Duff couldn’t miss the thrill in her tone.
TWO
In a classroom on the “old campus” of the University of Miami, four young men were engaged in a discussion of the Uncertainty Principle with Dr. Oliver Slocum, a full professor of mathematics and a large man with twinkling eyes, no hair on his head, and a goatee.
“A common mistake,” said the doctor, “made by many philosophers, has been to assume that the ‘uncertainty’ is neither logical nor empirical, and not even physical, but that it derives from a subjective interposition of the purely human observer, whereas—”
At about “whereas,” Duff Bogan, one of the four graduate students present for the seminar, lost track of the thought. Since he already knew that the interposition of a machine had the same effect as the interposition of a person, and had known it since his mathematically precocious high school days, he missed nothing essential.
Duff looked out the windows. He watched a huge truckload of dead branches proceed down the street past several pretty houses. He reflected that there were still hurricane-detached branches hanging serenely in the Yates trees. His mind passed to greater worries.
There was the matter of the proposal of marriage to Eleanor Yates by Scotty Smythe, of the New York-Bar Harbor-Palm Beach Smythes. Duff had nothing against Smythe. He was a good-looking, intelligent, witty young man. Eleanor deserved the best. Plainly, she liked Smythe. The question was: Did Smythe represent the best? A lightweight, Duff felt. No character. Too smooth. Too social. Too much given to girl-chasing. It was Duff’s belief, during the reverie, that he was thinking in abstract, detached and big-brotherly terms. Any suggestion that jealousy motivated him would have been met by a haughty, almost amused stare of his china-blue eyes.
By coincidence, yet not surprisingly — since Doctor Slocum greatly enjoyed discussing his part in the work of the Manhattan District; within the limits of secrecy, of course — Duff’s wandering attention came back abruptly to a relevant speech: “Some of our early calculations on the subsidiary effects of nuclear reactions to bomb-released particles were rendered difficult by—”
Duff listened, hoping to be able to frame a question that might start a new line of discussion which would not advance the class in any way, but which might help him with another worry. Luckily for Duff, when the professor finished a sentence as long and as neatly balanced as a complex equation, Iron-Brain Bates, the grind of the group, took an ideal tack.
“Doctor,” he said, “to deviate for a moment. How many bombs do you think Russia has?”