force that worked through me produced a bunch of stuff that looks more like stuff from Boys' Life plans than anything else - built by a fairly incompetent boy, at that.'
'They work,' Gardener replied.
Yes, Anderson had agreed. They did. She even had a vague idea of how they worked - on a principle which could be called 'collapsing-molecule fusion.' It was non-atomic, totally clean. The telepathic typewriter, she said, depended on collapsing-molecule fusion for juice, but the actual principle of that one was much different, and she didn't understand it. There was a power-pack inside that had begun life as a fuzz-buster, but beyond that she was completely blank.
'You get a bunch of scientists in here from the NSA or the Shop, and they'd probably have this stuff down pat in six hours,' Anderson said. 'They'd go around looking like somebody just kicked them in the balls, asking each other how the hell they could have missed such elementary concepts for so long. And do you know what would happen next?'
Gardener thought about it hard, his head down, one hand gripping the can of beer Bobbi had given him, the other gripping his forehead, and suddenly he was back at that terrible party listening to Ted the Power Man defend the Iroquois plant which even now was loading hot rods: If we gave these nuke-freaks what they wanted, they'd turn around a month or so later and start whining about not being able to use their blow-dryers, or found out their Cuisinarts weren't going to work when they wanted to mix up a bunch of macrobiotic food. He saw himself leading Ted the Power Man over to Arberg's buffet - he saw this as clearly as if it had happened ... shit, as if it was happening right then. On the table, between the chips and the bowl of raw veggies, was one of Bobbi's contraptions. The batteries were hooked up to a circuit board; that was in turn hooked up to an ordinary wall switch, the sort available in any hardware store for a buck or so. Gardener saw himself turn this switch, and suddenly everything on the table - chips, raw veggies, the lazy susan with its five different kinds of dip, the remains of the cold cuts and the carcass of the chicken, the ashtrays, the drinks - they rose six inches into the air and then simply held there, their shadows pooling decorously beneath them on the white linen. Ted the Power Man looked at this for a moment, mildly annoyed. Then he swept the contraption off the table. The wires snapped. Batteries rolled hither and yon. Everything fell back to the table with a crash, glasses spilling, ashtrays overturning and scattering butts. Ted took off his sport-coat and covered the remains of the gadget, the way you might cover the corpse of an animal hit and killed on the road. That done, he turned back to his small captive audience and resumed speaking. These people think they can go on having their cake and eating it too forever. These people assume that there is always going to be a fallback position. They are wrong. There is no fallback position. It's simple: nukes or nothing. Gardener heard himself screaming in a rage that was, for a change, totally sober: What about the thing you just broke? What about that? Ted bent and picked up his sport-coat as gracefully as a magician waving his cape before a bedazzled audience. The floor beneath was bare except for a few potato chips. No sign of the gadget. No sign at all. What about what thing? Ted the Power Man asked, looking straight at Gardener with an expression of sympathy into which a liberal helping of contempt had been mixed. He turned to his audience. Does anybody here see anything? ... No, they were answering in unison, like children reciting: Arberg, Patricia McCardle, all the rest; even the young bartender and Ron Cummings were reciting it. No, we don't see anything, we don't see anything at all, Ted, not a thing, you're right, Ted, it's the nukes or nothing. Ted was smiling. Next thing you know, he'll be telling us that old wheeze about the itty-bitty pill you can put in your gas tank and run your car on all day. Ted the Power Man began to laugh. All the others joined in. All of them were laughing at him.
Gardener raised his head and turned agonized eyes on Bobbi Anderson.