through these floating,
waving radiances for which he had no name was nightmarish, like falling
into some bottomless well. With great relief he heard the voice of his
guide breaking the spell.

"I'm terribly sorry, Dr. Lee, I shouldn't have deserted you, there was
some little interruption--" palpably the voice was tickled to death
"--my boy friend called from another department and so ... you know how
it is. Let's see, where are you? Good lord, already near the end of the
Medulla Oblongata with the Cerebellum coming and I haven't told you a
_thing_. Goody, where should I begin; I'm all in a dither: Well, Dr.
Lee; most people seem to expect The Brain to be like a great big
telephone exchange, but it really isn't that kind of a mechanism _at
all_. We have found--" she sounded important as if it were her very own
discovery "--that the best pattern for The Brain would actually be the
human brain. So The Brain is organized in nearly identical manner,
likewise our whole terminology is taken from anatomy rather than from
technology. The glideways for instance, travel along the natural
fissures between the convolutions of the various lobes; that's why they
are so very winding as you will see as you enter The Brain proper. Those
columns you see are filled with liquid insulators for the nerve cables
to vibrate in; for they _do_ vibrate, Dr. Lee, as they transmit their
messages.

"You have noticed the narrowness of the glideways, the terrible
confinement of space. I know it's horrible--many of our visitors suffer
claustrophobia, but they just must be built that way. You see even
fractions of a millionth of one second count in the coordination of the
association bundles and nerve circuits, that's why everything is built
as compact as possible, worse than in a submarine.

"Then, too, you must have wondered why everything is so dark inside.
That's another thing wherein The Brain is like the human brain; its
nerve cells are so extremely sensitive that they are distributed by
light. We use black light almost exclusively or activated phosphorous
such as on the sheaths of the nerve cables. For the same reason we of
the personnel are normally not permitted to pass through the interior of
The Brain during operations-time. Exceptions are only made in the case
of very important persons such as you are. Normally one travels to one's
stations through the ducts elevator shafts in the bone matter or rather
the rock outside. Those are _so_ mu