ed of roses, so far. "I don't think I could
be much worse off than I've been so far. How would you like to be
penned up--"

"Penned up?" He snorted disgustedly. "You've had yourself a holiday,
and you can't see it. Try to see the military, the legal point of
view. Here is one person, Peter Ambrose Miller, one man and only one
man, with the ability, the power, to cancel at one stroke every
scientific advancement that armament has made in the past three
thousand years."

"And the big boys don't like it," I mused.

"The little boys, as you use the word, won't like it, either," he
said. "But, that's not the point. Not the point at all. The stem of
the apple is this--what are we going to do with you?"

"We?" I asked him.

"We," he explained carefully, as to a baby, "is a generic term for the
army, the navy, the government, the world in general. As long as you
live, as long as you continue to be able to do the things you can do
now, a gun or an airplane is so much scrap metal. But--only as long as
you live!"

* * * * *

That I didn't like. "You mean that--"

"Exactly what I said. As long as you're alive a soldier or a sailor
might as well be a Zulu; useful for the length he can throw a spear or
shoot an arrow, but useless as he now stands. There is no army,
apparently, right now that is worth more than its body weight--again,
as long as you live."

"Do you have to harp on that?"

"Why not? Do you want to live forever, or do you expect to?"

He had me there. You bet I wanted to live forever. "Well?"

He yanked pensively at his upper lip. "Two solutions; one, announce
you to the world with a clang of cymbals and a roll of drums. Two,
bury you someplace. Oh, figuratively speaking," he added hastily as he
saw my face.

"Solution one sounds good to me," I told him. "I could go home then."

He made it quite clear that Solution One was only theoretical; he was
firm about that. "Outside of rewriting all the peace treaties in
existence, do you remember how our Congress huddled over the Bomb? Can
you see Congress allowing you, can you see the General Staff agreeing
to share you with, for example, a United Nations Commission? Can you?"

No, I couldn't.

"So," with a regretful sigh, "Solution One leaves only Solution Two.
We'll grant that you must be kept under cover."

I wondered if Stein was somewhere at the earphones of a tape recorder.
For someone with as big a job as the old man