Status Updates From The descent

We put it this way: Military capability is the launching pad of diplomacy.

"I worry about something more basic," she said, turning her head to look up at him sideways.
"More basic?" Radovan asked.
"Like the question of how we got into that bind." She gazed up at him, still sideways, waiting for an answer whose wisdom would match her own, though hers was a paraphrasing of her father's answer to Bernice and to any-body, back in DeVelbiss, who voiced the same fear.

1"Do you think there'll be a war by accident anyway?" she asked, framing her question differently in order to ask
it twice.
"Anyway?" he inquired.
"I mean anyway, in spite of what you said that the hrst missile would probably never be fired. Could there be a war by accident, anyway?"

Among the scholars, the best man, they fig-ured, was one whose field was mankind. Well, philosophy sounded too highbrow-it does to the average man, that is
—and anthropology is too much concerned with the primitive and the past, sociology sounded statistical and cold, and so history won out.

Then they decided that he must be a modest fellow, somebody with some accomplishments but not too many; not a four-star professor, they're intimi-dating, but almost one, maybe somebody who just didn't make the grade or hadn't made it yet, like a lot of us—an associate professor.