Then he was at it again, prying and probing, and reversing Maculay's attitude on gambling, liquor, tobacco, and politics. He made a slight revision on Cliff's idea of proper dress; the physicist had a horror of appearing dirty, even when engaged in the dirtiest of jobs. With some effort the doctor convinced Maculay that a mechanic emerging from beneath a car with a face full of grime was not automatically an undesirable character, either to men or women. The crux of the matter was whether he liked that condition of dirt or not.
With a number of factors accomplished, Hanson took a deep breath, felt his pulse, counted his heartbeat and respiration, and fished for a pill from his desk and swallowed it quickly before he went on. The hardest part was to come.
Cliff took himself seriously, far too seriously. With delicate verbal barbs, Hanson began to poke fun at some of the imbecilities of pedantic reasoning. Maculay offered resistance at first, but Hanson worked him over the ground carefully, pointing out that Maculay, the only man in the world capable of understanding the variable-matrix wave mechanics, was in no position to snort at his fellow man. After all, Gertrude Stein had once gained great popularity on the theory that no one could understand her and therefore she must be sheer genius. Eventually he had Cliff laughing over an old limerick:
The wonderful family Stein,
There's Gert, and there's Ep, and there's Ein.
Gert's poems are bunk;
Ep's statues are junk,
And nobody understands Ein.
Hanson worked over Maculay's Equations with a bit of acid humor. In third person, he had Maculay chuckling over the physicist who worked for years on some mathematics that did not come out even. Gradually, the doctor convinced his patient that he was not Clifford Maculay, the renowned abstract mathematician, but Maculay's nephew—the black sheep of the family—who viewed the brainy members with as much distaste as they viewed him. Young Cliff had often been mistaken for his brilliant uncle, and found this funny, since he felt himself smarter than his namesake; he, young Cliff, had fun whereas his uncle had only hard work to show for his life. Actually, any pondering of his uncle's work made young Cliff sick to his stomach, and he was glad to ignore such things; the whole theory was so much stupidity.