I shrugged. "Couldn't say. You've seen cases. You'll likely witness another—my own—before long—"
"Good God! I'm sorry—Phil—!"
I laughed and he relaxed—visibly.
"The mass of humanity," he went on after a time, "hasn't that kind of insight, education, nerve—"
"No. Maybe not. Hasn't—as I'd put it—even that much access to its own instincts. Doesn't know even that clearly the relationship of ideals to acts. Of material gains to inner responsibilities. That's the trouble with the mass of humanity. It decides to use atom bombs—the work of a few geniuses who, left to themselves, might not."
"Appalling," Tom said.
"Sure. But the moldboard plow is just as deadly as the bomb in the hands of the common mass. And the implications of plows are much easier for the common jerk to understand than the implications of nucleonics. But he doesn't. So why worry about atomic bombs? Merely another aspect of the same, deep, and ubiquitous nonsense."
We sat awhile.
"What," Tom finally said, "will the better world be like?"
"Woodsy," I answered.