the religious boys in my outfit share--they call me
'that misguided old atheist'), I don't think none of us would go over
big at Atla-Hi."

* * * * *

We had to agree with him there. I couldn't imagine Pop or Alice or even
me cutting much of a figure (even if we weren't murder-pariahs) with the
pack of geniuses that seemed to make up the Atla-Alamos crowd. The
Double-A Republics, to give them a name, might have their small-brain
types, but somehow I didn't think so. There must be more than one
Edison-Einstein, it seemed to me, back of antigravity and all the
wonders in this plane and the other things we'd gotten hints of. Also,
Grayl had seemed bred for brains as well as size, even if us small
mammals had cooked his goose. And none of the modern "countries" had
more than a few thousand population yet, I was pretty sure, and that
hardly left room for a dumbbell class. Finally, too, I got hold of a
memory I'd been reaching for the last hour--how when I was a kid I'd
read about some scientists who learned to talk Mandarin just for kicks.
I told Alice and Pop.

"And if _that's_ the average Atla-Alamoser's idea of mental recreation,"
I said, "well, you can see what I mean."

"I'll grant you they got a monopoly of brains," Pop agreed. "Not sense,
though," he added doggedly.

"Intellectual snobs," was Alice's comment. "I know the type and I detest
it." ("You _are_ sort of intellectual, aren't you?" Pop told her, which
fortunately didn't start a riot.)

Still, I guess all three of us found it fun to chew over a bit the new
slant we'd gotten on two (in a way, three) of the great "countries" of
the modern world. (And as long as we thought of it as fun, we didn't
have to admit the envy and wistfulness that was behind our wisecracks.)

I said, "We've always figured in a general way that Alamos was the
remains of a community of scientists and technicians. Now we know the
same's true of the Atla-Hi group. They're the Brookhaven survivors."

"Manhattan Project, don't you mean?" Alice corrected.

"Nope, that was in Colorado Springs," Pop said with finality.

* * * * *

I also pointed out that a community of scientists would educate for
technical intelligence, maybe breed for it too. And being a group picked
for high I. Q. to begin with, they might make startlingly fast progress.
You could easily imagine such folk, unimpeded by the boobs, creating a
wonder world