Rule of the Brains

by John Russell Fearn

  This puzzle was always with me, always defeating my efforts at analysis.

  I went forward in leaps of hundreds of years and saw mankind wax and wane according to circumstance and line of probability. Monstrous cities that seemed all glass rose out of lazy sun-drenched landscapes. People, delicately attired and ineffably lovely, walked in the midst of these paradises. I did not stop, I went on and on, drawn by a magnetic all-consuming desire to behold the remoter futures.

  I ultimately paused when I beheld civilization at the apparent close of its life. The vast cities were changeless and grey, the sun less brilliant, the sky less blue. And it was here, in the decadent city of Dijanipol, in the year twenty-two million A.D., that I encountered Forunda, supreme intelli­gence of the Earth’s vanished peoples.

  With my strange powers of mental assimilation it was easy enough for me to find him. He was seated brooding alone in the ruins of a once superb palace—a little, emaciated figure of a man in tattered garments. His arms and legs were spindly, his chest narrow, his face pinched. The most dominant features about him were his extremely large and intelligent eyes, in which there seemed contained the whole history of a race’s knowledge, and the high, smooth forehead rising to a hairless skull.

  He regarded me with but little surprise as I merged out of the air. I was far smaller than he—now a mere foot in height. The faintest suggestion of a smile came and went on his dried and wearied face.

  “Nathan Brant, the mental ultimate?” he questioned. Though his voice was swift and his language oddly truncated, my mind quickly converted his thought waves into sense.

  “Yes,” I assented. Then I looked round the great crumbling room. For long minutes I surveyed the eroded pillars and fissured walls while Forunda sat motionless in his age-stained chair—bony, veined hands gripping the arms in image-like rigidity.

  Presently he spoke again. His fluting voice brought my wandering gaze back to him.

  “You are not entirely a stranger, Nathan Bryant. Records of past time have revealed the story of your departure into time from the twenty-first century. Remember that you left a machine behind you to record your thought impressions as you journeyed. That machine is still working—it is the last machine in this shattered, passing world. It will go on recording until you pass away. By the same paradox it is recording in every age preceding this one. Tell me, Nathan Bryant, why did you seek me out?”

  “Because you’re the only person likely to answer two very strange questions,” I answered broodingly. “Can you explain the reason for my enormous intelligence, and why do I perpetually shrink?”

  He mused for a time, narrow chin on claw-like hand. Then his domed, veined head nodded slowly.

  “Yes, I can explain it. But I shall have to ask you to allow yourself to remember the twenty-first century for a moment. When you lived in that age, were you not aware that a Russian scientist, Vanlowski by name, postulated the conception of a linked brain? His theory was debarred from worldwide acclaim by reason of its striking improbabil­ity. Vanlowski averred that if a human being could be born in full possession of all his brain power he would be a super genius, at one with the cosmos. Every human being has five times more brain matter than he ever uses. That fact has been proven time and time again.

  “Between the used portions and the area of the subconscious, cognitive, and ideative sections there is no link. A normal brain has to embody all these powers in a very small space and is, in consequence, ineffectual. But if there were a link between the unused portion and the normal section, it would place the possessor in control of all his powers—able to project his mind with a force five times in excess of so-called normalcy. He would be a mental wizard, able not only to understand the conscious but the subconscious as well—able to materially project his ideas instead of theorizing them. He could bend the very atomic fabric of the universe to his will.

  “Such a brain link would of necessity be a nerve connection. You, Nathan Bryant, have that connection. How or why, will never be known. You are a caprice of nature, the very thing that Vanlowski thought might one day happen. Prodigies are known through all history, and freaks. But you are the greatest of them all— Yet in another sense you are the only perfect man because you have a complete brain. That little neuronic brain connection has given you supreme power, but for such a power nature demands a certain price.”

  The thin voice paused impressively. I looked into those wise, age-filled eyes, and waited.

  “The price,” he resumed, “is extraordinary death in return for your extraordinary life. You have assimilated natural death so flawlessly that you cannot grow old or feeble in the accepted sense. Instead, you have decreased in stature. I do not need to tell you that in the animal there is progressive catabolism—the constant breakdown of material. The very energy of the body finally burns it out. In the plant, one has the opposite effect—anabolism. But in your case you have both catabolism and anabolism in a state difficult to under­stand.

  “Since you are able to defeat ordinary catabolistic death by mental power, you have produced an anabolistic state within yourself—an eternal balance of energy preventing you from ever becoming older. But nature, forced to find an equilibrium somewhere, has forced you to become smaller! The cells of your body, instead of breaking down, simply change into radiation and pass away into the immediate surroundings. Little by little the atoms of your body are parting company. You are shrinking—shrinking—but will remain the master of your body until you are reduced to the last electrons remaining inside your super brain. Then electronic orbits will close smaller and smaller until they achieve coin­cidence with the proton. When that happens, you will pass away—will become a minus quantity.”

  “So that is it,” I said with slow bitterness. “And no matter what states I pass through in my descent into smallness, I shall escape death until the end because of my profound adaptability.”

  He nodded slowly. “That is inevitable. Not always can supreme genius be classed as beneficial, my friend.”

  For a long time I stood in moody silence. Then, taking a grip on myself, I went on talking to him. For two hours we discussed the history of the human race, of the slow descent of Earth into cosmic dust. He represented the last natural man alive—a category into which I did not fit. For seven genera­tions he had brooded there in the shadows of crumbling achievement, a lone man battling still with the multiple problems of existence. Yet how small his battle seemed by comparison with mine.

  When I finally departed, he was still seated in his chair, the sombre finality of all that was left of humanity. Never had I felt so apart, so alone.

  * * * *

  Onward I went, and onward, growing smaller with my journeyings. Earth became ice-sheathed, the Sun a dull red and nearly extinct ball. Through unguessable ages I moved, pausing ever and again to wonder at the increasing giantism of things about me as I shrank to inconceivably tiny proportions.

  Smaller and further. Smaller—

  I lost all conceptions of Earth. Perhaps it had passed into space—perhaps I became so small that I slipped in between the interstices of matter and became subatomic— My only realization was of being amidst the eternal stars and vast, empty spaces. But there was a certain move­ment! Yes, definite movement—and it was upon me! I seemed to be smothered with some strange parasitism.

  Eyes, ears, and ordinary organs had long ceased to mean anything. I only understood by the sheer essence of thought, and little by little the strange explanation of the parasitism came home to me. I had become a planet—a thinking, electronic planet with life spawning upon me, a life that was moving from birth to death with incredible rapidity!

  Almost before I realized it, the strange life on my fast-decreasing body had reached the end of its course. I was revolving and moving, no longer in human form, but a perfect ball pursuing an incredibly fast and narrowing orbit round a proton Sun.

  I watched it as I circled round it, and thought of the immeasurable distances of space and time I ha
d covered. I was about to die—

  The entire universe seems nothing but blinding flame. I am hurtling toward that enormous incandescence—

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  British writer John Russell Fearn was born near Manchester, England, in 1908. As a child he devoured the science fiction of Wells and Verne, and was a voracious reader of the Boys’ Story Papers. He was also fascinated by the cinema, and first broke into print in 1931 with a series of articles in Film Weekly.

  He then quickly sold his first novel, The Intelligence Gigantic, to the American magazine, Amazing Stories. Over the next fifteen years, writing under several pseudonyms, Fearn became one of the most prolific contributors to all of the leading US science fiction pulps, including such legendary publications as Astounding Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Weird Tales.

  During the late 1940s he diversified into writing novels for the UK market, and also created his famous superwoman character, The Golden Amazon, for the prestigious Canadian magazine, the Toronto Star Weekly. In the early 1950s in the UK, his fifty-two novels as “Vargo Statten” were bestsellers, most notably his novelization of the film, Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  Apart from science fiction, he had equal success with westerns, romances, and detective fiction, writing an amazing total of 180 novels—most of them in a period of just ten years—before his early death in 1960. His work has been translated into nine languages, and continues to be reprinted and read worldwide.