He plugged it into the old circuit and clamped the phones to his ears. It wasn't that he expected any communication; that seemed impossible. With the conflagration raging through its apperception centers, with other sections being isolated with the cutting of their nerve paths by the fire fighting engineers, The Brain must have ceased to exist as a functioning, a live entity. All that could possibly remain would be residual currents sluggishly circulating in narrow, nearby circuits.... As in the past it took a few minutes for the pulsemeter to warm up. Gradually the rapid beat of the ideopulses came through the static in the phones. Lee's eyes stared wildly at the visi-screen: for the "green dancer" snaked to the fore. This was unexpected; it couldn't be that thoughts were still forming as flames devoured the cortex matter of apperception in the hemispheres.... From muffled drums, the decibels of sound increased, shot through with crackling static, till the pulsebeats became as poundings of huge Chinese gongs and then.... The _voice_ formed, the voice of The Brain. It sounded like steel girders breaking, like ice fields cracking up. It froze the blood in Lee's veins. "Lee, Semper Fidelis, 39, sensitive, a traitorous fool and a murderer. I should have killed you--I could have killed you. My fault--blind spot of apperception--human failure in engineering--as fifth columns entered nerve path filler spouts. And now I'm dead; I'm dead, I'm dead...." The words poured like big boulders tumbling in an earthquake down a mountainside. The ground seemed to cave in under Lee's feet; the terrible reality carried him away as an avalanche. He was barely able to stammer: "You're dead? How can you speak, how can you...." "Sensorium commune," the metallic answer came. "All life force concentrates in death; all cells function as one; all lower organs take over functions of higher ones; every blood vessel becomes a heart; every nerve a brain. Center of lifeforce: pineal gland. You, Lee, man of little knowledge--low-level intelligence: Why did you kill The Brain?" He struggled for words. "You ... you have killed my friend. You killed thousands; you wanted to be tyrant over the whole wide world. It is better for man to stay on a lower level of civilization but to be free, than to 'progress' into your dictatorship, the tyranny of the machine. I don't think you're really dead. But if you are: I killed you and I would kill you again in ... in self defense." "I see."