easure during a pleasant
dream--or is the enjoyment of a pleasant dream only available to the
after-awakened brain?

What is Man but his Memories?

* * * * *

In one very odd manner, the brain of Jerry Markham retained its
intellectual orientation, and realized that its physical orientation was
uncontrollable and undetectable and therefore of no importance. Like the
lighthouse keeper who could not sleep when the diaphone did not
wrneeee-hrnawwww for five seconds of each and every minute, Jerry
Markham's brain was filled with a mild concern about the total lack of
unimportant but habitual data. There was no speckle of light to classify
and ignore, no susurrus of air molecules raining against the eardrum.
Blankness replaced the smell and taste and their absence was as
disturbing as a pungence or a poison. And, of course, one should feel
something if it is no more than the tonus of muscle against the mobile
bones.

Communication is the prime drive of life. Cut off from external
communication entirely, section A, bay 6, tier 9, row 13 hollered
over to box Q, line 23, aisle F and wanted to know what was going
on. The gang on the upper deck hailed the boiler room, and the
crew in the bleacher seats reported that the folks in charge of
C.I.C.--Communication Information Center--were sitting on their hands
because they didn't have anything to do. One collection of bored brain
cells stirred. They hadn't been called upon since Jerry Markham sang
"_Adeste Fidelis_" in memorized Latin some fifteen years earlier and so
they started the claque. Like an auditorium full of people impatient
because the curtain had not gone up on time, bedlam broke loose.

Bedlam is subject to the laws of periodicity, stochastic analysis, and
with some rather brilliant manipulation it can be reduced to a Fourier
Series. Fourier says that Maxwell is right and goes on to define exactly
when, in a series of combined periodicities of apparently random motion,
all the little particles will be moving in the same direction.
Stochastic analysis says that if the letter "U" follows the letter "Q"
in most cases, words beginning with "Q" will have "U" for a second
letter.

Jerry Markham began to think. Isolated and alone, prisoner in the cell
of bone, with absolutely nothing to distract him, the Brain by common
consent pounded a gavel, held a conference, appointed a chairman and
settled down to do the one job that the Brain was