Free The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson Page B

of promoting an unseemly fracas in the Smoking Room.
    But no sooner does the Mechanical Brain catch on to Engelbrecht’s wavelength than all the dials start purring at once and he registers the maximum degree of pleasure possible. From then on he and the dwarf are inseparable.
Towards the end of the Epoch, at the season of celebration and regret, the Club Committee announce a special dinner in honour of the Mechanical Brain at which full clock-work will be worn. This time there is not a dissident voice, and everything looks to be all set for one of the most festive evenings in Surrealist Sporting history.
    Dinner, which is held in a private room at the Power Station, is the devil of a do. The Mechanical Brain sits between the Id and Engelbrecht, and he’s so happy he gives out a continuous crackle of blue sparks. His diet is a bit recherché, consisting mainly of curves and measurements, but his attendants have done their best to fix him a really slap-up meal. Once the crackle becomes a roar, and I gather that the M.B. is laughing at a rather esoteric joke about the difference between the co-ordinates for a 4-dimensional sirloin and a bathing beauty’s hip.
    At last Dreamy Dan, our Surrealist Toastmaster, pronounces the time-honoured formula: “Gentlemen, you may drug.” Opium pipes and reefers are lit; ether sprays are squirted; and we wind up our main springs, oil our cogs, and get set for the speeches.
    I won’t bother you with all that is said, but so fervent and sincere are the tributes paid to the Mechanical Brain that when the time comes for him to reply he is overcome with Purpose Tremor (which is a complaint that Mechanical Brains suffer from in moments of stress) and unable to utter so much as a spark.
    It’s a heartrending time for us, as the attendants,—electronic engineers, statisticians and cybernetecists—fuss round his dials and coils, adjusting and computing until they get him on the beam again. Then he thanks us very prettily and, by way of an after-dinner story, proceeds to recite the contents of the “case” books in the British Museum Library—those which are kept under lock and key and can only be read, by special permission, in the North Library.
    By now we are well on in the seventh stage of intoxication. The weaker brethren have been carried away, some by the men in white, others by indescribable phantasms of their own imagining. Only the tough inner cadre of Surrealist Sport remains, grouped round the guest of honour, plying him with the formulae for vegetable alkaloids, which he seems well able to take.
    Joey DeAth exhales lightly, and the last of the M.B.’s attendants to retain any shreds of the priceless gift of consciousness rolls over on his back, flat out as a slide-rule. With a high-pitched sound like a schoolgirl’s giggle the Mechanical Brain emits a stream of violent sparks. Engelbrecht leaps on the table to address the company.
    His proposal is simplicity itself. Nothing more than to give the Mechanical Brain a bit of fun, take him out and show him some mechanical night life, free him for a few glorious hours from the irksome restraint of the laboratory.
    There is tremendous enthusiasm for this humane, machine proposal, and in less time than it takes to tell, the M.B.—with Engelbrecht and Dr. Sadismus, the Surrealist Surgeon (who has just popped in after a difficult delivery at the Clock Hospital) at the controls—is being borne by a forest of willing hands, fins, tentacles and other appendages belonging to a host of Surrealist Sons of Belial, whooping and shrieking through the streets of night-town, en route for the red light district down by the marshalling yard.
    Our first port of call is “Puffing Billy’s”, a notorious haunt of dissolute locomotives. We arrive in the middle of the cabaret just as La Donkey Engine is completing her famous boiler dance. Puffing Billy ushers us to a table near the floor and whistles up a bevy of his most glamorous