me, and if I hurt everyone in return that is unconscionable usury.
"Then, too, if you'd rather have a less noble reason, Selene, consider my daughter. Just before I left for the Moon, she had 'applied for permission to have a child. She'll probably get it and before long I'll be - if you don't mind my saying so - a grandfather. Somehow I'd like to see my grandchild have a normal life expectancy. So I prefer to believe the Pump is dangerous and to act on that belief."
Selene said, intensely, "But here's' my point. Is the Pump dangerous or is it not? I mean, the truth, and not what anyone wants to believe."
"I should ask you that. You're the Intuitionist What does your intuition say?"
"But that's what bothers me, Ben. I can't make it really certain either way. I tend to feel the Pump is harmful, but maybe that's because I want to believe that."
"All right. Maybe you do. Why?"
Selene smiled ruefully and shrugged her shoulders. "It would be fun for Barron to be wrong. When he thinks he's certain, he's so vituperatively certain."
"I know. You want to see his face when he's forced to back down. I'm well aware of how intense such a desire can be. For instance, if the Pump were dangerous and I could prove it, I might conceivably be hailed as the savior of humanity, and yet I swear that I'd be more interested in the look on Hallam's face. I'm not proud of that feeling so I suspect that what I'll do is insist on an equal share of the credit with Lamont, who deserves it after all, and confine my pleasure to watching Lamont's face when he watches Hallam's face. The pettishness will then be one place removed. . . . But I'm beginning to speak nonsense. . . . Selene?"
"Yes, Ben?"
"When did you find out you were an Intuitionist?"
"I don't quite know."
"You took physics in college, I imagine."
"Oh, yes. Some math, too, but I was never good at that Come to think of it, I wasn't particularly good in physics, either. I used to guess the answers when I was desperate; you know, guess what I was supposed to do to get the right answers. Very often, it worked and then I would be asked to explain why I had done what I did and I couldn't do that very well. They suspected me of cheating but could never prove it"
"They didn't suspect Intuitionism?"
"I don't think so. But then, I didn't either. Until - well, one of my first sex-mates was a physicist. In fact, he was the father of my child, assuming he really supplied the sperm-sample. He had a physics problem and he told me about it when we were lying in bed afterward, just to have something to talk about, I suppose. And I said, 'You know what it sounds like to me?' and told him. He tried it just for the fun of it, he said, and it worked. In fact, that was the first step to the Pionizer, which you said was much better than the proton synchrotron."
"You mean that was your idea?" Denison put his finger under the dripping water and paused as he was about to put it in his mouth. "Is this water safe?"
"It's perfectly sterile," said Selene, "and it goes into the general reservoir for treatment. It's saturated with sulfates, carbonates, and a few other items, however. You won't like the taste."
Denison rubbed his finger on his briefs. "You invented the Pionizer?"
Chapter 24
"Not invented. I had the original concept. It took lots of development, mostly by Barren."
Denison shook his head. "You know, Selene, you're an amazing phenomenon. You should be under observation by the molecular biologists."
"Should I? That's not my idea of a thrill."
"About half a century ago, there came the climax to the big trend toward genetic engineering - "
"I know. It flopped and was thrown out of court. It's illegal now - that whole type of study - insofar as research can be made illegal. I know people who've done work on it just the same."
"I dare say. On Intuitionism?"
"No. I don't think so."
"Ah. But that's my point. At the height of the push for genetic engineering, there was this attempt to stimulate Intuitionism. Almost all the great scientists had intuitive ability, of course, and there was the feeling that this was the single great key to creativity. One could argue that superior capacity for intuition was the product of a