I saw that Andersen was a little hurt. "He's only joking, Nils," I put in.

Zarias swore. "I am not joking, Drummond. When a serious scientist starts going mystic, it's time he had his complexes checked."

"Come, come, gentlemen," said Burris, in his mocking way. "We must remember not to get on one another's nerves!"

We all laughed at that, for it was spoken in the Director's pompous manner, and recalled the best joke we had at Transuranic Station. It was a worn-out joke, but still welcome in our isolation and monotony.

Now please don't misunderstand me. I'm not going to strike that "Ah, the loneliness of it all!" pose. The first atomic scientists who served at Transuranic Station pretty well overdid that pose for the benefit of an admiring world. Personally, it always made me sick.

But it was a lonely environment; there's no getting away from that. Thirty scientists and technicians, twenty-one of them men and nine of them women, doing a six-month stretch in this complex tomb of concrete and metal sunk in the face of the Moon.

When we had first arrived to take over Transuranic Station, we had been solemnly admonished by Cubbison, our Director.

"The most important thing of all," he told us, "is not to get on one another's nerves."

The joke of that was that Cubbison himself was the only man who got on everybody's nerves. Doctor Walter Cubbison—he always insisted on the "Doctor"—was as fine a specimen of scientific bureaucrat as you'd want to see. He had done good research back in the 1950's but that wasn't what had wangled the Commission on Atomic Energy into making him head of Transuranic Station. It was his political ability, we all knew.

"There must be no emotional obstacles to our work," he had adjured us. "All such problems must be submitted to our able psychologist, Doctor Varez."

Well, despite Cubbison's worry over our nerves, we hadn't had to bother Varez yet. We were too well-adjusted a lot for that. But now Nils Andersen seemed to have gone off the deep end, a little.

He had given me something to think about, though. It had never occurred to me that Transuranic Station was an outpost of unprecedented defiance of normality. But in a way, it was.

It's not easy to explain to laymen. It's all 

 Prev. P 2/19 next