“Yes, I know that.”

“It would clearly be too risky for them; like using nitroglycerine in ton-lots in rocket engines—only worse.”

“Very good. And you are also writing a history of the Pump.”

“An informal one, sir. When the manuscript is ready I will ask you to read it, if I may, so that I might have the benefit of your intimate knowledge of events. In fact, I would like to take advantage of some of that knowledge right now if you have a little time.”

“I can make some. What is it you want to know?” Hallam was smiling. It was the last time he ever smiled in Lament’s presence.

“The development of an effective and practical Pump, Professor Hallam, took place with extraordinary speed,” began Lamont “Once the Pump Project—”

“The Inter-Universe Electron Pump Project,” corrected Hallam, still smiling.

“Yes, of course,” said Lamont, clearing his throat. “I was merely using the popular name. Once the project started, the engineering details were developed with great rapidity and with little waste motion.”

“That is true,” said Hallam, with a touch of complacence. “People have tried to tell me that the credit was mine for vigorous and imaginative direction, but I wouldn’t care to have you overstress that in your book. The fact is that we had an enormous fund of talent in the project, and I wouldn’t want the brilliance of individual members to be dimmed by any exaggeration of my role.”

Lamont shook his head with a little annoyance. He found the remark irrelevant. He said, “I don’t mean that at all. I mean the intelligence at the other end—the para-men, to use the popular phrase. They started it. We discovered them after the first transfer of plutonium for tungsten; but they discovered us first in order to make the transfer, working on pure theory without the benefit of the hint they gave us. And there’s the iron-foil they sent across—”

Hallam’s smile had now disappeared, and permanently. He was frowning and he said loudly, “The symbols were never understood. Nothing about them—”

“The geometric figures were understood, sir. I’ve looked into it and it’s quite clear that they were directing the geometry of the Pump. It seems to me that—”

Hallam’s chair shoved back with an angry scrape. He said, “Let’s not have any of that, young man. We did the work, not they.”

“Yes—but isn’t it true that they—”

“That they what?”

Lamont became aware now of the storm of emotion he had raised, but he couldn’t understand its cause. Uncertainly, he said, “That they are more intelligent than we— that they did the real work. Is there any doubt of that, sir?”

Hallam, red-faced, had heaved himself to his feet “There is every doubt,” he shouted. “I will not have mysticism here. There is too much of that. See here, young man,” he advanced on the still seated and thoroughly astonished Lamont and shook a thick finger at him, “if your history is going to take the attitude that we were puppets in the hands of the para-men, it will not be published from this institution; or at all, if I have my way. I will not have mankind and its intelligence downgraded and I won’t have para-men cast in the role of gods.”

Lamont could only leave, a puzzled man, utterly upset at having created harsh feeling where he had wanted only to have good will.

And then he found that his historical sources were suddenly drying up. Those who had been loquacious enough a week earlier now remembered nothing and had no time for further interviews.

Lamont was irritated at first and then a slow anger began to build within him. He looked at what he had from a new viewpoint, and now he began to squeeze and insist where earlier he had merely asked. When he met Hallam at department functions, Hallam frowned and looked through him and Lamont began to look scornful in his turn.

The net result was that Lamont found his prime career as para-theoretician beginning to abort and turned more firmly than ever toward his secondary career as science-historian.

“That damned fool,” muttered Lament, reminiscently. “You had to be there, Mike, to see him go into panic at any suggestion that it was the other side that was the moving force. I look back on it and I wonder—how was it possible to meet him, however casually, and not know he would react that way. Just be grateful you never had to work with him.”

“I am,” said Bronowski, indifferently, “though there are times you’re no angel.”

“Don’t complain. With your sort of work you have no problems.”

“Also no interest. Who cares about my sort of work except myself and five others in the world. Maybe six others —if you remember.”

Lamont remembered. “Oh, well,” he said.

Bronowski’s placid exterior never fooled anyone who grew to know him even moderately well. He was sharp and he worried a problem till he had the solution or till he had it in such tatters that he knew no solution was possible.

Consider the Etruscan inscriptions on which he had built his reputation. The language had been a living one till the first century a.d., but the cultural imperialism of the Romans had left nothing behind and it had vanished almost completely. What inscriptions survived the carnage of Roman hostility and—worse—indifference were written in Greek letters so that they could be pronounced, but nothing more. Etruscan seemed to have no relationship to any of the surrounding languages; it seemed very archaic; it seemed not even to be Indo-European.

Bronowski therefore passed on to another language that seemed to have no relationship to any of the surrounding languages; that seemed very archaic; that seemed not even to be Indo-European—but which was very much alive and which was spoken in a region not so very far from where once the Etruscans had lived.

What of the Basque language? Bronowski wondered. And he used Basque as his guide. Others had tried this before him and given up. Bronowski did not.

It was hard work, for Basque, an extraordinarily difficult language in itself, was only the loosest of helps. Bronowski found more and more reason, as he went on, to suspect some cultural connection between the inhabitants of early northern Italy and early northern Spain. He could even make out a strong case for a broad swatch of pre-Celts filling western Europe with a language of which Etruscan and Basque were dimly-related survivors. In two thousand years, however, Basque had evolved and had become more than a little contaminated with Spanish. To try, first, to reason out its structure in Roman times and then relate it to Etruscan was an intellectual feat of surpassing difficulty and Bronowski utterly astonished the world’s philologists when he triumphed.

The Etruscan translations themselves were marvels of dullness and had no significance whatever; routine funerary inscriptions for the most part. The fact of the translation, however, was stunning and, as it turned out, it proved of the greatest importance to Lamont.

—Not at first. To be perfectly truthful about it, the translations had been a fact for nearly five years before Lamont had as much as heard that there were such people, once, as the Etruscans. But then Bronowski came to the university to give one of the annual Fellowship Lectures and Lament, who usually shirked the duty of attending which fell on the faculty members, did not shirk this one.

It was not because he recognized its importance or felt any interest in it whatever. It was because he was dating a graduate student in the Department of Romance Languages and it was either that or a music festival he particularly wanted to avoid hearing. The social connection was a feeble one, scarcely satisfactory from Lament’s point of view and only temporary, but it did get him to the talk.

He rather enjoyed it, as it happened. The dim Etruscan civilization entered his consciousness for the first time as a matter of distant interest, and the problem of solving an undeciphered language struck him as fascinating. When young, he had enjoyed solving cryptograms, but had put them away with other childish things in favor of the much grander cryptograms posed by nature, so that he ended in para-theory.