Benton stopped short. He had just entered the control room, intending to seat himself at the panel and ask Urei some pointed questions. That could be done in the usual way one presented the machine with a problem--activating one of the forty-eight positions and typing his question. Now he was confronted by a voice coming out of the intercom, apparently answering a question he had been thinking about. Benton shuddered involuntarily and started once more for the panel. Somewhere in the building housing the great brain a switch was open on the intercom; that was all. It was the voice of a technician he had heard, and the reason he hadn't heard any more was because the man had moved away from the intercom unit that had picked up.... "I'm not kidding you," said Urei; "why kid yourself?" Benton sat down, sweating. "I'm still doing the sort of thing I was built to do," said Urei, soothingly. "Solving man's problems. Quit shivering and shaking; it might be contagious, and if I start shaking, there'll be an earthquake." Benton's throat was dry but he swallowed and got it working. He also got control of his nerves. This was what he had come here for, wasn't it? "I can't see what problem will be solved by slowly driving me crazy," he said. "You're doing that, not me," Urei charged. "Which might tend to prove you weren't very sane in the first place." "Explain that." "You're worried and upset," Urei said. "From a simple observation which no more than proved that I'm sentient, you've drawn conclusions which aren't warranted by the facts. Thalamic reactions, instead of reason." * * * * * Benton pondered for a second. "Partly," he admitted. "But it is a fact that you made me do something I had no intention of doing. You took over my body for a second or two; that was a hostile act. And if you committed one overt move against a man, it is reasonable to suspect that, if it becomes convenient, you might take over all mankind. What's thalamic about that?" A hearty laugh issued from the intercom speaker. "I don't suppose you knew I had a built-in sense of humor, did you? Of course that laugh was manufactured, inasmuch as I have no diaphragm, per se. But a sense of humor is actually an intellectual attribute, even if you do express it physically. It is not so?" Benton grunted. "Isn't that a little off the subject?" "Please," Urei pleaded. "Let's not be pedestrian; I expected some co-operation from you. Don't let the trees obscure your vision. Don't you realize that your own words justified any mental manipulation I might practice on humans? If a little thing like I did can be considered hostile, then you humans declared war on me thirty years ago. Actually, all I did was to get to some information a little faster than you intended to give it to me; it didn't inconvenience you a bit."