"Don't tense up, I won't," I told her. At the same time I made myself the little promise that if I ever got to feeling restless, that is, restless and _bad_, I'd just go ahead and punch the button and see what happened--sort of leave my future up to the gods of the Deathlands, you might say. "What makes you so sure it's a weapon?" Pop asked. "What else would it be," I asked him, "that they'd be so hot on getting them in the middle of a war?" "I don't know for sure," Pop said. "I've made a guess, but I don't want to tell it now. What I'm getting at, Ray, is that your first thought about anything you find--in the world outside or in your own mind--is that it's a weapon." "Anything worthwhile in your mind is a weapon!" Alice interjected with surprising intensity. "You see?" Pop said. "That's what I mean about the both of you. That sort of thinking's been going on a long time. Cave man picks up a rock and right away asks himself, 'Who can I brain with this?' Doesn't occur to him for several hundred thousand years to use it to start building a hospital." "You know, Pop," I said, carefully tucking the cube back in my pocket, "you _are_ sort of preachy at times." "Guess I am," he said. "How about some grub?" * * * * * It was a good idea. Another few minutes and we wouldn't have been able to see to eat, though with the cans shaped to tell their contents I guess we'd have managed. It was a funny circumstance that in this wonder plane we didn't even know how to turn on the light--and a good measure of our general helplessness. * * * * * We had our little feed and lit up again and settled ourselves. I judged it would be an overnight trip, at least to the cracking plant--we weren't making anything like the speed we had been going east. Pop was sitting in back again and Alice and I lay half hitched around on the kneeling seats, which allowed us to watch each other. Pretty soon it got so dark we couldn't see anything of each other but the glowing tips of the cigarettes and a bit of face around the mouth when the person took a deep drag. They were a good idea, those cigarettes--kept us from having ideas about the other person starting to creep around with a knife in his hand. The North America screen still glowed dimly and we could watch our green dot trying to make progress. The viewport was dead black at first, then there came the faintest sort of bronze blotch that very slowly shifted forward and down. The Old Moon, of course, going west ahead of us.