He led her across the lattice-work flooring to a large flat panel, on which a number of lights shone evenly, without change in their asymmetrical pattern. Lloyd slid open a flat panel half-way down the face of this instrument, and removed a flexible metal band. He sat in the only chair in the chamber, directly before the open panel, and began adjusting the band about the circumference of his head. Andra eyed the metal band and the wires that led from it back into the light-strewn panel with misgivings.
"What are you going to do, Lloyd?"
"Ask the Brain for some answers," he said. Lloyd flipped open the lid of a small keyboard, and started to type, carefully: What is the Hive?
When he'd completed his question, he steadied himself in the chair, closed his eyes, and pressed a small button at the side of the exposed keyboard. Andra took a step back, quite startled as Lloyd stiffened in the chair, his face twitching. Before his closed eyes, the lights on the panel began to flicker on and off, dancing with incredible intricacy, and a weird, high-pitched tootling and tweetling began to echo through the chamber, through the scaffolding, through the entire mechanism of the great Brain. Andra jammed her hands to her ears to shut out the nerve-plucking noise. And then the lights blinked, held steady, and the cacophony of the electronic mind cut off. Lloyd opened his eyes.
"Well?" Andra said, going to him. "What happened?"
"It answered my question!" he said, with bitter disgust. "Told me the population of the Hive, told me it had ten truncated conic tiers, with ten levels in each tier, gave me the names of its officers, industries and short, just about what anybody in the Hive already knows!"
"All that," Andra marveled. "So quickly?"
"The Brain doesn't spell it out in words, Andra," Lloyd said ruefully. "It implants the information instantaneously in your mind. When it's implanted, the Brain stops feeding your brain, and you come out of the information-cycle with a new memory. Except that, in this case, there was nothing new to learn."
"If only your father had completed his instructions."
Lloyd's hands, about to remove the headband while he pondered their dilemma, froze in place, and he grunted in sudden wonder. "You don't suppose," he said, shakily, "that this is the question?!"