The Cybernetic Brains

Chapter 2

There was darkness and utter silence and the absence of any familiar thing; but he was alive, and that was good.

He had no right to be alive. The car had rolled down the hundred-foot slope of Canyon Cliff to the river below. He recalled the slow lazy turning, end over end, the smashing, clattering impact as it came down on four wheels, then tipped sickeningly forward again, faster and faster…

He remembered the final plunge. He had been conscious, even at the end, when the shining foam of the river filled the car and shut out all the world with its cold white cover.

And Martha — four hours his bride. Halfway down the mountainside, she had been thrown clear. He remembered the glimpse of her face, not bruised or bleeding—just white, with eyes closed.

Now he tried to call her name but his mouth seemed numb and unresponding. His eyes made no response to light. He could hear no sound.

His pain was diffuse; there was so much of it that he could not tell whence any of it came. Every nerve, from the remote extremity of his toes and fingertips to the most secret core of his brain, signaled pain. There was the pain of the knife and of fire, the pain of crushing, bruising, stabbing things.

They must have him doped with hypos, he thought. He shouldn’t be conscious now except for the fury of the pain that had battered down the barriers against it.

He felt as if the nerve channels of his body had long passed their point of overload. They could carry no more currents of distress to his brain regardless of how much the stimulus of destruction piled up in the distant cells of his body.

And his brain could receive no more. The channels of reason were clogged with messages of hysteria.

And yet a part of him seemed able to think. He seemed capable of speculating and evaluating the vast damage to his body and mind.

It was only when he allowed himself to think of Martha that total collapse threatened the tiny sanctuary where reason was yet in control.

He was in a hospital, he thought. Someone must have seen the accident. He could not have remained in the submerged car more than a few minutes or he would have drowned.

But why didn’t someone come?

He tried to call out again. His lips at first refused his bidding. With all the power of his being he forced them to shape the name of his wife.

“Martha! Martha…”

MarthaShe would not be here, he told himself. She had been hurt, too; she could be dead. The little cell of reason shrank within his brain as he gave way before that thought.

He moved his hands out from his sides to make sure it was a bed upon which he lay. He could not tell. The nerve channels, so clogged with pain, could not tell him whether it was a sheet or a stone upon which he lay. He moved his arms about in the air. They encountered nothing. But, with his damaged sensory apparatus, he was not certain that he had even moved his arms.

He struggled and called out again. “Nurse!”

Nurse!There was no reassuring answer. There was no sound at all—only the memory of sound. Deaf, he thought.

And blind. He tried to feel his eyes, but he could not tell if there were bandages or not. It was like feeling with pillows tied about his hands.

He lay still for a long time, trying to catch the sound and the feeling of his breathing, the beat of his heart. There was no sensation whatever.

It was like being imprisoned within a corpse, he thought. He could never go back to Martha, a senseless, unfeeling scrap of flesh that somehow still lived. He wished he had remained in the wreckage in the river. It would have been better if he had died there. But now he did not want to die, no matter how broken and shattered his body.

Only he could not go back to Martha. He wished that somehow she would never have to see him or know his fate.

He wondered how long it had been since the accident. What might they be doing now if it hadn’t occurred? Martha’s brother, Al, had offered them the privacy of his family cabin in the mountains for their honeymoon. They had been on their way there when the car plunged over the embankment.

They might be boating now on the lake in front of the cabin, he thought. The moon would be full; in its light, Martha’s hair would shine as if with some phosphorescence of its own.

They had planned a supper by the light of a campfire near the water.

“If it gets burned a little or if sand and ashes get in it I’ll have an excuse for your wife’s first meal giving you indigestion,” she had said.

He’d never eat that meal now, he thought.

He tried to sleep, to push out the thoughts and the memories and the torrents of pain from his mind, but sleep would not come. He wished they would give him another hypo.

His bodily sensations seemed to be growing more numb and indistinct. He could not tell for sure if his eyelids were open or shut.

He groaned aloud as an accumulating flood seemed to burst within him. He was alone and scared like a little boy lost in a darkness that would never lift.

He cried as the full flood crest of agony burst wide. His sobbing shook his being and fed upon the terror and the pain like ravening fire.

After a time, when it was over, he felt partly cleansed of the chaos and the fear. A wave of calm began to overlay his mind in the aftermath of the storm within him. He could sleep now, he thought.

But sleep would not come. He tried to retreat before the incessant activity of his mind. He tried to fade out the memories and withdraw support from his imagination.

There was no sleep.

He fought for it as if for a tangible possession that he prized above all else but sleep would not cross the barrier of his mind.

In panic and frenzy he finally gave way to cries and screams for the hospital attendants. They’d have to dope him to sleep. He’d go crazy without it.

What kind of a hospital was it anyway—where they left him without attention of any kind? He tried to think where they might have taken him.

On the trip he and Martha had passed through the little town of Dixon. They had a small hospital there. Or they could have taken him all the way back to Warrenton, the industrial center where he lived and worked. That would have been the most likely.

In either place he could have expected more adequate care and attention.

Yet perhaps they were helping him. In his nearly senseless condition he would never know it. There might be a score of nurses and doctors about him now. They might have administered a dozen hypos. He would never have known it amid all the other pain.

He imagined himself closing his eyes. He tried to draw a curtain of calmness across his mind, and it helped. Something approaching a state of rest fell upon him; but he did not sleep.

He could not measure the passage of hours and of days, but he felt that a long time elapsed while he lay a prisoner in his own corpse.

That was the only term he could apply to himself. The pain seemed to be dying away—not as if healing had come but as if they very nerve channels were at last burned away by the intensity of it. With the lessening of pain, however, there came on resurgence of sensation.

He lay still blind and deaf and unfeeling; he supposed he was being kept alive by intravenous feeding, but he had no sensation of it.

There were only memory and desperate despairing thought.

He tried to mark the days against his imaginary time scale. He knew it was entirely fanciful; what he supposed to be a day might be only an hour in reality. But it seemed worth while.

It was on his fifth day of the darkness and the silence, according to his own tabulation, that he first noticed a change.

Light. It would have been imperceptible except that his visual nerves had been dormant so long. They responded violently to the first quantum that stimulated their sensory endings.

He almost cried from the joy of that first feeble perception. It was like the faint moonlit cast of a snow-laden sky at night. But it was light.

He watched it grow in brightness, so slowly that sometimes he wondered if there really was any change at all. Over the days it brightened and swelled and grew and slowly became an image.

It was when he first detected some vague motion that he knew his sight was actually returning. It seemed to be the figure of a man but it was beyond recognition.

And then it was cut off as if a bandage had been wrapped about his eyes suddenly. He wondered what had gone wrong. He asked questions but the same impenetrable silence shrouded him. He got no answers. He heard no sound.

The light came back after a day—as suddenly as it had been removed. But this time it was clear and sharp; it was vision as perfect as any he had ever known.

Directly before him was a familiar and friendly face. Al Demming, Martha’s brother—Dr. Albert Demming, the noted cyberneticist. He was looking directly into his eyes and his face was drawn and troubled.

“Al!” he cried. “Al, tell me what has happened! Is Martha hurt? Al—Al, can’t you hear me? Al, look at me! Tell me about Martha!”

Al!AlHis voice had risen to a shrill cry but Albert Demming was turning away as if he had not heard a word—as if he had not even seen anyone before him.

“Al! Don’t go away. Talk to me, Al. Tell me…”

He tried to turn his head and his eyes to follow the figure of the retreating man. He could not; he could only stare directly in front of him, helpless to move even his eyeballs.

For a moment despair mounted to its former peak. Paralysis—paralysis of even his eye muscles. But he could see. They must have repaired some of the damage to his eyes. If they could do that they could give movement to his eyeballs and restore his other muscles. It meant they were working, helping him.

couldHe didn’t understand the strange action of Martha’s brother. It could be doctor’s orders, he supposed. Perhaps they had told Al not to disturb him. That was why he had turned and walked away so suddenly.

Al had come because Martha wanted to know about him. That was it, he decided. The thought made him feel good. He had tangible evidence that she was alive and safe.

Then his eyes concentrated on the scene before him. It was a strange thing, a huge board covered with inscriptions and meters and pilot lights. He stared at it and read the inscriptions. They were chemical formulae. He was a chemist and he understood them. He understood the intricate and complex biochemical process that they described. He had developed it.

Slowly a surge of terror began mounting in his brain as he continued to stare at that board his vision could not avoid. Helplessly a scream burst suddenly from within him.

He knew now where he was.

It was no hospital.

He screamed again and again and he couldn’t stop. Only when consciousness left him did the screaming die.