Only the most healthy mind can look at this problem. It immediately immunizes itself from disease that seems to worm out of the steel shrouding of the weapon itself.

Pessimism, like the yellow poppy of the happy mountain, also has its moments of glory. When it stands upright over the billions of living people and says not a word. It stares deep into the dark horizon. It asks a simple question to no one in particular. "What arrangement of power are you going to use to prevent the use of these things?" "And if the arrangements of power can not solve the dilemma how long will they stand as arrangements of power?

But then optimism, twin brother to the dark, pops up and says something necessary to hear. "You will now have to manifest the full potential as yourselves as people!"

Ah, the poignant failures of those who try. The few successes. Those that will a thing never seen before. Those who do not fear or fear only th processes, techniques, machinery that bring these things into being. When annihilation is a wispy shriek of the hand in an ambiguous direction it signals the spirit so demoralized and on an instant before vanishing into that empty center where all the manipulative power of the world lives.

On one platform is an old man who holds a weapon above the head of the assembled like the sword of Damocles. He talks to get rid of it. At the same time he builds it up as some gleeful catastrophe and now the audience runs in havoc-making circles out into whatever social fabric Hell has.

And the Devil himself simply says, "It determines the form of spirit each generation ad infinitum now until there is no more."

And there goes the man who carries pessimism around on the tip of his head, sticking out like the weapon itself and he believes the destiny of the race resides in his mind! The Devil laughs! "Yes, that is what I wanted after all, a pessimistic group of folk worried that the end is near!"

"Oh great accelerators of history," he chants. "Squeeze segments deep and small until they are emptied out into the guideless world!"

"Ha ha, free human beings are obligated to think about these things from time to time!" Outrage and then cold analysis of the numbers.

"Oh pressure of problem so great that they will not touch it and will not touch what it touches which is the political life. Therefore, so many minds alienated from the political life to cripple it!"

I see now humanity at a great wailing wall. I see it with arms extended in flames of skulls.

Perhaps Earth made one revolution too many around the Sun. Perhpas on one of its many rotations on its axis all common sense flowed through the core of Earth and is stored there now for a million more years. Perhaps humanity had been exposed to too much too early and had a head lifted up high above the clouds, feeling confident that it could contain the menace. Perhaps. Perhaps the last person will be a child with peeled skin and eternal disease. Its mind, strangely, not compacted with nonsense like those before him but ice clear about his own fate. "I have been given a task," he thinks to himself. He cries only because no one can see his sincerity; there are no witnesses to his struggle to overcome doubts. The end. Then end of endness. The end of rotation. The end of a certain suppleness. And the beginning is greeted with a kind of dripping disease throughout the universe, cancerous strings thrown out in all direction to finally eat itself to the end. There it is again. The end. A lousy end considering the alternatives. A good end was reasonably thought of by a few who were dragged away as hopeless dreamers.

Oh pretty yellow and red thing you come at me with a certain geometry. Are you our suicide? A blue and thin layer rises up to touch the dirty old moon. It carries no message. Here on this layer were the books. This layer, slightly singed, were the faces. Up above, near the top, the layer containing all the objects. Below that are the ideas. A pair of sad eyes stretches for at least one hundred thousand miles.

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