was nothing at all--he even
lived off the state--and the magnificent power that was in him and that
he brought to the world was never fully recognized. But the story of his
life is probably the greatest story I have ever heard. He was the
beginning of You. I only wish I had known.

From his earliest days, as I remember, no one ever looked after Wainer.
His father had been one of the last of the priests. Just before young
Wainer was born in 2430, the government passed one of the great laws,
the we-take-no-barriers-into-space edict, and religious missionaries
were banned from the stars. Wainer's father never quite recovered from
that. He went down to the end of his days believing that the Earth had
gone over to what he called "Anti-Christ." He was a fretful man and he
had no time for the boy.

Young Wainer grew up alone. Like everyone else, he was operated on at
the age of five, and it turned out that he was a Reject. At the time, no
one cared. His mother afterward said that she was glad, because Wainer's
head even then was magnificently shaped and it would have been a shame
to put a lump on it. Of course, Wainer knew that he could never be a
doctor, or a pilot, or a technician of any kind, but he was only five
years old and nothing was final to him. Some of the wonderful optimism
he was to carry throughout his youth, and which he was to need so badly
in later years, was already with him as a boy.

And yet You must understand that the world in which Wainer grew up was a
good world, a fine world. Up to that time, it was the best world that
ever was, and no one doubted that--

(Some of Them had smiled in Their minds. The old man was embarrassed.)

You must try to understand. We all believed in that world; Wainer and I
and everyone believed. But I will explain as best I can and doubtless
You will understand.

When it was learned, long before Wainer was born, that the electronic
brains could be inserted within the human brain and connected with the
main neural paths, there was no one who did not think it was the
greatest discovery of all time. Do You know, can You have any idea, what
the mind of Man must have been like before the brains? God help them,
they lived all their lives without controlling themselves, trapped,
showered by an unceasing barrage of words, dreams, totally unrelated,
uncontrollable memories. It must have been horrible.

* * * * *

The brains changed all that. They