And within the passing of the next five minutes, said O'Hara, his mind went through the progressive stages of the full cycle of evolution--inert at first, then active only as a salt solution might react electrically, then numbly timorous as a hypersensitive vegetable, and finally aware. The worm recoils from surfaces too hot or cold. He was aware like that, until somewhere along toward the rapid reassertion of the human mind he met and conquered, if not fear, at least the impossibility of fearing. To fear, he said, and to know the reason for it, constitutes the greatest single stride up from the primal ooze. "Nedra!" his first cry was. And then, "Oh, Father, Father, help me! Help me--" And the voice came to him gently: "You see, O'Hara? Are you so measurably superior to that dawn child who worshiped the fire that burnt him? You call upon me now as if indeed I were a god, and solely because I seem to injure you." "Father, you mock me." "Yes, O'Hara, I mock you--but only to help you regain your reason. There is something you should know, O'Hara--you must understand that a man who has lived in authority as long as I have has seen all the pitifully few reactions of men under duress. As you were walking away from me, I knew that you were considering how you would plot against me. I cannot read your mind, but given the man you are, trained as you are, it was inevitable that you would react in that manner. I could, I believe, reduce all this to an understandable equation, just as I can shuffle about the components of this city into the pattern I desire without thinking in detail of the various phases of it. The integrocalculators do that detail thinking for me. That should be comprehensible to you, for all these little mechanical marvels were rooted in the world as it existed here before the Curtain, and exist now beyond it. Equations of the brain--we had the fundamentals of them in the years before the Third World War; and the origins of spatial architecture lay in those experimental buildings in which the walls were movable, of course only horizontally, but not remote in mathematical technique from the vertical and spherical construction of this city. A matter of imagination only, isn't it? "And memory, O'Hara. My memory for the keys upon this board, and the integrocalculators' automatic memory of the meaning of successive stabs of power.