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While Fawzi was talking, Rodney Maxwell went to the table, rummaged his pistol out of the pile and buckled it on. The mayor stopped short.

“You leaving us, Rod?”

“Yes, it’s getting late. Conn and I are going for a little walk; we’ll be at Senta’s in half an hour. The fresh air will do both of us good and we have a lot to talk about. After all, we haven’t seen each other for over five years.”

* * * * *

They were silent, however, until they were away from the Airport Building and walking along High Garden Terrace in the direction of the Mall. Conn was glad; his own thoughts were weighing too heavily within him: I didn’t do it. I was going to do it; every minute, I was going to do it, and I didn’t, and now it’s too late.

“That was quite a talk you gave them, son,” his father said. “They believed every word of it. A couple of times, I even caught myself starting to believe it.”

Conn stopped short. His father stopped beside him and stood looking at him.

“Why didn’t you tell them the truth?” Rodney Maxwell asked.

The question angered Conn. It was what he had been asking himself.

“Why didn’t I just grab a couple of pistols off the table and shoot the lot of them?” he retorted. “It would have killed them quicker and wouldn’t have hurt as much.”

His father took the cigar from his mouth and inspected the tip of it. “The truth must be pretty bad then. There is no Brain. Is that it, son?”

“There never was one. I’m not saying that only because I know it would be impossible to build such a computer. I’m telling you what the one man in the Galaxy who ought to know told me–the man who commanded the Third Force during the War.”

“Foxx Travis! I didn’t know he was still alive. You actually talked to him?”

“Yes. He’s on Luna, keeping himself alive at low gravity. It took me a couple of years, and I was afraid he’d die before I got to him, but I finally managed to see him.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That no such thing as the Brain ever existed.” They started walking again, more slowly, toward the far edge of the terrace, with the sky red and orange in front of them. “The story was all through the Third Force, but it was just one of those wild tales that get started, nobody knows how, among troops. The High Command never denied or even discouraged it. It helped morale, and letting it leak to the enemy was good psychological warfare.”

“Klem Zareff says that everybody in the Alliance army heard of the Brain,” his father said. “That was why he came here in the first place.” He puffed thoughtfully on his cigar. “You said a computer like the Brain would be an impossibility. Why? Wouldn’t it be just another computer, only a lot bigger and a lot smarter?”

“Dad, computermen don’t like to hear computers called smart,” Conn said. “They aren’t. The people who build them are smart; a computer only knows what’s fed to it. They can hold more information in their banks than a man can in his memory, they can combine it faster, they don’t get tired or absent-minded. But they can’t imagine, they can’t create, and they can’t do anything a human brain can’t.”

“You know, I’d wondered about just that,” said his father. “And none of the histories of the War even as much as mentioned the Brain. And I couldn’t see why, after the War, they didn’t build dozens of them to handle all these Galactic political and economic problems that nobody seems able to solve. A thing like the Brain wouldn’t only be useful for war; the people here aren’t trying to find it for war purposes.”