My colleague Professor Mozart burst into my office, just back from a pro-SSC rally in Washington and still full of excitement. “The police estimated the crowd at seventy thousand, but it was at least a quarter of a million. It makes you proud to be a physicist. And to top it all off. while I was dodging tear-gas canisters, it came to me!”

“Tear gas, at a pro-SSC demonstration?” I gasped in disbelief.

“Yes,” he confirmed. “An enormous crowd, unaware that they should have been addressing their concerns to Congress, started to march toward the White House chanting, ‘Hey, hey, Allan Bromley, give us the Higgs or we won't go calmly!’ and the Secret Service must have panicked. Those teenagers can be frightening, you know. They really get quite out of control when they think we might pass up an opportunity to find the Higgs. And those MIVeBs can be pretty alarming too, when they're on the move,”

“MIVeBs?” I inquired.

“Mothers for Intermediate Vector Bosons,” he explained impatiently, unable to disguise his disdain at how out of touch I was with the Movement. “But then as the first canisters started to pop, I realized how simple the solution really was.”

“Solution to what?”

“The funding problem for the individual investigator, of course! I can't imagine why nobody has thought of it before. We simply abolish all such grants, freeing the investigators to return to the full-time pursuit of their individual science.” He settled into my only comfortable chair, beaming with satisfaction.

I've heard some zany things from Mozart before, but this one was just a little too self-serving to let pass. “Very fine for you, W. A.,” I said with ill-concealed scorn, “who loathe writing proposals and progress reports and feel no responsibility for training the next generation of physicists. But what about the more conscientious members of our profession? How are they to keep the enterprise of small science alive?”

I hadn't intended to be so brusque with him, but it really is disgusting to see how much happier he's become since his grant was cut. Undeterred by my swipe, he continued.

“You don't understand. I'm not proposing to abolish support for small science—just to stop distributing it so irrationally. Take that next generation. Why do the agencies give out so few graduate student fellowships, and only for the first few years?