Cables snaked from the tank to a nearby clutter of electrical devices, but he paid them no particular notice. His attention was drawn to a woman standing before the aquarium. Her lab smock seemed to glow in the gloom.
She had clearly been waiting for him, for without preamble, she said, “I am Professor Anna Pavlova.” Her face was old and drawn; her eyes blazed with passionate intensity. “You have probably never heard of me, but — ”
“Of course I know of you, Professor Pavlova!” Rudy babbled. “You are one of the greatest inventors of all time! The monorail! Citywide steam heat! You made the Naked Brains possible. The masses idolize you.”
“Pah!” Professor Pavlova made a dismissive chopping gesture with her right hand. “I am but a scientist, nothing more nor less. All that matters is that when I was young I worked on the Naked Brain Project. Those were brave days indeed. All the best thinkers of our generation — politicians, artists, engineers — lined up to surrender their bodies in order to put their minds at the service of the people. I would have done so myself, were I not needed to monitor and fine-tune the nutrient systems. We were Utopians then! I am sure that not a one of them was influenced by the possibility that as Naked Brains they would live forever. Not a one! We wished only to serve.”
She sighed.
“Your idealism is commendable, comrade scientist,” Rudy said. “Yet it is my unhappy duty to inform you that the Council of Naked Brains no longer serves the people’s interests. They — ”
“It is worse than you think!” Professor Pavlova snapped. “For many years I was part of the inner circle of functionaries serving the Brains. I saw… many things. Things that made me wonder, and then doubt. Quietly, I began my own research. But the scientific journals rejected my papers. Lab books disappeared. Data were altered. There came a day when none of the Naked Brains — who had been my friends, remember! — would respond to my messages, or even, when I went to them in person, deign to speak to me.
“I am no naïve innocent. I knew what that meant: the Fist would shortly be coming for me.
“So I went underground. I befriended the people here, whose bodies are damaged but whose minds remain free and flexible, and together we smuggled in enough equipment to continue my work. I tapped into the city’s electric and gas lines. I performed miracles of improvisation and bricolage. At first I was hindered by my lack of access to the objects of my study. But then my new friends helped me liberate Old Teddy” — she patted the side of the fish tank — “from a pet shop where he was kept as a curiosity. Teddy was the key. He told me everything I needed to know.”
Rudy interrupted the onslaught of words. “This fish told you things?”
“Yes.” The scientist picked up a wired metal dish from the lab bench. “Teddy is very, very old, you see. When he was first placed in that tank, he was quite small, a wild creature caught for food but spared the frying pan to be put on display.” She adjusted cables that ran from the silver dish to an electrical device on the bench. “That was many years ago, of course, long before you or I were born. Sturgeon can outlive humans, and Teddy has slowly grown into what you see before you.” Other cables ran from the device into the tank. Rudy saw that they had been implanted directly into the sturgeon’s brain. One golden-grey eye swiveled in the creature’s whiskered, impassive head to look at him. Involuntarily, he shuddered. It was just a fish, he thought. It wished him no ill.
“Have you ever wondered what thoughts pass through a fish’s brain?” With a grim smile that was almost a leer, the scientist thrust the silver dish at Rudy. “Place this cap on your head — and you will know.”
More than almost anything, Rudy wanted not to put on the cap. Yet more than anything at all, he wanted to do his duty to his fellow beings, both human and fish. This woman might well be mad: she certainly did not act like any woman he had ever met. The device might well kill him or damage his brain. Yet to refuse it would be to give up on the adventure entirely, to admit that he was not the man for the job.
Rudy reached out and took the silver cap.
He placed it upon his head.
Savage homicidal rage filled him. Rudy hated everything that lived, without degree or distinction. All the universe was odious to him. If he could, he would murder everyone outside his tank, devour their eggs, and destroy their nests. Like a fire, this hatred engulfed him, burning all to nothing, leaving only a dark cinder of self at his core.
With a cry of rage, Rudy snatched the silver cap from his head and flung it away. Professor Pavlova caught it, as if she had been expecting his reaction. Horrified, he turned on her. “They hate us! The very fish hate us!” He could feel the sturgeon’s deadly anger burning into his back, and this filled him with shame and self-loathing, even though he knew he did not personally deserve it. All humans deserved it, though, he thought. All humans supported the idea of putting fish in tanks. Those who did not were branded eccentrics and their viewpoint dismissed without a hearing.
“This is a terrible invention! It does not reveal the universal brotherhood natural among disparate species entwined in the Great Web of Life — quite the opposite, in fact!” He despaired of putting his feelings into words. “What it reveals may be the truth, but is it a truth that we really we need to know?”
Professor Pavlova smiled mirthlessly. “You understand so well the inequalities in human intercourse and the effect they have on the human psyche. And now! Now, for the first time, you understand some measure of what a fish feels and thinks. Provided it has been kept immobile and without stimulation for so many years it is no longer sane.” She glanced over at Old Teddy with pity. “A fish longs only for cold water, for food, for distances to swim, and for a place to lay its eggs or spread its milt. We humans have kept Teddy in a tank for over a century.”
Then she looked at Rudy with almost the same expression. “Imagine how much worse it would be for a human being, used to sunshine on his face, the feel of a lover’s hand, the soft sounds an infant makes when it is happy, to find himself — even if of his own volition — nothing more than a Naked Brain afloat in amniotic fluid. Sans touch, sans taste, sans smell, sans sound, sans sight, sans everything. You have felt the fish’s hatred. Imagine how much stronger must be the man’s.” Her eyes glittered with a cold fire. “I have suspected this for years, and now that I have experienced Teddy’s mind — now I know.” She sliced her hand outward, as if with a knife, to emphasize the depth of her knowledge, and its force. “The Naked Brains are all mad. They hate us and they will work tirelessly for our destruction.”
“This is what I have been saying all along,” Rudy gasped. “I have been trying to engage — ”
Pavlova interrupted him. “The time for theorizing and yammering and pamphleteering is over. You were brought here because I have a message and I need a messenger. The time has come for action. Tell your superiors. Tell the world. The Naked Brains must be destroyed.”
A sense of determination flooded Rudy’s being. This was what all his life had been leading up to. This was his moment of destiny.
Which made it particularly ironic that it was at that very moment that the Fist smashed in the door of the laboratory.
Radio Jones had punched a hole in the center of a sheet of paper and taped it to the casing of her all-frequencies receiver with the tuner knob at the center, so she could mark the location of each transceiver set she found. The tuner had a range of two hundred ten degrees, which covered the entire spectrum of the communications band. So she eyeballed it into quarters and then tenths, to give a rough idea how things were laid out. It would be better to rank them by electromagnetic frequency, but she didn’t have the time to work all that out, and anyway, though she would never admit this out loud, she was just a little weak on the theoretics. Radio was more a vacuum-tube-and-solder-gun kind of girl.