A Novel by RAYMOND F. JONES
the
Cybernetic Brains
Their honeymoon interrupted by apparent death, John and Martha
Wilkins find themselves condemned to serve a world in
which they can never really exist!
CHAPTER I
Silent Screams
There was darkness and utter silence and the absence of any familiar thing. But he was alive. And that was good.
He had no right to be alive. The car had rolled down the hundred foot slope of Canyon Cliff to the river below. He recalled the slow lazy turning, end over end, the smashing, clattering impact as it came down on four wheels, then tipped sickeningly forward again, faster and faster—
He remembered the final plunge. He had been conscious even at the end when the shining foam of the river filled the ear and shut out all the world with its cold white cover.
And Martha—four hours his bride. Halfway down the mountainside she had been thrown clear. He remembered the glimpse of her face, not bruised or bleeding. Just white, deathly white with eyes closed. He remembered the terrible silence of her lips after the first scream of terror.
Now he tried to call her name but his mouth seemed numb and unresponding. His eyes made no response to light. He could hear no sound.
His pain was diffuse and terrible. There was so much of it that he could not tell from whence any of it came. Every nerve, from the remote extremity of his toes and fingertips to the most secret core of his brain, signaled pain. There was the pain of the knife and of fire, the pain of crushing, bruising, stabbing things.
They must have him doped with hypos, he thought. He shouldn’t be conscious now except for the fury of the pain that had battered down the barriers against it.
He felt as if the nerve channels of his body had long passed their point of overload. They could carry no more currents of distress to his brain regardless of how much the stimulus of destruction piled up in the distant cells of his body.
And his brain could receive no more. It seemed burned and parched by the hot currents from far organs that cried out for succor and relief. The channels of reason were clogged with messages of hysteria.
And yet a part of him seemed able to think. It was as if he could somehow stand aside and view objectively the neural chaos that was within himself. He seemed capable of speculating and evaluating the vast damage to his body and mind.
It was only when he allowed himself to think of Martha that total collapse threatened the tiny sanctuary where reason was yet in control.
He was in a hospital, he thought. Someone must have seen the accident. He could not have remained in the submerged car more than a few minutes or he would have drowned.
But why didn’t someone come?
He tried to call out again. His lips at first refused his bidding. With all the power of his being he forced them to shape the name of his wife.
“Martha! Martha—”
SHE would not be here, he told himself. She had been hurt too. She could be dead. The little cell of reason shrank within his brain as he gave way before that thought. If she had died life would be a meaningless unwelcome thing for him.
He moved his hands out from his sides to make sure it was a bed upon which he lay. He could not tell. The nerve channels, so clogged with pain, could not tell him whether it was a sheet or a stone upon which he lay. He moved his arms about in the air. They encountered nothing. But, with his damaged sensory apparatus, he was not certain that he had even moved his arms.
He struggled and called out again. “Nurse!”
There was no reassuring answer. There was no sound at all. Only the memory of sound. Deaf, he thought.
And blind. He tried to feel of his eyes, but he could not tell if there were bandages or not. It was like feeling with pillows tied about his hands.
He lay still for a long time, not moving, only trying to catch the sound and the feeling of his breathing, the beat of his heart. There was no sensation whatever.
It was like being imprisoned within a corpse, he thought. He could never go back to Martha, a senseless unfeeling scrap of flesh that somehow still lived. Even if they both lived he could never let her claim him. He wished he had remained in the wreckage in the river. It would have been better if he had died there. But now he did not want to die, no matter how broken and shattered his body.
Only he could not go back to Martha, He wished that somehow she would never have to see him or know his fate.
He could not think of her dead. She had to be alive. She had been spared the crushing fall down the face of the mountain. She could have lived, he told himself over and over again.
He wondered how long it had been since the accident. What might they be doing now if it hadn’t occurred? Martha’s brother, Al, had offered them the privacy of his family cabin in the mountains for their honeymoon. They had been on their way there when the car plunged over the embankment.
They might be boating now on the lake in front of the cabin, he thought. The moon would be full. In its light Martha’s hair would shine as if with some phosphorescence of its own.
They had planned a supper by the light of a campfire near the water.
“If it gets burned a little or if sand and ashes get in it I’ll have an excuse for your wife’s first meal giving you indigestion,” she had said.
He’d never eat that meal now, he thought. But at that he was luckier than anyone else he knew. No one else had ever held Martha in his arms and heard her say, “I love you, darling.” Nobody ever would. That was enough to last him the rest of his life.
But it was wrong—about Martha not loving again. She’d have to learn to love again. She could not live her life with a memory. She would have to find someone who would love her and take care of her. She would have to marry again.
Her first love had been his. That was enough to last him a lifetime and no one could take it from him.
He tried to sleep, to push out the thoughts and the memories and the torrents of pain from his mind. But sleep would not come. He wished they would give him another hypo.
His bodily sensations seemed to be growing more numb and indistinct. He could not tell for sure if his eyelids were open or shut. Perhaps his butchered face had no eyelids, he thought. Perhaps no eyes.
He groaned aloud as an accumulating flood seemed to burst within him. He was alone and scared like a little boy lost in a darkness that would never lift, He cried as the full flood crest of agony burst wide. His sobbing shook his being and fed upon the terror and the pain like ravening fire.
After a time, when it was over, he felt partly cleansed of the chaos and the fear. A wave of calm began to overlay his mind in the aftermath of the storm within him. He could sleep now, he thought.
But sleep would not come. He tried to retreat before the incessant activity of his mind. He tried to fade out the memories and withdraw support from his imagination.
There was no sleep.
He fought for it as if for a tangible possession that he prized above all else but sleep would not cross the barrier of his mind.
In panic and frenzy he finally gave way to cries and screams for the hospital attendants. They’d have to dope him to sleep. He’d go crazy without it.
What kind of a hospital was it anyway—where they left him without attention of any kind? He tried to think where they might have taken him.
On the trip he and Martha had passed through the little town of Dixon. They had a small hospital there. Or they could have taken him all the way back to Warrenton, the industrial center where he lived and worked. That would have been the most likely.
In either place he could have expected more adequate care and attention.
There stan
ding erect in the centre of the laboratory was Martha
YET perhaps they were helping him. In his nearly senseless condition he would never know it. There might be a score of nurses and doctors about him now. They might have administered a dozen hypos. He would never have known it amid all the other pain.
Sure, that was it, he decided. They were watching him, taking care of him. He’d be all right—as near right as was possible for him to be. The hypos just couldn’t beat down all the pain that was in him.
He imagined himself closing his eyes. He tried to draw a curtain of calmness across his mind. And it helped. Something approaching a state of rest fell upon him. But he did not sleep.
He could not measure the passage of hours and of days, but he felt that a long time elapsed while he lay a prisoner in his own corpse.
That was the only term he could apply to himself. The pain seemed to be dying away—not as if healing had come but as if the very nerve channels were at last burned away by the intensity of it. With the lessening of pain, however, there came no resurgence of sensation.
He lay still blind and deaf and unfeeling but he supposed he was being kept alive by intravenous feeding but he had no sensation of it. If they were sticking needles into his body they were probing a dead thing that could no longer feel.
There were only memory and desperate despairing thought.
He tried to mark the days against his imaginary time scale. He knew it was entirely fanciful. What he supposed to be a day might be only an hour in reality. But it seemed worth while.
It was on his fifth day of the darkness and the silence, according to his own tabulation, that he first noticed a change.
Light. It would have been imperceptible except that his visual nerves had been dormant so long. They responded violently to the first quantum that stimulated their sensory endings.
He almost cried from the joy of that first feeble perception. It was like the faint moonlit cast of a snow laden sky at night. But it was light, an incredible avenue of release from the sightless prison that held him.
He watched it grow in brightness. So slowly that sometimes he wondered if there were any change at all it increased. Over the days it brightened and swelled and grew and slowly became an image.
It was when he first detected some vague motion that he knew his sight was actually returning. It seemed to be the figure of a man but it was beyond recognition.
And then it was cut off as if a bandage had been wrapped about his eyes suddenly. He wondered what had gone wrong. He asked questions but the same impenetrable silence shrouded him. He got no answers. He heard no sound.
The light came back after a day—as suddenly as it had been removed. But this time it was clear and sharp. It was vision as perfect as any he had ever known.
Directly before him was a familiar and friendly face. Al Demming, Martha’s brother—Dr. Albert Demming, the noted cyberneticist. He was looking directly into his eyes and his face was drawn and troubled.
“Al!” he cried. “Al, tell me what has happened! Is Martha hurt? Al—Al, can’t you hear me? Al, look at me! Tell me about Martha!”
His voice had risen to a shrill cry but Albert Demming was turning away as if he had not heard a word—as if he had not even seen anyone before him.
“Al! Don’t go away. Talk to me, Al. Tell me—”
He tried to turn his head and his eyes to follow the figure of the retreating man. He could not. He could only stare directly in front of him, helpless to move even his eyeballs.
For a moment despair mounted to its former peak. Paralysis—paralysis of even his eye muscles. But he could see. They must have repaired some of the damage to his eyes. If they could do that they could give movement to his eyeballs and restore his other muscles. It meant they were working, helping him.
He didn’t understand the strange action of Martha’s brother. It could be doctor’s orders, he supposed. Perhaps they had told Al not to disturb him. That was why he had turned and walked away so suddenly.
Al had come because Martha wanted to know about him. That was it, he decided. The thought made him feel good. He had tangible evidence that she was alive and safe.
Then his eyes concentrated on the scene before him. It was a strange thing, a huge board covered with inscriptions and meters and pilot lights. He stared at it and read the inscriptions. They were chemical formulae. He was a chemist and he understood them. He understood the intricate and complex biochemical process that they described. He had developed it.
Slowly a surge of terror began mounting in his brain as he continued to stare at that board his vision could not avoid. Helplessly a scream burst suddenly from within him.
He knew now where he was.
It was no hospital.
He screamed again and again and he couldn’t stop. Only when consciousness left him did the screaming die.
CHAPTER II
The Hennigers
DR. ALBERT DEMMING was a blond massive man with startlingly blue eyes that safely guarded the secrets of the mind that lay behind them. As Chief Cybernetic Engineer it was not his duty to supervise personally an individual control installation. But General Biotics was something special.
He did not dwarf Thornton Henniger, Chief Steward of General Biotics. Henniger matched him in height and thickness of chest—and in instinctive dislike.
They stood on the narrow control room balcony with their backs to the windows that overlooked the thousand-acre plant. In the center of the chamber before them was visible the fifty-foot control central with its sterile glass walls. In the exact center of this chamber, amid the mass of machinery that it held, a platinum box no more than half a cubic foot in volume rested upon a supporting pedestal.
The men’s eyes were on that box.
“I did not know—until yesterday,” said Albert Demming. “That’s why I called you. I am powerless to prevent this in the face of the contracts the Institute holds, which John and Martha signed. But you, as Steward, could release them to me. I’ll guarantee you an installation equivalent in every respect. Will you release them?”
Henniger moved his cigar from between his teeth. “We’ve waited five years for such contracts. Why should I release them now? The Institute is obligated to release no contracts except upon request of the original signers. They are dead. You have no claim. And you talk strangely for a cyberneticist.”
“I have a claim,” Al said flatly. “The woman was my sister. John Wilkins was her husband. They were killed eight days ago on their honeymoon.”
Henniger watched the tightening around Al’s mouth. “You have no claim,” he repeated. “I sympathize with your personal loss. I knew of Martha and John Wilkins, but not of your relationship to them. I would have thought the Institute would have sent someone else—but I suppose the magnitude and uniqueness of this installation demanded your personal attention.
“You know the history of this plant. It has long been the desire of Biochem to centralize the production of biotics in a single cybernetically-controlled plant. Up to now it has been mathematically impossible. We have finally discovered the means through the coupling of two units.”
“I discovered the means,” AI interrupted sharply. “It was my theory that such an installation could be made, I demonstrated the proof of it. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I have the authority to say that I can guarantee you an equivalent installation if you release these contracts to me.
“Martha was my sister and I went to school with John. I have claim on you because you would still be working piecemeal in a score of duplicate structures if it were not for what I have given you.”
Henniger’s eyes narrowed as they turned penetratingly to Al’s. “You have no claim!” he repeated. Each word was clipped short and heavy, like a blow with his fist that he knew he was delivering without mercy beneath Al’s unprotected heart.
“I see,” said Al. His voice was barely a whisper.
“I trust that you do see. I still think the Institute should rep
lace you. Such sentimentality as you express is useless to your dead relatives and to you—and it is harmful to me. Your technical work is bound to suffer and if I detect any evidence of it I shall request the Institute to replace you. I am sure the Institute Board would not be at all happy to hear about the proposal you have just made me.”
“The technical aspect of this installation will be adequate,” said Al thinly.
“Good. Then we’ll hear no more of sentimental matters. I want to know more about this adjustment collapse of which you speak. I have not seen a new installation before. This collapse seems to me a dangerous thing. If it can happen once why can’t it repeat?”
Henniger searched Al’s face for the merest trace of a break but the cyberneticist’s eyes controlled the churning emotions behind them. He spoke with sharp, technical precision.
“We have no adequate explanation of the collapse. I have spent most of my research on this particular aspect of cybernetics but I have nothing to release. We know that when the brain is first stimulated visually or otherwise there follows a period of complete neural dissociation as if all synapses are suddenly dissolved.
“The technique has been to overcome this by a gentle electronic forcing that clears this block and realigns the synapses in desired patterns. Once established this forcing pattern is maintained. There is no more block and our oldest cybernetic installation of this type is nearly seventy-five years old now.”
HENNIGER looked down at the small box behind the glass walls—the box big enough to hold the brain of a man.
He removed the cigar from his mouth again and held it in the hand that rested against his thickening paunch. His lips parted in the humor of a gargoyle. “Seventy-five years, eh? Wouldn’t it be a hell of a thing if it turned out that they were alive? Imagine a man locked up in that box—he could live forever, I guess, couldn’t he? That is, if he didn’t go crazy first.”
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