The Cybernetic Brains

by Raymond F. Jones

  In the dark she held it and ran the fingers of the other hand over its contours. She felt the pitted hide, the smooth muscle band that covered the belly. She touched that face and felt the monster teeth.

  It was like a gesture of grotesque farewell, for she kneeled then in bed and hurled the frog with all her strength through the open window.

  “John! Come here. It’s Kit!” Al’s urgent cry sought out his companions.

  John touched with the frog that tumbled down the grassy slope outside the house.

  “The frog in the study!” said Al.

  John left it to Al’s control, watching as the frog hopped through the darkened house. There was no sign then of Kit in the bedroom. They returned to the hall. Kit’s figure was silhouetted in the open bathroom door. Her hand held a glass to her lips.

  “Get it!”

  The frog smashed into the glass and hurled it against the wall. The dripping fragments showered down and the frog fell to the floor bathed in the liquid from the glass.

  LIKE a dimming light the frog’s vision shrank to the threshold of darkness but Kit’s ringing scream seemed amplified by the darkening vision.

  “I threw you away!” she screamed the words over and over. “You are a dream that can’t come back! I don’t need you any more.”

  They saw as through a dim curtain the shadowy outline of her leg. She kicked at the frog until the toe of her slipper was covered with its fragments.

  “The poison destroyed the frog’s sight,” said Al. “Get Martha. Bring in more of the frogs. We’ve got to keep her occupied until we can figure out a way to get help.”

  In the darkness Kit moved back to the bedroom, her feet soundless on the carpeting. She stood in dread expectancy there in the center of the room, waiting—just waiting and listening.

  And then she heard them. Not just one this time but scores of things that were not there at all—things she knew her sick mind had woven out of madness.

  She could hear them on the cement outside. It was like a faint slap of a hand on a cheek. Then on the carpeting of the inside it came, a quieter, gentler plopping sound.

  “Kit.” Al’s voice was low, barely audible above the thresh hold of sensibility.

  She answered just as quietly, “Go away. I’m not dreaming any more and you’re not real. Al’s dead and I’m going to Al. Go away. I didn’t dream you all!” Her voice rose In panic and she screamed the final words into the darkness.

  The plopping things seemed to swarm all about her. Backing, she fell against a chair and crumpled on the carpet.

  “Martha—what can we do with her?” Al sounded as if his own powers had been strained as much as Kit’s.

  “Let’s withdraw the frogs. She may be unconscious or at least she’s distracted from her suicidal intent for the moment. I’ll keep watch with one frog here in the corner. But you’ll have to find some way to attract help.”

  “We can open the phone circuit with the frogs. That will attract attention eventually. But listen—I think someone’s coming outside.

  Dark scud had completely covered the moon but the infra-red vision of a frog atop the corner of the house showed John the exterior clearly. A half dozen cars without lights had driven silently into the approach to the house. Twenty or thirty figures were emerging in equal silence. He heard the sound of hushed voices and caught the outline of weird shapes.

  There were men wearing brief scarlet capes on which a white sword was emblazoned.

  “Al!” John’s own message was a near scream.

  “What is it? Who are they?”

  “It’s that lunatic outfit, the Society for Artificial Dangers. They’re after Kit.”

  Al’s thought processes seemed a sudden snarl of incoherency. He made no move, no gesture. “John!” His voice sounded lone and far away. “What is it, Al?”

  “Nothing. Things seemed kind of foggy for a minute. We’re not going to get out of this, are we? Right from the first we never had a chance, did we?”

  “Aim for their throats,” said John. “We’ve got at least a hundred frogs nearby. Their throats or their eyes. Is there a gun inside that Kit could use if she were able?”

  “There’s a gun but do we dare?” he hesitated. “Maybe it would be better even that way.”

  In every culture its own insanity, John thought wearily. The human mind, the greatest product of two billion years of terrestrial evolution. How close nature had come to a masterpiece and how terrible the slim margin of error by which she had failed.

  Insufficient long connectors for the mass of neurons assembled in that brain. Inadequate control against damaging positive feedback. A machine that functioned like the handiwork of God as it neared the invisible point of overload—and became a vast horror once that peak was passed.

  He leaped from the roof into the darkness as the creeping men passed under the eaves. There was a moment’s screaming struggle, then a figure fell writhing. It gurgled and screamed as dark liquid flowed on the ground.

  A MISSILE hurtled suddenly from the line of figures into the house and disappeared within. Almost instantly, the glare of flame lit up the landscape.

  Inside Martha cried out, “Kit! Get up! Behind you—the gun from the drawer. Kill them, Kit!”

  The torch had fallen in Al’s study. She could see the glare. Kit could smell the stench of its burning. It made no sense. Its warning was not a thing to which her mind could any longer respond. She reached for the gun.

  “Run, Kit! Hide behind the patio wall. Shoot the men out there. They burned the house.”

  As if in sleep she obeyed the command. There was no longer terror. The commotion had shaken that. In its stead there came bewilderment, a yearning uncomprehending sense of pilgrimage, a search for destiny.

  She had lost her slippers and her small bare feet were like a child’s moving slowly across the room beyond the range of the advancing fire. She held the gun in her hand but only because she had been told to.

  She advanced along the hallway and emerged from the house, standing behind the low wall that formed a narrow patio in front. Beyond her the half light showed a nightmare of cursing, snarling figures. Half, at least, were writhing on the ground. The rest, upright, fought the surging waves of creatures that flung at them out of the darkness, silently ripping at faces and throats.

  The scene was meaningless. Only the sick longing within her had any reality. The pit of darkness out beyond the flickering light seemed the goal towards which she must go. She stood up on the wall, the cold wind whipping her hair and the thin nightdress that was scarcely a covering.

  Martha screamed, “Get down, Kit! Get down!”

  The mobbers saw her at the same time. Coarse cries came out of the half light. “There she is. Get her!”

  Kit gave no sign of hearing. With one hand outstretched she sobbed into the night, “Al—take me to you, Al.”

  Al and John saw her then. Sickness overwhelmed them. She was naked against the flames that thundered behind her. Like an angel hovering over the pits of Inferno, Al thought dully while his mind raged for coherent action.

  Then, out beyond the circle of light, one of the Society raised a gun. One Simon McRae, who had a daughter. It might almost have been her whose body was bared against the flames, he thought as he sighted upon her small silhouette.

  He shook off the deceiving thought. This was a thing of evil—a witch in angel’s guise, whose demented plaint had shocked the world with fear, Against such evil the Society would fling its might.

  He leveled the weapon.

  John flicked out for the nearest frog, then retreated. There were none closer than the one he’d left. In sick dismay he sent it leaping. It was too far for one jump. He bounded and shot into the air again but the mobber fired even as he left the ground.

  For a moment Al did not believe Kit was hurt. He had seen the lightning-streak that betrayed the bolt of energy in the night but it could have passed behind her.

  Even while gladness was rising within him
she crumpled. She fell backwards from the wall as if the life she had despised had fled in sudden glad escape.

  She was dead, Al knew then. One touch of that flaming energy burned every neuron in the human body. He reached out, touched the frog that John empowered.

  “Let me!” He seized control with savage demand.

  “He’s dead,” said John,

  As if Al had not heard the frog tore and ripped while blood streamed upon the ground. It clawed the face of Simon McRae beyond human recognition.

  Only one car was started in the attempted escape of the mobbers. The frog that was stationed within it prevented any remnant from fleeing. A mile away the car crashed from the highway and burned.

  It could have been no more than ten minutes since the first cars had driven up, John thought. In so short a time the whole world had changed.

  People were approaching now, attracted by the flaming house. He moved the frogs into the woods beyond. Only one remained beside the fallen body of Kit.

  Martha was there and Al murmured over and over, “They couldn’t let you live, could they, Kit? You never hurt them but they couldn’t let you live. We’ll get them for you, Kit darling. Ten thousand of them for every hair of your head.”

  “Al, we’ve got to get the frog away.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  The Oscar

  THE yearning for physical movement grew out of proportion to all other torments. The nerve endings that had once reported the flow of muscular power through legs and arms and back were not wholly dead, John thought.

  Now above all he wanted to run. He wanted to feel the surge of tightening thigh muscles, the hot fast breath of agonized exertion. He wanted to feel the fatigue of exhaustion and let it flow over him, burying him. He wanted to sleep.

  How much could their minds stand, even with the help of the forcing fields, before sliding into the schizophrenic retreat where Eden beckoned? “John—John, don’t, please!”

  “What? Don’t what, Martha?” “You—going off like that. It frightens me. It’s like those brains we invaded. It’s like Al. I’m scared, John. I’m afraid he’s not coming back.”

  “Have you tried to force contact?”

  “Yes. It’s like a barrier of steel he’s built around his mind I can’t get through it at all.”

  “Don’t worry for the present I think he’s just shut himself away from us because human contact is too much to endure after watching Kit die. He blamed himself for her schizoid attack. He thinks he should have anticipated it and never made contact with her after she thought him dead. She could have endured that.

  “But he’ll come back, darling. If he’d slipped away like those other brains he couldn’t hold you out.”

  “He doesn’t believe there’s any use of going on. I heard what he said back there—‘Right from the first we never had a chance.’ He’s right, John. Look what they did to poor little Kit. How can we fight them?”

  He felt the fingers of her despair clutching as if at his throat. They crept into his brain and usurped pools of unnumbered neurons, and there they planted new seeds of desolation where already his own grew in chaotic profusion.

  Kit’s death had stricken the last pillars of his faith in the people. She had been only the carrier of his message of salvation and they had killed her for it. It could be argued that only a single maniac had fired the shot that killed her, he thought, but that was only a lying half-truth.

  The entire civilization that permitted the Society to flourish as a symptom of its own illness could be indicted for her murder. Overload, he thought with grim recognition—overload and breakdown. Circular impulses occupying great neuron pools and rendering them valueless.

  “Martha!” His voice was brutal. It shook her and jolted the circular structures building like crystals in a drying pool.

  “We’ve got the anthropomorphs to finish,” he said with the same hardness. “I need your help now.”

  She felt the impact of sudden rage and then—clarity.

  “I’m sorry, John. Show me what’s needed.”

  There was healing in work. Slowly it broke up the pathological bands of circulating memory and freed the neuron pools for constructive usage. But never, without the forcing field that bathed them, would they have been able to do it. They would have gone the whole way into escape that meant final break with reality.

  The shapeless forms upon which they worked were heartbreaking. A thing that faintly approached a human form suddenly burst with wild cancerous growth of rebel cell life. Another, that seemed to have reached near perfection, was afflicted with a decaying mould that shed leprous masses.

  But one attained the shape of a man—and held it.

  It was a sorry looking thing at best but the cells did not go wild nor did they die. John made contact with the small mass of synthetic neurons in the brain case. He raised the figure to an upright position and looked through its eyes.

  “The vision’s good,” he said. “You look like a zombie.”

  “Call me Oscar.”

  “You’d better activate the heart and lungs or you’ll kill more cells than can be replaced.”

  As deliberately as throwing a switch he sent a neural pulse that contracted the heart muscles in rhythmic beat. He did the same for the diaphragm. He adjusted the rate of pulse and respiration and turned the control over to the memory cells.

  SLOWLY, as if rising from a long sleep, he thrust a leg over the edge of the vat and stood up on the floor. Through the eye of a frog he looked at the form. It was a thing of horror.

  “We couldn’t send that out,” said Martha.

  “I don’t know. Maybe something like this would win more sympathy for our cause than a perfectly human looking reproduction. We can argue that this physical horror is the counterpart of what the brains endure.”

  They had tried to make it as complete as possible but the hair was thick wirelike stuff. The epidermis resembled masses of crimson scar tissue more than normal flesh. The limbs and torso were lumpy ill-shaped things.

  “It will do for a starter,” said John. He walked the Oscar about the room. “The muscular controls are excellent. I’d be willing to enter him in a foot race any day. Finger flexure is very good, too.”

  “Let’s try again. We know how to control cell growth now. We should be able to build the contours better. We simply haven’t got the right cell for skin at all.”

  He laid the figure on a bench. Then, as they turned back to the planning of an improved Oscar, they heard a faint voice.

  “John—Martha!” It was Al for the first time in days.

  Martha uttered his name with a sobbing cry. “Al, are you all right? Why did you shut yourself away from us?”

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I guess I went like Kit for a little while. I’m working on the transmitter again and I’ve been watching the Institute Board.”

  “I was so afraid you would never come back! We’ve done nothing but work on these. We want one to send before the Court.”

  “You should have kept watch on the Board. But that is my fault. They are planning a move of some kind for tonight. We could find out if we had time and means to search their papers. But I know only that it consists of a public announcement Senator Humphries is going to make tonight. He’s using a live audience and it’s being given world coverage.”

  “And it has to do with the cybernetics question?”

  “I’m sure of it from what I’ve overheard.”

  “A live audience,” said Martha. “That means an attempt to whip up public hysteria for something. But what could it be in connection with cybernetic brains?”

  “It seems part of a long-planned action and somehow they have used our contribution to trigger it.”

  John glanced at the shape lying on the bench. “We could never get the frogs into a crowd like that and we’ve got to be present. We’ll send that one.”

  With stolen, ill fitting clothes, the Oscar shambled through the streets of Warrenton. Through its eyes J
ohn watched the city and the people. It was so much different from looking with the eyes of the frogs. Passersby sometimes gave a startled second glance as they caught the glint of scar tissue in his face, yet he could walk among them.

  There were no olfactory organs. He could not smell the ever-present scent of flowers in the air but the rise and fall of the creature’s lungs was a pleasant thing.

  It seemed like a city from which he had been absent on a trip. There was just, the faint unfamiliarity of long absence. The streets, the lights, the buildings—he had remembered them but his perspective had erred by just a trifle.

  He saw a familiar figure coming towards him, a biochemist he knew. Then just in time he remembered—and withheld the greeting that almost burst from his lips. He shrank back, retreating against a dark wall to let the man go by. He saw all the chatting people, the gay and laughing people walking and riding by, and suddenly he was an utter stranger.

  There was none with whom he could speak. Half the city would know the name of John Wilkins—but none would know his name. None would know that shapeless face that looked as if it had been seared in flame.

  The bitter winds of loneliness swept through the empty corridors of friendship. But, watching the faces as they passed before him, he felt as lonely for them as for himself.

  Were they any less prisoners than he? There was only a single difference between the cybernetic brains and every man. The severed brains knew and understood their lone and forsaken fate.

  A man deluded himself. By the crudities of touch and speech and sight he made himself believe he was close to other men. Yet between them stood the barren impersonal intermediaries of sound and light and electric waves that traversed long neural pathways.

  From secret thought to neural impulse, to psychical act, to neural stimulation, to electron displacement in another’s brain—men believed they were close when all that crude and feeble way was the shortest path between them!