thing is immune to an attack by so-called modern science?"
he said.

"Sure!" Ken went on enthusiastically, not understanding the expression
on his father's face. "Look at the problems that have been licked as
soon as people were determined enough and willing to pay the cost. Giant
computers, radar eyes, atomic energy. Everybody knows we could have made
it to Mars by now if governments had been willing to put up the
necessary money."

"You still have to learn, all of you do," Professor Maddox said slowly,
"that the thing we call science is only a myth. The only reality
consists of human beings trying to solve difficult problems. Their
results, which seem to be solutions to some of those problems, we call
science. Science has no life of its own. It does not deserve to be
spoken of as an entity in its own right. There are only people, whom we
call scientists, and their accomplishments are severely limited by their
quite meager abilities. Meager, when viewed in comparison with the
magnitude of the problems they attack."

Ken felt bewildered. He had never heard his father speak this way
before. "Don't you believe there are scientists enough--scientists who
know enough--to lick a thing like this in time?"

"I don't know. I'm quite sure no one knows. We became conscious long ago
of the fallacy of assuming that the concentration of men enough and
unlimited funds would solve any problem in the world. For every great
accomplishment like atomic energy, to which we point with pride, there
are a thousand other problems, equally important, that remain unsolved.
Who knows whether or not this problem of weakened surface tension in
metals is one of the insoluble ones?"

"We have to find an answer," said Ken doggedly. He could not understand
his father's words. "There's nothing science can't accomplish if it sets
about it with enough determination. Nothing!"

Chapter 6. _The Scientist_

Ken spent an almost sleepless night. He tossed for long hours and dozed
finally, but he awoke again before there was even a trace of dawn in the
sky. Although the night was cool he was sweating as if it were
mid-summer.

There was a queasiness in his stomach, too, a slow undefinable pressure
on some hidden nerve he had never known he possessed. The feeling pulsed
and throbbed slowly and painfully. He sat up and looked out at the dark
landscape, and he knew what was the matter.

Scared, he thought, I'm scared sick.

He'd never known an