of fatigue in The Brain makes operations possible for 20 out of
the 24 hours of the day--the rest of the time we need for servicing and
overhauling."

* * * * *

With apparent effort Scriven turned his face away from the blue flames.
His dark brown eyes probed into Lee's as he summed up:

"All together, Lee, The Brain has now reached the approximate capacity
of 25,000 first class human brains. You as a man of vision will
understand what that means...."

Lee had his face upturned. The tension of thought gave to his features
something of the ecstatic or the somnambulist. Slowly he said:

"The equivalent of twenty-five-thousand human brains--there is no
comparison other than a God's...."

Striven had jumped from his chair. He started pacing the flagstones in
front of the fire, whirling his mighty frame around at every corner with
a sort of wrath, as if about to meet some attack.

"Yes, you are right," he almost shouted, "we hold that power; that power
almost of a God's. And how we are wasting it."

"What do you mean?" Lee's eye-brows shot up. "You would not waste those
powers once you have them. You would turn them to the most constructive
use--the advancement of science, of humanity!"

Scriven froze in his steps. A cruel smile parted his lips; there was a
gnashing sound of big white teeth. He pointed a finger at his visitor.

"Idealist, eh? That's what I thought I was ten years ago. That's what I
had in mind with The Brain right from the start. As it has turned out,
however, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and half a dozen other government
departments, besieged The Brain for the solution of their "problems",
some of them as destructive as warfare, others as insipid as the trend
of the popular vote in some provincial primaries. Sometimes Uncle Sam
even farms out the services of the Brain to aid some friendly foreign
government--without that government's knowledge as to where the solution
is coming from. To cut a long story short: What these fellows utterly
fail to understand is that The Brain is not a finite mechanism like any
other, but a mechanism which unendingly evolves and becomes richer in
its associations by the material which is being fed into its cells. In
other words; the Brain _learns_; consequently it must be _taught_, it
must be given the wherewithal for its own self-improvement...."

Scriven halted his impatient step by the other's chair. His nervous
fingers tapped Lee's