The Brain Part 1

The Brain.

by Alexander Blade.

CHAPTER I

Cautiously the young flight engineer stretched his cramped legs across some gadgets in his crowded little compartment. Leaning back in his swivel chair he folded a pair of freckled hands behind his neck and smiled at Lee.

"This is it doctor; we're almost there."

The tall and lanky man at the frame of the door didn't seem to understand. Bending forward he peered through the little window near the engineer's desk, into the blue haze of the jets and down to the earth below, a vast bowl of desert land gleaming like silver in the glow of the sunrise.

"But this couldn't possibly be Was.h.i.+ngton," he finally said in a puzzled tone. "Why, we crossed the California coast only half an hour ago. Even at 1200 miles an hour we couldn't be almost there."

The engineer's smile broadened into a friendly grin: "No, we're not anywhere near Was.h.i.+ngton. But in a couple of minutes you'll see Cephalon and that's as far as we go. One professor and 15 tons of termites to be flown from Wallabawalla Mission station, Northern Territory, Australia, to Cephalon, Arizona, U.S.A., one way direct. Those are our instructions. Say, this is the queerest cargo I've ever flown, doctor, if you don't mind my saying so."

Lee blinked. Removing his gla.s.ses which were fairly thick, he wiped them carefully and put them on again as if to get a clearer picture of an unexpected situation. His long fingered hand went through his greying hair and then down the cheek which was sallow, stained with the atabrine from his latest malaria attack and badly in need of a shave. His mouth formed a big "O" of surprise as nervously he said:

"I don't get it. I don't understand this business at all. First the Department of Agriculture extends an urgent letter of invitation to a completely forgotten man out there in the Never-Never land. Then almost on the heels of the letter the government sends a plane. I would have been glad to mail to the Department samples of "Ant-termes Pacificus"

sufficient for most scientific purposes if they needed them for experiments in termite control; that would have been the simple and the sensible thing to do. But no, they want everything I have; you fellows drop out of the sky with a sort of habeas corpus and a whole wrecking crew. You disturb the lives of my species, which took me ten years to breed; you pack up their mounds lock, stock and barrel. And then you drop me at some place I never even heard about--Cephalon. What is this Cephalon, anyway? If the place had any connotations to entomology, I would have known about it...."

The flight engineer glanced at the irritated scientist curiously and sympathetically: "If you don't know, I couldn't tell you what it's all about myself, I'm sure," he said slowly. "Cephalon--Cephalon is a place alright, but it doesn't show on the map. Sort of a Shangri-la, if you know what I mean."

This cryptic statement failed to have a calming effect on Lee.

"Nonsense," he frowned. "If it is an inhabited place it must be on the map and if it isn't on the map the place doesn't exist."

"Look here," the flight engineer pointed through the window to the horizon ahead. "What do you think this is, doctor, a mirage?"

Lee stared at the apparition which swiftly materialized out of the ground haze at the plane's supersonic speed. "It _does_ look like a mirage," he said judiciously. "Is that Cephalon?"

The engineer nodded. "Prettiest little town in the U. S. for my money.

Ideal airport, too. Rather unusual though--I mean the architecture. Take a good look while we're circling around for the come-in signal."

Pretty and unusual were hardly the words for it, Lee thought, as he gazed in admiration. Below, Cephalon spread like a visionary's dream of a far-away future blended with a far-away past. Along wide, palm shaded avenues the flat-roofed terraced houses fanned out into the desert.

Style elements of ancient Peru and Mexico were blended together with the latest advances of technology, such as the rectangular sheets of water which covered and cooled the roofs. The business center, dotted with helicopter landing fields on top of the pyramidal buildings, was reminiscent of the cla.s.sic Babylon and Nineveh. At the center of the man-made oasis a huge fortress-like structure sprawled and towered like a seven-pointed star. Even so, for all its impressiveness of masonry, the lush green of its parks, the bursts of color from its hanging gardens, made Cephalon resemble one enormous flower bed.

Overawed and mystified the lone pa.s.senger from Down-Under took in the scene while the big plane circled with diminished speed. "It's beautiful," he murmered. "It's a dream." And louder then: "Pardon me if I find it hard to trust my senses. I've been away from home for more than ten years, to be sure. But then, even in the Australian bush I've received some periodicals and scientific journals from the U.S.A. Surely if a city like this has been built during my absence there should have been mention of the fact. And surely a city like this must show on some map. I don't understand. The longer I look the less I understand...."

The flight engineer shrugged. "It's a new city, maybe that's why it doesn't show."

Lee nodded. "In that case you must know the meaning of all this. Why did they build this city in the middle of the desert? What purpose does it serve? Why am I here? Why are we circling for so long? There don't seem to be any other planes up in the air."

"We cannot come in until our cargo has been examined and okayed," the engineer said.

Lee raised a pair of heavy and untidy brows: "Cargo examination? In mid-air and with n.o.body from the ground examining it?"

"That's it. It's being done by Radar, one of the new fangled kinds, you know." He grinned: "I hope, doctor, that your termite species is neither explosive nor fissionable in any way. Because in that case we could never make a landing in Cephalon."

"How utterly absurd," Lee said disgustedly. "Even a child would know better. There is no war going on--or is there? What makes them take such absurd precautions?"

The engineer narrowed his eyes. "You're an American, Dr. Lee, aren't you? Well, in any case, I can see no reason why I should be beating about the bush. After all, every foreign agent in this country must have learned by now about the existence of Cephalon. It's too big to be secret anyway. Besides, as you perceive, no attempt has been made to camouflage the place. Cephalon and the whole district takes up about a thousand square miles. It's a military preserve. Only you don't see any Bra.s.s. What they are doing, I wouldn't know, but I would rather try to rob all the gold from Fort Knox than get away with a single sc.r.a.p of paper from that Braintrust Building in the center of the city over there. By the way, that skull shaped building right across the Plaza is the official hotel reserved for very important persons, such as you are listed."

A deep-throated buzz over the intercom interrupted him. "There, thank G.o.d, they finally made up their minds to let us in. One minute more and then a shower, a shave, bacon and eggs, and lots of Java!"

There were what appeared to Lee to be a mult.i.tude of people waiting as they landed. Eager and intelligent white faces all lifted up to him and pressed forward with bewildering offerings and requests. A Western Union messenger handed him a telegram in which one Dr. Howard K. Scriven proffered greetings, expressing a desire to interview him. Some cleancut youngster, obviously a scientific worker, a.s.sured Lee that he was fully familiar with the care and feeding of "_Ant-termes-pacificus-Lee_", that Lee need not concern himself about their welfare, that the mounds would be immediately transferred to Experimental Station 19 G. The "Flying Wing's" supercargo and two truck-drivers came forward with papers for Lee to sign, as the first of the heavy steelboxes which harbored the mounds were lowered into a van with the whine of an electric hoist.

Meanwhile somebody who said he was an a.s.sistant manager of the Cranium hotel informed Lee that reservations had been made for him and that he had a car waiting to conduct Dr. Lee to his suite. It was all very mysterious, but efficient. Feeling more and more like some prize exhibit handled without a will of its own on a whirlwind tour, Lee allowed himself to be whisked from the airport to the hotel. With the din of the jets still in his ears, overpowered by impressions which crowded his senses from all sides, he listened politely to the hotel manager's explanations of the sights without understanding a word of them.

There were flowers in his suite, the carpets were deeper, the bathtub was bigger, the towels piled higher, the breakfast more abundantly rich than anything Lee could remember in the 38 years of his life. "So this is America in 1960," he thought. "It must have advanced by leaps and by bounds over these past ten years."

He felt embarra.s.sed because he had almost forgotten the uses of all those comforts, and at the same time deeply moved over the way they embraced him, him, the lost son, the voluntary exile who once had turned his back on them in despair and disgust. But why was all this? He had done nothing to deserve this kind of hospitality. Entomologists as a rule were not transported by magic carpets into Arabian Nights for modest achievements such as the discovery of a new species. All the things which had happened within the last 24 hours were riddles wrapped up in enigmas. Fatigued as he was he couldn't lie down, he was desperately resolved to get at the bottom of this thing.

There came a buzz from the telephone. A soft and melodious contralto voice announced that its carrier was Dr. Howard K. Scriven's secretary and would Dr. Lee be good enough to come over to the Braintrust Building to meet Dr. Scriven at 9:30 A.M.? Lee said that he would.

The distance across the Plaza was short enough, but as Lee entered the hall of the huge concrete pyramid he was reminded of Was.h.i.+ngton's Pentagon in wartime, for his progress was halted right from the start and at more than one point. He had to line up at the receptionist's, he was being checked over the phone, a pa.s.s was handed to him, and somebody, obviously a plain-clothes man, took him to the express elevator which shot him up to the 40th floor.

There, another plain-clothes man conducted Lee through a long carpeted corridor and up one flight of stairs to a steel door which slid open automatically at their approach. Sunlight was flooding through its frame as Lee followed the guard and the door closed noiselessly behind them.

The man from Down-Under took a deep breath. He had not expected this for it was not a stepping in, but rather a stepping out from a vast tomb into the light of day. This was the top of a huge pyramid, and was in an entirely different kind of world.

The terrace was laid with flagstones and landscaped like a luxurious country club. In its middle there arose a penthouse, low and irregularly shaped like some organic outcropping of native rock. It could hardly be said that it had walls, overgrown as was the stone by creepers and built into the shape of ma.s.sive pillars. The structure seemed a kind of Stonehenge improved upon by America's late great architect Frank Lloyd Wright. There were birch shade trees around the house, the leaves whispering in the breeze. From some crevice in the rock came the peaceful murmurings of a spring. A meandering little brook criss-crossed the gravel path under Lee's feet. From a stone table which might have belonged to some Pharaoh there came the only incongruous noise in this bucolic idyll; it was the nervous ticking of a typewriter, which stopped abruptly at Lee's approach, and the melodious contralto voice he had already heard over the phone greeted him. "Oh--it's Dr. Lee from Canberra University, isn't it? I'm so happy to meet you. Please, do sit down. How was your trip? I'm Oona Dahlborg, Dr. Scriven's secretary."

Lee blinked. Out of this world as was this Stone Age cabin in the sky, even more so was the girl. He had a vivid image of American girls as they had been when he had left the States way back in '49; in fact, he had an all too vivid memory of at least one of them. His memory had been refreshed within the last hour at the airport, at the hotel, at the receptionist's, and it had been confirmed: they still wore masks instead of their true faces, they still were overdressed, overloud, overs.e.xed, overhung with trinkets and their voices still resounded shrilly from the roof of their mouths.

This girl Oona Dahlborg was different. He raked his brains to find some concept which would express how she was different. The word "organic"

came to mind; yes, as one looked at her one sensed a unity of being, a creatural whole compared to which those other girls appeared as artificial composites.

She was tall for a girl, the pure Scandinavian type, and she looked like a young Viking with the golden helmet of her hair gleaming in the sun.

She wore a tunic, short, sleeveless and of cla.s.sic simplicity, the kind of dress which once Diana wore. It revealed the splendor of her slender figure and stressed the length of her full white limbs. On the black of the tunic an antique necklace of large amber beads formed the only ornament. The bow or the spear of the great huntress whom she resembled so much would have looked more natural in her hands than the typewriter; even so, her every move showed perfect coordination of body and mind, a large surplus of vital energy carefully controlled. Had she turned to some different career she might easily have developed into some great athlete or else a great singer. Her beautiful voice had that rare natural gift of using the whole thorax for a vessel of resonance instead of merely the mouth.

It was this voice which fascinated Lee more than the strangeness of the scene, more than her beauty, more even than the things she said. It was like remembering some haunting melody, it transported him into the forgotten land of his youth. It made him feel happy except that suddenly he felt painfully conscious of his ill fitting suit, the emaciation of his body, the atabrine stains on the skin of his face, the wildness and the grey of his hair.

With the shyness of a boy, he accepted first the firm pressure of her hand and then a seat which was another piece of ancient Egyptian furniture.

"Dr. Scriven will be with you in a few minutes," she said.

"Unfortunately he is a little delayed by an official visitor from Was.h.i.+ngton. The unexpected always happens over here. Meanwhile...."

She suddenly interrupted herself. The searching look of her deep blue eyes startled Lee by its directness. There was in it a depth of understanding and of sympathy which penetrated to his heart. He felt as if she already knew about him and knew everything. It lasted only a few seconds before she continued, but in a different, a warmer voice:

"I think we can drop the usual conventions," she said. "We know you, Dr.