by Jerry
His thoughts were grim as he flung himself in the direction of the workshop. This was going to be a close thing. What good were all these efforts if Klarth could blast their minds internally if they should show the slightest resistance?
But he certainly could not stop now, with so much at stake.
CHAPTER VI
Battle of the Brains
THE D class Super working on the brain-case beamed Mason as he entered and lowered his treads.
“Yes?”
“That brain-case ready for the examination?”
“Klarth hasn’t ordered it sent in yet.”
“I’ll take it. Klarth is busy with an emergency.”
The Super D’s fingers paused from their work.
“That is not like Klarth. They would have informed me. I will contact Them first and-
Mason’s metallic talons flashed out. They closed on the body of the startled Super with a clash of sparks. The Super’s working body of soft metal was crunched inward by the irresistible pressure as if it were made of cheese. In a split second, Mason’s inner fingers had jabbed into it and disemboweled the life out of the mangled wreckage by jerking the brain-case, dangling wires and all, free from any possible contact with Klarth. He pushed it out of the way.
Immediately, the voice of Klarth crashed into him.
“Four-o-Five G, report to Our presence. Your actions have been observed.”
Hurriedly, Mason lifted the newly arrived brain-case and swung it into his body where his inner fingers moved it into the main workshop he had installed forward of his own brain-case. He connected the speech and reception centers directly into his own system.
“This is Mason,” he said tensely, “what’s the rest of the hook-up and hurry.”
“What’s my name?” came the cool answer.
“This is no time for games. What—”
“What’s my name?”
“Judy,” he snapped. “What’s that hookup?”
He retracted his treads and lifted down the corridor toward the room of Klarth. For the moment, he had to appear as if he were obeying the command.
“I had to be sure.” The voice had a soft feel to it. “It’s so dark in here and I don’t know where I am.”
“The hookup—” Mason was impatient.
He had to figure this thing out, find out what it would do, try to rescue 233-G and then he didn’t know what. With each moment he was drawing nearer to the room of Klarth and the unknown fate that awaited him.
“All right!” came the piqued answer. “The others are waiting within tight beam range to help if you can make it work. Listen.”
As the instructions followed, Mason assembled two of the circuits and plugged them into their brain-cases. The hook-ups didn’t look like much.
Mason halted his massive body just outside the room of Klarth and his mind wrenched savagely at the problem. It was just a transmitting circuit of a type that didn’t give him the slightest inkling of its use. He turned it to low power. Nothing seemed to happen. None of his senses could detect that it was even pushing out anything.
“Is it finished?” came her question. “What is it? What will it do?”
“I don’t know.” Mason’s words were hushed.
It took seconds for the realization of what he had said, and the enormous significance of the words, before his mind thundered as from the blow of a gigantic hammer. Here was victory, apparently within his grasp—and he didn’t know. And Klarth wanted him.
“Do that again,” came her startled thought.
“Do what?”
Before he could get a reply he felt his ponderous body jerked with such irresistible force that the next few seconds were jumbled into a meaningless pattern.
When his senses cleared, he saw he had been pulled into the room of Klarth and massive talons held him in an unbreakable grip of steel. Near him, ripped from its body, lay the brain-case of 233-G.
“Four-o-Five G, you are guilty of treason,” came the stern message. “Your unaccountable actions were observed. You will be punished, demoted and your brain-case removed to perform menial tasks. If you resist We will blast your brain into oblivion.”
AS Mason felt the punishing torture grip his mind, despair poured into him in an all-engulfing flood. What a fool he’d been to think he could try openly to get that brain-case. There was no escape now. This then, was the end. The time was past for planning and dreams.
Klarth had tripped him up and had him helpless like a stone in quicksand. He couldn’t even attempt an escape. If he did, instantly Klarth would burn out his life. And the humans? He had bungled their only chance to have removed the heavy yoke that throttled them.
Mason’s mind quivered. He was feeling an alien sensation struggling somewhere in his consciousness. It didn’t belong there. What was it? Despite the pain whipping at his brain, he concentrated.
“Mason. . . . Mason. . . . This is Judy. . . . Are you getting me?. . . . Answer me. . . . Mason. . . .”
Desperate, Mason seized at the thought, as a falling man grasps at a cloud.
“Judy. . . . What are you doing?. . . .”
“I don’t know. . . . But I think it’s that hook-up. . . . I started to pick you up when you first plugged in. . . . Turn it on full power. . . .”
Mason could feel Klarth’s mechanical talons cutting at his port lock as he pushed the tiny electronic hook-up to full load. He was astounded to feel the mental agony drop away from him as if it were dissolving wisps of fog.
Comprehension jolted him. Instantaneously, his starboard lock flung open. His darting talon seized the brain-case of 233-G and swung it inside as the lock clanged shut.
Like claps of thunder his gun turrets blasted, and the bases of the clutching arms melted into molten rivulets of running metal. Gone now was his fear of having his brain blasted. The room was filling with the continuous blinding flashes of exploding colors and the hiss of incandescent metal as his gun turrets belched streams of the deadly rockets.
So sudden, and unexpected was his violent attack that even Klarth Themselves must have been shocked into momentary inaction.
Mason had lifted his massive body up and around, driving out into the corridor before Klarth recovered. He could hear Klarth bellowing on full beam for Their Supers to handle the emergency.
Continuing to drive for the twelfth level, section eight, at as high a speed as the curving corridors would permit, Mason plugged in 233-G direct.
“Just as I thought,” said Mason grimly, “Klarth hasn’t any other gadgets outside of Their room to handle an emergency. They’ve been depending on that brain-case attachment too long.”
“What happened?” cut in 233-G.
His voice sounded shaken.
“I think I know,” said Mason swiftly. “But tell me—could you pick up my thoughts back there?”
“No,” returned 233-G unsteadily. “All I know is that Klarth was giving me the pain treatment, hot and heavy, trying to make me talk, when suddenly, the pain just fell away.”
“We’ve got it!” interrupted Judy’s thought into Mason.
“Right,” said Mason on the three-way channels. “That transmitting hook-up broadcasts something that neutralizes Klarth’s control. This thought transference stuff is probably some sort of a secondary effect from hookup to hookup.”
Mason’s fingers completed another electronic circuit and wired it into 233-G as he swung into corridor thirteen. He headed for room three. His vision, although limited by the surrounding metal walls, still penetrated far enough for him to see Supers converging from every direction, blocking every path of escape.
He squeezed into room three and following 233-G’s directions, activated the mechanism that softened the outer skin.
“How many of your friends are out there?” he thought at Judy. “What’s the call?”
“About a dozen. Send anything. Just kick it out that they can get in and the gadget works.”
“Right,” thought Mason. “Now don’
t bother me.” Concentrating all energy on his general transmitter he broadcast the information.
“Calling all Supers! Klarth’s control over you has been destroyed. If my message were not true They could destroy me. I ask you to remember your birthright. You are still human—all of you! We must destroy Klarth. Humanity still has a job for us to do. That is all.”
Mason flashed down the corridors toward the room of Klarth. His vision ranged out to see Supers beginning to battle with other Supers in the surrounding passageways. This proved that some of Klarth’s subjects strove to maintain the situation as it was. Darting in and out of exploding laboratories and melting workshops, the Supers began playing a colossal game of blind-man’s bluff. Friend or foe?
The vacuum of the corridors was filling with roaring torrents of molecules from the volatized metal of the super-heated walls, expanding and rushing at hurricane speed, ripping and buckling the steel walls themselves.
Mason fought his way through the raging cross-currents toward the room of Klarth. He had one bad moment when three of the outlaw Supers that had entered from outer space caught him in a cross fire until he had identified himself.
GUN turrets bristling, every sense on the alert, Mason swept into the room of the gigantic jewel statue. The room was a shambles. The crimson statue sprawled as a shapeless blob of melted crystal.
High above, the soaring arches were sagging slowly as the heat, with no means of radiating, softened their metallic flesh. A fiery holocaust was now raging through every passageway, pushing the temperatures higher and higher.
Mason’s temperature sense warned him. Rivers of molten metal were trickling across the sagging floor to gather in ever growing puddles of bubbling incandescence.
He felt uneasy. He had to get out of here soon. But where was Klarth? The far end of the room slid downward, and splashed to the floor, sending waves of glowing, molten steel lapping at his milk-white sides.
Suddenly, the roof crashed down at him. Mason fought to lift himself out into the roaring corridor as the falling white-hot metal clutched at his outer skin.
Klarth’s entire metal world was melting and falling inward upon itself as he struggled and blasted his way toward the outside. He found the main exit corridor blocked by the motionless, fused bodies of two Supers locked in a death embrace.
Mason retreated and dived through the center well at headlong speed. If there was no exit—he’d make one!
Ahead of him he could see the glowing partition that sealed the well entrance from outside. His momentum increased with each passing second. He tensed as the distance shortened—and became nothing. He struck, with a smashing impact that blasted a gaping hole in the heat softened metal. He was through! Outside!
The cooling breath of space greeted him, and Mason’s vision saw a watchful patrol of Supers circling at a thousand kilometers. Hastily, he identified himself and headed toward them as his stern plates watched the glowing metal sphere collapse.
Mason’s thoughts were bleak as he remembered all the wonderful machines and strange sciences that were at this minute melting into unrecognizable heaps of junk. But at least the many unfortunate and unwilling brain-cases Klarth had enslaved would find peace in the forgetfulness of death. And where was Klarth?
As if in answer, Klarth’s metal world unfolded, soundlessly, like a gigantic crimson flower of space, expanding in a bursting explosion that flung fiery fragments spinning in every direction.
It was the end of Klarth, They, the unconquerable brain combine, as it would always be the inevitable end for those who violated the freedom of human beings.
“Hey—!” the thought banged against Mason’s mind. “How about plugging me in on some vision? I’m tired of sitting here all alone in the dark with nothing to do but read your nasty mind.”
“Judy!” His own thought had a warmth in it that startled him. “I had forgotten about you.”
He checked the emotions that were crowding into his consciousness.
“Have you been reading my mind, you little imp?”
Then as he pried at her brain, he unexpectedly felt her slam the opening shut as if it were a private door.
“Hey—” she flashed, “You get out of there. Sure I’ve been reading your mind.” Then softly, “Just wait until I know you better and let you read mine.”
Then a thought, that felt almost tired, came to both of them:
“Will you two people calm down and please try to remember this is still a three-way hookup?” The thought faltered a moment, then 233-G went on, “Really, I mean it. It’s embarrassing.”
ONE TIMELESS SPRING
Ray Bradbury
If you can remember being baffled and hint by an adult world, you’ll like this story about a kid who fought desperately, with strange weapons, against ever growing up
THAT week, so many years ago, I thought my mother and father were poisoning me. And now, twenty years later, I’m not so sure they didn’t. There’s no way of telling.
It all comes back to me through the simple expedient of an examined trunk in the attic. This morning I pulled back the brass hasps and lifted the lid, and the immemorial odor of mothballs shrouded the unstrung tennis rackets, the worn sneakers, the shattered toys, the rusty roller skates. These implements of play, seen again through older eyes, make it seem only an hour ago I rushed in from the shady streets, all asweat, the cry of “Ollie, Ollie, Oxen Free!” still excitedly trembling on my lips.
I was a weird and ridiculous boy then with brooding and uncommon ideas; the poison and the fear were only part of me in those years. I began making notes in a lined nickel tablet when I was only twelve. I can feel the stubby pencil in my fingers now, writing in those timeless spring mornings.
I PAUSED to lick my pencil, thoughtfully. I sat in my upstairs room at the beginning of a clear endless day, blinking at the rose-stamped wallpaper, my feet bare, my hair shorn to a hairbrush stubble, thinking.
“I didn’t know I was sick until this week,” I wrote. “I’ve been sick for a long time. Since I was ten. I’m twelve now.”
I scrouged up my face, bit my lips hard, focused blurrily on the tablet. “Mom and Dad have made me sick. Teachers at school also gave this—” I hesitated. Then I wrote: “Disease to me! The only ones who don’t scare me are the other kids. Isabel Skelton and Willard Bowers and Clarisse Mellin; they aren’t very sick yet. But I’m really bad off . . .”
I laid the pencil down. I went to the bathroom mirror to see myself. My mother called me from downstairs to come to breakfast. I pressed close to the mirror, breathing so fast I made a big damp fog on the glass. I saw how my face was—changing.
The bones of it. Even the eyes. The pores of my nose. My ears. My forehead. My hair. All the things that’d been me for such a long time, starting to become something else. (“Douglas, come to breakfast, you’ll be late for school!”) As I took a quick bath I saw my body floating under me. I was inside it. There was no escape. And. the bones of it were doing things, shifting, mixing around!
Then I began singing and whistling loud, so I wouldn’t think about it; until Father, rapping on the door, told me to quiet down and come eat.
I sat at the breakfast table. There was a yellow box of cereal and milk, white cold in a pitcher, and shining spoons and knives, and eggs planked with bacon, Dad reading his paper, Mom moving around the kitchen. I sniffed. I felt my stomach lie down like a whipped dog.
“What’s wrong, Son?” Dad looked at me casually. “Not hungry?”
“No, sir.”
“A boy should be hungry in the morning,” said Father.
“You go ahead and eat,” said Mother at me. “Go on now. Hurry.”
I looked at the eggs. They were poison. I looked at the butter. It was poison. The milk was so white and creamy and poisonous in its pitcher, and the cereal was brown and crisp and tasty in a green dish with pink flowers on it.
Poison, all of them, poison! The thought ran in my head like ants at a picnic. I caught my lip in my
teeth.
“Unh?” said Dad, blinking at me. “You said?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Except I’m not hungry.”
I couldn’t say I was ill and that food made me ill. I couldn’t say that cookies, cakes, cereals and soups and vegetables had done this to me, could I? No, I had to sit, swallowing nothing, my heart beginning to pound.
“Well, drink your milk at least, and go on,” said Mother. “Dad, give him money for a good lunch at school. Orange juice, meat and milk. No candy.”
She didn’t have to warn me on candy. It was worst of all the poisons. I wouldn’t touch it again, ever!
I strapped my books and went to the door. “Douglas, you didn’t kiss me,” said Mom. “Oh,” I said, and shuffled to kiss her. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “Nothing,” I said. “ ‘By. So long, Dad.” Everybody said goodby. I walked to school, thinking deep inside, like shouting down a long, cold well.
IRAN down through the ravine and swung on a vine, way out; the ground dropped away, I smelled the cool morning air, sweet and high, and I screamed with laughter, and the wind threw away my thoughts. I tossed myself in a flip against the embankment and rolled down as birds whistled at me and a squirrel hopped like brown fuzz blown by the wind up around a tree trunk. Down the path the other kids fell like a small avalanche, yelling. “Ahh—eee—yah!” Pounding their chests, skipping rocks on the water, jumping their hands down to catch at crayfish. The crayfish jetted away in dusty spurts. We all laughed and joked.
A girl passed by on the green wooden bridge above us. Her name was Clarisse Mellin. We all hee-hawed at her, told her to go on, go on, we didn’t want her with us, go on, go on! But my voice caught and trailed off, and I watched her going, slowly. I didn’t look away.
From way off in the morning we heard the school bell ring.
We scrambled up trails we’d made during many summers over the years. The grass was worn; we knew each snake hole and bump, each tree, every vine, every weed of it. After school we’d made tree huts here, high up over the shining creek, jumped in the water naked, gone on long hikes down the ravine to where it emptied lonely and abandoned into the big blue of Lake Michigan, near the tannery and the asbestos works and the docks.
