Rule of the Brains

by John Russell Fearn

  It seemed quite a simple thing to me to discourse with learned men upon the multi-integral calculus, the exact funda­mental nature of energy and gravitation, and the pure concep­tions of fourth, fifth, and sixth dimensions. Yet, clever as these men were reputed to be, they struck me as rather doltish. Not able to understand the sixth dimension! Not able to conceive how space and time interweave with consciousness!

  I was twenty when I began my private researches. It was also the time when I began to realize that I was indeed unlike the multi-millions of people around me. I was in truth an intellectual giant, and therein lay a certain odd fear of myself.

  In my research work I found that I needed assistance. I obtained it in the form of a plain-faced, brown-haired man of my own age—Dick Emerton by name. He was a shrewd-enough fellow, with a brutal directness of manner and a good deal of common sense. He never once made any remarks on my own singular gifts until the day when I added twenty columns of multiple figures simultaneously and gave the right total. To my surprise he told me it would have taken the world’s greatest mathematicians nearly a week to accomplish that feat.

  “But why?” I asked, puzzling over them. “What’s the matter with everybody, Dick? It’s like trying to carve steel with a putty knife to drive sense into people. You’re not much better either, with all due respect.”

  “I’m normal, that’s why,” was his quiet answer. Then he started to study me reflectively. “To outward appearances you’re all right,” he resumed thoughtfully. “You have a large forehead—but by no means exceptional—grey eyes, black hair, and yet— Well, it isn’t the first time I’ve heard of your mental feats. Nat, I only really answered your advertisement because I wanted to get a closer look at the man who fooled those math professors. Up to now I’ve thought you a phoney. Now I see how wrong I’ve been. Don’t you realize, man, what intellectual power you’ve got?”

  “Sometimes I do wonder about it,” I admitted. “And yet why should I be so abnormal? I was born naturally; I’ve never had an accident, no blows on the head or anything like that. Seeing and knowing things is pure simplicity to me, so much so that I can’t figure why nobody else can do it.”

  “In a way you’re an intellectual freak—like double-headed frogs and bearded ladies, if you’ll forgive the simile,” Dick said. “This research of yours, for instance. Do you realize that nobody on Earth, save perhaps yourself, under­stands the physical relation between matter, time, and space?”

  I smiled at him. “Frankly, I hadn’t thought of being alone in my ideas. You see, it’s so plain to me. With sufficient effort I could live a hundred years back in time, following a past time-line in the millions of possible ones that exist.”

  “Too much for me.” He sighed, shaking his head. “I’m afraid you’ll have to get a fresh assistant, Nat—but I doubt you’ll ever find one. I’ve tried to understand your ideas, but it’s no dice. You assert that a physical body does nothing, except what the mentality commands. That may be all right in pure metaphysics, but in science it doesn’t match up. According to your reckonings, mind power can offset anything—even death!”

  “Certainly!” I declared firmly. “My body is only the carrier for my intelligence, and my intelligence is the one dominating force. There have been others in the past who have proven that fact—for instance, Enoch, Abraham, Jesus of Nazareth—all of them complete masters of mental power over physical.”

  At that Dick shrugged. “Well, I guess I’m only a straight laboratory technician, and for that very reason I’ll have to leave you. I’ll make one suggestion, though—go and see a psychoanalyst and see what he thinks about your brain. You’re an abnormality and owe it to yourself to discover the truth. That is, if you’re interested?”

  “I’m interested in knowing why everybody else is so dense,” I answered thoughtfully.

  I suppose that sounded egotistical.

  In any case, I followed Emerton’s advice and went that very same afternoon to see Professor Calden, one of America’s leaders in psychoanalysis.

  * * * *

  I cannot detail all he said, or the tiring experi­ments he put me through. But the gist of it all was that I possessed cerebral hypertrophy. According to him, the hypertrophy was in a progressive state that would mean a constant accumulation of intelligence until the thing finally killed me from sheer pressure.

  The diagnosis should have frightened me, but it didn’t. I knew inwardly that I was the complete master of my body. I knew, too, that the great Professor Calden was for once utterly wrong in his reckonings. It was not that I had a type of hypertrophy, but something else—a something which self-analysis could not determine, in much the same fashion as a surgeon sometimes cannot diagnose his own ailment.

  I returned alone to my researches, somewhat embittered by the complete isolation engendered by my strange genius. There were times when my mental excursions into the profoundest realm of mathematics and cosmic things wearied me a little. I longed for the company of a mind like my own, yet isolated, shunned by very reason of my superhuman powers. By the time I was twenty-six, I had solved all sciences of Earth and brought each one to fruition in my own mind. I discovered the real meaning of electron waves, of the vast possibilities lying beyond the velocity of light. I found other radiations moving at speeds far in excess of 186,000 miles a second. Instead of the normal seventy octaves of vibration which had been known, I found and classified as many as 137! Yet where lay the use of all these discoveries? Nobody could understand me!

  I returned to my studies in my laboratory in the city, and the more I delved, the more I realized that Professor Calden had at least been right in one thing—my mental powers were increasing, to such an extent that I was becoming rather afraid of myself. There seemed to be no barrier to the growing force of my mind.

  I clearly remember what a stunning shock I received when my little dog, Mopes—my only companion in those dreary early years—came into conflict with my mind. In an exuberance of mischievous energy, he jumped on the bench beside me and overturned a glass container filled to the brim with a fluid that I knew contained the elements of a startling new life. In the heat of the moment I flew into a rage and cursed poor old Mopes for all I was worth.

  Then I relaxed, horror-stricken, to see him gaze at me dumbly for a moment and then drop motionless to the bench. All traces of life had literally been blasted clean out of him by the power of the thoughts behind my words!

  Probably I could have brought him back to life by the same uncanny mental power, but that was something that did not occur to me in my abject despair. I only thought of it after I had buried him. For days I was a victim of acute melancholia, overwhelmed by the knowledge of the terrible gift—or curse—I possessed. Nothing was safe from me.

  If the incident with Mopes did nothing else, it at least provided me with the basis of a new mental science—the control of atoms and electrons into any desired formation by sheer will power. I tried little things at first and was unsuccessful. Then, as months sped by, I began to merge inorganic objects out of apparent nothing.

  Knowing by heart all the atomic elements making up various objects, it was not too difficult for me, though I suppose the mental effort of memorizing the exact atomic structure of every form of inorganic matter would be considered prodigious. I can only say it did not appear so to me.

  To my delight I succeeded in merging common stones. I brought minerals and peculiar isotopic metals into being—each time with a sharp explosion as the atomic aggregates of the air suddenly changed their courses and patterns to make up the new element.

  I fingered diamonds of stupefying size, gazed on emeralds of surpassing value, even created radium and sent it in lead-x containers—lead-x being an element of my own discovery—to the principal hospitals of the country. Nor did I send it by any ordinary method. No, I willed it there and had my first good laugh in years wondering what the various hospitals thought of their discoveries.

  All the world’s wealth was at my comman
d had I wished it—which I did not. Willing things of overwhelming value into being was interesting at first, but it soon palled. I had money enough in any case. If I had more, I could not spend it. So I went further and tussled for five more weary years in an effort to create organic matter.

  Organic matter certainly represented a profound struggle. Beyond memorizing all the atomic units of inorganic matter, I had now to tabulate every known constituent of living matter and assimilate all the data in my mind. Written notes were quite useless, for in a mind-effort the whole pattern had to be set infallibly in my thoughts before I could even start.

  But little by little I mastered every detail—the primary patterning of the electrons and their build-up into molecules, their exact position in the scheme of the whole, the entire sequence of stresses, strains, and co-relationships. From this stage I went on to the conception of cells, nerve connections, atomic structure, and a myriad other details of almost bewildering complexity.

  And I was successful! I brought a mouse into being, and watched it move around the laboratory under the influence of my commands until an accidental fall into an uncorked vat of acid put an untimely end to it. Still, I had seen enough—if a mouse, why not a human being? That thought obsessed me. Why not a woman?

  Lord! How that thought grew upon me! I realized it was perhaps the absence of a woman that had made my life so dreary and desolate. Normal women were pure anathema to me, and I to them. Thereupon I set to work to conceive the mental image of the most perfect woman ever known.

  Four more years went by in patterning the unbeliev­ably complex organisms. But at the end of that time I produced her—to the accompaniment of an explosion that sent me stumbling backward. When I recovered, she was standing there in front of me, motionless—a creature as white as alabaster, flaxen hair flowing round her perfectly shaped head. Her clear blue eyes were looking at me steadily, yet with a certain indefinable emptiness.

  “Why don’t you speak?” I whispered hoarsely, mov­ing slowly toward her. “Speak I say! Walk!”

  She commenced to move toward me, only stopping when I commanded her to do so. But still no word passed from her red lips. I reached out and gripped her shoulders. They were warm with the flow of life, but—

  Slowly, gradually, I began to realize the bitter impossibility of the thing I had done. A woman, yes—a creation of my will, and more beautiful than any woman had ever been—born out of atoms by mental power alone. Yet she was devoid of the one vital thing I could not give—intelligence!

  For an instant my mind flashed back to the mouse I had made. It occurred to me that it had obeyed only the small stimuli of my commands. Its sheer inability to think for itself had led it to walk blindly over the bench edge and into the acid vat.

  And now? I stared anew, only to re-convince myself. This woman had no intellect—only a brain that responded to my will, but which was itself dead, grey matter.

  I stood and concentrated, slogged my mind with all the power in my possession to bring consciousness and mental entity into her stillborn brain, but it was wasted effort. I had encountered a locked door. Intelligence could not beget intelligence. It was something beyond my reach.

  The despair of that realization! I gazed speechlessly at her living dead body, the expressionless face and clear eyes— Then, with a stream of livid curses, I shattered her into a thousand pieces that swirled, misted, and vaporized into the air until there remained not a trace.

  I thudded down into a chair and reviled the fate that had made me a genius. An hour passed before I was the master of myself again.

  * * * *

  From that time onward, I dabbled no more in organic imagery. Instead I turned my mind to world affairs, forced myself out of my hermitage and took my place amongst the apparent giants of civilized progress. Once again I was rewarded with honors, degrees, dictatorships, presidencies—the whole gamut of supreme power. I dispensed with them all, told the rulers what to do, and saw that they did it. Without difficulty I found a solution to every world problem and became an unwilling demigod.

  That state did not please me. I was still looking for something I had missed. Again I dared to love a woman—a natural one, of course, and of considerable intelligence so far as normalcy goes. Everything went well until one day she did something that irritated me—as had poor old Mopes. Before I knew what I had done she lay dead at my feet.

  No longer did I doubt that my intellect was a curse and not a gift. I vanished from the public eye that day and vowed never to mingle with humanity again. No one could say how the woman of my affections had died. It was diagnosed as heart failure from extreme shock. But I was her murderer—­an even greater one because I had really loved her.

  I repeat, then, that I left the perfect world I had created and plunged into the study of mental space and time concep­tion. Space I did not find difficult to conquer. My body was the complete slave of my will and felt no change from Earthly to interplanetary conditions. By the merest intellectual effort I projected myself from Earth to the arid, sun-drenched airlessness of the Moon and found it as barren as I had expected.

  I travelled to Mars to find traces of a vanished civilization. Venus lay as a steaming, torrid wilderness, lashed eternally by frightful winds or—during sudden cessation—blanketed in dense and poisonous mists. The planet had little to tell me.

  The outer planets were no more difficult to reach, but it did entail considerable mental adjustment to adapt myself to their crushing gravitation. Nowhere, from Jupiter to Pluto, did I find a trace of anything resembling life.

  My attention turned to the only other avenue of exploration—time. My early studies of the problem had revealed time as possessing millions of different futures and past courses, it being a chance as uncertain as an electron wave which course Earth would take in its forward progression. The past path was known, of course. But I could easily move back along any of the paths not traversed and so escape annihilation by cancellation of my own birth.

  The method by which it might be done was obviously a mental one—to force my mentality back along any of the postulated, untraversed tracks, and by that very fact force my body, also. That involved adjusting my body to the movement, the changing air, and the altered ratio of different time.

  At first it was sufficiently hard to project myself a week past into an unknown path of possible happenings. I managed it successfully, merging from one state to the other without any undue difficulty. My body flawlessly obeyed my will.

  From a week I extended to months, and then to years—­spent a considerable interval exploring the might-have-been paths of the past, following the varied evolutions man might have taken had the law of chance operated differently.

  But finally the past grew monotonous; there was so much that had already been done. My real course lay in the future. Perhaps there I could find a brain capable of explaining what was really wrong with me, why I possessed such unhuman powers.

  Just as I had resolved to move futureward, however, I made a singular discovery in regard to myself. I was, amazingly enough, becoming smaller in stature! The fact confounded me utterly. I had decreased an inch in height and width in one week! I put it down to a contraction of the cartilage from my time-travelling experiences. But at the back of my mind I had an idea that this was not altogether correct. There was some other reason, not entirely clear to me.

  I tried finally to ignore it and instead busied myself with the construction of a recording machine able to operate from mental vibrations. It had occurred to me that mankind might be interested in knowing future possibilities, or even my own strange odyssey for that matter.

  The machine was simple enough—to me, that is. It consisted of a central vibratory mechanism somewhat on the fashion of a seismograph, only far more delicate in balance. The impact of my mental waves from future time would train directly upon it and set in motion an intricate keyboard resembling that of a typewriter, which in turn would write down in words whatever thought impacts were direct
ed upon it. I wondered when I completed the device and supplied it with an endless stack of paper, what, exactly, contemporary inventors would think of it.

  When the machine was finished, I was four inches less in stature. In three weeks I had dropped from five feet eight to five feet four. The fact settled in my mind as a profound perplexity. I tried to couple my age with the cause, but there was no apparent connection.

  So, baffled, I willed myself into the future.

  * * * *

  I find it unusually difficult to express the singular fascination of wandering unhampered through the countless variations of possible future times.

  Without the least effort, so perfectly was my concen­tration and knowledge schooled, I willed myself wherever I wished to go. I was deathless, a searching wanderer, oblivious to all conditions, since my mind made it possible for me to immediately adapt myself to whatever state I found—whether it happened to be space, fire, water, or solids. At first I made the mistake of miscalculating the Earth’s journey through space, and found myself materialized in a star-ridden void. After that my mind took good care of the defect.

  The wandering was glorious, and yet strangely lonely. There is little real happiness in being the sole possessor of a strange genius. I needed companionship—I literally craved it—yet it was still something that eluded me. I merged into the year 2139 as my first experiment; in fact I merged into it twice, and saw two different postulations of the future. In one, the Earth was nearly empty of people, war-shattered and desolate; in the other there had been no war and man had reached a peak in scientific achievement. In this lovely world I lingered for a while, a stranger amidst its kindly peoples, but still my genius was something they could not understand, and the old curse of isolation returned to me. I was too clever. I moved on, but not before I reckoned my measurements. I was now only four feet high. And still diminishing!