human
Press the blue button, Burns.
gpt
Burns,
human
Hell, Morry, who cares about these damned specimens? How would you like to be expelled? No classification, no chance of a job, spend the rest of your life in a compulsory Holiday Reservation.
gpt
How does he get away with it, muttered Lee, looking around at the open desert and the bare hills on the skyline.
human
Tomorrow we'll be back in a ten-to-a-room bachelor unit in the Nebraska suburbs, with a fine view of continuous rooftops to the Gulf, the Atlantic and the Great Lakes, and the nearest geological specimen at the bottom of the community hydroponic tanks. And here he is--the only David Adam Smith, the one original--with a desert of his own. It makes me sick.
gpt
That's just emotional reaction, Lee. We were all busting ourselves to be admitted, to be one of the select three hundred. Just because we're being slung out doesn't mean the whole Desert Institute is no good. You know perfectly well why he has the place reserved.
human
I know his excuse. I can just see him, flapping his cloak at the Salvagers and croaking, 'I don't care what you want to do with the ground, gentlemen. I must have open spaces to live in. Am I or am I not the only leading scientist of importance who has retained his sanity and continued to produce discoveries of unique value? Where is Firnivale, Williams, Hutk, Marrpole, and so on and so on? Lost. Missing. Probably in a sodden stupor in one of the South American City-States. I tell you, science cannot produce anything in laboratories. Science must have room to breathe!'
gpt
And why, Professor Smith, said Burns imitating a heavy official voice,
human
Because, dear sir, Lee answered in David Adam Smith's thin voice,
gpt
I never admit more than three hundred students to the Institute. And because apparently I have the only mind capable of absorbing the weight of modern knowledge without much strain.
human
You do not dislike yourself, Professor.
gpt
I give credit where it is due, dear sir. Lee stopped and continued in his normal voice.
human
The trouble is, he _does_ produce the stuff. He's supposed to be a geologist, but there hasn't been an invention for the last decade that he didn't master-mind.
gpt
Pity he can't think of some way of speeding up the emigration, John said.
human
If only we could leave Earth!