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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77823 ***
+
+[Illustration: “High above them it towered, a smooth, slender column.”]
+
+
+
+
+                             The Red Brain
+
+                           by Donald Wandrei
+
+
+One by one the pale stars in the sky overhead had twinkled fainter and
+gone out. One by one those flaming lights had dimmed and darkened. One
+by one they had vanished forever, and in their places had come patches
+of ink that blotted out immense areas of a sky once luminous with stars.
+
+Years had passed; centuries had fled backward; the accumulating
+thousands had turned into millions, and they, too, had faded into the
+oblivion of eternity. The earth had disappeared. The sun had cooled
+and hardened, and had dissolved into the dust of its grave. The solar
+system and innumerable other systems had broken up and vanished, and
+their fragments had swelled the clouds of dust which were engulfing
+the entire universe. In the billions of years which had passed,
+sweeping everything on toward the gathering doom, the huge bodies, once
+countless, that had dotted the sky and hurtled through unmeasurable
+immensities of space had lessened in number and disintegrated until the
+black pall of the sky was broken only at rare intervals by dim spots of
+light--light ever growing paler and darker.
+
+No one knew when the dust had begun to gather, but far back in the
+forgotten dawn of time the dead worlds had vanished, unremembered
+and unmourned. Those were the nuclei of the dust. Those were the
+progenitors of the universal dissolution which now approached its
+completion. Those were the stars which had first burned out, died, and
+wasted away in myriads of atoms. Those were the mushroom growths which
+had first passed into nothingness in a puff of dust.
+
+Slowly the faint wisps had gathered into clouds, the clouds into seas,
+and the seas into monstrous oceans of gently heaving dust, dust that
+drifted from dead and dying worlds, from interstellar collisions of
+plunging stars, from rushing meteors and streaming comets which flamed
+from the void and hurtled into the abyss.
+
+The dust had spread and spread. The dim luminosity of the heavens had
+become fainter as great blots of black appeared far in the outer depths
+of Space. In all the millions and billions and trillions of years that
+had fled into the past, the cosmic dust had been gathering, and the
+starry horde had been dwindling. There was a time when the universe
+consisted of hundreds of millions of stars, planets, and suns; but they
+were ephemeral as life or dreams, and they faded and vanished, one by
+one.
+
+The smaller worlds were obliterated first, then the larger, and so in
+ever-ascending steps to the unchecked giants which roared their fury
+and blazed their whiteness through the conquering dust and the realms
+of night. Never did the Cosmic Dust cease its hellish and relentless
+war on the universe; it choked the little aerolites; it swallowed
+the helpless satellites; it swirled around the leaping comets that
+rocketed from one black end of the universe to the other, flaming their
+trailing splendor, tearing paths of wild adventure through horizonless
+infinitudes the dust already ruled; it clawed at the planets and sucked
+their very being; it washed, hateful and brooding, about the monarchs
+and plucked at their lands and deserts.
+
+
+Thicker, thicker, always thicker grew the Cosmic Dust, until the giants
+no longer could watch each other gyres far across the void. Instead,
+they thundered through the waste, lonely, despairing, and lost. In
+solitary grandeur they burned their brilliant beauty. In solitary
+defeat and death they disappeared.
+
+Of all the stars in all the countless host that once had spotted
+the heavens, there remained only Antares. Antares, immensest of the
+stars, alone was left, the last body in the universe, inhabited by
+the last race ever to have consciousness, ever to live. That race, in
+hopeless compassion, had watched the darkening skies and had counted
+with miserly care the stars which resisted. Every one that twinkled
+out wrenched their hearts; every one that ceased to struggle and was
+swallowed by the tides of dust added a new strain to the national
+anthem, that indescribable melody, that infinitely somber pæan of doom
+which tolled a solemn harmony in every heart of the dying race. The
+dwellers had built a great crystal dome around their world in order
+to keep out the dust and to keep in the atmosphere, and under this
+dome the watchers kept their silent sentinel. The shadows had swept in
+faster and faster from the farther realms of darkness, engulfing more
+rapidly the last of the stars. The astronomers’ task had become easier,
+but the saddest on Antares: that of watching Death and Oblivion spread
+a pall of blackness over all that was, all that would be.
+
+The last star, Mira, second only to Antares, had shone frostily pale,
+twinkled more darkly--and vanished. There was nothing in all Space
+except an illimitable expanse of dust that stretched on and on in every
+direction; only this, and Antares. No longer did the astronomers watch
+the heavens to glimpse again that dying star before it succumbed. No
+longer did they scan the upper reaches--everywhere swirled the dust,
+enshrouding Space with a choking blackness. Once there had been sown
+through the abyss a multitude of morbidly beautiful stars, whitely
+shining, wan--now there was none. Once there had been light in the
+sky--now there was none. Once there had been a dim phosphorescence in
+the vault--now it was a heavy-hanging pall of ebony, a rayless realm of
+gloom, a smothering thing of blackness eternal and infinite.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“We meet again in this Hall of the Mist, not in the hope that a remedy
+has been found, but that we find how best it is fitting that we die.
+We meet, not in the vain hope that we may control the dust, but in the
+hope that we may triumph even as we are obliterated. We can not win the
+struggle, save in meeting our death heroically.”
+
+The speaker paused. All around him towered a hall of Space rampant. Far
+above spread a vague roof whose flowing sides melted into the lost and
+dreamy distances, a roof supported by unseen walls and by the mighty
+pillars which rolled upward at long intervals from the smoothly marbled
+floor. A faint haze seemed always to be hanging in the air because of
+the measureless lengths of that architectural colossus. Dim in the
+distance, the speaker reclined on a metal dais raised above the sea of
+beings in front of him. But he was not, in reality, a speaker, nor was
+he a being such as those which had inhabited the world called Earth.
+
+Evolution, because of the unusual conditions on Antares, had proceeded
+along lines utterly different from those followed on the various bodies
+which had dotted the heavens when the deep was sprinkled with stars in
+the years now gone. Antares was the hugest sun that had leaped from
+the primeval chaos. When it cooled, it cooled far more slowly than the
+others, and when life once began it was assured of an existence not of
+thousands, not of millions, but of billions of years.
+
+That life, when it began, had passed from the simple forms to the
+age of land juggernauts, and so by steps on and on up the scale. The
+civilizations of other worlds had reached their apex and the worlds
+themselves become cold and lifeless at the time when the mighty
+civilization of Antares was beginning. The star had then passed through
+a period of warfare until such terrific and fearful scourges of
+destruction were produced that in the Two Days War seven billion of the
+eight and one-half billion inhabitants were slaughtered. Those two days
+of carnage ended war for eons.
+
+From then on, the golden age began. The minds of the people of Antares
+became bigger and bigger, their bodies proportionately smaller, until
+the cycle eventually was completed. Every being in front of the
+speaker was a monstrous heap of black viscidity, each mass an enormous
+brain, a sexless thing that lived for Thought. Long ago it had been
+discovered that life could be created artificially in tissue formed
+in the laboratories of the chemists. Sex was thus destroyed, and the
+inhabitants no longer spent their time in taking care of families.
+Nearly all the countless hours that were saved were put into scientific
+advance, with the result that the star leaped forward in an age of
+progress never paralleled.
+
+The beings, rapidly becoming Brains, found that by the extermination of
+the parasites and bacteria on Antares, by changing their own organic
+structure, and by _willing_ to live, they approached immortality.
+They discovered the secrets of Time and Space; they knew the extent
+of the universe, and how Space in its farther reaches became
+self-annihilating. They knew that life was self-created and controlled
+its own period of duration. They knew that when a life, tired of
+existence, killed itself, it was dead forever; it could not live again,
+for death was the final chemical change of life.
+
+These were the shapes that spread in the vast sea before the speaker.
+They were shapes because they could assume any form they wished. Their
+all-powerful minds had complete control of that which was themselves.
+When the Brains were desirous of traveling, they relaxed from their
+usual semi-rigidity and flowed from place to place like a stream of ink
+rushing down a hill; when they were tired, they flattened into disks;
+when expounding their thoughts, they became towering pillars of rigid
+ooze; and when lost in abstraction, or in a pleasurable contemplation
+of the unbounded worlds created in their minds, within which they often
+wandered, they resembled huge, dormant balls.
+
+From the speaker himself had come no sound although he had imparted his
+thoughts to his sentient assembly. The thoughts of the Brains, when
+their minds permitted, emanated to those about them instantly, like
+electric waves. Antares was a world of unbroken silence.
+
+The Great Brain’s thoughts continued to flow out. “Long ago, the
+approaching doom became known to us all. We could do nothing. It does
+not matter greatly, of course, for existence is a useless thing which
+benefits no one. But nevertheless, at that meeting in an unremembered
+year, we asked those who were willing to try to think of some possible
+way of saving our own star, at least, if not the others. There was no
+reward offered, for there was no reward adequate. All that the Brain
+would receive would be glory as one of the greatest which has ever been
+produced. The rest of us, too, would receive only the effects of that
+glory in the knowledge that we had conquered Fate, hitherto, and still,
+considered inexorable; we would derive pleasure only from the fact that
+we, self-creating and all but supreme, had made ourselves supreme by
+conquering the most powerful menace which has ever attacked life, time,
+and the universe: the Cosmic Dust.
+
+“Our most intelligent Brains have been thinking on this one subject
+for untold millions of years. They have excluded from their thoughts
+everything except the question: How can the dust be checked? They
+have produced innumerable plans which have been tested thoroughly.
+All have failed. We have hurled into the void uncontrollable bolts of
+lightning, interplanetary sheets of flame, in the hope that we might
+fuse masses of the dust into new, incandescent worlds. We have anchored
+huge magnets throughout Space, hoping to attract the dust, which is
+faintly magnetic, and thus to solidify it or clear much of it from
+the waste. We have caused fearful disturbances by exploding our most
+powerful compounds in the realms about us, hoping to set the dust so
+violently in motion that the chaos would become tempestuous with the
+storms of creation. With our rays of annihilation, we have blasted
+billion-mile paths through the ceaselessly surging dust. We have
+destroyed the life on Betelgeuse and rooted there titanic developers
+of vacua, sprawling, whirring machines to suck the dust from Space and
+heap it up on that star. We have liberated enormous quantities of gas,
+lit them, and sent the hot and furious fires madly flashing through the
+affrighted dust. In our desperation, we have even asked for the aid of
+the Ether-Eaters. Yes, we have in finality exercised our Will-Power to
+sweep back the rolling billows! In vain! What has been accomplished?
+The dust has retreated for a moment, has paused--and has welled onward.
+It has returned silently triumphant, and it has again hung its pall of
+blackness over a fear-haunted, nightmare-ridden Space.”
+
+Swelling in soundless sorrow through the Hall of the Mist rose the
+racing thoughts of the Great Brain. “Our chemists with a bitter
+doggedness never before displayed have devoted their time to the
+production of Super-Brains, in the hope of making one which could
+defeat the Cosmic Dust. They have changed the chemicals used in our
+genesis; they have experimented with molds and forms; they have
+tried every resource. With what result? There have come forth raging
+monstrosities, mad abominations, satanic horrors and ravenous foul
+things howling wildly the nameless and indescribable phantoms that
+thronged their minds. We have killed them in order to save ourselves.
+And the Dust has pushed onward! We have appealed to every living Brain
+to help us. We appealed, in the forgotten, dream-veiled centuries, for
+aid in any form. From time to time we have been offered plans, which
+for a while have made terrific inroads on the Dust, but plans which
+have always failed.
+
+“The triumph of the Cosmic Dust has almost come. There is so little
+time left us that our efforts now must inevitably be futile. But today,
+in the hope that some Brain, either of the old ones or of the gigantic
+new ones, has discovered a possibility not yet tried, we have called
+this conference, the first in more than twelve thousand years.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The tense, alert silence of the hall relaxed and became soft when the
+thoughts of the Great Brain had stopped flowing. The electric waves
+which had filled the vast Hall of the Mist sank, and for a long time
+a strange tranquillity brooded there. But the mass was never still;
+the sea in front of the dais rippled and billowed from time to time as
+waves of thought passed through it. Yet no Brain offered to speak, and
+the seething expanse, as the minutes crept by, again became quiet.
+
+In a thin column on the dais, rising high into the air, swayed the
+Great Brain; again and again it swept its glance around the hall,
+peering among the rolling, heaving shapes in the hope of finding
+somewhere in those thousands one which could offer a suggestion. But
+the minutes passed, and time lengthened, with no response; and the
+sadness of the fixed and changeless end crept across the last race. And
+the Brains, wrapped in their meditation, saw the Dust pushing at the
+glass shell of Antares with triumphant mockery.
+
+The Great Brain had expected no reply, since for centuries it had been
+considered futile to combat the Dust; and so, when its expectation,
+though not its wish, was fulfilled, it relaxed and dropped, the signal
+that the meeting was over.
+
+But the motion had scarcely been completed, when from deep within the
+center of the sea there came a violent heave; in a moment, a section
+collected itself and rushed together; like a waterspout it swished
+upward and went streaming toward the roof until it swayed thin and
+tenuous as a column of smoke, the top of the Brain peering down from
+the dimness of the upper hall.
+
+“I have found an infallible plan! The Red Brain has conquered the
+Cosmic Dust!”
+
+A terrific tenseness leaped upon the Brains, numbed by the cry that
+wavered in silence down the Hall of the Mist into the empty and
+dreamless tomb of the farther marble. The Great Brain, hardly relaxed,
+rose again. And with a curious whirling motion the assembled horde
+suddenly revolved. Immediately, the Red Brain hung upward from the
+middle of a sea which had become an amphitheater in arrangement, all
+Brains looking toward the center. A suppressed expectancy and hope
+electrified the air.
+
+The Red Brain was one of the later creations of the chemists, and had
+come forth during the experiments to produce more perfect Brains.
+Previously, they had all been black; but, perhaps because of impurities
+in the chemicals, this one had evolved in an extremely dark, dull-red
+color. It was regarded with wonder by its companions, and more so when
+they found that many of its thoughts could not be grasped by them. What
+it allowed the others to know of what passed within it was to a large
+extent incomprehensible. No one knew how to judge the Red Brain, but
+much had been expected from it.
+
+Thus, when the Red Brain sent forth its announcement, the others formed
+a huge circle around, their minds passive and open for the explanation.
+Thus they lay, silent, while awaiting the discovery. And thus they
+reclined, completely unprepared for what followed.
+
+For, as the Red Brain hung in the air, it began a slow but restless
+swaying; and as it swayed, its thoughts poured out in a rhythmic chant.
+High above them it towered, a smooth, slender column, whose lofty end
+was moving ever faster and faster while nervous shudders rippled up
+and down its length. And the alien chant became stronger, stronger,
+until it changed into a wild and dithyrambic pæan to the beauty of the
+past, to the glory of the present, to the splendor of the future. And
+the lay became a moaning praise, an exaltation; a strain of furious
+joy ran through it, a repetition of, “The Red Brain has conquered the
+Dust. Others have failed, but he has not. Play the national anthem in
+honor of the Red Brain, for he has triumphed. Place him at your head,
+for he has conquered the Dust. Exalt him who has proved himself the
+greatest of all. Worship him who is greater than Antares, greater than
+the Cosmic Dust, greater than the Universe.”
+
+Abruptly it stopped. The puzzled Brains looked up. The Red Brain had
+ceased its nodding motion for a moment, and had closed its thoughts to
+them. But along its entire length it began a gyratory spinning, until
+it whirled at an incredible speed. Something antagonistic suddenly
+emanated from it. And before the Brains could grasp the situation,
+before they could protect themselves by closing their minds, the
+will-impulses of the Red Brain, laden with hatred and death, were
+throbbing about them and entering their open minds. Like a whirlwind
+spun the Red Brain, hurtling forth its hate. Like half-inflated
+balloons the other Brains had lain around it; like cooling glass
+bubbles they tautened for a second; and like pricked balloons, as their
+thoughts and thus their lives were annihilated, since Thought was Life,
+they flattened, instantaneously dissolving into pools of evanescent
+slime. By tens and by hundreds they sank, destroyed by the sweeping,
+unchecked thoughts of the Red Brain which filled the hall; by groups,
+by sections, by paths around the whole circle fell the doomed Brains in
+that single moment of carelessness, while pools of thick ink collected,
+flowed together, crept onward, and became rivers of pitch rushing down
+the marble floor with a soft, silken swish.
+
+The hope of the universe had lain with the Red Brain.
+
+And the Red Brain was mad.
+
+
+
+
+  Transcriber’s note:
+
+
+  This etext was produced from Weird Tales, October 1927 (Vol. 10, No.
+  4.).
+
+  Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but
+  minor inconsistencies have been retained as printed.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77823 ***
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+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77823 ***</div>
+
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowe103_0000" id="cover">
+  <img class="w20" src="images/cover.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"><div class="chapter"></div>
+
+<h1>
+The Red Brain
+</h1>
+
+
+<p class="center f15">by <strong>Donald Wandrei</strong></p>
+
+<div class="p2">
+<figure class="figcenter illowe43_7500" id="redbrain">
+  <img class="w30" src="images/redbrain.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      “High above them it towered, a smooth, slender column.”
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"><div class="chapter"></div>
+
+
+
+<p>One by one the pale stars in the sky overhead had twinkled fainter
+and gone out. One by one those flaming lights had dimmed and darkened.
+One by one they had vanished forever, and in their places had come
+patches of ink that blotted out immense areas of a sky once luminous
+with stars.</p>
+
+<p>Years had passed; centuries had fled backward; the
+accumulating thousands had turned into millions, and they, too, had
+faded into the oblivion of eternity. The earth had disappeared.
+The sun had cooled and hardened, and had dissolved into the dust of
+its grave. The solar system and innumerable other systems had broken
+up and vanished, and their fragments had swelled the clouds of dust
+which were engulfing the entire universe. In the billions of years
+which had passed, sweeping everything on toward the gathering doom,
+the huge bodies, once countless, that had dotted the sky and hurtled
+through unmeasurable immensities of space had lessened in number and
+disintegrated until the black pall of the sky was broken only at
+rare intervals by dim spots of light—light ever growing paler and
+darker.</p>
+
+<p>No one knew when the dust had begun to gather, but far back
+in the forgotten dawn of time the dead worlds
+had vanished, unremembered and unmourned. Those were the nuclei of
+the dust. Those were the progenitors of the universal dissolution
+which now approached its completion. Those were the stars which had
+first burned out, died, and wasted away in myriads of atoms. Those
+were the mushroom growths which had first passed into nothingness in a
+puff of dust.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly the faint wisps had gathered into clouds, the
+clouds into seas, and the seas into monstrous oceans of gently heaving
+dust, dust that drifted from dead and dying worlds, from interstellar
+collisions of plunging stars, from rushing meteors and streaming
+comets which flamed from the void and hurtled into the abyss.</p>
+
+<p>The dust
+had spread and spread. The dim luminosity of the heavens had become
+fainter as great blots of black appeared far in the outer depths of
+Space. In all the millions and billions and trillions of years that
+had fled into the past, the cosmic dust had been gathering, and the
+starry horde had been dwindling. There was a time when the universe
+consisted of hundreds of millions of stars, planets, and suns; but
+they were ephemeral as life or dreams, and they faded and vanished, one
+by one.</p>
+
+<p>The smaller worlds were obliterated first, then the larger,
+and so in ever-ascending steps to the unchecked giants which roared
+their fury and blazed their whiteness through the conquering dust and
+the realms of night. Never did the Cosmic Dust cease its hellish and
+relentless war on the universe; it choked the little aerolites; it
+swallowed the helpless satellites; it swirled around the leaping
+comets that rocketed from one black end of the universe to the other,
+flaming their trailing splendor, tearing paths of wild adventure
+through horizonless infinitudes the dust already ruled; it clawed
+at the planets and sucked their very being; it washed, hateful and
+brooding, about the monarchs and plucked at their lands and deserts.</p>
+
+
+<p>Thicker, thicker, always thicker grew the Cosmic Dust, until the
+giants no longer could watch each other gyres far across the void.
+Instead, they thundered through the waste, lonely, despairing, and
+lost. In solitary grandeur they burned their brilliant beauty. In
+solitary defeat and death they disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the stars in all
+the countless host that once had spotted the heavens, there remained
+only Antares. Antares, immensest of the stars, alone was left, the
+last body in the universe, inhabited by the last race ever to have
+consciousness, ever to live. That race, in hopeless compassion, had
+watched the darkening skies and had counted with miserly care the stars
+which resisted. Every one that twinkled out wrenched their hearts;
+every one that ceased to struggle and was swallowed by the tides of
+dust added a new strain to the national anthem, that indescribable
+melody, that infinitely somber pæan of doom which tolled a solemn
+harmony in every heart of the dying race. The dwellers had built a
+great crystal dome around their world in order to keep out the dust
+and to keep in the atmosphere, and under this dome the watchers kept
+their silent sentinel. The shadows had swept in faster and faster from
+the farther realms of darkness, engulfing more rapidly the last of
+the stars. The astronomers’ task had become easier, but the saddest
+on Antares: that of watching Death and Oblivion spread a pall of
+blackness over all that was, all that would be.</p>
+
+<p>The last star, Mira,
+second only to Antares, had shone frostily pale, twinkled more darkly—and
+vanished. There was nothing in all Space except an illimitable
+expanse of dust that stretched on and on in every direction;
+only this, and Antares. No longer did the astronomers watch
+the heavens to glimpse again that dying star before it succumbed. No
+longer did they scan the upper reaches—everywhere swirled the dust,
+enshrouding Space with a choking blackness. Once there had been sown
+through the abyss a multitude of morbidly beautiful stars, whitely
+shining, wan—now there was none. Once there had been light in the
+sky—now there was none. Once there had been a dim phosphorescence
+in the vault—now it was a heavy-hanging pall of ebony, a rayless
+realm of gloom, a smothering thing of blackness eternal and infinite.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>“We meet again in this Hall of the Mist, not in the hope that
+a remedy has been found, but that we find how best it is fitting that
+we die. We meet, not in the vain hope that we may control the dust,
+but in the hope that we may triumph even as we are obliterated. We can
+not win the struggle, save in meeting our death heroically.”</p>
+
+<p>The speaker paused. All around him towered a hall of Space rampant. Far
+above spread a vague roof whose flowing sides melted into the lost and
+dreamy distances, a roof supported by unseen walls and by the mighty
+pillars which rolled upward at long intervals from the smoothly marbled
+floor. A faint haze seemed always to be hanging in the air because of
+the measureless lengths of that architectural colossus. Dim in the
+distance, the speaker reclined on a metal dais raised above the sea of
+beings in front of him. But he was not, in reality, a speaker, nor was
+he a being such as those which had inhabited the world called Earth.</p>
+
+<p>Evolution, because of the unusual conditions on Antares, had proceeded
+along lines utterly different from those followed on the various bodies
+which had dotted the heavens when the deep was sprinkled with stars in
+the years now gone. Antares was the hugest sun that had leaped from
+the primeval chaos. When it cooled, it cooled far more slowly than the
+others, and when life once began it was assured of an existence not
+of thousands, not of millions, but of billions of years.</p>
+
+<p>That life,
+when it began, had passed from the simple forms to the age of land
+juggernauts, and so by steps on and on up the scale. The civilizations
+of other worlds had reached their apex and the worlds themselves
+become cold and lifeless at the time when the mighty civilization of
+Antares was beginning. The star had then passed through a period of
+warfare until such terrific and fearful scourges of destruction
+were produced that in the Two Days War seven billion of the eight
+and one-half billion inhabitants were slaughtered. Those two days of
+carnage ended war for eons.</p>
+
+<p>From then on, the golden age began. The
+minds of the people of Antares became bigger and bigger, their bodies
+proportionately smaller, until the cycle eventually was completed.
+Every being in front of the speaker was a monstrous heap of black
+viscidity, each mass an enormous brain, a sexless thing that lived
+for Thought. Long ago it had been discovered that life could be created
+artificially in tissue formed in the laboratories of the chemists. Sex
+was thus destroyed, and the inhabitants no longer spent their time in
+taking care of families. Nearly all the countless hours that were saved
+were put into scientific advance, with the result that the star leaped
+forward in an age of progress never paralleled.</p>
+
+<p>The beings, rapidly
+becoming Brains, found that by the extermination of the parasites and
+bacteria on Antares, by changing their own organic
+structure, and by <i>willing</i> to live, they approached immortality. They
+discovered the secrets of Time and Space; they knew the extent of the
+universe, and how Space in its farther reaches became self-annihilating.
+They knew that life was self-created and controlled its own period
+of duration. They knew that when a life, tired of existence, killed
+itself, it was dead forever; it could not live again, for death was the
+final chemical change of life.</p>
+
+<p>These were the shapes that spread in
+the vast sea before the speaker. They were shapes because they could
+assume any form they wished. Their all-powerful minds had complete
+control of that which was themselves. When the Brains were desirous
+of traveling, they relaxed from their usual semi-rigidity and flowed
+from place to place like a stream of ink rushing down a hill; when
+they were tired, they flattened into disks; when expounding their
+thoughts, they became towering pillars of rigid ooze; and when lost
+in abstraction, or in a pleasurable contemplation of the unbounded
+worlds created in their minds, within which they often wandered, they
+resembled huge, dormant balls.</p>
+
+<p>From the speaker himself had come no
+sound although he had imparted his thoughts to his sentient assembly.
+The thoughts of the Brains, when their minds permitted, emanated to
+those about them instantly, like electric waves. Antares was a world
+of unbroken silence.</p>
+
+<p>The Great Brain’s thoughts continued to flow
+out. “Long ago, the approaching doom became known to us all. We could
+do nothing. It does not matter greatly, of course, for existence is
+a useless thing which benefits no one. But nevertheless, at that
+meeting in an unremembered year, we asked those who were willing to
+try to think of some possible way of saving our own star, at least, if
+not the others. There was no reward offered, for there was no reward
+adequate. All that the Brain would receive would be glory as one
+of the greatest which has ever been produced. The rest of us, too,
+would receive only the effects of that glory in the knowledge that
+we had conquered Fate, hitherto, and still, considered inexorable; we
+would derive pleasure only from the fact that we, self-creating and
+all but supreme, had made ourselves supreme by conquering the most
+powerful menace which has ever attacked life, time, and the universe:
+the Cosmic Dust.</p>
+
+<p>“Our most intelligent Brains have been thinking on
+this one subject for untold millions of years. They have excluded
+from their thoughts everything except the question: How can the
+dust be checked? They have produced innumerable plans which have
+been tested thoroughly. All have failed. We have hurled into the
+void uncontrollable bolts of lightning, interplanetary sheets of
+flame, in the hope that we might fuse masses of the dust into new,
+incandescent worlds. We have anchored huge magnets throughout Space,
+hoping to attract the dust, which is faintly magnetic, and thus to
+solidify it or clear much of it from the waste. We have caused fearful
+disturbances by exploding our most powerful compounds in the realms
+about us, hoping to set the dust so violently in motion that the
+chaos would become tempestuous with the storms of creation. With our
+rays of annihilation, we have blasted billion-mile paths through the
+ceaselessly surging dust. We have destroyed the life on Betelgeuse
+and rooted there titanic developers of vacua, sprawling, whirring
+machines to suck the dust from Space and heap it up on that star. We
+have liberated enormous quantities of gas, lit them, and sent the hot
+and furious fires madly flashing through the affrighted dust. In our
+desperation, we have even asked for the aid of the
+Ether-Eaters. Yes, we have in finality exercised our Will-Power to sweep
+back the rolling billows! In vain! What has been accomplished? The
+dust has retreated for a moment, has paused—and has welled onward.
+It has returned silently triumphant, and it has again hung its pall
+of blackness over a fear-haunted, nightmare-ridden Space.”</p>
+
+<p>Swelling
+in soundless sorrow through the Hall of the Mist rose the racing
+thoughts of the Great Brain. “Our chemists with a bitter doggedness
+never before displayed have devoted their time to the production of
+Super-Brains, in the hope of making one which could defeat the Cosmic
+Dust. They have changed the chemicals used in our genesis; they have
+experimented with molds and forms; they have tried every resource.
+With what result? There have come forth raging monstrosities, mad
+abominations, satanic horrors and ravenous foul things howling wildly
+the nameless and indescribable phantoms that thronged their minds. We
+have killed them in order to save ourselves. And the Dust has pushed
+onward! We have appealed to every living Brain to help us. We appealed,
+in the forgotten, dream-veiled centuries, for aid in any form. From
+time to time we have been offered plans, which for a while have made
+terrific inroads on the Dust, but plans which have always failed.</p>
+
+<p>“The
+triumph of the Cosmic Dust has almost come. There is so little time
+left us that our efforts now must inevitably be futile. But today, in
+the hope that some Brain, either of the old ones or of the gigantic
+new ones, has discovered a possibility not yet tried, we have called
+this conference, the first in more than twelve thousand years.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The tense, alert silence of the hall relaxed and became soft when the
+thoughts of the Great Brain had stopped flowing. The electric waves
+which had filled the vast Hall of the Mist sank, and for a long time a
+strange tranquillity brooded there. But the mass was never still; the
+sea in front of the dais rippled and billowed from time to time as
+waves of thought passed through it. Yet no Brain offered to speak, and
+the seething expanse, as the minutes crept by, again became quiet.</p>
+
+<p>In
+a thin column on the dais, rising high into the air, swayed the Great
+Brain; again and again it swept its glance around the hall, peering
+among the rolling, heaving shapes in the hope of finding somewhere in
+those thousands one which could offer a suggestion. But the minutes
+passed, and time lengthened, with no response; and the sadness of the
+fixed and changeless end crept across the last race. And the Brains,
+wrapped in their meditation, saw the Dust pushing at the glass shell of
+Antares with triumphant mockery.</p>
+
+<p>The Great Brain had expected no reply,
+since for centuries it had been considered futile to combat the Dust;
+and so, when its expectation, though not its wish, was fulfilled,
+it relaxed and dropped, the signal that the meeting was over.</p>
+
+<p>But the
+motion had scarcely been completed, when from deep within the center of
+the sea there came a violent heave; in a moment, a section collected
+itself and rushed together; like a waterspout it swished upward and
+went streaming toward the roof until it swayed thin and tenuous as a
+column of smoke, the top of the Brain peering down from the dimness
+of the upper hall.</p>
+
+<p>“I have found an infallible plan! The Red Brain
+has conquered the Cosmic Dust!”</p>
+
+<p>A terrific tenseness leaped upon the
+Brains, numbed by the cry that wavered in silence down the Hall of the
+Mist into the empty and dreamless tomb of the farther
+marble. The Great Brain, hardly relaxed, rose again. And with a curious
+whirling motion the assembled horde suddenly revolved. Immediately,
+the Red Brain hung upward from the middle of a sea which had become an
+amphitheater in arrangement, all Brains looking toward the center. A
+suppressed expectancy and hope electrified the air.</p>
+
+<p>The Red Brain
+was one of the later creations of the chemists, and had come forth
+during the experiments to produce more perfect Brains. Previously,
+they had all been black; but, perhaps because of impurities in the
+chemicals, this one had evolved in an extremely dark, dull-red color.
+It was regarded with wonder by its companions, and more so when they
+found that many of its thoughts could not be grasped by them. What it
+allowed the others to know of what passed within it was to a large
+extent incomprehensible. No one knew how to judge the Red Brain, but
+much had been expected from it.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, when the Red Brain sent forth
+its announcement, the others formed a huge circle around, their minds
+passive and open for the explanation. Thus they lay, silent, while
+awaiting the discovery. And thus they reclined, completely unprepared
+for what followed.</p>
+
+<p>For, as the Red Brain hung in the air, it began a
+slow but restless swaying; and as it swayed, its thoughts poured out
+in a rhythmic chant. High above them it towered, a smooth, slender
+column, whose lofty end was moving ever faster and faster while nervous
+shudders rippled up and down its length. And the alien chant became
+stronger, stronger, until it changed into a wild and dithyrambic pæan
+to the beauty of the past, to the glory of the present, to the splendor
+of the future. And the lay became a moaning praise, an exaltation; a
+strain of furious joy ran through it, a repetition of, “The Red Brain
+has conquered the Dust. Others have failed, but he has not. Play the
+national anthem in honor of the Red Brain, for he has triumphed. Place
+him at your head, for he has conquered the Dust. Exalt him who has
+proved himself the greatest of all. Worship him who is greater than
+Antares, greater than the Cosmic Dust, greater than the Universe.”</p>
+
+<p>Abruptly it stopped. The puzzled Brains looked up. The Red Brain had
+ceased its nodding motion for a moment, and had closed its thoughts to
+them. But along its entire length it began a gyratory spinning, until
+it whirled at an incredible speed. Something antagonistic suddenly
+emanated from it. And before the Brains could grasp the situation,
+before they could protect themselves by closing their minds, the
+will-impulses of the Red Brain, laden with hatred and death, were
+throbbing about them and entering their open minds. Like a whirlwind
+spun the Red Brain, hurtling forth its hate. Like half-inflated
+balloons the other Brains had lain around it; like cooling glass
+bubbles they tautened for a second; and like pricked balloons, as their
+thoughts and thus their lives were annihilated, since Thought was Life,
+they flattened, instantaneously dissolving into pools of evanescent
+slime. By tens and by hundreds they sank, destroyed by the sweeping,
+unchecked thoughts of the Red Brain which filled the hall; by groups,
+by sections, by paths around the whole circle fell the doomed Brains in
+that single moment of carelessness, while pools of thick ink collected,
+flowed together, crept onward, and became rivers of pitch rushing down
+the marble floor with a soft, silken swish.</p>
+
+<p>The hope of the universe
+had lain with the Red Brain.</p>
+
+<p>And the Red Brain was mad.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="transnote">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Transcribers_note">
+    Transcriber’s note:
+  </h2>
+
+<p>This etext was produced from Weird Tales, October 1927 (Vol. 10,
+No. 4.).</p>
+
+<p>Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but minor
+inconsistencies have been retained as printed.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77823 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #77823
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77823)