 Why do the leprechauns prefer poets to scientists?
Every writer must seek his own Flowery Kingdom in imagination's wide demesne, and if that search can begin and end on Earth his problem has been greatly simplified. A one-time Air Force officer, he has turned to fantasy in his lighter moments, to bring us such brightly sparkling little gems as this. But its small, mischievous pilots had a rendezvous with destiny—on Earth. It was in a park near the nuclear propulsion center—a cool, green spot, with the leaves all telling each other to hush, be quiet, and the soft breeze stirring them up again. You may call it gas, if you wish, for we treated it like gas at the center for convenience—as it came from the rocket tubes in our engine. Without this coefficient to give us control, we would have lacked a workable equation when we set about putting the first moon rocket around those extraordinary engines of ours, which were still in the undeveloped blueprint stage. I had to figure everything into it—diameter of the nozzle, sharpness of the edge, the velocity of approach to the point of discharge, atomic weight and structure— Oh, there is so much of this that if you're not a nuclear engineer yourself it's certain to weary you. Perhaps you had better take my word for it that without this equation—correctly stated, mind you—mankind would be well advised not to make a first trip to the moon. Not children, but a group of little people, hard at work. I had seen them first as a boy of eight, and then, very briefly again, on my tenth birthday. I smiled, and the foreman of the leprechauns—if that's what he was—saw me smile and became stiff and alert for a moment, as though suspecting that perhaps I actually could see him. Or so the legends affirmed, though I've wondered often about the truth of them. I shook my head in wonder, then stepped back from the spaceship and looked about the glade. I am descended from King Niall himself—or so at least my father used to say! Simply because I was so lonely that my mind had become clogged. I knew that if I could just once hear the old tongue again, and talk about the old things, I might be able to think the problem through to a satisfactory conclusion. "And mine's Houlihan, as I've told you. After living for many centuries I am all too acutely aware of the perversity of human nature."
 Poets are less likely than scientists to want to capture and experiment with the leprechauns
 Poets are more likely than scientists to collaborate with leprechauns without expecting compensation  Poets are less likely than scientists to want to capture and experiment with the leprechauns  Poets are less likely than scientists to understand the leprechauns' mission  Poets are more likely than scientists to show compassion to non-human species