A half-dozen times I tried to steer our talk in the direction of my thoughts; each time I allowed the words to drift to another topic. What was the use of upsetting her? _Promise me that, Hodge._ But I had not promised. This was something I had to settle for myself. What was I afraid of? Because I’d never grasped anything to do with the physical sciences did I attribute some anthropomorphism to their manifestations and like a savage fear the spirit imprisoned in what I didnt understand? (But HX-1 _did_ have subjective factors.) I had never thought of myself as hidebound, but I was acting like a ninety-yearold professor asked to use a typewriter instead of a goose quill. I recalled Tyss’s, “You are the spectator type, Hodgins.” And once I had called him out of my memory I couldnt escape his familiar, sardonic, interminable argument. _Why are you fussing yourself, Hodgins? What is the point of all this introspective debate? Don’t you know your choice has already been made? And that you have acted according to it an infinite number of times and will do so an infinite number of times again? Relax, Hodgins; you have nothing to worry about. Free will is an illusion; you cannot alter what you are about to decide under the impression that you have decided._ My reaction to this imagined interjection was frenzied, unreasonable. I cursed Tyss and his damnable philosophy. I cursed the insidiousness of his reasoning which had planted seed in my brain to sprout at a moment like this. Yet in spite of the violence of my rejection of the words I attributed to Tyss, I accepted one of them. I relaxed. The decision had been made. Not by mechanistic forces, nor by blind response to stimulus, but by my own desire. And now to my aid came the image of Tyss’s antithesis, René Enfandin. _Be a skeptic, Hodge; be always the skeptic. Prove all things; hold fast to that which is true. Joking Pilate, asking,_ What is truth? _was blind. But you can see more aspects of the absolute truth than any man has had a chance to see before. Can you use the chance well, Hodge? That is the only question._ Once I could answer it with a vigorous affirmative, and so buttress the determination to go, I was faced with the problem of telling Catty. I could not shut her out of so important a move. I told myself I could not bear the thought of her anxiety; that she would worry despite the fact others had frequently used HX-1, for my object could not be accomplished in a matter of minutes or hours. I was sure she would be sick with apprehension during the days I would be gone. No doubt this was all true, but I also remembered, _Promise me, Hodge_.... I finally took the weak, the ineffective course. I said I’d decided the only way to face my problem was to go to Gettysburg and spend three or four days going over the actual field. Here, I explained unconvincingly, I thought I might at last come to the conclusion whether to scrap all my work and start afresh, or not.