The Affair of the Brains by Anthony Gilmore (read an ebook week txt) 📗

was just ahead. Carse glanced back.

"Yes, suh!" a fierce voice yelled out to him. "Coming!"

Friday was bringing up the rear as fast as he could. He came sideways in a zigzag course ducking and whirling constantly, and in between firing promptly at any portions of enemy anatomies that dared project into the line of the corridor. The Hawk covered the last few yards of his retreat, and then they were together at the laboratory.

"The knob!" Carse ordered, spraying the corridor in general warning.

Friday tried it, but the door was locked. He hurled himself against it, but it did not budge.

How to get through? On the other side of the door was Leithgow, and probably Ku Sui; on this side they were trapped in a blind end. They could never make it back down that gauntlet and live, and anything like concerted action on the part of the yellows would do for them where they were.

That concerted action came at once. Seventy feet behind, a heavy shot-projector was pushed out on its little rollers from one of the doors. A hand reached out and whirled it so that its muzzle bore straight down the corridor at them. Carse shot at the hand, but the target was too small even for his fine eye, and he missed; Friday silenced an emboldened orange spot of light that was spitting streaks at them.

Hopeless! It looked like the end. Hawk Carse's face was in its old, emotionless mold as he waited, his gun sharp on the spot where the hand must reappear if they would fire the deadly projector. He had to get that hand—and any others that took its place. An almost impossible shot. He couldn't rush it and get it too. Not in time.

A moment passed. The hand flashed out; Carse shot and again missed. Then a narrow cone was along the corridor, a blinding orange streak. Instantly, with a rasp of thunder, it was gone, and the air was stifling.

The Hawk was untouched; Friday, too, he saw. The bolt had been taken by the door—and one of the door's two halves was ajar!

At once Hawk Carse acted. "Inside!" he yelled, then was through, the negro right behind. Carse's eyes swept the laboratory. It was a place of shadows, the sole light being a faint gleam from a tiny bulb-tipped surgical tool which glimmered weirdly from the bank of instruments waiting by the operating table. Carse saw no one.

"Hold the door!" he ordered. "I don't think it'll lock!"

Friday obeyed. He found the inner bolt melted and the lock inoperative; and, placing his forearms on either side of the middle crack of the door, he stood bracing it.

A furious pounding shook the door. A heavy pressure bent it inward.

"Quick!" the big black gasped. "Somethin' to wedge it!"

"A minute, Friday," the Hawk answered. "Hold it!"

He was already dragging a metal table there; and, upended under the knob, making an angle with the floor, it held stoutly closed the door, now thumping and quivering with blows given it from outside. The panting negro fell back from the door exhausted, but rose to help his master at the need for placing additional barricades.

That finished, the Hawk wheeled, and at once, pantherlike, ray-guns at the ready, stalked the room. There was no sign of the enemy. He approached the operating table.

A great relief flooded his grim face as he sighted Eliot Leithgow lying there, apparently untouched and still conscious. The elderly scientist was strapped down tight, but he was smiling.

"I knew you'd come, Carse, if you could," he said simply.

There was no time for visiting. "Where's Ku Sui?" the adventurer asked.

"Gone," Leithgow answered. "I heard a door open and close—which one I couldn't see. He went as soon as that bell began to ring. The assistants, too."

Through the shouts and batterings at the barricaded door came a new sound—from another direction. Like a streak the Hawk was at one of the three other doors, throwing its inside hand bolt; and by the time he had shot over the second, Friday had taken the cue and secured the remaining one.

The negro let out a vast breath. "Umph!" he said. "I'll tell the universe that was close!"

Hawk Carse said nothing. With eyes ever-watchful for sign of a trick or a trap in the apparently deserted laboratory, he quickly unbuckled the bands that held Leithgow to the operating table. Friday lifted the scientist to the floor, where he stretched weakly.

The adventurer smiled faintly, then his eyes went cold and serious. Crisply he said:

"We came, yes—but now I think we're trapped. There'll be men outside each of these four doors. The bolts may hold them a while, but eventually they'll get through. We must look for further weapons. If only there were better light! Friday," he ordered, "look for a switch. Ah!"

With a thud and a booming reverberation a systematic battering had begun on the metal door through which they had entered. It quivered visibly and rang as the powerful blows from the other side bludgeoned into it, and evenly spaced, shrewdly delivered at the vital middle point. Whrang, whrang—even strokes, ringing throughout the barred laboratory—whrang ... whrang....

And then a similar piece settled into clanging routine on another door; then on the remaining two. The bolts holding them jumped with each deafening thud. Friday scowled, forgot to search farther for the switch, took a few short, indecisive steps, and then stood still again, looking questioningly at his master. The Hawk stood silent also, smoothing the bangs of flaxen hair above one temple, his face knit in concentration.

He had been afraid they would use the great projector on the door, and had been somewhat cheered by the reflection that they dared not, for fear of destroying the contents of the laboratory, especially the irreplaceable brains. But this was worse; Ku Sui was without question directing their efforts now. And that being the case, he could expect to see one door after another battered down—and then a concerted, four-point rush which would end everything....

Eliot Leithgow said the extraordinary thing that pointed a way out. "May I suggest," he said mildly, "that we try to get Dr. Ku Sui's brains to help us?"

"What do you mean?"

The older man smiled, a little sadly. "Those brains—they once were friends of mine. It's possible they'll answer our questions. It won't hurt to try. We'll ask them how it might be possible to get out."

Hawk Carse cried: "Eliot, you've got it! There is a chance!"

But the negro shivered. The brains stood for magic, for ghosts—for awful, unknown things he wanted nothing to do with.

Carse shoved back the screen concealing the infamous device.

"We know where this switch is, at least. If only the current's not been turned off!"

"Probably not," the Master Scientist said, out of his own technical thought-train.

Friday hung back, loath to be concerned. He looked askance at the thing, his open mouth a small round circle.

The Hawk was at the switch, but his hand hesitated. In spite of the emergency at the doors, in spite of his innate promptness of action, he hesitated. This thing he was about to do—this awful human mechanism before him—they were so weird and unnatural....

Then he heard a faint click inside the laboratory—in a place where no one should be. Instinctively he whirled and crouched—and an orange ray streaked over his head with its wicked spit of death. At once his own ray-gun was up and answering to the spot where the other bolt had started, and then he was flat on the floor and ceiling toward the wall opposite.

A high wide panel in the wall had slid open, with only the faint noise Carse had heard to mark its movement. For just a few seconds it stayed open. The Hawk covered the last few feet in a desperate rush, but he reached it too late. It clicked shut in his face, and there was no hold for his hands when he tried to force it back.

Only a voice showed that someone was on the other side. In familiar, suave tones it said:

"Carse, I still will take you and Leithgow—alive. It would of course be idle to ask you to surrender, but that's not necessary, for you're trapped and can't possibly last another five minutes. I intrude only to warn you away from my synchronized brains. I will destroy without compunction anyone who meddles with them."

Dr. Ku's voice dropped away; the last words seemed to have come from below. Apparently he was descending by a stairway or hidden elevator.

"Without compunction!" Leithgow echoed with a bitter smile.

Carse ordered Friday curtly to watch the panel, then returned to Leithgow.

"Eliot," he said, "we've got to be quick."

And with his words the delicate, overstrained filament in the tiny instrument bulb gave out, and the laboratory was plunged into ultimate blackness....

CHAPTER XII

Out Under the Dome

Within the well of darkness rang the metallic reverberations from the battering on the four doors all around. The fluid nothingness was a place of fear. Its nerve-shattering, mind-confusing bedlam might have come from the fantastic anvils of some giant, malevolent blacksmith.

The Hawk's curt voice cut through imperatively:

"Keep your heads. We'll have a light in a second. Light of a sort."

He threw the switch by the side of the chamber of brains.

Seconds passed, and where was darkness grew a faint glow. The switch had operated; the current, probably from the device's own batteries, was there! Quickly and steadily the liquid within the case took on its self-originating glow, until the midnight laboratory was faintly washed with the delicate rosy light. The wires emerged in their complexity as before, and then the brains, all gruesome and naked in their cradles of unnatural life.

Around the internally-lit case were the three besieged Earthlings, half in blackness, the light from the front making ghastly shadows on their faces. Acolites at some sorcerer's rite they looked, with the long inky patches that left them to dissolve formlessly against the far walls of the room.

Grotesque in the operating garments he wore, his bald head shining in the eery light, Eliot Leithgow approached the microphone Dr. Ku had used to communicate with his pathetic subjects. He looked down at the brains, at the wires which threaded the pans they lay in, at the narrow gray tubes that pulsed with blood—or whatever might be the fluid used in its stead. All mechanical was the apparatus—all of metal and other cunningly fashioned man-made materials—all but the brains....

To the old Master Scientist there came a vision of five human figures, rising specterlike from the case they were entombed in; straight, proud young figures, two of them; two others old, like himself, and the fifth a gnarled hunchback. Very different were they, each from each other, but each face had its mark of genius; and each face, to Eliot Leithgow, was warm and smiling, for these five men were friends....

So he saw them in vision....

"Another switch has to be thrown to talk with them, Carse," he said. The Hawk indicated one inquiringly. Leithgow nodded. "Yes. That was it." The switch went over.

He steadied himself and said into the speaking grille:

"I am Eliot Leithgow—Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow. Once you knew me. Professors Geinst, Estapp and Norman, Dr. Swanson and Master Scientist Cram—do you remember me? Do you remember how once we worked together; how, long ago on our Earth, we were friends? Do you remember your old colleague, Leithgow?"

He stopped, deeply shaken. In seconds his mind sped back through the years to those five men as he had last seen them—and to two women he had met, calm-faced as their husband-scientists.... God forbid those women should ever learn of this!

Carse watched his old comrade closely, fearful of the strain this was on him.

Then came a cold, thin, mechanical voice.

"Yes, Master Scientist Eliot Leithgow. I remember you well."

The scientist strove to keep level his voice as he continued:

"Two friends and I are trapped here. Dr. Ku Sui desires my brain. He wishes to add it to——" He