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

They had built their new mounds pointing due North as had their ancestors for the past 100 million years. To the human eye nothing betrayed the teeming life within except the tiny tunnels creeping out from the mounds in the direction of the foods which were placed different from day to day. Cemented from loam and saliva by the invisible sappers, the tunnels, like threads of grey wool, unerringly moved to the deposits of pulpwood, up the shelves, up the tin cans and glass containers they had determined to destroy. Their instincts were uncanny, their destruction as methodical and "scientific" as was modern war.

In Northern Australia Lee had come across big eucalyptus trees, healthy-looking and in full bloom, and then they would collapse under the first stroke of an axe or even as one pushed hard against them.

The termites had hollowed them out from roof to top, had transformed them into thin walled pipes, leaving just enough "flesh" to keep some sap-circulation going, to maintain a semi-balance of life in order to exploit it more efficiently. Over here in the lab they would open up a number 3 tin can within a couple of hours; first with the soldiers' vicious nasi-corn secretions eating the tin away and then with the workers mandibles gnawing at the weakened metal. In time perhaps they would learn to collapse steel bridges, sabotage rails, perforate the engines of motorcars if these should prove to be menaces to their race. As they had persevered through the eons of the past, so they would in all the future; their civilization would be extant long after Man and his work had disappeared from the earth....

With the aid of The Brain, Lee had accumulated more data, more knowledge of the "Ant-termes" society within a few months than a lifetime of study could have yielded him under normal conditions. Even so, some of the greatest mysteries remained. What, for instance, caused these blind creatures to attack a sealed tin can of syrup in preference to its neighbor with tomatoes or some other stuff? No racial memory could have taught them; there were no tin cans a million years, not even a hundred years, ago. It couldn't be a sense of smell, it couldn't be any sense; there would have to be some weird extrasensory powers in that unfathomable collective brain of their race.

The magnifying fluoroscope screens arrayed all along the walls and hooked up to the circuits of The Brain showed him details and phases of the specie's life as The Brain perceived them and as no human eye had ever seen before.

For a minute or so Lee stared at the luminous image nearest to him and then with an effort he turned his eyes away to escape from its hypnotic influence. It was but the head of one worn-out worker used as a living storage tank for excremental food. It was absolutely immobile, its decaying mandibles pointing down, cemented as the animal was by its overextended belly to the ceiling. But magnified as were its remaining life manifestations by the powers of The Brain, he could see it breathe, could count the slow pulse, could sense a strain in its ophthalmic region, some hidden effort to see, like a blind man's, and above all Lee perceived the ganglion primitive as it was, yet twitching in reaction to pain. There could be no doubt that in its last service for the racial commonweal the animal was suffering slow torture even if its senses were closed to that torture. It was a fascinating and at the same time a terrible thing to see; and it was only one out of the hundred equally revealing sights.

Lee frowned at himself; manifestly some emotional element interfered with the objectivity of his observations; this was entirely out of place, it would be better to call it a day.

The electric clock showed 20 minutes to midnight. At midnight The Brain would stop its mighty labors; the hours from midnight to four a.m. were its rest periods, or "beauty-sleep" as the technicians jokingly called it. It was the only period wherein the maintenance engineers were permitted to enter the interior of the lobes, checking and servicing group after group of its myriad cells and circuits, and incidentally it was the most wonderful and exciting portion of Lee's day.

For the project which Scriven had handed him, this study of the collective brains in insect societies, also involved a comparative study of The Brain's organisms and functionings. Toward this end Lee had been given a pass which allowed him freely to circulate through all the lobes, to enter convolution, any gland during the overhaul period and to ask question of the employees. The privilege was rare and he enjoyed it immensely. So vast was this underground world that even now after months he had not seen the half of it; to him the travels of every new night were fantastic Alice-in-Wonderland adventures.

As he now left Apperception 36 through the door which led to the interior, the glideways were already swarming with the maintenance crews en route to their stations. The spectacle was colorful, almost like a St. Patrick's Day parade. Gangs of air conditioners were dressed blue, electricians white, black-light specialists in purple, radionics men in orange. The maintenance engineers of the radioactive pyramidal cells looked like illustrations from the science-fiction magazines, hardly human in their twelve-inch armor or sponge rubber filled with a new inert gas which was supposed to be almost gamma ray proof. All these men were young, were tops in their fields, the pick of American Universities, colleges and the most progressive industries. Carefully selected for family background they had been screened through health and intelligence tests, had been trained in special courses, had been subjected to a five-minute personality analysis by The Brain itself. They constituted what was undoubtedly the finest working team ever assembled, and incidentally they made the little city of Cephalon the socially healthiest community in the United States.

In his nightly expeditions over these past months Lee had spoken to a great many of them. As now he joined the line, there were many who hailed the lanky, queer looking man: There comes the ant-man. Hello, Professor. Hello, Aussie.

For some reason most of the boys assumed that he was an Australian, perhaps because with his graying mane and his emaciated face he looked like a foreigner to them.

This popularity with the younger generation, coming as it did so late and unexpected in his life, made Lee very proud. Those were the kind of Americans he had been secretly longing for in those desert years, hardworking, wide-awake, radiant with life:

"They really are the salt of the earth, the hope of the world," he thought.

He had passed through the median section of the hemispheres and had reached the point just below the cerebrum. This was a region of cavities, the seats of various glands in the human brain. Some of these had their mechanical counterparts in The Brain, huge storage tanks with an elaborate pumping system which carried their fluid chemicals through the labyrinth of The Brain. But there was one gland which had not been duplicated in The Brain, the pineal gland.

In the human, the pineal gland was the despair of the medical sciences. It was not demonstrably linked to any other organ nor did it serve any demonstrable function. Yet, it was known that its sensitivity was greater by far than even that of the pyramidal cells and that in some mysterious manner the pineal gland was vitally connected with the center of life because its slightest violation caused instant death. Metaphysicists had dealt with this mystery of mysteries; it was their theory that the pineal gland were the seat of "extrasensory" faculties and it was often referred to as "the inner eye."

Even if such an organ could have been duplicated by science and technology, there would have been no use for it; it could have served no purpose in The Brain. The Brain had been designed for the solution of exact problems; no matter what nature had created in the brains of higher animals, no matter how unprejudiced their approach, scientists like Dr. Scriven would have hesitated to impair an otherwise perfect apparatus through the addition of nuisance values such as any "extrasensory" faculties.

However, with The Brain being modelled so closely after the human brain, the space for the pineal gland did exist even if in a sort of functional vacuum. In order to utilize this space in some manner, the designers had converted the gland into a subcenter for the distribution of spare parts. As such it had become one of Lee's favorite observation posts. Here he could get a closeup view of all types of electronic and radioactive cells; he could even touch and handle them because they were not hooked up in any circuit of The Brain; and above all there was Gus Krinsley, master electrician, who never tired of telling Lee whatever he wanted to know. Gus was a real friend....

He had left the glideway on the point of its nearest approach; the pineal gland in front of him looked like a miniature barrage balloon; egg-shaped, it hung suspended from the cerebral roof, a shell of plastics which could be entered only over a bridge across a dark abyss. Inside, its walls were aglitter with sound-proofing aluminum foil, it was piled with a bewildering variety of electronic parts on shelves somewhat like an over-stocked radio store. Near the door a counter divided the room; Gus used it and a little cubicle of an office to fill the orders as the maintenance engineers handed in their slips. As usual there was nobody in sight. "Gus!" he called.

Out of the jungle of machinery way back a head popped up like a Jack-in-the-box. It was as bald and shiny as an electric bulb. High up on its dome it balanced gold-rimmed glasses which quivered as it moved seachingly from side to side. Then, with an amazing twisting of big ears, the head caused the biofocals to drop onto a saddle near the tip of a long, sensitive nose; and now the head could see.

"It's you Aussie, is it? Come over."

Gus Krinsley was a pony edition of a man; in fact he had once been hired as a midget to install automatic bomb-sights in the confined spaces of the early bombers of the second World War. Before long, however, he became respectfully known as "the mighty midget" in the California factory, and he had ended up as their master electrician before Braintrust made him the head of one of its experimental divisions. The midnight hours he spent in the pineal gland were only a sideline of his work. Like many a small man in a country where six-footers enjoy a preferred status, Gus made up for lack of size by mobility. He reminded one much of a billiard ball in the way he bounced, collided and ricocheted amongst taller men. That this was no more than act became manifest the moment one saw Gus at work.

As Lee reached the spot where Gus' head had shown, he found his friend crouching, his hands thrust deep in the intestines of something radionic, his fingers working on it with the deft rhythm of a good surgeon at his thousandth appendectomy. The bifocals had returned to their incongruous perch on the dome of the head. Gus didn't need them; even as he stared at his job he worked by touch alone.

"What is it?" Lee asked.

"Pulsemeter," came the quiet answer. "She's a dandy. Still got some bugs in her, though."

A melodious chime came from a big instrument panel built into the wall of the oval room. Dropping a number of tiny precision tools upon a piece of velvet, Gus rushed over to the panel. A great many indicator needles were tremulously receding around their luminous dials.

For a minute or so he went through the complex and precise ritual of a bank cashier closing the vault.

"They'll do it every time," he said reproachfully. "Catch me by surprise."

Lee grinned. It wasn't The Brain's fault if the midnight signal surprised Gus. It merely announced that the current was being cut off by the main power station. Repetition of this maneuver throughout all the convolutions and glands of The Brain was required for the added safety of the maintenance engineers, a double-check, a routine. Pointing to the gadget which looked somewhat like a big radio console Lee asked:

"This pulsemeter, Gus, what does it do? I haven't seen it before."

"You haven't?" the little man frowned. "Ah, no; you haven't. It's standard in most apperception centers, but not in yours. That's because in yours The Brain works under a permanent problem-load."

Lee shook his head. "I don't get it, Gus; you know I'm the village idiot of this mastermind community."

"It's like this," Gus explained. "The Brain has a given capacity. The Brain also has an optimal operation speed,