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, thisisthis 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; hewasthat 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 andlaughed.
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 ourdutyto 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....
Thevoiceformed, 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, killthis thing,finishthis 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 againsthumanfailure 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."
[A]Transcriber Note: printer error. Text missing from original.
[A]Transcriber Note: printer error. Text missing from original.