"We won't bother with lunch, Joe," said Rothman.
"Must be a pretty good game if you won't even knock off to eat," said Joe. "Well, will you at least mark your menu for tomorrow?"
"For tomorrow? Tomorrow isn't going to come, you know."
"Nuts," muttered Joe as he closed and locked the door. "Pure nuts."
Avery cleared his throat, and his voice was thin. "Look here, Rothman! If the Universe were composed of matter as unstable as you claim, it would have ceased to exist long ago. Somewhere, somehow, in the infinity of chance events since the creation of the Earth, something would have occurred to start the self-sustaining chain reaction, and all matter would have been annihilated."
"Are you trying to prove something to yourself?" asked Rothman. "Surely you don't equate infinity with a mere four billion years. That's a finite time—long enough for the more dangerous radioactives to disappear completely, of course, but not long enough for all possible chance events to have taken place. Anyway, I never have asserted that the reaction would reach from Earth to the other planets, or even to the Moon. The Universe, including the Solar System, will still go on. But our old Earth is going up like a pile of magnesium powder mixed with potassium chlorate when you drop a lighted match on it."
Avery wiped his forehead. "I don't know why I keep arguing with a lunatic. But you know yourself that the value you give for the integration constant in those equations is a pure guess, only you spend ten pages of doubletalk trying to hide that fact. If the constant is the one you give, why, sure, then you get a chain reaction. But you made it up! Who ever heard of a constant of that magnitude in the solution of an ordinary differential equation?"
"That's one criticism of my work the Harvard and Columbia boys never mentioned."
"Okay, then I mention it. You're crazy!"