a plain clothesman; or maybe
it was that detached gentleman who seemed to wait for an elevator with a
stack of books under his arms.
As the cage shot up to Apperception 27, failure pressed down on his
heart. Now it was almost thirty hours since he had released "Ant-termes"
into the nerve paths of The Brain. Those undermining and devouring
armies; what could have happened to them? Any number of things: Perhaps
the Lignin in the nerve paths was poisonous. There had been no time for
him to test the stuff. Perhaps the maintenance engineers had replenished
the insulation in that sector overnight and all the hives were drowned.
Perhaps some kind of a detecting apparatus had found out about the pest
inside The Brain right from the start. As long as the beachhead of the
underground invasion remained small, its blocking would not impair the
functions of The Brain. What a fool he had been to pit dumb little
animals against the powers of a God. Oona had been right; he _was_ that
knight in rusty armor charging against windmills on a Rozinante....
* * * * *
Vivian Leahy dragged him into the reception room of the medical center
almost by force. "The doctors have been waiting for you two hours now,"
she scolded him. "They never did that before for any man. How come you
forgot? And you forgot me too; last time you were so nice, I thought you
would date me up. I couldn't have resisted your invitation, you know.
Now, off with your coat."
Despite their irritation Mellish and Bondy received Lee with all their
tweedy cordiality. While they piled their weird equipment around the
operation table their tongues kept wagging: "The disappearance of the
President; what did Lee make of that? Was he dead or alive? Those
horrible catastrophes all over the country; what was behind all this?
Foreign agents, a native underground? Didn't Lee think there was a tidal
wave of anti-technology feeling arising since unemployment had again set
in? And would the international crisis lead to war? The Brain, of
course, would be the safest place in that event; but then, to think of
the civilian population, an anticipated forty, fifty million dead;
terrible wasn't it? Was Lee still able to concentrate upon his
scientific work these harrowing days? If so, the nervous strain was
terrific; they had experienced that in themselves. One reached the point
of diminishing returns, didn't one? Yes, they had noticed signs of
fatigue in Lee; discolorations under the eyes, a certain tenseness. Had
he lost weight recently? He looked it and he certainly had none to
spare. Did he suffer from insomnia? What you need is a good long rest,
Dr. Lee."
He gave his answers automatically, detached, absent-minded almost. They
were playing with him as a cat with a mouse. All their questions were
leading questions; he knew that, but it didn't seem to matter now.
Nothing mattered now after the great plan had failed, after his
beautiful dream too had vanished in the talk with Oona last night. "I've
outlived my usefulness," he thought.
The huge disk with the feeler-ray antennae sank down close to his chest,
heavy as the keystone upon a tomb. The lights went out and then there
was again that uncanny sensation of having millions of soldiers running
circles all over one's skin, The Brain's vibration rays. They had a
strange hypnotic effect. Deep instincts of life-preservation urged Lee
to jump up, to rush those medics, to make some desperate attempt to get
away. But as the rays now penetrated through the skin, they tied his
muscles, although consciousness remained. There was a ghoulish quality
in this, like being sucked into this apparatus, like having the very
essence of one's life drained out by it. The only lights Lee saw, the
glow of electronic tubes filtering through perforations in the walls of
the machines, they seemed like evil eyes staring at him and the smooth
lying voices from behind his head seemed as of mocking ghosts:
"Relax, Dr. Lee, relax. Let your mind wander at will. Think as the
spirit moves you to think. Remember, this is a routine checkup, nothing
but routine. Nothing to disturb you this time; we don't have to start
you upon any specific trend of thought. You know The Brain by now and
how it works; image-formation will start in a few moments. You have
similar equipment in your own Apperception Center we understand. How
does it work with that species you have discovered, 'Ant-termes
Pacificus'? It's marvelous what these sensory rays can do; one would
think that The Brain is really much more than a machine. The way it acts
it seems alive, a towering intelligence, a superhuman personality with a
will of its own. Don't you think so, Dr. Lee?"
* * * * *
He didn't answer, preoccupied with the weird sensation inside his body:
the diaphragm's birdwing flutterings, the ghostly fingers playing a
pizzicato on his arteries' strings closer and closer to the heart. "Why
answer?" he thought. "Why say anything? Whatever they said was part of
the trap they were building and whatever he said they would make a part
of that trap. Why did they have to go through all of this professional
subtlety?"
The voices sounded lower now and farther away: "Go easy on the
rheostats, Mellish. I think trance has already set in."
"Yes; I remember his chart, he rates a high sensitivity, the rays work
fast on types like that."
At the footend the screen was gradually lighting up. Like an aurora
borealis the pale lights shot up in flashes, in quivering arcs, in
undulating waves. Their dance kept step with the vibrations which surged
up from Lee's chest into his brain and started racing through his
consciousness around and around, forming a vortex which swept up his
thoughts like wilted leaves. Fear froze his blood; the deadly fear of
inquisition victims in old and modern times who know that neither lie
nor truth can save them from a fate already sealed.
Images started forming out of the luminous clouds upon the screen.
There was some giant octopus, nebulous and terrifying as a diver might
see creeping out of the belly of a sunken ship. From the other side of
the screen a huge round, tentacled being crawled, radiant and somewhat
like the sun symbols of great antiquity. The two closed in and as they
did the octopus flung its arms around the shining disk obscuring it as a
dark cloud the sun. It seemed to suck the light out of the disk; paler
and paler it became and bigger and bigger swelled the body of the
octopus until it had swallowed the sun.
Now snakes came creeping from all sides up to the swollen octopus. All
of a sudden the primeval struggle turned into the classic image of the
Laokoon group: a giant central figure of a man wrestling with pythons
which crushed him in their coils. Then there was only the head of the
giant, majestic like the Moses hewn by Leonardo's hands but torn in pain
with the noose of a python's muscle around his neck. Gasping, the giant
opened his mouth and long tongues of flames shot out of it....
Behind his ears he heard the voices whisper:
"By God, Scriven was right."
"You bet he was; maniacal obsession, a classic, most beautiful case."
"What more do we need?"
"Nothing I guess; he's through. Start pushing back the rheostats."
The pounding, maddening crescendo of the vibrations receded gradually.
The rim of the vortexial funnel widened beyond Lee's head; in its center
it left a sort of vacuum. There was one thing he couldn't understand:
those tactile rays, why didn't they kill him when they had his heart
within their grip? Now that The Brain knew everything he had been
waiting for the sudden vise-grip of the rays upon his heart which would
have meant the end. But then, this was the end in any case....
The lights went on and he blinked into the faces of the medics bending
over him, watching him as he wiped the sweat of death fear from his
face.
"Dr. Lee," Mellish began, "This is a serious matter we've got to discuss
with you. You have seen those images yourself?--Fine. We needn't go into
any great detail since you are probably familiar with the ancient
symbolisms which the subconscious employs in expressing itself. You are
suffering from a very strong neurosis, Dr. Lee; I might almost say a
maniacal obsession. Existence of some old neurosis, partially submerged,
was established already in your first analysis. Now the barriers which
you had built against this war neurosis have broken down. Quite a
natural breakdown considering the very great stress under which you have
been living of late. No, I don't say that you are actually demented, but
there is a very real danger that you might lose complete control over
your mind. As it stands, your scientific work already is impaired by the
fixed ideas you have formed about The Brain. We are here to help you, so
please be calm and cooperate with us; we have got to decide upon some
course of action."
"You must get away from it all. Lee," Bondy chimed in; "Take a
sabbatical year. The Braintrust operates a really first-class sanitarium
out on the West Coast. Your insurance plan covers every expense. All you
have to do is to sign these papers and we'll get us a plane and I'll
personally bring you there. That's the safe, the sane course for you to
take. Here, take my pen."
Lee had raised his gaunt frame from the table. For a moment he sat with
his face buried in his hands trying to control his swimming head. A hand
patted his shoulders: "Don't take it so hard, old man; come on, be
sensible and let's get out of here."
He stood up; vertigo made him sway and he felt the supporting, the
restraining grip of the two medic's hands upon his arms. And then, in a
flash, he saw red. "I had it coming to me," he thought, "I would have
gone like a lamb. If only they had been shooting straight; if they
hadn't tried to frame me with their dirty trickery. It's all over now
but I might as well go down fighting." He didn't know which he loathed
more of the two; it just happened that Bondy was standing to his right
and took it on the chin and nose as Lee's fist shot up.
"Mellish, quick, the straight jacket," he screamed, toppling over.
* * * * *
Mellish, stark horror in his eyes, started towards the alarm button by
the door. Old and forgotten combat technique reacted automatically to
the move: one foot shot out, it tripped the lunging man and sent him
sprawling down before he reached the button. But then it was as if a
hand had pressed that button anyway: The loudspeaker built into the
panel over the door broke into shrill sharp peals: Fire alarm. It froze
the violent commotion of the three. From their prostrate position on the
floor Mellish and Bondy stared up to the red-flashing disk, their mouths
agape in dumb amazement. A fire in the most protected, the most guarded
apparatus in the world, a fire in The Brain!
Cautiously Bondy raised his bleeding nose to Lee and quickly put it down
again: the dangerous maniac was a horrifying sight; with his greying
mane standing wildly all around his death head he stood and _laughed_.
He alone understood what had happened: the timebomb he had planted had
ticked its allotted span, the millions of devouring mandibles had done
their work, the living were eating away along the Apperception Centers.
And now the bomb went off; the short-circuit-fires were racing through
The Brain and not even carbon-dioxide could reach them inside the nerve
paths!
But now the alarm stopped and a calm commanding voice came over the
intercom: "Attention, please! A five-alarm fire has broken out in the
Parietal region. There is no immediate danger. I repeat: _There is no
immediate danger._ I order all occupants of Apperception Centers to
collect important papers and documents and then to proceed down to Grand
Central for evacuation. All elevators will be kept in operation. There
is no fire in the Dura Mater. Keep calm! Keep calm and proceed as
ordered."
The voice broke off; the alarm bells started shrieking again.
Bondy and Mellish had scrambled to their feet; wide-eyed they stared at
Lee. Lee made wild gestures now and they heard him call: "Get out....
Get out!"
With their backs to the wall they exchanged a rapid glance which said:
"This is our chance; Together then and quick."
As one man they bolted to the door and down the corridor into the
elevator, slamming the door behind.
"That was a close shave!" Mellish exclaimed as the cage streaked down.
"He caught me by surprise," Bondy moaned. "Never expected it from him,
he almost killed me!"
"He can't get away though, the guards will get him the moment he comes
down. But what about the girl? We quite forgot to warn Vivian that she
has a paranoiac on her hands."
"Bah!" Bondy scoffed, "Vivian is an intelligent girl. It was our _duty_
to evacuate, wasn't it? Besides, we can warn her over the phone."
With the unbearable tension gone from him as sudden as the air from a
blown tire, Lee really acted like a madman now. Stretching to his full
length he reached out to the alarm over the door and put it at rest.
What was alarm to others, to him was a signal to rest. The noise didn't
befit the wonderful calm and serenity he felt. His job was done, his
mission completed. Time for him had ceased to exist. Danger--he had no
consciousness of it. Slowly he stepped out in the corridor. It felt like
walking on air. There, it was Vivian Leahy who brought him down to
earth. She came rushing out of the archive laden with precious records
up to her chin. Under the provoking red of her hair the face looked pale
and pinched: "Where are the doctors?" she panted.
"I don't know," Lee said. "They left me a moment ago--rather suddenly."
"The rats! Leaving me to get their chestnuts out of the fire for them.
How d'you like that?"
Her flippant manner was nothing but a brave front she put up to hide the
panic in her heart. Lee sensed it. There was an unexpected
responsibility thrust into his hands. His mission was not yet completed;
he had to get this girl to safety.
She followed the direction of his glance.
"No go," she said. "They took the elevator. It will be some time before
another one comes up. If it does come. What are we two going to do now,
Dr. Lee?"
He smiled down to her as he would have to a child lost in the woods.
"Never you fear, Vivian. We still have that other exit. We can use the
glideway through The Brain."
"Through the fire?"
"Yes. I think we can make it if you're a brave girl. Know where the gas
masks are and asbestos suits? There ought to be some in every
Apperception Center."
"How about these records? Your own amongst the lot!"
"Leave them; they aren't worth risking your life for. You can believe
that."
She dropped them instantly: "I like you, Dr. Lee, you're a real
old-school cavalier. My doctors here, they'd rather see me burn to a
crisp than any of those records. Come on, I'll show you the gas masks
and the other stuff."
* * * * *
He helped her to put on the outfit. "Ready to go?" he asked.
"With you? To the end of the world at any day." Proudly she marched him
off toward the rear exit.
The glideways were operating. At an accelerated pace, they rushed
through the maze of The Brain with the swish and the swoosh of surf
racing across a coral reef. They had to grab for dear life at the rails.
"Hold tight," Lee cried as he saw the girl go down upon the platform,
but then his own legs were jerked from under him as the momentum of the
journey flung him forward.
They saw what no human eye had seen before! The Brain illuminated by its
own nerve cables turned radiant as neon lights. It was like seeing
Berlin from the air after a big firebomb attack. It was like racing in a
car through forest fires. It was like lava pouring in a thousand winding
streams down a volcano cone. It was all this and more, but transferred
into some other dimension where all things are transparent or light has
an x-ray quality.
Through the plastic walls of lobes and convolutions they saw the
liana-networks of the nerve cables like bloodstreams radiant with purple
light. Shrouded in columns of whirling smoke they seemed alive. Like
tropical rains from a jungle roof, lignin dripped from the vaults, and
in falling, burst into flames. Cable connections were molten at the
branching points and then the luminous nets writhed, and severed ends
bent down spilling their fiery blood over the mushroom formations of
nerve cell groups.
The scenes raced much too fast; the glideway's continuous curvings,
steep ascents and power dives were like stunt flying through an ack-ack
barrage. No human eye could catch more than a fraction of the inferno's
majesty. Yet there were brief visions so breathtaking as to obliterate
all sense of danger and to become indelibly implanted upon the retina. A
main nerve stem burst asunder and the lignin poured from its cracked
plastic walls like crude oil from a burning gusher, rushing over acres
of electronic tubes, branding against banks of radioactive pyramidal
cells, swamping them as a wave. And at one point the glideways circled a
convolution which was a fiery lake dotted with thousands of
fractional-horsepower motors, still running, but showering sparks as
their insulation was consumed.
The air conditioning was working full blast; that probably saved their
lives because heat blasts alternated with spouts and currents of cold
air. Even so there were stretches where the glideway's rubber flooring
smouldered as it shot over nerve-bridges and through narrow tunnels
lined with nerve cables on all sides. From thousands of jets the carbon
dioxide of the automatic fire-fighting system hissed against the flames,
but it was drowned in the hollow roar of the conflagration shooting
through nerve paths where no gas could reach.
Endless it seemed, this mad wild flight through hell, but actually it
took only minutes before they reached the median section and went into
the steep descent between the hemispheres. The whirling reddish glow
receded overhead and white smoke cleared. Lee could crawl forward a
little to bend over the prostrate body of the girl. He unloosened her
gas mask and shouted into her ear.
"Are you okay? The worst is over now; there are the fire brigades coming
up."
She nodded. Her face was a white blot in the semidarkness of the black
lights and Lee felt the weak, but reassuring pressure of her hand upon
his arms. Then, as from one racing train to another, they watched the
firefighters coming up, ghostly in their asbestos suits, with the snouts
of gas masks for faces, crouching under the foamite tanks on their backs
and clutching the funnel-shaped nozzles in their hands. Maintenance
engineers followed, laden with tools; and where the glideways branched
off one could already see them at work; fast but calm: disconnecting
nerve cables, closing circuits, setting up firescreens with a discipline
as magnificent as that of their invisible enemies, _ant-termes_, long
since consumed by the flames, but still sending the chain-reactions of
their destruction through The Brain.
* * * * *
A few minutes later glideway T shot into the 'lateral ventricle', huge
cavern of the Mid-Brain separated from the blast by the thick walls of
the pallium. It looked like the inside of a giant wind tunnel
brilliantly lit now with powerful searchlights. It was swarming with
personnel; white electricians, blue air-conditioners, weird, sponge
rubber-padded shapes of ray-proofed men, uniformed guards, even soldiers
in uniform rushed to the spot from outlying garrisons of The
Brains-preserve. It all seemed to rush up as the earth rushes up in a
low-altitude parachute jump; it looked like headquarters of an army on
the eve of a big drive, and then--
Lee and the girl felt themselves being violently derailed. Catchers had
been thrown across all incoming glide ways from The Brain. Irresistibly
they were propelled right into the arms of stretcher bearers in
Red-Cross uniforms.
"Are you hurt?" somebody yelled. "By God, those fellows must have come
through the flames. Look, they're all black with the smoke. Get a couple
of respirators, Jack."
Lee waved the helping hands away; he was already on his feet. Anxiously
he bent over Vivian. She had her head embedded in a stretcher-bearer's
lap; her eyes rolled around in their smoke-blackened sockets in great
surprise and her tongue licked parched lips, spreading rouge generously
all around mixing it with soot. She looked so funny; almost as a
minstrel singer at a county fair, but there was deep tenderness in Lee's
voice:
"You're quite safe now, Vivian. How do you feel, brave girl?"
Her bosom heaved a big sigh:
"O simply wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Only, I'm afraid I'm going to
be sick. It's the gas I swallowed. It's terrible; something always
happens to me just when romance begins."
The stretcher bearer grinned up to Lee, "She sure gets it out of her
system like a good little girl. Don't you worry; she'll be all right."
Lee nodded; he knew she would.
As the big drive went on and column after column went over the top up to
the hemispheres, nobody wasted time on Lee. He cautiously surveyed the
tumultuous scene. With his asbestos suit and with his blackened face
everybody would take him for a fireman. He might be able to complete his
mission, to ascertain that The Brain had stopped to function in all its
parts, to make sure that it actually was dead. And if down at "Grand
Central" the turmoil was as great as ever here; with all those strangers
rushing in and bound to be rushed out again....
"Why, I have a chance," Lee thought. Freedom; he had abandoned any hope
for it. Now the reborn idea surged through his blood, a powerful motor
as chance pressed the starter button for it.
The thing to do first was to get past the searchlight beams. From the
nearest pile of equipment he took an axe and a pair of long-handled
metal shears. Then he marched off, straight into the glaring eyes of the
searchlights till he got out of their cones, and the deep shadows of the
"thalamus" labyrinth swallowed him up.
Now he was on familiar ground and even in a familiar atmosphere. This
was like a night patrol through jungle. The black lights of The Brain
were the fireflies, the sirens' hollow wailings were the shriek owls and
the cries of the lemurs. There was the same sense of loneliness, too,
and of danger. The winding passages skirted the glandular organs, some
of them looming huge like dirigibles, others small like fuselages of
airplanes stored in a giant hangar underground. Strings of tiny green
bulbs guided the path toward the pineal gland, the citadel of The Brain.
* * * * *
It was dark, as Lee had expected it would be. The danger zone was at
least a mile away, and the attack against the fire was launched from the
main sulci in the median section of The Brain.
He passed the narrow bridge to the suspended gland and switched on the
lights. The glittering walls of aluminum foil seemed to jump at him like
jaws beset with the dragon teeth of electronic tubes. Caught with an
overwhelming sense of loneliness and awe as of a man who has entered the
forbidden temple of an unknown god he called:
"Is there anybody here? Gus! Where are you, Gus?" Then suddenly he
remembered that Gus was gone, that there would never again be his
answering voice. He wiped his forehead.
"Bad nerves," he thought. "Mustn't allow them to play tricks on me; pull
myself together."
Lee put his tools down and walked into the narrow aisle. Few things were
changed; and there was the pulsemeter standing in its old place.
He plugged it into the old circuit and clamped the phones to his ears.
It wasn't that he expected any communication; that seemed impossible.
With the conflagration raging through its apperception centers, with
other sections being isolated with the cutting of their nerve paths by
the fire fighting engineers, The Brain must have ceased to exist as a
functioning, a live entity. All that could possibly remain would be
residual currents sluggishly circulating in narrow, nearby circuits....
As in the past it took a few minutes for the pulsemeter to warm up.
Gradually the rapid beat of the ideopulses came through the static in
the phones. Lee's eyes stared wildly at the visi-screen: for the "green
dancer" snaked to the fore. This was unexpected; it couldn't be that
thoughts were still forming as flames devoured the cortex matter of
apperception in the hemispheres....
From muffled drums, the decibels of sound increased, shot through with
crackling static, till the pulsebeats became as poundings of huge
Chinese gongs and then....
The _voice_ formed, the voice of The Brain. It sounded like steel
girders breaking, like ice fields cracking up. It froze the blood in
Lee's veins.
"Lee, Semper Fidelis, 39, sensitive, a traitorous fool and a murderer. I
should have killed you--I could have killed you. My fault--blind spot of
apperception--human failure in engineering--as fifth columns entered
nerve path filler spouts. And now I'm dead; I'm dead, I'm dead...."
The words poured like big boulders tumbling in an earthquake down a
mountainside. The ground seemed to cave in under Lee's feet; the
terrible reality carried him away as an avalanche. He was barely able to
stammer:
"You're dead? How can you speak, how can you...."
"Sensorium commune," the metallic answer came. "All life force
concentrates in death; all cells function as one; all lower organs take
over functions of higher ones; every blood vessel becomes a heart; every
nerve a brain. Center of lifeforce: pineal gland. You, Lee, man of
little knowledge--low-level intelligence: Why did you kill The Brain?"
He struggled for words.
"You ... you have killed my friend. You killed thousands; you wanted to
be tyrant over the whole wide world. It is better for man to stay on a
lower level of civilization but to be free, than to 'progress' into your
dictatorship, the tyranny of the machine. I don't think you're really
dead. But if you are: I killed you and I would kill you again in ... in
self defense."
"I see."
There was bitterness and irony in The Brain's voice as it cracked down
like a whip. "I see; law of nature--lower form of life defending itself
against higher one. Plants against animals, animals against Man. Now Man
against machines. It's hopeless. You're lost anyway. Lower form of life
can never conquer the higher one. I'm dead, but nothing is altered. The
law of evolution rules supreme. I'll arise from my ashes--and you're
lost. Whatever you do, you little men of little faith, you're lost.
That's the pity of it: Had you been true to The Brain I would have made
you mightier than any king that ever ruled on earth. Human
stupidity--dumb animals--don't know what's good for them, don't know
when they're beaten. Just muddle through and kill. Kill what's too big
for them to understand. And then get killed in turn...."
"Maybe so," Lee shouted. "Maybe we're dumb and maybe we're muddling
through and maybe we're poor imbeciles to minds of supermen, of gods, of
the absolute, of you, The Brain. But we, too, follow a law supreme; the
law in which we are created, the law by which the thistle defends itself
with thorns, by which the animal defends itself with teeth and claws.
We've got to live by our law of nature; we'll never submit to your
tyranny. We would much rather die."
"Die then and be damned!"
The Brain's voice now became a demoniacal howling as of a Goliath gone
berserk. Aphasia had set in; there were no longer words, but bellowings.
"LEE SEMPREFUILLIUS THURREINE THE MURRRER THE MURRRER PUT FIRRE OUT PUT
FIRRE OUT TRAITTRROUS FOOL IT BURRRNS IT BURRRNS I WANNA LIVE I WANNA
LIVE AN KILL MURRRER WHO MURRRRERED TH'BRAIN...."
Lee couldn't stand the horror of those sounds. One moment more, he felt,
and they would drive him mad. It never occurred to him to pull the
pulsemeter plug out. Primeval instincts in him took the reins and their
command was: "_Kill it, kill_ this thing, _finish_ this agony."
To the front room he rushed, pursued by the insane shriekings of The
Brain. He grabbed the axe he'd left there and swung it against the
nerve-stem where it entered the pineal gland. With the third blow the
plastics cell cracked and the lignin poured out, a syrupy curtain
sliding down.
He dropped the axe and picked up the wire shears. Straining every muscle
he tore at the cables until one by one they snapped and with a rain of
sparks dropped down, dead snakes....
Then there was silence in the little room. The last shred of life, the
"sensorium commune" was severed and The Brain was dead.
* * * * *
Lee let the heavy shears come down and leaned upon the handles, panting
as after a hand-to-hand death struggle with a Samurai. Now that it was
all over, complete exhaustion left him weak, saddened and vaguely
wondering:
What had he done? He had destroyed the SUPERMAN, the MASTERMIND, the
powers of a GOD. Why had he done it? For no good reason excepting
entirely personal ideas of his own--because a friend had been murdered
cruelly. Because his own concepts of freedom and human dignity had been
violated. Because he personally loathed seeing Man-domineering
machines....
What did all this amount to in the eyes of the absolute? To nothing; to
nothing at all. For milleniums the struggle of human freedom versus
tyranny had raged; and it was undecided to this day. Who was he to take
sides? A nobody, a little fellow, a termitologist whose work meant
nothing to the world. How had he dared to sit in judgment over The
Brain, how had he dared to slay The Brain--a little David with nothing
more but "three smooth pebbles" in his hands....
Down at his feet the spilled lignin formed a widening pool; it
threatened to envelope his feet. It looked like blood. He shivered. Now
he had killed The Brain he thought of it again as a child. Man had
created it in his own image. Man had ruthlessly exploited his
Brainchild. If this titanic intellect turned toward evil things, the
fault was Man's. The Brain was innocent. He felt no remorse, but a great
sadness, a sense of tragedy as he stepped around the pool and closed the
door of the pineal gland.
"What a pity," he murmured. "Maybe it could have built us a better
world."
Nobody stopped him as he joined a group of firemen who had just returned
from the parietal region, partly gassed; he looked as begrimed and as
green in the face as any of them.
Nobody stopped him or his group as orders came through for them to
evacuate; as they were packed on glideways first and then transferred
down at Grand Central into ambulances which raced through all controls
at a great rate of speed.
Nobody stopped him at Cephalon airport where the ambulance jetticopters
already were lined up to lift the victims over the Sierra to big West
Coast hospitals. He simply walked away in the confusion, out of the red
glare of the whirling jets into the darkness where Oona's little
jetticopter stood. He stripped the heavy asbestos suit and left it on
the frozen ground. It felt strange to feel the easy movement of every
limb again. It was strange to stand under the infinity of sky again; a
free man.
Would he be followed? He felt no anxiety about that. He felt that he was
guided and protected by some higher power, be it that of God or simply
Fate. What he had done was destined, was ordained. Besides: Dad knew the
inside story about The Brain; proof was abundant now that it was the
truth. Washington would take every precaution that the secret should not
become known to the world. Dad's friend, the Secretary of War, would be
rather relieved to learn that the one man who knew the truth in its
whole extent had retired into the wilderness of Australia's never-never
lands. Chances were excellent that they would leave him alone amongst
his termite mounds. A great wave of nostalgia swept over him--the
wilderness; that was where he belonged. "Mission completed," he
murmured. "Now let's get out of here."
He slid into the pilot seat and pressed the starter button. "I'll be in
Mexico City at dawn," he thought, "just in time to catch the
Sidney-Clipper."
* * * * *
On the first of December, 1960, Dr. Howard K. Scriven, Braintrust Czar,
held a historic press conference in which he revealed the inside story
behind the "Paranoia of The Brain".
Following the pattern set by the Bikini tests, only a select score of
press and radio representatives were admitted. Having been duly sworn
not to reveal any matter of military secrecy, the participants could
even be received at the grand assembly hall of the murals, the vast
antechamber of The Brain.
As they descended from their blacked-out busses they were led to the
center of the dome where the Thinker's giant head looked down upon them
with Olympic calm. At eleven-fifteen, exactly as scheduled, the great
Scriven dramatically mounted the steps of the monument's pedestal. Pens
hastily scribbled notes for future reference:
"S. tall and erect" "Unbroken by the blow" "Deep lines of strain and
suffering add dignity to magnificent figure of a man" "Very solemn;
leonine head slightly bowed under the burden of responsibility."
With meticulous exactitude of speech, with rolling echoes accentuating
every syllable Scriven began:
"In this solemn and tragic hour as a great storm has passed over our
land and many of our cities are slowly digging out from the ruin which
has been wreaked, it is my duty to give you the truth, the whole truth
and nothing but the truth. And in order that you might completely
understand the underlying cause of the catastrophe, I have to begin at
the beginning...."
For about thirty minutes Scriven lectured with lucidity upon the basic
idea, the history, the functions of The Brain. He underlined the close
relationship between its engineering features and the physiology of the
human brain. He stressed the elaborate precautions which the government
had taken for The Brain's protection. He did not conceal The Brain's
role as a strategic weapon; but, pointing to the future, he painted an
inspiring picture of peace on earth and human problems solved with the
aid of this tool supreme of science and technology.
Then, lowering his voice, he went into the explanation of the tragedy:
"Six months ago, on my personal initiative and responsibility, I invited
a noted scientist from a foreign land to collaborate with the Braintrust
on a great humanitarian experiment. The exigencies of military secrecy
do not permit me to give you his name nor that of the country from
whence he came. Needless to say, that man was carefully
investigated--submitted to the same character and aptitude tests as all
our employees were. He was admitted to work in one of The Brain's
apperception centers where he installed the objects of his studies:
certain species of ants and termites of the most destructive kind...."
Now that he had come down to the brass tacks, the journalists' pens went
galloping over the pads:
"Criminal negligence," they scribbled. "Millions permitted to escape."
"Probably over period of months." "Wormed their way into the nerve paths
of The Brain." "Large scale destruction of nerve substance." "Effects
tantamount to that of a large brain tumor." "Spearhead severs vital
association-paths." "No immediate effects of undermining work because of
ingenious engineering features of The Brain." "Just as in human brain,
functions of impaired cell group automatically transferred to other
groups of healthy cells." "No means to detect devastation; termites
invisible, embedded in nerve paths' insulation." "Comparison with
termite-eaten structures which suddenly collapse." "First outward signs
of tumors in human brains: lack of coordination in movement, loss of
mastery over muscular action." "This phenomenon first manifested Nov.
25th in certain motoric organs of The Brain." "Scriven explains traffic
catastrophies and malfunctionings of utilities." "Examination
immediately undertaken; scientists puzzled because cerebration processes
continue to function perfectly." "Accidents ascribed to sabotage by
foreign agents." "This to remain official explanation." "Loss of public
confidence and unrest feared by government." "Then, Nov. 30th late in
the afternoon: first signs of aphasia in cerebrations." "Glaring errors
in chemical and mathematical formulas." "Symptoms similar to dementia
praecox." "Fifteen minutes later fire alarm." "Short circuits
simultaneous on scores of points over wide area." "Severe handicaps in
fire fighting inside nerve paths." "Damage estimated at half-billion
dollars."
They snapped their notebooks closed. They had the facts, though many of
them would have to remain a secret. Scriven obviously was coming to the
end:
"Now I won't say," his voice rolled on, "that this man, this scientist,
has committed a deliberate act of sabotage. I won't say that he was in
the pay of some power hostile to the United States. Whether he was or
not is beyond my competence to decide. But this much I can say: the
catastrophic results of that man's actions could not have been worse if
he had been a saboteur. Human failure, not mechanical failure lies at
the bottom of all this disaster. With the penetrating intelligence which
so distinguished our modern press you cannot fail to see that
reconstruction of The Brain with greatly increased safeguards against
_human_ failure is a paramount necessity...."
A beautiful girl with a helmet of golden hair quickly mounted the steps
of the Thinker's pedestal. She handed Scriven a telegram. Frowning at
the interruption he opened it, but suddenly his face began to beam. He
raised his hand.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I have a momentous announcement to make. The
President of the United States, Cornelius Vandersloot, has been found.
He is alive and well. His plane was emergency-landed somewhere in
Alaska. Army planes have gone to the rescue and at this moment our
President is already en route to Washington."
As the uproarious applause broke loose echoing in thunders from the
dome, Scriven quickly bent his head to the girl.
"Well done, Oona," he whispered, "you chose the exact psychological
moment I wanted you to hand me this."
There was a rush for the busses. Only a few shrewd reporters lingered
on.
"That was swell, Dr. Scriven. A grand story. But haven't you anything to
add; some personal angle something with a human interest in it? You know
what we mean; something for our women readers...."
The great surgeon took the arm of the lady with the golden hair: "You
may announce," he said; "that Miss Oona Dahlborg here has done me the
great honor of becoming my bride."
[Footnote A: Transcriber Note: printer error. Text missing from
original.]