"Realists are born, not made." The younger man sat down on a lab stool and stared at the scarred, stained counter. "It’s coming apart," he said.

"You think so? Seriously?" Avelin nodded. "You heard that report from Prague." Fabbre nodded.

"Last week... this week... next year – yes. An earthquake. The stones come apart – it falls apart – there was a building, now there’s not. History is made. So, I don’t understand why you’re here, not there."

"Seriously, you don’t understand?" Avelin smiled and said, "Seriously."

"All right." Fabbre stood up and began walking up and down the long room as he spoke. He was a slight gray-haired man with youthfully intense, controlled movements. "Science or political activity, either/or: Choose. Right? Choice is responsibility, right? So I chose my responsibility responsibly. I chose science and abjured all action but the acts of science. The acts of a responsible science. Out there, they can change the rules; in here, they can’t change the rules; when they try to, I resist. This is my resistance." He slapped the laboratory bench as he turned round. "I’m lecturing. I walk up and down like this when I lecture. So. Background of the choice. I’m from the northeast. Fifty-six, in the northeast, do you remember? My grandfather, my father-reprisals. So, in Sixty, I come here, to the university. Sixty-two, my best friend, my wife’s brother. We were walking through a village market, talking, then he stopped, he stopped talking, they had shot him. A kind of mistake. Right? He was a musician. A realist. I felt that I owed it to him, that I owed it to them, you see, to live carefully, with responsibility, to do the best I could do. The best I could do was this," and he gestured around the laboratory. "I’m good at it. So I go on trying to be a realist. As far as possible, under the circumstances, which have less and less to do with reality. But they are only circumstances. Circumstances in which I do my work as carefully as I can."