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

human brain; its nerve cells are so extremely sensitive that they are distributed by light. We use black light almost exclusively or activated phosphorous such as on the sheaths of the nerve cables. For the same reason we of the personnel are normally not permitted to pass through the interior of The Brain during operations-time. Exceptions are only made in the case of very important persons such as you are. Normally one travels to one's stations through the ducts elevator shafts in the bone matter or rather the rock outside. Those are so much faster and more comfortable Dr. Lee; oh I feel so bad about you, poor man, traveling all alone through this horrible maze without a human soul in sight."

Lee grinned. He wouldn't have liked to be married to this chatterbox no matter how beautiful she might turn out to be; but at the moment her exceeding femininity was most comforting in the weirdness which surrounded him.

The little platform under his feet started acting up again in the queerest manner. It pushed him forward and the wall at the rear kicked him in the back; his nose flattened against the sliding cylinder in front as the contraption reverted from the perpendicular course to something like the undulations of a traveling wave. Lee darkly perceived group after group of luminous cables coiling away into cavernous pits filled with what looked like eyes of cats, faintly aglow and twinkling at him from the dark. They reminded him of the fireflies of the green hells he had been in during the war.

"You are now skirting the convolutions of the cerebellum," his guardian angel told him. "They are electronic tubes which receive sensory impressions and translate them into impulses for cerebration. Here in the cerebellum the bulk of the associations is being evoked; these are then distributed throughout the hemispheres of the cortex or higher brain. Oh I do wish you wouldn't get seasick, Dr. Lee; some of our visitors do, you know; it's those wavy, wavy movements."

The sympathetic Vivian came much too close to the truth for Lee to think her funny. With a sense of approaching disaster he stared at the sliding cylinder walls; from time to time the passing lights reflected his face, distorted and decidedly greenish in tint. Trouble was that seemingly nowhere there was any fixed point on which to stabilize the eye. He seemed to be carried on the back of a galloping boa constrictor with a couple of others streaking away under his armpits.

Some of the caves which he had skirted were alive with ruby electronic eyes and some were green and again there were others in which all the colors of the rainbow mixed. There was no end to them, nor could he gauge their depths. After an interminable time of this the glideway went into a flying upward leap. Again the perspective changed completely; now the thing seemed to be suspended from the ceiling with slanting views opening toward the scene below through its transparent sides.

"You are now passing across the commissures into the cerebrum," came Vivian's voice just as Lee thought that nausea was getting the better of him. "You'll now ascend along one of the main gyri through the mid-brain between the hemispheres. Those masses of ganglions below and coming from all sides as they go over the pass of the ridge are association bundles. Beyond they disperse again over the cortex mantle to all the centers of coordination, higher cerebration and higher psychic activities. Things will be a little easier now for you, Dr. Lee; physically I mean. There will be some gyrations but not quite so violent. Oh you're holding out fine, like a real He-man, you're looking swell in my television screen."

Certain as he was that he looked rather like a scarecrow in a snowstorm Lee felt grateful for the praise. Besides she was right; the boa constrictor which he rode calmed down a little, marching with a dignity more in accordance with its size. Momentarily the luminous nerve cables, flying as they did toward him, threatened sudden death, however, they merely brushed the transparent cylinder, wrapping it up in a rainbow and then winged away again. Below acres of space streamed by, seed beds one could imagine to be young typewriters, millions of them, all ticking away with dainty precision, sparkling with myriads of tiny lights as they did.

Then there came more acres teeming with fractional horsepower motors; he could hear their beehive hummings even through the plexiglass. The things they drove Lee couldn't make out because the adjoining acres of this underground hothouse for mushrooming machines were again shrouded in darkness except for sparks which crossed the unfathomable expanse like tracer bullets. Struck with a sort of word blindness caused by the sensory impressions barrage, Lee could no longer grasp the meaning of Vivian's voice as it went on and on explaining things like "crystal cells," "selenoid cells," "grey matter pyramidal cells," powered somehow by atomic fission, "nerve loops" and "synthesis gates" which were not to be confused with "analysis gates" while they looked exactly the same....

Apart from this at least one half of his mental and physical energy had to be expanded in suppressing nausea and bracing himself against the gyrations which still jerked his feet from under him and made friction disks of his shoulders as his body swayed from side to side. All of a sudden he felt that he was being derailed. There was an opening in the plastics wall of the cylinder; a curved metal shield like the blade of a bulldozer jumped into his path, caught him, slowed down his momentum and delivered him safely at a door marked "Apperception-Center 24." It opened and within its frame there stood an angel neatly dressed in the uniform of a registered nurse.

"There," said the angel, "at last. How did you like your little Odyssey through The Brain, Dr. Lee?"

Lee pushed a hand through the mane of his hair; it felt moist and much tangled up.

"Thanks," he said. "It was quite an experience. I enjoyed it; Ulysses, too, probably enjoyed his trip between Scylla and Charybdis—after it was over! It's Miss Leahy, I presume."

The reception room where he had landed, the long white corridor, the instruments gleaming in built-in recesses behind crystal glass, the nurse's uniform; all spelled clinic, a private one rather for the well-to-do. Since the procedure was routine he might as well submit to it, Lee thought. He felt the familiar taste of disinfectant as a thermometer was stuck into his mouth and then the rubber tube around his arm throbbing with the vigorous pumpings of the efficient Vivian.

"L. F. Mellish, M.D.—I. C. Bondy, M.D." was painted on the frosted glass door where she led him afterward. The two medics received Lee with a show of respect mixed with professional cordiality. Both Bondy, the dark and oriental looking chap, and Mellish, blond and florid, were in their middle twenties and both wore tweeds which depressed Lee with the perfection of their cut. Seeing the professional table at the center of the office, Lee frowned but started to undress; he wanted this thing done and over with as soon as possible.

"No, no—that won't be necessary, Dr. Lee," they stopped him laughingly, "We have already a complete medical report on you. Came in this morning from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Canberra on our request. You're an old malaria man, Dr. Lee; your first attack occured in '42 during the Pacific campaign. Pity you refused to return to the States for a complete cure right then. As it is it's turned recurrent; left you a bit anemic, liver's slightly affected. But in all other respects you're sound of limb and wind; we've gone over the report pretty carefully."

"Then why bother with me at all?" Lee said irritably. He had been in doctors' hands too often and had become a little impatient of them.

The freckled hand of Mellish patted his arm. "We do things different over here," he said and Bondy chimed in. "Or rather The Brain does. Just lie down on that table, Dr. Lee, and relax. We're going to enjoy a little movie together, that's all."

Lee did as he was bidden, but hesitant and suspiciously. He hated medical exams, especially those where parts of one's body were hooked up to a lot of impressive machinery. Of this there obviously was a good deal. The two medics seemed determined literally to wall him in with gadgetry. From the ceiling they lowered a huge, heavy-looking disk; not lights, but more like an electro-magnet beset with protruding needles. Lee couldn't see the cables but hoped they were strong, for the thing weighed at least a ton and, overhanging him, looked much more ominous than the sword of Damocles. They wheeled a silver screen to the foot of the table and batteries of what appeared to be thermo-therapeutic equipment to both sides. He wasn't being hooked up to anything, but there was much activity with testing of circuits, button-pushings and shiftings of relay-levers. And then all of a sudden lights went out in the room.

"Say, what is the meaning of all this?" Lee raised his head uneasily from the hard cushion. All he could see now were arrays of luminous dials and the faint radiations from electronic tubes filtering through metal screens inside the apparatus which fenced him in. From behind his head a suave voice—was it Bondy's or Mellish's answered out of the dark.

"This is a subconscious analysis and mental reactions test, Dr. Lee. It's an entirely new method made possible only by The Brain. It has tremendous possibilities; they might include your own work as well."

"Oh Lord," Lee moaned. "Something like psychoanalysis? Have you got it mechanized by now? How terrible."

There was a low chuckle from the other side of his head; they both appeared to have drawn up chairs beyond his field of vision. Lee didn't like it; he liked none of it, in fact. He felt trapped.

"No, Dr. Lee," said the chuckling voice. "This isn't psychoanalysis in the old sense at all. You are not exposed to any fanciful human interpretation, and it isn't wholly mechanical either as you seem to think. The Brain is going to show you certain images and by way of spontaneous psychosomatic reaction you are going to produce certain images in response. Results are visual, immediate and as convincing as a reflection in a mirror; that's the new beauty of it. And now, concentrate your mind upon your body. Do you feel anything touching you?"

"Y-e-s," Lee said, "I think I do—it's—it's uncanny: it's like spiders' feet—millions of them. It's running all over my skin. What is it?"

"I think he's warming up," whispered the second voice; then came the first again.

"It's feeler rays, Dr. Lee; the first wave, low penetration surface rays."

"Where do they come from?"

"From overhead; that is, from the teletactile centers of The Brain."

"What do they do to me?"

There was the low chuckle again. "They excite the surface nerves of your body, open up the path for the deep-penetration rays; they proceed from the lower organs to the higher ones; in the end they reach the conscious levels of your brain. It's the tune-in as we call it, Dr. Lee."

A small movie projector began to purr; a bright rectangle was thrown upon the silver screen and then, Lee stirred. Hands, soothing but firm held him down. "Where did you get those." he exclaimed.

"From many sources," a calm answer came, "The papers, the newsreels, the War-Department, old friends of yours...."

What was unrolled on the silver screen were chapters from Lee's own life. They were incomplete, they were hastily thrown together, they were like leaves which a child tears from its picturebook. But knowing the book of his life, every picture acted as a key unlocking the treasures and the horrors amassed in the vaults of memory. It began with the old homestead in Virginia. Mother had taken that reel of the new mechanical cotton picker at work. There it was, a great big thing with the darkies standing around scratching their heads. There he was himself, aged twelve, with his .22 cal. rifle in hand and Musha, the coon dog, by his side; Musha, how he had loved that dog—and how he had cried when it got killed.

Pictures of the Alexander Hamilton Military Academy. Some of the worst years of his life he had spent behind the walls of that imitation castle.

The bombs upon Pearl Harbor.... He had enlisted the following day. On his return from the induction center mother had said.... Her figure, her movements, her voice loomed enormous in his memory.... But now the pictures of the Pacific War flicked across the screen.... They were picked from campaigns in which he, Lee had participated. They were also picked from documentaries which the government had never dared to let the public see ... close-ups of a