"Played!" Ken cried. "We've built our observatory, a 1000-watt radio transmitter—"
"Play; these things are toys. Educational toys, it is true, but toys, nevertheless."
"I don't understand."
"Toys are fine for children. You and your friends, however, are no longer children. You haven't got a chance now to grow up and gain an education in a normal manner. You can't finish your childhood, playing with your toys. You can't take all the time you need to find out what your capacities and aptitudes are. You will never know a world that will allow you that luxury.
"Every available brain is needed on this problem. You've got to make a decision today, this very minute, whether you want to give a hand to its solution."
"You know I want to be in on it!"
"Do you? Then you've got to decide that you are no longer concerned about being a scientist. Forget the word. What you are does not matter. You are simply a man with a problem to solve.
"You have to decide whether or not you can abandon your compassion for the millions who are going to die; whether you can reject all pressure from personal danger, and from the threat to everything and everyone that is of any importance to you.
"You've got to decide whether or not this problem of the destruction of surface tension of metals is the most absorbing thing in the whole world. It needs solving, not because the fate of the world hinges on it, but because it's a problem that consumes you utterly. This is what drives you, not fear, not danger, not the opinion of anyone else.
"When he can function this way, the scientist is capable of solving important problems. By outward heartlessness he can achieve works of compassion greater than any of his critics. He knows that the greatest pleasure a man can know lies in taking a stand against those forces that bend ordinary men."