He attempted, as usual, to place the information in historical perspective, to give it some context, to impress on the kids why this subject was important. To make them think.

“We’re facing the fallout even now,” he said. “The Nazi experiments on human beings, onerous as they were, yielded valuable scientific information that could now be put to good use. Therein lies the dilemma. Is that knowledge tainted because of the way in which it was obtained? A lot of people believe that no good can come of evil and that recognition of the worth of this information would indirectly validate what the Nazis did. There are other people who believe that knowledge is knowledge, it is neither good nor evil in and of itself, and the method by which it was obtained should have no bearing on its validity. Still others believe that if any good can come of this evil, all of those people would not have died in vain. It’s a complex question with no easy answer.”

The bell rang.

“Think about it over the weekend. You may have to write an essay.” He smiled as the students picked up their books and papers, groaning. “And enjoy your days off.”

“We always do!” Greg Wass yelled as he sped out the door.

The weather was still gorgeous after school, and Norton cut across the football field to Fifth Street. At the edge of the field, in the dirt border adjoining the chain-link fence that separated school property from the sidewalk, he saw a line of huge red ants marching from a hole in the ground to a discarded lunch sack, and he stopped for a moment to watch them. It had always seemed ironic to him that the ant, the Nazi of the insect kingdom, was the bug most frequently subjected to genocide. Flies and gnats, spiders and beetles, were usually killed individually. But ants were squashed or sprayed with poison, killed a hundred, two hundred at a time, entire colonies wiped out in one stroke.

He frowned, recalling a memory from his childhood, when he and a neighbor girl had set fire to an anthill, dousing the small mound of dirt and the surrounding grassy ground with kerosene before dropping a match and watching the little insect bodies shrivel and blacken. They’d thrown other bugs into the fire as well, beetles and spiders, whatever they could catch, and they’d almost tossed in a kitten but the flames had sputtered out before they could capture the animal.

He closed his eyes. Where had that memory come from?

He felt suddenly ill at ease, slightly queasy, and he took a deep breath and walked through the open gate onto the sidewalk. The day no longer seemed so perfect, and instead of strolling slowly, enjoying the cool weather and the premature season, he hurried down Fifth Street toward home.