At least what was remote and wild in the country could be relied on to go on nearly forever: the sky, the curve of the earth, the sun.
—When I was a kid, she said to Ben one morning when they were afraid to get out of bed because the room was cold and the floor was cold and their feet would have to touch the floor, —I would stand in my parents’ house when I was bored and wait to be told what to do. There was this static feeling right then, this feeling of being frozen. With this reluctance and at the same time a sense of anticipation. Feeling torn between doing something and doing nothing.
She pulled the comforter up to her chin and sat back against the headboard.
—I didn’t recognize it back then but now I see what it was.
—So what was it?
—It was how I was going to spend the rest of my life.
In a late afternoon in the early spring they walked down into an arroyo together and trailed their hands over the sage bushes to lift their fragrant fingers to their faces. A breeze moved the brush and ahead of them the sun was setting, and because there were no clouds it was a wide and vacant sky.
Stepping over rocks on the crumbling red soil he asked her if it was wrong to want to have a child when their paralysis was so clear, when they lived already in a present that could not go forward and only longed for what had already been and was gone.
—It is not wrong for people to want something, she said quietly, —but our problem is we want everything.
She was walking ahead of him by then and since she did not turn back toward him to speak her answer was carried away from him on the wind.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century the men who had been central to the design and construction of the atom bomb a half a century earlier were dead. The bombs they had conceived remained, of course; the bombs in their various silos, trucks and trains, their submarines and aircraft, had been dispersed over the globe like seeds, and lay quietly waiting to bloom.
But the scientists had lived thoughtful lives, weighing their responsibilities gravely. They were not warlike men. Mindful of the moral dimensions of their work, they were inclined for obvious reasons to value reason over instinct. They were duly troubled by the implications of the first great weapon of mass destruction. They had built the first device under the shadow of Hitler, and they dedicated it to him. But finally they were driven by something far simpler than fear or anger.
They worked because they wanted to see; they worked because they worshipped the structure deep within the universe, what was sweetly unknown and could only with great perseverance be drawn into the light. As others might feel tenderness for a child or a home, so they cherished and nurtured their science.
It was love that led them to the bomb.
