The Dreamer - 5

 

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Chapter 5

While I was trying to go further in what the man had told of his personal story he took back with a sad voice to tell his tale.

«I apologize for talking in such a confused mess. Before continuing telling you the story of my son it would be better to resume what happened first. At the age of twentyone, after a long journey and appropriate studies, I started some peculiar experiments on the human brain. I felt that I had to create a super brain in order to be reproduced and form a race of supermen able to drive in the right direction this dreg of humanity that inhabits the world. After all, I had to consider that the brain of every living being contains, even though modified by evolution, the original matrix of our existence.

After some rough attempts of surgical engineering, that occupied me for different years, whose initial success and following disappointing bitterness almost led me to abandon the whole project, it was fate to intervene and to point out the right way to me.

Which kind of proof would I need to wait for? The same celestial stars directly showed me the way!

A beautiful day, in fact, while I was observing under the microscope a cat’s brain, an ulterior, fortunate guinea-pig, subtracted from the deprivations of its life for the glory of science, an amazing account happened to me.

I had set the small feline’s organ in a cylindrical open neck test-tube and I was continuously thinking about it, looking as usual for a sprout of understanding on its complex and mysterious composition. At a certain point, needing something to eat, I went upstairs. I unwillingly left the microscope’s focus. I was going to have a cup of tea, with my daily survival meal.

As I returned down stairs, I immediately noticed that something strange had happened during my brief absence. In the test-tube the brain of the cat had dried, acquiring a grey and pale color.

I extracted it with the pliers: it seemed like a dry sponge without any weight nor smell. What devil had it happened to? It was a gust of wind which answered me.

In that underground where I secretly developed my experiments, I had not left but a small window that I wanted surfaced to the level of the ground. It had slightly disclosed, quiet enough to allow the passage of a provident ray of sun which, intruding the optic circuit of the microscope, had poured in with all its mighty energy, dehydrating completely the object of my experiments.

But my light, initial disappointment had soon to be transformed into high exultation, when I closely observed the test-tube that had served like a furnace to that unforeseen experiment. On its fund rested some drops of a dense and glimmering liquid! I had a lightning, an intuition that afterwards had to be exactly revealed.

Admirably exact, my friends! I had found the way to extract from the muscle that includes our life, from the brain that contains all the knowledge of a human being, its own essence. An extract, a summary, that is the same, but free from the physical brain’s encumbrance, from the grey mash that comprises it. Free from the flesh as a soul is free from his body as an idea from his thinker as a thought from his action!

As you certainly know all our mental energy springs by a simple chemical reaction that is continuously produced in our brain. Such a reaction, that the physicians define with the name of “synapse”, is originated by the reaction between the liquid whose brain is imbued and the cells it copiously contains. In practice this liquid, that has equal molecular structure in every man, works as a tracing detector of the cerebral process, whose action is, instead, what countersigns a man from another.

The intimate reasons for such different actions of the cerebral processing, have seen divided for a long time the humanity. Manhood has however been until now incapable of determining the true reason for the difference of the beings of its species. A human being, from the scientific point of view, is only a product of a causal connection of the basically chemical mixtures that are contained in the cells. And all its activity is coordinated by the cerebral cells.

To succeed in obtaining a distillate of those cells, meant therefore to dispose of a substance of inestimable value.

At the beginning I thought to try his reproduction, but actually this would have been only an interesting and suggestive detour from my principal aim.

In order to reach it I had to gather all my efforts, and the results of those first experiments constituted the base of my following job.

First of all it was clear that the cerebral muscle, under particular conditions of temperature and environment, like those which took accidentally place that prophetic day in my laboratory, released a particular, liquid and dense substance, containing the fundamental geniuses, that I call primaries; those which are responsible of the most intimate and proper characters of the race.

It was also evident that such substance appeared able to be moved into another brain, creating there a new habitat in which to regenerate its cells and with them repurchase its functions and its aboriginal characters.

I verified more times the exactness of these hypotheses, but only in a direction that I define evolutionary. The experiment only succeeded if the essence of a superior animal, in the steps of the evolutionary chain, was introduced in the brain of an inferior animal, while in the other way down, the phenomenon took place in a lesser and very attenuated tone deprived of significant consequence.

I baptized the liquid essence ‘nouchefalon ', and I prepared myself to develop in the foreseen direction of my experiments. What would happen if I transfused some ‘human nouchefalon ' into the brain of another man?»