I supposed, now, that Marcia was offering me the opportunity to ask if I hadn't seen her in Miami; I supposed she had pointed out the hurt to let me, if I wished, open it up. Paul had crushed his napkin. He was sitting beside her and across from me--wondering, probably, how to turn the conversation away from the heat wave, the weather, to a less self-conscious, more profitable subject. "Workin'?" he asked. "Miami," I said to Marcia, "is quite a place." Then I said to Paul, "Yeah." "He's cutting a serial," Paul told the girl. "When he gets through, they'll pay him about five years of my salary for it. A month's work, for him. A story about how some college football player married the Daisy Queen, I imagine. For that, he gets sixty bucks to my one. All I do, though, is make atom bombs. You can see the public would rather--" "--have its ego blown up than its cities." She laughed. "What is it really about?" I gave them an outline of the story. "You see," I said, "it's just the way Shaw put it. If you're going to tell people the truth, you've got to make them laugh, or they'll kill you." "Why will they?" Marcia asked. "Because the truth doesn't seem amusing to them at all. However--they have a feeling life should be amusing. So--if you can make them laugh, and still occasionally set down a fact, they assume it's possible for somebody to know a few truths and still laugh. This permits them--in the long run--to ignore the truth you set down and go on laughing." "Does the truth seem amusing to you, Phil?" she asked. "Infinitely." "It seems ghastly to me." "Infinitely ghastly, too. You have to approach it in both moods at once--or else, and this is commoner--in first one and then the other." "There is an unwritten law in this country," Paul reminded us dryly, "that everything is just dandy all the time--and anybody who says different is a communist!" I nodded. "There is also a superstitious belief that the act of stating an unpalatable truth will increase its danger to the folks. What you don't know won't hurt you. Innocence is bliss. Boost, don't knock. If you haven't anything good to say, don't say it. This is the folklore of advertising. This is the theme song of radio. Everything has to be on the up-and-up. Criticism is regarded as un-American and un-Christian. The nation was founded by a rebellion of the early fathers against British tyranny. Christ was the most passionate critic man ever had. But it is considered the essence of patriotism and the chief tenet of the Master to be anticritic. So the whole meaning both of our nation and of its principal religion have been thrown overboard--and we are all riding on a roller-coaster where no track inspectors are allowed." "Goodness!" Marcia said. "Where," I went on, "nobody is even sure that the tracks were ever laid to the end: looking ahead realistically also is forbidden." The drinks came.