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 gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s 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, b.u.t.ton-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 a.n.a.lysis 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 psychoa.n.a.lysis? 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 psychoa.n.a.lysis 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 ama.s.sed 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 c.o.o.n 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 partic.i.p.ated. They were also picked from doc.u.mentaries which the government had never dared to let the public see ... close-ups of a torpedoed troop carrier, capsizing, coming down upon the struggling survivors in the shark-infested sea. It had been his own ship, the _Monticello_, but he had never known that an automatic camera had operated in the nose of the plane which had circled the scene....
Port Darwin--Guadaca.n.a.l--Iwo Jima: close-ups of flame throwing tanks advancing up a ridge. He had commanded one of them.... Antlike human figures of fleeing j.a.ps and the flames leaping at them.... So vivid was the memory that the smell returned to his nostrils, the sickening stench of burning human flesh. It tortured him. His voice was husky with revulsion 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"ve got 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 sides like--like a vibration ma.s.sage. It"s strange though--they"re tapping from the inside--little pneumatic hammers at a furious pace. They seem to work upon my diaphragm for a drum. But it doesn"t pain."
"Good, very good; that was a fine description, Lee. That burning city was Manilla wasn"t it, when MacArthur returned? You were in that second Philippine campaign too weren"t you, Lee? That was when you won the Congressional Medal of Honor."
Yes, it was Manila all right, and there was Mindanao where the j.a.ps had put up that suicide defence of the caves.
Lee"s battalion had been in the attack; steeply uphill with no cover, it had been murder.... And seeing his best men mowed down, he had turned berserk. He had used a bulldozer for a battering ram, had driven it single handed directly into the fire-spitting mouth of the objective, raising its blade like a battle-axe. An avalanche of rocks and dirt had come down from the top of the cave under the artillery barrage and he had rammed the stuff down into the throat of the fiery dragon, again and again. He never rightly knew he did it. It had all ended in a blackout from loss of blood. It had been in a hospital that they pinned that medal on him which he felt was undeserved....
Now the reel showed him what at the time he hadn"t seen; the end of the battle for the Philippines: Pulverised volcanic rock seen from the air, battle planes swooping down upon little fumaroles, the ventilator shafts of caves defeated but still unsurrendered. Big, plump canisters plummeted from the bellies of the planes. And then the jellied gasoline ignited, turning those thousands of lives trapped in the deep into one vast funeral pyre.... For over fifteen years he had tried to forget, to bury 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 it stared at him from the screen it had that blood-freezing, that hypnotic effect which the Greeks once ascribed to the monstrous Gorgon.
Mellish"s voice--or was it Bondy"s?--seemed to come through a fog and over 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--the fingers. They are gripping the heart; it"s like the whole body was turned 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 reacting beautifully; you"re really feeling fine, Lee, just fine."
"If only I could get at his throat," Lee thought. "I would squeeze the oil of that voice and never be sorry I did." He tried to stir and found that it couldn"t be done; every muscle seemed tied in a cataleptic state. Then he heard the other medic speak.
"You were shown this little movie Lee in order to stimulate your mind into the production of a movie of its own. You have responded, you have answered the call. While you saw the first, the sensory tactile rays working in five layers of penetration have recorded and have carried your every reaction to The Brain. The Brain, in a very real sense has read your mind and it has retranslated these readings into visual images. We are now going to watch the shapes of your own thoughts. Here we go...."
The projector which had stopped for a minute began to purr again. As the first thought-image jumped upon the screen there was a low moan of amazement mixed with acute pain. It escaped Lee"s mouth, uncontrollably as the abyss of the subconscious opened and he saw:
A monstrous animal shaped like an octopus crawling across a cotton field. Nearer and nearer it crept, enormous, threatening; and suddenly there was a sharp excited bark and a spotted c.o.o.n dog raced across the field 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 and the monster flashed an enormous evil eye, just once and then it gripped the dog with its tentacle arms tearing its body apart, chewing it up between horrible sabre teeth.... As through an ether mask he heard the two medics say: "That must have been a considerable shock to him," and "With a sensitive nature like that, and at that sensitive age, such an impression becomes permanent."
The Alexander Hamilton Military Academy appeared, not real, yet more than real. It was a narrow court yard surrounded by huge walls slanting toward the inside; it was huge and forbidding, fortress-towers standing guard, it was enormous gates forever barred, it was the figure of a huge Marine pacing fiercely back and forth in front of those gates, the same ghostly Marine watching all gates so that n.o.body could escape....