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“You scientists think too much,”
blurted Miss Pefko.
She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.
“Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.”
“Then I’m dumber than an eight-year-old,”
Miss Pefko m...
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“I don’t even know what a cha...
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Miss Pefko showed the guard on the left the pink confidential badge at the tip of her left breast.
Dr. Breed showed the guard on our right the black top-secret badge on his soft lapel.
I smiled at one of the guards. He did not smile back.
There was nothing funny about national security, nothing at all.
“Ask Dr. Horvath to explain something sometime,”
said Dr. Breed to Miss Pefko.
“See if you don’t get a nice, cl...
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“He’d have to start back in the first grade—or maybe e...
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she ...
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“I missed ...
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“We all missed...
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Dr. Breed ...
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“We’d all do well to start over again, preferably wi...
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Miss Naomi Faust was a merry, desiccated old lady. I suppose she had served Dr. Breed for almost all his life, and her life, too.
She explained to me that the Girl Pool was the typing bureau in the Laboratory’s basement.
All year long, she said, the girls of the Girl Pool listened to the faceless voices of scientists on dictaphone records—records brought in by mail girls. Once a year the girls left their cloister of cement block to go a-caroling—to get their chocolate bars from Dr. Asa Breed.
“They serve science, too,”
Dr. Breed tes...
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“even though they may not understand a word of it. God bles...
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Every question I asked implied that the creators of the atomic bomb had been criminal accessories to murder most foul.
Dr. Breed was astonished, and then he got very sore.
“All your questions seem aimed at getting me to admit that scientists are heartless, conscienceless, narrow boobies, indifferent to the fate of the rest of the human race, or maybe not really members of the human race at all.”
Where did you ever get such ideas? From the funny papers?”
“From Dr. Hoenikker’s son, to name one source.”
“I’m sick of people misunderstanding what a scientist is, what a scientist does.”
Everybody talks about research and practically nobody in this country’s doing it.
We’re one of the few companies that actually hires men to do pure research.
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”
They looked upon him as a sort of magician who could make America invincible with a wave of his wand.
I remember, shortly before Felix died, there was a Marine general who was hounding him to do something about mud.”
The miracle of Felix—and I sincerely hope you’ll put this in your book somewhere—was that he always approached old puzzles as though they were brand new.”
The puzzle is how to get Marines out of the mud—right?”
The seed, which had come from God-only-knows-where, taught the atoms the novel way in which to stack and lock, to crystallize, to freeze.
“Now suppose,”
“that there were many possible ways in which water could crystallize, could freeze. Suppose that the sort of ice we skate upon and put into highballs—what we might call ice-one—is only one of several types of ice. Suppose water always froze as ice-one on Earth because it had never had a seed to teach it how to form ice-two, ice-three, ice-four …? And suppose,”
“that there were one form, which we will call ice-nine—a crystal as hard as this desk—with a melting point of, let us say, one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit, or, better still, a m...
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“But suppose, young man, that one Marine had with him a tiny capsule containing a seed of ice-nine, a new way for the atoms of water to stack and lock, to freeze. If that Marine threw that seed into the nearest puddle …?”
“The puddle would freeze?”
“And all the puddles in the frozen muck?”
“They would freeze?”
“You bet they would!”
“And the United States Marines would rise from the swamp and march on!”
DR. BREED WAS MISTAKEN about at least one thing: there was such a thing as ice-nine.
