Nobody likes that one. I said, "Sorry," and carried Paul his drink. He was sitting in one of my chairs; he had his legs on another; his elbow rested on my coffee table. I saw in my mirror that I was flushing a little: I felt embarrassed. But Paul had already forgotten chiding me. "Phil," he said, jiggling his glass to cool his psyche with the ice-clink, "it gets worse and worse. It is beyond horrible. Past hideous. More than unthinkable. And it surpasses the unbearable." "How about--tiresome?" He remembered again--and grinned. "Quid pro quo? Okay. What do you want to talk about?" "It," I said. "You. Any damned thing you please." Paul sipped his highball. And that was another difference. At his age, I hadn't sipped. I had guzzled. He appeared to be thinking over what he would like to discuss--as if it were a scientific problem. Finally he said, "Phil, what's the matter with us?" "Us who?" "Physicists." "Religion," I said. "The faith of skepticism?" He leered at me. "If all you've got on it is that old chapter about the law of opposites, never mind." "Lack of skepticism," I answered. Paul chuckled. "Goody! Go ahead." "The religion of a physicist is his belief in pure reason. He has done so well with it that he regards it as the whole of consciousness. He is like a man who has discovered the shovel. It digs so much better than his hands that he never looks for--" "--the steam shovel?" "Dynamite." "Ouch!" I laughed. "Take the _Bulletin_ of the Atomic Scientists. This journal has been coming to me ever since you guys got frightened by What-Hath-God-Wrought-Now. I've been reading it for so long that I maybe ought to carry a pocket radiation meter to be sure I don't read it too much. What is this noble publication? An inquiry, it claims, into the means for controlling atomic energy and assuring world peace." "And a pretty complete, exhaustive inquiry, too." "Is it? Is it even a scientific inquiry? The atomic bomb will never go to war by itself. Men will drop, toss, or convey it." "Sure. And the _Bulletin_ has taken up every known means by which people can be told what atomic energy is, and why it must be controlled, and how to do that. Every step of the debate in the House and the Senate--and the debates in the United Nations--has been followed. Every idea my fellow physicists could hit on has been aired--" "With no result." "No result, my eye! If we hadn't ganged up to make Congress see that atomic energy was more than a military matter--soldiers would control the whole business right now." "Grant that. You did get the AEC appointed. The brass doesn't run the whole domestic show. But the world show is run entirely from the viewpoint of possible war." "Do you expect the physicists to be able to do anything about Russia and the Iron Curtain--when all the statesmen of all the nations can't drive a pinhole in it?"