"Very good. You make it clear. But with the atomic bomb comes more orders of magnitude, no? You must go past concrete and steel for protection."
"Right. Only we can’t just make thicker and thicker walls. We’ve run out of materials that are strong enough. So we must abandon materials altogether. If the atom attacks, we must let the atom defend. We will use energy itself; a force field."
"And what," asked Blaustein, gently, "is a force field?"
"I wish I could tell you. Right now, it’s an equation on paper. Energy can be so channeled as to create a wall of matterless inertia, theoretically. In practice, we don’t know how to do it."
"It would be a wall you could not go through, is that it? Even for atoms?"
"Even for atom bombs. The only limit on its strength would be the amount of energy we could pour into it. It could even theoretically be made to be impermeable to radiation. The gamma rays would bounce off it. What we’re dreaming of is a screen that would be in permanent place about cities; at minimum strength, using practically no energy. It could then be triggered to maximum intensity in a fraction of a millisecond at the impingement of short-wave radiation; say the amount radiating from the mass of plutonium large enough to be an atomic war head. All this is theoretically possible."
"And why must you have Ralson?"
"Because he is the only one who can reduce it to practice, if it can be made practical at all, quickly enough. Every minute counts these days. You know what the international situation is. Atomic defense must arrive before atomic war."
"You are so sure of Ralson?"
"I am as sure of him as I can be of anything. The man is amazing, Dr. Blaustein. He is always right. Nobody in the field knows how he does it."
"A sort of intuition, no?" the psychiatrist looked disturbed. "A kind of reasoning that goes beyond ordinary human capacities. Is that it?"
"I make no pretense of knowing what it is."
"Let me speak to him once more then. I will let you know."
"Good." Grant rose to leave; then, as if in afterthought, he said, "I might say, Doctor, that if you don’t do something, the Commission plans to take Dr. Ralson out of your hands."
"And try another psychiatrist? If they wish to do that, of course, I will not stand in their way. It is my opinion, however, that no reputable practitioner will pretend there is a rapid cure."
"We may not intend further mental treatment. He may simply be returned to work."
"That, Dr. Grant, I will fight. You will get nothing out of him. It will be his death."
"We get nothing out of him anyway."
"This way there is at least a chance, no?"
"I hope so. And by the way, please don’t mention the fact that I said anything about taking Ralson away."
"I will not, and I thank you for the warning. Good-bye, Dr. Grant."
"I made a fool of myself last time, didn’t I, Doctor?" said Ralson. He was frowning.
"You mean you don’t believe what you said then?"
"I do!" Ralson’s slight form trembled with the intensity of his affirmation.
He rushed to the window, and Blaustein swiveled in his chair to keep him in view. There were bars in the window. He couldn’t jump. The glass was unbreakable.
Twilight was ending, and the stars were beginning to come out. Ralson stared at them in fascination, then he turned to Blaustein and flung a finger outward. "Every single one of them is an incubator. They maintain temperatures at the desired point. Different experiments; different temperatures. And the planets that circle them are just huge cultures, containing different nutrient mixtures and different life forms. The experimenters are economical, too – whatever and whoever they are. They’ve cultured many types of life forms in this particular test-tube. Dinosaurs in a moist, tropical age and ourselves among the glaciers. They turn the sun up and down and we try to work out the physics of it. Physics!" He drew his lips back in a snarl.
"Surely," said Dr. Blaustein, "it is not possible that the sun can be turned up and down at will."
"Why not? It’s just like a heating element in an oven. You think bacteria know what it is that works the heat that reaches them? Who knows? Maybe they evolve theories, too. Maybe they have their cosmogonies about cosmic catastrophes, in which clashing light-bulbs create strings of Petri dishes. Maybe they think there must be some beneficent creator that supplies them with food and warmth and says to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply!’ "We breed like them, not knowing why. We obey the so-called laws of nature which are only our interpretation of the not-understood forces imposed upon us.
"And now they’ve got the biggest experiment of any yet on their hands. It’s been going on for two hundred years. They decided to develop a strain for mechanical aptitude in England in the seventeen hundreds, I imagine. We call it the Industrial Revolution. It began with steam, went on to electricity, then atoms. It was an interesting experiment, but they took their chances on letting it spread. Which is why they’ll have to be very drastic indeed in ending it."
Blaustein said, "And how would they plan to end it? Do you have an idea about that?"
"You ask me how they plan to end it. You can look about the world today and still ask what is likely to bring our technological age to an end. All the earth fears an atomic war and would do anything to avoid it; yet all the earth fears that an atomic war is inevitable."
"In other words, the experimenters will arrange an atom war whether we want it or not, to kill off the technological era we are in, and to start fresh. That is it, no?"
"Yes. It’s logical. When we sterilize an instrument, do the germs know where the killing heat comes from? Or what has brought it about? There is some way the experimenters can raise the heat of our emotions; some way they can handle us that passes our understanding."
"Tell me," said Blaustein, "is that why you want to die? Because you think the destruction of civilization is coming and can’t be stopped?"
Ralson said, "I don’t want to die. It’s just that I must." His eyes were tortured. "Doctor, if you had a culture of germs that were highly dangerous and that you had to keep under absolute control, might you not have an agar medium impregnated with, say, penicillin, in a circle at a certain distance from the center of inoculation? Any germs spreading out too far from the center would die. You would have nothing against the particular germs who were killed; you might not even know that any germs had spread that far in the first place. It would be purely automatic.
"Doctor, there is a penicillin ring about our intellects. When we stray too far; when we penetrate the true meaning of our own existence, we have reached into the penicillin and we must die. It works slowly – but it’s hard to stay alive."
He smiled briefly and sadly. Then he said, "May I go back to my room now, Doctor?"
Dr. Blaustein went to Ralson’s room about noon the next day. It was a small room and featureless. The walls were gray with padding. Two small windows were high up and could not be reached. The mattress lay directly on the padded floor. There was nothing of metal in the room; nothing that could be utilized in tearing life from body. Even Ralson’s nails were clipped short., Ralson sat up. "Hello!"
"Hello, Dr. Ralson. May I speak to you?"
"Here? There isn’t any seat I can offer you."
"It is all right. I’ll stand. I have a sitting job and it is good for my sitting-down place that I should stand sometimes. Dr. Ralson, I have thought all night of what you told me yesterday and in the days before."
"And now you are going to apply treatment to rid me of what you think are delusions."
"No. It is just that I wish to ask questions and perhaps to point out some consequences of your theories which… you will forgive me?… you may not have thought of."