If I were a physicist, he told himself, if I were a physicist instead of a newshawk, I could get a computer to tell me the probability ratio of whether I hold an answer.
That probability ratio is probable ten billion to one, he told himself.
That probability ratio is zero.
Witches are for burning, he told himself.
He told himself a lot of things, and he sweated through the cold January weather.
It had been two weeks since the world heard the first details of Formosa, and the details were so grim now that you couldn't use them at all. Just a blanket story.
That night, the map of the world behind his desk, Bill Howard leaned toward his audience.
He told them the human side of the story of Formosa.
He spoke of the people there, the pawns in a game of international suicide, real people, not just statistics.