The knowledge machine
I broke off, and goggled. "Holy cats, it worked! I do know French, just like that!"

I did, too. I could speak it as easy as English. And I'd never known a word of it in my life before. The thing floored me.

"Now do you believe?" Carter asked.

"And how!" I managed to say. "But I still don't see how there's millions to be made from it."

"Think, man!" he said. "It takes a student four years and several thousand dollars to get a university education. Suppose he can go in and get it off tapes for a few hundred dollars?"

The possibilities of it hit me, just like that. "Say, there'd be millions of students for prospects, every year!"

"And college students are only a small part of the market," Carter pointed out. "Everybody would like to know more than they do. Everybody would like to know higher mathematics or Latin or architecture or a hundred other subjects. They don't learn them because it takes too much time and work to study them. But if they can just buy them?"

"Why, there's no limit to the market!" I said. "How many different subjects could you pour into a guy's brain with the thing?"

Carter explained that there was a limit to that. "The potential neural paths in each brain are limited in number. We found that the average person has a neural index that will allow him to absorb the equivalent of a Ph.D. education from the tapes, but not much more."

He added quickly:

"But there'd be a chance for repeat business even so. The scanner can erase this new-found knowledge from the brain, by using a neutralizing electronic impulse. Then the student can learn entirely new subjects."

Right then and there, I saw my big opportunity and I grabbed it.

"You can count me in!" I told him. "But mind, if I put up the dough for the apparatus, I get one-third interest."

"One-third?" said Carter, kind of puzzled.

"Sure, one-third for me, a third for you, and a third for Doc Kindler," I reminded him.

"Oh, certainly," Carter said hastily. "I'll put Doctor Kindler's share in trust for him. But you understand we'd better not use his name at all in developing this. It would prejudice people if they 
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