Page:Fantastic v08n11 1959-11.djvu/46
that makes it crystal clear that I am not one of the infinitely competent new nuclear men, but a physicist of the Cavendish breed—a half-mad hobbyist. Yes, that is a typewriter of sorts you hear behind the door—it is part of the Folly. The typist seems to think a lot between bursts, does he not?
Bother, I have left my key at home. We will pass up the Folly, Di. Without regrets. You will remember it better as a trivial mystery, an old man's flaunting boast in a dimly lit corridor, than in its shrunken dull reality.
You really would like to see the Folly? It does have a certain robot fascination. Well, I suppose we can get Olafson's key. He lives in the machine shop except for a brief respite after midnight—and it lacks three hours of that. With your permission, Di, we will descend to Olafson's Hole. This way. Your furs and silks will make a brave shine in his dismal smithy where, a wide-cheeked Alberich, he fashions our brass and steel traps for the molecule. Olafson is a physicist's machinist of the old breed, a dogged perfectionist such as Babbage depended on for building his ill-starred difference machine. Our Swedish Vulcan will be delighted by your presence and perhaps inwardly flustered—I imagine he is as unused to lovely young ladies as I.
But there is one thing that not even you will be able to elicit from Olafson—a smile. Olafson may conceivably have smiled as a baby, but there is no record of it, and he certainly has never smiled since. He is the very embodiment of sullen materialism, an aggregation of solidly packed molecules in which there is no room for the nonsense of spirit. I must confess that I like him that way, for I am a materialist myself, a devoted monist and atheist—I trust I do not shock you. I do not well understand the new young men in my field, who listen to Bach and Bruckner and Bartok, read Kierkegaard and Niebuhr and Dostoyevsky, have themselves psychoanalyzed, and eventually become Unitarians or High Episcopalians. I stand by Haeckel and Haldane, I know that the universe is a meaningless swirl of atoms, though from time to time I have whimsical fancies.
The Folly? Yes, perhaps it is best that I describe it to you now. Then we need steal only a quick glimpse of the actuality, which may leave it a shred of glamor. Besides, it