"There isn't all the change you imagine," he said. "Have you had your first physiology?"
"Yes. I was very good...." Mary saw from his smile that her inadvertent little conceit had trapped her.
"Then, Miss Mary Walden, how do you think it is possible?"
Why did teachers and medicops have to be this way? When all you wanted was to have them talk to you, they turned everything around and made you think.
She quoted unhappily from her schoolbook, "The main things in an ego shift are the two vegetative nervous systems that translate the conditions of either personality to the blood and other organs right from the brain. The vegetative nervous systems change the rate at which the liver burns or stores sugar and the rate at which the kidneys excrete...."
Through the closed door to the other room, Mrs. Harris's voice raised at the visiophone said distinctly, "But, Mr. Walden...."
"Reabsorb," corrected Captain Thiel.
"What?" She didn't know what to listen to—the medicop or the distant voice of Mrs. Harris.
"It's better to think of the kidneys as reabsorbing salts and nutrients from the filtrated blood."
"Oh."