Neill's cards had slipped from his fingers and he stooped to the floor, fumbling for them. Avery was bending one corner of a card, creasing it, smoothing it out, and creasing it again. Nobody was going to answer, MacPherson realized. They were leaving it up to him.
He spoke sharply. "You're getting onto forbidden ground, Rothman. You know we're not allowed to discuss the Project with you. We're allowed to visit you only under the strictest promise not to speak of it at all. You're certainly rational enough to understand what the therapists have told you, that you'd get well easily enough if you'd stop worrying. Forget about zero hour. Everything's going to be all right."
Rothman turned to look out the window. "Is it today?"
"How should we know? We're only innocent bystanders now, like you. Remember, we all left the Project over six months ago, except Avery, and last month they let him go."
Neill had rearranged his cards now and he looked at them instead of Rothman as he spoke. "There's nothing to worry about. Your calculations were wrong. The test is not going to get out of control—if and when they make it. But they don't tell us things any more."
"Since they fired you," said Rothman.
"That's right, since they fired us," Neill said. The creased corner of a card suddenly broke off in his fingers.
"If you didn't believe in my calculations, why did you back me up? I didn't ask you to. If you didn't believe in the danger, why didn't you stay out of the argument and keep your jobs? It wasn't your fight. You could have kept out of it—or attacked me, like Avery."
"All we did was insist that even if you had made a mistake in your calculations, that didn't necessarily prove you were crazy," said Neill. "We didn't know whether you were right or not. We couldn't argue about the math. Avery tore that to pieces and the boys at Columbia and Harvard backed him up. MacPherson and I aren't competent to check your math. To us, you didn't seem any crazier than the people who sent you here. But after you'd scared them silly, they had to do something to stop your scaring other people."