Meantime, the scientists took measures to study and if possible to arrest the universal disintegration of humanity. It is the custom of journalists (and it is the habit in fiction) to depict scientists as impractical, dreamy men, absent-minded, innocent, and not competent to deal with simple situations--men forever in need, like infants, of overseers. Nothing could possibly be further from the truth. Indeed, it may fairly be said that, had the people of the world understood this fallacy about scientists, they might themselves have been more scientific--which is to say aware--and so prevented their catastrophe. Actually, it was known--known statistically--even before World War II, that scientists as a group were possessed of an all-round superiority over their fellows. They were not merely precocious, but like the precocious everywhere, they had on the average larger physiques, more strength and endurance, quicker reflexes, greater athletic ability, and better looks than common Homo sapiens. However, although this fact had been published a thousand times and proved in a hundred ways, the people preferred to cling to the myth that scientists were inept in all but their métier--naïve, absent-minded, and rather foolish. That but affords another index of the general foolishness. New York's tragedy convinced the farsighted physicists, chemists, biologists, and others at Los Alamos that the nation and possibly the world would be swept with unprecedented panic. The steps anent local guards which have been already described were immediately taken. Under Xerxes Cohn, the scientists organized research parties; in fifteen planes, they took off to study the situation at first hand. Within forty-eight hours they had assembled a full report of events in a dozen urban areas and of the gory melee in progress everywhere in the countryside. (They had, naturally, all the information available on the Words from Calk's first account in the Chicago papers, through Cummings's initial survey, to the latest military data--as well as reports of many great savants made before their own flights from various cities of the earth.) These data were now screened, and evaluated. Charts were prepared. A discussion meeting was held in the hall for top-secret conferences. Various papers were read, including the following: _Tead's Hypothesis_ that energy, in whatever form, has a sort of subnuclear consciousness and will power and that the watery masses which made up clouds, revolted by the wretched spectacle of humanity, had taken up word-spelling as a form of rebuke, i.e., as Nature talking to human nature.