Chapter Six — Fritz Haber

It was late at night. A laboratory: glass tubing and round flasks along every shelf, the smell of chemicals sharp in the nose. A single lamp lit the table. A man stood with his back to me, holding a test tube up to the light. Well dressed, and his shoulders heavily bent. "You work late," I said. He turned. Pride was in his face, and something darker than pride mixed into it. "I am the man who took bread out of the air," he said. "Out of the air... bread?" "Nearly all of the air we breathe is nitrogen," he said. "And that nitrogen was useless. Heaped up beside us like a mountain, and grain could not eat a mouthful of it. It was a time when the soil ran short of feeding and people went hungry. I found a way to take hold of the nitrogen in the air and turn it into a feeding grain could eat. I took bread out of invisible air." He paused. "It would not be too much to say that half the flesh on the bodies of the people alive today was built from nitrogen that passed through my hands. Hundreds of millions did not starve because of it." "That," I said slowly, "is near the greatest good a man can do." "It is good." He set the test tube down. His hand shook slightly. "...And with the same mind I made something else. A poisonous gas that, released on a battlefield, chokes men to death. I made it, and I directed its release myself. With my own hands." He lost his words for a moment. I waited. Judgment was not mine to give. "All my life I defended myself this way," he said at last. "The nitrogen is not guilty. The tool is not guilty. The same knife cuts bread and stabs a man. What matters is the hand that holds it, not the thing. The knowledge that made the fertilizer and the knowledge that made the gas are one root — so the knowledge cannot be blamed." "Is that," I asked quietly, "wrong?" "It is not wrong," he said slowly. "That is what makes it terrible. The nitrogen truly is not guilty. The tool truly is not guilty. Because it is true... it cannot defend me." He looked down at his two hands. A long time. "If the guilt is not in the tool, where is it? If the hand that made the bread and the hand that made the gas are the same hand, that hand was mine. The evil was not in the nitrogen. It was in me. And all my life I have pushed it off onto the nitrogen, onto the age, onto the fatherland." The laboratory went quiet. In the glass tubing something cooled slowly. "The strange thing," he said low, "is that I see it in myself more clearly now than when I was young. When I was young I thought I was right. For the fatherland, for science — there were plenty of fine names. As I grew older the names came off one by one, and what was left at the end was simply my own heart. Knowing more did not make me cleaner. It made me understand more deeply how unclean I am." He looked around at the tubes a moment. "People are always afraid of the new tool. A new machine comes and they say it will ruin us. But I know. It is not the machine that ruins. It is the heart that holds the machine. Blaming the tool is comfortable, so people stop there. Looking past it to the heart is frightening. But however dull you grind the knife, it does not make the man holding it good." He went to the window and looked out into the dark. "And the first to pay for it was not me. It was the one beside me. The one who could not bear what my hands had done. Feeding the whole world, I lost one person in my own house." I looked at that bent back a long while. Hundreds of millions lived by the bread he made; tens of thousands died by the gas he made; and the two will stand forever under one man's name. I could neither forgive him nor condemn him. That was not mine. But before the deep dark well of that man's heart, I trembled again. The well was not only Haber's. The further I looked down it, the more the face at the bottom was also my own. And in that very moment I wanted, more achingly than ever, to meet again the one who broke bread and vanished. He alone, it seemed to me, could go down to the floor of that well and still not draw back his hand. But that night my thirst met no rain. Dry, I went out again onto the road. As I left the laboratory he was still looking out the window. Beyond the glass the air — the invisible air he had drawn bread out of, and poison out of — lay spread over the world without a word. The same air. What is taken out of it has always depended on a human hand.