Mind Over Matter by Raymond Z. Gallun

Author:Raymond Z. Gallun [Gallun, Raymond Z.]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Sci-Fi Short
Published: 2010-03-07T18:14:03.296000+00:00

THE little doctor tapped him solic-itously on the shoulder. "You will know presently what I know, my dear pal," he said softly, "for I shall tell you. You are depressed now. You should not be. You have become a demigod. You should rejoice as I am rejoicing, and in the end you shall, I assure you—unless you do something very rash. Glorious things, glorious adventures, lie ahead. I will explain. Do not think; do not interrupt. Only listen!"

The robot nodded dumbly.

"When I brought you here after the plane crashed, in no circumstances could you have lived, as you were, more than half an hour," Toussaint began. "What did I do? What could I do? I removed your brain from your skull, salvaging it from the wreckage of your body. I placed it in a bath of oxygen-ated fluid containing nourishing food elements. I caused the fluid to circulate through the veins and arteries of your brain by means of a small mechanical pump which served you then and serves you now as a heart.

"I kept the fluid always perfectly pure by means of a filter system. The oxygen content was constantly renewed, the carbon dioxide, and other wastes, removed. Necessary gland secretions were supplied in their normal quanti-ties. The temperature was held steady at blood heat. It was all quite simple, entirely automatic.

"Your brain lived, harboring—what should I say?—a trapped soul, an im-potent intellect. It could receive no real impressions of the outside world, only false and incoherent sensations of light and sound from the severed and raw optic and auditory nerves, and similarly jangled impressions, including great pain, from other crushed nerve tissue. It had no body. I must give it one, else its life was worse than death.

"You can guess much of the rest. This hand—this mechanical hand of mine—gave me the needed suggestion. I made your form as it is now. I made it strong—far stronger than you were. Thousands of electromagnets went into its construction, almost as many delicate relay systems. As a source of power I installed in it a sub-atomic energy cell that can hardly run down in a hundred years. Count-less fine platinum wires were prepared, ready to be attached to the motor nerves leading out of your brain, when I started the final assembling.

"Meanwhile, I was trying to give you senses. This phase of my task was somewhat more difficult, for I had never worked with sensory nerves before—only motor nerves controlling the move-ments of muscles. I constructed eyes, they were television cameras, really; I made a microphone to serve you in place of ears; I devised artificial or-gans of touch, and artificial organs of balance. Smell and taste I did not trou-ble with, for I considered them super-fluous. I fitted my creations with plati-num threads for attachment to the vari-ous sensory nerve ends leading into your brain. All this was quite simple.

"The great trick, my friend, was to cause those platinum threads to carry a properly modulated electric current to stimulate your nerve cells in just the way that would make you see and hear and feel properly.

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