Chapter 11: Ordeal

Five bodies lay on the operating tables in Eliot Leithgow’s laboratory. The air, hushed and heavy, was pervaded by the various odors of antiseptics and etheloid. The breathing cones had been applied to each of the bodies, and they were now locked fast in controlled unconsciousness.

On the first table lay the body of the robot-coolie, a man of medium size, sturdy, well-muscled, with the smooth round yellow face and stub nose of his kind. His short-cropped, bristly black hair had been shaved off; the head was now bald. That head was destined to hold the mighty brain of Master Scientist Raymond Cram.

On the second table lay a twisted, distorted thing, an apelike body with which fate had played grotesque pranks. It was hairy, of middle height, and its dark skin all over was wizened and coarse, almost like the bark of a tree. The legs were short and bowed, the hands stubby claws; the face, puckered even in unconsciousness, was that of a gargoyle in pain. The long matted hair had been shaved away; the large pate washed with antiseptics. Soon, were the operation successful, that head would hold the brain of Professor Edgar Estapp, world-famous chemist and bio-chemist.

On the third table lay a shape skeletonlike in appearance, so emaciated was it, so closely did the bones press into the dry, fever-yellowed skin. Of one leg, only the stump was left; this creature had been forced to hop or crawl his way through the isuan swamps. The head, too, was no more than a skull, with great sunken dark-rimmed eyes, discolored fangs and loose, leathery lips. There had been no hair on this death’s head; it had long been bald, and now, washed, clean for the first time in months or even years, it was to hold the brain of Dr. Ralph Swanson, Earth’s one-time leader in the science of psychology.

On the fourth table lay a giant’s body--but a hollow giant, a giant made thin and pitiful by the ravages of his destroyer, isuan. A roistering, free-booting space-ship sailor, this man may once have been, but, from the drug, the mighty arms had been twisted and shrivelled, the strong legs wasted away. One ear had been torn from the skull in an old brawl, and what was left was naked and ugly to the eye. Behind that bitter, drug-coarsened face would be the new home of the brain of Sir Charles Esme Norman, wizard of mathematics and once a polished, charming Englishman.

On the fifth table lay a dwarf. Its ridiculous body was not over four and a half feet long, though the head was larger than that of a normal man. In the old dark ages on Earth this body would have served for the jester of a lord, the comic butt of a king; in more recent times as the prize of a circus side-show. The huge, weighty head with its ugly brooding mask of a face, the child’s body below--this was for the brain of Professor Erich Geinst, the solitary German who had stood preeminent on Earth in astronomy.

These creatures were the result of Hawk Carse’s desperate search. They had composed, with one other, the band of isuanacs that had been rooting in the swamp at the end of the lake when the asteroid had first arrived. The Hawk had remembered them, and had quickly seen that they were the only answer to the problem. And so, with Ban Wilson, he had gone out for them, his mind steeled to the ghastly thought of the great scientists’ brains in such bodies. In space-suits they had swept down on them. There had been no time for considerate measures: the four isuanacs had been abruptly knocked out by the impact of the great suits swooping against them, and carried back to the laboratory.

Eliot Leithgow had been shocked at the idea of a scientist’s brain in the head of the robot-coolie; how much greater, then, was his horror when confronted by the need of using these appalling remnants of men! But he could not protest. What else was there? Ku Sui, under the V-27, had spoken the truth: the operations would be impossible without the aid of his four assistants. The brains even now were dying. The choice was: bodies of isuanacs or death for the brains. The scientist and the adventurer had chosen.

Circumstances had required their use. Ku Sui’s attempt to kill the brains, thus inflicting a time limit: the presence of the band of isuanacs near the laboratory; each circumstance with a long train of other, minor ones behind it. Chance or Fate--whatever it is--whether predetermined or accidental--men must wonder at its working, and know awe from its patterns and results. Seldom, certainly, was there a pattern more strange than this now being worked out in the laboratory of Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow.

The bodies lay there, washed, shaved and swathed in customary loose operating garments: globules of etheloid dropped steadily down into the breathing cones, of hunchback, living skeleton, twisted giant, dwarf and robot-coolie. One by one the isuanacs dropped with the falling of the etheloid into unconsciousness--and that was their farewell to the brains, each one debauched either by isuan-drug or skill of genius, that they had known.

And movement began in the laboratory. White-clothed figures, masked and capped, used gleaming instruments in their gloved hands; and all the figures were mute--mute from their great concentration on the delicate work in progress--or mute from horror that would not die...

So began the ordeal.

Of its details, Hawk Carse knew little. They were not of his world. Only for the first half-hour could he follow intelligently what was being done. He too had put on a white robe, as had Ban Wilson and Friday; and he stood at one side of the room, a silent, intently watching figure, with the two other men of action, Ban and the Negro, while the rest moved in a kind of rhythm. The center-piece was the black-garbed Ku Sui, moving from this table to that, slim gloved hands flying, pausing, flying again, steadying, concentrating on a detail, once more sweeping forward. No more than single words came from him; he and his assistants worked almost as a whole, in perfect sympathy and coordination, and a constant stream of instruments flowed to him and then away, their task done.

The first table, and then to the second, with one white figure staying behind at the first, finishing off details of the work, left by the master. The third table; the fourth; the fifth; and then back to the first, while two white figures detached themselves from the main group and went to the nearby case of coordinated brains. An object held in a specially formed type of pan was lifted out and carried to the first table; and Carse sensed a crisis in the attitudes of the working men. This, he knew, was the first great, step. A brain was being re-born. The fingers of men, and one man in particular, were fashioning a miracle.