SHARONA BEN-TOV
603
"This is a scientific institute. It is not a munitions factory."
Avram doesn't remember what he said as Weizmann, still clamped
onto Bergmann, let himself be led away amid Bergmann's complicated
apologies.
The girls' hands were still at their lips, but not covering smiles. Avram
closed the door.
"What does he expect?" asked one of the girls, hushed but angry.
"We have to make weapons. How does he expect us to fight?"
Avram tried to explain the dream of the Weizmann Institute.
It
was
like his own: a family gathering in a garden. Instead of sons and daugh–
ters, around the table would be seated Arab kingdoms and African
tribes, India and Vietnam, and our old trading partners, the Chinese.
They would pass their plates and we would serve the dishes of the Insti–
tute, sharing our grapefruit orchards and carp fisheries, water purifica–
tion systems and genetically improved cereals. Everyone would see that
sharing with us was better than fighting us.
"But the Egyptians are bombing Rehovot," the girls objected.
"Sometimes, visions must be postponed," he replied.
The Final Test
"How
CAN YOU
TELL?" I asked Avram after he told me about the pres–
ident and the kindergarten. "How do you know when a vision is just
postponed, and when it's an illusion to begin with?"
"You assess the facts and probabilities," he answered. "Then you
work and wait."
I liked this. My father would have said that you could find out any–
thing by sitting down, meditating, and tuning in to the Universal Mind.
That's what he did for three hours every morning, before entering the
lab. He would have suggested a session with his transcendometer, to see
if the top of my skull produced the right ballisto-cardiac signal, 7 Hz,
for tuning into the higher realities. Once, when I was sixteen and as log–
ical as Mister Spock, I asked my father if his theory of the universe could
be tested. He replied that my whole western science was no damn good.
What bothered me was his calling it my western science. I didn't feel up
to the responsibility.
Perhaps, I thought, my father had been missing a sense of connec–
tion to time, to promise and fulfillment, to his place in the order of
generations. He'd wanted a universe with instant answers. I wondered
