Oona; she was that other white spot on Lee's mental map and to him it was much bigger and more dangerous than the first. He loved her as can only a man who discovers loves secret with greying hair and after the loneliness of a desert hermit. He understood, or thought he understood, that because he had failed to live his life to the full in its proper time, this love had come to him as a belated nemesis. His brain knew that it was hopeless; every morning when he shaved, his mirror told him very plainly one big reason why. But then, as the brain told the heart in unmistakable terms what was the matter, the heart talked back to the brain to the effect that the brain didn't know what it was talking about. It was a new thing and a painful thing for Lee to discover that he knew very little about himself and less about the girl.

He had seen Oona on and off over these last months, mostly at the hotel, but he had never been really alone with her. She always seemed to be on some mission, always the center of some group or other of "very important persons", senators from Washington, ranking officers in civvies, big businessmen. Her duties as Scriven's private secretary apparently included the role of a first lady for Cephalon.

Despite this preoccupation an intimate and tense relationship existed between him and her. Sometimes she would invite him to join her group and then for one or two brief moments their eyes would meet above the conversation and her eyes seemed to ask: "What do you think of these people?" or "How do I look tonight?"

His eyes would answer:

"These people are strangers to me; you know that I'm a bit out of this world. But you handle them expertly and you are looking wonderful tonight."

She was tremendously popular, especially with the set of the young scientists who made the hotel their club. This new generation, born in the days of the Second World War, was changing the horses of its feminine ideals in the mid-stream of its youth. The old ideal, the "problematic woman" who had ruled over and had made life miserable for three generations of American males, was on its way out. The new ideal was the woman who would unite beauty and intellect into one fully integrated, non-problematical personality. The ideal being new, the feminine type which represented it was rare. Oona in her perfect poise, in her rare beauty combined with her importance as Scriven's confidential secretary was the perfect expression of the new desired type; it was natural that these young men should worship her as "the woman of the future."

With the hopeless and--in consequence--unselfish love he had for her, Lee wasn't jealous of her popularity. On the contrary, he was rather proud of it like a knight-errant who rejoices in the adoration bestowed upon the lady of his heart. What worried him was a very different problem: Was Oona really all those others thought she was? Was she really that "fully integrated", that "non-problematical" personality she appeared to be?

He couldn't believe it, and the conflict came in because all those others were so certain that she was. He couldn't get over his first impression of her. He had met her in that cabin in the sky, the most synthetic, the most perversely artificial setup one could dream up in the second half of the 20th century. She had impressed him as something "out of this world", a G.o.ddess, a Diana with a golden helmet for hair, so radiant as to blind the eyes of mortal men. She was the confidential secretary of a man of genius, Scriven, one of those rare comets which fall down upon this earth and remain forever foreign to its atmosphere.

With all these thoroughly abnormal elements entering into her life and forming her, it would be a miracle for any girl to develop into a "non-problematical", a "fully integrated" personality.

Was it possible that he alone was right and all those others were wrong about Oona? Like innumerable men before him when they stood face to face with the Sphinx or with the Gioconda or even with the smile of a mere mortal woman, Lee drew a sigh: Man's only answer to the riddle of the eternal feminine....

No, he probably would never be able to chart these white spots on his mental map. The effort was wasted; it would be much better for him to return to those charts right in front of him, the data of which were exact because they came from The Brain.

In Apperception 36 the sensory organs of The Brain had been especially adapted to the a.n.a.lysis of "_Ant-termes-pacificus-Lee_". The apparatus was essentially the same as in Apperception 27, dedicated to personality a.n.a.lysis. As Lee strongly suspected, it would be essentially the same in any other field of a.n.a.lysis. The Brain possessed five sensory organs just as did man. One difference between The Brain's senses and human senses lay in their range, their penetration and in their sensitivity; these were a multiple of man's sensory capacities. Another difference was that The Brain translated all its sensory apperceptions into visual form, i.e. into the language best understood by Man, the eye being Man's most highly developed sensory organ. The third and perhaps the most significant difference was that the five senses of The Brain were at all times working in concert so that in its a.n.a.lysis of, for instance, a ma.n.u.script, The Brain not only conveyed the ideas expressed in that ma.n.u.script, but also the author's personality, the smell of his room, the feel of his paper and the ideas he had hidden between the lines of that ma.n.u.script.

The flow of observations processed by The Brain and pouring back to Apperception 36 via teletype and visual screen was prodigious. Lee had been forced to ask for an a.s.sistant; between the two of them they were working for 20 out of the 24 hours to match the working time of The Brain, charting results in the main.

Some of The Brain's findings had been most unexpected and rather strange. It had observed, for instance, an increasing acidity of the nasi-corn secretions with "_Ant-termes-pacificus_". Formidable as this chemical artillery already was, in another ten thousand generations it would eat through every known substance including gla.s.s and high-carbon steel.

Another development which had escaped human observation, was a mutation of the workers' mandibles; it went very fast. Within no more than maybe a thousand generations they would double in size and strength, would become veritable jumping tools.

While the bellicose spirit had been successfully bred out of the new species, its capacities for material destructions had increased.

Likewise the appet.i.te of "_Ant-termes_" was even more ferocious than that of the older species; Lee was feeding all kinds of experimental foods, but woodpulp remained the staple, the very stuff which in its liquid form, lignin, embedded the nerve paths of The Brain.

Lifting his strained eyes from the charts, Lee looked over the row of air conditioned gla.s.s cubicles wherein "_Ant-termes-pacificus_"

continued its lives undisturbed by the new habitat, undisturbed by the rays which flowed over and through their bodies, unconscious that a superhuman intelligence was probing steadily into every manifestation of the mysterious collective brains of their race.

They had built their new mounds pointing due North as had their ancestors for the past 100 million years. To the human eye nothing betrayed the teeming life within except the tiny tunnels creeping out from the mounds in the direction of the foods which were placed different from day to day. Cemented from loam and saliva by the invisible sappers, the tunnels, like threads of grey wool, unerringly moved to the deposits of pulpwood, up the shelves, up the tin cans and gla.s.s containers they had determined to destroy. Their instincts were uncanny, their destruction as methodical and "scientific" as was modern war.

In Northern Australia Lee had come across big eucalyptus trees, healthy-looking and in full bloom, and then they would collapse under the first stroke of an axe or even as one pushed hard against them.

The termites had hollowed them out from roof to top, had transformed them into thin walled pipes, leaving just enough "flesh" to keep some sap-circulation going, to maintain a semi-balance of life in order to exploit it more efficiently. Over here in the lab they would open up a number 3 tin can within a couple of hours; first with the soldiers'

vicious nasi-corn secretions eating the tin away and then with the workers mandibles gnawing at the weakened metal. In time perhaps they would learn to collapse steel bridges, sabotage rails, perforate the engines of motorcars if these should prove to be menaces to their race.

As they had persevered through the eons of the past, so they would in all the future; their civilization would be extant long after Man and his work had disappeared from the earth....

With the aid of The Brain, Lee had acc.u.mulated more data, more knowledge of the "_Ant-termes_" society within a few months than a lifetime of study could have yielded him under normal conditions. Even so, some of the greatest mysteries remained. What, for instance, caused these blind creatures to attack a sealed tin can of syrup in preference to its neighbor with tomatoes or some other stuff? No racial memory could have taught them; there were no tin cans a million years, not even a hundred years, ago. It couldn't be a sense of smell, it couldn't be any sense; there would have to be some weird extrasensory powers in that unfathomable collective brain of their race.

The magnifying fluoroscope screens arrayed all along the walls and hooked up to the circuits of The Brain showed him details and phases of the specie's life as The Brain perceived them and as no human eye had ever seen before.

For a minute or so Lee stared at the luminous image nearest to him and then with an effort he turned his eyes away to escape from its hypnotic influence. It was but the head of one worn-out worker used as a living storage tank for excremental food. It was absolutely immobile, its decaying mandibles pointing down, cemented as the animal was by its overextended belly to the ceiling. But magnified as were its remaining life manifestations by the powers of The Brain, he could see it breathe, could count the slow pulse, could sense a strain in its ophthalmic region, some hidden effort to see, like a blind man's, and above all Lee perceived the ganglion primitive as it was, yet twitching in reaction to pain. There could be no doubt that in its last service for the racial commonweal the animal was suffering slow torture even if its senses were closed to that torture. It was a fascinating and at the same time a terrible thing to see; and it was only one out of the hundred equally revealing sights.

Lee frowned at himself; manifestly some emotional element interfered with the objectivity of his observations; this was entirely out of place, it would be better to call it a day.

The electric clock showed 20 minutes to midnight. At midnight The Brain would stop its mighty labors; the hours from midnight to four a.m. were its rest periods, or "beauty-sleep" as the technicians jokingly called it. It was the only period wherein the maintenance engineers were permitted to enter the interior of the lobes, checking and servicing group after group of its myriad cells and circuits, and incidentally it was the most wonderful and exciting portion of Lee's day.

For the project which Scriven had handed him, this study of the collective brains in insect societies, also involved a comparative study of The Brain's organisms and functionings. Toward this end Lee had been given a pa.s.s which allowed him freely to circulate through all the lobes, to enter convolution, any gland during the overhaul period and to ask question of the employees. The privilege was rare and he enjoyed it immensely. So vast was this underground world that even now after months he had not seen the half of it; to him the travels of every new night were fantastic Alice-in-Wonderland adventures.

As he now left Apperception 36 through the door which led to the interior, the glideways were already swarming with the maintenance crews en route to their stations. The spectacle was colorful, almost like a St. Patrick's Day parade. Gangs of air conditioners were dressed blue, electricians white, black-light specialists in purple, radionics men in orange. The maintenance engineers of the radioactive pyramidal cells looked like ill.u.s.trations from the science-fiction magazines, hardly human in their twelve-inch armor or sponge rubber filled with a new inert gas which was supposed to be almost gamma ray proof. All these men were young, were tops in their fields, the pick of American Universities, colleges and the most progressive industries. Carefully selected for family background they had been screened through health and intelligence tests, had been trained in special courses, had been subjected to a five-minute personality a.n.a.lysis by The Brain itself.

They const.i.tuted what was undoubtedly the finest working team ever a.s.sembled, and incidentally they made the little city of Cephalon the socially healthiest community in the United States.

In his nightly expeditions over these past months Lee had spoken to a great many of them. As now he joined the line, there were many who hailed the lanky, queer looking man: There comes the ant-man. h.e.l.lo, Professor. h.e.l.lo, Aussie.

For some reason most of the boys a.s.sumed that he was an Australian, perhaps because with his graying mane and his emaciated face he looked like a foreigner to them.

This popularity with the younger generation, coming as it did so late and unexpected in his life, made Lee very proud. Those were the kind of Americans he had been secretly longing for in those desert years, hardworking, wide-awake, radiant with life:

"They really are the salt of the earth, the hope of the world," he thought.

He had pa.s.sed through the median section of the hemispheres and had reached the point just below the cerebrum. This was a region of cavities, the seats of various glands in the human brain. Some of these had their mechanical counterparts in The Brain, huge storage tanks with an elaborate pumping system which carried their fluid chemicals through the labyrinth of The Brain. But there was one gland which had not been duplicated in The Brain, the pineal gland.

In the human, the pineal gland was the despair of the medical sciences.

It was not demonstrably linked to any other organ nor did it serve any demonstrable function. Yet, it was known that its sensitivity was greater by far than even that of the pyramidal cells and that in some mysterious manner the pineal gland was vitally connected with the center of life because its slightest violation caused instant death.

Metaphysicists had dealt with this mystery of mysteries; it was their theory that the pineal gland were the seat of "extrasensory" faculties and it was often referred to as "the inner eye."

Even if such an organ could have been duplicated by science and technology, there would have been no use for it; it could have served no purpose in The Brain. The Brain had been designed for the solution of exact problems; no matter what nature had created in the brains of higher animals, no matter how unprejudiced their approach, scientists like Dr. Scriven would have hesitated to impair an otherwise perfect apparatus through the addition of nuisance values such as any "extrasensory" faculties.

However, with The Brain being modelled so closely after the human brain, the s.p.a.ce for the pineal gland did exist even if in a sort of functional vacuum. In order to utilize this s.p.a.ce in some manner, the designers had converted the gland into a subcenter for the distribution of spare parts. As such it had become one of Lee's favorite observation posts.

Here he could get a closeup view of all types of electronic and radioactive cells; he could even touch and handle them because they were not hooked up in any circuit of The Brain; and above all there was Gus Krinsley, master electrician, who never tired of telling Lee whatever he wanted to know. Gus was a real friend....

He had left the glideway on the point of its nearest approach; the pineal gland in front of him looked like a miniature barrage balloon; egg-shaped, it hung suspended from the cerebral roof, a sh.e.l.l of plastics which could be entered only over a bridge across a dark abyss.

Inside, its walls were aglitter with sound-proofing aluminum foil, it was piled with a bewildering variety of electronic parts on shelves somewhat like an over-stocked radio store. Near the door a counter divided the room; Gus used it and a little cubicle of an office to fill the orders as the maintenance engineers handed in their slips. As usual there was n.o.body in sight. "Gus!" he called.

Out of the jungle of machinery way back a head popped up like a Jack-in-the-box. It was as bald and shiny as an electric bulb. High up on its dome it balanced gold-rimmed gla.s.ses which quivered as it moved seachingly from side to side. Then, with an amazing twisting of big ears, the head caused the biofocals to drop onto a saddle near the tip of a long, sensitive nose; and now the head could see.

"It's you Aussie, is it? Come over."

Gus Krinsley was a pony edition of a man; in fact he had once been hired as a midget to install automatic bomb-sights in the confined s.p.a.ces of the early bombers of the second World War. Before long, however, he became respectfully known as "the mighty midget" in the California factory, and he had ended up as their master electrician before Braintrust made him the head of one of its experimental divisions. The midnight hours he spent in the pineal gland were only a sideline of his work. Like many a small man in a country where six-footers enjoy a preferred status, Gus made up for lack of size by mobility. He reminded one much of a billiard ball in the way he bounced, collided and ricocheted amongst taller men. That this was no more than act became manifest the moment one saw Gus at work.

As Lee reached the spot where Gus' head had shown, he found his friend crouching, his hands thrust deep in the intestines of something radionic, his fingers working on it with the deft rhythm of a good surgeon at his thousandth appendectomy. The bifocals had returned to their incongruous perch on the dome of the head. Gus didn't need them; even as he stared at his job he worked by touch alone.

"What is it?" Lee asked.

"Pulsemeter," came the quiet answer. "She's a dandy. Still got some bugs in her, though."

A melodious chime came from a big instrument panel built into the wall of the oval room. Dropping a number of tiny precision tools upon a piece of velvet, Gus rushed over to the panel. A great many indicator needles were tremulously receding around their luminous dials.