Jennings and Goodman stayed inside for a long time. Finally, they came out into the orange sunlight of early evening. Jennings’ face seemed pale, as if he had been out of the sunlight for a long time. His hands trembled perceptibly as he lit a thin cigar.
“The food at our hotel is very good,” said Mart.
Jennings nodded. Neither he nor his companion said a word. The four men turned and walked all the way to the hotel in silence. Only as they sat down to the table and picked up the menu did Jennings emerge from his remoteness.
“Baked ham,” he murmured to the waitress. “And make the coffee strong. Very strong.”
Then, while they waited, he folded his hands on the table and settled his eyes on Mart. “I know you too well,” he said, “to ask if you are simply pulling our leg, but I have to ask it, anyway.”
Mart shook his head. “You’ll have to tell me what you mean by that. I have shown you only a contraption for parting dollars from suckers — with apologies and exceptions to present company,” he smiled as he glanced in Dr. Goodman’s direction.
The AEC man gave no notice that he’d heard.
“Only two kinds of men could produce the Volcano,” said Jennings. “One would be merely a fool who had stumbled on the design by accident and didn’t know what he’d made. The other would be a genius who knew exactly what he had — a genius whose brilliance was so great that he could afford to sit back and laugh at the rest of us scratching our heads and looking silly trying to figure it out.”
“Nobody’s laughing,” said Mart soberly. “But you’ve got to say it.”
“All right,” said Jennings. “That Volcano of yours is nothing but an extremely exact hyper scale model of a radioactive atomic nucleus, complete with potential barrier penetration in full operation.