He walked through the rows of the cubicles, halting his step every now
and then. The fluorescent screens on which The Brain drew the curves of
its observation-rays showed two sharp rises of the lines marked
"activity" and "emotionality". The lower levels of the glass cages
already were opaque; the glass corroded by the viscous acids which the
soldiers had squirted from their cephalic glands in their attempts to
break out and to reach food.
"Poor beasts," Lee thought, and he thought it without restraint because
it was normal, a perfectly harmless thought. But then; below the layers
of his consciousness his instincts told a different story.
"This is marvelous," they triumphed. "Fate takes a hand; they are
desperate; they're ready for the warpath and even the tiger and the
elephant would run for cover when their columns march."
As if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do Lee
walked over to the south wall, the one which separated the lab from the
interior of The Brain. He removed a sliding panel marked
"L-Filler-Spout" and there it was before his eyes, looking almost like a
fireplug. There was one in every apperception center and there were
hundreds more throughout The Brain, and their purpose was to replenish
the liquid insulation which shielded the sensitive electric nervepaths
of The Brain. Without looking at the thing, concentrating his every
thought upon the hunger of "_Ant-termes-pacificus_", Lee unscrewed the
cap and put a finger into the opening. The finger came back covered with
the thick, the syrupy lignin, this amber-colored sluggish stream of
woodpulp liquefied, this soft bed of The Brain's vibrant nerves.
Unthinking, absent-minded, Lee wiped the finger with his handkerchief.
"Now, I'm going to try a slightly different arrangement of the tests,"
he thought. "It's normal; I'm doing that almost every day."
The feeling he experienced as he swung into action was strange. As he
walked back and forth it felt like somnambulic walk; something his limbs
did without an act of will. As his hands did things expertly and
skillfully the feeling was that they were instruments automatically
moved not by his own volition but by some power outside himself.
His movements were those of a child serenely at play, a child
incongruously tall and gaunt and grey-haired constructing little
causeways and bridges on the ground with the logs of the fireplace; a
happy child engrossed in an innocent game....
* * * * *
It took about an hour and then causeways of fresh pulpwood were laid
from every termite hill to every feeding gate, from every glass cubicle
to the south wall and along the south wall to the "Lignin-Filler-Spout";
and from the ground up to the spout a little tepee of sticks had been
built.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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