by Curt Siodmak
It is disturbed by this stereotypic repetition. The encephalograph clearly shows delta curves. This proves that the brain can read my thoughts. My precaution was taken none too soon.
Janice phoned me from Los Angeles. Patrick had talked to her. She told me about their conversation and asked my advice. I cannot give ha instructions. I cannot take the risk of any other mind’s knowing what I intend to do. Janice never was Patrick’s confidante, and now she must think she has lost me too. That makes me sad.
Tonight Patrick phoned. He wants to return home. I persuaded him to stay where he is. My mission has failed if he comes back.
To destroy the brain I must proceed carefully, with the precision a difficult test requires, for I am ignorant of the brain’s potential powers.
Theoretically it is easy to destroy the brain. I should have only to stop feeding it, to cut off the electricity, to upset the vessel. I could poison the brain; a grain of potassium cyanide in the blood serum would kill it. Except that it might sense my purpose in advance and strike first How, I do not know, but if it has that power, my plan would fail.
I cannot take a risk. I must wait, employ the safest method. In the meantime I must go on as the brain’s faithful servant. Must nurse it, take its temperature, read the encephalograph.
It looks horrible. A whitish-gray formless mass, which grows to the edge of its container. I would not be surprised if it suddenly developed eyes and ears and a mouth! It is monstrous!
DECEMBER 5
Janice arrived today without having announced her coming.
She acted very nervous. I sat opposite her in her bedroom listening to what she had to say about Patrick’s strange behavior and knew all the answers without being able to tell her anything. I was fearful the brain might read my thoughts, so I talked lightly to her, and advised her to forget about Patrick for a while. Why not go back to her mother?
But she was returning to Los Angeles; she knew Patrick would need her soon. For a moment she even convinced me that this was the right thing for her to do, but I would not tell her so.
She was upset, thinking I took Patrick’s side against her! She believed I had deserted her!
Desert Janice? She was blind, or she would have known the unkindness of her words.
She asked me many questions and I had to lie, without even daring to let her guess the truth. She left me soon.
It was a sad day for me, but I was consoled to think she would understand later.
DECEMBER 13
The situation has become reversed. Patrick phoned to order me to stop feeding the brain. He is frightened! He wants it to die, but too late. I had to refuse.
How could I agree when it might have meant my own life, might have been beyond my power to do what he wanted? If the brain should switch its telepathic force to me instead of Patrick, I shall have to carry out its orders.
I have always groped for life’s hidden meaning, and I know now! Life trained me for this task. I am thinking clearly, as I never did before. My years have not been wasted. I believe in no one religion, I believe in them all, for the search for God is a personal undertaking.
One day Patrick will know and understand, for knowledge comes from within.
I know, I understand!
DECEMBER 15
I missed my chance to kill it!
A man broke into the laboratory today and attacked the brain with a wrench. The sudden attack distracted its attention. That was the time for me to kill! Something violent must happen; then it can be destroyed.
I am glad I have not tried rashly to touch it. It would have murdered me as it did that man. It can destroy life just by ordering a man to die! His heartbeat stopped at a telepathic command.
The encephalograph registered the brain’s excitement. The pen-stroke was widely deflected, as if the organ moved in its vessel.
I phoned Patrick, but he would not understand. Talking to him was like talking to the brain itself.
If I could produce this explosion of power again and direct it not against me—that will be my moment! I cannot miss!
DECEMBER 17
I do not dare take the dead body out of the house, or phone the hospital or the morgue. I am afraid the brain will stop me, and I could not take that risk.
For two nights I have not slept. I do not dare close my eyes for fear of missing the moment. Also the gnawing doubt whether I can succeed is undermining my courage.
Patrick in his admirable intellectual honesty often told me I was a failure. Now I am not so sure that I am. A man sometimes needs a whole life to learn a single truth, and this is the truth and the advice I am leaving.
Don’t try to find God in your test tubes, Patrick. Look among people and you will meet Him there!
Here the pages end.
MAY 21
Schratt was dead when we arrived in Washington Junction.
Janice and I did not talk about him during our fast journey along the two hundred and fifty miles of highway. We knew what to expect.
She was sitting very close to me so that I should feel the nearness of her body. Every breath she took was to make me aware of her presence. I had only to look into her face, calm in its precognition, and all fear that Donovan might return evaporated.
When we stopped before our house in Washington Junction, Tuttle came running over from the drugstore He was relieved to see me. He and Phillips had been worried about Schratt. They had just put a call through to the Roosevelt Hotel. Schratt had left my address with Tuttle in case he should not be seen for three days, but had expressly forbidden them to enter the house.
Thanking Tuttle, I sent him back to his store, assuring him I would call in case I needed him. He left reluctantly, and stopped half-way across the street to watch me enter my yard.
We walked through the back garden. I dreaded going into the laboratory. To prepare myself for the inevitable shock, I wanted to look through the windows first.
In the driveway stood a new Cadillac coupé, Yocum’s I presumed.
One of the laboratory windows was smashed in, but the curtains were drawn. Light burned inside, and a buzzer sounded continuously.
I unlocked the back door and told Janice to stay outside until I called her. I wanted to spare her a sight which would be pregnant with horror. But she shook her head violently, and pressed my arm. She did not want me to go in alone.
In the small anteroom Yocum was lying, his face turned toward the wall. Schratt must have deposited him there, but had not taken time to cover him with a sheet.
Schratt lay in the laboratory, his face in a pool of blood. His big head with its sparse white hair was soiled, his heavy hands were holding the brain. He had plunged his fingers deep into the soft gray mass, holding on to it with all his might, as if still afraid it might free itself and continue its putrid life. The glass vessel was broken, the serum splashed over the floor and walls, the electric wires torn from their sockets. Shapeless and prodded with rubber tubes, the brain still looked formidable in its inert mass.
I lifted Schratt up and carried him into my bedroom. There we washed his hands and face.
What had happened was easy to reconstruct:
When Donovan attacked Janice in the Hollywood Hills, Schratt recognized the angry, neurotic deflections of the encephalogram. He knew the brain was busy with a kill again.
He took his chance and jumped at the vessel, tearing it from its electrical connections.
Immediately the brain left Janice and turned against its attacker. In a desperate effort, concentrating all its power on this new enemy, it killed Schratt. But deprived of the serum and pump, it died too.
Schratt’s face showed the typical characteristics of death from coronary thrombosis, including the pallor which follows cyanosis. There was a deep cut on his forehead. But where people display anguish in their distorted features, an apprehensive cognizance of impending death, Schratt’s face was quiet and happy. He must have died fast.
As I looked at his face, my brain began to reel
. I turned, tortured by a sharp pain in my forehead and my eyes. I saw Janice staring at me in fright.
My body began to tremble frantically. I stretched out my hands for help and she quickly stepped toward me.
Before she could reach me I lost consciousness.
JUNE 1
For more than five months I had been confined to my bed, suffering from a reaction to the violent strain my brain had been submitted to. Now I am well on my way to recovery.
I am sitting in the hospital garden, in a wheel chair, dictating to Janice.
She is writing a letter to Chloe Barton. I will turn the secret account over to Chloe. I am certain she will look after Sternli, and also fulfill her father’s wish to help those poor relatives of Hinds in Reno and Seattle.
Janice showed me a strange newspaper clipping:
Cyril Hinds, condemned to death a few months ago, has been hanged. At the execution, however, the trap did not open. Hinds had to be returned to his cell and the trap mechanism was repaired.
The strange thing happened a second time. The trap door stuck. The lever did not respond to the pull of the switch.
Since a man can be hanged only three times, according to an ancient law, the executioner did not want to take any chances. He supported the door with a wooden beam, which at the right moment he pushed away with his foot.
This time Hinds died.
I watched Janice as she read that notice to me. Her forehead furrowed. She tore the clipping into little pieces, looking at me with a wan smile.
I knew what she was thinking: Donovan’s unquenchable energy still roams this mortal world. He had tried again to push through his will, to save Hinds from hanging!
Energy cannot be destroyed.
JUNE 2
Higgins, the head physician, visited me today to congratulate me on my recovery. I am out of danger. I can leave the hospital any time, he says.
He asked if I was going back to Washington Junction, and when I said no, he sat around for a while, smoking and looking frustrated. I had to laugh and ask him what he wanted.
Reluctantly he again proposed to me Schratt’s vacant job at Konapah. The government has ordered him to engage a competent physician who can run a hospital in that barren country, who will supervise the Indian population and educate them in modem hygiene. Higgins is convinced nobody would be better qualified than I.
I was certain he had talked to Janice before he spoke to me.
“Why shouldn’t they just get along with snake charms, if they believe in them? Haven’t you heard of healings by faith?” I asked Higgins in Schratt’s words. Higgins nodded and smiled.
“Of course. I am not against them, if the charms have been sterilized and some potent medicine added!”
I asked him to give me time to think it over, but I was sure I would accept.
JUNE 5
We have decided to leave for Konapah, but nothing from our old house in Washington Junction will go with us. It was once a custom of the Indians to burn their tents every seven years, to smoke out evil spirits. We will follow their ancient example. Bad thoughts saturate old furniture. The smell of unhappiness clings to it and travels with it to new surroundings. Everything will be new in the shining place the government has built for us in Konapah. Our thoughts, too, will be new ones.
JUNE 10
We are leaving tomorrow. Before we go I have to purge from my mind my experiment with Donovan’s brain.
I did prove that under certain conditions the tissues of a human brain can be kept alive. What else did I gain by the experiment except to demonstrate that the most important achievement, the synthetic creation of mental improvement, is beyond our reach? Nature has set limits which we cannot pass.
The brain’s constructive imagination for mechanical devices and chemical exploitations is limitless, but to create kindness, honesty, love, humanity itself must first grow into that shape.
Man can engender what he is himself. Nothing more.
