the—"

"Lock, stock and personnel," he nodded. "I'm three months before birth, already. My goal is conception."

A big, brassy gong chimed in my brain. "That sounds like this dianetics business that was going the rounds awhile back."

Hardy nodded. "In some respects, yes. But I have a single goal, total recall, and I'm taking a more comprehensive approach. Psycho-therapy helped a great deal, but I have traced-out every angle of mnemonics, improved on most and invented some new ones. The final problem is one of improving synaptic potentials and actual tissue tone in the brain. Biochemistry is giving me the answers. With enough of the new B vitamin derivative I'm confident I can reach conception—and a totality of recall."

"But Hardy, what have you got when you get there? I still say, what's the percentage?"

The look he gave me was puzzled but completely tolerant. "You raved to me about my last play, yet you don't see what I'm getting at?" He stopped pacing and sat opposite me with his muscular hands knotted into fists on my desk.

"George," he said with quiet intentness, "I will be the first man since creation to have the full potential of his brain at his creative disposal."

"How do you figure that?"

"The brain has three principal functions. It can store information for recall, it can analyze and correlate this information and finally it can synthesize creatively. Now the latter two functions are inherently dependent upon the quality of the first, or memory recall. As a truly thinking animal, man considers he has reached some acme of perfection because his brain is so superior to the lower animals. Actually, the real gulf is between what man has achieved and what he can achieve with his brain.

"The key lies in perfecting his recall. What good does it do to keep pouring in information when most of us are forgetting old things almost as rapidly as we are learning new ones? Of course, we don't really ever forget anything, but our power of exact recall grows fuzzy through disuse. Then when we need a certain name or factual bit of information we can't quite dig it up, or it comes up in distorted approximations.

"The same holds for calling on experience to help us with new problems. We may grasp the general lesson of experience, but most of the specific incidents of our lives are dulled in time. The lessons we paid dearly to learn are largely useless. So we go on making the same mistakes, paying the same penalties over and over again."

I shrugged. "Everybody would like a better memory, I suppose, but I've never known anyone to go off the deep end over it like you have. What more can you gain?"

"Can't you visualize what it would be like to have even a short life-time of knowledge and experience laid out in sharp detail of recall? Think of the new associations of thoughts and concepts that would be possible! Consider the potential for creating drama, alone! Every word ever read or spoken, every emotion ever conveyed, every gesture of anger, love, jealousy, pain, pleasure—all this raw material glittering brightly, ready to pour out in new conflicts, dramatic situations, sharp pungent dialogue—"

He made me sense his enthusiasm, but I couldn't quite feel it. Would such a tremendous ability necessarily be good? Something about its immensity frightened me, and I didn't care to consider it for my own use at all.

I said, "Don't get me wrong. If this is what's going into your playwriting, I'm all for it. And what you do with your money is your own business. What do you propose?"

"Can you absorb more of my work?" he asked abruptly.

"I'm your agent, aren't I? I'll peddle it if I can't use it myself," I told him, not that I was so eager for the broker's 10% so much as I wanted to have the pick of his output for my own productions.

I didn't know what I was taking on. He turned out his third play in just ten days. Ten days, I said. I read to the bottom of page two and decided