Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 6 (1926-12).djvu/7

 wave of applause and laughter rippled across the stadium at sight of it.

And after the game, the football team, become heroes of the hour by their victory over Bannister, marched together to the home of the university's president and presented him with a petition demanding the summary dismissal of the professor whose charlatanry was smirching the name of Juston. The president smilingly accepted the document.

So the next morning, after an hour of nervous fidgeting and snapping of fingers, the president summoned Detmold and smoothly informed him that his resignation would be accepted.

here was a stormy scene in that office when Detmold learned that he was to be shunted out of the university. He was a tall, powerful man with a keen, relentless face, and in his rage he came near to laying violent hands on the president, and said a number of scathing things regarding that individual's stupidity and cowardice, winding up with a red-hot denunciation of the world at large. When he burst out of the office, he thrust rudely through the little knot of curious listeners at the door, and hurried over to his laboratory, to begin packing the experiment that had caused his dismissal.

It was there that he was found an hour later by Gilbert Lanier, the one instructor at Juston who understood and sympathized with the man. Also Lanier, a diffident young English teacher, was probably Detmold's only friend, for Detmold seemed to have no close relatives at all, and his testy, high-strung nature repelled most people. Sitting on a desk, moodily contemplating the little room that had been his private laboratory for years, he told Lanier of his dismissal, raging the while at the president and his disapproval of "impossible theories". "Impossible theories!" he mocked.

"My God, and I used to think that a great scientific discovery was welcomed with open arms! And these fools think I am crazy, to work on such a thing at all! Look at this, Lanier,—you haven't seen it since I made the improvements," and he turned to a table on which rested the artificial brain.

It was very simple in appearance, resembling an egg of black metal, some ten inches in length. Inset in its upper surface was a small lens of glass, and leading into each end of the thing were three wires, which were connected to a complicated tangle of electrical apparatus on the other side of the room.

As Lanier watched, Detmold made swift adjustments and snapped on several switches, and the low humming of a motor-generator filled the room. Turning eagerly, his smoldering resentment forgotten for the moment, he said, "The same basic principle. The T-wave, the vibratory current, is produced over there and led into the brain-case to act on the atomic organism inside. Right now that thing is conscious," and he gazed at it with mingled fondness and

Lanier could not restrain an increduluous shrug of his shoulders, and Detmold took it up at once. "I repeat, conscious," he asserted. "It is consciousness of a crude, dim sort, but still consciousness, awareness, knowledge. And I can prove it now. Since you last saw it I've provided it with the sense of sight. See that inset lens? Well, it's like no lens you ever saw, for it's really an artificial eye, that I made myself. There is an artificial retina beneath and it is connected direct to the brain-stuff, and carries its sensations to it, as electric currents."

"An artificial retina?" asked Lanier. "Isn't that going a bit too far? An inorganic material sensitive to light?"