In War Times (2 page)

Properly appreciative of the warmth into which he had been suddenly deposited, Sam was always in his seat each morning at seven
A.M.
when Dr. Hadntz opened the door, set her briefcase decisively on the bare metal desk at the front of the room, and draped her coat and scarf over the back of the desk chair. She always began her lecture immediately, chalking formulas on the board which he was sure represented some of the most rudimentary knowledge that she possessed. She was an exiled physicist from Budapest. The Army, of course, had not provided the students with an extensive background, but it was rumored that she had worked with Curie, Wigner, Teller, Fermi. Everyone who was anyone in theoretical physics.

Dr. Hadntz was the fourth instructor in a two-month course that rotated speakers weekly.

He and his classmates were being sorted out. The question was: By whom and for what?

Sam did not know whether Eliani Hadntz, as she sat splendorously naked on the side of his bed, her chin in her hand, was reverie-struck, paralyzed by guilt (was she married?), adrift in matters of speculative physics, or wondering what to have for dinner. The steam radiator clanked, and his Crosley, which he had switched on in a fit of awkward nervousness when they entered the room, played “Mood Indigo.” Ellington’s brilliant melancholia infused the moment.

He realized that he didn’t know a thing about Dr. Hadntz except that she was intellectually renowned, part of a generation in which European women felt free to follow their own genius to the shrines of physics in Berlin, Copenhagen, Cambridge, Princeton. And that she was part of the mass exodus of physicists escaping the advancing tide of National Socialism. Dr. Compton, one of Sam’s professors in Chicago, had brought Szilard and Fermi, both refugees, to lecture at the university while he was there. They brimmed with a strange mixture of dread and excitement—love of information for its own sake, insights that seemed to be unlocking the secrets of the physical world, and fear of the technologies such discoveries might lead to.

Dr. Hadntz rose from the rumpled bed, still deeply contemplative, her hair falling around her like a curtain. Crossing the room, she stood for a moment, still naked, directly in front of the window.

Deeply surprised at her immodesty, Sam jumped out of bed and pulled the blackout curtains shut, certain that she had been fully visible in the glow cast by the streetlight. A bit confused, he tentatively touched her hip, and she shook her head: no. She went into the bathroom, taking her bag. He heard her lock the door to the adjoining room, where a soldier by the name of Mickelmaster got roaring drunk every other night, then she closed Sam’s door. Water ran for a few minutes.

She emerged wrapped in a towel and rummaged through the pocket of her overcoat, which hung over the wooden chair in front of the desk. “They have not given you many luxuries here,” she said, as she pulled a cigarette from the coat pocket. Her lighter snapped open and flared briefly in the dark room.

Sam smiled. “You have no idea.” Hot water, warm air, privacy, and electric lights to read by were prized commodities, and he did not know how long he could hold on to them. His inherent sense of tremendous awkwardness returned, a downward sensation like falling from a plane before you pulled the rip cord of your parachute.

Cigarette dangling from her mouth, Hadntz put her arms through the long sleeves of her white blouse, pulled on lacy underpants. She turned up the volume of the radio. Then she seated herself on the end of the bed, cross-legged, her back resting against the metal footboard. “You said something.”

“I said—”

“I mean on Monday. During the first lecture. You asked some very interesting questions.”

It was now Saturday evening. Their eyes had met and held on Tuesday, and on Friday they had dinner together.

“Your background is in physical chemistry. You were at the University of Chicago.”

“For almost three years.” On scholarship; his family was not wealthy, and he had also worked at night in a bakery the entire time he was in school.

She pointed her cigarette toward a dark shape in the corner. “Is that a musical instrument case?”

“Saxophone.”

“You play with an orchestra?”

“Jazz.” Sam loved jazz—as did most people his age. It was the popular music of the day. But his devotion was intense, encyclopedic; almost a calling.

“Good. Jazz requires a supple mind.” She leaned toward him. He wanted to ask to share her cigarette, but it seemed too intimate a request and he flushed slightly in the dark. She was, of course, older than the hometown girls he knew, and European, but it had still happened so quickly, although certainly not against his will.

She said, “I have been working on quantum processes in the brain.”

He did not like to look puzzled in front of her, but he was. “I don’t understand.”

“No one does. I was a medical doctor, like my mother, and then, quite briefly, a Freudian psychologist. Freud argued with me, but he could not convince me. I decided that it was not the answer. That was when I became interested in physics.”

She knew Freud? He could not help computing. She must be at least twenty years older than him. She didn’t look it.

She lowered her voice. He could barely hear her over the radio. “How does an atom
decide
when to emit an electron? I have been working on deciphering what we call consciousness. The quantum nature of our brains; the nature of will. Of course, I am positing that there exists more altruism than not.” She frowned. “Or perhaps, just hoping.”

She sucked in her cheeks, drawing from her cigarette. “I am attempting to…not to change human nature, but to try to understand it. So that we can use it to our advantage, as we have used mechanical processes to our advantage. I envision a vast computational network that is capable of helping us make changes according to what is truly best for each one of us. What do we all want? Food. Shelter. Love. Hope. Contentment. Challenge. Community. I have had all of these. Because of luck, I have been part of a tremendous intellectual community. But now, most of those people whom I so deeply respect—close colleagues of mine—are working on something that could destroy us all.” She sighed. “As could this, perhaps. Nobel and Gatling thought that dynamite and machine guns would ensure perpetual peace, after all. But what is beauty? What is freedom? We all know what they are, even if they sometimes seem impossible to describe. We all want them. Perhaps we can choose, together, among the possibilities, if we combine the best of what we all want.”

Abruptly, she got out of bed, crushed her spent cigarette in the heavy glass ashtray on Sam’s desk, and finished dressing, her movements impatient; angry. “I have left their project. I regret to say that I contributed to it in many ways.” She looked up at Sam. “We are in a race with the Nazis to create an atomic bomb.” A grim, ironic smile quirked briefly. “Does this surprise you?”

Sam had heard rumors of this, had intimations that such a project was under way. Before he’d left the University of Chicago, one of his close friends in the Physics Department had become involved in some project with Fermi that he couldn’t discuss.

Still, he was shocked. “Yes.”

“I could probably be shot just for telling you this directly. I do this because there is so much at stake. We don’t know what might happen if a nuclear explosion takes place. It might be never-ending. It could destroy everything. The world.”

He stood and grabbed his trousers from the floor, glancing at her as she attached silk stockings to garters and slipped her feet into stylish two-toned high heels. Her black wool suit was cut differently than the ones American women were wearing now, but it was clearly well made, expensive. Sam found her sexy, scary, enchanting.

“I am always followed, although I think that tonight I have probably given them a good pretext for being here with you alone.” As if she could feel the sudden final plummet of his heart, she turned and gave him a quick, unexpected hug, rested her head against his chest for an instant, and let go.

Opening her scarred leather valise, she took a manila folder from a huge accordion file that fell open from the lid. As she did so, he saw that in the bottom of the valise was a steel box, about the size of a hardcover book, locked with a heavy padlock. She touched it with her fingertips. “There is only one of these. I created it in Paris. I am not sure how it should be used.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know what to call it. For me, it cannot be named.” She set the folder on the desk, then closed and locked the valise. “These are the plans. I am leaving them for you to use. The product they will produce requires a catalyst—a chain reaction.
This
is the reason atomic fusion must take place, but I no longer have time to try to integrate this with the project they all have in mind, the atomic bomb.”

She shrugged into her jacket and buttoned it over her simple white shirt. “My ideas do not matter to them. These scientists and your government are focused on only one goal. I think it is possible that some of my colleagues are simply curious, or drunk with the power of creating something that could destroy the world.”

Handing him the two-inch-thick manila file, she said, “This is not the only copy. 1 have given this information to several of my friends. But they are all too busy with bombs to even consider it. While I do not blame them, given the gravity of their task, and the speed with which they think it must be accomplished, I am deeply sad that this avenue to peace might be disregarded.”

“Which friends?”

“You would only be intimidated by their names. I believe that you have the ability to understand much of what I am positing, despite the fact that you have had only a few years of college. You asked good questions; you grasped my answers.” She smiled—not to him, but to herself, as she bent to pick up her valise. Then she looked at him. “I should tell you. I gave you a test different from the other tests. It was much more difficult. Your answers were very good. The solutions worked, and you found them using unusual avenues of thought.”

Her hand was on the doorknob.

“Wait.” He put the file on his desk and grabbed his shirt.

She shook her head. “No. I have done all that I can here. My daughter is in Budapest with my parents, and they are in danger. I counted on others to help. They could not.”

“You have a daughter?”

“My only child. She is twelve. My husband was a mathematics professor. He died several years ago. I’m not sure what is going to happen. They don’t want to let me go. They tell me that they are doing the best they can to get my family out, but I don’t believe them.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

She dropped her hand from the doorknob, gave him a look he could not read, kissed him on the lips briefly, then opened the door. Hastily buttoning his shirt, he bent and slipped into his shoes, then grabbed his coat.

“Do not follow, please. I must leave alone. It is important that you do not arouse the interest of those following me. They must think that this was just a sexual tryst.”

He went to the door and watched her go.

In her foreign suit, she looked like a woman from another time and place. As she left the room, she did not look back. The authoritative sound of her heels on the wooden stairs at the end of the hall diminished and vanished.

He closed the door and leaned his back against it, disturbed, exhilarated, and puzzled. Her words had carried powerful admonitions. She knew things that few other people knew. And this amazing woman had entrusted him with this knowledge.

There was nothing much to do but turn on the light and the radio, sit down at the desk, pull out the papers, and try to understand what she had left him.

Dr. Eliani Hadntz was a Magyar Gypsy by blood.

And, she thought, adding to her leather bag a toothbrush, tooth powder, and extra stockings for eventual bribes, a Gypsy now by trade. She carefully lowered two hats into a shared hatbox, one flamboyantly red with a large feather, the other small, tailored and black, with a veil, the hat of a completely different woman than the one who would wear the red.

In the cosmopolitan climate of Europe in the twenties and early thirties, having exotic blood had been an asset. But being an intelligent woman was even more of an asset. After the war ended in 1918, learning, and steady progress toward that sleek, fabulous future in which machines would one day do away with physical labor, were prized. One stunning scientific discovery after the next was released to the world, though most people had not yet even absorbed the basic fact of evolution.

Throughout, though, there was terrible news from the Soviet Union. Her grandmother lived in St. Petersburg and refused to leave. The old lady’s letters to Budapest boiled with anger toward Stalin and fear of the Germans. The Russians could see the German military buildup and were responding in kind. She hoped her grandmother’s fiery letters were still arriving in Budapest, but the chances of that were slim.

The telephone in Hadntz’s room rang. She did not answer it and, finally, it stopped.

The call made her nervous. No one who knew where she was staying, at the Hay-Adams on Lafayette Square in Washington, would call her. The War Department had a messenger who memorized any communiqués she was to receive and delivered them in person. The only person on the street when she left Sam’s rooming house had been a blonde, probably a prostitute, smoking a cigarette as she leaned against a lamppost.

Dr. Hadntz had been issued tickets for the night train to Chicago; she was supposed to return to the Manhattan Project. Instead, she would go to New York. By tomorrow she would be on a boat carrying munitions to England.

A German, Otto Hahn, had done much of the chemistry work that in 1939 led to the knowledge that uranium atoms could be split. His exiled Jewish colleague in this work, Lise Meitner, confirmed the physics. Their conclusion, confirmed by Neils Bohr, was that it was theoretically possible to release previously unimaginable amounts of energy.

And thus it was possible to create an atomic bomb.

Surely the Germans, knowing this, were far ahead of the United States in this regard. It was a hopeless race.