DeLancey himself waited on them as they left. "Going so soon, gentlemen?" he asked, in a voice that implied that their departure would leave him no reason to stay open. "Beautiful lobster thermidor tonight. If you do not like it, you need not pay." He smiled brightly.
"Not sea food, Lance," Harper told him, "not tonight. Tell me — why do you stick around here when you know that the bomb is bound to get you in the long run? Aren't you afraid of it?"
The tavernkeeper's eyebrows shot up. "Afraid of the bomb? But it is my friend!"
"Makes you money, eh?"
"Oh, I do not mean that." He leaned toward them confidentially. "Five years ago I come here to make some money quickly for my family before my cancer of the stomach, it kills me. At the clinic, with the wonderful new radiants you gentlemen make with the aid of the bomb, I am cured — I live again. No, I am not afraid of the bomb, it is my good friend."
"Suppose it blows up?"
"When the good Lord needs me, He will take me." He crossed himself quickly.
As they turned away, Erickson commented in a low voice to Harper, "There's your answer, Cal — if all us engineers had his faith, the bomb wouldn't get us down."
Harper was unconvinced. "I don't know," he mused. "I don't think it's faith; I think it's lack of imagination — and knowledge."