of making him look like a rather sleepy
specimen of the giant panda. He finished the few papers he had been
working on, stacked them together, rose, and went into the outer
office, where he told his staff that he was going out for a short
walk.

By the time he arrived at the brownstone building in Arlington and was
pushing open the door of Brian Taggert's office, Taggert had received
reports from New York and had started other chains of action. As soon
as Senator Kerotski came in, Taggert pushed the letter across the desk
toward him. "Check that."

Kerotski read the letter, and a look of relief came over his round
face. "Not the same typewriter or paper, but this is him, all right.
What more do we know?"

"Plenty. Hold on, and I'll give you a complete rundown." He picked up
the telephone and began speaking in a low voice. It was an
ordinary-sounding conversation; even if the wire had been tapped, no
one who was not a "core" member of the S.M.M.R. would have known that
the conversation was about anything but an esoteric article to be
printed in _The Metaphysicist_--something about dowsing rods.

The core membership had one thing in common: _understanding_.

Consider plutonium. Imagine someone dropping milligram-sized pellets
of the metal into an ordinary Florence flask. (In an inert atmosphere,
of course; there is no point in ruining a good analogy with side
reactions.) More than two and a half million of those little pellets
could be dropped into the flask without the operator having anything
more to worry about than if he were dropping grains of lead or gold
into the container. But after the five millionth, dropping them in by
hand would only be done by the ignorant, the stupid, or the
indestructible. A qualitative change takes place.

So with understanding. As a human mind increases its ability to
understand another human mind, it eventually reaches a critical point,
and the mind itself changes. And, at that point, the Greek letter
_psi_ ceases to be a symbol for the unknown.

When understanding has passed the critical point, conversation as it
is carried on by most human beings becomes unnecessarily redundant.
Even in ordinary conversation, a single gesture--a shrug of the
shoulders, a snap of the fingers, or a nose pinched between thumb and
forefinger--can express an idea that would take many words and much
more time. A single word--"slob," "nazi," "saint"--can be more
descriptive than the dozens of words