I have often wondered about the consciousness of animals, how it must be more shadowy than ours, more dreamlike and fleeting, small thoughts like half-burned candles, their outlines never fully formed. And perhaps that is also the case for many of us who must strain to think with clarity. I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue, and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends, and Albert Einstein was a good friend too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Janos von Neumann. I remarked on this in the presence of those men, several times, and no one ever disputed me. Only he was fully awake.

I myself suffer from a morbid sense of despair, and even now, decades after I worked with von Neumann, I still find myself questioning our central tenet: Is there really a rational course of action in every situation? Johnny proved it mathematically beyond a doubt, but only for two players with diametrically opposing goals. So there may be a vital flaw in our reasoning that any keen observer will immediately become aware of; namely, that the minimax theorem that underlies our entire framework presupposes perfectly rational and logical agents, agents who are interested only in winning, agents who pose a perfect understanding of the rules and a total recall of all their past moves, agents who also have a flawless awareness of the possible ramifications of their own actions, and of their opponents’ actions, at every single step of the game. The only person I ever met who was exactly like that was Johnny von Neumann. Normal people are not like that at all.

We, the Martians, played an oversized role in the American nuclear program. It’s what they called us after a joke Fermi made when someone asked him whether extraterrestrials were real: “Of course they are, and they already live among us. They just call themselves Hungarians.”

For some reason, hearing him like that just made me angrier, and I told him that if he did not open the garage in the next five minutes, I would burn his papers and the entire house down to the ground. It was a half-empty threat and both of us knew it. Not because I wasn’t willing to torch that tacky, loathsome, piss-yellow house, but because we both knew that he was perfectly capable of recovering his work and writing it all down again, line by line, number by number, from memory.