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play as he walked to
his office. I’ll give him the deer in the
headlights routine. That’ll make him happy. He loves to hunt. Pull
out your rifle, boss. Here comes your trophy buck, all snorting and
ready for your best shot.
    “Come in and sit down, Dave. Please close the
door.”
    “Thank you. I’ve been standing a lot today. My feet
sure do hurt.”
    Probably from you standing out by
the water cooler as usual. “Please relax. I
just need to clarify some rumors that have come to my
attention.”
    Dave stiffened and his eyes grew wide. “Rumors? Not
about me.”
    “I’m afraid so. As usual, they took forever to get as
high up as me. Did you stay here in the building when the Gadget
was tested?”
    “I had no choice. Look at what happened to Daghlian
and Slotin. They got killed by the rays from the same radioactive
material months apart. That stuff must last forever. They don’t
call it the Demon Core for nothing. I wouldn’t be too surprised if
something goes wrong with the bomb that that core wound up in.”
    “Their deaths were tragic, but they were both in
direct contact with the makings of the next bomb. All of us were
more than a sufficient distance from the Gadget when it exploded.
None of us have died. We followed adequate safety precautions.”
    “Are you 100 percent certain of that?”
    The boss sighed, placed his hands
behind his head and feet on his desk and leaned back in his chair.
For a final touch of removing all the invisible barriers that exist
between supervisor and employee, he took off his glasses. The dark
circles that had for the last three years given him the appearance
of a prize fighter after a bad ten rounds in the ring had faded to
a dull gray that at least somehow blended into his ruddy
complexion. Quite a bit of hair had dropped off of his head during
his five years of working to develop and detonate Earth’s first
atomic weapon. The few hairs that remained on the top of his head
looked like antennas to Dave, antennas no doubt tuned into the
collective unconscious defined by Jung. No use lying to such a
boss. Dave’s mother had told him of George Washington chopping down
the cherry tree and that “honesty is the best policy.” If President George and janitor George could be
honest then so can I.
    “Sir, with some of our scientists predicting that
detonating the Gadget would have set off a chain reaction that
would destroy the Earth, can you blame me for being careful? Sure,
I was covering my own butt. But can you blame me?”
    “Look, Dave. You know I’m a scientist by training.
But the powers that be made me more of an administrator than
anything else. So my job is to make sure that people like you do
your job. My big worry is that your fears are hindering you from
doing your job.”
    “Look at it this way. Maybe by
protecting myself I’m healthier than the ones who went near the
blast and then the detonation site afterwards. Maybe what they were
exposed to has made all of them less effective.” Including you, you big fat dummy! I bet the rays
turned that pea-sized brain of yours into pea soup! Pretty soon
green goop will start oozing out of your ears. Don’t say I didn’t
warn you when they wheel you out of here on a gurney. He hid his thoughts with a smile so broad that it
exposed his recent dental work; two fillings and a cleaning that
had made his gums bleed. His boss grimaced at the still raw gums as
he wondered if Dave liked meat cooked very rare and had eaten some
for lunch.
    “Dave, believe it or not, I’m on your side. Tin foil
does not offer the protection that you think it does. Besides, it’s
totally unnecessary.”
    “Huxley, whose mind is greater than ours put
together, said it did in his book.”
    “That one about tin foil hats keeping others from
reading your thoughts and from projecting their thoughts into your
mind? That’s science fiction, with the emphasis on fiction. I sure
hope you don’t read too many of those kind of books or those