"I am become Death, destroyer of worlds." -- J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad Gita

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Albert Einstein. Oppenheimer. Richard Feynman. Sir Joseph Rotblat. My father admired all these men. Jewish physicists, some of whom escaped Nazi oppression. He felt they were proudly representing our religion when they made enormous contributions to science. I admired them, too, but for a different reason.

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I walked into the infirmary to the lovely sound of someone in the bathroom emptying his stomach of everything he'd ever eaten. I wasn't sure who it was at first, but the Gaelic curses delivered in an ever-thickening brogue quickly gave it away. I winced in sympathy. Had Carson fallen victim to the stomach flu passed around by Radek Zelenka? Or was it something else? Either way, he sounded like he'd be feeling lousy -- and irritable as hell -- for awhile.

I fetched a bottle of "Lantisade", the expedition's version of Gatorade, which we had concocted because of the invariably high numbers of dehydration cases that we saw. The causes ranged from alien viruses to heat exhaustion to hypoglycemia, but fortunately the treatment was always the same: fluid replacement. The beverage's formula was based on the World Health Organization's oral rehydration solution, but the taste was unlikely to improve our fearless leader's mood any. Still, it would probably piss him off less than being hooked up to an IV.

Carson finally emerged from the bathroom looking, as my late mother might have said, like a dead dog. "Go away!" he growled when he saw me. "Just give me some bloody privacy so I can die in peace."

I already knew that he was one of the worst patients I've ever seen, so I wasn't offended. "Tempting as that may sound, I'd rather not have to deal with the paperwork," I said dryly. "So sit the hell down before you fall down and drink some of this." And it was a measure of how miserable he must have been feeling that he acquiesed with only some token bitching about the general intelligence level of surgeons.

I took a seat next to Carson at the nurses' station. He took a small sip of the bright orange-colored liquid and grimaced, but continued to drink slowly when he realized it was going to stay down for now. "What happened?" I asked. "Zelenka strikes again?"

"Not the lad's fault. I just watched Dr. Biro perform an autopsy. She can be a right scary woman sometimes."

I raised my eyebrows. Carson didn't strike me as someone who would get sick watching autopsies. We doctors prided ourselves on our ability to watch gory things without flinching. As a medical student, I could talk about horrible accidents or autopsies and eat at the same time. However, it quickly became difficult to find anyone besides other medical students willing to have dinner with me. (Maybe that's why I'm still single.) "Who died?"

"Dr. Collins. He suffered lethal radiation burns during the test firing of a weapon Colonel Sheppard's team found. But the thing is, he couldn't have been exposed to the radiation for more than about fifteen seconds. Any way you look at it, he shouldn't be dead right now. But yet, that autopsy could have been of someone just outside the blast radius at Hiroshima." Carson eyed his drink with distaste, but took several more swallows.

"Bad, was it?" I asked. No wonder he was queasy!

"The worst. He must have been reaching for something to shut the leak down, because his right hand bore the brunt of the damage. There wasn't a single area with intact skin, and two of his fingers were fused together. It reminded me of the reports I read about Daniel Jackson's death from naquadriah radiation poisoning." Carson closed his eyes and swallowed convulsively, probably due to another wave of nausea.

"You okay?" I asked. He shouldn't have been affected this badly, even if it had been an horrific sight.

He nodded without opening his eyes and pushed the bottle of Lantisade away from him. "Disgusting stuff," he muttered. After a minute, he opened his eyes again. "I've never seen anything like it. It must have been some altogether new form of radiation."

"Incidents like that are not without precedent," I argued. "Criticality accidents have occurred back on Earth. The first one occurred at Los Alamos, I believe." At Carson's quizzical look, I clarified. "A criticality accident can happen either when controls to prevent a chain reaction fail or when a desired chain reaction somehow goes out of control. Sounds like this one was the latter." How did I know this? After we deliberately nuked ourselves to fake out the Wraith, I had read everything I could find on radiation exposure and the Manhattan Project. Hey, always fun to find out what may be in store for you.

"Aye, Rodney said something about that. Some poor sod who dropped a plutonium brick. But that guy deteriorated over a period of weeks, not seconds!" Carson mumbled something that sounded like "arrogant git."

"Excuse me?"

"Rodney. He wants to try again. Thinks he can somehow make this work when the Ancients couldn't. I ought to drag his sorry ass over to the morgue and make him look at what's left of Collins. He's acting like it barely bothers him!" Abruptly Carson doubled over, curling his arms against his abdomen as he was wracked by a spasm of pain.

"Okay, this is NOT just a case of you being squeamish." I had a bad feeling about this. Impossibly high radiation doses? New forms of radiation? "Carson, were you and Dr. Biro using any shielding on the body while doing the postmortem?"

"Lead shielding? No. Do you think...?"

"Yes I do," I said grimly. I grabbed him as he started to sway and gently but firmly sat him down on one of the infirmary beds.

"But that's impossible. Collins was just exposed to external radiation. His body itself shouldn't be radioactive!"

"You yourself said you've never seen anything like this before. I don't think we can afford to overlook any possibility." I called out for one of the nurses, ignoring Carson's indignant sputtering. Then I grabbed a couple of blood tubes, a tourniquet, and a needle. If he hadn't chosen that moment to retch again, I don't think I would have been able to get him to cooperate. But when he started vomiting blood, even he got scared.

Damn it! I so did not need this right now.

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I knew I would find Rodney on this particular balcony. It had become the place to go when you were sad, angry, lonely, or any other emotion that could be dealt with by staring out at the ocean. From what I'd heard, Rodney would probably be experiencing all of them.

As I got closer, I saw that John was on the balcony with him. Rodney was gripping the railing with white-knuckled hands, while John was dropping Athosian fruit pits into the ocean one by one. "I said I'm sorry, John. I don't know what else I can say."

"Yes, you're sorry," replied John in an odd tone of voice. "But do you even understand what you did wrong?"

Rodney sounded affronted. "I would think that was obvious. I screwed up the test firing and blew up most of a solar system. Most people would say that's not good."

"No, Rodney! I mean, yes, you did detonate the greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time. Fine. Here's an honorary membership in the Axis of Evil. But if it had just been that, I wouldn't be as upset. No, it was the fact that you put almighty science ahead of everything else. Including your own life, the lives of your friends, and your own humanity."

"What!" yelped Rodney. I probably should have left and come back later. But I also wanted to know what John meant. Call me a yenta.

"Just before the first A-bomb test, some of the scientists placed bets on what they thought would happen. One group thought that the chain reaction might be self-sustaining and ignite the planet's atmosphere. Don't you get it? They thought it might be a complete cataclysm, but they went ahead with the test anyway. Who cares if every living thing on Earth is incinerated? At least it will be one hell of a bang before we go!"

"It was a theoretical impossibility!" Rodney protested. "The calculations proved that never could have happened."

"Same thing for that large cloud of space debris you just created! Can you imagine if any of those planets had been inhabited?" Rodney looked sick. "My point is that even if such a disaster was absolutely, positively impossible by the equations, there are some things too horrible to take a chance with. Even if it answers the question about life, the universe, and everything. Even if it gets you fame and fortune. And even if it gets you the chance to prove you're smarter than everyone else! Science. Isn't. Everything."

John stopped, took a deep breath, and made an effort to stop shouting. "Rodney, I almost didn't recognize the man I was talking to there at the end. It wasn't you; it was more like the Terminator. I hated that movie, okay? I don't really want to see it again."

Now Rodney looked like someone had punched him in the gut. "You don't think I know that?" he said hoarsely. "You don't think I'm gonna have to live with this for the rest of my life? Collins is dead. I almost killed the two of us and could have destroyed the Daedalus. Jesus. And Carson..."

"Carson is fine," I said firmly, stepping onto the balcony. "He's tired and cranky and starting to drive me nuts, but he's otherwise fine. He wanted me to let both of you know."

"Just starting?" asked John with a faint smile on his face.

"You have no idea."

"How is that possible?" asked Rodney. "We all heard what the radiation did to Collins."

I joined the two men at the rail. "Carson wasn't directly exposed to the radiation source. Instead, he got a secondary dose from the body. That dose was much lower, and therefore he had only a mild case of acute radiation toxicity."

"What about the whole throwing up blood thing?" Rodney wanted to know. That had really freaked him out.

"That was as much from stress as from anything else. Really, he's okay. His blood counts are coming back up and the vomiting has stopped, to my great relief."

"His, too, I bet." smirked John. Then he turned serious again. "Just think about what I said, okay Rodney?" He nodded to me and left.

I continued to look out over the ocean, figuring that Rodney probably wasn't done talking. Sure enough, he didn't disappoint me.

"Well?" he demanded.

"Well what?"

"Well, shouldn't you be off... saving someone or something like that?"

I pretended to think for a minute. "Nope. No one in dire need of saving right now." Unless you counted the man standing in front of me.

"So you're just going to hang around to make sure I don't blow anything else up?"

I snorted. "Right now, McKay, the only thing I'm worried about exploding is your brain. Relax, will you?"

And surprisingly, he did. "I used to not care about trust, but now that I've lost that trust, it matters to me," he admitted, sounding subdued. "I really screwed up, didn't I."

I nodded. "Yup, you did. And you're right, people may not trust you for awhile."

"Was that supposed to be comforting?"

"Yes!" I snapped. "You're lucky that you have friends willing to watch over you, to see that you don't do something even you can't live with. Cadman said you were a passionate man; you'd be eaten alive by guilt if anything like that ever happened."

"She's one to talk!" Rodney snapped back, but his heart didn't seem to be in it.

"Look at how guilty you felt about Carson's illness," I said more gently. "He knew it, too; that's why he wanted me to update you and John. And that was a relatively minor consequence of your actions."

"Yeah, I know. It's just that... I wanted that thing to work so badly I could taste it. The sheer knowledge we could have gained. I think that's what really drove me." He paused, "Don't get me wrong, though, the fame and fortune would have been nice, too."

"Well at least you're in good company. To some extent, Oppenheimer believed that about the atomic bomb. Einstein and Richard Feynman felt the same way -- it was easy to lose sight of the consequences when caught up in the excitement of solving a puzzle."

Rodney sniffed. "That's all well and good, but wasn't that at the end of their careers? They had plenty of time to create their own explosions before then."

"Okay, then. Here's another name for you. Sir Joseph Rotblat." I was really enjoying sparring with Rodney McKay! It was invigorating, and I could definitely see why John did it so often.

"Who?"

"He was the only person to quit the Manhattan Project because of ethical concerns."

"Yeah? And what happened to him? He flip burgers or something for the rest of his life?"

I kept my tone deliberately casual. "Oh, he won a little prize in 1995. The Nobel Peace Prize, that is." Rodney's jaw dropped. Let him chew on that for a bit.

My earpiece suddenly clicked twice and a frantic voice spoke from the other end. I listened, then shrugged. "Sorry, I've got to get back to the infirmary. I've got to keep the rest of the medical staff from killing the CMO."

Rodney smiled, albeit a little sadly. "For a surgeon, you're not a bad shrink. Thanks for giving me something to think about, Goldberg."

"Schwartz."

"Oh, right. Sorry."

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Albert Einstein. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Richard Feynman. Sir Joseph Rotblat. Yes, they were all brilliant Jewish scientists. But just as importantly, they were also humanists. Would Rodney McKay join their ranks? Only time would tell, but he'd certainly taken an important step today.

Even though Rodney's not Jewish, I think my father would have been proud.

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A/N: The last time I had a case of gastroenteritis, my own Jewish mother told me I looked like a dead dog. Very sympathetic. :-)