He waved toward the desk behind him, piled high with manuscript and a sprawling heap of books on which rested a slide-rule.
"Calm down," said MacPherson. "Nothing is going to happen. Damn you, Avery! Are you proud of what you accomplished?"
Avery glared. "It'll do him good! He's got to learn to face reality, like the rest of us. In a little more than half an hour, the test will be finished. The world will still be here. Rothman will have to admit his equations were wrong—and then he'll be cured."
Rothman leaned forward. "Or contrariwise, Rothman will not have to admit he was wrong and Rothman will not be cured! If I made a mistake in my math, why couldn't anybody put his finger on it? I'm not so crazy that I wouldn't be able to see an error in calculus when it was pointed out to me. If you're sure my calculations are wrong, why do you look so frightened?"
"Do we have to go over all that again?" said MacPherson. "The boys at Columbia told you where the mistake was. It's where you inverted that twelve-by-twelve matrix. Didn't you bother to check the inverted matrix?"
"The same old tale." Rothman picked up his cards. "No mathematician will ever admit that another mathematician could invent a method beyond his comprehension. Still harping on an error in my inverted matrix. What time is it now?"
"There's no doubt that your calculations are wrong," said Neill, "but I still don't see why we have to insist on proving it the hard way. With bombs, why do we need to fool around with the total disintegration of matter? Sure, I know the new model releases a googol times the energy you get out of uranium fission, but who cares? There's plenty of uranium for our needs."