He opened the door and looked around—as usual—in this vault as silent as the grave of a Pharaoh. There was a little dust on the glass cubicles of "Ant-termes-pacificus" and there were a few lines scribbled on the yellow memo-pad on his desk:
"Thanks for the weekend, boss. Everything normal and under control. Next feeding time at 8 p.m. the 27th. So long, Harris." Of course; he had given Harris, his assistant, the weekend off. That had escaped his mind in the excitement when The Brain's mutiny began.... And now it was the 29th.
"They must be ravenously hungry by this time," he thought, and that thought was in order because it was a normal thought.
He walked through the rows of the cubicles, halting his step every now and then. The fluorescent screens on which The Brain drew the curves of its observation-rays showed two sharp rises of the lines marked "activity" and "emotionality". The lower levels of the glass cages already were opaque; the glass corroded by the viscous acids which the soldiers had squirted from their cephalic glands in their attempts to break out and to reach food.
"Poor beasts," Lee thought, and he thought it without restraint because it was normal, a perfectly harmless thought. But then; below the layers of his consciousness his instincts told a different story.
"This is marvelous," they triumphed. "Fate takes a hand; they are desperate; they're ready for the warpath and even the tiger and the elephant would run for cover when their columns march."
As if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do Lee walked over to the south wall, the one which separated the lab from the interior of The Brain. He removed a sliding panel marked "L-Filler-Spout" and there it was before his eyes, looking almost like a fireplug. There was one in every apperception center and there were hundreds more throughout The Brain, and their purpose was to replenish the liquid insulation which shielded the sensitive electric nervepaths of The Brain. Without looking at the thing, concentrating his every thought upon the hunger of "Ant-termes-pacificus", Lee unscrewed the cap and put a finger into the opening. The finger came back covered with the thick, the syrupy lignin, this amber-colored sluggish stream of woodpulp liquefied, this soft bed of The Brain's vibrant nerves. Unthinking, absent-minded, Lee wiped the finger with his handkerchief.
"Now, I'm going to try a slightly different arrangement of the tests," he thought. "It's normal; I'm doing that almost every day."
The feeling he experienced as he swung into action was strange. As he walked back and forth it felt like somnambulic walk; something his limbs did without an act of will. As his hands did things expertly and skillfully the feeling was that they were instruments automatically moved not by his own volition but by some power outside himself.
His movements were those of a child serenely at play, a child incongruously tall and gaunt and grey-haired constructing little causeways and bridges on the ground with the logs of the fireplace; a happy child engrossed in an innocent game....