“Are all governments as stupid as ours?”

Gathu stiffened. His ridge crest waved in suppressed irritation.

“You may, of course, emigrate to any other nation you wish, Academician. The international Concords give you the right to establish yourself as a citizen of any system of government found under our sun.”

“Shall I arrange to have the papers sent over? Perhaps you’ll have better luck…”

Gathu’s voice trailed off, for Fetham had raised his hands in the Gesture of Supreme Disgust and fled the room.

Federman stared at the ceiling while he tilted back in his swivel chair. “You know, someone once told me that the true definition of genius was the ability to suddenly see the obvious.”

Liz Browning stopped pacing long enough to pick up her coffee cup. The stained newspaper was open to a page of boldface headlines and photos of armed men.

“Do you mean that the answer may just be staring us in the face? Are you saying we’re stupid?”

“Not stupid. Obstinate, perhaps. We hold on to our basic assumptions tenaciously, even when they are about to kill us. It’s the way human beings work.

“For instance, did you know that for years Europeans thought tomatoes were poisonous? No one bothered to test the assumption.

“Even the most daring and open of us can’t question an assumption until he becomes aware of it! When everyone accepts a paradigm it never becomes a topic of conversation. There must be thousands, millions, of things like that which men and women never even notice because they don’t stand out from the background.”

Liz shook her head.

“You don’t have to belabor the point. Every sophomore has thought about that at one time or another. And it’s certainly happened that some genius has leapt out of the bathtub, screaming ‘Eureka!’ and gone on to tell everybody of the new way to do things.”