The Brain

  CHAPTER III

  The Brain Trust car which took Lee out of Cephalon was a normal-lookinglimousine, a rear-engined teardrop like all the "60" models, slotted forthe insertion of wings which most of the garages now kept in stock andrented at a small charge for cross-country hops. The only non-standardfeature seemed to be the polaroid glass windows which were provided allaround and not only in front.

  "That's a good idea," Lee said adjusting the nearest ones, "they oughtto have that on every car, all-round protection to the eyes."

  "Think so, sir? Must be the first time you're driving out there," theyoung chauffeur said.

  The car left the outskirts and the desert started to fly by as thespeedometer needle climbed above the 100 mark. Lee sank back into hisseat; the desert had no novelty for him and since the chauffer appearednot inclined to small talk he abandoned himself to thought.

  His visit to his father had not been much of a success....

  _Time_ magazine had carried an item in its personal column, brieflystating that General Jefferson E. Lee, "the Old Lion of Guadalcanal,"had retired from the Marines to Phoenix, Ariz.... Phoenix, the hoteldesk had informed him, was only some 300 miles away and there was hourlyservice by Greyhound helicopter-bus.

  So he had taken the ride, a taxi had brought him to the small neatbungalow, and there he had seen his father for the first time in years.It had been very strange to see him aged, the nut brown face a littleshrunk. He had anticipated that much. But somehow he had failed toimagine the most obvious change; to see his father in civvies and evenless to see him trimming roses with a pair of garden shears. It lookedsuch an incongruous picture for a "Marines' Marine."

  As he had come up the little path his father had looked up.

  "So it's you, Semper." Slowly he had peeled off the old parade kidgloves without a change in his face. "Nice to see you," he had said."Didn't expect to before I start pushing up the daisies from below.Where's your butterfly net?"

  No, in character his father hadn't changed a bit. He still was the old"blood and guts" to whom an entomologist was sort of a humangrass-hopper wielding a butterfly net, and a son indulging in suchantics a bit of a freak, a reproach to his father, a failure of hislife.

  Even so, he had led the way into the house and things had been just ashe remembered them: the old furniture, pictures crowding one another allover the walls, on the unused grand piano--Marines in Vera Cruz, Marinesin China, Marines in Alaska, in the Marianas, in Japan, at the Panamacanal; Marines, Marines, Marines, wherever one looked, in ghostlyparade. No, nothing had changed. It had been mainly jealously which hadcaused him to rebel against becoming another Marine, the first wedgewhich had driven him and his father apart.

  "What are you doing now, padre?" he had asked.

  "You've seen it. Nothing. Just puttering around. They've made mecommander of the National Guard over here," and with a contemptuoussnort, "--a sinecure; might as well have given me a bunch of tinsoldiers to play with. What brought you here?"

  Glad to change the subject Lee had told about Australia, had mentionedThe Brain and the possibility of joining it. His father had not beenpleased.

  "Heard of it," he had grumbled. "Shows how the country is going to thedogs. Now they need machines to do their thinking with. If their ownbrains were gas they couldn't back a car out of the garage. So you'remixed up with that outfit; well--how about a drink?"

  "Rather," he had answered, feeling the need for washing down abitterness; thinking, too, that it might break the ice between him andhis father.

  And then there was that painful moment when they had stood, glasses inhand and remembered....

  The selfsame situation fifteen years ago as the Bomb fell uponHiroshima. He had been on convalescence furlough. They had been alonewhen the news came and there had been a drink between them just as now.And after the announcer stopped he had cried out hysterically like achild in a nightmare.

  "Those fools, that's the end of civilization, that's no longer war."

  "Shut up," his father had shouted, "how dare you insult the Commander inChief to my face. Get out of here and _stay_ out."

  A highball glass had crashed against the floor. And that had been theend. He hadn't returned after the war.

  Yes, it was most unfortunate that now, after so many years, they shouldread that memory in their faces; that it was only the glasses and notthe minds which clicked.

  They had put them down awkwardly with frozen smiles on their lips andhis father had said:

  "Sorry. But an old dog won't learn new tricks. Guess it's too late inthe day for me and you to get together, son."

  "It's never too late, Dad," he had wanted to say, but the words died onhis lips.

  So it had been the failure of a mission; but then it closed an old andpainful chapter with finality and he was free to open a new leaf.

  * * * * *

  Lee looked ahead again. The speedometer needle trembled around the 150mark. The sun drenched sand shot by, Joshua trees gesticulating wildlyin the tricky perspectives of the speed, out-crops of rocks gettingbigger now and more numerous, the road ahead starting to coil into amaze of natural fortresses, giant pillars and bizarre pyramids lookinglike the works of a titan race from another planet shone in unearthlycolor schemes of black and purple and amber and green. With the windingof the road and the waftings of the heat it was hard to make out acourse, but the Sierra Mountains now were towering almost up to thezenith; like a giant surf they seemed to race against the car.

  "Mind if I close the windows, sir?"

  The chauffeur's question was rhetoric; he had already pushed a button,the glass went up and within the next second the inside of the carturned completely dark.

  "Man," Lee shouted, gripping the front seat, "are you crazy?"

  There suddenly was light again, but it was only the electric lightinside the car. The blackout of the world without remained complete, andthe speedometer needle still edged over the 150 mark.

  "Crazy? I hope not." The chauffeur said it coolly; leaning comfortablyback he turned around for a better look at his fare.

  With mounting horror Lee noticed that he even took his hands off thewheel. Nonchalantly he lit a cigarette while the unguided wheel milledcrazily from side to side and the tires screeched through what seemed tobe a sharp S-curve. Still with his back to the wheel and in betweensatisfying puffs of his smoke he continued:

  "It's quite O.K. sir; it's only that we're on the guidebeam now. Thishere car doesn't need a driver no more; it's on the beam."

  "What beam?" Lee relaxed a little; it was the unexpectedness which hadbowled him over. "What beam? And why the blackout?"

  "Just orders," the young man said. "The Brain's orders and it's theBrain'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 entereda beleaguered fortress. "The Count of Monte Cristo," it was called; everheard about it? Pretty soon now we'll be stopped for examination beforewe enter the secret passage underground. Romantic isn't it?"

  "Very much so," Lee dryly remarked. He continued to watch the behaviorof the car with some misgivings. The controls appeared to be functioningsmoothly enough and after a minute or so the brake pedal came down allby itself. Lee, with a breath of relief, saw the speedometer recede tozero.

  But the doors would not open from the inside and as he tried them hefound that they were locked. "What's the idea," he asked, "I thought yousaid we would be examined at this spot?"

  "Bet they're at it right now," the chauffeur grinned. "I wouldn't knowhow they do it, but they get us photographed inside and outside, what wehave in our pockets, what we had for breakfast this morning and the verybones of our skeletons. I pass through here maybe half a dozen times aday, still they will do it every time: take my likeness. Makes me feellike I was some darned movie star."

  To Lee it felt uncanny to sit trapped and blindfolded in this "BlackMaria" of a car while unseen rays and cameras went over him. He couldh
ear 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 goagain. Now we're entering the Labyrinth."

  "The Labyrinth?"

  Reticent as he had been in the beginning, the chauffeur now seemed tolike Lee; he was proud to explain. "Queer, isn't it? They've got thedamnedest names for things down here. Take them from anatomy, Iunderstand. The Labyrinth is supposed to be inside the ear; it leadsinside in a roundabout way; it's the same here, it's a tunnel--see--downwe go."

  The soft swoosh of the gas-turbine turned into a muffled roar. The caraccelerated at a terrific rate and from the way it swayed and dived itwas clear that the tunnel spiralled downwards in steep serpentines. Leegripped the holding straps; his every nerve was on edge and those edgeswere sharpened by the ominous fact that all the instruments on thedashboard had stopped functioning so that he couldn't even read thespeed.

  As if to make things still worse, the chauffeur had abandoned his postaltogether. Stretching his legs across the front seat he reclined as ifenjoying his easy chair at home by the fire place.

  "It beats a roller coaster, doesn't it?" the chauffeur said. "Got mescared the first few times before I found out it was safe. Nothing toworry about, never you fear."

  With his stomach throttling his throat, Lee asked, "How deep are wegoing underground?"

  "That we are not supposed to know; that's why all the instruments arecut off. The other day I had a passenger, one of those weathermen, aprofessor. He laughed when I told him I didn't know how deep it was. Gota little doodad out of his pocket; aneroid barometer, or something, hesaid it was. But he got a surprise; in the first place the thing didn'twork, so he said the whole tunnel was probably pressurized. In thesecond place he never got where he wanted to go. They stopped the car atthe next control and shot him right back whence he came."

  "But why?"

  The chauffeur looked mysterious. "Seems The Brain doesn't like peoplewith doodads in their pockets even if they mean no harm. The Brain ismost particular about such things; maybe somehow it peers into this carthis moment, maybe it records every word we say. How do we know?" Heshrugged his shoulders. "Not that I give a damn. I've got nothing toconceal. The hours are right and the pay's right; that's good enough forme."

  * * * * *

  Lee experienced an old, familiar sensation: that creepy feeling one goton 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 oneshould feel as haunted as in the jungle hell."

  Then, just as he began to wonder whether the dizzy spiralling plunge asif in the belly of a shark would ever end, the tunnel levelled. Now thecar shot straight as a bullet and just as fast it seemed.

  As his stomach returned to something like normal position, the feelingof oppression changed into one of flying through space, of beingdynamically at rest. Again just as the duration of this dynamic flightevoked the feel of infinity, the motion changed. So fast did it recedethat the momentum of his body almost hurled Lee from the back seat intothe front.

  Doors snapped open and as Lee staggered out somewhat benumbed in limband head, his eyes grew big as they met the most unexpected sight. Thecar rested on the concrete apron of what appeared to be a super-duperbus terminal plus service station and streamlined restaurant. Beyondthis elevated terrace yawned a vaulted dome, excavated from the solidrock and at least twice the size of St. Peter's giant cupola. Its wallswere covered with murals. Both huge and beautiful they depicted thehistory of the human race, Man's evolution. From where he stood theystarted out with scenes of primeval huntings of the mammoth, went on tofire making, fire adoration, then to the primitive crafts and from therethrough the stages of science evolution and technology until they endedon Lee's right hand side with an awesome scene from the Bikini test. Thegorgeous mushroom cloud of the atomic explosion looked alive andthreatening like those Djinni once banned by Solomon.

  But then, all these murals looked more alive than any work of art Leehad ever seen and he discovered that this was due to a new techniquewhich had been added and commingled with one of the oldest.

  The pictures were built up from myriad layers of Painted Desert sandsand these were made translucent or illuminated by what Lee thought mustbe phosphoric salts turned radiant under the stimulants of hiddenlights. Whatever it was, the esoteric beauty of this jewel-likeluminosity surpassed even that of the stained glass windows in the greatcathedrals of France.

  "Pretty isn't it? The chauffeur's words came as an anticlimax to whatLee felt. "That fellow over there in the middle; he's supposed to haveit all thought out." He pointed to a collossal bronze statue whichtowered in the center of the cupola to a height of better than a hundredfeet.

  Raising his eyes to the head of this giant, Lee discovered that thefigure was that of "The Thinker" by Rodin though it was cast inproportion its creator would not have deemed possible.

  Completely overwhelmed and overawed by the grandeur of it all, Leebarely managed to stammer, "What--what is this place; what is itcalled?"

  "It's kind of an assembly hall; the staff of The Brain have meetingsover here at times. Besides it's sort of a Grand Central; transportationstarts here at times throughout the Brain. But listen, they are alreadypaging you."

  Out of nowhere as it seemed there came a brisk, pleasant female voice.

  "Dr. Lee, calling Dr. Semper F. Lee from Canberra University, pleaseanswer 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'mto be your guide on the way up. Now, Dr. Lee, will you please step overto the glideways. They're to your right. Take glideway T, do just as youwould in a department store--" she giggled, "--stand on it and it willget you right to the occipital cortex area. I'll be waiting for you overthere. I would have loved to come down and conduct you personally, butit's against regulations; I'll explain to you the reasons why in alittle while. And if you have any questions while en route, just callout. So long, Dr. Lee; I'll be seeing you...."

  Greatly bewildered by this gushing reception Lee found it hard to followinstructions, simple as they were. The array of escalators which hefound in a side wing was a formidable one and confusing with movementsin all directions, crisscrossing and overlapping one another. Despitethe 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 theone--there."

  Obviously his loquacious guardian angel could not only hear him butwatch his steps as well. Apart from being uncanny, this wasembarrassing; feeling reduced to the mental age of the nursery, hegripped the rails of "T" which went with him into a smooth and noiselessupward slide. The shaft was narrow, there was little light at the startand it grew dimmer as he went. After a minute or so the darkness hadturned almost complete and became oppressive. Simultaneously there was adisquieting change from the accepted normal manner in which escalatorsare supposed to move. Its rise gradually turned perpendicular and indoing so the steps drew apart. Before long Lee felt squeezed into someinterminable cylinder, standing on top of a piston as it were, a pistonwhich moved with fair rapidity along transparent walls. That these wallswere either glass or transparent plastics he could perceive from objectswhich came streaking by with faint luminosity. They looked like columnsof amber colored liquids in which were suspended what looked like giantsnakes, indistinct shapes, but radiant in the mysterious manner of deepsea fishes. They almost encircled the transparent cylinder shaft inwhich Lee moved
; there were many of them; how many Lee couldn't evenattempt to guess. The swiftness of his ascent through these floating,waving radiances for which he had no name was nightmarish, like fallinginto some bottomless well. With great relief he heard the voice of hisguide breaking the spell.

  "I'm terribly sorry, Dr. Lee, I shouldn't have deserted you, there wassome little interruption--" palpably the voice was tickled to death"--my boy friend called from another department and so ... you know howit is. Let's see, where are you? Good lord, already near the end of theMedulla 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 bigtelephone exchange, but it really isn't that kind of a mechanism _atall_. We have found--" she sounded important as if it were her very owndiscovery "--that the best pattern for The Brain would actually be thehuman brain. So The Brain is organized in nearly identical manner,likewise our whole terminology is taken from anatomy rather than fromtechnology. The glideways for instance, travel along the naturalfissures between the convolutions of the various lobes; that's why theyare so very winding as you will see as you enter The Brain proper. Thosecolumns you see are filled with liquid insulators for the nerve cablesto vibrate in; for they _do_ vibrate, Dr. Lee, as they transmit theirmessages.

  "You have noticed the narrowness of the glideways, the terribleconfinement of space. I know it's horrible--many of our visitors sufferclaustrophobia, but they just must be built that way. You see evenfractions of a millionth of one second count in the coordination of theassociation bundles and nerve circuits, that's why everything is builtas 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 human brain; itsnerve cells are so extremely sensitive that they are distributed bylight. We use black light almost exclusively or activated phosphoroussuch as on the sheaths of the nerve cables. For the same reason we ofthe personnel are normally not permitted to pass through the interior ofThe Brain during operations-time. Exceptions are only made in the caseof very important persons such as you are. Normally one travels to one'sstations through the ducts elevator shafts in the bone matter or ratherthe rock outside. Those are _so_ much faster and more comfortable Dr.Lee; oh I feel _so_ bad about you, poor man, traveling all alone throughthis _horrible_ maze without a human soul in sight."

  * * * * *

  Lee grinned. He wouldn't have liked to be married to this chatterbox nomatter how beautiful she might turn out to be; but at the moment herexceeding femininity was most comforting in the weirdness whichsurrounded him.

  The little platform under his feet started acting up again in thequeerest manner. It pushed him forward and the wall at the rear kickedhim in the back; his nose flattened against the sliding cylinder infront as the contraption reverted from the perpendicular course tosomething like the undulations of a traveling wave. Lee darkly perceivedgroup after group of luminous cables coiling away into cavernous pitsfilled with what looked like eyes of cats, faintly aglow and twinklingat him from the dark. They reminded him of the fireflies of the greenhells he had been in during the war.

  "You are now skirting the convolutions of the cerebellum," his guardianangel told him. "They are electronic tubes which receive sensoryimpressions and translate them into impulses for cerebration. Here inthe cerebellum the bulk of the associations is being evoked; these arethen distributed throughout the hemispheres of the cortex or higherbrain. Oh I _do_ wish you wouldn't get seasick, Dr. Lee; _some_ of ourvisitors do, you know; it's those wavy, wavy movements."

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

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

  "You are now passing across the commissures into the cerebrum," cameVivian's voice just as Lee thought that nausea was getting the better ofhim. "You'll now ascend along one of the main gyri through the mid-brainbetween the hemispheres. Those masses of ganglions below and coming fromall 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 ofcoordination, higher cerebration and higher psychic activities. Thingswill 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 holdingout fine, like a real _He_-man, you're looking _swell_ in my televisionscreen."

  Certain as he was that he looked rather like a scarecrow in a snowstormLee felt grateful for the praise. Besides she was right; the boaconstrictor which he rode calmed down a little, marching with a dignitymore in accordance with its size. Momentarily the luminous nerve cables,flying as they did toward him, threatened sudden death, however, theymerely brushed the transparent cylinder, wrapping it up in a rainbow andthen winged away again. Below acres of space streamed by, seed beds onecould imagine to be young typewriters, millions of them, all tickingaway with dainty precision, sparkling with myriads of tiny lights asthey did.

  * * * * *

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

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

  "_There_," said the angel, "at _last_. How did you like your littleOdyssey through The Brain, Dr. Lee?"

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

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

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

  "L. F. Mellish, M.D.--I. C. Bondy,
M.D." was painted on the frostedglass door where she led him afterward. The two medics received Lee witha show of respect mixed with professional cordiality. Both Bondy, thedark and oriental looking chap, and Mellish, blond and florid, were intheir middle twenties and both wore tweeds which depressed Lee with theperfection of their cut. Seeing the professional table at the center ofthe office, Lee frowned but started to undress; he wanted this thingdone 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 morningfrom the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Canberra on our request. You're anold malaria man, Dr. Lee; your first attack occured in '42 during thePacific campaign. Pity you refused to return to the States for acomplete cure right then. As it is it's turned recurrent; left you a bitanemic, liver's slightly affected. But in all other respects you'resound 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 indoctors' hands too often and had become a little impatient of them.

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

  * * * * *

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

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

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

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

  There was a low chuckle from the other side of his head; they bothappeared to have drawn up chairs beyond his field of vision. Lee didn'tlike it; he liked none of it, in fact. He felt trapped.

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

  "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 thefirst again.

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

  "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 yourbody, open up the path for the deep-penetration rays; they proceed fromthe lower organs to the higher ones; in the end they reach the consciouslevels 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 thrownupon the silver screen and then, Lee stirred. Hands, soothing but firmheld him down. "Where did you get _those_." he exclaimed.

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

  * * * * *

  What was unrolled on the silver screen were chapters from Lee's ownlife. They were incomplete, they were hastily thrown together, they werelike leaves which a child tears from its picturebook. But knowing thebook of his life, every picture acted as a key unlocking the treasuresand the horrors amassed in the vaults of memory. It began with the oldhomestead in Virginia. Mother had taken that reel of the new mechanicalcotton picker at work. There it was, a great big thing with the darkiesstanding around scratching their heads. There he was himself, agedtwelve, with his .22 cal. rifle in hand and Musha, the coon dog, by hisside; Musha, how he had loved that dog--and how he had cried when it gotkilled.

  Pictures of the Alexander Hamilton Military Academy. Some of the worstyears of his life he had spent behind the walls of that imitationcastle.

  The bombs upon Pearl Harbor.... He had enlisted the following day. Onhis return from the induction center mother had said.... Her figure, hermovements, her voice loomed enormous in his memory.... But now thepictures of the Pacific War flicked across the screen.... They werepicked from campaigns in which he, Lee had participated. They were alsopicked from documentaries which the government had never dared to letthe public see ... close-ups of a torpedoed troop carrier, capsizing,coming down upon the struggling survivors in the shark-infested sea. Ithad been his own ship, the _Monticello_, but he had never known that anautomatic camera had operated in the nose of the plane which had circledthe scene....

  Port Darwin--Guadacanal--Iwo Jima: close-ups of flame throwing tanksadvancing up a ridge. He had commanded one of them.... Antlike humanfigures of fleeing Japs and the flames leaping at them.... So vivid wasthe memory that the smell returned to his nostrils, the sickening stenchof burning human flesh. It tortured him. His voice was husky withrevulsion as he said:

  "What's the good of all this; take it away."

  "Oh, no," one of the medics answered. "We couldn't think of that. We'vegot to see this to the end. What are your physical sensations now, Dr.Lee?"

  "It's fingers now--soft fingers. They are tapping me from all sideslike--like a vibration massage. It's strange though--they're tappingfrom the inside--little pneumatic hammers at a furious pace. They seemto work upon my diaphragm for a drum. But it doesn't pain."

  "Good, very good; that was a fine description, Lee. That burning citywas Manilla wasn't it, when MacArthur returned? You were in that secondPhilippine campaign too weren't you, Lee? That was when you won theCongressional Medal of Honor."

  Yes, it was Manila all right, and there was Mindanao where the Japs hadput up that suicide defence of the caves.

  Lee's battalion had been in the attack; steeply uphill with no cover, ithad been murder.... And seeing his best men mowed down, he had turnedberserk. He had used a bulldozer for a battering ram, had driven itsingle handed directly into the fire-spitting mouth of the objective,raising its blade like a battle-axe. An avalanche of rocks and dirt hadcome down from the top of the cave under the artillery barrage and hehad rammed the stuff down into the throat of the fiery dragon, again andagain. He never rightly knew he did it. It had all ended in a blackoutfrom loss of blood. It had been in a hospital that they pinned thatmedal on him which he felt was undeserved....

  Now the reel showed him what at the time he hadn't seen; the end of thebattle for the Philippines: Pulverised volcanic rock seen from the air,battle planes swooping down upon little fumaroles, the
ventilator shaftsof caves defeated but still unsurrendered. Big, plump canistersplummeted from the bellies of the planes. And then the jellied gasolineignited, turning those thousands of lives trapped in the deep into onevast funeral pyre.... For over fifteen years he had tried to forget, tobury the war, to keep it jailed up in the dungeon of the subconscious.Now those accursed medics had unleashed the monster of war and as itstared at him from the screen it had that blood-freezing, that hypnoticeffect which the Greeks once ascribed to the monstrous Gorgon.

  Mellish's voice--or was it Bondy's?--seemed to come through a fog andover a vast distance as it asked: "What seems to be the matter, Lee?You're sweating, your body shakes; what do you feel?"

  "It's those rays," he tried to defend himself. "It's the vibrations--thefingers. They are gripping the heart; it's like the whole body wasturned into a heart. It's like another life invading mine--it's ghostly.Stop it, for heaven's sake."

  "Not yet, Lee, not yet. Everything's under control, you're reactingbeautifully; you're really feeling fine, Lee, just fine."

  "If only I could get at his throat," Lee thought. "I would squeeze theoil of that voice and never be sorry I did." He tried to stir and foundthat it couldn't be done; every muscle seemed tied in a catalepticstate. Then he heard the other medic speak.

  "You were shown this little movie Lee in order to stimulate your mindinto the production of a movie of its own. You have responded, you haveanswered the call. While you saw the first, the sensory tactile raysworking in five layers of penetration have recorded and have carriedyour every reaction to The Brain. The Brain, in a very real sense hasread your mind and it has retranslated these readings into visualimages. We are now going to watch the shapes of your own thoughts. Herewe go...."

  * * * * *

  The projector which had stopped for a minute began to purr again. As thefirst thought-image jumped upon the screen there was a low moan ofamazement mixed with acute pain. It escaped Lee's mouth, uncontrollablyas the abyss of the subconscious opened and he saw:

  A monstrous animal shaped like an octopus crawling across a cottonfield. Nearer and nearer it crept, enormous, threatening; and suddenlythere was a sharp excited bark and a spotted coon dog raced across thefield toward the monster. He heard the voice of a small boy whimpering:"Musha, oh Musha, don't, _please_ don't." But the dog wouldn't hear andthe monster flashed an enormous evil eye, just once and then it grippedthe dog with its tentacle arms tearing its body apart, chewing it upbetween horrible sabre teeth.... As through an ether mask he heard thetwo medics say: "That must have been a considerable shock to him," and"With a sensitive nature like that, and at that sensitive age, such animpression becomes permanent."

  The Alexander Hamilton Military Academy appeared, not real, yet morethan real. It was a narrow court yard surrounded by huge walls slantingtoward the inside; it was huge and forbidding, fortress-towers standingguard, it was enormous gates forever barred, it was the figure of a hugeMarine pacing fiercely back and forth in front of those gates, the sameghostly Marine watching all gates so that nobody could escape....

  "That's probably his father," the voices whispered behind his ears."Yes; the archetype. He'll bring up the Mother, too, I'll bet...."

  As in those paintings of the primitives where kings and queens are verytall and common folks are very small, Lee saw her now: Mother. That hadbeen just after induction when he had brought her what he thought wasjoyous news. Her face filled the whole screen. It looked as if composedfrom jagged ectoplasms, quite transparent except for the eyes. Deep andburning with pain they were, boring into his own. And there was smokecoming out of her mouth and it formed words: "But, Semper, you are stilla child. One mustn't use children for this sort of thing; one mustn't."Every letter of these smoke-written words seemed to be flying toward himon wings....

  "Terrific," the voices murmured at Lee's back. "Remember the casehistory? She died of cancer six months after he went overseas." "Yes, Iremember; he's never seen her again. He's probably built up a strongcomplex out of that one, too."

  On the screen now danced images almost totally abstracted from therealities of the filmed documentaries from the war.

  They were whirling columns of smoke; they were like the vast, darkinterior of a huge thunderhead cloud through which a glider soars,illuminated only by the flashes of lightning as for split seconds theyrevealed a fraction of some horrible reality: A burning ocean withscreaming human faces bobbing in the flames. The whirling tracks of atank going across some writhing human body and leaving it flat in itstracks, sprawling like an empty coat dyed red. And then the swirling,howling darkness closing in again....

  "Interesting eh?" A voice broke through his cataleptic trance and theother answered: "Beautiful; almost a classical case. Great plasticity ofimagination." "Yes; that's exactly what sets me wondering; the fellowshould have cracked up by all the rules of the game." "How do we knowthat he hasn't? Maybe he was psycho and they didn't notice; they hadsome godawful asses for psychiatrists in war medicine. It's quite apossibility; well, his image production is ebbing now; I don't expectanything new of significance, what do you think?" "Now; we've got whatwe wanted anyway. Let's take him out of it; but go easy on therheostats."

  The projector stopped. The masterful, the ghostly fingers which had beenplaying on the keyboard of his mind very slowly receded from a furiousfortissimo to a pianissimo. At first only the flutterings of thediaphragm eased, then the violent palpitations of a foreign pulseslipped off the heart; the liberated lungs expanded; tremors wererunning through the body as through the ice of a frozen river at spring;and then at last the mind escaped from its captivity.

  * * * * *

  Gradually as in a cinema after the show the lights reappeared. Blinking,Lee stared at the man who stood over him taking his pulse; it was Bondy.Mellish stood at the foot of the table with his back to Lee; he seemedto watch some apparatus which made noises like a teletype machine.Swinging his legs off the table Lee said:

  "I'm okay; you needn't hold my hand."

  But then he noticed that he wasn't. His head spun, his whole body waswet with perspiration, he felt very weak and limp. He swayed and buriedhis face in his hands trying to gain his balance, trying to shake offthe trance. "Excuse me," he said. "I'm a bit dizzy."

  As he opened his eyes again the two medics were standing right in frontof him and smiling down on him with their bland, professional smiles.Lee felt the upsurge of intense dislike. He had seen those smilesbefore, often--too often: they seemed to be standard equipment with themedical profession whenever a fellow was about to be dispatched to the"table", or worse, to the psychopathic ward. Instinct told him thatthere was something in the air and also that his best bet would be abrave show of normalcy:

  "This test, these new methods of psychoanalysis, they are extremelyinteresting," he said with an effort.

  "Thank you, Dr. Lee," it was Mellish who spoke. "We knew you would findthe experience worthwhile even if we put you under a considerablestrain. A complete analysis in those olden days of Dr. Freud took threeyears; now thanks to The Brain we get approximately the same resultswithin as many hours; that's some progress, isn't it?"

  "Enormous," Lee said dryly while his eyes wandered over to Bondy; heknew the pattern, it would be Bondy's turn now to have a shot at him.There it came; and how he loathed the false heartiness of that voice.

  "Dr. Lee, I'm afraid we have a bit of bad news for you--your test--theresults have been negative. You have failed."

  "Failed?" For a fraction of a second Lee's heart stopped beating. "Inwhat sense? And what does that mean?"

  Now it was Mellish's turn. "Dr. Lee, there must be frankness amongstcolleagues and as a fellow scientist you'll understand. In the firstplace the decision isn't ours; we merely conduct the test on behalf ofThe Brain. The Brain, as you know, is the most highly developed machinein all the world. Its functions, its whole existence depend entirelyupon the human skills and the human loyalties amongst its
staff. Athree-billion-dollar investment, plus the vital role of The Brain in ournational defence, justify the extreme precautions which we are forced totake for its protection."

  "What exactly are you driving at?"

  "Please don't take it as an insult," now it was Bondy again. "There'snothing personal in this. It's merely that your emotional-reaction chartdefinitely shows a certain antagonism which from childhood-experienceand war-experience you have built up against technology. It's nothingbut a potential; it is confined to your subconscious. But even apotential danger of subconscious revolt is more than The Brain can riskamongst its associates. We fully appreciate the wish of our Dr. Scrivento enlist your very valuable aid, but...."

  "I see" Lee interrupted, "but you would feel safer if I were to returnto Australia by the next plane."

  His head bent under the blow. A short 24 hours ago The Brain had been anebulous, almost a non-existent thing. Since then a whole new world hadbeen opened to him in revelations blinding and magnetic with infinitepossibilities. His work--the efforts of a lifetime--would not equal whathe could do in days with the aid of The Brain. His love--he would neversee Oona Dahlborg again as he left under a shadow, rejected by TheBrain.

  "Sorry I wasted so much of your time," he said aloud. "I do not believein this analysis; I cannot disprove it though. That's all, I guess; Ibetter be going now."

  "Here's your pass, Dr. Lee." He took mechanically the yellow slip whichBondy handed him....

  He had already opened the door when somebody sharply called: "Dr. Lee,one moment please."

  He whirled around. "Yes?"

  "Will you please read what's written on your slip?"

  Suspiciously he looked at the yellow paper; what more torture were thesefellows going to inflict? Then his eyes popped as he read: "Lee, SemperFidelis, 39: Cortex capacity 119%, Sensitivity 208%, Personalityintegration 95%, Service qualification 100%...." There were more data,but he didn't read them as wide-eyed he stared at the medics. With theirfaces beaming they looked like identical twins to him; Lee never knewwho said the words:

  "Congratulations Lee. That has been your last test. We just had to findout how you would take a serious frustration. You've passed it withflying colors. Shake."