A tall, very thin man in a fedora and smoking a Chesterfield walks in to the Inn at the End of the World1. The man is Robert Oppenheimer.
SOPHIA: Bienvenido, señor. Welcome to the Inn at the End of the World. What can I get you?
OPPENHEIMER: A martini, please.
SOPHIA: How do you like it?
OPPENHEIMER: Four ounces of good gin, dash of vermouth, dip the rim of the glass in honey and lime juice.
SOPHIA: As you wish. What’s your name? What brings you to the Inn?
OPPENHEIMER: Robert. Ever since throat cancer took me under, instead of the dark nothing I expected I’ve been wandering this coast. In a sort of limbo. I saw your sign on the road and was strangely drawn to walk out here.
SOPHIA: Anyone joining you?
OPPENHEIMER: I was hoping my wife Kitty or some of my, ahem, other interests might be here too – but I’ve not seen any of them.
SOPHIA: We had a girl here the other night, señor Robert, says you wrecked a car with her chasing a train.
OPPENHEIMER: Ah, yes. My father gave her a painting by Cezanne to calm things down. Did she say where she’s staying?
SOPHIA: No. But you meet some interesting types here. Just wait.
[They hear hoofbeats on the road. The door opens. A tall man, white beard, gray overcoat with brass buttons and a sword at his side walks in. It is Robert E. Leee.]
SOPHIA: Bienvenido, General. What may I get you?
LEE: Evening, miss. May I get hay and water for Traveller?
SOPHIA: Certainly, general. Ali!2 Can you see to General Lee’s horse?
ALI: [quietly] You know who this cracker is, right?
SOPHIA: Yes. Now put your feelings aside and just do your job. I have a feeling things might get rough tonight. [Ali walks out scowling.]
SOPHIA: General Lee, what can I get you to drink? We’ve got a fine old rye just in.
LEE: I like whiskey, always did. That’s why I never drink it. How about buttermilk?
SOPHIA: Coming up. [She pours, then cuts a big slice of cake to go with it.]
LEE: Orange and lemon layer cake? How’d you know my favorite, miss? And what do they call you?
SOPHIA: Sophia. Sometimes my job calls for guessing. General, meet Mr. Oppenheimer. He invented the nuclear bomb.
LEE: Mr. Oppenheimer, it’s an honor. You’re the man I was sent to see. [He takes of a white glove and shakes his hand.] What’s a nuclear bomb?
OPPENHEIMER: It’s a bomb that works by splitting atoms. [He draws on his Chesterfield, blows smoke.] What do you mean you were sent to see me, General?
LEE: Oh – we’d like to invite you higher into the mountains.
OPPENHEIMER: What’s up there? They seem quite…forbidding.
LEE: Oh, I think you’ll find it rather heavenly. But tell me, sir. Was this bomb like the Union’s Rodman gun?
OPPENHEIMER: No. You never saw a bomb like this one. When we detonated the first one in New Mexico, the crater was half a mile wide, the plume went to 38,000 feet and the light was seen in three states.
LEE: I see by your face that you were deeply troubled by your part in this.
OPPENHEIMER: We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'
LEE: How is such a weapon delivered?
OPPENHEIMER: We dropped it by airplane. On two Japanese cities.
LEE: The US was at war with Japan, I heard. Military targets, I presume?
OPPENHEIMER: No. We dropped them in the heart of two cities.
LEE: The civilian deaths must have been staggering.
OPPENHEIMER: Fat Man, the bomb we dropped on Nagasaki, killed as many as 80,000. Little Boy, at Hiroshima, may have killed 146,000.
LEE: I assume the President authorized something so deadly. What was his objective?
OPPENHEIMER: To end the war. And it did.
LEE: Did you meet with the President afterward?
OPPENHEIMER: Yes. I told him I had blood on my hands.
LEE: And he said?
OPPENHEIMER: The buck stops with me. In the end I see he was right. Our work changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists. But I’m more interested right now in why you’re down here trying to convince me to go up into the hills. Sounds like you’re trying to get me to heaven.
LEE: They told me you’re a quick one.
OPPENHEIMER: So that means you’re in heaven. How can a guy who fought to keep blacks enslaved make it to heaven?
BERNARD: The same way a man who incinerated two hundred thousand Japanese civilians can. By repenting.
OPPENHEIMER: I hear they are taking down statues of you in Richmond. I also hear an Army general, at his wife’s urging, took down your portrait he had hanging in his home for decades.
LEE: McChrystal? Fine soldier, but a man who let’s his wife’s worries about what her friends are going to think influence him I would call henpecked. My statues? Up in the hills we don’t care about our own honor. That’s not the glory we care about.
OPPENHEIMER: With so little else to do I still read the papers. I read that someone even called the Washington Monument to be “repurposed” because Washington held slaves.
LEE: All men have flaws. Look at me. But if someone does not recognize the greatness of the man who, like Cincinnatus, refused the crown and returned to his plow, the stature of the one who helped to guarantee the very freedom he has to publish words that dishonor him, that scoundrel should be horsewhipped.
SOPHIA: But General, you took up the sword against the very Union that Washington helped create.
LEE: Miss Sophia, is it? Yes. That was the most difficult decision of my life. President Lincoln offered me command of all the Union army. But Virginia was my home. I could not lift a sword against my own people.
OPPENHEIMER: So why not just sit it out?
LEE: The best answer to that hard question was given by a private in my army from Roanoke. A Union squad had closed in on him, alone, a single ragged soldier. They asked him: “You got no slaves. What are you fighting for?” He said: “I’m fightin’ cuz y’all are down here.”
I could ask you, Mr. Oppenheimer. What makes a war just?
SOPHIA: The man to answer that is due to walk in just about now.
[A man with a bald head, white beard, white robe and walking staff comes through the door. His bald head shines with a glow that is somehow more than just the reflection of the lamplight. It is Bernard of Clairvaux, Doctor Mellifluous, the Last of the Church Fathers.]
SOPHIA: Bienvenido, Padre. Right on time. What do you lack?
BERNARD: Daughter, a glass of cold albariño, if you would.
SOPHIA: Gentlemen, this is Bernard of Clairvaux. Father, General Lee and Mr. Oppenheimer here were arguing about just war. Perhaps you could help them settle it.
BERNARD: Let’s raise our glasses to peace first, brothers. In His peace is our rest, as Dante said. [All three raise their glasses and drink.] So what are the facts of the case?
OPPENHEIMER: [tapping his Chesterfield in the ashtray] The General here led an army that almost split his country in two and would have continued one of the worst systems of slavery the world has known. He justifies his decision because his “country” was invaded.
BERNARD: You men don’t need me. Surely you have read Augustine, myself and our brother Thomas Aquinas on just war. Augustine planted, I watered and Thomas brought it to full flower.
SOPHIA: Speaking of war and Aquinas, he left us a merluza he caught. Would you gentlemen care for soldaditos de pavia? They are usually morsels of fried cod – my mom taught me how to make it with merluza.
LEE: [tries the tapa] Delicious. Almost as good as a Virginia trout. Yes, Father Bernard. Augustine’s position was that war was just when fought against injustice. You refined it: war is just first when it is a defensive war, including a fight to resist injustice against the Church and her people, and second when God’s vicar the pope authorizes it. You advised the Templars to take up the sword in defense of pilgrims and in the retaking of Jerusalem itself. You saw it as a defensive war to protect the innocent against great evil.
BERNARD: I rebuked popes that weren’t doing their duty, but like both of you, I was a man under authority. And you, brother Lee, I suppose you saw your taking up the sword as protecting your home, like any good father.
LEE: You put it well, Father.
BERNARD: But there is a case where the king’s men are justified in breaking into your home. And that case is when they see that you are harming the children under your care. And that is what God had determined that the South was doing.
LEE: This may surprise you, Father, but I agree. I thought we were continuing Washington’s initiative, when he freed his own slaves, and were taking our own steps toward putting slavery “on a course to extinction,” as my great rival Lincoln put it. With the clarity of hindsight, I now see that God had given us great leeway but determined that we were not going fast enough. He decided to accelerate things, by crushing us and spilling the blood of more than six hundred thousand men. In the end, even the friendly bullet that felled my beloved Stonewall Jackson was an instrument in His hands.
OPPENHEIMER: Poppycock, General. That bullet was as random as Brownian motion.
BERNARD: Was it, brother? But for that bullet, Jackson might have helped win Gettysburg. America might have become two countries. The South may or may not have come to the aid of Britain in the second world war. The north may not have had the means to recruit you and a thousand scientists to the desert. Mr. Heisenberg may have gotten the bomb first for Germany. But for that bullet, the world would be a different place.
SOPHIA: Señor Lee, what did you love about Stonewall Jackson?
LEE: What I loved about Jackson, Miss Sophia, is that he lived by the New Testament but fought by the Old. Now Father Bernard, we submit a more recent question to you. Mr. Oppenheimer led the creation of a weapon capable of killing more people at one time than anything in history. That weapon, I am chagrined to hear, was used by my country to destroy two entire cities in the last great war. It was used against an aggressor who had attacked our country, unprovoked. The United States intended to cow them into submission. It worked, thus saving perhaps more lives than it took. Was this justified?
BERNARD: As you know, my friend Aquinas would put it to six questions: Was there just cause? Was it a last resort? Was it declared by proper authority? Did it possess right intention? Did it have a reasonable chance of success? And was the end proportional to the means used?
OPPENHEIMER: Intelligent men could make a case that all six were satisfied. But that is only jus ad bellum. When do you go to war. Jus in bellum tells you how to fight once you are in it.
BERNARD: I heard Americans were not keen students. I see that is not true in all cases. You are indeed right. And what are the two principles of jus in bellum?
OPPENHEIMER: Discrimination – deciding who is a proper target – and proportionality – how much force is morally appropriate.
BERNARD: And do you think your country´s use of this weapon met those criteria?
OPPENHEIMER: Now I do not. It clearly violated the first principle: civilians were not proper targets. No matter what Hitler and Hirohito had done, it was not right for Churchill and Roosevelt to firebomb Dresden or Tokyo (which last bombing, by the way, killed more than Fat Boy did in Nagasaki). But I was just a scientist. Our politicians are the problem.
BERNARD: That is where you are wrong, brother. When we choose our leaders, we are all complicit.
OPPENHEIMER: [lights a new Chesterfield] General Lee, why are you agreeing with a Catholic monk? You were an Episcopalian, for Christ’s sake.
LEE: Martin Luther said Bernard of Clairvaux was a preacher who surpassed even Augustine. Calvin revered him. If he’s good enough for those two, he’s good enough for me.
OPPENHEIMER: Well, Father Bernard, you’ve gotten some bad press about the Second Crusade.
BERNARD: And well-deserved. But for gaining Lisbon, it was an utter failure.
SOPHIA: Mr. Oppenheimer understands the viciousness of the press, Father. I learned in school he was accused of being a spy for Russia in the 1950s. They revoked his clearances, banned him from government work.
OPPENHEIMER: It was mainly because I opposed the hydrogen bomb. Imagine a bomb one thousand times more powerful than what we dropped on Hiroshima. But of course they would not listen – and then that miserable pissant Lewis Strauss tried to destroy me. My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.
BERNARD: Could it be your parents taught you a lot of facts, but not much truth?
OPPENHEIMER: It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we try to stop it from doing so.
BERNARD: My son, it is not your task to prevent the world from going to hell. It is your task to determine whether you are going there.
LEE: Speaking of your destination, Mr. Oppenheimer, we have an opening for physics professor at the Mountain Campus of Washington and Lee. Would that be of interest?
OPPENHEIMER: What’s the pay?
LEE: The pay? Gold up there is just paving stones. You’ll find the pay is better than gold.
OPPENHEIMER: Will Niels Bohr be there?
LEE: You’ll be surprised who you find there.
BERNARD: And, my son, you may be surprised to meet the One you’ve been looking for in all the loves you sought.
LEE: [finishes his buttermilk and begins to sing] “O sacred head now wounded / with grief and shame weighed down…”
BERNARD: General, you know my song?
LEE: After Gettysburg we sang it around the campfire. So many of my men were not around that fire. I’ve never heard a song more healing, and Father, at that moment…we needed healing.
BERNARD: Well, I am pleased. I must be going, daughter. Give my regards to brother Augustine if you see him. Tell him Luther was wrong - he was the better preacher.
LEE: We’ll walk out with you. Mr. Oppenheimer, will you consider my offer?
OPPENHEIMER: It’s intriguing, General. Would I be free to hire my own adjuncts?
LEE: Mr. Oppenheimer, I can split an army but not an atom. Hire away! Good night, and thank you for your excellent buttermilk and mahr-loosa, Miss Sophia!
SOPHIA: Good night, gentlemen. I’ll save that rye for General Grant if I see him!
[They laugh and walk out together. Sophia sees money on the bar. She picks it up. It’s a $100 Confederate note].
SOPHIA: Ali, get in here. General Lee just left me some worthless Confederate paper!
A: [looks at the bill] Hmm. That cracker ain’t as bad as I thought.
SOPHIA: Why?
A: This bill’s gonna pay your rent for a year, girl. Last one like this auctioned for $35,000 dollars.
[Sophia and Ali watch the three men on the road south – one mounted on a white horse, one tall and angular, and one in white robes with a staff, getting smaller in the distance on the road rising to the first hills.]
On a finger of land on the north coast of Spain stands a lighthouse. In the lighthouse there is an inn, the Inn at the End of the World. The inn is made of stone and old oak timbers. In the inn there is a bar. Sophia tends the bar. She never knows who is going to walk in. But the bar is well-stocked, and she knows her trade.
Muhammad Ali is one of the bouncers at the Inn.