u have read the part you want to memorize just
to be sure of your material. Then, with the machine running, you
carefully read aloud the passage from your book. The vibrating amplifier
in the machine monitors and records each electrical impulse, then
furnishes it back to your brain as a successive series of repetitious
vibrations, each identical in shape and magnitude, just as if you had
actually read and re-read that list of stuff time and again."

"And then I'll know it cold?"

James shook his head. "Then you'll be about as confused as you've ever
been. For several hours, none of it will make sense. You'll be thinking
things like a 'cup of salt and a pinch of water,' or maybe, 'sugar three
of mustard and two spoonthree teas.' And then in a few hours all of this
mish-mash will settle itself down into the proper serial arrangement; it
will fit the rest of your brain-memory-pattern comfortably."

"Why?"

"I don't know. It has something to do with the same effect one gets out
of studying. On Tuesday one can read a page of textbook and not grasp a
word of it. Successive readings help only a little. Then in about a week
it all becomes quite clear, just as if the brain had sorted it and filed
it logically among the other bits of information. Well, what about that
cookbook?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Bagley, with the air of someone agreeing to have a tooth
pulled when it hasn't really started to hurt, "I'll get it."

* * * * *

James Holden allowed himself a few pleasant daydreams. The most
satisfactory of all was one of himself pleading his own case before the
black-robed Justices of the Supreme Court, demolishing his detractors
with a flow of his brilliance and convincing them beyond any doubt that
he did indeed have the right to walk alone. That there be no question of
his intellect, James proposed to use his machine to educate himself to
completion. He would be the supreme student of the arts and the sciences,
of law, language, and literature. He would know history and the
humanities, and the dreams and aims of the great philosophers and
statesmen, and he would even be able to quote in their own terms the
drives of the great dictators and some of the evil men so that he could
draw and compare to show that he knew the difference between good and
bad.

But James Holden had no intention of sharing this limelight.

His superb brilliance was to be compared to the average man's, not to
another