th information centers and
other minds. But I was a fluke." His dark blue eyes twinkled.
"Biological units are never so standardized that _all_ of them fall
under any system that can be devised. I functioned in this System, true,
but I could imagine my mind existing outside, could see my functioning
_from the outside_. This is terribly rare--most people are limited to
the functions which sustain them. They experience nothing else except
when circumstances force them to. I, though, could see the System was
not all-powerful."

"Not all-powerful!" Connor exploded. "It got rid of me awfully easily."

His wife tried to calm him. "Listen, dear, then decide."

"You're surviving as a pariah, Mr. Newman, aren't you? Your wife tells
me you've even started to study robot controls, valuable knowledge for
the future and personally satisfying now. Millions of people do survive
as outsiders, as do the planetary colonists who only have limited access
so far to social telepathy. The System has built into it defenses
against Subscribers who lack confidence in it--if it didn't it would
collapse. But people _in_ the System are not forced to remain there.
They can _will_ themselves out any time they close their minds to it, as
I did. But they don't want to will themselves out of it--you certainly
didn't--and their comfortable inertia keeps everything going. I think
you have to know a little about its history, a history which never would
have interested you if you were still comfortably inside it."

He slowly outlined the way it had developed. First those uncertain steps
toward understanding the universally latent powers of telepathy, then
growing chaos as each individual spent most of his time fighting off
unwanted messages. After a period of desperate discomfort a few great
minds, made superhuman by their ability to tap each others' resources,
had devised the Central System Switchboard. Only living units,
delicately poised between rigid order and sheer chaos, could receive
mental messages but this problem had been solved by the molecular
biologists with their synthesized, self-replicating axons, vastly
elongated and cunningly intertwined by the billions. These responded to
every properly-modulated thought wave passing through them and made the
same careful sortings as a human cell absorbing matter from the world.
Then, to make certain this central mind would never become chaotic,
there was programmed into it an automatic rejection of al