Enslaved Brains by Eando Binder

Book Details

Enslaved Brains shows the effects that a civilization of the future (1973) would have on a man lost in the jungles and isolated from the world for forty years. Wonders surround him on every hand. But Unitaria, the world of the future, is not all Utopia. The government scientists have instituted several terrible things—things that stagger the imagination. Enslaved Brains is a tale of humanity rising against the Cult of the Scientists.

Enslaved Brains (1934)
Part One
Chapter II – The Return to Civilization
Chapter III – The Drug
Chapter IV – The Unidum

Part Two
What Has Gone Before:
Chapter V – An Enslaved Brain
Chapter VI – A Terrible Revelation
Chapter VII – Disaster
Chapter VIII – M’bopo’s Plot
Chapter IX – The Tide-Station
Chapter X – A Chance Friend
Chapter XI – Through the Stratosphere
Chapter XII – Daring
Chapter XIII – Death to the Brains

Part Three
Conclusion
Chapter XIV – The Mad Scientist
Chapter XV – Aboard the Sansruns
Chapter XVI – The Sun-power Weapon
Chapter XVII – The Reckoning
Chapter XVIII – The Lost Scientist

Eando Binder is the pen-name used by brothers, Earl Andrew Binder (1904-1965) and Otto Binder (1911-1974).

Files:

1. Binder-EnslavedBrains.epub

Excerpt: Enslaved Brains

Part One

THERE’S my ship,” said Earl Hackworth, pointing down into a long barren valley which they viewed from the top of a tumbled rock ridge. “Isn’t it a wonderful sight in this primeval country? like a jewel in a setting of lead.”

The man spoken to bent blue eyes on the object which indeed glinted like a fiery gem in the strong sunlight, but made no answer. Then he turned his eyes to all the countryside. Far to the back was the green of jungle, spreading eagerly to right and left without end—the cruel, hot jungle which it had taken them three agonizing weeks to traverse. It seemed to crouch like a savage beast, relentless, waiting. It hurled defiance to man, but man had won. From its edge to where the two men stood was a sickly stretch of scrubland, accursed by nature, avoided by even the lowly snake. It had been hot like the inside of a furnace and deceptively long. It had seemed to mock their dragging limbs and vanishing water supply. Even the jungle was better.

But that was all over now, the man with the blue eyes reflected. Jungle and waste had been crossed and conquered. Danger and suffering had buffeted them and left them weaker in body but stronger in spirit. Before them was but a short trip to the bottom of the valley of naked sand. Then a man-made thing, an incredible marvel in aboriginal Africa, would take them up and away, away from feverish lowland jungle, from heartless scrub wastes. It would pick them off the ground and drop everything below into a memory.

“I say, Williams,” spoke Hackworth again. “How do you like my ship?”

The man Williams looked again, parted his lips and twitched a slow tongue that seemed undecided what answer to make. “Your ship!” he said, his eyes unfocusing with inward concentration.

“Yes, the ship I told you about,” Hackworth said. “The ship that will take us to the coast, and will take you from a ghastly exile. Now that ship down there is what is called a ‘Sansrun,’ or helicopter airplane. It can rise vertically, not like your 1933 airplanes, Williams, that had to run along the ground for a few hundred yards. Do you understand, old boy, or do I still talk too fast?”

“I can . . . . understand,” Williams said. The words came slow and precise.

“Good,” Hackworth said. “In another few weeks you won’t have any trouble with the language at all. Forty years is a long time . . . .”

“But rather than talk aimlessly up here, let’s get the boys together and finish our trek. We’ve all had a good drink of water. Two hours and we’ll be there. You call ’em, Williams. You speak their garbled Bantu better than I ever hope to. Just two more hours and then — ‘farewell to Africa, jungle, and sand.’ “

But the man Williams made no immediate move to call the “boys,” or native safari men. Instead, some strong emotion flooded his face. Even his superb tan, that had darkened his white skin to a coffee color, could not hide an odd expression of dismay, almost of fear.

“What’s the matter, Williams?” Hackworth asked sharply, laying a hand on his shoulder.

His blue eyes glazed for a moment in strong feeling; Williams evasively muttered to himself in native dialect.

“Listen here!” cried Hackworth fiercely, tightening his fingers on the other’s shoulder. “Out with it. Something’s bothering you.”

Williams ceased his muttering then and turned an agonized face to his companion. When he spoke, his voice was high and jerky. His throat muscles worked spasmodically.

“I can’t do it! . . . . Africa, Olgor . . . . it belongs to me . . . . I belong to it! Musri et kraal . . . . How can I leave my home?”

For a moment, Hackworth was thunderstruck, speechless. He stared at the brawny Williams and saw handsome features tightened with inner pain, with mental distortions. Was this the Williams of his boyhood? Could this man have once been his eager, joyous cousin? Or was this all a mad dream—a spell of magic Africa?

Hackworth swept his brow clear of perspiration and his mind of feverish obsession. He stretched forth both his hands to the other, grasping him by the shoulders.

“Good Lord! You don’t belong here,” he said firmly. “Think, Williams; you are a white man, as I am. You are my cousin; you were born far from this continent of mystery and misery. You are a virtual exile here. The civilization of the white man, your natural heritage, calls you—”

“I’m afraid!” cried Williams suddenly. “Forty years of this . . . . I’m afraid to go back!”

Hackworth shook him, none too gently.

“Afraid? Afraid! Of what?” he roared.

Williams gulped before he spoke. “Civilization . . . . I wouldn’t fit . . . . I’m only a white man by birth . . . . at heart, after these forty years, I’m like our safari boys . . . like faithful M’bopo—”

“Dan!”

It was just a name, a word wrung out of Hackworth by his cousin’s emotional outburst. Yet that name had power. It suddenly rolled the mists of dusty time away from the memories of youth in Williams’ mind.

“Dan!” continued Hackworth eagerly, seeing that he had fanned a spark. “Dan, you remember?—kids in Baltimore—how we played together, fought together; we were pals . . . . Dan, how can you say you belong to Africa?”

The blue eyes glistened from inner revelation, looking back upon a life that had been buried under a landslide of later impressions. Williams threw off his nostalgia for Africa and smiled weakly.

“Of course you’re right. I’ll go talk to the boys and start them off.”

“As Williams left with a firm step, Hackworth reflected that not till that moment had either of them really realized who they were and what they were to each other. “Hackworth” and “Williams” they had called each other, as distant as strangers. Forty years of Africa had set up a barrier between them. Only that magic name, that timely cry of “Dan!” had pierced the wall of time.

WITH A FLOOD of native dialect, Williams got the safari men started with their heavy packs. Down the winding trail of crumbling sandstone, the party made its way. The two white men brought up the rear with rifles. A new eagerness had come into all of them, tired though they were from the three-week trek from wildest Congo. The spearing glint of the airship in the bottom of the valley promised rest and ease. They would reach it before sundown. Back of them the upflung ridge of wind-worn rock blotted out the jungle.

Dan Williams had left the United States in 1933 with his father, on an exploration into the Congo. He was then a lad of eighteen, but already full-grown and dependable. The elder Williams had had two purposes in mind: to penetrate the jungles just above the northern bend of the Congo River, and to find some trace of a previous expedition which was said to have gone in there and never returned. Both success and failure came to them. They came upon Pierre D’Lawoef, sole survivor of the other expedition, dying from knife wounds, in the hands of friendly Bantu natives.

D’Lawoef told a dreadful tale of savage Zulus, a wandering tribe from the south, attacking and destroying his five white companions and many black boys. He himself had managed to escape and lived with unwariike tribes for eight years. The Zulus had apparently left. But just before the Williams’ expedition had come, the blood-thirsty Zulus had again reappeared and given the Frenchman his death wounds.

The elder Williams began to fear for his own party’s safety, and after the burial of D’Lawoef, gave the order to retrack back to the Congo River. Then it had come. Screaming Zulus with hideous painted faces had puffed out of the jungle and attacked with kris and spear. Rifle fire drove them off only after three of the white men and a dozen safari boys had been killed outright, and the others had been wounded in greater or lesser degree.

Dan Williams, a mere boy, had seen all this and not long after saw the remaining white man die of infection. Months after, his father died of fever, induced by his weakened condition. The kindly Bantu natives then adopted the orphan white boy and time had flown swiftly.

Forty years of Africa had made him a native in all but birth. He became as much a child of nature as the Bantus, and came to exceed them in both physical and mental exploits, so that for thirty years he had been unquestioned patriarch of the tribe. He thought of reaching the Congo River and civilization more than once, but the southern lands between had filled with Zulus, enough of them to prevent his ever crossing a mountain pass which was the only reasonable connection with the Congo valley.

The ever-present threat of Zulu attack aroused his fighting instinct. Under his guidance, the Bantus were trained in simple warfare, and the Zulus soon came to respect his tribe which, though they had only bone and flint weapons, fought like demons under the leadership of a clever general.

Thus had Dan Williams spent a lifetime in Africa.

Then had come an echo from the dim past. A lone white man and his native safari had come from the north. This white man talked patiently and stirred the jellied contents of the pot of the past. Then he had embraced him and called him “cousin.” And gradually Dan Williams had recognized his strange words.

Excerpt From: Eando Binder. “Enslaved Brains.”