ke an inspired ballerina, would take a mighty jump accompanied
by rasping earphone sounds, not like tickings of a heart, but rather
like a heavy breathing under emotional stress. There probably would be
some repair work going on in those circuits....

He tried another outlet; this one was marked "pineal gland." What
happened if one plugged some apparatus of the pineal gland into the
circuit of the pineal gland? Lee vaguely wondered. "Nothing probably. It
would be a closed circuit and a very small one at that."

Yes, he was right; the green line paled, its dance seemed tired and
there were only whispering noises in the phones; a weak pulse, a shallow
breathing as of a person after a heart attack. Lee closed his fatigued
eyes to concentrate the better upon the rhythm of the sounds.... It was
very irregular. It came in gusts. There was a pattern to these rasping
breathings as of typewriter keys forming words. Somehow it was familiar.
Was he suffering hallucinations? This rhythmic pattern _was_ forming
words. He _knew_ those words, they had engraved themselves indelibly in
his memory cells; the judgment of The Brain as it had come over the
teletype on a slip of yellow paper: "Lee, Semper Fidelis, 39--cortex
capacity 119--sensitivity 208...."

It was repeated over and over again.

Lee opened his eyes to reassure himself that something was the matter
with his ears.

There was the green line on the screen. It danced. It danced like a
telegraph key under the fingers of a skilled operator. It had a very
definite rhythm. And the rhythm spelled the selfsame words which
continued to flow into the phones: "Lee, Semper Fidelis, 39...."

"God Almighty," Lee murmured and it seemed a magic word. The green
dancer stopped its capers; now it merely ran back and forth across the
stage in a series of pirouettes. Likewise there was only an angry
buzzing in the microphones. For a moment Lee was able to catch his
breath. But only for a moment and then the rasping, unearthly sounds
started on a new rhythm, trying to form speech again. This time the
rhythm was familiar too, but it was preserved in a much deeper layer of
Lee's memory.

"I think--therefore--I am. I think--therefore--I am."

Those would be Aristotle's famous words. Almost twenty years ago Lee had
heard them when he had taken a course on Greek philosophy at the old
Chicago University. He had hardly ever thought of them again. What
strange tricks a fellow's memory could play.