"They don't seem to realize it's 1993," said the young man with the shotgun. The fat man nodded. "Come on," he said, turning back toward the town and the coolness. "We've done our duty." The young man with the squirtgun took a last look. "There they go, Art and Science," he observed with satisfaction. "Those two subjects always did make my head ache." * * * * * On the hot road Madson began to stride briskly. His nostrils flared. "Smell the morning air," he commanded. "It's good, good!" Ellenby, matching his stride with longer if older legs, looked at him with mild wonder. "Smell the hot sour grass," Madson continued. "It's things like this man was meant for, not machines and formulas. Look at the dew. Have you seen the dew in years? Look at it on that spiderweb!" The physicist paused obediently to observe the softly twinkling strands. "Perfect catenaries," he murmured. "What?" "A kind of curve," Ellenby explained. "The locus of the focus of a parabola rolling on a straight line." "Locus-focus hocus-pocus!" Madson snorted. "Reducing the wonders of Nature to chalk marks. It's disgusting." Suddenly each tiny drop of dew turned blood-red. Ellenby turned his back on the spiderweb, whipped a crooked little brass tube from an inside pocket and squinted through it. "What's that?" Madson asked. "Spectroscope," Ellenby explained. "Early morning spectra of the sun are fascinating." Madson huffed. "There you go. Analyzing. Tearing beauty apart. It's a disease." He paused. "Say, won't you hurt your eyes?" Turning back, Ellenby shook his head. "I keep a smoked glass on it," he said. "I'm always hoping that some day I'll get a glimpse of an atomic bomb explosion." "You mean to say you've missed all the dozens they dropped on this country? That's too bad." "The ball of fire's quite fleeting. The opportunities haven't been as good as you think." "But you're a physicist, aren't you? Don't you people have all sorts of lovely photographs to gloat over in your laboratories?" "Atomic bomb spectra were never declassified," Ellenby told him wistfully. "At least not in my part of the project. I've never seen one." "Well, you'll probably get your chance," Madson told him harshly. "If you've been reading your dirty telefax, you'll know the Hot Truce is coming to a boil. And the Angeles area will be a prime target." Ellenby nodded mutely. They trudged on. The sun began to beat on their backs like an open fire. Ellenby turned up his collar. He watched his companion thoughtfully. Finally he said, "So you're the Madson who wrote those _Enemies of Science_ stories about a world ruled by poets. It never occurred to me back at Ozona. And that non-fiction book about us--what was it called?"