Chapter 4

Apperception 36, Lee’s lab within The Brain, looked much like Apperception 27 except for its interior fittings. As a matter of fact, all the several hundred Apperception Centers were built after the same plan, like suites in a big office building in many respects. They were spread over The Brain occipital region; they were built inside the concrete wall of the “dura matter” which in turn lay within the shell of the “bone matter”, a mile or so of solid rock. Each apperception center had its own elevator shaft which went through the concrete of the “dura matter” down to “Grand Central”, the traffic center below The Brain. Each one was also connected at the other end of its corridor with the glideways which snaked through the interior of The Brain. There were, however, no transversal or direct communications from one apperception center to the next. Because of the extraordinary diversity and secrecy of the projects submitted to The Brain’ processings, each apperception center was completely insulated against its neighbors.

Life hadn’t changed so much from what it had been in the Australian desert Lee had found; at least not his working life. For all he knew some nuclear physicists might be working in the lab next door; or they might be ballistics experts working with The Brain on curves for long-range rockets to be aimed at the vital centers of some foreign land; it might be some mild looking librarian submitting the current products of foreign literature to the analysis as to “idea-content”; or else it could be a lab to plot campaigns of chemical warfare; or some astronomer, happily abstracted from all bellicose ideas, might employ The Brain’s superhuman faculties in mathematics to figure comet courses and eclipses which in turn would form material for the timing and the camouflaging of those man-made meteorites science would use in another war. Directly or indirectly, he knew, practically every project submitted to The Brain would be of a military nature. Of this there could be no doubt.

Sometimes, especially when tired, he could feel the weight of those billions of rock tons over his head and it was like being buried alive in the tomb of the Pharaoh. And also in that state of mental exhaustion at the end of a long day, he sensed the emanations of The Brain’s titanic cerebrations as one senses the presence of genius in human man. The knowledge that all this mighty work was being devoted to war had deeply depressing effects on him. Would there be anybody else in this vast apperception area who worked for the prevention of war? A few perhaps; Scriven would be one of them in case he had a lab somewhere in here and time to work in it. Lee didn’t know whether he had. He hadn’t seen Scriven again after that inauguration speech he had made when Lee, together with other newly appointed scientific workers had taken “The Oath of The Brain.”

They had assembled in that vast subterranean dome of the luminous murals at the feet of the giant statue of The Thinker, looking almost forlorn in the expanse, though there had been several hundred of them. The atmosphere had been solemn, the silence hushed, as Scriven mounted the statue’s pedestal. The address by that mighty voice resounding from the cupola had been worthy of the majestic scene:

“As we stand gathered here, the eons in evolution of our human race are looking down upon us...”

The speech had been followed by the taking of the oath, deeply stirring to the emotions of the young neophytes who formed the large majority of the new group. The chorus of their voices had resounded in awed and solemn tones as they repeated the formula; even now after six months some of it echoed in Lee’s ears:

“I herewith solemnly swear:

“That I will serve The Brain with undivided loyalty and with all my faculties.

“That I will at all times obey the orders of the Brain Trust on behalf of The Brain.

“That I will never betray or reveal any secrets of The Brain’s design or work, be they military or not, neither to the world outside nor to any of my fellow workers except by special permission...”

It had been almost like taking holy orders. There had been mystery in the atmosphere of the vast crypt, something medieval in the unconditional surrender to The Brain.

Lee looked up from the charts on which he had been working; his eyes were tired and so was his mind after ten hours of hard concentration. That was probably what set his thoughts wandering. But strange that they should always wander to those blind spots in his mental vision so intriguing because he knew there was something there that he could not lay a finger on.

The first of these blind spots hovered somewhere between Scriven’s words and Scriven’s deeds; between The Brain as an ideal of science and The Brain’s reality as in instrument of national defense. Somehow the two didn’t connect; there was a break, some layer of thin ice, a danger zone which nobody seemed willing to discuss or tread, not even Oona Dahlborg.

Oona; she was that other white spot on Lee’s mental map and to him it was much bigger and more dangerous than the first. He loved her as can only a man who discovers loves secret with greying hair and after the loneliness of a desert hermit. He understood, or thought he understood, that because he had failed to live his life to the full in its proper time, this love had come to him as a belated nemesis. His brain knew that it was hopeless; every morning when he shaved, his mirror told him very plainly one big reason why. But then, as the brain told the heart in unmistakable terms what was the matter, the heart talked back to the brain to the effect that the brain didn’t know what it was talking about. It was a new thing and a painful thing for Lee to discover that he knew very little about himself and less about the girl.

He had seen Oona on and off over these last months, mostly at the hotel, but he had never been really alone with her. She always seemed to be on some mission, always the center of some group or other of “very important persons”, senators from Washington, ranking officers in civvies, big businessmen. Her duties as Scriven’s private secretary apparently included the role of a first lady for Cephalon.

Despite this preoccupation an intimate and tense relationship existed between him and her. Sometimes she would invite him to join her group and then for one or two brief moments their eyes would meet above the conversation and her eyes seemed to ask: “What do you think of these people?” or “How do I look tonight?”

His eyes would answer:

“These people are strangers to me; you know that I’m a bit out of this world. But you handle them expertly and you are looking wonderful tonight.”

She was tremendously popular, especially with the set of the young scientists who made the hotel their club. This new generation, born in the days of the Second World War, was changing the horses of its feminine ideals in the mid-stream of its youth. The old ideal, the “problematic woman” who had ruled over and had made life miserable for three generations of American males, was on its way out. The new ideal was the woman who would unite beauty and intellect into one fully integrated, non-problematical personality. The ideal being new, the feminine type which represented it was rare. Oona in her perfect poise, in her rare beauty combined with her importance as Scriven’s confidential secretary was the perfect expression of the new desired type; it was natural that these young men should worship her as “the woman of the future.”

With the hopeless and--in consequence--unselfish love he had for her, Lee wasn’t jealous of her popularity. On the contrary, he was rather proud of it like a knight-errant who rejoices in the adoration bestowed upon the lady of his heart. What worried him was a very different problem: Was Oona really all those others thought she was? Was she really that “fully integrated”, that “non-problematical” personality she appeared to be?

He couldn’t believe it, and the conflict came in because all those others were so certain that she was. He couldn’t get over his first impression of her. He had met her in that cabin in the sky, the most synthetic, the most perversely artificial setup one could dream up in the second half of the 20th century. She had impressed him as something “out of this world”, a goddess, a Diana with a golden helmet for hair, so radiant as to blind the eyes of mortal men. She was the confidential secretary of a man of genius, Scriven, one of those rare comets which fall down upon this earth and remain forever foreign to its atmosphere. With all these thoroughly abnormal elements entering into her life and forming her, it would be a miracle for any girl to develop into a “non-problematical”, a “fully integrated” personality.

Was it possible that he alone was right and all those others were wrong about Oona? Like innumerable men before him when they stood face to face with the Sphinx or with the Gioconda or even with the smile of a mere mortal woman, Lee drew a sigh: Man’s only answer to the riddle of the eternal feminine...

No, he probably would never be able to chart these white spots on his mental map. The effort was wasted; it would be much better for him to return to those charts right in front of him, the data of which were exact because they came from The Brain.

In Apperception 36 the sensory organs of The Brain had been especially adapted to the analysis of “Ant-termes-pacificus-Lee“. The apparatus was essentially the same as in Apperception 27, dedicated to personality analysis. As Lee strongly suspected, it would be essentially the same in any other field of analysis. The Brain possessed five sensory organs just as did man. One difference between The Brain’s senses and human senses lay in their range, their penetration and in their sensitivity; these were a multiple of man’s sensory capacities. Another difference was that The Brain translated all its sensory apperceptions into visual form, i.e. into the language best understood by Man, the eye being Man’s most highly developed sensory organ. The third and perhaps the most significant difference was that the five senses of The Brain were at all times working in concert so that in its analysis of, for instance, a manuscript, The Brain not only conveyed the ideas expressed in that manuscript, but also the author’s personality, the smell of his room, the feel of his paper and the ideas he had hidden between the lines of that manuscript.

The flow of observations processed by The Brain and pouring back to Apperception 36 via teletype and visual screen was prodigious. Lee had been forced to ask for an assistant; between the two of them they were working for 20 out of the 24 hours to match the working time of The Brain, charting results in the main.

Some of The Brain’s findings had been most unexpected and rather strange. It had observed, for instance, an increasing acidity of the nasi-corn secretions with “Ant-termes-pacificus“. Formidable as this chemical artillery already was, in another ten thousand generations it would eat through every known substance including glass and high-carbon steel.

Another development which had escaped human observation, was a mutation of the workers’ mandibles; it went very fast. Within no more than maybe a thousand generations they would double in size and strength, would become veritable jumping tools.

While the bellicose spirit had been successfully bred out of the new species, its capacities for material destructions had increased. Likewise the appetite of “Ant-termes“ was even more ferocious than that of the older species; Lee was feeding all kinds of experimental foods, but woodpulp remained the staple, the very stuff which in its liquid form, lignin, embedded the nerve paths of The Brain.

Lifting his strained eyes from the charts, Lee looked over the row of air conditioned glass cubicles wherein “Ant-termes-pacificus“ continued its lives undisturbed by the new habitat, undisturbed by the rays which flowed over and through their bodies, unconscious that a superhuman intelligence was probing steadily into every manifestation of the mysterious collective brains of their race.

They had built their new mounds pointing due North as had their ancestors for the past 100 million years. To the human eye nothing betrayed the teeming life within except the tiny tunnels creeping out from the mounds in the direction of the foods which were placed different from day to day. Cemented from loam and saliva by the invisible sappers, the tunnels, like threads of grey wool, unerringly moved to the deposits of pulpwood, up the shelves, up the tin cans and glass containers they had determined to destroy. Their instincts were uncanny, their destruction as methodical and “scientific” as was modern war.

In Northern Australia Lee had come across big eucalyptus trees, healthy-looking and in full bloom, and then they would collapse under the first stroke of an axe or even as one pushed hard against them.

The termites had hollowed them out from roof to top, had transformed them into thin walled pipes, leaving just enough “flesh” to keep some sap-circulation going, to maintain a semi-balance of life in order to exploit it more efficiently. Over here in the lab they would open up a number 3 tin can within a couple of hours; first with the soldiers’ vicious nasi-corn secretions eating the tin away and then with the workers mandibles gnawing at the weakened metal. In time perhaps they would learn to collapse steel bridges, sabotage rails, perforate the engines of motorcars if these should prove to be menaces to their race. As they had persevered through the eons of the past, so they would in all the future; their civilization would be extant long after Man and his work had disappeared from the earth...

With the aid of The Brain, Lee had accumulated more data, more knowledge of the “Ant-termes“ society within a few months than a lifetime of study could have yielded him under normal conditions. Even so, some of the greatest mysteries remained. What, for instance, caused these blind creatures to attack a sealed tin can of syrup in preference to its neighbor with tomatoes or some other stuff? No racial memory could have taught them; there were no tin cans a million years, not even a hundred years, ago. It couldn’t be a sense of smell, it couldn’t be any sense; there would have to be some weird extrasensory powers in that unfathomable collective brain of their race.

The magnifying fluoroscope screens arrayed all along the walls and hooked up to the circuits of The Brain showed him details and phases of the specie’s life as The Brain perceived them and as no human eye had ever seen before.

For a minute or so Lee stared at the luminous image nearest to him and then with an effort he turned his eyes away to escape from its hypnotic influence. It was but the head of one worn-out worker used as a living storage tank for excremental food. It was absolutely immobile, its decaying mandibles pointing down, cemented as the animal was by its overextended belly to the ceiling. But magnified as were its remaining life manifestations by the powers of The Brain, he could see it breathe, could count the slow pulse, could sense a strain in its ophthalmic region, some hidden effort to see, like a blind man’s, and above all Lee perceived the ganglion primitive as it was, yet twitching in reaction to pain. There could be no doubt that in its last service for the racial commonweal the animal was suffering slow torture even if its senses were closed to that torture. It was a fascinating and at the same time a terrible thing to see; and it was only one out of the hundred equally revealing sights.

Lee frowned at himself; manifestly some emotional element interfered with the objectivity of his observations; this was entirely out of place, it would be better to call it a day.

The electric clock showed 20 minutes to midnight. At midnight The Brain would stop its mighty labors; the hours from midnight to four a.m. were its rest periods, or “beauty-sleep” as the technicians jokingly called it. It was the only period wherein the maintenance engineers were permitted to enter the interior of the lobes, checking and servicing group after group of its myriad cells and circuits, and incidentally it was the most wonderful and exciting portion of Lee’s day.

For the project which Scriven had handed him, this study of the collective brains in insect societies, also involved a comparative study of The Brain’s organisms and functionings. Toward this end Lee had been given a pass which allowed him freely to circulate through all the lobes, to enter convolution, any gland during the overhaul period and to ask question of the employees. The privilege was rare and he enjoyed it immensely. So vast was this underground world that even now after months he had not seen the half of it; to him the travels of every new night were fantastic Alice-in-Wonderland adventures.

As he now left Apperception 36 through the door which led to the interior, the glideways were already swarming with the maintenance crews en route to their stations. The spectacle was colorful, almost like a St. Patrick’s Day parade. Gangs of air conditioners were dressed blue, electricians white, black-light specialists in purple, radionics men in orange. The maintenance engineers of the radioactive pyramidal cells looked like illustrations from the science-fiction magazines, hardly human in their twelve-inch armor or sponge rubber filled with a new inert gas which was supposed to be almost gamma ray proof. All these men were young, were tops in their fields, the pick of American Universities, colleges and the most progressive industries. Carefully selected for family background they had been screened through health and intelligence tests, had been trained in special courses, had been subjected to a five-minute personality analysis by The Brain itself. They constituted what was undoubtedly the finest working team ever assembled, and incidentally they made the little city of Cephalon the socially healthiest community in the United States.

In his nightly expeditions over these past months Lee had spoken to a great many of them. As now he joined the line, there were many who hailed the lanky, queer looking man: There comes the ant-man. Hello, Professor. Hello, Aussie.