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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 ***