A few minutes later glideway T shot into the 'lateral ventricle', huge cavern of the Mid-Brain separated from the blast by the thick walls of the pallium. It looked like the inside of a giant wind tunnel brilliantly lit now with powerful searchlights. It was swarming with personnel; white electricians, blue air-conditioners, weird, sponge rubber-padded shapes of ray-proofed men, uniformed guards, even soldiers in uniform rushed to the spot from outlying garrisons of The Brains-preserve. It all seemed to rush up as the earth rushes up in a low-altitude parachute jump; it looked like headquarters of an army on the eve of a big drive, and then—
Lee and the girl felt themselves being violently derailed. Catchers had been thrown across all incoming glide ways from The Brain. Irresistibly they were propelled right into the arms of stretcher bearers in Red-Cross uniforms.
"Are you hurt?" somebody yelled. "By God, those fellows must have come through the flames. Look, they're all black with the smoke. Get a couple of respirators, Jack."
Lee waved the helping hands away; he was already on his feet. Anxiously he bent over Vivian. She had her head embedded in a stretcher-bearer's lap; her eyes rolled around in their smoke-blackened sockets in great surprise and her tongue licked parched lips, spreading rouge generously all around mixing it with soot. She looked so funny; almost as a minstrel singer at a county fair, but there was deep tenderness in Lee's voice:
"You're quite safe now, Vivian. How do you feel, brave girl?"
Her bosom heaved a big sigh:
"O simply wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Only, I'm afraid I'm going to be sick. It's the gas I swallowed. It's terrible; something always happens to me just when romance begins."
The stretcher bearer grinned up to Lee, "She sure gets it out of her system like a good little girl. Don't you worry; she'll be all right."
Lee nodded; he knew she would.
As the big drive went on and column after column went over the top up to the hemispheres, nobody wasted time on Lee. He cautiously surveyed the tumultuous scene. With his asbestos suit and with his blackened face everybody would take him for a fireman. He might be able to complete his mission, to ascertain that The Brain had stopped to function in all its parts, to make sure that it actually was dead. And if down at "Grand Central" the turmoil was as great as ever here; with all those strangers rushing in and bound to be rushed out again....