The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (29 page)

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 Jimmy 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!”

“So I have suspected,” said Kreynborg gently. “I like dogs. But this is important. It makes my original purpose look small.”

Dorothy said suddenly: “Carl, I—I noticed something. You’ve got to stop these experiments. Really, Carl! I noticed something—terrifying!”

But Kreynborg merely blinked at her through his spectacles.

“I wonder,” he said meditatively, “how intelligent it would have been had it not been for the hypnotic drug I gave it. More intelligent still, Jimmy? We must find out.”

* * * *

Outside the laboratory building, Jimmy Cottrell put Dorothy into his car and went around to the driver’s seat. He stepped on the starter and put the car in gear. Dorothy glanced sidewise at him, but Jimmy remained sunk in a brown study. He drove one block—two—three without a word. He turned aside and drove between the rows of trees on the boulevard toward Dorothy’s home.

“Jimmy,” she said quietly, “what do you think really happened?”

“Whatever it was,” said Jimmy, frowning, “the results of today, though, are simply—well—impossible. Thirty-seven units!”

“I wonder if it’s impossible,” said Dorothy cryptically. “You talked about rates of pulsation and intensity of consciousness. Just what relationship have those two things to brains—physical brains, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Jimmy. “Nobody does. It’s been known for a long time that electric currents accompany all nerve-action. But it’s only a couple of years ago that I proved that thought produced electrical phenomena too and started measuring them.”

“I remember the excitement that caused!” said Dorothy. “You talk as if it isn’t important, but I know better, Jimmy. But these pulsations—”

“Think of the movies,” said Jimmy. “The image on the screen seems continuous, but actually it’s a series of pulsations of light in every second. Well, human beings seem to be conscious continuously, but actually we have nine consciousness-pulsations per second. Nine times in every second we’re really awake and aware. We don’t realize the gaps in our consciousness any more than we recognize the gaps in the flow of light to the movie screen. Now, it happens that a dog has only four pulsations of consciousness a second. His consciousness is slower, and his thoughts haven’t the same intensity—”

Dorothy nodded abstractedly, as if getting to her point. “The intensity—”

“Is like the candle-power behind the images on the movie screen,” said Jimmy: “A well-illuminated picture shows more detail. A man’s thoughts have extra candle-power, he thinks them faster—and there’s a persistence of thought as well as a persistence of visual images. So a man—because of that persistence—can blend several thoughts into one, just as his eyes blend several screened pictures into one. On the screen, the result is movement. In a man’s brain, it’s reason. A dog’s brain pulsates so slowly it can’t blend thoughts, and so can’t reason.”

Then Dorothy said: “But your meters showed that the dog was four times as intelligent as a man.”

Jimmy squirmed.

“In theory, he was. He’d an intensity of thirty-seven units. The candle-power of his thoughts was terrific. And his consciousness-pulsation was at a rate I’d simply have to guess at. Where we can blend two thoughts or three, and therefore reason, through the persistence of thoughts in our brain, he should have been able to blend four—five—perhaps a dozen thoughts into one. But the physical parts of his brain simply couldn’t stand it. They burned out.”

“He’d have been able to do cube roots in his head?”

“He’d have been able to do anything!” said Jimmy. “What are you driving at?”

Dorothy ignored the query.

“I go back to my first question,” she said coolly. “What is the relationship between intelligence and the physical substance known as brains?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Jimmy. “Nobody does.”

“I think I do,” said Dorothy. “There isn’t any—any more than the relationship between an automobile and the man who drives it.”

Jimmy swung his car around a corner.

“I had it in my mind to ask you to go swimming,” he observed. “Can we drop this technical discussion long enough to settle that problem?

“Surely. I’ll go. But, Jimmy—”