ver, until they were away from the Airport
Building and walking along High Garden Terrace in the direction of the
Mall. Conn was glad; his own thoughts were weighing too heavily within
him: I didn't do it. I was going to do it; every minute, I was going to
do it, and I didn't, and now it's too late.

"That was quite a talk you gave them, son," his father said. "They
believed every word of it. A couple of times, I even caught myself
starting to believe it."

Conn stopped short. His father stopped beside him and stood looking at
him.

"Why didn't you tell them the truth?" Rodney Maxwell asked.

The question angered Conn. It was what he had been asking himself.

"Why didn't I just grab a couple of pistols off the table and shoot the
lot of them?" he retorted. "It would have killed them quicker and
wouldn't have hurt as much."

His father took the cigar from his mouth and inspected the tip of it.
"The truth must be pretty bad then. There is no Brain. Is that it, son?"

"There never was one. I'm not saying that only because I know it would
be impossible to build such a computer. I'm telling you what the one man
in the Galaxy who ought to know told me--the man who commanded the Third
Force during the War."

"Foxx Travis! I didn't know he was still alive. You actually talked to
him?"

"Yes. He's on Luna, keeping himself alive at low gravity. It took me a
couple of years, and I was afraid he'd die before I got to him, but I
finally managed to see him."

"What did he tell you?"

"That no such thing as the Brain ever existed." They started walking
again, more slowly, toward the far edge of the terrace, with the sky red
and orange in front of them. "The story was all through the Third Force,
but it was just one of those wild tales that get started, nobody knows
how, among troops. The High Command never denied or even discouraged it.
It helped morale, and letting it leak to the enemy was good
psychological warfare."

"Klem Zareff says that everybody in the Alliance army heard of the
Brain," his father said. "That was why he came here in the first place."
He puffed thoughtfully on his cigar. "You said a computer like the Brain
would be an impossibility. Why? Wouldn't it be just another computer,
only a lot bigger and a lot smarter?"

"Dad, computermen don't like to hear computers called smart," Conn said.
"They aren't. The people who build them are smart; a computer only knows
what's fed to it. They can hold more in