"O simply wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Only, I'm afraid I'm going to be sick. It's the gas I swallowed. It's terrible; something always happens to me just when romance begins." The stretcher bearer grinned up to Lee, "She sure gets it out of her system like a good little girl. Don't you worry; she'll be all right." Lee nodded; he knew she would. As the big drive went on and column after column went over the top up to the hemispheres, nobody wasted time on Lee. He cautiously surveyed the tumultuous scene. With his asbestos suit and with his blackened face everybody would take him for a fireman. He might be able to complete his mission, to ascertain that The Brain had stopped to function in all its parts, to make sure that it actually was dead. And if down at "Grand Central" the turmoil was as great as ever here; with all those strangers rushing in and bound to be rushed out again.... "Why, I have a chance," Lee thought. Freedom; he had abandoned any hope for it. Now the reborn idea surged through his blood, a powerful motor as chance pressed the starter button for it. The thing to do first was to get past the searchlight beams. From the nearest pile of equipment he took an axe and a pair of long-handled metal shears. Then he marched off, straight into the glaring eyes of the searchlights till he got out of their cones, and the deep shadows of the "thalamus" labyrinth swallowed him up. Now he was on familiar ground and even in a familiar atmosphere. This was like a night patrol through jungle. The black lights of The Brain were the fireflies, the sirens' hollow wailings were the shriek owls and the cries of the lemurs. There was the same sense of loneliness, too, and of danger. The winding passages skirted the glandular organs, some of them looming huge like dirigibles, others small like fuselages of airplanes stored in a giant hangar underground. Strings of tiny green bulbs guided the path toward the pineal gland, the citadel of The Brain. * * * * * It was dark, as Lee had expected it would be. The danger zone was at least a mile away, and the attack against the fire was launched from the main sulci in the median section of The Brain. He passed the narrow bridge to the suspended gland and switched on the lights. The glittering walls of aluminum foil seemed to jump at him like jaws beset with the dragon teeth of electronic tubes. Caught with an overwhelming sense of loneliness and awe as of a man who has entered the forbidden temple of an unknown god he called: "Is there anybody here? Gus! Where are you, Gus?" Then suddenly he remembered that Gus was gone, that there would never again be his answering voice. He wiped his forehead. "Bad nerves," he thought. "Mustn't allow them to play tricks on me; pull myself together." Lee put his tools down and walked into the narrow aisle. Few things were changed; and there was the pulsemeter standing in its old place.