ine, there were many who
hailed the lanky, queer looking man: There comes the ant-man. Hello,
Professor. Hello, Aussie.

For some reason most of the boys assumed that he was an Australian,
perhaps because with his graying mane and his emaciated face he looked
like a foreigner to them.

This popularity with the younger generation, coming as it did so late
and unexpected in his life, made Lee very proud. Those were the kind of
Americans he had been secretly longing for in those desert years,
hardworking, wide-awake, radiant with life:

"They really are the salt of the earth, the hope of the world," he
thought.

He had passed through the median section of the hemispheres and had
reached the point just below the cerebrum. This was a region of
cavities, the seats of various glands in the human brain. Some of these
had their mechanical counterparts in The Brain, huge storage tanks with
an elaborate pumping system which carried their fluid chemicals through
the labyrinth of The Brain. But there was one gland which had not been
duplicated in The Brain, the pineal gland.

In the human, the pineal gland was the despair of the medical sciences.
It was not demonstrably linked to any other organ nor did it serve any
demonstrable function. Yet, it was known that its sensitivity was
greater by far than even that of the pyramidal cells and that in some
mysterious manner the pineal gland was vitally connected with the center
of life because its slightest violation caused instant death.
Metaphysicists had dealt with this mystery of mysteries; it was their
theory that the pineal gland were the seat of "extrasensory" faculties
and it was often referred to as "the inner eye."

Even if such an organ could have been duplicated by science and
technology, there would have been no use for it; it could have served no
purpose in The Brain. The Brain had been designed for the solution of
exact problems; no matter what nature had created in the brains of
higher animals, no matter how unprejudiced their approach, scientists
like Dr. Scriven would have hesitated to impair an otherwise perfect
apparatus through the addition of nuisance values such as any
"extrasensory" faculties.

However, with The Brain being modelled so closely after the human brain,
the space for the pineal gland did exist even if in a sort of functional
vacuum. In order to utilize this space in some manner, the designers had
converted the gland into a subcenter for the dis