De Camp Lyon Sprague - The day of the dinosaur

It took me a long time to decide whether to let the earth live. Somemight think this an easy decision. Well, it was and it wasn't. I wantedone thing, while the mores of my culture said to do the other.This is the decision that few have to make. Hitler might give orders forthe execution of ten million, and Stalin orders that would kill anotherten million. But neither could send the world up in a puff of flame bya few marks on a piece of paper.Only now has physics got to the point where such a decision ispossible. Yet, with due modesty, I don't think my discovery wasinevitable. Somebody might have come upon it later -- say, in a fewcenturies, when such things might be better organized. My equation wasfar from obvious. All the last three decades' developments in nuclearphysics have pointed away from it.My chain reaction uses iron , the last thing that would normally beemployed in such a series. It's at the bottom of the atomic energycurve. Anything else can be made into iron with a release of energy,while it takes energy to make iron into anything else.Really, the energy doesn't come from the iron, but from the...the other elements in the reaction. But the iron is necessary. It isnot exactly a catalyst, as it is transmuted and then turned back intoiron again, whereas a true catalyst remains unchanged. But the effectis the same. With iron so common in the crust of the earth, it shouldbe possible to blow the entire crust off with one big poof .I recall how I felt when I first saw these equations, here in my officelast month. I sat staring at my name on the glass of the door, "Dr. WadeOrmont," only it appears backward from the inside. I was sure I had madea mistake. I checked and rechecked and calculated and recalculated. Iwent through my nuclear equations at least thirty times. Each time myheart, my poor old heart, pounded harder and the knot in my stomach grewtighter. I had enough sense not to tell anybody else in the departmentabout my discovery.I did not even then give up trying to find something wrong with myequations. I fed them through the computer, in case there was someglaring, obvious error I had been overlooking. Didn't that sort of thing-- a minus for a plus or something -- once happen to Einstein? I'm noEinstein, even if I am a pretty good physicist, so it could happen to me.However, the computer said it hadn't. I was right.The next question was: What to do with these results? They would not helpus toward the laboratory's objectives: more powerful nuclear weapons andmore efficient ways of generating nuclear power. The routine procedurewould be to write up a report. This would be typed and photostated andstamped "Top Secret." A few copies would be taken around by messengerto those who needed to know such things. It would go to the AEC and theothers. People in this business have learned to be pretty close-mouthed,but the knowledge of my discovery would still spread, even though itmight take years.I don't think the government of the United States would ever try to blowup the world, but others might. Hitler might have, if he had known how,when he saw he faced inevitable defeat. The present Commies are prettycold-blooded calculators, but one can't tell who'll be running their showin ten or twenty years. Once this knowledge gets around, anybody with areasonable store of nuclear facilities could set the thing off. Most wouldnot, even in revenge for defeat. But some might threaten to do so asblackmail, and a few could actually touch it off if thwarted. What's theproportion of paranoids and other crackpots in the world's population? Itmust be high enough, as a good fraction of the world's rulers and leadershave been of this type. No government yet devised-monarchy, aristocracy,theocracy, timocracy, democracy, dictatorship, soviet, or what have you-- will absolutely stop such people from coming to the top. So longas these tribes of hairless apes are organized into sovereign nations,the nuclear Ragnarok is not only possible but probable.For that matter, am I not a crackpot myself, calmly to contemplateblowing up the world?No. At least the psychiatrist assured me my troubles were not ofthat sort. A man is not a nut if he goes about gratifying his desiresin a rational manner. As to the kind of desires, that's nonrationalanyway. I have adequate reasons for wishing to exterminate my species.It's no high-flown farfetched theory either; no religious mania aboutthe sinfulness of man, but a simple, wholesome lust for revenge.Christians pretend to disapprove of vengeance, but that's only one wayof looking at it. Many other cultures have deemed it right and proper,so it can't be a sign of abnormality.For instance, when I think back over my fifty-three years, what do Iremember? Well, take the day I first entered school...I suppose I was a fearful little brute at six: skinny, stubborn, andprecociously intellectual. Because my father was a professor, I earlypicked up a sesquipedalian way of speaking-which has been defined as atendency to use words like "sesquipedalian." At six I was sprinkling myconversation with words like "theoretically" and "psychoneurotic." Becauseof illnesses I was as thin as a famine victim, with just enough muscleto get me from here to there.While I always seemed to myself a frightfully good little boy whomeveryone picked on, my older relatives in their last years assuredme I was nothing of the sort, but the most intractable creature theyever saw. Not that I was naughty or destructive. On the contrary, Imeticulously obeyed all formal rules and regulations with a zeal thatwould have gladdened the heart of a Prussian drill-sergeant. It was thatin those situations that depend, not on formal rules, but on accommodatingoneself to the wishes of others, I never considered any wishes but myown. These I pursued with fanatical single-mindedness. As far as I wasconcerned, other people were simply inanimate things put into the worldto minister to my wants. What they thought I neither knew nor cared.Well, that's my relatives' story. Perhaps they were prejudiced, too.Anyway, when I entered the first grade in a public school in New Haven,the fun started the first day. At recess a couple grabbed my cap for agame of siloochee. That meant that they tossed the cap from one to theother while the owner leaped this way and that like a hooked fish tryingto recover his headgear.After a few minutes I lost my temper and tried to brain one of mytormentors with a rock. Fortunately, six-year-olds are not strong enoughto kill each other by such simple means. I raised a lump on the boy'shead, and then the others piled on me. Because of my weakness I was nomatch for any of them. The teacher dug me out from the bottom of the pile.With the teachers I got on well. I had none of the normal boy's spiritof rebellion against all adults. In my precocious way I reasoned thatadults probably knew more than I, and when they told me to do somethingI assumed they had good reasons and did it. The result was that I becameteachers pet, which made my life that much harder with my peers.They took to waylaying me on my way home. First, they would snatch mycap for a game of siloochee. The game would develop into a full-fledgedbaiting session, with boys running from me in front, jeering, whileothers ran up behind to hit or kick me. I must have chased them all overNew Haven. When they got tired of being chased they would turn around,beat me -- which they could do with absurd ease -- and chase me for awhile. I screamed, wept, shouted threats and abuse, made growling andhissing noises, and indulged in pseudo-fits like tearing my hair andfoaming at the mouth in hope of scaring them off. This was just whatthey wanted. Hence, during most of my first three years in school,I was let out ten minutes early so as to be well on my way to my homeon Chapel Street by the time the other boys got out.This treatment accentuated my bookishness. I was digging throughMillikan's "The Electron" at the age of nine.My father worried vaguely about my troubles but did little about them,being a withdrawn bookish man himself. His line was medieval Englishliterature, which he taught at Yale, but he still sympathized witha fellow intellectual and let me have my head. Sometimes he madefumbling efforts to engage me in ball-throwing and similar outdoorexercises. This had little effect, since he really hated exercise, sport,and the outdoors as much as I did, and was as clumsy and uncoordinatedas I to boot. Several times I resolved to force myself through a regularcourse of exercises to make myself into a young Tarzan, but when it cameto executing my resolution I found the calisthenics such a frightfulbore that I always let them lapse before they had done me any good.I'm no psychologist. Like most followers of the exact sciences, I havean urge to describe psychology as a "science," in quotes, implyingthat only the exact sciences like physics are entitled to the name.That may be unfair, but it's how many physicists feel.For instance, how can the psychologists all these years have treatedsadism as something abnormal, brought on by some stupid parent's stoppinghis child from chopping up the furniture with a hatchet, thereby fillinghim with frustration and insecurity? On the basis of my own experience Iwill testify that all boys -- well, perhaps 99 percent -- are natural-bornsadists. Most of them have it beaten out of them. Correct that: mostof them have it beaten down into their subconscious, or whatever thehead-shrinkers call that part of our minds nowadays. It's still there,waiting a chance to pop up. Hence crime, war, persecution, and all theother ills of society. Probably this cruelty was evolved as a usefulcharacteristic back in the Stone Age. An anthropological friend oncetold me this idea was fifty years out of date, but he could be wrong also.I suppose I have my share of it. At least I never wanted anything withsuch passionate intensity as I wanted to kill those little fiends inNew Haven by lingering and horrible tortures. Even now, forty-fiveyears after, that wish is still down there at the bottom of my mind,festering away. I still remember them as individuals, and can still workmyself into a frenzy of hatred and resentment just thinking about them. Idon't suppose I have ever forgotten or forgiven an injury or insult in mylife. I'm not proud of that quality, but neither am I ashamed of it. Itis just the way I am.Of course I had reasons for wishing to kill the little tyrants, while theyhad no legitimate grudge against me. I had done nothing to them exceptto offer an inviting target, a butt, a punching bag. I never expected,as I pored over Millikan's book, that this would put me on the track ofas complete a revenge as anybody could ask.So much for boys. Girls I don't know about. I was the middle one of threebrothers; my mother was a masterful character, lacking the qualitiesusually thought of as feminine; and I never dated a girl until I wasnearly thirty. I married late, for a limited time, and had no children. Itwould neatly have solved my present problem if I had found how to blow upthe male half of the human race while sparing the female. That is not thedesire for a super-harem, either. I had enough trouble keeping one womansatisfied when I was married. It is just that the female half has nevergone out of its way to make life hell for me, day after day for years,even though one or two women, too, have done me dirt. So, in a milddetached way, I should be sorry to destroy the women along with the men.By the time I was eleven and in the sixth grade, things had got worse. Mymother thought that sending me to a military academy would "make a man ofme." I should be forced to exercise and mix with the boys. Drill wouldteach me to stand up and hold my shoulders back. And I could no longerslouch into my father's study for a quiet session with the encyclopedia.My father was disturbed by this proposal, thinking that sending me awayfrom home would worsen my lot by depriving me of my only sanctuary. Alsohe did not think we could afford a private school on his salary andsmall private income.As usual, my mother won. I was glad to go at first. Anything seemed betterthan the torment I was enduring. Perhaps a new crowd of boys would treatme better. If they didn't, our time would be so fully organized thatnobody would have an opportunity to bully me.So in the fall of 1927, with some fears but more hopes, I entered RogersMilitary Academy at Waukeegus, New Jersey.The first day things looked pretty good. I admired the gray uniformswith the little brass strip around the edge of the visors of the caps.But it took me only a week to learn two things. One was that the school,for all its uniforms and drills, was loosely run. The boys had plenty oftime to think up mischief. The other was that, by the mysterious senseboys have, they immediately picked me as fair game.On the third day somebody pinned a sign to my back, reading CALL MESALLY. I went around all day unconscious of the sign and puzzled by beingcalled "Sally." "Sally" I remained all the time I was at Rogers. Thereason for calling me by a girl's name was merely that I was small,skinny, and unsocial, as I have never had any tendencies toward sexualabnormality.To this day I wince at the name "Sally." Some years ago, before I married,matchmaking friends introduced me to an attractive girl and could notunderstand why I dropped her like a hot brick. Her name was Sally.There was much hazing of new boys at Rogers; the teachers took afatalistic attitude and looked the other way. I was the favorite hazee,only with me it did not taper off after the first few weeks. They kept itup all through the first year. One morning in March 1928 I was awakenedaround five by several boys seizing my arms and legs and pinching my noseand another holding me down while one of them forced a cake of soap intomy mouth."Look out he don't bite you," said one."Castor oil would be better.""We aln't got none. Hold his nose; that'll make him open up.""We should have shaved the soap up into little pieces. Then he'd havefoamed better.""Let me tickle him; that'll make him throw a fit.""There, he's foaming fine, like a old geyser.""Stop hollering, Sally," one of them addressed me, "or we'll put thesuds in your eyes.""Put the soap in 'em anyway. It'll make a red-eyed monster out of him. Youknow how he glares and shrieks when he gits mad.""Let's cut his hair all off. That'll