Part 23 (1/2)
”Are you hurt?” somebody yelled. ”By G.o.d, those fellows must have come through the flames. Look, they're all black with the smoke. Get a couple of respirators, Jack.”
Lee waved the helping hands away; he was already on his feet. Anxiously he bent over Vivian. She had her head embedded in a stretcher-bearer's lap; her eyes rolled around in their smoke-blackened sockets in great surprise and her tongue licked parched lips, spreading rouge generously all around mixing it with soot. She looked so funny; almost as a minstrel singer at a county fair, but there was deep tenderness in Lee's voice:
”You're quite safe now, Vivian. How do you feel, brave girl?”
Her bosom heaved a big sigh:
”O simply wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Only, I'm afraid I'm going to be sick. It's the gas I swallowed. It's terrible; something always happens to me just when romance begins.”
The stretcher bearer grinned up to Lee, ”She sure gets it out of her system like a good little girl. Don't you worry; she'll be all right.”
Lee nodded; he knew she would.
As the big drive went on and column after column went over the top up to the hemispheres, n.o.body wasted time on Lee. He cautiously surveyed the tumultuous scene. With his asbestos suit and with his blackened face everybody would take him for a fireman. He might be able to complete his mission, to ascertain that The Brain had stopped to function in all its parts, to make sure that it actually was dead. And if down at ”Grand Central” the turmoil was as great as ever here; with all those strangers rus.h.i.+ng in and bound to be rushed out again....
”Why, I have a chance,” Lee thought. Freedom; he had abandoned any hope for it. Now the reborn idea surged through his blood, a powerful motor as chance pressed the starter b.u.t.ton for it.
The thing to do first was to get past the searchlight beams. From the nearest pile of equipment he took an axe and a pair of long-handled metal shears. Then he marched off, straight into the glaring eyes of the searchlights till he got out of their cones, and the deep shadows of the ”thalamus” labyrinth swallowed him up.
Now he was on familiar ground and even in a familiar atmosphere. This was like a night patrol through jungle. The black lights of The Brain were the fireflies, the sirens' hollow wailings were the shriek owls and the cries of the lemurs. There was the same sense of loneliness, too, and of danger. The winding pa.s.sages skirted the glandular organs, some of them looming huge like dirigibles, others small like fuselages of airplanes stored in a giant hangar underground. Strings of tiny green bulbs guided the path toward the pineal gland, the citadel of The Brain.
It was dark, as Lee had expected it would be. The danger zone was at least a mile away, and the attack against the fire was launched from the main sulci in the median section of The Brain.
He pa.s.sed the narrow bridge to the suspended gland and switched on the lights. The glittering walls of aluminum foil seemed to jump at him like jaws beset with the dragon teeth of electronic tubes. Caught with an overwhelming sense of loneliness and awe as of a man who has entered the forbidden temple of an unknown G.o.d he called:
”Is there anybody here? Gus! Where are you, Gus?” Then suddenly he remembered that Gus was gone, that there would never again be his answering voice. He wiped his forehead.
”Bad nerves,” he thought. ”Mustn't allow them to play tricks on me; pull myself together.”
Lee put his tools down and walked into the narrow aisle. Few things were changed; and there was the pulsemeter standing in its old place.
He plugged it into the old circuit and clamped the phones to his ears.
It wasn't that he expected any communication; that seemed impossible.
With the conflagration raging through its apperception centers, with other sections being isolated with the cutting of their nerve paths by the fire fighting engineers, The Brain must have ceased to exist as a functioning, a live ent.i.ty. All that could possibly remain would be residual currents sluggishly circulating in narrow, nearby circuits....
As in the past it took a few minutes for the pulsemeter to warm up.
Gradually the rapid beat of the ideopulses came through the static in the phones. Lee's eyes stared wildly at the visi-screen: for the ”green dancer” snaked to the fore. This was unexpected; it couldn't be that thoughts were still forming as flames devoured the cortex matter of apperception in the hemispheres....
From m.u.f.fled drums, the decibels of sound increased, shot through with crackling static, till the pulsebeats became as poundings of huge Chinese gongs and then....
The _voice_ formed, the voice of The Brain. It sounded like steel girders breaking, like ice fields cracking up. It froze the blood in Lee's veins.
”Lee, Semper Fidelis, 39, sensitive, a traitorous fool and a murderer. I should have killed you--I could have killed you. My fault--blind spot of apperception--human failure in engineering--as fifth columns entered nerve path filler spouts. And now I'm dead; I'm dead, I'm dead....”
The words poured like big boulders tumbling in an earthquake down a mountainside. The ground seemed to cave in under Lee's feet; the terrible reality carried him away as an avalanche. He was barely able to stammer:
”You're dead? How can you speak, how can you....”