ed so funny; almost as a
minstrel singer at a county fair, but there was deep tenderness in Lee's
voice:

"You're quite safe now, Vivian. How do you feel, brave girl?"

Her bosom heaved a big sigh:

"O simply wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Only, I'm afraid I'm going to
be sick. It's the gas I swallowed. It's terrible; something always
happens to me just when romance begins."

The stretcher bearer grinned up to Lee, "She sure gets it out of her
system like a good little girl. Don't you worry; she'll be all right."

Lee nodded; he knew she would.

As the big drive went on and column after column went over the top up to
the hemispheres, nobody wasted time on Lee. He cautiously surveyed the
tumultuous scene. With his asbestos suit and with his blackened face
everybody would take him for a fireman. He might be able to complete his
mission, to ascertain that The Brain had stopped to function in all its
parts, to make sure that it actually was dead. And if down at "Grand
Central" the turmoil was as great as ever here; with all those strangers
rushing in and bound to be rushed out again....

"Why, I have a chance," Lee thought. Freedom; he had abandoned any hope
for it. Now the reborn idea surged through his blood, a powerful motor
as chance pressed the starter button for it.

The thing to do first was to get past the searchlight beams. From the
nearest pile of equipment he took an axe and a pair of long-handled
metal shears. Then he marched off, straight into the glaring eyes of the
searchlights till he got out of their cones, and the deep shadows of the
"thalamus" labyrinth swallowed him up.

Now he was on familiar ground and even in a familiar atmosphere. This
was like a night patrol through jungle. The black lights of The Brain
were the fireflies, the sirens' hollow wailings were the shriek owls and
the cries of the lemurs. There was the same sense of loneliness, too,
and of danger. The winding passages skirted the glandular organs, some
of them looming huge like dirigibles, others small like fuselages of
airplanes stored in a giant hangar underground. Strings of tiny green
bulbs guided the path toward the pineal gland, the citadel of The Brain.

* * * * *

It was dark, as Lee had expected it would be. The danger zone was at
least a mile away, and the attack against the fire was launched from the
main sulci in the median section of The Brain.

He passed the narrow bridge to the