He had been testing some ideas concerned with the solution of the many-particle time-independent Schrodinger equation when — quite suddenly, by a trick of conceptual parallax — he saw deeper than ever before into the mathematical forest which screens reality from reason. A tree lane seemed to open in the thickets of Hermite polynomials, eigenvectors, and Legendre functions; and shimmering at its farthest end, for a brief second, was the antibomb machine. The path closed again almost at once, but Hutchman’s flying pencil was recording enough of the landmarks, the philosophical map references, to enable him to find his way back again at a later date.

Accompanying the flash of inspiration was a semimystical feeling that he had been chosen, that he was the vehicle for another’s ideas. He had read about the phenomenon of the sense of givenness which often accompanies breakthroughs in human thought, but the feeling was soon obscured considerations of the social and professional implications. Like the minor poet who produced a single, never-to-be-repeated classic, like a forgotten artist who has created one deathless canvas — Lucas Hutchman, an unimportant mathematician, could make an indelible mark on history. If he dared.

The year had not been one of steady progress. There was one period when it seemed that the energy levels involved in producing self-propagating neutron resonance would demand several times the planet’s electrical power output, but the obstacle had proved illusory. The machine would, in fact, be adequately supplied by a portable powerpack, its signals relaying themselves endlessly from neutron to neutron, harmlessly and imperceptibly except where they encountered concentrations close to critical mass. Then there had come a point where he dreamed that the necessary energy levels were so low that a circuit diagram might become the actual machine, powered by minute electrical currents induced in the pencil lines by stray magnetic fields. Or could it be, he wondered in the vision, that merely visualizing the completed circuitry would build an effective analog of the machine in my brain cells? Then would mind find its true ascendancy over matter — one dispassionate intellectual thrust and every nuclear stockpile in the world would consume its masters…