Summary
Analysis
John and Miss Faust arrive on the sixth floor, the location of Dr. Hoenikker’s old lab. There is a plate commemorating him on the wall. The lab is just as Dr. Hoenikker left it. John notices a lot of “cheap toys lying around.” Miss Faust explains how many of his experiments were “performed with equipment that cost less than a dollar.”
The presence of the toys is a grotesque nod to childhood innocence, which is essentially what Dr. Breed claims of Dr. Hoenikker—that his work was a kind of play, free from moral constraints or implications.
Miss Faust calls Dr. Hoenikker an “unusual man.” “Maybe,” she hypothesizes, “in a million years everybody will be as smart as he was and see things the way he did. But, compared with the average person of today, he was as different as a man from Mars.”
Miss Faust’s comment acts as a counterpoint to the idea of the relentless march of human progress. The progress represented by Dr. Hoenikker—the atom bomb—is too far ahead of humanity’s ability to respond appropriately.