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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Weird Tales, January 1929, with "The Chemical Brain"
It fell over the horribly mutilated body of its victim.
WALTER PARSONS is dead.
At the inquest the jury returned a verdict to the effect that the deceased came to his death by being accidentally crushed under a machine with which he was experimenting. But that is not true. It ignores several peculiar things which the panel of men could not understand and before which their matter-of-fact minds recoiled in horror. Now I do not wish to be misunderstood. Perhaps the verdict, as rendered, was the only sane one that could be returned. Nevertheless, if ever a man was murdered, that man was Walter Parsons. Let me put the incredible facts on paper. I do not expect to be believed, and yet...
LAST February I was coming out of an employment agency
in Pasadena, California, when a vigorous-looking gentleman
of about fifty years accosted me.
"Pardon me, but I overheard what you said to the lady inside. You are a machinist?"
"Yes."
"And looking for work?"
"I am."
"Would you consider a hundred and fifty dollars a month and your board?"
"You've hired me."
He smiled briefly. "My name is Rowan, Captain Rowan. And yours?"
"Lester. John Lester."
He motioned me into the front seat of a Cadillac touring-car.
"Where shall we call for your things?"
"I haven't any."
He raised his eyebrows.
"They're pawned, sold, gone," I explained. "I was down to my last thin dime when you hired me."
He answered nothing to this but drove to a men's furnishing-store on Colorado Boulevard.
"Here is fifty dollars, an advance on your wages. Buy what you think you'll need."
When my purchases were placed in the rear of the car, we drove out South Fair Oaks, almost to South Pasadena, and turned into the driveway of a fairly large estate on the east side of the road. The grounds were quite extensive, I noticed, and surrounded by a low stone wall. Palm trees bordered the drive that led to the garage, and orange trees grew in serried rows to right and left. The house itself was an old-fashioned wooden residence with wide verandas on each side. In the rear of the house was a brick building.
"This," said the captain, throwing open the door, "is the machine-shop and laboratory. You will notice that the machine-shop is small but quite well equipped for ordinary work. Parts that can not be made here will, of course, be ordered from larger establishments. Your work will be mostly assembling those parts and turning out certain small devices according to plans and specifications I shall give you."
He took me to my room on the second floor of the house and left me to bathe and shave.
AT dinner that evening I met. Walter Parsons. He was a
clever-looking man of middle age, a chemist, I gathered,
with a private income—nothing particularly striking
about him, unless it was the feeling he gave of being
very meticulous, very correct. The third person at the
table was Captain Rowan's sister, Genevieve, who was also
the housekeeper and cook, as there were no servants. She
was one of those women whom at first glance you dismiss
as uninteresting. At second glance you decide they are
actually plain. After that you pay them little attention,
and are never certain when it was you discovered they were
beautiful.
The captain sat at the head of his table and talked easily and naturally. "Have you ever read Lucian Larkin?" he asked me.
"No, never," I confessed.
"You know to whom I refer?"
"I'm afraid not."
He made a wry face. "Such is fame. Well, my boy, Lucian Larkin was an astronomer, the director until his death of Mount Lowe Observatory on the peak over there. But not only was he an astronomer; he was also a great mystic, the author of several wonderful books, not the least of which is The Matchless Altar of the Soul. You must read it, by all means."
Parsons gave a little laugh. He looked slyly at Genevieve Rowan, and then as if guilty of an indiscretion glanced quickly away.
"Not that you'll understand it," he mocked. "It is doubtful whether Larkin himself understood half of what he wrote."
The captain smiled tolerantly. "Walter is a materialist. He doesn't believe in the theory of a great mind back of all manifestation."
"Who could?" countered Parsons. He turned to me with the little sudden gesture that was characteristic of him. "It is so evident," he said, "that the mind of man is nothing but the sum of his bodily organization. When that organization breaks down—puff!—where is your mind?"
"And I might observe," replied the captain, "that when the dynamo breaks down, ditto, where is your power? Your very argument defeats you, Walter. Man is a machine. Very well. When he functions properly he is medium for mind, thought. When he breaks down, his mind, thought, goes—where? Into oblivion? Yes, the same oblivion that engulfs electricity when the generator fails to work; the same nothingness that claims radio waves when the machine fails to send them or the receiving-set to pick them up. Don't be absurd!"
I listened to them argue, rather puzzled as to what it was all about.
SEVERAL days later Parsons and I were in the
machine-shop together and I expressed my bewilderment to
him. "You see, Lester," he explained, "there are really two
schools of thought. One school—the material school
to which I belong—holds that our so-called mind
is the result of bodily nerves and organs functioning a
certain way. The other school—to which the captain
subscribes—holds that mind is something exterior to
our bodily organization, merely expressing itself through
our brains and directing our activity."
As I worked I pondered these two concepts. Never before had I given such things serious thought. Now they interested me. Why? Because I sensed that in some fashion they were connected with the work I was doing. The captain as an electrical engineer, Parsons as a chemist, were engaged in some profound experiment. This much I gathered from their conversation. But what sort of an experiment? Now and then Captain Rowan talked to me freely. For days at a time he would work in his laboratory, hardly uttering a word; then for some reason he would open up and become almost loquacious.
"Consider this fact, Lester. Within the entire range of the telespectroscope and telecamera, where their range is so immense that one hundred million giant suns in space are now photographed, there is no entity able to add to itself but mind, thinking thoughts that have never been thought before'."
I tried to grasp his meaning. "Just what is your definition of mind, sir?"
"That of Larkin. Electrons are the first manifestation of mind. They alone have been created. All else have been formed by an incredible number of varying combinations of electrons."
"I'm afraid I do not understand."
"It is very simple. Back of all manifestation is a cosmic mind—call it creator, if you will; I prefer to call it director. This director creates electrons. Electrons combine to form all other kinds of matter—the molecule, the atom. Ninety kinds of atoms are now known to chemists. Do you know what determines the atom of an element?"
"No."
"Well, what kind of an atom shall appear in space depends on four basic factors: number of electrons in revolution; specific speed of revolution; distance of orbits from the center; and directions of motion."
Parsons looked up from his chemical labors. "That is all true, Lester," he said, "but don't let the captain sweep you away by a statement of facts into an acceptance of a cosmic mind. Lucian Larkin was a great astronomer, and a scientist, but beyond a certain point—what we have verified with our instruments—he enters the realm of pure speculation. There is not one iota of proof that mind exists distinct from the body."
Captain Rowan laughed. "No? Then tell me: What if the hand of a person begins suddenly to write words at a rate ten to twenty times faster than normal, in a handwriting other than his own, upon wise and lofty subjects not heard of before; sometimes even in a language of which the owner of the hand is ignorant—tell me, what guides that hand?"
"There is usually fraud back of this automatic writing, deceit of some sort," replied Parsons. "In the few eases where it seems to be genuine, it is due, doubtless, to the subconscious mind of man."
"But if the person doing the automatic writing has no knowledge, either conscious or subconscious, of Latin or Greek, or even of Sanskrit (for I assure you whole reams have been written in Sanskrit), and the writing should be in any one of those languages—what then?"
Parsons shrugged his shoulders. "Still there is no valid reason for assuming an overmind or director as does Larkin." He turned to me. "Undoubtedly there are some mysterious things in connection with psychic phenomena which are baffling, but to use those mysterious things as a base from which to launch into wild and irrational speculations is not scientific. You will appreciate this better if you make an earnest study of the new psychology, behaviorism. Even James and Jung and Freud are being seriously challenged by John B. Watson. It begins to appear that our viscera are the directors of mind; that our memory, our so-called subconscious, is the result of habit, of conditioning. What you need to read, Lester, is Watson's book, Behaviorism, and leave Larkin to the metaphysicians."
THAT night I was permitted to see something curious. In
coming through the hallway from the rear of the house to
the front, I surprised Parsons and Genevieve Rowan in the
front room. I was ahead of the captain and distinctly saw
her in the arms of the chemist. Whether the captain saw
the embrace, the quick springing apart, I do not know. The
room was but dimly lighted, twilight prevailing, and the
electric lights not yet turned on. It is possible he did
not. At any rate he made no comment. Beyond surmising that
Miss Rowan and Parsons were secretly sweethearts, I should
have given little thought to the occurrence, if it had not
been for what followed. Coming down the back steps to the
kitchen after bathing and changing clothes, I surprised
another tableau, more startling by far than the first. This
time it was the captain and his sister. He held her above
both elbows, at arm's length, shaking her furiously. I
could not see her face, as her back was toward me, but his
own was snarling, murderous.
"By God!" he growled, "I'll kill him first! Do you understand? And you too!"
I retreated up the steps. What did it mean? That the captain had seen Parsons embrace his sister? But what of that? Weren't Parsons and he friends, fellow experimenters? Then why the terrible anger I had witnessed, the seething rage? I could not understand it.
At the dinner table Genevieve Rowan was her usual quiet, well-poised self; her brother's face was placid. Had I imagined the scene in the kitchen, exaggerated it? No, that was impossible. But perhaps I was mistaken in linking it up with the earlier scene in the parlor.
Parsons seemed unaware of anything amiss. He baited the captain on his mysticism in his usual mocking manner. But as the days passed I became aware of something tense, something electric in the air. Two or three times I caught the captain watching Parsons when he thought himself unobserved. His face didn't change expression at those times, no; nor his eyes; yet the fixity of his stare, something about its utter immobility, chilled the blood in my veins.
I told myself I was imagining things, developing a ease of nerves; only at this time I became dynamically conscious of Genevieve Rowan herself. Her ashen hair was suddenly full of glints that caught the eye. Her rounded figure held an allure that was hard to resist. "Don't be a fool," I told myself. "The woman is gray-headed; she is fifty, if she is a day." Yet in spite of such reasoning I knew her to be beautiful, desirable. And other things I knew—half suspicions, half certainties—gleaned from a word, a gesture, a step at midnight; the creak of a loose board, of an opening door. No, I won't tell what those things were! They are too horrible to put on paper, too terrible; yes. and too sad. Now that the captain is in his grave, Parsons dead, and only Genevieve alive—Genevieve who looks and walks about like a forlorn ghost—it is well that such things should be forgotten. Only I know that a real cause, a real lust for murder existed—existed and was glutted with blood. But enough of that!
IN the workshop a strange machine grew under our hands
as day succeeded day. Parts came from distant factories
and I put them together. Other pieces of machinery I made
myself according to plans furnished me by the captain and
Parsons. The machine was mounted on wheels; incorporated in
its body was an especially constructed electric dynamo. The
captain wired the various parts, and in what he called the
backbone of the ponderous, tapering mechanism he placed at
intervals of three inches crystals derived from a saturated
solution of Rochelle salt.
"Perhaps," said Parsons to me, "you have heard of singing crystals?"
"No," I replied, "I haven't."
"Well," he said, "it has long been known that lopsided crystals such as these have a certain effect on a ray of light passing through them. If you squeeze or pinch them, positive electricity collects at one part of the crystal and negative electricity at another. Now if you connect these two points you get a current. The discoverer of this interesting idiosyncrasy on the part of crystals was Professor Curie of Paris, who, in conjunction with his wife, later discovered radium. Behold!"
He pressed one crystal between a thumb and forefinger and its neighbor shrieked as if in pain. He laughed at my astonishment.
"One of these little crystals is enough to run two hundred telephones."
I could hardly credit it.
"Yes," the captain assured me, "that is true. But in this case they are going to be the little bodies which receive and send messages up and down the vertebrae of our machine, and to various parts of its body."
"Body!"
"Yes, body. For this is an iron creature we're building, a metal man."
I thought him joking. "It doesn't look much like a human being," I said.
"And has it to?"
"Lester," said Parsons, "is under the impression—the quite common impression—that to build a machine which will function like a man one must duplicate the human body."
"As in Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein," commented the captain, "the artificial man complete from nerves, muscles, lungs, liver, to a fluid that circulated like blood."
"Exactly," agreed Parsons. "Only it had no soul and killed its inventor."
Both men laughed briefly.
"The concept is a mediaeval one," went on the captain. "For you must know, my boy, that the human body is not the perfect mechanism the average person thinks it is. A skilled mechanic would be ashamed to turn out a machine as faulty in parts as is his own body."
"Perhaps so," I retorted, "but I notice that man is not able to improve on nature."
"There you are mistaken. Wherever man has been able to compete with nature by means of his machines he has bettered her. Take, for instance, the process on which all life depends, the storing up of solar energy in the green leaf. The leaf is not able to catch and hold more than one per cent of the radiant energy that, falls upon it from the sun. In that respect it is much less efficient than any of man's machines. A steam engine can turn into mechanical work at least twelve per cent of the heat energy fed to it in the shape of coal, besting the natural process eleven to one."
"And nature," chimed in Parsons, "has never yet proved itself capable of producing a human being that could not make mistakes. Man has come pretty near doing that very thing. Have you ever read the play, R.U.R.?"
"No."
"Well, a foreign playwright wrote a play called by those letters, which were an abbreviation for 'Rossum's Universal Robots.'"
"Robots?" I interrupted. "I believe I do know what you mean now. I've heard that word before."
"Of course you have. It's become a part of the English language. Well, the playwright's idea was quite fantastic and absurd. Who ever heard of Robots, mechanical men? Nobody. Yet at Washington, D.C., stands what is called the Brass Brain. Men step in front of it and ask questions. Talk of your ancient oracles! On the answers of this modern one men stake their lives and millions of dollars."
"Good Lord," I breathed, "what is it?"
"Nothing much. Only a machine that calculates how high and low tides will be in every port of the world today, tomorrow, and fourteen years from now."
I gaped at him.
"But why continue? There are in existence machines which turn switches, dig ditches, answer telephones, steer ships, come and go at the command of the human voice, and perform numerous duties. Of course these machines are not all assembled in one piece or place. They are distinct inventions, such as the adding-machine, the electric crane, or that latest marvel of them all, the calculating-machine which works out in a few hours or weeks or months intricate problems that would take learned men ten, yes, and even twenty years to solve. And the machine makes no mistakes."
"You mean," I said, enthralled, "that in some sort of fashion those machines are Robots?"
"Isn't it obvious? Consider, Lester: What would be the result if all those automatic brains, hands and feet were incorporated into one body!"
"My God!"
"And the brains directed the hands and feet?"
"Impossible!"
"That is the retort the scientist and inventor has always met with. Now this machine—"
"This machine?"
"Why, yes, the one we're building. It will demonstrate the correctness of the captain's and my theory."
I stared at him in a species of horror. "You mean," I gasped, "that this thing here"—I waved at the ponderous mass—"is intended to be a Robot, a metal man?"
He adjusted a crystal before answering. "We hope so."
"But, good Lord!" I exclaimed; "you're making a big mistake!"
"Indeed; how so?"
"Because no matter how much you give your machine chemical brains it won't be able to start its own thinking processes."
"That is true. Man has not yet been able to build a machine that can think. The ones I referred to above all operate at a note of music, the push of a button, the sound of a voice. We recognize that fact. The problem engrossing the captain and me is this: Can we build a mechanical, a chemical brain delicate enough to respond to thought as it now does to sound or other stimuli? Can we give such a command as this to our chemical and mechanical brain: 'Keep the motor running; every four hours feed it gas and oil'? Can we do more than that? Can we set our machine certain tasks to do, fixing those tasks in its 'mind,' and then going away and forgetting it? Don't you see what that would mean? It would mean the creation of a genuine Robot, an independent metal creature that would work without supervision, eat its daily ration of fuel, and never get sick or go on strike."
But I was not to be swept away altogether by mere oratory.
"You forget," I said, "that, they would break down from time to time; that human beings would then have to build others."
"At first, yes. But what if after awhile we created thousands of them whose specialty it was to repair their worn-out or broken-down brother Robots? They would not have to resemble each other in the least, you understand, save in their mental capacity to receive certain commands and keep on obeying them. Once you had your workers toiling at producing for humanity, your repair machines busy at repairing and building the workers, what more supervision would man have to exercise over them than the average boss does over workers now? Indeed it ought to be possible to create a machine that will be all brain, vast, godlike in comparison to the ones that toil and repair, and imbue it with the thought of keeping the Robots working and the wheels of industry turning; and there you are!"
The idea was horrible to me. I couldn't entertain it without protest.
"But if man started such a process going," I whispered, horrified, "he might not be able to check it at will. What if the Robots grew out of hand, built themselves into great armies, turned on man and destroyed him?" I wiped the sweat from my brow. "Good God, Parsons!" I said; "such inventions fly in the face of nature. They can bring humanity no good. Better leave well enough alone."
He shook me by the shoulder scoffingly. "All progress man has ever made, from tilling the ground to talking over radios, has been a flying in the face of nature."
The captain, who had said nothing for some time, now broke in.
"There is no need to be alarmed, my boy. Those Robots which Parsons visualizes would be the product of mind, therefore obedient to it."
I MADE no reply to him; but from the day of the above
conversation my interest in the work I was doing, in the
amazing experiment that was being undertaken, became
intensified.
The machine grew under our hands until it was six feet tall. It stood, as I have said before, on rollers, the rollers being encased in caterpillar belts. At the base it was about four feet around, tapering to twelve inches at the top. It was built, not in one piece but in segments, jointed ball-and-socket fashion, with various springs and rubber cushions separating the different parts. To describe it further is beyond me; only it had two arm-like pistons, one on each side, possessed a central electric dynamo, and was wired so profusely as to make the interior seem a tangled mass of cord.
CAME the day when the brain of this monstrous mechanism
was put in place. The part that fitted into what I must
call the neck was made of aluminum, all except the cover,
which was transparent glass and screwed into place. A
small cylinder, which emitted an intense bluish light
when brought into contact with electricity, was inside
the aluminum bowl. The captain connected the necessary
wires. His face was very red. I watched breathlessly as
Parsons filled the hollow globe with a glutinous mixture of
opaque liquid. My hands unconsciously gripped each other
until they hurt while I waited for something to happen,
but nothing did. He screwed the glass cap into place and
stepped down and back from the machine.
"It is finished," he said quietly, looking at the captain; "finished—and ready."
As if his words were a knockout blow, the captain fell.
"Quick!" cried Parsons to me, kneeling beside him, "a glass of water! The excitement has been too much for him. He's fainted!"
But he hadn't fainted. When the doctor reached the house he was dead.
"That heart of his," explained the physician. "I told him to be careful, to avoid any sudden strain or excitement."
Genevieve Rowan was beside herself with grief. In front of us all Parsons put his arms around her.
"There, there, dearest. It is terrible, yes. But it may be for the best."
Was it relief I saw on his face? T scorned myself for the thought, and yet, in spite of the fact that they had been absorbed in a kindred experiment, working together harmoniously enough in the laboratory, I was conscious of the fact that all was not, as it should be between the two men. How did I know this when I never heard a word of ill-feeling pass between them, never intercepted a glance that could be actually interpreted as inimical? I can't, say. But I knew it instinctively, as I knew other things on which their antagonism was based: things as to which my lips are forever sealed.
On the back porch I found a large notebook. It had evidently dropped from the captain's pocket as we carried him into the house. I slipped it into my pocket, intending to give it to Miss Rowan later, and continued on my way to the laboratory to lock things up. What I saw there drove all thought of the notebook from my mind. A strange glow was radiating from the glass cap which topped the head of the machine. It was reddish-blue in color. Evidently the chemical solution contained in the aluminum bowl gave rise to this phenomenon.
Fascinated, I climbed the short stepladder and peered through the glass. The glutinous mixture was pulsing as if alive. It was now a gray, speckled mass shot through with red streamers. The sight startled me? The gooseflesh rose on my skin, and I had that familiar sensation of the scalp which people mean when they say their hair stands on end.
I left the laboratory abruptly, in my haste forgetting to fasten the door. It was my intention to tell Parsons of what I had seen, but he was still in the parlor comforting the captain's sister; so I continued on my way upstairs.
I had just begun to strip when the deep purring of a motor came from the rear yard. This was strange, as I had heard no car entering the driveway. My room was in the rear of the house; so it was possible for me to glance out the open window to observe who it was. Darkness had fallen. The motor, by the sound of it, was right under me, near the back door. I could hear it, but the thick foliage of a pepper tree prevented me from looking straight down. Baffled, I stepped back, and as I did so someone flung open the back door with considerable force.
"What's the matter, Lester?" called Parsons' voice.
"It isn't I," I shouted down; "I'm upstairs."
"Then who the devil——"
A ponderous weight was dragging across the kitchen floor. My heart leapt suffocatingly in my throat. A floor board cracked like a pistol shot somewhere beneath me.
"I say," came Parsons' voice, "I say, what's the matter here? What's the—oh my God!"
His voice went up in a terrible crescendo; went up—and ceased. I snatched up the first thing beneath my hand—a large stilson wrench—and leapt down the stairs. Someone was screaming like mad, and the house was rocking under the impact of stamping blows. In the passageway I nearly trampled on a prone body—that of Genevieve Rowan—and had to hurdle it to reach the kitchen.
Parsons had evidently turned on the lights as he entered, for the room was well lighted. At the sight of what I saw strength nearly left, me. I stood as if petrified. There before me—believe it or not, as you like—was lying the crushed and bleeding body of Walter Parsons, his features fixed in a set grimace of stark horror and agony, while crouching over him like some fearsome prehistoric monster was the metal man he had helped to make, the hideous Robot, driving its short, arm-like pistons into his still quivering flesh.
The sight sickened me. My bowels turned to water. The awful monstrosity was bent over like a bow, screaming as if in rage, and the pulsing matter under the glass cap on the top of its head sent out its reddish-blue tinge and glared at me like an evil eye.
Insane with terror I showered blow after blow on it with my stilson wrench. The glass cap broke; the glutinous mass rolled out and pulsed on the floor like a living thing in its death throes. Even as it fell the whole body of the machine straightened up convulsively. Through all its sinuous wires and lengths ran a sighing sob. Then with a terrible crash it fell over on the already horribly mutilated body of its victim and was still.
I waited to see no more. I turned and ran. I remember that I screamed as I ran.
THAT is all. I told them everything at the inquest.
Nay, more, I showed them what was written in Captain
Rowan's notebook, the one I had picked up, put in my
pocket, forgotten, and then accidentally glanced at
later—only two pages of writing in the captain's
almost illegible script. They read as follows:
Within the entire realm of the vast and intricate modern science of electricity, there is nothing more wonderful and awe-inspiring than induction, action at a distance without a conducting wire. This fact is the base of the wireless systems of telegraphy and telephony, and of all electrodynamic machinery as dynamos and motors, the bases of electric lights and electric railroads. But see this.... I am convinced that we actually think by induction.
And underneath this palpable quotation, which is credited to Lucian Larkin, was written these words:
If this be true, then man's mind is more than the sum and total of his bodily organization. What if my heart can not hold out much longer? I know that my mind shall live on. It shall manifest itself through the brain of the machine. Parsons is mistaken about this. He is a fool. If he understood, if he knew.... Oh, Genevieve! If I thought that were true I would kill....
The writing stops here. But the question will not down [sic]. Did the mind of Captain Rowan, as it was leaving its fleshly vehicle, glimpse his sister in the arms of Walter Parsons? Was it his intelligence that animated the chemical brain, put the ponderous mechanism into motion, drove it across the yard into the kitchen, and brutally killed the man he hated? The coroner and the jury may ignore the facts. They may recoil from them in horror. They may attribute what I say to hysteria, an unbalanced mind; but the uncanny truth remains. Walter Parsons was not accidentally killed: he was murdered by a man already dead, and the weapon with which he was slain was the metal man and the chemical brain of his own partial creation!
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
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