"Buy 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.