"Beings," I breathed awedly. "The implication is clear but crazy. Why, a being no smaller than a rat couldn't have human intelligence. The molecules of matter remain of the same size. Building a truly sentient brain at such an extreme of smallness, using those same molecules, would be like trying to make fine pottery out of coarse sand!" "Who said anything about molecules?" Doc demanded almost angrily. "When--just for instance--the flow of far smaller electrons has been the soul of complicated calculating devices for a century? But who knows anything? Maybe, before long, I'll let you in on my project, if you have the courage and interest. But you need more general education. Now, not another word. Go to bed. Answering your whys and whats, I'd be mostly guessing, too." I went to my room where I lay for hours with a tingle in my guts, aware of the frosty stars, the squawking katydids, the universe big and little, and buzzes from Doc's workroom. And I thought of how the human body conformed to the laws of machines. Hence it was a natural robot. It was near dawn before I slept. Thereafter, life went on in the sunshine and shadow of a campus, idyllic and gentle, masking unrest. There were my instructors and the classrooms and labs, and the faces of my contemporaries, easy going young faces, matching a languid attitude of body coupled with latent strength, as a cat's languidness is coupled with the capacity to galvanize into lightning speed. For them the times held a pleasant spark of fright, and the rich red meat of coming triumph. In all fairness, I was one of them. Minden, Fellows, Bowhart, Griswold, Scharber, and the others--the rhythm and meaning of their voices and words was usually the same: "Hi, Charlie! How was the astrogation quiz?" Or: "Yesterday, I rocketted the training ship two thousand kilometers over Lake Michigan, and it was a cinch!..." Or: "Could any course be dopier than this 'Suggested Techniques For Establishing Friendly Relations With Possible Extra-Terrestrial Intelligences?'" Or: "So long, Charlie! I'm going out to help build Pallas City for the asteroid miners!..." Or it might be Mars, Venus, Mercury, or the well remembered Moon, where huge, fantastic starcraft were already in the blueprint stage. Yes, all this was my life, too; though already it seemed half diverted to another, much stranger destiny. * * * * * And there was Janice Randall whom I first spotted in Astrogation Lecture. But I really met her in the company of George who had a special room up in the top of the University Library. It was an eerie place, suitable for such an entity. George was more than an electronic calculator; he was a Giant Brain. He was also a student's and research worker's oracle. You could ask him questions. One day, with Doc Lanvin's remarks sharply in mind, I went up there and waited my turn at George's microphone.