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Title: Brains for Bricks
Date of first publication: 1945
Author: Malcolm Jameson (1891-1945)
Date first posted: Apr. 24, 2022
Date last updated: Apr. 24, 2022
Faded Page eBook #20220460

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines

This file was produced from images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries.




[Source: Astounding Science Fiction, April 1945]




Brains for Bricks

by MALCOLM JAMESON

_Given time enough, ants learn, even though, individually, they are
almost brainless.  They might--or a type like them might--rule a
world, in time.  But men have something worth while, too; brains have
their advantages._



When next an Armadian ship came to Terra it was a gala day.  This
time it hove into sight escorted by a guard of honor; not harried and
hounded by Terrestrian cruisers pecking futilely away at it out of
their dread of the unknown.  Now the world knew that the Armadian
intentions were not hostile.  They merely wanted that portion of the
Solar System which Earthmen could not use themselves, and by way of
recompense had sent an ambassador with a generous offer.  If the
Earth cruisers would quit attacking the Armadians engaged in mining
the Red Spot on Jupiter and cede that planet and Saturn, the
Terrestrians would be granted reciprocal rights in the Armadians' own
bailiwick--the vast family of planets that swam about the sun Gol.
It was this successful envoy whom the latest Armadian ship had come
to pick up.

Ellwood, chief of the Bureau of Interplanetary Military Intelligence,
better known simply as the boss bimmy, watched the proceedings with
interest.  He saw how cleverly the incoming ship maneuvered itself
alongside the grounded wreck of the ambassadorial vessel.  For the
first visitor was a partial wreck, having been fatally holed by a
zealous cruiser captain unaware of the peaceful mission on which it
was bent.  And Ellwood watched how deftly the alien monsters managed
the transfer of their imprisoned ambassador from his refuge in the as
yet intact control room.  Pholor, for that was the name finally given
by him, was about to go, bearing with him the perpetual treaty of
amity and commerce which he and Ellwood so laboriously had contrived
to negotiate.  And then, to the roar of saluting batteries and
amongst a display of flags, the alien ship was off--to bear back to
Armadia the strange news.  Two races, each detestable monsters in the
other's eyes, had found common ground.

Ellwood turned away.  He disregarded the flow of oratory still coming
from the temporary platform where the political bigwigs were holding
forth.  It was his own infinite patience and sympathetic
understanding that had made communication with these outside
creatures possible, but those qualities were essential to the proper
doing of his job.  He took no credit for them and expected none.
After all, his role had been that of a mere interpreter.  The
ultimate decision had had to rest with the Council.

He strode off toward the laboratory building.  Already the posters
were up proclaiming the millennium was at hand.  Shortly, thanks to
the wisdom of the Powers That Be, new and fairer worlds would be open
to settlement.  Pioneering expeditions were in preparation.  In a few
brief years congested, tired old Mother Earth would see her chicks
begin emigrating to far off Golia, where virgin planets were.  No
longer were the mysterious alien ships to be dreaded.  No longer
would conservationists have to worry about the approaching exhaustion
of the last mineral deposits.  No longer would the population-control
men quail at the sight of the latest census figures.  On New Eden, as
the unseen promised planet was already being called, such problems
would not exist.

Ellwood's mind was not on those by-products of his efforts.  They
were in the hands of others.  He still had work to do right where he
was.  His gang knew that too, for Darnhurst was waiting for him in
his office.

"All right, fella, hop to it," said Ellwood, sensing the unspoken
question, and getting at once to the point.  "Let the politicians
spout.  Our job is only half done.  Round up your men and go on into
that control room and find out what all the gadgets are for.  Pholor
gave us the ship for whatever we could learn from it."

"Dynamic or static study, chief?"

"Both--in that order.  But I warn you.  You'll have to take
precautions.  Working conditions in there are not nice.  It's hot--a
thousand Fahrenheit, about.  It's filled with stinking, poisonous
gases at hellish pressures.  And the grav plates are still putting
out 3-Gs.  You'll need to rig yourselves like I did or you'll pass
out in nothing flat.  But aside from that, the rest of it ought to be
duck soup.  Nothing was damaged in there."

"Yes, sir," grinned Darnhurst, and began punching call buttons on the
order board.

After he left, Ellwood went down the hall to where Gonzales was
working.  As he passed the cadaver of the Armadian they had held back
from dissection he paused a moment for a closer inspection of it.  He
was thankful that the Armadians appeared to have no respect for their
dead, for Pholor had never intimated that he would like to carry away
the bodies of the three killed by the hasty cruiser.  This one would
be an invaluable addition to the Bureau's museum.

As he regarded the sprawling remains of the--well, Thing--he could
not fail to appreciate the horror the sight of it would inspire in
the normal human being.  There was no denying that the instinctive
reaction would be revulsion.  For it was grotesque,
ugly--_incredible_.  It lay there, an inert mass now, of armored
sections from which sprouted strange appendages.  It was as if some
madman had dreamed up in a moment of a delirium a beast compounded in
part of rhinoceri, octopuses, and armadillos, and ranged the segments
in rows caterpillar fashion.  For each plated segment rested on an
elephantine monopod, and atop them were either nests of wide-ranging
retractable tentacles, or else sets of weirdly shaped horns arranged
as pentodes, triodes and diodes.

Ellwood wondered whether the psychomeds had made further progress
while he had been engaged with Pholor.  There were mysteries as yet
unsolved.  The Armadian was mouthless, eyeless, noseless, and
earless.  It had no alimentary tract.  It subsisted on the vile
mixture of ammonia-dominated air.  It breathed through gills located
beneath the segmental plates.  It hunched itself around clumsily on
its monopodial feet.  It tended the intricate machinery of its ship
with its many tentacles, each of which ended in some toollike
terminal of horny growth.  Some were capable of grasping, others
cutting, punching, or exerting pressure.  The body mechanics of the
monsters, granting their queer metabolism, was fairly well
understood.  It was the nervous system that was baffling.

Perception came to an Armadian through his horns.  Under their plates
was a tangled mess of wire-like nerves, actuated by the radioactive
salts abundant in their body fluids.  Somehow they generated a queer
sort of what can only be called organic radiation, similar to but
different from ordinary radio waves or any other in the band of
electro-magnetic phenomena.  They radiated those waves on a variety
of frequencies from the antennae horns, and in turn interpreted their
environment as they rebounded.  Ellwood knew that much, and accepted
it.  What bothered him was that nowhere in the creature's structure
was there anything analogous to a brain.  There were only clotted
ganglia arranged haphazardly throughout.  Some were motor
controlling, others sensorily interpretive.  And there ended their
capacity so far as any human knew.


Ellwood shrugged and walked on into Gonzales' room.  His assistant
was hunched over a microscope intent on something in its field while
his fingers played incessantly on the buttons of a small testing box.
Meter needles quivered as oscillating currents surged back and forth.
But at Ellwood's footfall Gonzales sat back and flicked off the juice.

"What luck?" asked Ellwood.

"Still looking for a brain.  They just haven't any, that's all.  It's
a screwy thing to say, but that is the way it is."

"Humph," frowned Ellwood.  "It doesn't fit.  They have memory, for
they have been coming here at intervals for fifty years, and after
the first visit confined their attentions to Jupiter, knowing the
inner planets were unsuitable for them.  They also remembered our
many futile attacks on them.  That is why they wanted to reach an
understanding."

"That may be," shrugged Gonzales, "but now that you bring it up, how
much memory does a young salmon have when she first goes to spawn?
Yet she unerringly finds the proper place, though no fish is heavily
endowed with thinking matter.  No, I have examined this stuff over
and over.  There is no seat of reason.  There are only reflexes.
Highly intricate ones, yes, but reflexes."

Ellwood picked up a handful of the shredded stuff on the table.  It
was the remnants of an involved lump of nerve ganglia.

"Shoot amps enough into that," went on Gonzales, "and follow through,
and it comes to life.  In its essence it is a sort of radar.  But it
reports.  It doesn't think.  And it is the biggest and the most
complicated of all the Armadian ganglia.  Armadians do what they do
like a bird builds her nest or a cobra spits venom--by a sort of
super instinct.  You needn't tell me that because they have
space-spanning power ships jammed with crazy machinery that they have
to be reasoning beings.  I can't find any histological evidence to
support the view.  What they do is largely automatic."

"Nonsense," said Ellwood, a little testily, recalling the fine spirit
displayed by Pholor.  "They do reason, as was evidenced by Pholor's
coming here at grave risk to himself.  He wanted us to stop our
senseless attacks on his ships, and at the same time realized we
would expect some inducement.  There you have not only memory, but
foresight and logic.  I even got a clear impression that the
Armadians have what we call a sense of honor."

"The sense of honor," said Gonzales, dryly, "waits on the future to
be proved.  As to memory, foresight, and logic I merely suggest to
you the well-known phenomenon known as symbiosis.  Is the three-way
partnership reputed to prevail among owls, prairie dogs and
rattlesnakes the result of logically arrived at treaties?  Or the
relations between sharks and pilot fishes?  Or those between ants and
aphids?  In their queer way these Armadians appreciate that we are no
threat to them, though something of a bother.  Who knows?  Perhaps
elsewhere in the galaxy they have experimented with co-operation and
found that it pays better than strife.  They sensed the same
possibilities here and reacted.  To me it is no more mysterious than
that."

"I don't know," said Ellwood slowly.  "Pholor _showed_ me--through
his marvelous telepathic power--their high civilization, their
immense heavy industries, their knowledge of atomics.  I can't
believe it is just instinct."

Gonzales laughed, for he saw the chief was shaken, despite his stand.

"Consider the lowly ant, boss.  With lots less on the ball it has
managed a pretty intricate social order too, and one that has lasted
down through eons of perpetual adaptation by the rest of us so-called
higher beings.  Who are we to be scornful?  Where are the dinosaurs
today?  Or Babylon, Rome, or a score of other perfected
civilizations?  The ant is a pragmatic creature.  He found what
worked, and stuck to it, dumbly if you please, but the ant endures.
Yet we, vain with our sharp critical ability and ever itching to move
on to loftier heights, tear down as fast as we build.  If history
means anything at all, it is that man is doomed by his own restless
intellect to a succession of cycles.  We go up, we go down, we get
nowhere.  That is what reasoning and your precious logic does for
you."

It was Ellwood's turn to grin.  Gonzales was a fellow with a
philosophy all his own.  This sort of thing could go on all
afternoon.  Ellwood was just about to break off and go when an
annunciator began howling.  Darnhurst was paging him.

"Yes, Darnhurst?"

"Better come down to the ship, chief.  We've run into trouble in
bunches."

Darnhurst did not exaggerate.  Ellwood went, and he saw.

"No," he said, "this won't do.  You've got to do it the hard way."


A hard way it was.  One exasperating week of mankilling work followed
another; the season waned and its successor came in before the bimmy
gang satisfied its exacting chief that all had been learned about the
Armadian spaceship.  Where Darnhurst fell down in the beginning was
in trying to ameliorate the conditions under which they must work.
It proved to be impossible except for one detail.  They found they
could cut the artificial gravity down from 3-Gs to Earth normal.
Every other effort at comfort failed.

The first had been the withdrawal of the noxious superheated Armadian
gases and the substitution of air.  At once hot metals that had never
been exposed to the element before began oxidizing at an alarming
rate.  Unless oxygen was kept away there shortly would be no machines
to study.  So the ammonia-methane-phosgene combination went back in.
Nor was it possible to reduce its temperature.  It was discovered
that the lubricants favored most by the Armadians were metals such as
tin and lead.  At temperatures tolerable to the bimmies these
congealed and the machines froze.  In like manner it was learned that
pressures had to be maintained.  Many of the Armadian valves were
controlled by barystats which operated as the pressures rose or fell
about the mean, and that mean was high.  When pressures were allowed
to fall appreciably some of the stats began to swell, two of them
bursting and spewing mercury vapor into the room.

Those were preliminary discoveries.  Then a week after the beginning
Darnhurst put in a hurry call for a dozen more men.

"Why so many?" asked Ellwood.  "You have eight of our best."

"Chief," said Darnhurst wearily, "an Armadian is like an
old-fashioned pipe-organ player.  When he works on his instrument he
uses everything he's got--both hands, both feet, both eyes and both
ears.  Well, that's the way these Armadian machines are set up.
Those babies have twenty tentacles with an over-all spread of around
forty feet and the one that used to operate that ammonia purifying
gadget used every one of them all the time.  It takes a lot of men
scattered all over the ship to take his place."

"I see," said Ellwood, and O.K.'d the chit for the extra men.  He
also visited the ship the next day to see them in action.  Darnhurst
was putting the purifier through its paces.

"You, over there," he called through his helmet phone.  "That thing
you've got the jack against is a regulator for the methane flow just
before it enters the mixer.  When the monsters wanted less of the
stuff they just got hold of it and squeezed, see?  O.K., squeeze now
while Jim and Freddie work those things across the room."

"I need a heavier jack," panted the man after a brief exertion.
"Wow, what a grip those animals must have!"

The experience with the purifier was typical.  The machine controls
roamed like climbing vines all over the walls and overhead.  The
simplest operating adjustments often required simultaneous action at
widely separated points.  Mechanically speaking the vessel was a
surrealistic dream.

But there came a day when the dynamic study was completed, and it was
permissible to cool the ship off and drain the foul atmosphere.
After that the relieved bimmies proceeded to dismantle the parts and
examine them in detail.  What they discovered amazed them.

"This is getting me down," said Darnhurst at one of the conferences.
"The principles behind these machines are simply wonderful--far in
advance of much of our own science.  The material is
marvelous--alloys that are tailormade.  The workmanship--well, it's
just beautiful.  The stuff could be sold as jewelry.  Yet the allover
design stinks.  There is no other word for it."

"That's what happens," drawled Gonzales, "when brainless creatures go
in for invention.  I keep telling you they think with their reflexes."

"We won't start that again," ruled Ellwood.  "What we do next is
redesign the whole show, and we'll do it in duplicate.  One ship will
be strictly up to Armadian specifications, but simplified.  The other
will be for our use, using the principles we have discovered but
substituting air for ammonia, and so on.  Get going."


It took months more to build the two vessels.  Ellwood immersed
himself deeply in the collateral problems, turning all other routine
over to assistants.  From time to time rumors drifted to the lab of
the hubbub in the world at large, but they made little impression.  A
new program had been formulated known as the Ten Year Plan, and all
the industry of Earth was a beehive of activity.  Space transports
were being laid down on a colossal scale to be in readiness for the
day when the waves of emigration would begin.  Population control
experts roamed the five continents selecting the favored ones who
were to make up the first billion.  The talk was all about New Eden
and the paradise that was to be there.  But Elwood and his bimmy gang
stuck to their knitting.  It was an age of specialties, and they had
their own row to hoe.

At last came the day when the two ships were ready for their trials.
The human edition was a beauty, slicker and faster than anything
known, and as handy as a bicycle.  It embodied the best features of
Armadian science and construction, coupled with the best of
Terrestrian design.  The Golian version was an equally good ship--for
an Armadian--and the most startling feature of it was its apparent
emptiness.  The complicated controls had been reduced drastically and
made largely automatic.  Where twenty operations had been required
before now only one was needed--a jab at a stud or the flick of a
switch.  Bulk had been cut to one quarter.  There was now room for
additional auxiliaries that Ellwood assumed had been crowded out
before.  He had a few built and added.

It was well his work came to completion when it did.  The day the
ships' name plates were affixed there came an urgent message from the
director general.

"How long will it take you to get out to New Eden?" he inquired
anxiously over the telecom.

"A month I'd say.  There are a lot of parsecs in between."

"You are leaving at once," said the director.  "Take any ship you
please, but get going.  We are getting disturbing messages from the
Relocation Committee out there."

"Trouble with the Armadians?"

"That's what I want to find out," snapped the director.  "That fellow
Crawford is too vague.  All we know is that he keeps saying the Ten
Year Plan is unworkable."

"I'm practically on my way," replied Ellwood, and snicked off the
connection.


From afar the Golian System presented a gorgeous spectacle.  About a
blazing sun swam forty mighty planets and a number of lesser ones.
Armadia was one, and Trusch, and Ukor, and Linh, the last two being
ringed like Saturn.  Great Trusch, four times the size of Jupiter,
carried along with her a system of her own, a myriad of varicolored
satellites.  And finally there was New Eden and the five other lesser
orbs allotted to the men of Earth.  They were bluish, and also had
moons, those pertaining to New Eden numbering three.

Ellwood headed his new ship toward his planetfall, the _Golite_, its
Armadian counterpart, trailing behind under remote control.  Twice
stubby nosed Armadian scout cruisers zipped by, looking him over, but
except for the agreed upon exchange of recognition signals had
nothing to say.  And then Ellwood was spirally down into the clean
atmosphere of fair New Eden.

He circled the planet twice in order to see it whole.  It had not
been misrepresented.  It was well watered, but there were no vast
wastes of ocean as the Pacific.  Nor were there sprawling continents
covering a hemisphere.  It was an oceanic planet studded with many
large islands, each with its rich lowland plains and its cool
plateaus.  There were rivers and lakes and islets galore, but no
deserts, and the polar caps were small.  Ellwood crossed the island
known as Valhalla, and after that Paradise, flying low.  He saw sky
fields being prepared, and the tents of surveyors who were laying out
the future cities.  And then he was over New Eden proper, where the
planetary capital was to be.  He spotted the temporary barracks and
the flagstaff that marked the place of administration, and landed in
a field nearby after first guiding the _Golite_ to its berth.

As he stepped out into the open he _knew_ that this was heaven.  The
very first breath was exhilarating, and his quick step took on some
of the characteristics of a prance.  For oddly, though the gravity
was a trifle less than that on Earth, the oxygen content of the air
was a little richer.  The combination, together with the crisp, cool
air, made him feel a new being altogether--at once strong and full of
vigor, yet light and airy as a sprite.  But his exuberation was soon
to be dampened.  In Crawford he found a dispirited man.

The executive chairman of the Relocation Committee wiped the gloom
off his face only long enough to offer a perfunctory greeting, and
then dejectedly waved Ellwood to chair.

"I'm told you're a whiz as a trouble shooter," said Crawford, glumly.
"You'd have to be.  We're getting nowhere fast here."

Ellwood waited, but Crawford was staring out the window.

"Don't the Armadians co-operate?"

"Oh, bother the Armadians," said Crawford, irritably.  "How would I
know?  Yammer, yammer, yammer.  Then they run away.  Those codes you
wrote into the treaty just don't work.  Or something.  Gibberish is
what they send, and then they seem to get angry.  We can't make 'em
out, and the young fellows I send to Neutralia are afraid of them.
We haven't a soul there now."

"Neutralia?"

"Yes--the medium-sized planet they set aside for our two legations.
It isn't comfortable there for either one of us, but our envoys can
live under domes and confer."

Ellwood felt a letdown.  He was astonished that the code he and
Pholor worked out had failed, so he pressed the point.

"Oh, some messages got through, though badly garbled," admitted
Crawford, "but their demands are impossible.  They say you promised
commerce and they want to begin.  But what demands!  They can't use
our lumber or plastics or textiles; they would go up in a puff in
their temperatures.  All they want is metals."

"Well?"

"It's the quantities," sighed Crawford.  "They think in terms of
millions.  They offer a cubic mile or so of gold, or anything else
they have lots of, but here's what they want in exchange ... lemme
find the memo ... oh, half a million tons of tungsten, ditto indium,
ditto uranium bricks, and so on.  There just isn't that much stuff;
not anywhere.  And anyway, we're still in the pioneering stage here,
which as you will see is bad enough without complicating it with the
crazy demands of the Armadians."

Ellwood did not break the soggy silence that followed.


"The real trouble is at home," resumed Crawford, finally.  "They have
a bunch of dreamy optimists in charge and out of it comes the Ten
Year Plan.  I'm the guy that has to carry out this end of it.  It's
impossible, that's all."

"That word," said Ellwood, cheerfully, "is not familiar to me.  In
our labs we frown on it.  I prefer 'tough' myself."

"Listen," snorted Crawford, "and then repeat that."

Elwood listened, unsympathetically at first, for he had sized up the
man before him as a prime defeatist.  But as Crawford dismally
unfolded his tale Ellwood's respect for him rose.  The fellow _was_
holding the heavy end of the stick.

"The catch is," concluded Crawford, "that they want a perfect
civilization set up before the first batch of colonists arrive.  That
entails plenty, because the emphasis is on the 'perfect.'  There are
to be no slums--ever.  The cities are to be ready to move into when
the immigrants arrive, which same goes for all the
accessories--mining, agriculture, industry, transportation and
research.  All those facilities have to be exactly balanced as well.
And my committee has to do it with what we've got without help from
home, and be finished in time.

"Very well, so much for the program.  The preliminary work is largely
done, as I have an army of engineers to help me.  But let's list the
needs, and check off what we've done in this first two years.

"First of all we had to know what we had to work with, which means
surveys.  Our geodicists have mapped the place and sounded the
oceans.  Our geologists have a picture of the subterrane for ten
miles down, and I can tell you this planet has everything--coal, oil,
metals, what you will, with reserves for centuries.  The crop experts
have planted experimental farms and know what to expect from the
soil.  The planet is fertile.  The transportation sharks are doping
out the highway, seaway and skyway routes and have begun laying out
terminals.  Our astronomers--"

Crawford broke off and smiled a doleful smile.

"Say," he said wryly, "can you imagine having to dope out a strange
solar system lousy with planets and moons and comets in less than two
years?  We haven't completed our first circuit of Gol yet, but they
have a calendar.  Or a tentative one.  We also now possess what are
laughingly called tide tables, but with three moons to contend with
they are going to have to be revised."

"I think you have done remarkably well," commented Ellwood.

"So far, perhaps.  It is the next step where the shoe pinches.
Pretty soon we'll have to start construction, but what with?  Cities
to house a billion people call for a lot of bricks and steel, not to
mention the heavy machinery for industry.  I yell for material and
the Council comes back and says I have everything here, use it."

"I see," grinned Ellwood.  "Smelt your own ore and roll your own
steel from what's here."

"Yes.  But what do I sink the first shaft with, or drill the first
oil well?  They won't send me ore stamps or drill rigs because Earth
industry is working two hundred percent capacity building spaceships.
A billion people take a lot of transport even if you do spread 'em
out over the last five years of the Plan.  So they say it's my
problem.  I've got the egg--produce the chicken.  Wangle what you
need from the Armadians."

Again he smiled wanly.  "Except," he added, "it isn't as easy as
that.  To hatch your egg you have to set a hen on it."

It was a curious dilemma, and no fault of Crawford's.  The authors of
the Ten Year Plan had been over optimistic.  If a billion persons and
their baggage were to be shipped across the galaxy in the last five
years of it, every ounce of Terrestrian production would have to be
devoted to ship construction in the meantime.  No help for New Eden
could be expected from Earth.  Yet for all its rich resources, the
new planet was stymied for lack of machines.  Once the ball of
production was started rolling, trade was possible with nearby
Armadia.  Until then Crawford was in much the position of a hungry
man on a raft laden with canned goods but without an opener.

"I think I'll take a run over to Neutralia and ask them to send for
Pholor," announced Ellwood.

"You won't get far there," said Crawford, dismally.  "The monsters
seem to be sore about something.  Anyway, what have you got to offer?"

"Brains," was Ellwood's cryptic response.


He parked his two ships beside the cluster of ambassadorial domes and
waited for Pholor to come.  In those few days he had time to think
the problem through.  There were several ticklish aspects.

Ellwood shrewdly suspected that the reason the other envoys failed
was due to their mutual distrust of types so alien.  The human envoys
insisted on using radio code for conversation, and the nature of the
waves was such as to jar the delicate nerves of the heavy-world
creatures.  On the other hand, it was a good deal to expect of an
ordinary man that he would willingly surrender his mind to the
semihypnotic telepathic control of a beast as bizarre and repellant
as an Armadian.  Moreover, the compromise done in which they
conferred was uncomfortable to both parties.  Elwood would leap that
hurdle by going straight into the Armadian dome, for he had brought
his special armor and heavy chair with him.  He knew that thus
shielded he could stand the Armadian environment, and he had already
gone through the brain-searing ordeal of becoming neurally attuned to
Pholor's mentality.

He was much less sure of his bargaining position.  From one of the
men who had attempted intercourse with the Armadian emissaries he
learned a little of what was behind the present impasse.  The ammonia
breathers also had something analogous to the Ten Year Plan, and
their ambitions far outreached their capacity to produce.  They were
in as big a hurry to develop Saturn and Jupiter as the Council was to
colonize New Eden.  Therefore it was imports of hard metals they
wanted now in exchange for an equal tonnage of gold which was
plentiful with them but of little use.  Ellwood's informant also said
he was given to understand that there was a good deal of
dissatisfaction with Pholor's treaty.  Armadian hot-heads were
declaring that it would have been better to exterminate the
Terrestrians and have done with it, rather than pay for planets they
could have had for the taking.  To cede still others close to home
was an outrage.

Besides this bad start, Ellwood was growingly aware of still another
difficulty he was going to have to face.  He had taken upon himself
the task of talking Pholor out of the very thing he wanted--immense
quantities of structural material and heavy machines--in exchange for
nothing more tangible than ideas.  He foresaw that the negotiations
were likely to be tricky; a good salesman does not show all his hand
at once.  But in human intercourse a man is not compelled to reveal
more than he chooses.  In full psychic communion it was going to be
hard to keep the hole card face down.

Ellwood devised a neural scanner, utilizing principles he had learned
from the dissection of the dead Armadians.  Then he pitted himself
against it, setting up thought blocks and comparing them with the
resultant records.  The first results were disappointing.  His
efforts to hold back certain thoughts served only to emphasize them.
But by the time Pholor arrived Ellwood had hit upon a system.  He
imagined in advance every conceivable question that might be put to
him, and then thought out his answers.  Those he keyed with
appropriate cues, committed them to memory, and then deliberately
trained himself to forget them.  It called for the most strenuous
mental effort, but in the end he felt relatively safe.  Whatever he
was to say was now buried deep in his subconscious mind, locked away
until the appropriate question should recall it to the field of
awareness.


Ellwood and Pholor met in the latter's embassy.  The reunion was
cordial enough, for the two disparate creatures had deep respect for
each other, but Ellwood was quick to sense a new coldness.  Pholor
was not going to be as genially receptive as in their previous
dealings.

"Observe," smiled Ellwood, easily, "the present I have brought you."

He directed Pholor's perceptions toward the little _Golite_, the
bimmy designed ship for Armadian use.  It lay within easy range of
the Armadian's radarlike senses, and from where he sprawled on the
dome floor he could examine it with his neural tentacles, fingering
first one bit of Earth designed equipment and another.  Ellwood
followed his reactions with intense interest.

The initial response was quite different from what he was expecting.
It was wholly negative.  There was neither admiration nor delight,
but a sort of baffled wonder.  And then the wonder swiftly
degenerated into a mixture of suspicion and distaste.

"What trick is this?" Pholor's sharp thought snapped over.  "What
controls these paltry toy machines?  Except for a few buttons there
is no place to lay a tentacle.  What you have brought and call a
present is a mockery.  It is useless.  It looks dangerous.  Is this
what you have to trade?"

It was like a dash of ice water.  The superb design done by his
experts was wholly lost on the stumpy, plated monster.  Ellwood felt
already that Pholor's mind was quitting the ship, having dismissed it
as of no possible value.  Desperately he summoned his most persuasive
thoughts.  He brought Pholor back mentally to the control room and
went over each of the machines, explaining why the changes had been
made.  Why, in the interests of efficiency, they _had_ to be made.
Pholor remained unimpressed, but was finally persuaded to enter the
ship.

The original Armadian design had been ridiculously complicated; the
human version was a gem of compactness.  One machine was the master
barystat.  It registered the prevailing gravitic influences and
automatically adjusted every other machine.  It maintained the inside
gravity at 3-Gs, regardless of the nature of what was outside.  It
regulated the repulsors, so that they would develop just what power
was needed to lift from any planet.  It reported masses of all sizes
in the vicinity and actuated the meteor deflectors.  A single stud
controlled it.  It was either off or on.  There was also a computer,
which not only worked out from given co-ordinates the optimum
trajectory between two points, but took care of deviations caused by
stray bodies met in space.  There were compressors and purifiers, all
much simplified.

The control board was like none in human use.  There were no dials,
no name plates, no meters, no warning lights or buzzers.  Armadians
did not need them, being without sight or hearing.  Through their
curious means of perception they _knew_ what current surged through a
given circuit at a particular moment, and could appraise the
fluctuating magnetic and electric fields.  On the _Golite's_ panel
there was a single master button that would turn everything on or off
at once, and there was a single cutout for each auxiliary.

"Here," transmitted Ellwood, punching in co-ordinates on the
computer, "I'm laying out a triangular course--we will circumnavigate
Gol itself, angling off to come back in from behind Trusch.  Once I
set this it will take care of everything.  Now I press the take-off
button."

He felt Pholor's thoughts upon him, stolidly noncommittal.  Then, as
the ship soared away, there was a wave of distinct fear.  Pholor was
undergoing all the agonies of a backseat driver.  Where normally his
tentacles would be darting yards across the room to adjust this or
tinker with that, there was nothing now to do.  The automatics were
doing it.  The jangled tentacles twitched and coiled spasmodically.
Pholor was not happy.

Then he grew calmer.  At first it was a sort of resignation, but
gradually he began to observe that the barystats, bolometers and
other data takers were still feeding their machines and the machines
were responding nicely to every trifling variation.  Yet Ellwood had
not touched the panel since the start-off.

"It works," came an awed thought from Pholor, a reluctant thought and
one not fully believed in.  "I can't understand it."

Ellwood tried to explain.  Pholor tried hard to understand.  Neither
succeeded.  They were already around Gol and on the second leg when
Ellwood gave up in sheer exhaustion.  He laid back in his heavy chair
and tried to conjure up another approach.

He knew by then that Gonzales was right.  Armadians did not think.
They reacted.  The results of trial and error they could recognize,
abstract principles befuddled them.  Their science was strictly
empirical; there was nothing analytical about it.  Instinct,
intuition, and blind groping explained their seeming culture.
Automatic controls were beyond Pholor's comprehension.  Where there
is no capacity for logic there can be no concept of efficiency.
Improvement to an Armadian meant building more and bigger models of
what he had already found to work.  Ellwood resolved to take a
drastically different tack.

"Among my people," he sent, "when we find something that works but do
not know why, we call it magic, and accept it.  It is a very potent
principle.  This is a magic ship.  Yet having it, you can remodel
every ship you own.  The savings in metal and the gain in space will
be enormous.  In exchange, we expect you to deliver to us one half
the savings."

"Your magic is good," agreed Pholor after a time, "and I will take
your present and be thankful.  It will serve to placate those of my
kind who are denouncing the treaty.  But they will never consent to
exporting the savings.  We need every ton."

Ellwood was dismayed.  He floundered for a moment and then came up
with yet another idea.  Spatial motive power was only one form of
machinery.

"Take me on a mental tour again of all your industrial plants."

Pholor assented, and instantly Ellwood was launched again on a weird
voyage to strange, big planets, traveling by proxy through the wide
ranging perceptions of the other.  As in a dream he inspected
machines in mighty shops where the crushing drag of gravity would be
fatal to a man in the flesh.  What he saw confirmed his suppositions.
All were as crudely designed as the stuff in the envoy's ship.
Redesign would result in untold savings.

"Now show me your mines," asked Ellwood.

Here was a real surprise.  Armadian mines were surface strip mines,
and remarkably few in number.  Ellwood was puzzled for a moment as to
why planets larger in bulk than the sum of all Earth-controlled ones
should have such meager ore supplies.  And then he hit upon a
double-barreled explanation.  First, the large planet's heavy masses
held back more of the lighter elements which the lesser planets
tended to lose into space.  Their surfaces therefore would run more
to rock and less to iron.  But the real key was in the Armadian
mental habits.  Not being a contemplative race they were not likely
to ever develop a theory of geology.  It would not occur to them that
there were buried ore deposits, and had not looked for them.

"I have seen enough," announced Ellwood.  "Let's get back to the
dome."

Before he left he bore with him a codicil to the treaty.  It gave all
he asked and more.


"What luck?" asked Crawford, gloomily, as Ellwood strode into his
office.  There was no hope in his expression.

"It's in the bag," grinned Ellwood.  "You'll get your stuff when and
where you want it, delivered jobside.  It'll be prefabricated, too."

"What!  No, don't kid me.  It's no joking matter."

"I mean it."

"All right."  Crawford simply could not cheer up.  "What's the catch?"

"What do _you_ pay?  Not too much.  You assign me at once a couple of
hundred of your smartest engineers and model makers, with shops and
foundries to work in.  I could use a geologist or so, too.  I want our
neocosmic radiant geoprobes rebuilt for Armadian use."

"I don't get it," said Crawford.  "We can't send men onto Armadia and
Trusch.  They'd die."

"We aren't.  We just send along their brain throbs.  It is going to
work this way--Armadia will shortly ship us specimens of all their
machines.  We redesign them and ship the models back.  Blueprints and
specifications won't do.  They'd burn up.  We will send them
the geoprobes so they can uncover subsurface deposits they never
dreamed were there.  And along with it we send samples of the girders
and trusses and forges you want so they can get busy on manufacture."

"But," objected Crawford, "they insist on payment in metal.  We
haven't any."

"Oh, yes we have.  Billions of potential tons of it in savings as
they retool, not to speak of what is still in the ground.  And it has
already been delivered by me.  We get back half."

"You're either delirious," said Crawford, staring at him, "or you've
been pulling magic--"

"Magic," said Ellwood, grinning still wider, "is just what I used.  I
turned brains into bricks, and a fair swap is no robbery."



THE END.


[The end of _Brains for Bricks_ by Malcolm Jameson]