* * * * * Farley laughed placatingly. "I know it seems high-handed, but I think we all ought to remember there is such a thing as Security." "Security, my foot!" Phil said. "It was that kind of demented thinking that caused Germany to lose Lisa Meitner! _And_ Einstein." "What strikes _me_ as rather odd," Katherine said, "is their sending someone here on a Sunday. When did you hear about it, Russ?" "A little while ago. On the phone." "Curiouser and curiouser." "He was very polite and apologetic." "Quite typical," Phil said. "It's the velvet-glove touch." Farley looked at his wristwatch. "He won't be here for a while, so I wish you could brief me about the inwardness of what you are doing, Phil." He'd never used his first name before, and Phil became a little wary. "I know you can't give me a ten-year course in advanced physics this afternoon, but--well, I'd like to know what kind of stand to take. I'll be representing the university, after all." Phil Kaufman looked down from his perch on the stool at the earnest, kindly face and wondered what really lay behind it. So far as he could see, Doctor Farley had no reason to take any stand on the question at all, except to tell the A.E.C. man to go sit on a tack. If he wanted to represent the university, let him do it in the name of Academic Freedom. Phil glanced at Katherine. She was sitting very still and he had the impression that she was thinking about something else. "All right, I'll give it a try," he said. "There's an idea that's been around for quite a while that there is an analogy between the stars and the atoms." Doctor Farley's face lighted. "I believe I've heard of it. Back in the 'twenties, by a man called Dunn, wasn't it?" Phil shook his head. "Twenty years earlier by a man called Fournier-d'Albe. He wrote a book called _Two New Worlds_, in which he suggested that the solar systems are actually atoms in some vast cloud of super-gas. Of course, this notion ignores the celestial absence of molecular structure--unless you count double stars as molecules--but it might be accounted for by assuming a high temperature. Then he said that the newly hypothesized Rutherford model of the atom was a sub-microscopic solar system, but he didn't stop there. "The atoms and their electrons, he said, were in turn made up of sub-atoms and were perhaps populated by sentient beings who looked through their telescopes and counted the atoms in their vicinity, no doubt arranging them into constellations. You can carry this imaginary process in both directions and as far as you like, but are we to decide arbitrarily that it goes on infinitely? Or is it like Einsteinian space, finite but unbounded?