“I can just see them listening to me,” said Bill. “Why don’t you go and talk to the president?”

“Because yours was the only mind we were able to contact. Others seemed closed to us: we don’t understand why.”

“I could tell you,” said Bill, looking at the nearly empty bottle in front of him. He was certainly getting his money’s worth. What a remarkable thing the human mind was! Of course, there was nothing at all original in this dialogue: it was easy to see where the ideas came from. Only last week he’d been reading a story about the end of the world, and all this wishful thinking about bridges and tunnels through space was pretty obvious compensation for anyone who’d spent five years wrestling with recalcitrant rockets.

“If the sun does blow up,” Bill asked abruptly—trying to catch his hallucination unawares—’what would happen?”

“Why, your planet would be melted instantly. All the planets, in fact, right out to Jupiter.”

Bill had to admit that this was quite a grandiose conception. He let his mind play with the thought, and the more he considered it, the more he liked it.

“My dear hallucination,” he remarked pityingly, “if I believed you, d’you know what I’d say?”

“But you must believe us!” came the despairing cry across the light-years.

Bill ignored it. He was warming to his theme.

“I’d tell you this. It would be the best thing that could possibly happen. Yes, it would save a whole lot of misery. No one would have to worry about the Russians and the atom bomb and the high cost of living. Oh, it would be wonderful! It’s just what everybody really wants. Nice of you to come along and tell us, but just you go back home and pull your old bridge after you.”

There was consternation on Thaar. The Supreme Scientist’s brain, floating like a great mass of coral in its tank of nutrient solution, turned slightly yellow about the edges—something it had not done since the Xantil invasion, five thousand years ago. At least fifteen psychologists had nervous breakdowns and were never the same again. The main computer in the College of Cosmophysics started dividing every number in its memory circuits by zero, and promptly blew all its fuses.