Leo Szilard

“ Xram, as I mentioned before, has a theory of his own which he thinks can explain everything, the disks in the gadgets as well as the uranium explosions which extinguished life.
He believes that these disks were given out to earth-dwellers as rewards for services. He says that the earthdwellers were not rational beings and that they would not have collaborated in co-operative enterprises without some special incentive. ”

“ Apparently, he has made some elaborate calculations which show that a system of production and distribution of goods based on a system of exchanging disks cannot be stable but is necessarily subject to great fluctuations vaguely reminiscent of the manic-depressive cycles of the insane. He goes as far as to say that in such a depressive phase war becomes psychologically possible even within the same species. ”

“ It is, however, possible that the earth-dwellers located the depositories with aid of olfactory guidance, and we have determined that if their sense of smell had been about thirty to forty times more sensitive than the rudimentary sense of smell of our own species, the average time required would be reduced from one hour to about five or ten minutes. ”