On the drive over from Los Angeles during the night, Neill had seemed calm enough and even Avery, who had changed a lot during work on the Project, had chatted with them unconstrainedly. It was hard to be certain what other men were feeling, even when you had known them a long time, but it could not be pleasant for any of them to be visiting a former colleague who had been removed from the Project directly to a sanitarium.
"Tell me something," said Rothman as he picked up his cards. "Do you still think I'm crazy?"
"Don't be an idiot," MacPherson snapped. "Do you think we'd cut our classes and drive nearly five hundred miles just to play poker with a lunatic?"
"No," said Rothman. "That's how I know. But why aren't you frank about it? Why keep on pretending there wasn't a special reason for your visit?"
Neill was beating his foot against the table leg again and Avery's eyes were hard and staring as he examined his cards.
"Who'll open?" MacPherson asked. "I can't."
"I can," said Rothman. "I'm betting one blue chip. Listen, Avery, why won't you look at me? If you think I'm hamming, what do you call your own act? How long are we going to go on kidding each other? They've shut me up here, but that doesn't mean they've stopped me from logical thinking. My three old friends from the Project don't turn up in the middle of a Friday morning just to calm my fevered brain with a card game."
"What's wrong with poker?" demanded MacPherson.
"Poker? Nothing. I know—It must be the test. Total conversion of matter to energy. Not just a minute percentage any more—total conversion. They've finished the set, haven't they? They're ready to test. They're going to disintegrate Waaku, aren't they? It must be today. Then this is the day the world ends. Tell me, when is zero hour?"