“No, it’s mine.” She cackled with a return of the old merriment. She
found a stub of pencil, tore off a corner of newspaper, and began
writing in a crabbed hand. As she wrote she muttered, only half to me:
“Evening of the day they dropped the Bomb, your Uncle Henry told me:
‘Ma, the time’s come.’ But I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘People may be crazy,
but they’re not crazy enough to blow the whole world up and them on it.’
“But now.... If there’s a Man in the Moon, and he’s got a Bomb in his
hand and all he’s got to do is fling it, what’s to stop him? _Him_.
He’s safe in the Moon.... _There!_” She held out the scrap of paper.
“Go on, boy, do what you like with it, and I hope you like what you
do! I held back, I never thought I’d live to see times like these, But
there’s some duties you just can’t shirk, boy, I don’t have to tell you
that.”