by Jerry
Their ship climbed up and up until the entire City and the grounded Ships of Shiva were all part of a small confused pocket in a bowl. They saw the gigantic cloud of falling bombs, dropping like metal rain. Then there was nothing below them but an incredible rising blossom of seething black, billowing gas. An awesome final roaring encompassed them, buffeted the ship.
They circled far over the Sierras, returned when the gas had partly cleared. Kaye gripped Conrad’s arm. There was nothing down there now but a colossal blackened crater. It was huge, and of great depths with tendrils of aimless smoke curling out of it through clouds of fine debris. There was nothing else down there; not even small rubble. There was nothing to preserve even a memory of Shiva.
“It was a bad memory,” said Conrad wearily. “It took a long time to get rid of it.”
THE SHIP later set them down in a forest clearing, opened its doors for them. They walked away from it in the warm early-morning sunlight, turned looked at it. It wasn’t moving. It wasn’t saying anything. But it was alive. As they looked at it, the air-lock doors slid noiselessly open once more, and remained open—a question. The ship waited their answer.
Kaye’s voice was thick. “Well—shall we? They invited us.”
He didn’t answer for a while. He remembered the City of Light. A City of incomparable wonder across nine hundred thousand light years. He shook his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go. Yes, it was beautiful there, but it wasn’t human. It wasn’t for them; he felt the truth of that; and he knew that if they went to that City of Light again they would never come back to Earth. And Conrad knew that Earth would be a lot different now, a lot better. It had gotten rid of an old disease.
The ship knew; its doors closed. For protection they covered their eyes, stumbled back into the forest. When they opened their eyes and looked, the ship was gone.
They started walking down the valley slowly, along a small wild stream. Warmth from the water made a faint fog in the morning chill. They walked through areas that were blackened, burned; into others that were green and fresh.
“You were right, Alan. We belong with the Upinshads, mystical or not. No matter what the name is, they’re on a right road.”
Conrad shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t think we’re quite so lost now, anyway. We’re out of the woods.”
“It would have been nice there, though, in the City of Light,” said Kaye. “They saved us, and the Upinshads. But their main motive was self-preservation.” She paused. “So much space and time, yet there was unity in it all, Alan!”
“I know.” Conrad looked at the cloudless blue sky. “They knew human psychology, and they knew about the two basically different kinds of human pathology—both fanatical, both abnormal, but one good, the other destructive. They planned well, caught the forces of Shiva unawares with a terrifically weaponed ship the Kshatriya didn’t even know existed. They would have found out about the ship too, if those people in Andromeda hadn’t blanked out their minds so thoroughly.”
“They looked in our minds, and they read the whole future of men. They saw what had to be done, and they did it, with terrible efficiency. And they made a genius and a hero out of ‘Kilroy.’ That’s where they put the ‘spark.’ ”
Conrad kicked a stone into the water. “Kilroy was close to being able to think anyway.”
“Let’s rest,” suggested Kaye. “We’ve got lots of time from here on.” She stopped, repeated the word. “Time.”
Conrad stretched out on the bank of the stream with a long sigh. Kaye Tested her head on his arm. They looked at the sky until their eyes closed.
“Time,” he repeated sleepily. “Positive science and the concepts of Karma agree on that anyway. The unbroken consecutiveness of phenomena. Events most distant from one another, touch one another in—well—the fourth dimension? The unity, the ‘oneness’ of Karma, becomes a ‘timeless fourth-dimension’ of theoretical physics. This whole episode of ours—involving over six hundred years of so-called ‘time’ and ‘space’—eighteen hundred thousands light years and generations of men. Yet for us it was a unity of consecutive consciousness.”
Her voice stirred, half sleeping. “I’ll bet poor Kilroy’s lonesome. I wonder if he’s—?”
Her voice trailed away. He looked at her worn face, relaxed now, soft and childlike in its cushion of brilliant hair.
He closed his eyes. Vaguely he heard birds calling. The splashing of fish in the stream. The soft droning of insects.
“Babes in the woods—”
THE BRAIN
Norbert Wiener
The brain is a funny organ. It controls all the sensations of the body and yet it can be touched and cut with no local sensation at all. One man will die of a slight concussion and another can have a crowbar shot through his head with nothing but a ruined disposition to show for it. Recently it has become fashionable to do all sorts of weird things to the brain with needles and hot wires in order to cure or relieve some of the many forms of depressive insanity. It’s an ugly business—I don’t like it. Sometimes it cuts out a mans conscience, and pretty nearly every time it does eerie things to his judgment and personal balance.
There was a fellow in Chicago, for instance, a big-shot salesman with an insurance company. The only trouble with him was that he had the, blues so bad that they never knew whether he would leave for home via the elevator or the tenth-story window. His company begged him to have a little piece of his prefrontal lobe out, and he consented. After that, Mr. Big-shot became Mr. Bigger-shot. As a matter of fact, he outsold every salesman in the history of the company. As a token of their regard, they made him vice-president. They forgot one tiling, however, that a man with a prefrontal lobotomy isn’t very good at following the pea under the walnut shell. When he got out of the selling game into Higher Finance, he went flat and so did the company. No, I shouldn’t like to have anyone tamper with my inner wiring diagrams.
This brings me to a case which came to my attention the other day. I belong to a small group of scientists which meets once a month in the private room of a little restaurant. We have a scientific paper to give an excuse for our meeting, but the real reason for it is a miscellaneous interest and an unbridled loquacity on the part of the whole gang. It’s no place for the striped pants boys. We rib one another unmercifully; and if you can’t take it, the door is always open. I myself am something in between a mathematician and an engineer, but perhaps the bulk of us are medical men. Heaven help the waitresses when the medical boys get talking freely! I won’t go so far as to assert that the electric lights go blue, and that the atmosphere smells of sulphur at times, but that is the general idea.
Waterman is in our good graces. He runs a state madhouse some fifty miles away, and looks like the amiable and prosperous proprietor of a delicatessen shop. He is short, fat, walrus-moustached and completely without vanity. He usually has a lame duck in tow. This time he came in with a rather tall, sallow man, whose name I didn’t get. I did get the impression that he was a doctor, but he had some of the curious hesitation in company that I have seen in prospectors or engineers who have been too long away from normal civilization, confined in the mountains of Korea or the backwoods of Borneo. It is a mixture of lost familiarity with civilization and overdeveloped self-consciousness and self-criticism. Some of those boys had had to do things that no civilized man can do with impunity to himself, and they carry around the marks ever after.
I do not know how the conversation got around to frontal lobotomy. I think one of the engineering guests asked about it as a possibility for a distant relative who was a mental patient. Everybody present had an opinion about it. A few of them spoke for it, but most of them—even the brain surgeons—did not want any part of it.
Then we got talking about what a modem automobile accident can do to a child’s brain. The discussion was not exactly dainty, even as doctors’ discussions go. The talk was going hot and heavy; and I do not think anyone noticed anyone but the fellow he was talking to. S
uddenly there was a little crash. We looked around to see Waterman’s friend cold out on the floor. His forehead was covered with beads of sweat. Waterman knelt down beside him and felt his pulse.
“I don’t think it’s anything serious,” he said. “He is a patient of mine, but very intelligent, and I thought it might cheer him up a bit to come along. He is suffering from amnesia, and we don’t know his real name. I shouldn’t have taken the chance of bringing him here. Come on, let’s carry him out. It won’t be necessary to break up the meeting.”
Waterman telephoned to his hospital for an ambulance, while two or three of our medical contingent got in touch with the proprietor of the restaurant. He was flustered, but told us to carry the unconscious man to a couch in a back room. Our patient was beginning to come to a bit. He was in an obvious state of emotional excitement and confusion. He kept talking incoherently. Among the words that came out were “gangster,” “Little Paul,” “Martha,” and “the crash.” The words formed sentences, but they were spoken too low for us to understand them.
Waterman fetched his bag up from the cloakroom. He administered some sedative; a barbiturate, I think. For a while, it quieted our man; but you never can tell about these sedatives. After a while the patient opened his eyes. His mutterings became louder and more intelligible. The words were fairly coherent.
Waterman is a good enough doctor to use opportunities when he finds them.
“This is my chance,” he said. “He’s on a talking jag. Some I six weeks ago a cop picked him up in a doorway. The police turned him over to us. He doesn’t even remember his name. We know that he has been a doctor, and it isn’t hard to see that he has been through some pretty times. Up to now he’s been getting back strength, and we haven’t wanted to disturb his recovery by questioning him too much. However, since we seem to have got him into a talkative mood, here goes!
The return of the banished memory was fascinating to watch. Waterman is a smooth worker, and it was a delight to hear him ask questions. The new personality emerged like the face of a drowned man when they bring him to the surface with grappling irons. I haven’t kept any record of what I saw; but Waterman was writing steadily in a little black notebook. The following conversation is a transcription of his record.
Q. “What is your name?”
A. “My name is Arthur Cole.”
Q. “You are a doctor, aren’t you?”
A. “I am.”
Q. “What medical school did you go to?”
A. “Central Western Medical, in Chicago. Class of 1926.”
Q. “Where did you pass your internship?”
A. “I was surgical intern at the Physicians and Surgeons Charity Hospital in Chicago. You know where the hospital is—I down at the South End.”
I dimly remember the Physicians’ and Surgeons’ Charity Hospital in Chicago. It was a dingy pile of greasy red brick in that festering hell of dead streets where the South End meets the West End.
Q. “Surgical intern. That’s interesting—did you go in for any special branch of surgery?”
A. “Yes, of course, for two years I took pretty much what they gave me, but I always wanted to be a brain surgeon. What was I saying? I’m afraid I am very confused. I had forgotten altogether that I had been a brain surgeon.”
Q. “Oh, so you were a brain surgeon. What did you do after your internship?”
A. “I remember a long line of locked corridors and barbed windows. What was it called? It must have been a hospital for the insane. Oh yes, now I recollect. The Mere—Mere—Meredith County Hospital for the insane. That’s in Illinois isn’t it?”
Q. “I think it is. Do you remember what they called the town?”
A. “Buckminster. No, it wasn’t Buckminister, Now, I have it, it was Leominster.”
Q. “Yes, that’s right, it is at Leominster. How old were you when you went there?”
A. “About thirty.”
Q. “Do you remember the year?”
A. “It was in 1931.”
Q. “Did you go there alone?”
A. “I went there with my wife. I am married, aren’t I? What happened to my wife? She’s here, isn’t she? Oh, my I God! Martha—Martha.”
His voice rose to an incoherent scream. Waterman said, “I’m afraid we shall have to try some more sedative. I’m going to make the dose as light as I can. I don’t want to lose this opportunity to find out more about him.”
The excitement of the patient gradually subsided as the drug took hold. For a few minutes he seemed too dazed to say anything. Then the confusion began to wear off and Waterman recommenced his inquiries.
Q. “You must help us if we are to help you,” he said. “Pull yourself together. How long had you been married when you went to Leominster?”
A. “Not two years. Martha was a nurse at the Chicago Charity Hospital. Martha Sorenson was her name. She came from Minnesota, I remember. Her father owned a wheat farm somewhere near the North Dakota line. We went back there to be married.”
Q. “Any children?”
A. “Yes, a boy—Paul. Now it all comes back to me.”
He sunk his head in his arms and began to weep. He burst into incoherent cries. “Where is Paul? Where is Paul?” It seemed indecent to be the witness of such pain.
Waterman stood by the head of the couch where Cole lay. I had always thought of him as the life of the party—gay, witty and salty. I had never seen Waterman, the doctor. He was quiet and dignified, and his voice was more soothing than any anodyne. He was Aesculapius himself, the God of Healing.”
Q. “Calm yourself, Dr. Cole,” he said. “We want to help you, but you are the only man who can teach us how to. Tell us something about the County Hospital. Did you live in?” A. “For a few months. Then we took an old farmhouse about a mile away. Martha thought we could fix it up, but I didn’t see how we could ever dig through that mess of trash and dirt. Martha could make even a pigsty livable. Let’s see: I remember there was a U. S. highway passing in front of the house.”
He sank onto his face, his head between his arms—his shoulders heaved. “The brakes,” he said. “I can hear them scream. The crash! The car turned over. Blood on the road—blood on the road! I could see it and I couldn’t do a thing.”
Waterman motioned to us to be quiet. I felt the shame of witnessing another man’s naked suffering. Gradually the sobs subsided. Again Waterman took up the inquisition.
“Now, don’t bother yourself to put it all together,” he said. Just let me ask you questions. It will all come out easier that way. Let’s see. What sort of a place was this Goodair?”
A. “Oh, just one of those farming towns, set down on the prairie by pure chance. It was a farming town; that is, except for the factory.”
Q. “The factory—what was that? What did it make?”
A. “I never could tell. The people in the town—well, you couldn’t believe a word they said. You know the gossip in a small place like that.”
Q. “What sort of gossip?”
A. “Some people said it was a bootleg headquarters, and others that it was a headquarters for making drugs. Anyhow, I never liked the place.”
Q. “Why not?”
A. “It was a low building of crumbling concrete left over from World War I. I took a walk over there one day. I always felt that somebody was watching me, and I didn’t dare to go very near. It was surrounded by a tangle of giant pigweed, and ditches half-filled with a scummy green water. There were a lot of dismantled wrecks of old cars there, and some neglected farm machinery. Nobody ever seemed to go there for weeks at a time, but every now and then we saw a big car drive up just about dusk.”
Q. “What sort of a car?”
A. “It looked like a fancy limousine, but it drove like a truck—and the man in it—”
Q. “When did you see the man?”
A. “That was when the car was coming down our road at about eighty miles just before—Oh God! I saw my car open up like a wet paper boat and spring across the
road. They were in it. My Paul—my Martha—my poor little Paul.”
Cole became inarticulate again; he twitched all over. I have only seen the like in an experimental animal on the operating table. Waterman gave him another dose. I don’t know whether of sedative or stimulant, and Cole gradually quieted down. Q. “Tell me about the man in the car.”
A. “Tall and fat and well-dressed. A red scar went from the corner of his eye to his mouth.”
Q. “Do you remember what they called him?”
A. “Macaluso, I think. But they never spoke of him by his name. The country people didn’t talk of him much, but when they did they called him The Brain”
Q. “Was he the man who made the drugs?”
A. “I think so, but a friend of mine told me that he was a big-shot bank robber, too. A slick article, they said. The police had been looking for him a long time, but they hadn’t been able to get anything on him which would stick.”
Q. “What happened after the accident?”
The patient made as if to answer, but the words would not come through his mouth. The doctor waited silently until Cole seemed to take hold of himself. He spoke bitterly, forcing his words between his teeth.
A. “It broke my wife’s back,” he said. “From then to the day she died, she never walked one step. My boy had the left side of his skull crushed in against the seat in front. When I saw it, it was flat and utterly without shape. My partner at the hospital was a good man and saved his life. That is, saved him as a blind, deaf, paralyzed, healthy lump of flesh. With the care that he will get in an institution he will probably outlive most well children. You know what that means. Care that you can’t get at a state institution and money—money—money. Or else that I would have to live all my life with this horror right in front of me. My God! It can’t be real. It isn’t real.”
Q. “Didn’t they ever try to compensate you for the damage? Of course, I don’t mean that they could really compensate you, but you must have needed a lot of money to take care of your wife and child.”