Over the weekend all the issues that Dr. Stephan Pearson had been accustomed to dealing with one by one came avalanching down upon him all together. He was in the hurry of a conscience-stricken man who, having found at long last someone with whom he felt free to share his crushing load of sin and guilt, was impatient to connect with her again to unload the rest of it.
He skipped his usual Saturday and Sunday hikes, and also his Monday morning hike, and instead paced round and round his cabin as the pressure built up inside him.
Monday evening came at last. He left early on his hike and arrived early in front of the school. Just the same, he was relieved to find his little friend there already under the trees waiting for him and beckoning him to come and share the bank with her. As he took his place beside her, he greeted her self-consciously and struggled to think of a pleasant way to begin their conversation. Kay shared his nervousness, wondering what to expect and how to respond helpfully.
It was a different sort of day. Clouds had been building up since noon but had never quite reached the stage where their clean-cut towering billows fan out on top in broad indistinct anvils of ice and snow. Billow had simply been piling up on billow and swell on swell until they were balancing precariously high in the air, ready to topple over at a touch. But now the sky overhead was clear and blue as the clouds had moved off to the south and west directly in Steve and Kay’s line of vision.
“You know, Kay, I can never look at massive clouds like those without thinking that what nature does so peacefully, we do so violently. Those massive clouds bless us with cooling rains, a few puffs of wind, and a little harmless lightning and thunder. The mushroom clouds we have created rain down fire and destruction and human misery.”
They studied the imposing and ever-shifting cloud formations in silence. Kay’s heart was so full of confusing hopes and contradictory feelings that she scarcely dared to open her mouth for fear of what might come pouring out of it. Carefully now she planned each word she would say.
“Educated people keep telling us that man’s mind has been set free at last from the ancient taboos that once prevented him from investigating whatever he felt like investigating. Now he may venture anywhere he pleases without running into man-made road blocks. I suppose that’s basically good. But there is something to be said for the taboos if they were holding us in awe of forces that are too big for us to control properly, if they were sparing us the global menace we’re facing now.”
“Ah, but Kay, it’s inevitable. We are naturally curious creatures, and so our knowledge is bound to expand in all directions. Some people are content to learn what is already known, but others have to push beyond the current limits to our knowledge and venture into the unknown. The urge in them is so strong that they would die if they didn’t. It’s inevitable, Kay, inevitable…. But is it good? That’s what plagues me. Is it good?”
“You mean, what if it’s inevitable and evil?”
Kay’s eyes were as big as saucers.
“Yes. You can call it potentially good, which implies that we can’t just expand our knowledge without also taking responsibility for how it will be used. But who’s doing that? And based on what criteria? Or else you can call it always evil, which implies that the more we learn, the more trouble we get ourselves into. Or you can dodge the issue and keep plunging blindly ahead, hoping for the best. My dilemma is this: I can see what we need to do to make it good, but I can’t see any sign that enough of us are willing or able to do it to make a difference.
“What we call ‘progress’ is exciting and inevitable. How can it not be of God? Or, as one of my mentors would have put it, how can progress not be in harmony with the Creative Force of the universe? Now, if God is good, if the Creative Force is orderly and constructive, who would not conclude that progress, that is, the gradual evolution of man’s knowledge and his ability to put it to use, must also be good and orderly and constructive? Who would not equate evil with ignorance and the obstruction of progress? Who would not be honored to devote himself to the cause of progress, to lose himself in the world of research and discovery? But with my own eyes I have seen highly educated and brilliant men seize the fruits of progress, the cream of our discoveries, and fashion them into weapons of mass destruction.
“No! I unmask myself—I am … one of them!”
Steve hunched over, collapsed, and covered his face with his trembling hands.
Kay almost threw herself at him. She wrapped her arms around his chest and hung on, stroking his right cheek very gently with her soft hand. Slowly his trembling subsided.
Steve pulled himself together and sat up straight. She released him, still facing him squarely. He turned to face her.
“Now I put it to you. Progress is inevitable. Progress has been the cause of an evil more heinous than any evil created by men in the past. Tell me: Is progress of God? I cannot believe that it is not, yet how can I believe that it is?…”
“But Steve, think of advances in medicine, in labor-saving machinery, in comforts that make life for so many people more than just bearable.”
“I know. But that doesn’t begin to offset Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What do you make of what those two bombs did?”
Kay’s tongue went hot and dry. She dreaded what a truthful answer might do to Steve, but she dreaded even more what a dishonest answer would do to him. She closed her eyes.
“I try not to think of it, Steve. I try desperately not to think of it. I just want to dismiss that horrifying chapter of our recent past and move on into a better future. But I know that is not the right way to look at it…. Some of our Red Cross workers in Europe had spent time in those two vast crematoria after the war. Who was left? Human wrecks, crazed, crippled, gradually falling all apart from a creeping untreatable new disease created by us. Disbelief and despair were everywhere, they told us…. Steve, do you know why our leaders didn’t just drop those bombs over the ocean a little ways off the coast if they wanted to demonstrate their power, where a west wind would carry the fallout away from the people? Why, oh why did we have to match their treachery at Pearl Harbor with an act of even crueler treachery of our own?”
Steve’s eyes turned to glass. His body crumpled together, as if pounded down by a jackhammer. He was trembling again, all over. Kay clasped her arms around his shuddering shoulders.
“Steve! Steve! Forgive me! There are enough terrifying things in the world. I do not have to become one of them! O, forgive me!”
She moved her hands down to his arms and gripped them tightly. He pressed his hands together in a vise, closed his eyes, and bit his lip to regain control of himself. Somehow he must tell her the whole truth about himself right here, now, in real life, not just in his mind. But first he must stop shaking. Then he must find a way to wipe the vision of horror from his thoughts long enough to formulate for her what he needed her to know.
It took a long time, but eventually a measure of calm returned to him. Kay’s tight grip on him helped. As his tremors subsided, she relaxed her hold. Neither of them said a word, or even moved. At last he reached out for her hands, falteringly, and cupped them within his. He looked into her tear-stained eyes.
“May I tell you why I am so crushed?”
“Please.”
Once more his head and shoulders slumped down almost to his knees. A tide of sorrow engulfed him. Then he sat up straight, took a deep breath, and said without looking at her, “I share with a small handful of colleagues the chief responsibility for creating those bombs. I was at the center of the Oak Ridge work from its inception. Only I know how much I contributed, how terribly much. And why? Why did I do it? To defend the good, to protect civilization, to halt the barbarians. And by what means? By creating a barbarous monster on the end of a paper leash and turning it over to our leaders who turned it loose on mankind. That’s how we did it, Kay! We brilliant scientists!”
Kay gasped. “Was it that? O my poor, poor Steve….”
He shook his head hopelessly, staring dumbly between his drawn-up knees.
She stared at him and marveled. He was a little man. Just a kindly, harmless, sensitive little man. In his striped coveralls, he could have just come in from haying. Any farmer in the area might have borne his small head with its nondescript features and metallic hair. Only occasionally had his mannerisms betrayed to her anything noteworthy about him. To look at him, you would take him to be as common as a weed in the ditch.
So it is thanks to men like him that the world is hovering on the brink of global holocaust, she gasped within herself, shaking her head.
She leaned back on the bank right next to Steve, suddenly weak all over. He leaned back limply, too. His heart was still thumping.
How can he be any guiltier than I am? she thought.
And how guilty are you? came a voice from somewhere within her.