"Forget it," Lewis said.
"That's what I intend to keep on doing," Cardoza said. "Meanwhile, my little robotic barkeep is only the beginning. I'm working on other even more ingenious automata. One will do card tricks. Another is a tight-wire artist. And one can even tell fortunes."
"How about one that can drag humans out of a hat?" Lewis asked.
"Come on, ladies," Cardoza said as he moved away. "Let's go play Dr. McWilliams' new Q-X game."
"Ohhh," one of the wives said, giggling. "Something new?"
"Yeah," Lewis said to her, thinking of the fact that at one time, long ago and far away, McWilliams had been working on a theory supposed to have been aimed far beyond Einstein. "McWilliams' new mathmatical game. This one's also played in the dark. Mixed couples of course. Q-X, the big mathmatical discovery of the age. People get lost in pairs and later in the dark they add up to bigger numbers."
Lewis shoved off from the bar, and walked toward the far corner of the garden where he saw old Shelby Stenger, the great atomics expert, flat on his belly, lying in the moonlight with fountain water misting his face, snoring like a tired old dog, with a little thread of drool hanging out of the corner of his mouth.
Mac Brogarth, nuclear physicist, came waltzing grotesquely across the garden and toppled backward into the pool under the fountain and lay there too weak even to raise his head out of the water. He would have drowned if Lewis hadn't lifted it out for him.
The old man in Lewis' arms looked up at Lewis with a passing light of tragic sobriety.