thick reeling cloud of that intoxicating scent—

A wave of weakening relief and gladness almost overpowered him as he touched her. “You—it is you, Fran. You’re all right?”

“Yes. Yes.” Her breath came fast, impatient. “We’ve got to hurry, Rolly. I got rid of that one. But the new rapport-clan know about you, maybe. We don’t have much time. Come on!”

The levitator shaft panel slid shut behind them. The car whined, and Roland felt the sudden suffocating pressure of rapid acceleration.

They emerged in the darkened, damp basement of a vacant ruin just outside Worldcity. He saw a pallid, three-eyed lizard, and a huge grey rat with six legs. He followed Berti and Frances into a beautiful lazy summer day, with genuine sunlight. A hawk sailed easily across a pale blue sky. In the distance, rising like a gigantic bubble, the plastic dome shell that covered Worldcity gleamed in the sun.

They walked silently on down the cracked, weed-grown concrete highway.

Berti started talking again. Roland wanted Frances to talk, but she seemed too absorbed in the scenery. “Special excursion monorail systems were set up for trips into the natural areas. Psychological balance, you know. But it was too late. No one cares any more. An almost completely catatonic world is a pretty terrible sight, I suppose. World Brain blocked any action of free thought—the one spontaneous, progressive and unique characteristic of the human.”

That broke Frances’ reverie. “Yes, Rolly. Block that characteristic and you kill the human. The human is a step above the beast because of his free-associative brain. But it also persists in dooming him as a species. The human heart and muscle belong to the jungle—his overdeveloped brain to an environment of his own creation.”

She was swinging freely along beside him. Berti said, “Civilization subjected the human body to a vast and critical experiment. But the exaggeration of a part, like the fossil nautili, intended the experiment to fail.”

“But man isn’t licked yet!” said Roland vehemently. “He’s got his highly specialized brain, and complexity and specialization aren’t necessarily fatal—simply dangerous.”

“You’re proud of him,” said Berti, cutting off the tops of weeds with quick slicing motions of a green branch. “Even with his brain, he was never much better than the beast. A living anachronism, an unbalanced 

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