“The bomb. The one that ended World War II.” He replaced his glasses and met Jack’s stare. “He succeeded, Jack, building a weapon capable of destroying entire cities in a single flash. Thousands of lives, erased in an instant.”
Jack tried to imagine it, but couldn’t. The numbers were too large, the devastation too abstract. “Why?”
“That’s what he was hired to do.”
“So was he a bad man?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
The afternoon light caught the silver threading through his wheat-colored hair. He looked older than he had when they’d first met. Years of squinting over texts had worn grooves into his face.
“Oppenheimer believed he was protecting the world at the time. The project wasn’t just for the United States. He was following orders from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Canada too. He, like everyone else, believed the enemy would build just as evil a weapon if we didn’t build it first.”
“Like a race?”
“Yes. But after he showed the government what it could do...” He paused, shaking his head slowly. “He hoped they would never use it.”
“Did they?”
Mr. Carrow nodded, his eyes strained with deep regret. “The work he did haunted him for the rest of his life. They called him the father of the atomic bomb. He felt responsible for fundamentally changing humanity until the very end, incapable of forgiving himself. Even his last words, from the Bhagavad Gita, spoke of great regret—’Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’”
“Was he the one who launched it?”
“Doesn’t matter. He made it real for them. His mind,” he said, tapping his temple. “gave them the tools for absolute devastation. It wasn’t long before other countries reproduced his design.”
Mr. Carrow’s gaze drifted to the bed, then back to Jack, his eyes intensely sad. “Intellectuals that use their knowledge to advance monsters are just as responsible for the evil they spread.”
Jack didn’t understand why Mr. Carrow was telling him this.
His tutor’s pale eyes searched his face. “Sometimes, Jack, the bravest thing a man can do is refuse. Even if it costs him everything.”
There was never a quiz on Oppenheimer and after that morning, Mr. Carrow never brought up the scientist again. And as the winter months dragged on, Jack forgot all about it.
It had been an English spring that year, truly polarized by a battle to bloom while frost continued to freeze the ground. The chancellor insisted Jack spend his fourteenth birthday at the estate.
“You’re getting older now,” the chancellor had said. “Fourteen. Soon you’ll be a man. It’s time you started to make some connections.”
Jack’s mother never made any mention of doing anything for his birthday, so he didn’t fuss about extending his stay.
The morning of his birthday, he woke to servants bustling in the hallway, their footsteps more hurried than usual, their voices carrying an edge of anxiety that meant the chancellor was in one of his moods.
When Jack descended the grand staircase, he found the entrance hall transformed. Streamers in gold and red cascaded from the chandeliers. A banner stretched across the marble foyer, in elaborate gold script that read, ‘Happy Birthday, Jackie!’
He had never seen anything so spectacular in his life. Not for him.
“There he is! The man of the hour!” The chancellor stood before a table laden with wrapped packages, arms spread wide.
Jack froze on the bottom step. In eight years, the chancellor had never acknowledged his birthday. Not once. Seeing such fanfare made him nervous.
“Come, come.” The chancellor beckoned with fat fingers, his signet ring catching the light. “It’s all for you, Jackie boy. All yours!”
Even at fourteen, Jack knew transactional men like the chancellor didn’t make grand gestures without a motive. He’d want payment in return. For that reason alone, the elaborate scale of gifts and decor terrified him.
Cautiously, he crossed the foyer.
Marco stood near the wall with his usual defeated posture, but beside him stood a small boy. Dark-haired. Perhaps ten years old, with similar features to Marco. Was this his son? Why was he there?
“Fourteen years old,” the chancellor repeated, clamping a fat hand on Jack’s shoulder and steering him toward the table.
