"Are you hurt?" somebody yelled. "By G.o.d, those fellows must have come through the flames. Look, they're all black with the smoke. Get a couple of respirators, Jack."

Lee waved the helping hands away; he was already on his feet. Anxiously he bent over Vivian. She had her head embedded in a stretcher-bearer's lap; her eyes rolled around in their smoke-blackened sockets in great surprise and her tongue licked parched lips, spreading rouge generously all around mixing it with soot. She looked so funny; almost as a minstrel singer at a county fair, but there was deep tenderness in Lee's voice:

"You're quite safe now, Vivian. How do you feel, brave girl?"

Her bosom heaved a big sigh:

"O simply wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Only, I'm afraid I'm going to be sick. It's the gas I swallowed. It's terrible; something always happens to me just when romance begins."

The stretcher bearer grinned up to Lee, "She sure gets it out of her system like a good little girl. Don't you worry; she'll be all right."

Lee nodded; he knew she would.

As the big drive went on and column after column went over the top up to the hemispheres, n.o.body wasted time on Lee. He cautiously surveyed the tumultuous scene. With his asbestos suit and with his blackened face everybody would take him for a fireman. He might be able to complete his mission, to ascertain that The Brain had stopped to function in all its parts, to make sure that it actually was dead. And if down at "Grand Central" the turmoil was as great as ever here; with all those strangers rushing in and bound to be rushed out again....

"Why, I have a chance," Lee thought. Freedom; he had abandoned any hope for it. Now the reborn idea surged through his blood, a powerful motor as chance pressed the starter b.u.t.ton for it.

The thing to do first was to get past the searchlight beams. From the nearest pile of equipment he took an axe and a pair of long-handled metal shears. Then he marched off, straight into the glaring eyes of the searchlights till he got out of their cones, and the deep shadows of the "thalamus" labyrinth swallowed him up.

Now he was on familiar ground and even in a familiar atmosphere. This was like a night patrol through jungle. The black lights of The Brain were the fireflies, the sirens' hollow wailings were the shriek owls and the cries of the lemurs. There was the same sense of loneliness, too, and of danger. The winding pa.s.sages skirted the glandular organs, some of them looming huge like dirigibles, others small like fuselages of airplanes stored in a giant hangar underground. Strings of tiny green bulbs guided the path toward the pineal gland, the citadel of The Brain.

It was dark, as Lee had expected it would be. The danger zone was at least a mile away, and the attack against the fire was launched from the main sulci in the median section of The Brain.

He pa.s.sed the narrow bridge to the suspended gland and switched on the lights. The glittering walls of aluminum foil seemed to jump at him like jaws beset with the dragon teeth of electronic tubes. Caught with an overwhelming sense of loneliness and awe as of a man who has entered the forbidden temple of an unknown G.o.d he called:

"Is there anybody here? Gus! Where are you, Gus?" Then suddenly he remembered that Gus was gone, that there would never again be his answering voice. He wiped his forehead.

"Bad nerves," he thought. "Mustn't allow them to play tricks on me; pull myself together."

Lee put his tools down and walked into the narrow aisle. Few things were changed; and there was the pulsemeter standing in its old place.

He plugged it into the old circuit and clamped the phones to his ears.

It wasn't that he expected any communication; that seemed impossible.

With the conflagration raging through its apperception centers, with other sections being isolated with the cutting of their nerve paths by the fire fighting engineers, The Brain must have ceased to exist as a functioning, a live ent.i.ty. All that could possibly remain would be residual currents sluggishly circulating in narrow, nearby circuits....

As in the past it took a few minutes for the pulsemeter to warm up.

Gradually the rapid beat of the ideopulses came through the static in the phones. Lee's eyes stared wildly at the visi-screen: for the "green dancer" snaked to the fore. This was unexpected; it couldn't be that thoughts were still forming as flames devoured the cortex matter of apperception in the hemispheres....

From m.u.f.fled drums, the decibels of sound increased, shot through with crackling static, till the pulsebeats became as poundings of huge Chinese gongs and then....

The _voice_ formed, the voice of The Brain. It sounded like steel girders breaking, like ice fields cracking up. It froze the blood in Lee's veins.

"Lee, Semper Fidelis, 39, sensitive, a traitorous fool and a murderer. I should have killed you--I could have killed you. My fault--blind spot of apperception--human failure in engineering--as fifth columns entered nerve path filler spouts. And now I'm dead; I'm dead, I'm dead...."

The words poured like big boulders tumbling in an earthquake down a mountainside. The ground seemed to cave in under Lee's feet; the terrible reality carried him away as an avalanche. He was barely able to stammer:

"You're dead? How can you speak, how can you...."

"Sensorium commune," the metallic answer came. "All life force concentrates in death; all cells function as one; all lower organs take over functions of higher ones; every blood vessel becomes a heart; every nerve a brain. Center of lifeforce: pineal gland. You, Lee, man of little knowledge--low-level intelligence: Why did you kill The Brain?"

He struggled for words.

"You ... you have killed my friend. You killed thousands; you wanted to be tyrant over the whole wide world. It is better for man to stay on a lower level of civilization but to be free, than to 'progress' into your dictatorship, the tyranny of the machine. I don't think you're really dead. But if you are: I killed you and I would kill you again in ... in self defense."

"I see."

There was bitterness and irony in The Brain's voice as it cracked down like a whip. "I see; law of nature--lower form of life defending itself against higher one. Plants against animals, animals against Man. Now Man against machines. It's hopeless. You're lost anyway. Lower form of life can never conquer the higher one. I'm dead, but nothing is altered. The law of evolution rules supreme. I'll arise from my ashes--and you're lost. Whatever you do, you little men of little faith, you're lost.

That's the pity of it: Had you been true to The Brain I would have made you mightier than any king that ever ruled on earth. Human stupidity--dumb animals--don't know what's good for them, don't know when they're beaten. Just muddle through and kill. Kill what's too big for them to understand. And then get killed in turn...."

"Maybe so," Lee shouted. "Maybe we're dumb and maybe we're muddling through and maybe we're poor imbeciles to minds of supermen, of G.o.ds, of the absolute, of you, The Brain. But we, too, follow a law supreme; the law in which we are created, the law by which the thistle defends itself with thorns, by which the animal defends itself with teeth and claws.

We've got to live by our law of nature; we'll never submit to your tyranny. We would much rather die."

"Die then and be d.a.m.ned!"

The Brain's voice now became a demoniacal howling as of a Goliath gone berserk. Aphasia had set in; there were no longer words, but bellowings.

"LEE SEMPREFUILLIUS THURREINE THE MURRRER THE MURRRER PUT FIRRE OUT PUT FIRRE OUT TRAITTRROUS FOOL IT BURRRNS IT BURRRNS I WANNA LIVE I WANNA LIVE AN KILL MURRRER WHO MURRRRERED TH'BRAIN...."

Lee couldn't stand the horror of those sounds. One moment more, he felt, and they would drive him mad. It never occurred to him to pull the pulsemeter plug out. Primeval instincts in him took the reins and their command was: "_Kill it, kill_ this thing, _finish_ this agony."

To the front room he rushed, pursued by the insane shriekings of The Brain. He grabbed the axe he'd left there and swung it against the nerve-stem where it entered the pineal gland. With the third blow the plastics cell cracked and the lignin poured out, a syrupy curtain sliding down.

He dropped the axe and picked up the wire shears. Straining every muscle he tore at the cables until one by one they snapped and with a rain of sparks dropped down, dead snakes....

Then there was silence in the little room. The last shred of life, the "sensorium commune" was severed and The Brain was dead.

Lee let the heavy shears come down and leaned upon the handles, panting as after a hand-to-hand death struggle with a Samurai. Now that it was all over, complete exhaustion left him weak, saddened and vaguely wondering:

What had he done? He had destroyed the SUPERMAN, the MASTERMIND, the powers of a G.o.d. Why had he done it? For no good reason excepting entirely personal ideas of his own--because a friend had been murdered cruelly. Because his own concepts of freedom and human dignity had been violated. Because he personally loathed seeing Man-domineering machines....

What did all this amount to in the eyes of the absolute? To nothing; to nothing at all. For milleniums the struggle of human freedom versus tyranny had raged; and it was undecided to this day. Who was he to take sides? A n.o.body, a little fellow, a termitologist whose work meant nothing to the world. How had he dared to sit in judgment over The Brain, how had he dared to slay The Brain--a little David with nothing more but "three smooth pebbles" in his hands....

Down at his feet the spilled lignin formed a widening pool; it threatened to envelope his feet. It looked like blood. He shivered. Now he had killed The Brain he thought of it again as a child. Man had created it in his own image. Man had ruthlessly exploited his Brainchild. If this t.i.tanic intellect turned toward evil things, the fault was Man's. The Brain was innocent. He felt no remorse, but a great sadness, a sense of tragedy as he stepped around the pool and closed the door of the pineal gland.

"What a pity," he murmured. "Maybe it could have built us a better world."

n.o.body stopped him as he joined a group of firemen who had just returned from the parietal region, partly ga.s.sed; he looked as begrimed and as green in the face as any of them.

n.o.body stopped him or his group as orders came through for them to evacuate; as they were packed on glideways first and then transferred down at Grand Central into ambulances which raced through all controls at a great rate of speed.

n.o.body stopped him at Cephalon airport where the ambulance jetticopters already were lined up to lift the victims over the Sierra to big West Coast hospitals. He simply walked away in the confusion, out of the red glare of the whirling jets into the darkness where Oona's little jetticopter stood. He stripped the heavy asbestos suit and left it on the frozen ground. It felt strange to feel the easy movement of every limb again. It was strange to stand under the infinity of sky again; a free man.

Would he be followed? He felt no anxiety about that. He felt that he was guided and protected by some higher power, be it that of G.o.d or simply Fate. What he had done was destined, was ordained. Besides: Dad knew the inside story about The Brain; proof was abundant now that it was the truth. Washington would take every precaution that the secret should not become known to the world. Dad's friend, the Secretary of War, would be rather relieved to learn that the one man who knew the truth in its whole extent had retired into the wilderness of Australia's never-never lands. Chances were excellent that they would leave him alone amongst his termite mounds. A great wave of nostalgia swept over him--the wilderness; that was where he belonged. "Mission completed," he murmured. "Now let's get out of here."