Chapter 3

The Brain Trust car which took Lee out of Cephalon was a normal-looking limousine, a rear-engined teardrop like all the “60” models, slotted for the insertion of wings which most of the garages now kept in stock and rented at a small charge for cross-country hops. The only non-standard feature seemed to be the polaroid glass windows which were provided all around and not only in front.

“That’s a good idea,” Lee said adjusting the nearest ones, “they ought to have that on every car, all-round protection to the eyes.”

“Think so, sir? Must be the first time you’re driving out there,” the young chauffeur said.

The car left the outskirts and the desert started to fly by as the speedometer needle climbed above the 100 mark. Lee sank back into his seat; the desert had no novelty for him and since the chauffer appeared not inclined to small talk he abandoned himself to thought.

His visit to his father had not been much of a success...

Time magazine had carried an item in its personal column, briefly stating that General Jefferson E. Lee, “the Old Lion of Guadalcanal,” had retired from the Marines to Phoenix, Ariz ... Phoenix, the hotel desk had informed him, was only some 300 miles away and there was hourly service by Greyhound helicopter-bus.

So he had taken the ride, a taxi had brought him to the small neat bungalow, and there he had seen his father for the first time in years. It had been very strange to see him aged, the nut brown face a little shrunk. He had anticipated that much. But somehow he had failed to imagine the most obvious change; to see his father in civvies and even less to see him trimming roses with a pair of garden shears. It looked such an incongruous picture for a “Marines’ Marine.”

As he had come up the little path his father had looked up.

“So it’s you, Semper.” Slowly he had peeled off the old parade kid gloves without a change in his face. “Nice to see you,” he had said. “Didn’t expect to before I start pushing up the daisies from below. Where’s your butterfly net?”

No, in character his father hadn’t changed a bit. He still was the old “blood and guts” to whom an entomologist was sort of a human grass-hopper wielding a butterfly net, and a son indulging in such antics a bit of a freak, a reproach to his father, a failure of his life.

Even so, he had led the way into the house and things had been just as he remembered them: the old furniture, pictures crowding one another all over the walls, on the unused grand piano--Marines in Vera Cruz, Marines in China, Marines in Alaska, in the Marianas, in Japan, at the Panama canal; Marines, Marines, Marines, wherever one looked, in ghostly parade. No, nothing had changed. It had been mainly jealously which had caused him to rebel against becoming another Marine, the first wedge which had driven him and his father apart.

“What are you doing now, padre?” he had asked.

“You’ve seen it. Nothing. Just puttering around. They’ve made me commander of the National Guard over here,” and with a contemptuous snort, “--a sinecure; might as well have given me a bunch of tin soldiers to play with. What brought you here?”

Glad to change the subject Lee had told about Australia, had mentioned The Brain and the possibility of joining it. His father had not been pleased.

“Heard of it,” he had grumbled. “Shows how the country is going to the dogs. Now they need machines to do their thinking with. If their own brains were gas they couldn’t back a car out of the garage. So you’re mixed up with that outfit; well--how about a drink?”

“Rather,” he had answered, feeling the need for washing down a bitterness; thinking, too, that it might break the ice between him and his father.

And then there was that painful moment when they had stood, glasses in hand and remembered...

The selfsame situation fifteen years ago as the Bomb fell upon Hiroshima. He had been on convalescence furlough. They had been alone when the news came and there had been a drink between them just as now. And after the announcer stopped he had cried out hysterically like a child in a nightmare.

“Those fools, that’s the end of civilization, that’s no longer war.”

“Shut up,” his father had shouted, “how dare you insult the Commander in Chief to my face. Get out of here and stay out.”

A highball glass had crashed against the floor. And that had been the end. He hadn’t returned after the war.

Yes, it was most unfortunate that now, after so many years, they should read that memory in their faces; that it was only the glasses and not the minds which clicked.

They had put them down awkwardly with frozen smiles on their lips and his father had said:

“Sorry. But an old dog won’t learn new tricks. Guess it’s too late in the day for me and you to get together, son.”

“It’s never too late, Dad,” he had wanted to say, but the words died on his lips.

So it had been the failure of a mission; but then it closed an old and painful chapter with finality and he was free to open a new leaf.

Lee looked ahead again. The speedometer needle trembled around the 150 mark. The sun drenched sand shot by, Joshua trees gesticulating wildly in the tricky perspectives of the speed, out-crops of rocks getting bigger now and more numerous, the road ahead starting to coil into a maze of natural fortresses, giant pillars and bizarre pyramids looking like the works of a titan race from another planet shone in unearthly color schemes of black and purple and amber and green. With the winding of the road and the waftings of the heat it was hard to make out a course, but the Sierra Mountains now were towering almost up to the zenith; like a giant surf they seemed to race against the car.

“Mind if I close the windows, sir?”

The chauffeur’s question was rhetoric; he had already pushed a button, the glass went up and within the next second the inside of the car turned completely dark.

“Man,” Lee shouted, gripping the front seat, “are you crazy?”

There suddenly was light again, but it was only the electric light inside the car. The blackout of the world without remained complete, and the speedometer needle still edged over the 150 mark.

“Crazy? I hope not.” The chauffeur said it coolly; leaning comfortably back he turned around for a better look at his fare.

With mounting horror Lee noticed that he even took his hands off the wheel. Nonchalantly he lit a cigarette while the unguided wheel milled crazily from side to side and the tires screeched through what seemed to be a sharp S-curve. Still with his back to the wheel and in between satisfying puffs of his smoke he continued:

“It’s quite O.K. sir; it’s only that we’re on the guidebeam now. This here car doesn’t need a driver no more; it’s on the beam.”

“What beam?” Lee relaxed a little; it was the unexpectedness which had bowled him over. “What beam? And why the blackout?”

“Just orders,” the young man said. “The Brain’s orders and it’s the Brain’s beam. Seems to be new to you, sir; to me it’s like an old story; read about it when I was a kid: how they blindfolded people who entered a beleaguered fortress. “The Count of Monte Cristo,” it was called; ever heard about it? Pretty soon now we’ll be stopped for examination before we enter the secret passage underground. Romantic isn’t it?”

“Very much so,” Lee dryly remarked. He continued to watch the behavior of the car with some misgivings. The controls appeared to be functioning smoothly enough and after a minute or so the brake pedal came down all by itself. Lee, with a breath of relief, saw the speedometer recede to zero.

But the doors would not open from the inside and as he tried them he found that they were locked. “What’s the idea,” he asked, “I thought you said we would be examined at this spot?”

“Bet they’re at it right now,” the chauffeur grinned. “I wouldn’t know how they do it, but they get us photographed inside and outside, what we have in our pockets, what we had for breakfast this morning and the very bones of our skeletons. I pass through here maybe half a dozen times a day, still they will do it every time: take my likeness. Makes me feel like I was some darned movie star.”

To Lee it felt uncanny to sit trapped and blindfolded in this “Black Maria” of a car while unseen rays and cameras went over him. He could hear a faint noise of steps, and muffled voices.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s only some boys from Intelligence or whatnot; that’s nothing, that isn’t The Brain. It will be all over in a moment--see--there we go again. Now we’re entering the Labyrinth.”

“The Labyrinth?”

Reticent as he had been in the beginning, the chauffeur now seemed to like Lee; he was proud to explain. “Queer, isn’t it? They’ve got the damnedest names for things down here. Take them from anatomy, I understand. The Labyrinth is supposed to be inside the ear; it leads inside in a roundabout way; it’s the same here, it’s a tunnel--see--down we go.”

The soft swoosh of the gas-turbine turned into a muffled roar. The car accelerated at a terrific rate and from the way it swayed and dived it was clear that the tunnel spiralled downwards in steep serpentines. Lee gripped the holding straps; his every nerve was on edge and those edges were sharpened by the ominous fact that all the instruments on the dashboard had stopped functioning so that he couldn’t even read the speed.

As if to make things still worse, the chauffeur had abandoned his post altogether. Stretching his legs across the front seat he reclined as if enjoying his easy chair at home by the fire place.

“It beats a roller coaster, doesn’t it?” the chauffeur said. “Got me scared the first few times before I found out it was safe. Nothing to worry about, never you fear.”

With his stomach throttling his throat, Lee asked, “How deep are we going underground?”

“That we are not supposed to know; that’s why all the instruments are cut off. The other day I had a passenger, one of those weathermen, a professor. He laughed when I told him I didn’t know how deep it was. Got a little doodad out of his pocket; aneroid barometer, or something, he said it was. But he got a surprise; in the first place the thing didn’t work, so he said the whole tunnel was probably pressurized. In the second place he never got where he wanted to go. They stopped the car at the next control and shot him right back whence he came.”

“But why?”

The chauffeur looked mysterious. “Seems The Brain doesn’t like people with doodads in their pockets even if they mean no harm. The Brain is most particular about such things; maybe somehow it peers into this car this moment, maybe it records every word we say. How do we know?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Not that I give a damn. I’ve got nothing to conceal. The hours are right and the pay’s right; that’s good enough for me.”

Lee experienced an old, familiar sensation: that creepy feeling one got on jungle patrol, knowing that there were Jap snipers up in the trees, invisible with the devilish green on their faces and uniforms.

“Strange,” he thought, “that in the very center of civilization one should feel as haunted as in the jungle hell.”

Then, just as he began to wonder whether the dizzy spiralling plunge as if in the belly of a shark would ever end, the tunnel levelled. Now the car shot straight as a bullet and just as fast it seemed.

As his stomach returned to something like normal position, the feeling of oppression changed into one of flying through space, of being dynamically at rest. Again just as the duration of this dynamic flight evoked the feel of infinity, the motion changed. So fast did it recede that the momentum of his body almost hurled Lee from the back seat into the front.

Doors snapped open and as Lee staggered out somewhat benumbed in limb and head, his eyes grew big as they met the most unexpected sight. The car rested on the concrete apron of what appeared to be a super-duper bus terminal plus service station and streamlined restaurant. Beyond this elevated terrace yawned a vaulted dome, excavated from the solid rock and at least twice the size of St. Peter’s giant cupola. Its walls were covered with murals. Both huge and beautiful they depicted the history of the human race, Man’s evolution. From where he stood they started out with scenes of primeval huntings of the mammoth, went on to fire making, fire adoration, then to the primitive crafts and from there through the stages of science evolution and technology until they ended on Lee’s right hand side with an awesome scene from the Bikini test. The gorgeous mushroom cloud of the atomic explosion looked alive and threatening like those Djinni once banned by Solomon.

But then, all these murals looked more alive than any work of art Lee had ever seen and he discovered that this was due to a new technique which had been added and commingled with one of the oldest.

The pictures were built up from myriad layers of Painted Desert sands and these were made translucent or illuminated by what Lee thought must be phosphoric salts turned radiant under the stimulants of hidden lights. Whatever it was, the esoteric beauty of this jewel-like luminosity surpassed even that of the stained glass windows in the great cathedrals of France.

“Pretty isn’t it? The chauffeur’s words came as an anticlimax to what Lee felt. “That fellow over there in the middle; he’s supposed to have it all thought out.” He pointed to a collossal bronze statue which towered in the center of the cupola to a height of better than a hundred feet.

Raising his eyes to the head of this giant, Lee discovered that the figure was that of “The Thinker” by Rodin though it was cast in proportion its creator would not have deemed possible.

Completely overwhelmed and overawed by the grandeur of it all, Lee barely managed to stammer, “What--what is this place; what is it called?”

“It’s kind of an assembly hall; the staff of The Brain have meetings over here at times. Besides it’s sort of a Grand Central; transportation starts here at times throughout the Brain. But listen, they are already paging you.”

Out of nowhere as it seemed there came a brisk, pleasant female voice.

“Dr. Lee, calling Dr. Semper F. Lee from Canberra University, please answer Dr. Lee.”

The chauffeur nudged Lee in the ribs.

“Say something, she hears you all right.”

“Yes, this is Lee speaking,” he said in a startled voice.

The voice appeared delighted.

“Good morning, Dr. Lee: I’m Vivian Leahy of Apperception Center 27; I’m to be your guide on the way up. Now, Dr. Lee, will you please step over to the glideways. They’re to your right. Take glideway T, do just as you would in a department store--” she giggled, “--stand on it and it will get you right to the occipital cortex area. I’ll be waiting for you over there. I would have loved to come down and conduct you personally, but it’s against regulations; I’ll explain to you the reasons why in a little while. And if you have any questions while en route, just call out. So long, Dr. Lee; I’ll be seeing you...”

Greatly bewildered by this gushing reception Lee found it hard to follow instructions, simple as they were. The array of escalators which he found in a side wing was a formidable one and confusing with movements in all directions, crisscrossing and overlapping one another. Despite the very clear illuminated signs Lee almost stepped upon glideway “P” when “the voice” warned him:

“Oh no, Dr. Lee; just a little to your left--that’s fine, that’s the one--there.”

Obviously his loquacious guardian angel could not only hear him but watch his steps as well. Apart from being uncanny, this was embarrassing; feeling reduced to the mental age of the nursery, he gripped the rails of “T” which went with him into a smooth and noiseless upward slide. The shaft was narrow, there was little light at the start and it grew dimmer as he went. After a minute or so the darkness had turned almost complete and became oppressive. Simultaneously there was a disquieting change from the accepted normal manner in which escalators are supposed to move. Its rise gradually turned perpendicular and in doing so the steps drew apart. Before long Lee felt squeezed into some interminable cylinder, standing on top of a piston as it were, a piston which moved with fair rapidity along transparent walls. That these walls were either glass or transparent plastics he could perceive from objects which came streaking by with faint luminosity. They looked like columns of amber colored liquids in which were suspended what looked like giant snakes, indistinct shapes, but radiant in the mysterious manner of deep sea fishes. They almost encircled the transparent cylinder shaft in which Lee moved; there were many of them; how many Lee couldn’t even attempt to guess. The swiftness of his ascent through these floating, waving radiances for which he had no name was nightmarish, like falling into some bottomless well. With great relief he heard the voice of his guide breaking the spell.

“I’m terribly sorry, Dr. Lee, I shouldn’t have deserted you, there was some little interruption--” palpably the voice was tickled to death “--my boy friend called from another department and so ... you know how it is. Let’s see, where are you? Good lord, already near the end of the Medulla Oblongata with the Cerebellum coming and I haven’t told you a thing. Goody, where should I begin; I’m all in a dither: Well, Dr. Lee; most people seem to expect The Brain to be like a great big telephone exchange, but it really isn’t that kind of a mechanism at all. We have found--” she sounded important as if it were her very own discovery “--that the best pattern for The Brain would actually be the human brain. So The Brain is organized in nearly identical manner, likewise our whole terminology is taken from anatomy rather than from technology. The glideways for instance, travel along the natural fissures between the convolutions of the various lobes; that’s why they are so very winding as you will see as you enter The Brain proper. Those columns you see are filled with liquid insulators for the nerve cables to vibrate in; for they do vibrate, Dr. Lee, as they transmit their messages.

“You have noticed the narrowness of the glideways, the terrible confinement of space. I know it’s horrible--many of our visitors suffer claustrophobia, but they just must be built that way. You see even fractions of a millionth of one second count in the coordination of the association bundles and nerve circuits, that’s why everything is built as compact as possible, worse than in a submarine.

“Then, too, you must have wondered why everything is so dark inside. That’s another thing wherein The Brain is like the human brain; its nerve cells are so extremely sensitive that they are distributed by light. We use black light almost exclusively or activated phosphorous such as on the sheaths of the nerve cables. For the same reason we of the personnel are normally not permitted to pass through the interior of The Brain during operations-time. Exceptions are only made in the case of very important persons such as you are. Normally one travels to one’s stations through the ducts elevator shafts in the bone matter or rather the rock outside. Those are so much faster and more comfortable Dr. Lee; oh I feel so bad about you, poor man, traveling all alone through this horrible maze without a human soul in sight.”

Lee grinned. He wouldn’t have liked to be married to this chatterbox no matter how beautiful she might turn out to be; but at the moment her exceeding femininity was most comforting in the weirdness which surrounded him.

The little platform under his feet started acting up again in the queerest manner. It pushed him forward and the wall at the rear kicked him in the back; his nose flattened against the sliding cylinder in front as the contraption reverted from the perpendicular course to something like the undulations of a traveling wave. Lee darkly perceived group after group of luminous cables coiling away into cavernous pits filled with what looked like eyes of cats, faintly aglow and twinkling at him from the dark. They reminded him of the fireflies of the green hells he had been in during the war.

“You are now skirting the convolutions of the cerebellum,” his guardian angel told him. “They are electronic tubes which receive sensory impressions and translate them into impulses for cerebration. Here in the cerebellum the bulk of the associations is being evoked; these are then distributed throughout the hemispheres of the cortex or higher brain. Oh I do wish you wouldn’t get seasick, Dr. Lee; some of our visitors do, you know; it’s those wavy, wavy movements.”

The sympathetic Vivian came much too close to the truth for Lee to think her funny. With a sense of approaching disaster he stared at the sliding cylinder walls; from time to time the passing lights reflected his face, distorted and decidedly greenish in tint. Trouble was that seemingly nowhere there was any fixed point on which to stabilize the eye. He seemed to be carried on the back of a galloping boa constrictor with a couple of others streaking away under his armpits.

Some of the caves which he had skirted were alive with ruby electronic eyes and some were green and again there were others in which all the colors of the rainbow mixed. There was no end to them, nor could he gauge their depths. After an interminable time of this the glideway went into a flying upward leap. Again the perspective changed completely; now the thing seemed to be suspended from the ceiling with slanting views opening toward the scene below through its transparent sides.

“You are now passing across the commissures into the cerebrum,” came Vivian’s voice just as Lee thought that nausea was getting the better of him. “You’ll now ascend along one of the main gyri through the mid-brain between the hemispheres. Those masses of ganglions below and coming from all sides as they go over the pass of the ridge are association bundles. Beyond they disperse again over the cortex mantle to all the centers of coordination, higher cerebration and higher psychic activities. Things will be a little easier now for you, Dr. Lee; physically I mean. There will be some gyrations but not quite so violent. Oh you’re holding out fine, like a real He-man, you’re looking swell in my television screen.”