suspended gland and switched on the
lights. The glittering walls of aluminum foil seemed to jump at him like
jaws beset with the dragon teeth of electronic tubes. Caught with an
overwhelming sense of loneliness and awe as of a man who has entered the
forbidden temple of an unknown god he called:

"Is there anybody here? Gus! Where are you, Gus?" Then suddenly he
remembered that Gus was gone, that there would never again be his
answering voice. He wiped his forehead.

"Bad nerves," he thought. "Mustn't allow them to play tricks on me; pull
myself together."

Lee put his tools down and walked into the narrow aisle. Few things were
changed; and there was the pulsemeter standing in its old place.

He plugged it into the old circuit and clamped the phones to his ears.

It wasn't that he expected any communication; that seemed impossible.
With the conflagration raging through its apperception centers, with
other sections being isolated with the cutting of their nerve paths by
the fire fighting engineers, The Brain must have ceased to exist as a
functioning, a live entity. All that could possibly remain would be
residual currents sluggishly circulating in narrow, nearby circuits....

As in the past it took a few minutes for the pulsemeter to warm up.
Gradually the rapid beat of the ideopulses came through the static in
the phones. Lee's eyes stared wildly at the visi-screen: for the "green
dancer" snaked to the fore. This was unexpected; it couldn't be that
thoughts were still forming as flames devoured the cortex matter of
apperception in the hemispheres....

From muffled drums, the decibels of sound increased, shot through with
crackling static, till the pulsebeats became as poundings of huge
Chinese gongs and then....

The _voice_ formed, the voice of The Brain. It sounded like steel
girders breaking, like ice fields cracking up. It froze the blood in
Lee's veins.

"Lee, Semper Fidelis, 39, sensitive, a traitorous fool and a murderer. I
should have killed you--I could have killed you. My fault--blind spot of
apperception--human failure in engineering--as fifth columns entered
nerve path filler spouts. And now I'm dead; I'm dead, I'm dead...."

The words poured like big boulders tumbling in an earthquake down a
mountainside. The ground seemed to cave in under Lee's feet; the
terrible reality carried him away as an avalanche. He was barely able to
stammer:

"You're dead? How can you speak, how can you...."

"S