"He's cutting a serial," Paul told the girl. "When he gets through, they'll pay him about five years of my salary for it. A month's work, for him. A story about how some college football player married the Daisy Queen, I imagine. For that, he gets sixty bucks to my one. All I do, though, is make atom bombs. You can see the public would rather—"
"—have its ego blown up than its cities."
She laughed. "What is it really about?"
I gave them an outline of the story. "You see," I said, "it's just the way Shaw put it. If you're going to tell people the truth, you've got to make them laugh, or they'll kill you."
"Why will they?" Marcia asked.
"Because the truth doesn't seem amusing to them at all. However—they have a feeling life should be amusing. So—if you can make them laugh, and still occasionally set down a fact, they assume it's possible for somebody to know a few truths and still laugh. This permits them—in the long run—to ignore the truth you set down and go on laughing."
"Does the truth seem amusing to you, Phil?" she asked.
"Infinitely."
"It seems ghastly to me."
"Infinitely ghastly, too. You have to approach it in both moods at once—or else, and this is commoner—in first one and then the other."