He lowered a helmet over her expectant head and snatched it off again, but that moment had been enough for Dorothy. Her violet eyes widened terribly in an expression commingled of amazedly poignant horror and of dreadfully ecstatic fascination.
Her whole body trembled violently. "Oh, Dick, Dick!" she gasped. "How horrible!"
"Dick—Dick!" she shrieked; then, recovering slowly: "How horrible—how ghastly—how perfectly, exquisitely damnable! What is it? Why, I actually heard babies begging to be born! And there were men who had died and gone to heaven and hell; there were minds that had lost their bodies and didn't know what to do—were simply shrieking out their agony, despair, and utter, unreasoning terror for the whole universe to hear! And there were joys, pleasures, raptures, so condensed as to be almost as unbearable as the tortures. And there were other things—awful, terrible, utterly indescribable and unimaginable things! Oh, Dick, I was sure that I had gone stark, staring, raving crazy!"
"'Sall right, dear," Seaton reassured his overwrought wife. "All those things are really there, and more. I told you it was bad medicine—that it would tear your brain to pieces if you took much of it."
Seaton paused, weighing in his mind how best to describe the really indescribable signal that was being broadcast by the Brain, then went on, choosing his words with care:
"All the pangs and all the ecstasies, all the thoughts and all the emotions of all evolution of all things, animate and inanimate, are there; of all things that ever have existed from the unknowable beginning of infinite time and of all things that ever shall exist until time's unknowable end. It covers all animate life, from the first stirring of that which was to vitalize the first uni-cell in the slime of the first world ever to come into being in the cosmos, to the last cognition of the ultimately last intelligent entity ever to be.