"Two reasons," Jones said, with a somewhat shamefaced grin. "The minor one isn't easy to explain, but ... well, I hadn't been having an exactly easy time of it on Earth ... you all know about that, I suppose?"
They knew.
"Well, I was taking a very dim view of things in general, and a good fight would get it out of my system. It always does."
"I see. And the major reason?"
"I knew, of course, that I was on probation. I would have to get promoted, and fast, or stay sunk forever. To get promoted fast, a man can either be enough of a boot-licker to be pulled up from on high, or he can be shoved up by the men he is working with. The best way to get a crowd of hard-rock men to like you is to lick a few of 'em—off hours, of course, and according to Hoyle—and the more of 'em you can lick at once, the better. I'm pretty good at rough-and-tumble brawling, so I gambled that the cops would step in before I got banged up too much. I won."
"I see," Isaacson said again, in an entirely different tone. He did see, now. "The first technique is so universally used that the possibility of the second did not occur to me. Nice work—very nice." He turned to the other members of the Board. "This, I believe, concludes the business of the meeting?"
For some reason or other Isaacson nodded slightly as he asked the question; and one by one, as though in concurrence, the others nodded in reply. The meeting broke up. Outside the door, however, the magnate did not go about his own business nor send Jones about his. Instead:
"I would like to show you, if I may, the above-ground part of our Works?"
"My time is yours, sir. I am interested."
It is unnecessary here to go into the details of a Civilization's greatest uranium operation; the storage bins, the grinders, the Wilfley tables and slime tanks, the flotation sluices, the roasters and reducers, the processes of solution and crystallization and recrystallization, of final oxidation and reduction. Suffice it to say that Isaacson showed Jones the whole immensity of Uranium Works Number One. The trip ended on the top floor of the towering Administration Building, in a heavily-screened room containing a desk, a couple of chairs, and a tremendously massive safe.