Donovan’s Brain Read online

  She had made up her mind to stay and no unkindness, no disregard could ever part her from me. I would have had to kill her to get rid of her.

  Even this would be of no avail. Her memory would haunt me to the end of my days. My life was her life too. She would never give up. She knew I knew that, and the futility of my attacks on her gave her inexhaustible strength.

  “All right, let Schratt stay here.”

  I gave up wearily. I had solved nothing. She had only bound herself to me more securely.

  SEPTEMBER 25

  I have moved my bed into the laboratory. I want to live as close as possible to the object of my experiment.

  I eat alone, never leave the laboratory, never see Janice and Schratt. From time to time I hear Schratt’s car arrive or leave. Franklin brings my food but, well trained, he never distracts me by talking.

  I ordered him to collect news about Donovan’s death and he transmitted my wish to Janice. Now nearly every day he brings in newspapers or magazines with stories about Donovan. I have read them all and soon I knew as much about Donovan’s life as if we had been intimates.

  Between myself and the brain in the respirator a very close relationship has developed. It is not just dumb, mute matter, kept alive by a pump, going on existing aimlessly. It is a living organ, ductile in its reactions and responsive to stimuli like a human being.

  After public curiosity at the first briefly reported news of the crash and its victim was exhausted, gossip began to reveal sordid details of Donovan’s private life.

  The more I read about him, the more his character darkens. He, like all the great money-makers, was unscrupulous to a criminal degree. Only a limited amount of money can be honestly earned. To amass millions in the short course of a life one must be ruthless and untroubled by a conscience.

  Nobody knows for certain how much money Donovan made, but he owned the biggest mail-order house in the world. It sprawled like an octopus over all the states.

  Donovan was sixty-five when the plane cracked up, no age for a strong man to die. He was traveling with his lawyer and two pilots. A few days before his death he had turned over the reins of the business to his son. It was a surprise to all of them—his board of directors and especially his family.

  Why Donovan, a man whose only incentive all his life had been a craving for more and more power, suddenly sloughed off his authority, the papers could not reveal. He had undertaken the plane trip to his Miami house without informing his family or friends. There has been speculation about quarrels with his son and daughter. A paper hinted at a disease, but nobody knows for sure.

  I have become deeply curious about Donovan’s life story. The laws of human emotions are unknown, but here I have an opportunity to penetrate the mysteries of a brain, perhaps discover the factors which determine its capabilities.

  Which chemical reaction creates success? Which one is responsible for our failures? Which produces happiness—which misery?

  Donovan’s brain may supply the answers.

  For hours I let the encephalogram run through my fingers and tried to find a relation between the form of the pen-curves and the thoughts they must express.

  We know that when the brain imagines a tree these curves are different from those when it thinks of a horse or an automobile. An emotional outburst of hatred draws different lines from those of pleasure.

  It is within possibility to find a code which translates the relation between the reading of the encephalograph and the mental image. If I could find the key, the brain could communicate with me.

  I cannot talk to it for it has no organ of hearing. It cannot see or taste. But without doubt it is sensitive to touch. When I knock at the glass vessel the brain receives the sound-waves and reacts.

  If it thinks, a process I cannot determine, only assume, I should be able to tap messages to it.

  The problem is how to receive an answer.

  SEPTEMBER 30

  For days I have tried to transmit the same phrase to the brain in Morse:—— • • • • • — • — • — • • • • — • • • • • • — — , — — • !

  Listen, Donovan! Listen, Donovan!

  The encephalograph has reacted, but always differently, in beta and delta frequencies. Never the same pattern twice.

  It occurred to me the brain might not understand the code. Donovan probably knew nothing about telegraphy. A simple explanation for my failure!

  Though the brain can conceive only what it has experienced, however, it might be possible to add to the sum of its knowledge by training.

  Patiently I began to tap out the Morse signals against the glass vessel: • — A, — • • • B.

  I went on indefatigably for days and nights, whenever I found the bulb at the relay burning to indicate the brain was awake. I was sometimes disheartened, for no sign indicated the brain understood what I wanted.

  But the brain seemed to be watching me. The beta curves were smooth and precise, as if it concentrated on what I was doing. When I stopped tapping, the frequencies on the paper tape changed.

  Donovan’s brain might be trying to send a message to me.

  OCTOBER 2

  I repeated the Morse signs thousands of times, perfunctorily, sometimes half asleep. In my dreams I became an instrument myself, repeating the signs unendingly. As I tapped out the letters of the alphabet over and over again, they would have sunk into the memory of a baby. A brain as intelligent and versatile as Donovan’s must realize there was a pattern in this, must remember it, even automatically, must decipher the meaning.

  Again I began: Listen, Donovan! Can you understand? Donovan! If you understand, think three times of a tree, Donovan. Three times “Tree.” Tree! Tree! Tree!

  I watched the encephalogram. The pen moved convulsively and formed a sign, the same sign, three times. The wild delta waves shook the pen as if in confusion.

  Exhausted, I slumped on my bed, unable to organize my thoughts. Was I mistaken? Had the brain really answered me? The encephalogram had showed the same curve three times, but did that prove that Donovan had understood?

  Theoretical concepts outside the experimental proof are meaningless. I had to dismiss speculation. I can accept only the proof my instruments supply.

  Again I tried: Think of a tree, three times. Tree, tree, tree.

  The sign appeared, once, twice, again! The same sign!

  Then alpha cycles flowed into beta frequencies, smooth, repeating. The brain, exhausted, had fallen asleep.

  I could measure its deep slumber. The deflections became wider. The brain was dreaming. The pen on the paper strip moved wildly. The brain was having a nightmare!

  OCTOBER 3

  The same night, last night, I went out to Schratt’s room behind the garage. I was at my wits’ end and had to talk to him.

  The brain had obeyed my command and repeated the words I told it to think. But how could I translate its own thoughts, which no doubt were written in the scrawls on the paper strip. I am impatient, afraid the brain may die in the midst of my observations. My time is limited.

  It was three o’clock in the morning. The sky was clear. Freezing cold made the sand crackle under my feet.

  Without knocking I stepped into Schratt’s room. He was deep in sleep, his mouth open. His face was thinner, but he looked healthy. The bloated skin had tightened and some color had come into his coarse cheeks. Janice’s saintly influence has deprived him of his liquor, I assume.

  He suddenly opened his eyes and stared at me as if he thought me a ghost. When I spoke his name, he sat up but still stared.

  “Come with me,” I said. My voice sounded hoarse.

  I must have frightened Schratt for I saw fear and suspicion in his eyes. I was looking into a bottomless pit: he was afraid I might cut him up to stick him into my test tubes. He thought me capable of anything to further my researches.

  “I want to show you something,” I said.

  The frightened look did not leave his eyes, but he cra
wled out of bed and pulled on a dirty old bathrobe. He seemed to be thinking seriously, his forehead furrowed. Finally he sat down again and spoke with desperate determination.

  “I’m not interested in your experiments, Patrick.”

  He had made up his mind to have no part in my work. He was more detached from me now, living in my house, than he had been in the days when he stormed out of the laboratory resolving never to see me again.

  “You must help me, Schratt. I can’t continue without you.”

  That was the most flattering appeal I could think of. He was visibly moved, but drawing the robe closer about his fat body, he still stubbornly shook his head.

  For him, and for me too, the whole world was a laboratory. But I used it and he shied away from new knowledge. He had withdrawn into a monkish seclusion, abjuring himself as a scientist.

  “You know I detest your researches, Patrick. They can’t help humanity! All they could do is promote unhappiness. They take the world back to barbarism.”

  “I’m a specialist and you too,” I replied, to help him argue himself out of these notions. “Civilization cannot exist without specialization.”

  “I’m not interested in civilization. We are so ignorant of our souls we take refuge in mechanics, physics, chemistry. We are losing our consciousness of the human dignity that distinguished man from animal. You are making the human being a highly specialized stone-age man ruled by egotism. You are creating a mechanical, synthetic life and killing the spirit that has lifted humanity above the beast. You believe only your test tubes. You are killing faith! I’m glad only a few men like you exist! Your researches have made you more and more rational, until you refuse to recognize a single fact cannot be proved in the laboratory. I’m frightened, Patrick! You’re creating a mechanical soul that will destroy the world.”

  I listened patiently. Schratt obviously had thought deeply about all this, and saying it seemed to make him feel better.

  “Great mathematicians and physiologists,” I said quietly, “inevitably arrive at a point where their minds meet something beyond human comprehension, something divine. They can only face it by believing in God, Most scientists become religious when they reach that stage of research.”

  Schratt looked at me astonished. Those might have been his own words. When he saw I had not spoken with irony, he nodded, but doubtfully, still mistrusting me as a convert to his philosophy.

  “However,” I began again at once when I saw his suspicion that I had deceived him, “However, to come to this point of submission to the great holy unknown, man first must travel through the sphere he is capable of exploring. Somewhere where our intelligence has its limits the road of our research ends. We juggle the incomprehensible to arrive at the concrete. We use a symbol for the infinite, dividing concrete figures with it, adding a plus, a minus to it, as if we could visualize the shape of the boundless. We use the infinite to count with, as if it were tangible. But nobody comprehends its nature. We penetrate regions beyond our intelligence and return with solutions to our problems. Whom do we hurt? Not even ourselves! I cannot give up my research because fear prompts me not to go on. At the end of the road I am traveling stands God, who speaks not in formulas but in monosyllables. I want to stand close enough to Him to hear His yes or no!”

  Schratt looked through me with a far-away expression.

  “Salvation must be earned by deeds, not by negation,” I concluded.

  I walked to the door and waited.

  The moon shone clear as a white sun in the transparent sky and myriads of stars filmed the firmament

  I had not looked at the sky in years.

  I heard Schratt murmur, and after a minute he came out of his room.

  He followed me into the laboratory, still doubtful and defensive. “What is it you want me to see?”

  “The brain is communicating with me,” I said. I pointed out how the relay was connected. The brain was asleep, the lamp dark.

  I knocked at the glass vessel and the lamp began to glow.

  Schratt stood staring at the bulb, unwilling to reveal his desire to hear how I had accomplished this step.

  I told him how I had communicated with the brain and taught it Morse. Schratt listened motionless, like a man confronted by something supernatural.

  I knocked at the vessel and told it to think of a tree, three times.

  The encephalogram showed unmistakably congruent curves, repeated them three times.

  Schratt slumped onto my bed and nodded. He forgot his determination not to interest himself in the experiment. He stared awed at the vessel, the instruments, the encephalograph. Schratt is a genius. He never doubted the evidence of his eyes. Only an extraordinary mind can accept a new thing at once. He did. He understood it.

  I sat down too. I gave him time to overcome his excitement. Finally he got up, stepped over to the vessel, and gingerly ran a thick forefinger along the electric connection to the encephalograph. When the bulb suddenly glowed, he nodded and murmured. His coarse bloated face shone with an inner light.

  “The brain is alive,” he said as if he had discovered a cosmic truth. “No doubt it is alive! We must find a way to get its messages.”

  He sat down heavily again and half closed his eyes, thinking. He did not seem discouraged by the apparent hopelessness of the task he was setting himself.

  He ran the paper strip through his fingers and examined it closely.

  “Alpha, beta, and delta frequencies,” he said. “But they can’t be deciphered.”

  He dropped the strip, discarding the idea of reading its curves.

  “There’s no possibility of decoding that,” he said definitely. “You tried, didn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “You went at it the wrong way. And you knew it…”

  I began to defend my theory to make him prove I was wrong.

  “If you registered every thought-wave on a paper strip,” I said, “and made yourself familiar with its curve, you ought to be able to compare the encephalogram from Donovan’s brain with your own thought dictionary. Assume I register my encephalogram of the word horse. Wouldn’t Donovan, thinking the same word, produce the same curve? Comparing it with mine, couldn’t I determine its meaning? Why could we not similarly decode messages from Donovan’s brain? Sound waves and brain waves are similar in design. Brain waves move between 1/2 and 60 cycles per second, sound waves between 10 and 16,000. Sound has wider variation than thought.”

  I knew I was wrong but I wanted to hear him refute the theory.

  Schratt shook his head. “A sound wave has fixed frequency, but thought-waves differ with each individual. My brain does not produce the same waves as yours, and even the daily changing state of your health influences the microvolt output of your cells. The flux of every idea is dependent on the microvoltage the brain produces, and that varies from minute to minute. It changes when you excite yourself, when you feel sick, when you are well. No! We must discard the theory of reading the encephalogram like a telegraph message.”

  He was right. But what other approach is there?

  “We could try to get in touch with it by telepathy,” he pondered.

  I was astonished at him. I would never have considered such an unorthodox method, approaching an unknown medium by using an unknown component.

  I must have shaken my head in disapproval, for he continued: “Why not? Let’s use this idea as a priori and not wait for the slow gathering of experimental evidence! The brain produces micro short waves. The surrounding air is permanently electrically charged with 9,000 frequencies. Our brain waves send out oscillations that disturb the electric field of the atmosphere, which in turn conducts the waves to the receiver. The thinking brain is the transmitter, the other brain the receiver.”

  “What other brain?” I asked.

  “Yours,” he said.

  He stared at me, snorted and nodded, furrowed his brow and nodded again, as if he had already proved his theory.

  “You have just hande
d me a theoretical analysis of the phenomenon of telepathy,” I said dryly, “and it’s primitive.”

  “There is clarity in simplification,” he answered earnestly, without conceit.

  Conceit sets a limit to wisdom and Schratt lacks conceit to the point of self-negation.

  I pondered the explanation.

  Brain number one the transmitter, brain number two the receiver, the surrounding air the electric field.

  All this could be proved. The encephalograph verified the fact that the brain released microvolts. The electric field of the surrounding air can be measured. But what about the receiving end, the second brain? How could we know that it would transform micro-waves back into thoughts which had originated in another brain?

  There was, simply, a body of public testimony and my own personal experience that telepathy is not a fake.

  A thought created in the mind of person number one can be received by person number two. It is plausible that our brain works like a radio station.

  “Granting your theory of the working of telepathy is true, how could we apply it to this problem?” I asked.

  “Try,” Schratt said, gropingly. “Try to cut out your own thoughts. Donovan’s thoughts might transmit themselves to you.”

  “I might imagine things. I want a fool-proof test,” I said, impatient.

  “There are plenty of famous mediums,” he suggested.

  “We might get a faker,” I answered. I had expected something better from Schratt than this unhealthy suggestion. “We’re in a laboratory, not a spiritualist séance.”

  Schratt paced up and down, murmuring to himself, shaking his head. He was pursuing the truth and I, instead of helping, had rejected his groping suggestions.

  “Give me time,” he said. “We will find it.”