"I know all about your radiating innards!" Stanton exploded. "But _they_ couldn't trigger the Brain's protective level! It's impossible! You've been here before--" "I was never ... this aroused ... before, Fred," Bodger said weakly. "And now, for the first time, I ... know the answer to something I never knew before." He took a breath, gathered together all his strength, and lifted his face near the other man's, still smiling. "You asked the Brain about a third term, once--Don't argue, Fred, it's on record--and yet there is no memory in its circuits of a reply. Tell me, Fred.... What _was_ its reply?" When Stanton did not respond, Bodger said, "I think I can tell you. Chaos. Noise. A riot of sound and fury that knocked you clear off your chair and broke the circuit before it destroyed you. Because the Brain knew, of course. It's smart, Fred. It can predict with better accuracy than a human mind. It foresaw, after correlating all the facts at its disposal, what would be the result of your attempt at being elected a third time. And it tried to ... tell you...." Bodger faltered, went grey, and lay back upon the interwoven cables with his eyes closed. His lips were still working, though, and he finished, "... the result ... except that the ... Brain doesn't speak ... in words ... just concepts ... and its concept encompassed ... its own...." His head rolled to one side, limply. "_Danger_," croaked the voice of the Brain. "Its _what_? Its own _what_?!" Stanton yelled, grabbing Bodger's head by the hair and banging it violently upon the flooring. Bodger, his eyes rolling, coughed painfully, then sighed, as one who names a long-awaited friend, "... death." "_Danger!_" said the Brain. A wild tootling began in its depths as its metal mind tried to spare it its terrible fate. "What danger?" Stanton roared into the microphone, leaping to the chair before the control panel. "Tell me! I'll find a way out!" "_Danger!_" said the Brain. "_Danger! Danger!_" There was a wild bluish light playing on the face of the panel, now, and Stanton knew, suddenly, that it was not of the Brain itself. He turned, some hideous psychic insight telling him what he could not as yet realize by his senses, and looked at the body of Lloyd Bodger on the floor. Veins and arteries shone like a network of neon lights through the flesh, a pulsing glow that rose in its intensity by the second. The internal organs appeared through Bodger's smoldering clothing as on the screen of a fluoroscope, each alight with self-engendered hellfire. Bodger's eyes were glowing like hot tungsten through his transparent lids, his teeth were bared in a smile brighter than sunrise. His every bone, bit of cartilage, nerve ganglion and muscle fibre sparked like coals beneath a blacksmith's bellows, and the hairs of his head were a Medusa-wig of burning, writhing wire. And then he reached his critical mass. THE END