The Brain Part 21

For a second her small fists pounded against Lee's breast and the next moment, before he could do anything, she had jumped out of the plane slamming the door in his face. For a few seconds more he heard her footsteps rus.h.i.+ng across the frozen turf and the receding wails of echoes from the hangar walls:

"And now there's nothing I can do--nothing I can do."

When after a minute of fumbling in the dark he pushed the door open, it was too late.

He walked over to the hotel; not by an act of will, but with his legs somehow doing the job alone and by themselves. He ordered himself a car from the Braintrust garage. He entered The Brain and went up in the elevator to Apperception 36. n.o.body seemed to notice that there was a somnambulist pa.s.sing by.... He unlocked the door and under the rows of neon lights things were as he had left them eight hours ago. Only there were no longer any snakes crawling across the floor towards a hole in the wall. But the hole was still there and he thought that he had better tidy things up a bit. If n.o.body had noticed the arrangements for this new experiment so far; why should anybody be forewarned?

Lee put the lid back on the "Lignin-Filler-Spout." He closed the panel so the wall looked whole again. He gathered the sticks of cordwood from the floor and piled them neatly to their stacks again. All this he did like a child putting its things away after a long day's play; a grey-haired child, weary, with the sandman in its eyes. He looked around and found everything done and over with. On the fluorescent screens all curves The Brain described had dropped to the bottom. Like dead things they lay flat. On the visi-screens some stay-behinds of the great exodus were looming large, a hapless little ant-king scurrying about; a few disabled workers, their blind eyes staring into the face of death. It would come soon to them; their work on earth was done....

Lee looked at the clock: 10 p.m. He put out the lights and locked the door behind that yawning emptiness which once had been his lab, which he would never see again. As he descended in the elevator he felt very tired.

CHAPTER IX

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 apt.i.tude 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 a.s.sured 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. n.o.body 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 polis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d. 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 diminis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 cla.s.sic 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 G.o.d, Scriven was right."

"You bet he was; maniacal obsession, a cla.s.sic, most beautiful case."

"What more do we need?"

"Nothing I guess; he's through. Start pus.h.i.+ng 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....