Robert shook his head. “We should have dropped it just outside Tokyo, where the emperor and the residents could see it, then blanketed the city with leaflets demanding they surrender or overthrow their government.”

“Toppling governments is a messy proposition—and unpredictable. Besides, Tokyo has been firebombed far worse than the damage that would have resulted from an atomic bomb outside the city. During two days in March alone, we burned sixteen square miles of it.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is that the decision, no matter what you think of it, was not yours to make. You feel blame. You shouldn’t. It was war. You did your job.”

“Perhaps. But I can’t help feeling as though nothing matters anymore. I know now that the project gave me something I needed: purpose—and belief in what I was creating. Yet having seen the horror of it, I know now that I was a fool. The die is cast. Our extinction is merely a matter of time.”

The older man sat quietly for a moment.

“What if I told you there was a group of scientists and intellectuals, people like ourselves, from around the world, who believed as you do—that humanity has now become a danger to itself? What if I told you that this group was working on a sort of second Manhattan Project, a technology that might one day save the entire human race? This device would be controlled by the people who built it, intellectuals with only the common good in mind, not nationalism, or religion, or money.”

“If… such a group existed, I would be very interested in hearing more.”

Several months later, the two men traveled to London. They were shocked at the state of the city. The war, and in particular the Blitz, had leveled entire sections; others lay in ruins. But the endless attacks had not broken the British. And now they were rebuilding.

At one a.m., a car took the men to a private club. They made their way up the grand staircase and into a ballroom, where a lectern stood before rows of chairs. Signs emblazoned with three words hung above the stage: Reason, Ethics, and Physics. The attendees filed in silently and faced forward. Robert estimated that there were sixty people in the room.

What that speaker said that night changed Robert’s life forever.