“Crazy!”
But Bell said coldly:
“Go on.”
“I must rule,” said The Master soberly. “It is essential. If my little secret were known, intelligences would be magnified, but under many flags and with many aims. Scientists, with genius beside which Newton’s pales, would seek out deadly weapons for war. The world would destroy itself of its own genius. But under my rule—”
“Men go mad,” said Bell coldly.
The Master smiled reproachfully.
“Ah, you are trying to make me angry, so that I will betray something! You are clever, Señor Bell. With my little medicine, in such quantities as I would administer it to you.…”
“You describe it,” said Bell harshly and dogmatically, “as a brain stimulant. But it drives men mad.”
“To be sure,” said The Master mildly. “It does. It is not excreted from the body save very, very slowly. But it changes in the blood stream. As—let us say—sugar changes into alcohol in digestion. The end-product of my little medicine is a poison which attacks the brain. But the slightest bit of unchanged medicine is an antidote. It is”—he smiled amiably—“it is as if sugar in the body changed to alcohol, and alcohol was a poison, but sugar—unchanged—was an antidote. That is it exactly. You see that I have taken my little medicine for years, and it has not harmed me.”
“Which,” said Bell—and somehow his manner made utter silence fall so that each word fell separately into a vast stillness—“which, thank God, is the one thing that wins finally, for me!”
He stood up and laughed. Quite a genuine laugh.
“Paula,” he said comfortably, “get on the plane. In the cabin. Jamison and I are going to strip The Master.”
Paula stared. The Master looked at him blankly. Jamison frowned bewilderedly, but stood up grimly to obey.
“But Señor,” said The Master in gentle dignity, “merely to humiliate me—”
“Not for that,” said Bell. He laughed again. “But all the time I’ve been hearing about the stuff, I’ve noticed that nobody thought of it as a drug. It was a poison. People were poisoned. They did not become addicts. But you—you are the only addict to your drug.”
He turned to Jamison, his eyes gleaming.
“Jamison,” he said softly, “did you ever know of a drug addict who could bear to think of ever being without a supply of his drug—right on his person?”
Jamison literally jumped.
“By God! No!”
The Master was quick. He was swarming up the plane-wing tip before Jamison reached him, and he kicked frenziedly when Jamison plucked him off. But then it was wholly, entirely, utterly horrible that the little white haired man, whose face and manner had seemed so cherubic and so bland, should shriek in so complete a blind panic as they forced his fingers open and took a fountain pen away from him.
“This is it,” said Bell in a deep satisfaction. “This is his point of weakness.”
The Master was ghastly to look at, now. Jamison held him gently enough, considering everything, but The Master looked at that fountain pen as one might look at Paradise.
“I—I swear,” he gasped. “I—swear I will give you the formula!”
“You might lie,” said Jamison grimly.
“I swear it!” panted The Master in agony. “It—If the formula is known it—can be duplicated! It—the excretion can be hastened! It can all be forced from the body! Simply! So simply! If only you know! I will tell you how it is done! The medicine is the cacodylate of—”
Bell was leaning forward, now, like a runner breasting the tape at the end of a long and exhausting race.
“I’ll trade,” he said softly. “Half the contents of the pen for the formula. The other half we’ll need for analysis. Half the stuff in the pen for the formula for freeing your slaves!”
The Master sobbed.
“A—a pencil!” he gasped. “I swear—”
Jamison gave him a pencil and a notebook. He wrote, his hinds shaking. Jamison read inscrutably.
“It doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said soberly, “but you can read it. It’s legible.”
Bell smiled faintly. With steady finger he took his own fountain pen from his pocket. He emptied it of ink, and put a scrupulous half of a milky liquid from The Master’s pen into it. He passed it over.
“Your medicine,” said Bell quietly, “may taste somewhat of ink, but it will not be poisonous. Now, what do we do with you? I give you your choice. If we take you with us, you will be held very secretly as a prisoner until the truth of the information you have given us can be proven. And if your slaves have all been freed, then I suppose you will be tried.…”
The Master was drawn and haggard. He looked very, very old and beaten.
“I—I would prefer,” he said dully, “that you did not tell where I am, and that you go away and leave me here. I—I may have some subjects who will search for me, and—they may discover me here.… But I am beaten, Señor. You know that you have won.”
Bell swung up on the wing of the plane. He explored about in the cabin. He came back.
“There are emergency supplies,” he said coldly. “We will leave them with you, with such things as may be useful to allow you to hope as long as possible. I do not think you will ever be found here.”
“I—prefer it, Señor,” said The Master dully. “I—I will catch fish.…”
Jamison helped put the packages ashore. The Master shivered. Bell stripped off his coat and put it on top of the heap of packages. The Master did not stir. Bell laid a revolver on top of his coat. He went out to the plane and started the motors. The Master watched apathetically as the big seaplane pulled clumsily out of the little cove. The rumble of the engines became a mighty roar. It started forward with a rush, skimmed the water for two hundred yards or so, and suddenly lifted clear to go floating away through the air toward the north.
Paula was the only one who looked back.
“He’s crying,” she said uncomfortably.
“It isn’t fear,” said Bell quietly. “It’s grief at the loss of his ambition. It may not seem so to you two, but I believe he meant all that stuff he told me. He was probably really aiming, in his own way, for an improved world for men to live in.”
The plane roared on. Presently Bell said shortly:
“That stuff he has won’t last indefinitely. I’m glad I left him that revolver.”
Jamison stirred suddenly. He dug down in his pocket and fished out a cigar.
“Since I feel that I may live long enough to finish smoking this,” he observed dryly, “I think I’ll light it. I haven’t felt that I had twenty minutes of life ahead of me for a long time, now. A sense of economy made me smoke cigarettes. It wouldn’t be so much waste if you left half a cigarette behind you when you were killed.”
The tight little cabin began to reek of the tobacco. Paula pressed close to Bell.
“But—Charles,” she asked hopefully, “is—is it really all right, now?”
“I think so,” said Bell, frowning. “Our job’s over, anyhow. We go up the Chilean coast and find that navy boat. We turn our stuff over to them. They’ll take over the task of seeing that every doctor, everywhere in South America, knows how to get The Master’s poison out of the system of anybody who’s affected. Some of them won’t be reached, but most of them will. I looked at his formula. Standard drugs, all of them. There won’t be any trouble getting the news spread. The Master’s slaves will nearly go crazy with joy. And,” he added grimly, “I’m going to see to it that the Rio police take back what they said about us. I think we’ll have enough pull to demand that much!”
He was silent for a moment or so, thinking.
“I do think, Jamison,” he said presently, “we did a pretty good job.”
Jamison grunted.
“If—if it’s really over,” said Paula hopefully, “Charles—”
“What?”
“You—will be able to think about me sometimes,” asked Paula wistf
ully, “instead of about The Master always?”
Bell stared down at her.
“Good Lord!” he groaned. “I have been a brute, Paula! But I’ve been loving you—” He stopped, and then said with the elaborate politeness and something of the customary idiotic air of a man making such an announcement. “I say, Jamison, did you know Paula and I were to be married?”
Jamison snorted. Then he said placidly:
“No. Of course not. I never dreamed of such a thing. When did this remarkably original idea occur to you?”
He puffed a huge cloud of smoke from his cigar. It was an unusually vile cigar. Bell scowled at him helplessly for a moment and then said wrathfully:
“Oh, go to hell!”
And he bent over and kissed Paula.
*
THE EXTRA INTELLIGENCE
(Originally Published in 1935)
The laboratory was very still. Jimmy Cottrell watched his tubes warm up and was ready. Dorothy Mears had her notebook at hand.
Kreynborg gently withdrew the needle, pushed aside the anesthesia-cone, and began the skillful, gentle massage which was the preliminary to the action of the injected drug. The dog lay still. Kreynborg was a tenderhearted soul, and he had not strapped the animal to the table. Before anesthetizing it, he had given it a hypnotic drug so that it was sleeping soundly when the chloroform-cone went over it. The dog had not even been frightened.
Kreynborg massaged, gently and skillfully. Epinephrine injected into one of the larger veins. He was working it along that vein to the heart. The dog was dead. It had been dead for fifteen minutes. But the epinephrine caused a spasmodic contraction of the blood-vessels, forcing blood into the heart. And a heart, even a human heart, will beat rhythmically of its own self-excitation if it is once stimulated to an initial beat. The drug and the massage served to provide that initial stimulus—sometimes.
Jimmy moved the receptor-unit of his meters close to the motionless dog’s frontal-bone. Dorothy waited, pencil ready.
“No indication,” said Jimmy. “No indication… No indication…”
“Wait, Jimmy,” said Kreynborg gently. “It takes minutes. But he was dead, eh?”
“He is dead,” said Jimmy, his eyes upon the meters. “Not a flicker of consciousness. Not even a stray reflex. Not even—” He stopped. “A reflex then.”
“Yes,” said Kreynborg, “but it was a similar reflex that led to the invention of the galvanic battery. He is dead, Jimmy.”
He worked on patiently. There had been much publicity concerning Kreynborg’s success in reviving dead small animals. He was working toward a technique by which, ultimately, surgical operations now impossible could be performed with safety. The pulmotor and the oxygen/carbon dioxide tent were long strides forward. Kreynborg thought he could go farther—and he had.
But there had been some very peculiar results in certain of his experiments, and he had called in Jimmy Cottrell to help him interpret them.
“Some day,” said Jimmy, watching, “I’ll get my meters down to the registration of somatic life. The cells in this dog’s body are still alive. His fur and nails and bones would grow for days at least. As an aggregation of cells he’s living, or you couldn’t hope to bring him back. It’s the unifying factor, the ego, that’s dead.”
“Yes,” said Kreynborg, his strong, supple hands still working gently. “And it is that ego, Jimmy, which your meter detects, and that ego which I do not understand.”
Dorothy, pencil poised for experimental notes, said abruptly:
“I still think this is wrong. Perhaps I am superstitious. But I have a feeling that we are meddling with something dangerous.”
“I don’t see it,” said Jimmy. “If Carl, here, can work out a technique by which a patient who dies on the operating table can be revived instead of staying dead—”
“It isn’t that, Jimmy,” protested Dorothy. “That’s reasonable. If it’s done before the—” she hesitated, and said dubiously, “before the breath leaves the body. The heart stopping doesn’t count, but there’s something else. When somebody’s really dead—”
“She speaks of the soul,” said Kreynborg mildly. “The ego. Perhaps they are one. I think your meters should begin to read now, Jimmy. And remember, you took readings on this dog before I chloroformed it and as it died. I wish you to compare the readings as it is revived, if you do not see something very strange—”
“Meter kicking over!” said Jimmy sharply. “Quiet, now!”
The meters were kicking over. First a slow, deliberate, straining heave of the sensory meter. That was recording the electric currents accompanying the nerve-message to the brain that the heart was straining to make its beat. It did beat. It hesitated for a long time. The needle quivered again. It beat once more. Then again and again.
There were sudden little flickerings superimposed upon the main rhythm even as that rhythm struggled to establish itself. The consciousness-meter remained blank. Jimmy himself had devised this apparatus which detected, not consciousness itself, but the obscure electric phenomena which accompany consciousness. He’d tested his device in a hundred ways, from the strong and definite registrations of a human brain—which were stronger as the brain was more intelligent—down to the infinitely feeble and very curious phenomena accompanying a sensitive plant’s reaction to a touch or injury. There was a primitive form of ego even in the plant, and Jimmy’s apparatus measured it.
Now, the consciousness-meter showed nothing. The sensory-meters wavered feebly. The sensory nerves were sending messages to a brain which paid no heed to them. Then queer little jerks of the volition-needle. Nerve-ganglia, these, speeding up the heart-beat, adjusting blood-vessels to temperature-differences, and so on.
“The body’s beginning to function,” said. Jimmy briefly. “Nothing from the brain yet.”
“Sometimes we fail. Sometimes—”
Then the consciousness-needle jerked. It jerked again. It was still. It quivered, and ceased, and quivered again. To Jimmy there came a very curious feeling that it was like nibbles on a fishing-line. Then there was a sudden, violent fluctuation, and then a smooth climb of the intensity-of-consciousness register.
It began at five units on Jimmy’s arbitrary scale. A dog’s normal intensity-of-consciousness was seven. Even at the lower intensity, though, the normal quiverings of the needle were queer. A human being’s consciousness-intensity line goes up and down very nearly nine times a second. A dog’s line wavers four. Lower animals drop progressively, and the sensitive plant has what may be termed a pulsation of consciousness no more often than once in four minutes and a quarter.
The needle here, though, moved faster. Instead of four pulsations per second, for a dog’s intelligence, the meter quivered at least twelve times.
“Something now!” said Jimmy tensely. He watched. The intensity went up to six units. To seven. To nine. Twelve—fifteen—twenty! It hung there an instant. The speed of the pulsations increased. From twelve per second they were at least sixteen. The intensity wavered and leaped up again. Twenty-five. Thirty. Thirty-two! And the needle quivered so rapidly that it became a fuzzy dark line.
“Good Lord!” said Jimmy, staring. “The thing’s—the thing’s thinking faster than a man! Ten times as fast! And the intensity is away above human! Good Lord, man! This isn’t possible! It—”
The dog on the table stirred. It breathed deeply. It moved one paw—two. Kreynborg stepped back. Dorothy watched, her lower lip caught between her teeth. She had turned pale.
The dog staggered to its feet. It looked about the laboratory. Then it turned its head and regarded its own body with a peculiar curiosity. It lifted a paw and inspected it carefully.
“It’s—thinking!” gasped Dorothy.
“The intensity,” said Jimmy crisply, “is thirty-seven units!”
The dog turned its head and looked at Jimmy. There was something horribly un-doglike about the way it acted. There was something utterly intelligent about its eyes. It inspected Jim
my purposefully. Again it looked about the laboratory. And its eyes fixed upon the chemical and biological apparatus in view. It regarded that apparatus with an utterly, incredible interest, an intelligent, a comprehending interest!
“This,” said Kreynborg mildly, “is a sample of what I do not understand. That ego is of a higher order than a dog should have.”
“It’s uncanny,” said Dorothy, fascinated. “It’s—terrible!”
The dog gathered itself together. It jumped lightly down to the floor. It moved toward the chemical apparatus. Kreynborg put dog biscuits down upon the floor. The dog ignored them. It regarded the apparatus more closely. It stood up on its hind legs and reached out a paw.
Then, quite suddenly, it yelped. The sound was utterly dog-like. But it was a yelp of terror, of anguish, of unbearable grief. It howled, and there was grief and a queer suggestion of a bitter disappointment and a horrible rage in it. Then it shook convulsively and fell to the floor.
It lay there, breathing heavily. For half a minute or more the three in the laboratory stared at it. Then Kreynborg picked it up.
“Read its consciousness now, Jimmy,” he said mildly. “This has nearly happened before. And I do not understand.”
Jimmy’s hands were shaking. He put the receptor on the dog’s frontal bone.
He looked at the consciousness-meter. Its needle wavered slowly, irregularly. And the intensity was two units.
“Its body is alive,” said Jimmy unsteadily. “Its brain is—gone. In human beings, that irregular pulsation means an idiot.”
“Yes,” said Kreynborg regretfully. “The dog is now an idiot. It will live, and it will eat, and breathe, and drink. But it will never remember anything it had learned, and it will never learn anything. It will be only a living machine. But I have a feeling, Jimmy, that for a time it had intelligence greater than normal.”
“Greater than normal?” said Jimmy harshly. “Why, man! It had four times the intelligence of a man! It had intelligence beside which you and I are as children! It simply burned out its brain!”
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 21