Part 21 (1/2)

For a second her small fists pounded against Lee's breast and the next moment, before he could do anything, she had jumped out of the plane slamming the door in his face. For a few seconds more he heard her footsteps rus.h.i.+ng across the frozen turf and the receding wails of echoes from the hangar walls:

”And now there's nothing I can do--nothing I can do.”

When after a minute of fumbling in the dark he pushed the door open, it was too late.

He walked over to the hotel; not by an act of will, but with his legs somehow doing the job alone and by themselves. He ordered himself a car from the Braintrust garage. He entered The Brain and went up in the elevator to Apperception 36. n.o.body seemed to notice that there was a somnambulist pa.s.sing by.... He unlocked the door and under the rows of neon lights things were as he had left them eight hours ago. Only there were no longer any snakes crawling across the floor towards a hole in the wall. But the hole was still there and he thought that he had better tidy things up a bit. If n.o.body had noticed the arrangements for this new experiment so far; why should anybody be forewarned?

Lee put the lid back on the ”Lignin-Filler-Spout.” He closed the panel so the wall looked whole again. He gathered the sticks of cordwood from the floor and piled them neatly to their stacks again. All this he did like a child putting its things away after a long day's play; a grey-haired child, weary, with the sandman in its eyes. He looked around and found everything done and over with. On the fluorescent screens all curves The Brain described had dropped to the bottom. Like dead things they lay flat. On the visi-screens some stay-behinds of the great exodus were looming large, a hapless little ant-king scurrying about; a few disabled workers, their blind eyes staring into the face of death. It would come soon to them; their work on earth was done....

Lee looked at the clock: 10 p.m. He put out the lights and locked the door behind that yawning emptiness which once had been his lab, which he would never see again. As he descended in the elevator he felt very tired.

CHAPTER IX

Incessant shrieks of the phone aroused Lee from the deep well of his sleep. He didn't know the female voice which fairly jumped at him.

”Is this Dr. Lee? Dr. Semper F. Lee from Canberra; am I at last connected with Dr. Lee?”

”Lee speaking.”

”I've been phoning for you all over The Brain Lee. Have you forgotten you had an appointment with us? Checking up on your broad apt.i.tude test.

The doctors are waiting. This is Vivian Leahy speaking; don't you remember me?”

”Yes, of course.” The picture of the loquacious angel who had guided him to the medical center on his first trip flashed back into his mind. ”I know I have an appointment for this afternoon; I'll be there.”

”But, Dr. Lee, this _is_ this afternoon; it's four p.m. already. You aren't ill, Dr. Lee, are you? You sound so strange.”

Lee a.s.sured her that he wasn't and that he would be over right away.

”It's a miracle they left me undisturbed that long,” he thought as he shaved and dressed. His personal fate would be decided within the next two hours he knew; it would be the end. But even as the tension mounted in his consciousness he thought triumphantly. ”I've had sixteen hours of sleep; that's marvelous. n.o.body can take that away. The body has recharged its energies. Now I can stand the gaff.”

Down at the desk they handed him a Western Union. It was from Was.h.i.+ngton and bore no signature. ”Mission completed,” it read.

It made him feel fine. ”Father has done it; he is a better man than I,”

he thought.

While the car streaked though the desert Lee scanned the morning papers.

”No Trace Of President Vandersloot,” still was the headline. But below new havocs were listed as they had developed overnight. This time the West coast was the zone of catastrophes; the hostile power seemed to be bent upon the closing of all ports in the U.S.A.

Lee gnashed his teeth as he read the number of new casualties, women and children, too, who had become the victims of The Brain.

Arrived at ”Grand Central” he kept a sharp lookout for any unusual activity. There was none. All along elevator-row small groups of bookish-looking men returned from their day's work in the Apperception Centers. They looked calm and contented and with their briefcases under their arms almost like ordinary businessmen heading for the commuter train.

He didn't dare to linger or to look around. There was this all-pervading sense of being shadowed, of having gone into a trap from which there was no escape, of eyes following him everywhere. Whose eyes? That was impossible to know. Maybe The Brain's; its sensory organs could conceivably be installed anywhere. Maybe that janitor guiding a polis.h.i.+ng machine over the rubber floor was a plain clothesman; or maybe it was that detached gentleman who seemed to wait for an elevator with a stack of books under his arms.

As the cage shot up to Apperception 27, failure pressed down on his heart. Now it was almost thirty hours since he had released ”Ant-termes”

into the nerve paths of The Brain. Those undermining and devouring armies; what could have happened to them? Any number of things: Perhaps the Lignin in the nerve paths was poisonous. There had been no time for him to test the stuff. Perhaps the maintenance engineers had replenished the insulation in that sector overnight and all the hives were drowned.