ime of the surrender, we didn't have--"

"They weren't taking chances on that, Colonel. But the point I want to
make is that with everything I did find, I never found, in any official
record, a single word about the giant computer we call the Third
Fleet-Army Force Brain."

For a time, the only sound in the room was the tiny insectile humming of
the electric clock on the wall. Then Professor Kellton set his glass on
the table, and it sounded like a hammer-blow.

"Nothing, Conn?" Kurt Fawzi was incredulous and, for the first time,
frightened. The others were exchanging uneasy glances. "But you must
have! A thing like that--"

"Of course it would be one of the closest secrets during the war,"
somebody else said. "But in forty years, you'd expect _something_ to
leak out."

"Why, _during_ the war, it was all through the Third Force. Even the
Alliance knew about it; that's how Klem heard of it."

"Well, Conn couldn't just walk into the secret files and read whatever
he wanted to. Just because he couldn't find anything--"

"Don't tell _me_ about security!" Klem Zareff snorted. "Certainly they
still have it classified; staff-brass'd rather lose an eye than
declassify anything. If you'd seen the lengths our staff went to--hell,
we lost battles because the staff wouldn't release information the
troops in the field needed. I remember once--"

"But there _was_ a Brain," Judge Ledue was saying, to reassure himself
and draw agreement from the others. "It was capable of combining data,
and scanning and evaluating all its positronic memories, and forming
association patterns, and reasoning with absolute perfection. It was
more than a positronic brain--it was a positronic super-mind."

"We'd have won the war, except for the Brain. We had ninety systems, a
hundred and thirty inhabited planets, a hundred billion people--and we
were on the defensive in our own space-area! Every move we made was
known and anticipated by the Federation. How could they have done that
without something like the Brain?"

"Conn, from what you learned of computers, how large a volume of space
would you say the Brain would have to occupy?" Professor Kellton asked.

Professor Kellton was the most unworldly of the lot, yet he was asking
the most practical question.

"Well, the astrophysics computer I worked with at the University
occupies a total of about one million cubic feet," Conn began. This was
his chance; they'd take anything he told them about