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

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