grew complex, and Dr. Persons's
histograms filled pages and pages of his broad notebooks.

It was the first time that James Holden had ever seen a team of
researchers plow into a problem, running a cold and icy scientific
investigation to ascertain precisely how much cause produced how much
effect. Holden, who had taken what he wanted or needed as the time came,
began to understand the desirability of full and careful programming. The
whole affair intrigued him and interested him. He plunged in with a will
and gave them all the help he could.

He had no time to be bored, and he did not mark the passage of time until
he arrived at his thirteenth birthday.

Then one night shortly after his birthday, James Holden discovered women
indirectly. He had his first erotic dream.

We shall not go into the details of this midnight introduction to the
arrival of manhood, for the simple reason that if we dwell on the
subject, someone is certain to attempt a dream-analysis and come up with
some flanged-up character-study or personality-quirk that really has
nothing to do with the mind or body of James Holden. The truth is that
his erotic dream was pleasantly stirring, but not entirely satisfactory.
It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last very long. It awakened him
to the realization that knowledge is not the end-all of life, and that a
full understanding of the words, the medical terms, and the biology
involved did not tell him a thing about this primary drive of all life.

His total grasp of even the sideline issues was still dim. He came to a
partial understanding of why Jake Caslow had entertained late visitors of
the opposite sex, but he still could not quite see the reason why Jake
kept the collection of calendar photographs and paintings hung up around
the place. Crude jokes and rude talk heard long years before and dimly
remembered did not have much connection with the subject. To James
Holden, a "tomato" was still a vegetable, although he knew that some
botanists were willing to argue that the tomato was really a fruit.

For many days he watched Judge Carter and his wife with a critical
curiosity that their childless life had never known before. James found
that they did not act as if something new and strangely thrilling had
just hit the known universe. He felt that they should know about it.
Despite the fact that he knew everything that his textbooks could tell
him about sex and copulation he still had the quain