The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (30 page)

“What?”

“Did you ever hear of a man driving a car so fast it smashed up?”

“Sure.”

“Did you ever hear of a man having an accident with a new car just because he wasn’t used to it?”

“Naturally!”

“Suppose there was an—an extra intelligence, say, that got a new brain. And it needed a brain that could run at forty or fifty or sixty pulsations a second, and at an intensity of thirty-seven of your units, and—the brain it got was built to run at four pulsations and an intensity of seven?”

Jimmy braked the car and turned into the curb. He stopped before Dorothy’s home. This was a very quiet, residential street. Some children were playing a little distance off, and they played very quietly. There was a soft breeze blowing, and it rustled the leaves overhead. Dorothy looked anxiously at Jimmy.

“Do you see what I mean, Jimmy? Don’t you think Carl ought to stop these experiments? At once?”

Jimmy frowned unhappily.

“It’s plausible enough,” he admitted. “It fits into what happened. But, Dorothy! The—extra intelligence, if there was one—where come from? There’s no evidence, and there’s never been any evidence, that intelligence could exist without some sort of body! You’re suggesting that this—extra intelligence climbed into a dog’s brain that had been—vacated by the dog, but was going to be revived. Presumably, it didn’t have to vacate any brain or body of its own. We know of none, anyhow. Really, you’re talking about a disembodied spirit! And four times the intelligence of a man—” He stopped, and then said explosively, “It’s nonsense!”

Dorothy got out of the car.

“I’ll be ready to go swimming in half an hour,” she said quietly. “But, Jimmy—you saw that dog move over to the chemical apparatus. Why did he do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“What particular thing did he reach for?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“I did,” said Dorothy. “The ethyl chloride spray. Now—if he’d smashed that, what have happened?”

“We’d have passed out,” said Jimmy. “All of us, including the dog. But he wouldn’t have done it! Confound it, Dorothy! He was a dog!”

“I wonder!” said Dorothy quietly. “He had reached his paw for the ethyl chloride spray. If he’d toppled it, it would have smashed. There was just one of us who’d have gotten out of that room before being overcome. That was Carl. He’d have broken windows and let the gas out. We’d probably have been dead, or nearly, including the dog. And Carl would have tried to revive me first. He’s going to ask me to marry him, Jimmy.”

Jimmy Cottrell was staring, his brows contracted. His brain revoked against the implication Dorothy was making.

“Carl would have revived me first,” said Dorothy. “Then he’d have worked on you. And—maybe you’d have been the first man ever to be brought back from death by Carl’s process, Jimmy.”

Jimmy said doggedly: “Dorothy, it’s impossible!”

“Yes,” said Dorothy. “So was the intelligence the dog’s brain registered before it burned out. If you’d been the first man to be brought back from death, Jimmy—maybe a new intelligence, an extra intelligence would be using your brains now. They wouldn’t burn out like a dog’s. They’re good brains, Jimmy. Maybe—maybe that was why the—extra intelligence used the dog’s body to try to get them.”

Jimmy’s expression was a mixture of skepticism, and uneasiness, and several other things.

“Good Lord!” he said helplessly. “Dorothy, I—”

He regarded her blankly. And Dorothy smiled suddenly.

“We’ll talk about it later. I’ll be ready to go swimming in half an hour.”

She waved her hand and went into the house.

* * * *

Kreynborg was rather pale when Jimmy went into the laboratory next morning. His long, supple hands twisted upon the arm of his chair.

“Dorothy came, and she has gone home,” he said subduedly. “She talked to me, Jimmy. She is a strange girl.”

“Dammit,” said Jimmy ruefully, “I didn’t sleep last night! She went swimming with me, and she actually had me convinced! But it’s moonshine, of course.”

Kreynborg spread out his hands.

“I do not know,” he admitted, “I must find out.”

Jimmy’s lips opened. They started to frame the word “Why?” But they closed again. After all, he understood why. There was no reason for him, with the money he’d inherited, to spend his time sweating over problems involving the electrical phenomena accompanying consciousness. But some inner urge drove him on, and the same sort of urge impelled Kreynborg. Jimmy understood.

“Dorothy,” said Kreynborg, “is a strange girl and a remarkable one. She is the only person who could take down my notes as an experiment proceeds, not only as I dictate them, but sometimes notes of value which I fail to dictate. She understands much. But I think she is wrong about this matter.”

Jimmy sat down restlessly.

“She’s gone home?” he asked.

“Yes, I know.” It seemed to Jimmy that Kreynborg winced a little. “I will have no notes to dictate today. I have been thinking, Jimmy.”

Jimmy fidgeted. Kreynborg did not look or talk like himself at all. He looked as if he’d had some bad news which stunned him.

“Something bothering you, Carl?” asked Jimmy awkwardly.

Kreynborg smiled at him.

“Yes, Jimmy. I will tell you presently. I do not like Dorothy’s theory. I have a scientific prejudice against explanations which call in the supernatural.”

“Who hasn’t?” asked Jimmy. Kreynborg nodded gravely.

“Just so. We all object, because such explanations are the refuge of the lazy-minded, and they become matters of faith instead of reason. But I think that perhaps, when the dog died, some changes in the brain took place. And consequently, when he was revived the dog had brain fever. Your meters would not distinguish between delirium and normal activity, would they?”

Jimmy frowned. “The pulsations would be irregular, in delirium,” he said slowly. “They’d not be perfectly rhythmic. But yesterday they were so rapid I couldn’t tell whether they were rhythmic or not.”

“So I thought,” said Kreynborg. He sat quite still save for the twisting movement of his hands. “But one could administer a drug beforehand to make impossible any case of brain fever. So I shall prepare for another experiment under slightly changed conditions.”

He was silent. He seemed unnaturally abstracted. Jimmy stirred, and he came back to the moment.

“I am absent-minded,” he said apologetically. “I have had a shock, Jimmy. But there is another matter. I asked you here to do measurements for me. But there is another matter where you might be of some service, aside from my research. Will you do it, Jimmy?”

If I can. What is it?”

The gland researchers,” explained Kreynborg, “are trying to grow ductless glands outside the body, for a supply of pituitrin and such things. An extension of the work of Carrel, who kept a chicken’s heart alive—how many years?”

“Plenty,” said Jimmy. “Twenty or more.”

“Just so. They have a pituitary gland from the brain of a dog, which lives in its nutrient solution, but seems to undergo strange changes of activity. They suspect that perhaps some nerve-fibres remain attached and affect the gland. You can tell them?”

Jimmy shrugged.

“Probably. I’ll try, anyhow.”

“I will get the jar,” said Kreynborg. “You understand. It will require readings taken at different times, to search for nerve-currents. You might try one—say—now, if you like.”

“All right. I’ll try it,” said Jimmy.

He sat frowning while Kreynborg went out. He didn’t like the way Kreynborg was acting. It looked like a tremendous shock, and it disturbed Jimmy because he thought he might know what it was.

* * * *

He was relieved at the interruption to his own thoughts when Kreynborg came back. The culture-jar was not a very impressive bit of apparatus. Merely the jar itself, with a thermostat-controlled heating-unit, and the tubes by which the sterile nutrient solution might be changed. Kreynborg plugged in the heating-unit.

“Here you are, Jimmy.”

He watched, in the same subdued fashion, as Jimmy warmed up his amplifier-tubes and adjusted the receptor-unit to the jar.

“Not much to work with,” said Jimmy. “But we’ll see.”

He watched the meters. They read blank. Then, rather surprisingly, not the volition-meter nor the sensory-meter, but the consciousness-meter kicked over and back, and over and back and over and back. Then it was still for a time. It repeated the queer, intermittent registration. Sometimes the registration continued for half a minute.

“Something there,” said Jimmy, “but it’s funny… Consciousness!” He cut off his tubes and thought. “The pituitary’s in the brain. Perhaps some neurones were dissected out with the gland. There are two types of registration, one of three or four kick-overs of the meter, and another of an apparently indefinite number. They seem to alternate.” He frowned. “I’m puzzled. You tell the gland men there’s some nervous action remaining, and I’ll work out a way to record it and give them a graph on it.”

“Yes. It would be well to have graphic records,” said Kreynborg. “Of our work, too. How long before you could have such a device, Jimmy?”

Jimmy knitted his brows.

“Mmm…the intensity stuff is easy. But the pulsation-rate isn’t. We could record anything up to three or four thousand per second on a phonograph disk, though. Read off the wave-forms, too. I’ll go to a sound-equipment place and see a technician. Report tomorrow, Carl. It ought to be fairly simple to fix up.”

He stood up, restlessly. Kreynborg nodded.

“I will take the culture-jar back,” he said subduedly. “But before you go there is something I should tell you.”

“What?”

“I asked Dorothy to marry me,” said Kreynborg quietly. “She refused me.”

Jimmy blinked. Then: “I’m sorry, old man,” he said awkwardly. “Awfully sorry.”

Kreynborg smiled faintly.

“You should not be. She said she liked me very much, but she could not think of marrying me. I—I wished to have hope, Jimmy. I asked if there was someone else. And there is. I am betraying a confidence. She said that you had not asked her to marry you, but—”

Jimmy flushed crimson.

“Good Lord! Carl, I—I’m sorry! I have been hoping, but—”

“It hurts,” said Kreynborg gently. “Yes. It hurts. But I still like you, Jimmy. And—it clears the way for something I had thought of doing. A scientist should be free to take risks. And now, some day in the future I shall make an experiment that I would not make if I—had hopes of marrying Dorothy.”

He put out his hand. “I have betrayed her confidence,” he said, smiling, “because I wished to feel, that at least I had a share in bringing about her happiness. Good luck, Jimmy!”

He picked up the culture-jar and carried it carefully out of the laboratory to return it to its place.

* * * *

There was moonlight. There was music. There were waves rolling sedately ashore and making a hollow, booming roar that was a fitting accompaniment of the sea breeze and somehow even to the dance tune,. Jimmy and Dorothy strolled away from the dance-floor in the moonlight. There was a new, shining ring on Dorothy’s finger, and now and again she glanced down at it. But she spoke gravely.

“I still don’t like it, Jimmy, I wish we could persuade Carl—”

Jimmy said uncomfortably: “All this past week we’ve been checking and rechecking. And the last dog we experimented on didn’t put on any queer performance.”

“It was dead longer than the other,” said Dorothy soberly. “Twenty-two minutes. Its brain came back simply—empty. And—Jimmy, I think Carl has made some experiments we don’t know anything about. There are signs of it in the laboratory. The chloroform-bottle. And he’s been using your apparatus.”

“Taking readings on that pituitary gland,” said Jimmy more uncomfortably still. “I told him he could. Queer, that ‘gland’.”

Dorothy shuddered. “Horrible!”

“Not necessarily,” said Jimmy defensive]y. “You don’t think it horrible to keep a gland or a chicken’s heart alive in solution. Maybe some day the meat-supply for the whole world will be grown in test tubes instead of on the hoof.

“Those brain-cells attached to the pituitary gland simply happened to be memory-cells. They’re no more the individual dog kept alive in a culture-jar than—than a card index in the same jar would be. There’s no intelligence there. Just stored records. They happen to be auditory records, but that’s all.”

“They—bark,” said Dorothy, and shuddered again.

Jimmy had kept his promise to Kreynborg and prepared an addition to his apparatus for recording the data the meters registered. The intensity record had been simple. And to record the pulsations had been simple, too. An audio transformer and an extra amplifier bank inscribed each pulsation on a rotating disk record.

But an extraordinary thing had turned up on those records. Recording the pulsations from the culture-jar, Jimmy had examined the wave-forms of the pulsations composing the groups of three and four disturbances, and then those of the long-continued series. Under the microscope, the wavering scratch on the phonograph disk looked like sound waves.