The conversation between Couri and the patient is out of the Bizarro World Garden of Eden: Eve walks in with full knowledge of good and evil, and the snake tries to disabuse her of it with doubletalk.

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Sleep is also the new snake oil--the promise of a good snooze from a book or a bed or a bottle.

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Don Melrose, also at Sydney, points out that the gas in the middle of the galaxy might already be so strongly ionised, and thus such a good electrical conductor, that current would leak away rather than build up into a concentration like the Snake.

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