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."

"You didn't mention any of these doubts to the others, did you?"

"They were just doubts. You knew for sure, and you couldn't tell them."

"I'd come home intending to--tell them there was no Brain, tell them to
stop wasting their time hunting for it and start trying to figure out