You are herewith given notice to bring peace and freedom to all peoples within thirty days from this date. We are sick of your broken pledges, your compromises with principle, your verbal shilly-shallying. Give us peace within a month or I shall destroy the earth utterly.
Chetzisky.
I recognized the name immediately. "Chetzisky." A brilliant Polish physicist, a refugee who fled the twin tyrannies of Germany and Russia. Unknown to all but a few, he had played an important role in the Manhattan Project. His opinions and work had won the respect of the Comptons, the Oppenheimers, the Seaborgs; even, it's said, of Einstein himself.
His small face, with oddly shining eyes set close together, came vividly to mind. The last time I saw him was in March, 1946, en route to St. Louis for the convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I met him on the train out of Chicago. His conversation was bitter with denunciations of the world's fumblings toward peace.
"We scientists," Chetzisky had said, "give man the means to aid the suffering, to conserve the strength of the toiler, to bring more comfort and leisure to all. But does man appreciate our work? No! He uses our every work to steal from his brother, to cheat, enslave, even to kill him."
His eyes became glinting points as he spoke. His guttural tones grew indistinct as emotion choked him. He was a scientist of a rare order. Yet he was a humanist, too; the suffering he knew as a young Pole, son of tragically poor parents, made him that way. Chetzisky was savagely impatient of the stupidity of man, who built himself a hell instead of a paradise. Science, he felt, could find a way to put mankind on its best behaviour.
"I see your point, Doctor," I had said. "But science has given the world a dose of the atom bomb and it hasn't started behaving."
"Yes, I know. But there must be a way. An enforced goodness is better than none at all." He had fallen into a brooding silence, and I had left him to go to my berth. Next morning I had found Chetzisky still in the lounge car, wrapped in thought.