_The Voice of the Brains_
The central structure of the group of buildings was shaped like a
great plus-mark, each of its four wings of identical square
construction, with long smooth metal sides and top, and with a door at
the end giving entrance to a corridor that ran straight through to the
chief central laboratory of Dr. Ku Sui.
Carse skimmed swiftly, two feet off the glittering metallic soil,
towards the end of the nearest wing, where he gently landed. He tried
the door giving entrance. It was open. He cautiously floated through
into complete darkness.
The Hawk was prepared for that. He drew a hand-flash from the belt of
his suit, and, standing motionless, his raygun ready in his left
hand, he probed the darkness with a long white beam. Spaced evenly
along the sides of the corridor were many identical doors, and at the
end a larger, heavier door which gave entrance to the central
laboratory. He found no life or anything that moved at all, so,
methodically, he set about inspecting the side rooms.
The doors were all unlocked, and he moved down the line without alarm,
like a mechanical giant preceded by a sweeping, nervous flow of light.
Such he might from the outside have appeared to be, but the man within
himself was more like a cat scenting for danger, all muscles and
senses delicately tuned to alertness. Door by door, a cautious and
thorough inspection; but he found nothing of danger. All the rooms of
that wing were used merely for stores and equipment, and they were
quite silent and deserted. When he came at last to its end, Carse knew
that the wing was safe.
He paused a minute before the laboratory door. He had expected to find
it locked, and that he would have to seek other means of entrance; but
it was not. By pushing softly against it, it easily gave inward on
silent well-oiled hinges. He entered.
* * * * *
Carse found himself in a place of memories, and they were sharp and
painful in his brain as he stood there. Here so much had happened:
here death, and even more than death, had been, and was, so near!
The high-walled circular room was dimly lit by daylight tubes from
above. The damage he, Carse, had wrought when besieged in it, a week
before, had all been repaired. The place was deserted--it seemed even
desolate--but in Carse's moment of memory it was peopled. There had
been the tall, graceful shape in black silk; there the operating table
and the frail old man bound on it; there the four other men, white men
and gowned in the smocks of surgeons, but whose faces were lifeless
and expressionless. Dr. Ku Sui and his four assistant surgeons and his
intended victim, Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow....
They were all gone from the room now, but there was in it one thing of
life that had been there before. It lay behind the inlaid screen
which, standing on roller-legs, lay along the wall at one place. The
Hawk did not look behind the screen. He could see under it, to know
that no one lurked there. He knew what it was meant to conceal. There
his promise lay.
But his promise could not be fulfilled immediately. There were four
wings to the building, four doors leading into the laboratory, and he
had inspected but one.
An open door to his right revealed a corridor similar to the one he
had reconnoitered. He repeated down it his methodical search and found
no one. Then he returned to the laboratory.
Surely there were men somewhere! Surely someone was behind one of the
two closed doors remaining! Gun and flashlight still at the ready,
Carse listened a moment at the nearest one.
Silence. He grasped the knob, turned it and quickly threw the door
open. A rapid glance revealed no one. Wary and alert, he passed
through, and discovered that in this wing were the personal living
quarters of Dr. Ku Sui.
The quarters were divided into five rooms: living room, bedroom,
library, dining room and kitchen, and the huge metal figure passed
through all five, the cold gray eyes taking in every detail of the
comfortable but not luxurious furnishings. There was a great interest
to him, but it would have to wait.
He reentered the laboratory and went to the remaining door. Bending
his head he again listened. A sound--a faint whisper? He fancied he
heard something.
Ready for whatever it was, Carse pulled the door wide. And before him
he saw the control room of the asteroid, and the men for whom he had
been hunting.
* * * * *
They were white men. Carse recognized them immediately as the four
assistants of Dr. Ku Sui. Once, they had been eminent on Earth,
respected doctors of medicine and brain surgery, leaders in their
profession: now they were like the mechanicalized coolies. For their
brains, too, the Eurasian had altered, divested of all humanity and
individuality, so as to utilize unhampered their skill with medicine
and scalpel.
They were clad in soft yellow robes and seated at ease at one end of a
room crowded with a bewildering profusion of gauges, machines,
instruments, screens, wheels, levers, and other nameless controlling
devices. They did not show surprise at the huge clumsy figure that
stood suddenly before them, a raygun in one hand. Like the coolies,
their clean-cut features did not change under emotion. All they did
was rise silently, as one, gazing at the adventurer out of blank eyes,
saying nothing, and making no other move.
Carse tried simple measures in dealing with them. His voice gentle yet
firm, he said:
"You must not try to obstruct me. You have seen me before under
unfortunate conditions, yet I want you to know that I am really your
friend. I mean you no harm; but you must realize that I have a gun,
and believe that I will not hesitate to use it if you resist me. So
please do not. I only want you to come with me. Will you?"
They were simple words, and what he asked was simple, but would the
meaning reach these violated brains? Or would there instead be the
desperate reaction of the coolies, who had tried to kill him? Carse
waited with genuine anxiety. It would be hard to shoot them, and he
knew he could not shoot to kill.
A moment of indecision--and then with relief he saw all four, with
apparent willingness, move forward towards him. He directed them
through the laboratory and, without sign of resistance, herded them
down the corridor he had first searched to the outside.
* * * * *
The light of Jupiter, flooding undiminished through the dome, dazzled
him at first. When he could see clearly, he distinguished the great
form that was Friday standing motionless by the small port-lock, and,
an equal distance away, moving around one of the out-buildings,
another similar figure. He spoke by radio.
"Find any, Ban?"
Cheerful words came humming back.
"Only one coolie, Carse. Had no trouble after I disarmed him. He's now
locked inside a room in this building. Safe place for prisoners."
"Good," said Carse. "You can see I've got four men--white men. I
believe they're unarmed and quite harmless, but I want you to take
them, search them and put them away in that room too."
"Coming!"
The distant form rose lightly, skimmed low over the open area between,
and grew into the grinning, freckle-faced Ban Wilson. He bounced down
awkwardly, almost losing his balance, then surveyed, wonderingly, the
four assistants of Ku Sui.
"By Betelgeuse!" he muttered, "--like robots! Horrible!"
"Yes," said the Hawk shortly. "You had no trouble, eh?"
Ban grinned again. "Nothing to mention. This has been soft, hasn't
it?"
"Don't be too optimistic, Ban. All right--when you've put these men in
the room, please relieve Friday. Send him to me in the laboratory--he
knows where it is--and stand watch yourself. If Ku Sui appears--"
"I'll let you know on the instant!"
Hawk Carse nodded and turned back into the corridor from which he had
just come. Now he would fulfil his promise. With no possibility of a
surprise attack from anyone within the dome, and Ban Wilson posted
against the return of Ku Sui, he could attend unhampered to the vow
which had brought him there.
* * * * *
He returned to the central laboratory. Quickly be rolled back the high
screen lying across one part of the curved wall and stood looking at
what was behind it. The monstrousness of that dead-and-alive mechanism
overwhelmed his thoughts again.
Before him stood a case, transparent, hard and crystal-like, as long
as a man's body and half as deep, standing level on short metal legs.
What it contained was the most jealously guarded, the most precious of
all Dr. Ku Sui's works, the very consummation of his mighty genius,
his treasure-house of wisdom as profound as man then could know. And
more: it held the consummation of all that was so coldly unhuman in
the Eurasian. For there, in that case, he had bound to his will the
brains of five of Earth's greatest scientists, and kept them alive,
with their whole matured store of knowledge subservient to his need,
although their bodies were long since dead and decayed.
For some time the adventurer stood lost in a mood of thoughts and
emotions rare to him--until he was startled back into reality by a
heavy, clumping noise coming down the corridor through which he had
entered. His gun-hand flickered to readiness, but it was only Friday,
coming as he had been ordered. Carse greeted the Negro with a nod, and
said briefly:
"There's a panel in this room--over there somewhere--you remember--the
place through which Ku Sui escaped when we were here before. It's an
unknown quantity, so I want you to stand watch by it. Open your
face-plate wide, and warn me at the slightest sound or sight of
possible danger."
The Negro nodded and moved as silently as was possible in his
space-suit to obey. And Carse turned again to the thing to which he
had made a promise.
* * * * *
The icy-glittering case was full of a colorless liquid in which were
grouped at the bottom, several delicate, colored instruments, all
interconnected by a maze of countless spidery silver wires. Sheathes
of other wires ran up from the lower devices to the case's main
content--five grayish, convoluted mounds that lay in shallow
pans--five brutally naked things that were the brains of scientists
once honored and eminent on Earth.
Their bodies has long since been cast aside as useless to the ends of
Ku Sui, but the priceless brains had been condemned to live on in an
unlit, unseeing deathless existence: machines serving the man who had
trapped them into life in death. Alive--and with stray memories, which
Ku Sui could not banish entirely, of Earth, of love, of the work and
the respect that had once been theirs. Alive--with an unnatural and
horrible life, without sensation, without hope. Alive--and made to aid
with their knowledge the man who had brought them into slavery
unspeakable....
Hawk Carse's eyes were frigid gray mists in a graven, expressionless
face as he turned to the left of the case and pulled over one of the
well-remembered knife switches. A low hum came; a ghost of rosy color
diffused through the liquid in the case. The color grew until the
whole was glowing jewel-like in the dim-lit laboratory, and the narrow
tubes leading into the undersides of the brains were plainly visible.
Something within the tubes pulsed at the rate of heart-beats. The
stuff of life.
When the color ceased to increase, Carse pulled the second switch, and
moved close to the grille inset in a small panel above the case.
Slowly, gently he said into the grille:
"Master Scientist Cram, Professors Estapp and Geinst, Doctors Swanson
and Norman--I wish to talk to you. I am Captain Carse, friend of
Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow. Some days ago you aided us in our
escape from here, and in return I made you a promise. Do you
remember?"
There was a pause, a silence so tense it was painful. And then
functioned the miracle of Ku Sui's devising. There came from the
grille a thin, metallic voice from the living dead.
"_I remember you, Captain Carse, and your promise._"
* * * * *
A voice from living brain cells, through inorganic lungs and throat
and tongue! A voice from five brains, speaking, for some obscure
reason which even Ku Sui could not explain, in the first person, and
setting to mechanical words the living, pulsing thoughts that sped
back and forth inside the case and were coordinated into unity by the
master brain, which had once been in the body of Master Scientist
Cram. A voice out of nothingness; a voice from what seemed so clearly
to be the dead. To Hawk Carse, man of action, it was unearthly; it was
a miracle the fact of which he could not question, but which he could
not hope to understand. And well might it have been unearthly to
anyone. Even to-day.
Still thrilling to the wonder of it, he went on:
"I have returned here to the asteroid with friends. Primarily I came
to keep my promise to you, but I intend to do more. Dr. Ku Sui is not
here now, and will not be for at least fifteen minutes; but when he
does return, I am going to capture him. I am going to take him alive."
He was silent for a moment.
"Perhaps you do not know," he continued levelly, "but the people of
Earth hold Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow responsible for your
disappearance. He is therefore a fugitive, and there is a price on his
head. It is my purpose to restore Eliot Leithgow to his old place by
returning Dr. Ku to Earth to answer for the crimes he has effected on
you.
"I am now ready to fulfil my promise to you. I expect no interruption
this time. I regret exceedingly my inability to destroy you when I was
here before, but I simply could not in the little time I had. I still
do not know how best to go about it. Perhaps you will tell me. I will
wait...."
An afterthought came to him. He added into the grille:
"There is no hurry. Your extraordinary position--your thoughts--I
understand...."
Then there was a long silence. For once the Hawk was not impatient; in
fact there was in him the feeling that the pause was only decent and
fitting. For before him were the brains of five great scientists, who
as captive remnants of men had asked him to end their cold and lonely
bondage. Limbless, his was to be the hand of their self-immolation.
The present silent, slow-passing minutes were to be their last of
consciousness....
And then at last spoke the voice:
"_Captain Carse, I do not wish you to destroy me. I wish you to give
me new life. I wish you to transplant me within the bodies of five
living men._"
* * * * *
The words, so unexpected, took Hawk Carse by perhaps the greatest
surprise he had ever known. For a time he was completely astounded; he
could hardly credit his ears. It required a full minute for him to
summon even the most halting reply.
"But--but could that be done?" He strove to collect himself, to
consider logically this course that he had never dreamed would be
requested. "Who could do it? I know of no man."
"_Dr. Ku Sui could transplant me._"
"Ku Sui? He could, but he wouldn't. He would destroy you, rather."
Almost immediately the artificial voice responded:
"_You have said, Captain Carse, that you will soon have Ku Sui
captive. Will you not attempt to force him to do as I desire?_"
Carse considered the suggestion, but it did not seem remotely
possible. Ku Sui could not be prevented from having endless
opportunities for destroying the brains while enjoying the manual
freedom necessary to perform the operations of re-embodying them.
"I do not see how," he began--and then he cut off his words abruptly.
Something had come into his mind, a memory of something Eliot Leithgow
had told him once, long before. Slowly the details came back in full,
and at their remembrance his right hand rose to the odd bangs of
flaxen hair concealing his forehead and began to smooth them, and a
ghost of a smile appeared on his thin lips.
"Perhaps," he murmured. "I think ... perhaps...."
He said decisively into the grille:
"Yes! I think it's quite possible that I can force Ku Sui to
transplant you into living bodies! I think--I _think_--I cannot be
sure--that it can be done. At least I will make a very good attempt."
The toneless, mechanical voice uttered:
"_Captain Carse, you bring me hope. My thoughts are many, and they are
grateful._"
But the Hawk had made a promise, and had to be formally freed of the
duty it entailed.
"You release me, then," he asked, "from my original promise to destroy
you?"
"_I release you, Captain Carse. And again I thank you._"
The adventurer returned the switches motivating the case, and the
faint smile returned to his lips at the thought that had come to him.
But the smile vanished suddenly at the quick, excited words that came
crackling into his helmet receiver.
"Carse? Carse? Do you hear me?"
He threw over his microphone control.
"Yes, Ban? What is it?"
"Come as fast as you can. Just caught sight of three distant figures
flying straight towards here. It's Ku Sui, returning!"