The lights went on and he blinked into the faces of the medics bending over him, watching him as he wiped the sweat of death fear from his face.
"Dr. Lee," Mellish began, "This is a serious matter we"ve got to discuss with you. You have seen those images yourself?--Fine. We needn"t go into any great detail since you are probably familiar with the ancient symbolisms which the subconscious employs in expressing itself. You are suffering from a very strong neurosis, Dr. Lee; I might almost say a maniacal obsession. Existence of some old neurosis, partially submerged, was established already in your first a.n.a.lysis. Now the barriers which you had built against this war neurosis have broken down. Quite a natural breakdown considering the very great stress under which you have been living of late. No, I don"t say that you are actually demented, but there is a very real danger that you might lose complete control over your mind. As it stands, your scientific work already is impaired by the fixed ideas you have formed about The Brain. We are here to help you, so please be calm and cooperate with us; we have got to decide upon some course of action."
"You must get away from it all. Lee," Bondy chimed in; "Take a sabbatical year. The Braintrust operates a really first-cla.s.s sanitarium out on the West Coast. Your insurance plan covers every expense. All you have to do is to sign these papers and we"ll get us a plane and I"ll personally bring you there. That"s the safe, the sane course for you to take. Here, take my pen."
Lee had raised his gaunt frame from the table. For a moment he sat with his face buried in his hands trying to control his swimming head. A hand patted his shoulders: "Don"t take it so hard, old man; come on, be sensible and let"s get out of here."
He stood up; vertigo made him sway and he felt the supporting, the restraining grip of the two medic"s hands upon his arms. And then, in a flash, he saw red. "I had it coming to me," he thought, "I would have gone like a lamb. If only they had been shooting straight; if they hadn"t tried to frame me with their dirty trickery. It"s all over now but I might as well go down fighting." He didn"t know which he loathed more of the two; it just happened that Bondy was standing to his right and took it on the chin and nose as Lee"s fist shot up.
"Mellish, quick, the straight jacket," he screamed, toppling over.
Mellish, stark horror in his eyes, started towards the alarm b.u.t.ton by the door. Old and forgotten combat technique reacted automatically to the move: one foot shot out, it tripped the lunging man and sent him sprawling down before he reached the b.u.t.ton. But then it was as if a hand had pressed that b.u.t.ton anyway: The loudspeaker built into the panel over the door broke into shrill sharp peals: Fire alarm. It froze the violent commotion of the three. From their prostrate position on the floor Mellish and Bondy stared up to the red-flashing disk, their mouths agape in dumb amazement. A fire in the most protected, the most guarded apparatus in the world, a fire in The Brain!
Cautiously Bondy raised his bleeding nose to Lee and quickly put it down again: the dangerous maniac was a horrifying sight; with his greying mane standing wildly all around his death head he stood and _laughed_.
He alone understood what had happened: the timebomb he had planted had ticked its allotted span, the millions of devouring mandibles had done their work, the living were eating away along the Apperception Centers.
And now the bomb went off; the short-circuit-fires were racing through The Brain and not even carbon-dioxide could reach them inside the nerve paths!
But now the alarm stopped and a calm commanding voice came over the intercom: "Attention, please! A five-alarm fire has broken out in the Parietal region. There is no immediate danger. I repeat: _There is no immediate danger._ I order all occupants of Apperception Centers to collect important papers and doc.u.ments and then to proceed down to Grand Central for evacuation. All elevators will be kept in operation. There is no fire in the Dura Mater. Keep calm! Keep calm and proceed as ordered."
The voice broke off; the alarm bells started shrieking again.
Bondy and Mellish had scrambled to their feet; wide-eyed they stared at Lee. Lee made wild gestures now and they heard him call: "Get out....
Get out!"
With their backs to the wall they exchanged a rapid glance which said:
"This is our chance; Together then and quick."
As one man they bolted to the door and down the corridor into the elevator, slamming the door behind.
"That was a close shave!" Mellish exclaimed as the cage streaked down.
"He caught me by surprise," Bondy moaned. "Never expected it from him, he almost killed me!"
"He can"t get away though, the guards will get him the moment he comes down. But what about the girl? We quite forgot to warn Vivian that she has a paranoiac on her hands."
"Bah!" Bondy scoffed, "Vivian is an intelligent girl. It was our _duty_ to evacuate, wasn"t it? Besides, we can warn her over the phone."
With the unbearable tension gone from him as sudden as the air from a blown tire, Lee really acted like a madman now. Stretching to his full length he reached out to the alarm over the door and put it at rest.
What was alarm to others, to him was a signal to rest. The noise didn"t befit the wonderful calm and serenity he felt. His job was done, his mission completed. Time for him had ceased to exist. Danger--he had no consciousness of it. Slowly he stepped out in the corridor. It felt like walking on air. There, it was Vivian Leahy who brought him down to earth. She came rushing out of the archive laden with precious records up to her chin. Under the provoking red of her hair the face looked pale and pinched: "Where are the doctors?" she panted.
"I don"t know," Lee said. "They left me a moment ago--rather suddenly."
"The rats! Leaving me to get their chestnuts out of the fire for them.
How d"you like that?"
Her flippant manner was nothing but a brave front she put up to hide the panic in her heart. Lee sensed it. There was an unexpected responsibility thrust into his hands. His mission was not yet completed; he had to get this girl to safety.
She followed the direction of his glance.
"No go," she said. "They took the elevator. It will be some time before another one comes up. If it does come. What are we two going to do now, Dr. Lee?"
He smiled down to her as he would have to a child lost in the woods.
"Never you fear, Vivian. We still have that other exit. We can use the glideway through The Brain."
"Through the fire?"
"Yes. I think we can make it if you"re a brave girl. Know where the gas masks are and asbestos suits? There ought to be some in every Apperception Center."
"How about these records? Your own amongst the lot!"
"Leave them; they aren"t worth risking your life for. You can believe that."
She dropped them instantly: "I like you, Dr. Lee, you"re a real old-school cavalier. My doctors here, they"d rather see me burn to a crisp than any of those records. Come on, I"ll show you the gas masks and the other stuff."
He helped her to put on the outfit. "Ready to go?" he asked.
"With you? To the end of the world at any day." Proudly she marched him off toward the rear exit.
The glideways were operating. At an accelerated pace, they rushed through the maze of The Brain with the swish and the swoosh of surf racing across a coral reef. They had to grab for dear life at the rails.
"Hold tight," Lee cried as he saw the girl go down upon the platform, but then his own legs were jerked from under him as the momentum of the journey flung him forward.
They saw what no human eye had seen before! The Brain illuminated by its own nerve cables turned radiant as neon lights. It was like seeing Berlin from the air after a big firebomb attack. It was like racing in a car through forest fires. It was like lava pouring in a thousand winding streams down a volcano cone. It was all this and more, but transferred into some other dimension where all things are transparent or light has an x-ray quality.
Through the plastic walls of lobes and convolutions they saw the liana-networks of the nerve cables like bloodstreams radiant with purple light. Shrouded in columns of whirling smoke they seemed alive. Like tropical rains from a jungle roof, lignin dripped from the vaults, and in falling, burst into flames. Cable connections were molten at the branching points and then the luminous nets writhed, and severed ends bent down spilling their fiery blood over the mushroom formations of nerve cell groups.
The scenes raced much too fast; the glideway"s continuous curvings, steep ascents and power dives were like stunt flying through an ack-ack barrage. No human eye could catch more than a fraction of the inferno"s majesty. Yet there were brief visions so breathtaking as to obliterate all sense of danger and to become indelibly implanted upon the retina. A main nerve stem burst asunder and the lignin poured from its cracked plastic walls like crude oil from a burning gusher, rushing over acres of electronic tubes, branding against banks of radioactive pyramidal cells, swamping them as a wave. And at one point the glideways circled a convolution which was a fiery lake dotted with thousands of fractional-horsepower motors, still running, but showering sparks as their insulation was consumed.
The air conditioning was working full blast; that probably saved their lives because heat blasts alternated with spouts and currents of cold air. Even so there were stretches where the glideway"s rubber flooring smouldered as it shot over nerve-bridges and through narrow tunnels lined with nerve cables on all sides. From thousands of jets the carbon dioxide of the automatic fire-fighting system hissed against the flames, but it was drowned in the hollow roar of the conflagration shooting through nerve paths where no gas could reach.
Endless it seemed, this mad wild flight through h.e.l.l, but actually it took only minutes before they reached the median section and went into the steep descent between the hemispheres. The whirling reddish glow receded overhead and white smoke cleared. Lee could crawl forward a little to bend over the prostrate body of the girl. He unloosened her gas mask and shouted into her ear.
"Are you okay? The worst is over now; there are the fire brigades coming up."
She nodded. Her face was a white blot in the semidarkness of the black lights and Lee felt the weak, but rea.s.suring pressure of her hand upon his arms. Then, as from one racing train to another, they watched the firefighters coming up, ghostly in their asbestos suits, with the snouts of gas masks for faces, crouching under the foamite tanks on their backs and clutching the funnel-shaped nozzles in their hands. Maintenance engineers followed, laden with tools; and where the glideways branched off one could already see them at work; fast but calm: disconnecting nerve cables, closing circuits, setting up firescreens with a discipline as magnificent as that of their invisible enemies, _ant-termes_, long since consumed by the flames, but still sending the chain-reactions of their destruction through The Brain.
A few minutes later glideway T shot into the "lateral ventricle", huge cavern of the Mid-Brain separated from the blast by the thick walls of the pallium. It looked like the inside of a giant wind tunnel brilliantly lit now with powerful searchlights. It was swarming with personnel; white electricians, blue air-conditioners, weird, sponge rubber-padded shapes of ray-proofed men, uniformed guards, even soldiers in uniform rushed to the spot from outlying garrisons of The Brains-preserve. It all seemed to rush up as the earth rushes up in a low-alt.i.tude parachute jump; it looked like headquarters of an army on the eve of a big drive, and then--
Lee and the girl felt themselves being violently derailed. Catchers had been thrown across all incoming glide ways from The Brain. Irresistibly they were propelled right into the arms of stretcher bearers in Red-Cross uniforms.