The Brain by Edmond Hamilton (best free ebook reader .txt) 📗

mighty head: "Calm yourself Lee. We cannot afford emotional outbursts. Not here, not now. The situation is far too serious for that. I know he was your friend; he must have made a false move, given the wrong command; a tragic mistake...."

"That's a rotten lie, Scriven, and you know it!" Lee snapped. "Accident, hell! The disappearance of the President, the deaths of the representatives, the train wrecks, the plane wrecks all of them Brain controlled—were those too accidents? You're the head of the Braintrust, You stand responsible; your duty is plain. Cut off the power and kill this thing."

The muscles over Scriven's cheekbones quivered in his struggle to keep control over himself: "For your own sake, Lee, and for the sake of America, stop that kind of talk. You have been putting two and two together; I rather expected that from a man of your intelligence. All right then, something went wrong with The Brain; that is correct. We have not been able to locate the disturbance yet, but the trail is getting hot; it must be connected with those centers of 'higher psychic activities,' the one's we know least about. But we cannot cut those out because something of psychic activity goes into every kind of The Brain's cognitions, even the purely mathematical ones. And it would be utterly impossible to stop The Brain's operations altogether. I wanted to, but the General Staff won't permit it. There's an international crisis of the first magnitude. There may be war within a few days or even hours. Our country has got to prepare counter measures; get ready for the worst. A state of National Emergency already is declared. The Brain is the heart of our National Defense: You know that. It is vital and as indispensible at this hour as it never was before; it continues to function perfectly with the exception of these isolated disturbances in the civilian sector which we will have under control in no time.

"At present I am no more than a figurehead. If I were to give orders to cut off The Brain's power, I would be court-martialed; if I would try and force my way into the Atomic Powerplant, the guards would shoot me on the spot. That's orders Lee. And they apply to you as well. Be reasonable, man!"

Lee's fingers tore through his greying mane of hair.

"Scriven, this is maddening. I thought you knew what I know; I thought you knew everything. Then let me tell you that you're absolutely wrong. There is no technological, mechanical defect; it's worse, it's infinitely worse: you've created a Frankenstein in The Brain. The thing's alive; it's possessed with a destructive will, it demands the unconditional surrender of Man; it has made itself the God of the Machines. Behind all this there is a deep and evil plan by which The Brain aspires to dictatorship over the world."

For a second Scriven jerked his head sideways, away from Lee in that mannerism typical for him. His lips inaudibly formed words: "dementia-praecox." As he turned back to Lee his face was changed and so was his voice. There was calm and authority in it, the whole immense superiority and power which the surgeon holds over the patient on the operation table:

"Very interesting, Lee. You must tell me about it some day; as soon as we are over this emergency. This tragic thing, Gus Krinsley's end. It has had a deeply upsetting effect. I too, considered him my friend you know. Let's get out of here, Lee, there's nothing we can do for the poor fellow. The remains will be taken care of. Meanwhile, there are so many other things to do and we've got to pull ourselves together and keep our minds on the job ahead of us. Come on, at the communications center we can get a drink. I feel the need of one, don't you? And apropos of nothing, the routine checkups on the aptitude tests for all Brain-employees are on again. I take it you are scheduled for Mellish's and Bondy's office one of these days. This afternoon I think...."

Lee gave a long glance to the man who was now leading him towards the door with a brisk step and a kind firm hand on his arm. The man didn't look at him; he kept his eyes averted from both Lee and the blood-spattered assembly line.

Gus Krinsley had said: "I'm a lost soul down there, Aussie." Lee thought. Gus Krinsley was my friend. I should have warned him, I should have told him everything; it might have saved his life. Gus was a common man, a good man; he wouldn't have stood for Brain-dictatorship. In that he was like other common men who do not know their danger. It is not vengeance which I seek but the defense of those for whom Gus was a living symbol. For this defense I've got to preserve myself.

And aloud he: "The routine checkups on the aptitude tests—of course. I thought they were about due. Tomorrow afternoon at Mellish and Bondy's office; that would suit me fine. As you said it yourself, Scriven, a moment ago, this is an awful shock. Gus' tragic end and these tests ought to be based on a man's normal state of mind. So if you don't mind I think I'll go now and break the sad news gently to Gus' wife. You'll give me time for that; that's what you had in mind in the first place, wasn't it?"

"Of course, my dear fellow, of course, that's what I had in mind. Then, till tomorrow afternoon. They'll be waiting for you at the health center...."

CHAPTER VIII

As the elevator shot up through the concrete of The Brain's "dura mater" toward Apperception 36, Lee was feeling grand. Now he was a man with a mission. Now he knew exactly what he had to do. Whether it would help, whether it would stop The Brain; that was a different question, but at least he had his plan.

He marvelled at the ease and at the lightning speed with which the great decision had come. It had been at the sight of the senseless robot-monsters, at the blood-spattered assembly line that the sense of sacred mission had come over him. It had been at the moment when, in Scriven's grip upon his arm, he had read his condemnation that he had hit upon the plan.

He must take an awful chance and a terrific responsibility. For this he had to be morally certain that The Brain was a liar, that Scriven was a liar and that war was being provoked by The Brain despite all its assertions to the contrary because The Brain could assume power only over the dead bodies of millions of men like Gus; Gus whom The Brain had butchered like a guinea pig because he had refused to obey the Gogs and Magogs of the Machine God.

Now that he had this moral certainty Lee felt that strange and mystical elation which comes to the soldier at the zero hour in war. The worst was really over; the terrible waiting, the uncertainty, the struggle of morale in "sweating it out." Now his nerves were steady, exhaustion and fatigue had vanished; in its place was that wonderful feeling of full mastery over all faculties which comes to fighting men as the battle is joined. There was that upsurge of the blood from fighting ancestors which obliterates the cowardice of the intellect, that inspired intoxication which sharpens the intellect into a battle axe. By his quick-witted postponement of the fateful appointment with the psychiatrists he had gained thirty hours. Whether this would be enough he didn't know, but he felt in himself the strength to fight on endlessly.

The elevator stopped at Apperception 36 and Lee stood for a moment at the door of his lab for a last breath, a briefing addressed to himself:

"This is like walking into a mine field," he thought; "one false step and things go Boom. All the sensory organs of The Brain are in action behind this door and some of them are pretty near extrasensory in their mind-reading capacities. I've got to walk back and forth amongst those observation screens; there may be other radiations too, following me, penetrating into the recesses of my mind without my knowing it. That means I must make my mind a blank. It's like being quizzed by a lie-detector, only more so. I must not only seem normal and at ease, I actually must be so and harbor only friendly, innocuous thoughts toward The Brain. My actions will seem innocent enough; it is my thoughts wherein my danger lies. Whatever I do; I've got to direct that from the subconscious: act as by instinct and keep the mind a blank."

He opened the door and looked around—as usual—in this vault as silent as the grave of a Pharaoh. There was a little dust on the glass cubicles of "Ant-termes-pacificus" and there were a few lines scribbled on the yellow memo-pad on his desk:

"Thanks for the weekend, boss. Everything normal and under control. Next feeding time at 8 p.m. the 27th. So long, Harris." Of course; he had given Harris, his assistant, the weekend off. That had escaped his mind in the excitement when The Brain's mutiny began.... And now it was the 29th.

"They must be ravenously hungry by this time," he thought, and that thought was in order because it was a normal thought.

He walked through the rows of the cubicles, halting his step every now and then. The fluorescent screens on which The Brain drew the curves of its observation-rays showed two sharp rises of the lines marked "activity" and "emotionality". The lower levels of the glass cages already were opaque; the glass corroded by the viscous acids which the soldiers had squirted from their cephalic glands in their attempts to break out and to reach food.

"Poor beasts," Lee thought, and he thought it without restraint because it was normal, a perfectly harmless thought. But then; below the layers of his consciousness his instincts told a different story.

"This is marvelous," they triumphed. "Fate takes a hand; they are desperate; they're ready for the warpath and even the tiger and the elephant would run for cover when their columns march."

As if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do Lee walked over to the south wall, the one which separated the lab from the interior of The Brain. He removed a sliding panel marked "L-Filler-Spout" and there it was before his eyes, looking almost like a fireplug. There was one in every apperception center and there were hundreds more throughout The Brain, and their purpose was to replenish the liquid insulation which shielded the sensitive electric nervepaths of The Brain. Without looking at the thing, concentrating his every thought upon the hunger of "Ant-termes-pacificus", Lee unscrewed the cap and put a finger into the opening. The finger came back covered with the thick, the syrupy lignin, this amber-colored sluggish stream of woodpulp liquefied, this soft bed of The Brain's vibrant nerves. Unthinking, absent-minded, Lee wiped the finger with his handkerchief.

"Now, I'm going to try a slightly different arrangement of the tests," he thought. "It's normal; I'm doing that almost every day."

The feeling he experienced as he swung into action was strange. As he walked back and forth it felt like somnambulic walk; something his limbs did without an act of will. As his hands did things expertly and skillfully the feeling was that they were instruments automatically moved not by his own volition but by some power outside himself.

His movements were those of a child serenely at play, a child incongruously tall and gaunt and grey-haired constructing little causeways and bridges on the ground with the logs of the fireplace; a happy child engrossed in an innocent game....

It took about an hour and then causeways of fresh pulpwood were laid from every termite hill to every feeding gate, from every glass cubicle to the south wall and along the south wall to the "Lignin-Filler-Spout"; and from the ground up to the spout a little tepee of sticks had been built.

Admiringly the grey-haired child looked at its handiwork through thick-lensed glasses. "It's been an interesting game," Lee thought, "it might turn out to be a valuable new experiment. I'll sit down now and observe what happens...."

He went over to the desk again and settled down. He opened his files and laid out his charts on the desk and there were colored pencils to be sharpened for the entries. He was glad of that; his conscious mind rejoiced now over every little pursuit of routine, of normalcy, of the established scientific order of things; it concentrated on these. Pencil in hand, reclined in comfort, his heartbeat even, he kept expectant eyes upon the staggered rows of fluorescent screens, ready to note any significant developments.

He didn't have to wait long; their strange