gave Man freedom to think, freedom
from confusion: they made him logical. There was no longer any need to
memorize, because the brains could absorb any amount of information that
was inserted into them, either before or after the operation. And the
brains never forgot, and seldom made mistakes, and computed all things
with an inhuman precision.

A man with a brain--or "clerks," as they were called, after Le
Clerq--knew everything, literally _everything_, that there was to know
about his profession. And as new information was learned, it was made
available to all men, and punched into the clerks of those who desired
it. Man began to think more clearly than ever before, and thought with
more knowledge behind him, and it seemed for a while that this was a
godlike thing.

But in the beginning, of course, it was very hard on the Rejects.

Once in every thousand persons or so would come someone like Wainer
whose brain would not accept the clerk, who would react as if the clerk
were no more than a hat. After a hundred years, our scientists still did
not know why. Many fine minds were ruined with their memory sections cut
away, but then a preliminary test was devised to prove beforehand that
the clerks would not work and that there was nothing that anyone could
do to make them work. Year by year the Rejects, as they were called,
kept coming, until they were a sizable number. The more fortunate men
with clerks outnumbered the Rejects a thousand to one, and ruled the
society, and were called "Rashes"--slang for Rationals.

Thus the era of the Rash and Reject.

Now, of course, in those days the Rejects could not hope to compete in a
technical world. They could neither remember nor compute well enough,
and the least of all doctors knew more than a Reject ever could, the
worst of all chemists knew much more chemistry, and a Reject certainly
could never be a space pilot.

As a result of all this, mnemonics was studied as never before; and
Rejects were taught memory. When Wainer was fully grown, his mind was
more ordered and controlled and his memory more exact than any man who
had lived on Earth a hundred years before. But he was still a Reject and
there was not much for him to do.

He began to feel it, I think, when he was about fifteen. He had always
wanted to go into space, and when he realized at last that it was
impossible, that even the meanest of jobs aboard ship was beyond him, he
was very deeply depressed. He told me