sourly.

The machine stirred, searching for a response.

Anders felt a quick tremor of fear at the sheer alien quality of his
viewpoint. His sense of formalism had been sloughed off, his agreed-upon
reactions bypassed. What would be revealed next?

He was seeing clearly, he realized, as perhaps no man had ever seen
before. It was an oddly exhilarating thought.

But could he still return to normality?

"Can I get you a drink?" the reaction machine asked.

At that moment Anders was as thoroughly out of love as a man could be.
Viewing one's intended as a depersonalized, sexless piece of machinery
is not especially conducive to love. But it is quite stimulating,
intellectually.

Anders didn't want normality. A curtain was being raised and he wanted
to see behind it. What was it some Russian scientist--Ouspensky, wasn't
it--had said?

"_Think in other categories._"

That was what he was doing, and would continue to do.

"Good-by," he said suddenly.

The machine watched him, open-mouthed, as he walked out the door.
Delayed circuit reactions kept it silent until it heard the elevator
door close.

* * * * *

"You were very warm in there," the voice within his head whispered, once
he was on the street. "But you still don't understand everything."

"Tell me, then," Anders said, marveling a little at his equanimity. In
an hour he had bridged the gap to a completely different viewpoint, yet
it seemed perfectly natural.

"I can't," the voice said. "You must find it yourself."

"Well, let's see now," Anders began. He looked around at the masses of
masonry, the convention of streets cutting through the architectural
piles. "Human life," he said, "is a series of conventions. When you look
at a girl, you're supposed to see--a pattern, not the underlying
formlessness."

"That's true," the voice agreed, but with a shade of doubt.

"Basically, there is no form. Man produces _gestalts_, and cuts form out
of the plethora of nothingness. It's like looking at a set of lines and
saying that they represent a figure. We look at a mass of material,
extract it from the background and say it's a man. But in truth there is
no such thing. There are only the humanizing features that
we--myopically--attach to it. Matter is conjoined, a matter of
viewpoint."

"You're not seeing it now," said the voice.

"Damn it," Anders said. He was certain that he was on the track of
something big, perhaps some