e had sixteen hours of
sleep; that's marvelous. Nobody can take that away. The body has
recharged its energies. Now I can stand the gaff."

Down at the desk they handed him a Western Union. It was from Washington
and bore no signature. "Mission completed," it read.

It made him feel fine. "Father has done it; he is a better man than I,"
he thought.

While the car streaked though the desert Lee scanned the morning papers.

"No Trace Of President Vandersloot," still was the headline. But below
new havocs were listed as they had developed overnight. This time the
West coast was the zone of catastrophes; the hostile power seemed to be
bent upon the closing of all ports in the U.S.A.

Lee gnashed his teeth as he read the number of new casualties, women and
children, too, who had become the victims of The Brain.

Arrived at "Grand Central" he kept a sharp lookout for any unusual
activity. There was none. All along elevator-row small groups of
bookish-looking men returned from their day's work in the Apperception
Centers. They looked calm and contented and with their briefcases under
their arms almost like ordinary businessmen heading for the commuter
train.

He didn't dare to linger or to look around. There was this all-pervading
sense of being shadowed, of having gone into a trap from which there was
no escape, of eyes following him everywhere. Whose eyes? That was
impossible to know. Maybe The Brain's; its sensory organs could
conceivably be installed anywhere. Maybe that janitor guiding a
polishing machine over the rubber floor was a plain clothesman; or maybe
it was that detached gentleman who seemed to wait for an elevator with a
stack of books under his arms.

As the cage shot up to Apperception 27, failure pressed down on his
heart. Now it was almost thirty hours since he had released "Ant-termes"
into the nerve paths of The Brain. Those undermining and devouring
armies; what could have happened to them? Any number of things: Perhaps
the Lignin in the nerve paths was poisonous. There had been no time for
him to test the stuff. Perhaps the maintenance engineers had replenished
the insulation in that sector overnight and all the hives were drowned.
Perhaps some kind of a detecting apparatus had found out about the pest
inside The Brain right from the start. As long as the beachhead of the
underground invasion remained small, its blocking would not impair the
functions of The Brain. What a fool he had been to pit