Chapter 9

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, this is this 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; 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 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 and laughed.

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 our duty to 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.