“I know, too. You’ve told me often,” and Bronowski tossed another peanut into the air. He didn’t miss.
Author’s Note: The story starts with section 6. This is not a mistake. I have my own subtle reasoning. So, just read, and enjoy.
1
It had happened thirty years before. Frederick Hallam was a radiochemist, with the print on his doctoral dissertation still wet and with no sign whatever of being a world-shaker.
What began the shaking of the world was the fact that a dusty reagent bottle marked “Tungsten Metal” stood on his desk. It wasn’t his; he had never used it. It was a legacy from some dim day when some past inhabitant of the office had wanted tungsten for some long-forgotten reason. It wasn’t even really tungsten any more. It consisted of small pellets of what was now heavily layered with oxide—gray and dusty. No use to anyone.
And one day Hallam entered the laboratory (well, it was October 3, 2070, to be exact), got to work, stopped shortly before 10 A.M., stared transfixed at the bottle, and lifted it. It was as dusty as ever, the label as faded, but he called out, “God damn it; who the hell has been tampering with this?”
That, at least, was the account of Denison, who overheard the remark and who told it to Lamont a generation later. The official tale of the discovery, as reported in the books, leaves out the phraseology. One gets the impression of a keen-eyed chemist, aware of change and instantly drawing deep-seated deductions.
Not so. Hallam had no use for the tungsten; it was of no earthly value to him and any tampering with it could be of no possible importance to him. However, he hated any interference with his desk (as so many do) and he suspected others of possessing keen desires to engage in such interference out of sheer malice.
No one at the time admitted to knowing anything about the matter. Benjamin Allan Denison, who overheard the initial remark, had an office immediately across the corridor and both doors were open. He looked up and met Hallam’s accusatory eye.
He didn’t particularly like Hallam (no one particularly did) and he had slept badly the night before. He was, as it happened and as he later recalled, rather pleased to have someone on whom to vent his spleen, and Hallam made the perfect candidate.
When Hallam held the bottle up to his face, Denison pulled back with clear distaste. “Why the devil should I be interested in your tungsten?” he demanded. “Why should anyone? If you’ll look at the bottle, you’ll see that the thing hasn’t been opened for twenty years; and if you hadn’t put your own grubby paws on it, you would have seen no one had touched it.”
Hallam flushed a slow, angry red. He said, tightly, “Listen, Denison, someone has changed the contents. That’s not the tungsten.”
Denison allowed himself a small, but distinct sniff. “How would you know?”
Of such things, petty annoyance and aimless thrusts, is history made.
It would have been an unfortunate remark in any case. Denison’s scholastic record, as fresh as Hallam’s, was far more impressive and he was the bright-young-man of the department. Hallam knew this and, what was worse, Denison knew it too, and made no secret of it. Denison’s “How would you know?” with the clear and unmistakable emphasis on the “you,” was ample motivation for all that followed. Without it, Hallam would never have become the greatest and most revered scientist in history, to use the exact phrase Denison later used in his interview with Lamont.
Officially, Hallam had come in on that fateful morning, noticed the dusty gray pellets gone—not even the dust on the inside surface remaining—and clear irongray metal in their place. Naturally, he investigated—
But place the official version to one side. It was Denison. Had he confined himself to a simple negative, or a shrug, the chances are that Hallam would have asked others, then eventually wearied of the unexplained event, put the bottle to one side, and let subsequent tragedy, whether subtle or drastic (depending on how long the ultimate discovery was delayed), guide the future. In any event, it would not have been Hallam who rode the whirlwind to the heights.
With the “How would you know?” cutting him down, however, Hallam could only retort wildly, “I’ll show you that I know.”
And after that, nothing could prevent him from going to extremes. The analysis of the metal in the old container became his number-one priority, and his