dressed in the white sterility that leaves only the eyes visible. She
wielded the trephine that laid the patient's brain bare, he kept track of
the patient's life by observing the squiggles on the roll of graph paper
that emerged from his encephalograph. She knew nothing of the craft of
the delicate instrument-creator, and he knew even less of the craft of
surgery. There had been a near-argument during the cleaning-up session
after the operation; the near-argument ended when they both realized that
neither of them understood a word of what the other was saying. So the
near-argument became an animated discussion, the general meaning of
which became clear: Brain surgeons should know more about the intricacies
of electromechanics, and the designers of delicate, precision
instrumentation should know more about the mass of human gray matter they
were trying to measure.

They pooled their intellects and plunged into the problem of creating an
encephalograph that would record the infinitesimal irregularities that
were superimposed upon the great waves. Their operation became large;
they bought the old structure on top of the hill and moved in, bag and
baggage. They cohabited but did not live together for almost a year;
Paul Brennan finally pointed out that Organized Society might permit a
couple of geniuses to become research hermits, but Organized Society
still took a dim view of cohabitation without a license. Besides, such
messy arrangements always cluttered up the legal clarity of chattels,
titles, and estates.

They married in a quiet ceremony about two years prior to the date that
Louis Holden first identified the fine-line wave-shapes that went with
determined ideas. When he recorded them and played them back, his brain
re-traced its original line of thought, and he could not even make a
mental revision of the way his thoughts were arranged. For two years
Louis and Laura Holden picked their way slowly through this field;
stumped at one point for several months because the machine was strictly
a personal proposition. Recorded by one of them, the playback was clear
to that one, but to the other it was wild gibberish--an inexplicable
tangle of noise and colored shapes, odors and tastes both pleasant and
nasty, and mingled sensations. It was five years after their marriage
before they found success by engraving information in the brain by
sitting, connected to the machine, and reading aloud, word for word, the
informatio