you and your team from their large instruments much more because you goad them into it than out of any malice on their part. And that’s done us good, rather than harm, since it’s forced us to invent other instruments that are more subtle.”
“Based on your theoretical insight, Selene.”
Selene smiled. “I know. Ben was very complimentary about them.”
“You and your Ben. What the hell do you want with that miserable Earthie?”
“He’s an Immigrant. And what I want is information. Do you give me any? You’re so damned afraid I’ll be caught, you don’t dare let me be seen talking to any physicist; only you, and you’re my—For that reason only, probably.”
“Now, Selene.” He tried to manage a soothing tone, but there was far too much impatience to it.
“No, I don’t care about that really. You’ve told me I have this one task and I’ve tried to concentrate on it and sometimes I think I have it, mathematics or not. I can visualize it; the kind of thing that must be done—and then it slips away. But what’s the use of it, when the Pump will destroy us all anyway.… Haven’t I told you I distrusted the exchange of field intensities?”
Neville said, “I’ll ask you again. Are you ready to tell me that the Pump will destroy us? Never mind might, never mind ‘could’; never mind anything but ‘will.’ ”
Selene shook her head angrily. “I can’t. It’s so marginal. I can’t say it will. But isn’t a simple ‘might’ sufficient in such a case?”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Don’t turn up your eyes. Don’t sneer! You’ve never tested the matter. I told you how it might be tested.”
“You were never this worried about it till you started listening to this Earthie of yours.”
“He’s an Immigrant. Aren’t you going to test it?”
“No! I told you your suggestions were impractical. You’re not an experimentalist, and what looks good in your mind doesn’t necessarily work in the real world of instruments, of randomness, and of uncertainty.”
“The so-called real world of your laboratory.” Her face was flushed and angry and she held her clenched fists at chin-level. “You waste so much time trying to get a vacuum good enough—There’s a vacuum up there, up there on the surface where I’m pointing, with temperatures that, at times, are halfway down toward absolute zero. Why don’t you try experiments on the surface?”
“It would have been useless.”
“How do you know? You just won’t try. Ben Denison tried. He took the trouble to devise a system he could use on the surface and he set it up when he went to inspect the Solar batteries. He wanted you to come and you wouldn’t. Do you remember? It was a very simple thing, something even I could describe to you now that it’s been described to me. He ran it at day-temperatures and again at night-temperatures and that was enough to guide him to a new line of research with the Pionizer.”
“How simple you make it sound.”
“How simple it is. Once he found out I was an Intuitionist, he talked to me as you never did. He explained his reasons for thinking that the strengthening of the strong nuclear interaction is indeed accumulating catastrophically in the neighborhood of Earth. It will only be a few years before the Sun explodes and sends the strengthening, in ripples—”
“No, no, no, no,” shouted Neville. “I’ve seen his results and I’m not impressed.”
“You’ve seen them?”
“Yes, of course. Do you suppose I let him work in our laboratories without making sure I know what he’s doing. I’ve seen his results and they’re worth nothing. He deals with tiny deviations that are well within the experimental error. If he wants to believe that those deviations have significance and if you want to believe them, go ahead. But no amount of belief will make them have that significance if, in fact, they don’t.”
“What do you want to believe, Barron?”
“I want the truth.”
“But haven’t you decided in advance what the truth must be by your own gospel? You want the Pump Station of the Moon, don’t you, so that you need have nothing to do with the surface; and anything that might prevent that is not the truth—by definition.”
“I won’t argue with you. I want the Pump Station, and even more—I want the other. One’s no good without the other. Are you sure you haven’t—”
“I haven’t.”
“Will you?”
Selene whirled on him again, her feet tapping rapidly on the ground in such a way as to keep her bobbing in the air to the