The Cybernetic Brains

by Raymond F. Jones

  “One more thing now before we go—will you let us leave you a couple of the frogs? We have more outside. It will be a means of communication between us and if we can find Al we’ll let him have one.”

  Kit looked for a moment at the tiny monstrosity on the floor by the doorway. It was dimly visible in the faint night light coming through the window.

  “I’ll show you how to use it,” Martha encouraged. “You’ll get to love them so much you’ll have them following you around all the time. All you have to feed them is a handful of grass once a day.”

  Kit grinned nervously in the darkness. “If you say so—and provided you let me name them Monster One and Two.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  Too Hot to Handle

  JERRY RANDOLPH wrote much more for the waste basket than he did for dissemination. It was there that his best critiques of modern society and the Welfare State were filed. He knew where they would go when he wrote them but he had to get the stuff off his chest and no one cared one way or the other.

  If he wrote acceptable material it was used. He wrote sufficient of this to make it worth while to let him occupy an office as a writer. But, like other workers in the subsidized society, he had no worries about the essentials of living and his superiors had no worries about producing a profit. Jerry was perhaps one of ten in all News Central who even knew the meaning of that ancient word.

  He entered the office before any of his fellows arrived. He slumped in a chair and scanned the pile of releases that the telecon had turned in during the night.

  The insignificance of it sickened him. Trivial gossip, the report of new record gambling gains, the newest exploits of that maniacal Society for Artificial Dangers—

  He expected little and usually found it. This morning, halfway through the pile, he almost tossed it all in the waste-basket without looking at the rest. Then a small story a couple of feet down the roll caught his eye. He tore out the section of paper and read the stereotyped copy:

  “C. M. Biglow of Pest Control announces the discovery during the past three weeks of two specimens of a new type of pest, which are froglike in appearance. They are considered to have been brought in from outer space and increased controls are being clamped on all. vessels leaving and arriving on Earth.

  “The first of these specimens was discovered in a bad state of decomposition near a home in Warrenton. It appeared the animal had suffered from Terrestrial climatic conditions with the skin almost wholly destroyed by actinic rays of the sun, to which it was certainly not accustomed.

  “A second specimen was obtained after it had been freshly killed by a pet dog that had captured and toyed with it. Both were one-eyed creatures but the second had a mouth opening supplied with a vicious circle of teeth and a darker skin whose texture seemed able to resist sunlight. In contrast the first specimen seemed to have no mouth whatever.

  “Residents of Warrenton, especially those in the vicinity of the spaceports are asked to be on the watch for these creatures to capture, if possible, and report any that are seen.”

  This was the kind of thing that fascinated Jerry Randolph. He could write a harmless biting satire around such a bit of information that would shock as well as please the non-workers of the State. And because it pleased as well as shocked it would probably be passed by Editor Madsen and used.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad morning after all, Jerry thought. He sat before the writer, considering the item. He furrowed his brow thoughtfully, then began to write.

  There were only two of them, Joe and his kid brother, and they were such little guys. They had come a long way out of space, because they had heard there was a big; magnificent world out there that belonged to the creatures who built the ships from the stars. Joe and his brother were only little guys, but they figured it out—

  The faint klunk of mail in the chute disturbed him. He flipped the keys in irritation and opened the receiver.

  He recognized a half dozen petitions by their type of printing and tossed them away automatically. The last item was a letter that bore no familiarity. The return said Katherine Demming.

  Demming—it sounded a little familiar at that. Then it rang in his memory. Al Demming, the cyberneticist who had been killed in his laboratory not long ago. He remembered Kit Demming. Al had had him out at the house once to give him a release on some new engineering.

  He opened the letter and glanced at the brief notation.

  To be released to Jerry Randolph in case of my death. Albert Demming.

  It was simply typed. No signature and no other explanation. He flipped it over and began reading. His breath quickened as he comprehended the message that the cybernetic brains lived.

  He finished the papers. He tried to picture the reaction of the minds. He could not imagine it—but he could write of it as it might be.

  It was the story of the century. It would break the mighty power of the Institute of Cybernetics. It was one story that would not find its way to the waste-basket.

  He glanced at the clock. Madsen would be in now. He picked up the papers and walked down the softly-lit hallway where faint music was in the air. He entered the door labeled: editor-in-chief.

  Madsen looked up, then let irritation flow out upon his face, building lines of vexation. “Hello, Jerry. I’m pretty busy right now. If you’ve got anything can’t it come by tube?”

  “Uh-uh.—not this.” He laid the papers on the desk, “Read it now. Read the first two lines and you won’t be able to stop until you finish.”

  The editor glanced down. Like the rest of the newsmen he was a worker because he had chosen to be but he sometimes wondered why he rejected the subsidized life of ease and luxury that could be his for the taking. He wondered why he bothered with Jerry Randolph at all.

  He hunched forward suddenly. Jerry smiled in grim amusement and watched the figure of his boss alternately tensing, then slowly exhaling in disbelief.

  AT last Madsen looked up. “You knew this Dr. Demming, didn’t you?”

  “I’ve been to his house. He gave me a good deal of material in the past. He was top cybernetic engineer at the Institute.”

  “And now he’s dead.”

  “With this kind of information in his possession I can believe there would be plenty of people who would want him dead.”

  “Randolph! If that’s what you see in this story—”

  “Why do you suppose he made a specific request that this be sent to me in case anything happened to him? It couldn’t be that he expected anything, could it?”

  “You don’t realize what you’re saying,” said Madsen nervously. “You know the circumstances of his death.”

  He glanced down at the papers again and was surprised to see his own hands trembling faintly. “This is too big. It’s too much without foundation as it exists now. The only thing we can do is to get Institute clearance on it.”

  “Can’t you imagine them doing just that? You might as well offer them a knife and ask them to cut their own throats. They’ve got power, Madsen. Picture their reaction on hearing news, like this.”

  “I am picturing it. There’s been some mistake somewhere. Dr. Demming must have misunderstood his data. We can’t disseminate a thing like this without checking with the Institute. I’ll send these papers over for their clearance and whatever explanation they wish to give.”

  “Oh, no. Kit Demming sent those papers to me and I’m going to keep my hands on them.”

  Madsen’s face grew red. “If you are going to persist in this foolish matter it is automatically your resignation as well.”

  “You have it now. You’ve thrown away every honest word I’ve ever written up to now. But not this—this is going to be told in places where it will be heard by the right people!”

  Jerry Randolph scooped up the papers and left the office. He cleaned up his own desk and walked out of the building for the last time.

  An hour later he was dead.

  John and Martha Wilkins saw it. The frogs were trav
eling cautiously beneath a thick hedge in a park across from the Institute building. They had come to the end of the hedge, facing a street, and John hesitated about bringing the frogs out into the open.

  Then he saw the figure of Jerry Randolph. The newsman was walking slowly, almost idly, gazing at the huge block of the Institute as if trying to pierce its walls with his very eyes.

  He started absently into the street. Almost simultaneously, John heard the faint whine of a speeding car. Jerry heard it too.

  Martha screamed, “John, it’s going to—”

  It seemed to John that the car could have avoided Jerry. Instead it knocked him to the pavement, crushing him with the right front wheel. For a moment, John felt as if that crushing blow had landed upon his own body.

  “We could have warned him. We saw it first,” he said in self-accusation.

  He went back over it. He could have sent warning that would have puzzled Jerry but would have saved his life. That speeding yellow vehicle—the whine he’d heard—the vision of the careening car that had looked as if it would miss Jerry,

  “That was it,” said Martha. “The car was on a path to miss Jerry. It could have missed him. It deliberately ran him down. We didn’t sense that until it was too late.”

  There was a crowd gathering now. The murder car had stopped and the driver was approaching the scene. He walked with arrogance as if he’d just eliminated some vermin. They’d believe him, John thought. They always believed his kind. No one else had seen it. There would be no testimony that the car had swung deliberately into Jerry.

  The scene brought remembrance of terror back to John. He thought of his own accident, his car crashing down the mountainside toward the river’s foaming whitecaps.

  He remembered how it had been, driving around that curve, meeting the speeding car head on—a speeding yellow car like—

  Martha, cried out suddenly, “John! That man—that face!”

  He stared. His thought processes froze. And then a slow flame seemed to eat through his being.

  He remembered that car. He remembered that beefy arrogant countenance. He had glimpsed it once before, sunlight splashing upon it as it sped around a curve—a look of murderous intent twisting it hideously.

  CHAPTER IX

  Blind Plunge

  THE frogs moved carefully back, farther under cover of the hedge. John abandoned contact, withdrawing his powers into himself. He recoiled from the evil and the violence that swirled about him. Whose word could a man trust, he thought. Was there no hand that would not strike down his neighbor at the slightest whim?

  “John!” Martha recalled him gently. In some ways her spirit withstood the blunt fury of existence better than his.

  “Remember what Thornton Henniger said that day when we signed our contracts?” he said.

  “I remember,” said Martha.

  “I don’t know how—but someday I’ll kill him.”

  “No! That’s not our purpose, John. Remember—you lifted me up and showed me what we must do. This isn’t it.”

  He recalled the names of scientists he had known—men and women whose careers had been cut short by inexplicable accidents.

  There was Foster, the physicist, who had been drowned on a lonely stretch of beach where he often meditated. Foster had been an expert swimmer.

  There was Bruning, the biologist, accidentally shot during a hunt in Canada. Espard, the astronautical engineer, had been killed in an unexplained laboratory blast.

  The catalogue was long. As far as he knew and as far as he could recall the brain of every one had gone to the Institute.

  It was more than he could believe, a worldwide program of murder of the geniuses who stood as the sole contributors to civilization in a barren age.

  But the memory of a sunlit day and the face of a maniac plunging murderously toward him would not let him deny it.

  Night had come when all traces of the accident had been cleared away. The curious had dispersed and few passersby were about.

  Most functions of society were carried on through daylight and dark to accommodate a citizenry that was bound no more by clocks. There were as many who slept by day and lived by night as the reverse. The Institute was no exception in serving such a populace. Its doors were always open to those who had business with it.

  John watched the constant but small inflow and outflow of people. He moved out from the cover of the hedge to estimate the possibilities of getting in undetected.

  Suddenly the eye of a frog took in the lighted news kiosk on the corner. It was only a momentary scan, but John’s attention absorbed a single line of it and the frog came to a standstill.

  A NEWSMAN’S LAST STORY

  He stopped looking cautiously about, then the frog leaped to a projecting rail about the kiosk, It was Jerry Randolph’s story.

  News Central had told of Jerry’s death with maudlin sentimentality and included the bare beginning of the story that he had started to write that morning. Below it was the official account of the new pests discovered by the Interplanetary Pest Control Bureau.

  “John—get the frog down!”

  Pests—subject to eradication procedures. He dropped them into the dimmer shadows. He hadn’t dreamed the two lost frogs would bring such a tragic reaction.

  “Well have to keep them completely out of sight now,” said Martha.

  “Maybe we could change the form—give them legs or let them crawl like a snake. But the jumping motion is the simplest to control.”

  “Let’s not worry about it now. Let’s risk the continued use of the frogs until they’re destroyed or we reach our goal.”

  They led the frogs swiftly across the street in short rapid hops that kept them in the shadows. They abandoned all hope of taking them into the front hall of the Institute.

  At the rear of the gray block was the technical and emergency entrance where the bodies of dead men came from all the world to be prepared for restoration to life in eternal abandonment. Some of these were rushed from nearby centers as soon as death occurred from accident or occasional rare disease. Others came from far continents where they had first been treated at Institute centers to prevent deterioration of the brain cells.

  The frogs lay in the shadow of the dock, where a pair of coffins were being unloaded. “We had better take just one inside,” said John. “The other can be left out here.”

  A single android laborer, directed from a central cybernetic control, was unloading the boxes from the truck to conveyor rollers that led to the elevator. The frog edged closer as the first coffin approached the entrance.

  The laborer’s back was turned. The frog leaped atop the coffin and rode into the dark interior of the elevator shaft.

  “Do you have any idea where to look for the records department?” asked Martha.

  “No. We’ll have to hunt.”

  “It might take days of random hunting, keeping out of sight. Let’s stay with these coffins. Incoming brains should involve records.”

  BY infrared the eye of the frog viewed the walls of the shaft as the freight elevator rode upward. John scanned the appearance of the floors as closely as possible, but there was no clue to where the records might be. He agreed with Martha. A random hunt among the building’s ninety floors would be vain.

  The elevator stopped at last. Almost instantly a panel opened opposite the box and the conveyor started rolling it off. The frog dropped behind the coffin, out of sight of anyone who might be waiting for it. They saw the legs of a table and the frog leaped for its protecting cover as the panel slammed shut behind.

  The sound of voices registered through the aural diaphragm of the frog.

  “Two more, and then we can go home?”

  “Right. These are special jobs for the Metaral Mines in the Arctic. Something happened to one of the brains up there and they want two replacements to check on the circumstances involved. Something to do with low-temperature operations.”

  They opened the first coffin. The second speaker whis
tled softly. “Boy, do they beat these guys up!”

  “What do you mean, beat them up?”

  Sudden tension, so sharp that John seemed to feel it through the frog, filled the room. “Forget it,” said the technician. “I didn’t mean anything at all.”

  “Then that’s probably the first time I ever heard you make meaningless noises, Kraft.”

  “Ah, you know what I mean. You don’t think these accidents we get all the time just happen, do you?”

  “What are you driving at?”

  “This is a dirty business we’re in. Why do you think so many accidents mangle the bodies and leave the brains intact? It takes technique to do that!”

  “That can’t be true!” the other said faintly.

  “I’ll bet Kraft doesn’t live till morning,” said John. “He must be a fool to talk that way.” The entire building was undoubtedly wired with watch circuits.

  But the poor devil wasn’t to be helped now.

  John and Martha watched the technicians hoist the battered bodies onto operating tables. They cut open the brain cases and tore away the bony structure. Then, carefully they severed the great nerve connections and freed the brain from the body.

  They lowered the brains into a sealed chamber of nutrient and preservative for the journey to the point of installation where a cybernetic engineer would take over. Cleanup was a swift dumping of the bodies into a disposal chute, a gathering of instruments into a boiling bath,

  “That’s the way it’s done,” murmured Martha.

  “The way to make a machine out of a man.”

  “I’ll show you how to fill out these records and then we’ll be on our way,” said Kraft.

  The two bent over a table and hastily scratched notations on the forms that had come with the bodies and made out some new sheets from a supply desk.

  These they finally rolled and slipped into a tube. They put the tube into a repository and it shot from sight. The room darkened as they went out the door.