Once in every thousand persons or so would come someone like Wainer whose brain would not accept the clerk, who would react as if the clerk were no more than a hat. After a hundred years, our scientists still did not know why. Many fine minds were ruined with their memory sections cut away, but then a preliminary test was devised to prove beforehand that the clerks would not work and that there was nothing that anyone could do to make them work. Year by year the Rejects, as they were called, kept coming, until they were a sizable number. The more fortunate men with clerks outnumbered the Rejects a thousand to one, and ruled the society, and were called "Rashes"--slang for Rationals. Thus the era of the Rash and Reject. Now, of course, in those days the Rejects could not hope to compete in a technical world. They could neither remember nor compute well enough, and the least of all doctors knew more than a Reject ever could, the worst of all chemists knew much more chemistry, and a Reject certainly could never be a space pilot. As a result of all this, mnemonics was studied as never before; and Rejects were taught memory. When Wainer was fully grown, his mind was more ordered and controlled and his memory more exact than any man who had lived on Earth a hundred years before. But he was still a Reject and there was not much for him to do. He began to feel it, I think, when he was about fifteen. He had always wanted to go into space, and when he realized at last that it was impossible, that even the meanest of jobs aboard ship was beyond him, he was very deeply depressed. He told me about those days much later, when it was only a Reject's memory of his youth. I have lived a thousand years since then, and I have never stopped regretting that they did not let him go just once when he was young, before those last few days. It would have been such a little thing for them to do. * * * * * I first met Wainer when he was eighteen years old and had not yet begun to work. We met in one of those music clubs that used to be in New York City, one of the weird, smoky, crowded little halls where Rejects could gather and breathe their own air away from the--as we called them--"lumpheads." I remember young Wainer very clearly. He was a tremendous man, larger even than You, with huge arms and eyes, and that famous mass of brownish hair. His size set him off from the rest of us, but it never bothered him, and although he was almost painfully awkward, he was never laughed at. I don't quite know how to describe it, but he was very big--ominous, almost--and he gave off an aura of tremendous strength. He said very little, as I remember; he sat with us silently and drank quite a bit, and listened to the music and to us, grinning from time to time with a wonderfully pleasant smile. He was very likable.