The Einstein Prophecy (5 page)

“Speaking of which, I just saw the man himself.”

“Herr Professor?”

“I see they’ve got him on display, up in the tower of Fine Hall.”

“Why not—top study for the top dog,” Delaney said, going to the sideboard and pouring two cups of coffee from a dented percolator. “Cream and sugar?” he asked.

“No, black, thanks.”

“That’s good. We don’t have any cream or sugar.”

They both laughed, and Lucas said, “Someone didn’t ration his coupons carefully.”

“Yeah, if you ask me, that bastard Hitler’s got a lot to answer for.”

The table in the center of the lounge was cluttered with ashtrays filled with cigarette butts, and newspapers stained with coffee rings. Not a thing had changed here, Lucas reflected, dropping into a worn leather chair opposite Delaney’s. “Where is everybody?” he asked.

“ ‘Everybody’ isn’t what it used to be,” Delaney said, scratching at the scruffy brown beard he trimmed himself. He also cut his own hair, which was pretty much evident to anyone he met. “Now that the student body’s been reduced, the faculty’s been thinned to a skeleton crew, too. It’s a tribute to your utility that you’ve been taken back.”

“What utility could I possibly have?”

“You’re a testament to our fighting men.”

“Not anymore, I’m not.”

Delaney shrugged. “Maybe they figure somebody’s got to be around to remember all the cultural achievements that are now being systematically destroyed. Either way, you’re here.”

Oddly enough, it wasn’t until this moment that Lucas realized it was at all unusual to have been so readily reappointed. Hadn’t his invitation cited “Princeton in the nation’s service”—the motto that had been bestowed upon it by Woodrow Wilson, president of the college from 1902 to 1910—as the reason?

“Ed Randall’s still here, and he said to remind you that you still owe him five bucks,” Delaney said, before running through a litany of who else was still on faculty—most of them older men, several of whom had served in the First World War—and bringing him up to date on changes in the town. “The Garden Theater finally got a concession stand with decent popcorn, the hoagie shop’s closed—oh, and there’s a good Chinese laundry now, where the shoe repair used to be.” Funny, how life had gone on.

Glancing at the newspapers, Lucas saw a headline on Newark’s
Star-Ledger
—“Navy Convoy Torpedoed in North Atlantic”—followed by a subhead, “USS Van Buren Sunk by U-Boat.” He picked up the paper and scanned the front page, where there was a picture of another ship, the USS Seward, with a red cross painted on its side, safely in the dock.

“Yeah, bad news today,” Delaney said. “You hear about that submarine attack yet?”

“No, I hadn’t seen the papers till now,” he said, reading quickly.

“The Germans sank a destroyer. The amazing thing, though, is that the ship with the wounded on board got hit, too, but somehow managed to make it to port.”

The article went on to say that the Nazi submarine, hit by a depth charge, had exploded directly under the Seward, blowing a breach in its bow and causing it to take on water. Turning to an inside page for the rest of the story, Lucas saw a couple of photos of wounded soldiers being carried off the ship on stretchers, along with a shot of sheet metal haphazardly riveted over what was presumably the gaping hole in the hull. “How the pumps kept up with the flood,” the captain of the Seward was quoted, “is nothing short of a miracle. It felt like the hand of God must have been under us, keeping the ship afloat.”

“So much for the Geneva Conventions,” Delaney said, slurping his coffee. “The Seward was clearly marked as a Red Cross ship.”

In a short sidebar, the paper mentioned that there had been a freak accident in the harbor, resulting in yet another death, when a heavy crate, being lifted from the hold under tight security, broke loose and fell onto the loading dock. Sometimes, it seemed to Lucas, death was everywhere you looked—or didn’t look—and he wondered if his own close call had somehow immunized him. Wishful thinking. But in wartime, wishes were sometimes all you had.

CHAPTER FIVE

It was the furtive knock on his study door that finally brought him down to earth again. And he was lucky it had.

Einstein knew that sitting in the window seat was not a good idea—the seat was hard, and he had a tendency to sit too long in one position—but he liked the way the sunshine filtered through the stained-glass obelus, the mathematical sign for division, and spread the colors of a rainbow across the notebook in his lap. It reminded him of one of his first thought experiments, conducted when he was only fourteen and pictured himself riding on the back of a beam of light. Even his most complex and profound theorems had been rooted in just such flights of fancy.

The knock was not repeated, though he was perfectly aware of who it was. He and his young colleague, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, had an understanding: they knew that either one of them might be so deeply absorbed in thought that any disturbance could prove fatal to whatever work was being done, and if there was no immediate response to an interruption—such as a knock—then it was best to retire quietly until another time.

“I’m coming,” Einstein called out as he gingerly swung his legs onto the floor. Oh, how his bones creaked at times. He slipped his bare feet into the loafers that lay before the fireplace; its mantelpiece had been thoughtfully adorned with one of his most often-repeated quotes. When his theory of relativity had been challenged by a fellow physicist—whose own theories, Einstein contended, relied too much upon random events and coincidences—he had replied: “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.” He still believed that to be true; there was an order to everything in the universe, and the greatest achievement would lie in deciphering it. Shuffling across the study, he repeated, “I’m coming.”

But by the time he opened the door, Gödel was already halfway to the landing. He looked up through round black-framed glasses that gave him the look of a night owl, and said, “I do not disturb?”

“You do disturb,” Einstein said, “but if you did not, I would be stiff as a plank of wood.”

“I am walking,” Gödel said.

“Wait.” Einstein went to the blackboard behind his desk, rubbed out a few unsatisfactory figures with the sleeve of his rumpled sweatshirt, then joined Gödel on the stairs. When they emerged from the gloomy confines of Fine Hall, they both blinked at the bright fall day. “We live like a pair of moles,
ja
?” Einstein remarked.

“The mole is a creature that I admire,” Gödel said, before listing several of its most salient virtues, ranging from industry to persistence. “And it does not call attention to itself or its work. It works in secret. That, too, is to be admired.”

Einstein had to smile at Gödel’s spirited defense of the mole. In any conversation with Kurt, you never knew what you were going to elicit, which was one of the many profound pleasures of his company. The long walks they took together, on the college campus or going back and forth to the Institute for Advanced Study, were the best way he knew to clear his own head, or, if he wished, to air some half-formed argument or idea. Even among the most brilliant scientists and scholars in the world, many of whom had taken refuge here in this bucolic college town, Gödel stood out. Einstein, almost thirty years older, looked upon him as a father might look at his gifted, but undeniably eccentric, son.

Besides, it was nice to share what happy reminiscences they could of prewar Europe, where it had been possible to bandy about whatever theories you liked, over plates of sausages and glasses of schnapps. Berlin in particular had once been a thinking man’s paradise, though now, to Einstein’s horror—indeed, to the horror of the entire civilized world—all of Germany had become a bastion of willful ignorance and unequalled brutality. The transformation was shocking.

“I have been thinking,” Gödel said, smoothing back his already smooth head of brown hair, as they strolled down one of the leafy pathways of the campus.

Einstein chuckled. These were the words with which he began every conversation. The preeminent mathematical logician in the world, Kurt was a thinking machine, his brain never at rest. He reminded Einstein of himself a bit, but back when he, too, had had the energy to work through the night, to live entirely in his own head for countless hours on end, fueled by nothing but coffee and the urge to crack the secrets of the universe. “And what have you been thinking about this time?”

“The Constitution.”

This did surprise Einstein. He was expecting to hear something about the incompleteness theorem, or perhaps his friend’s latest proof of God. “The Constitution of the United States?”

“Yes.”

This did not bode well.

“There is a flaw in the logic of its construction,” Gödel said, “and if it is allowed to remain uncorrected, it would allow for the rise of a dictatorship.”

It was just what Einstein had feared. In preparing for his citizenship exam, Gödel had been studying the historical underpinnings of the United States. How like him it was to find a problem there—a problem that he would not be able to simply let pass. As his sponsor, the last thing Einstein wanted was for Gödel’s application to be scuttled by some abstruse argument that only another member of the Institute for Advanced Study could appreciate.

“Have you?” Einstein said. “Have you now? Well, I don’t think that such a thing is likely to happen, and I don’t see that it would be wise to bring it up when your application is being reviewed.”

“But I must,” Gödel said. “It must not be allowed to stand.” He spoke as if the nation, his newfound home, were in imminent danger of a coup.

“Perhaps you can send a letter to the judge, once it is all over,” Einstein said, simply to placate him, “and alert him to the danger in that way.”

Gödel, a bundle of nervous energy, smoothed his hair again, and then the lapels of his double-breasted jacket—he was as fastidious about his appearance as Einstein was lax. “But what if something should happen?”

“America has enough problems already,” Einstein said. “The whole world has enough problems already. This one can wait.” And then, to steer the conversation into safer territory, he asked after Gödel’s wife, a former Viennese cabaret dancer six years his senior, and perhaps the most unlikely companion imaginable for such a high-strung genius. And yet, somehow, the marriage seemed to work. Relativity, he reflected, was simple compared to the mysteries of Eros. “How is she doing with that new garden?”

Gödel, fortunately, took the bait—he was always happy to talk about his wife—and they walked the rest of the way to Einstein’s home with no further discussion of the constitutional crisis. At the gate, Einstein asked Gödel to come inside for a glass of Kirschwasser, but Gödel declined, and he knew why. Without his wife, who acted as his official taster, Gödel thought that all food and drink he was offered, no matter who it was offered to him by, might be poisoned; he was as mad as a hatter on that score. Adele, a good-natured woman who laughingly took a bite or a sip of everything put before him, once remarked to Einstein, “You see how much my Kurt loves me? On the chance that it is poisoned, he wants me to go first.”

Gödel shook Einstein’s hand firmly and formally, all but clicking his heels before he turned toward home, and Einstein opened the gate and went up the porch steps. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have his own quirks, which were much made fun of. But at least he ate fearlessly and with gusto.

“Is that you, Herr Professor?” his secretary of many years, Helen Dukas, called from her tiny office off the main hall.

“It is,” he said, closing the door behind him, “it is.”

“There is someone here to see you.” A suitcase sat by the stairs.

If Helen—his Cerberus, he liked to call her—had let the visitor in, then it had to be important.

A slender young man, intense and lean as a wolverine, stepped into the hall, still holding his brown porkpie hat by its brim.

“You have come all this way?” Einstein said, recognizing his old colleague at once. “It must be a matter of some urgency.”

“The utmost,” Robert Oppenheimer replied. “Where can we talk?”

Einstein ushered him toward the stairs.

“Shall I make up the guest room?” Helen called out.

“Yes, please,” Oppenheimer answered her before his host could.

And that was when Einstein knew for sure, as he plodded up the steps like a man ascending to the gallows, that the news would not be good. If Oppenheimer, the head of the top-secret project to develop an atomic bomb, had traveled all this way, from whatever undisclosed location where he was holed up these days, to discuss it, then it must mean something dire was in the offing.

Dire enough that only Einstein could remedy it.

CHAPTER SIX

SEPTEMBER 8, 1944

From New York Harbor to Grand Central Station, then onto a train to a place called Princeton Junction. Once there, Simone and her father had been shuttled to a single railcar that traveled on a short spur line, no more than a mile or two long, which terminated at the foot of the university campus. The only other passengers were three businessmen with loosened ties coming home from their offices, and some boisterous students plainly returning from a wild excursion to the city.

“Where to?” the taxi driver asked, piling their luggage into the trunk of the bright yellow car.

Simone didn’t know how to reply. There hadn’t been time to figure out where they would be spending the night. “We will need a hotel,” she said, and the driver said—“Sure thing”—and pulled away from the station.

Simone’s first impression of New Jersey was trees—great towering trees everywhere, making a canopy overhead, shading the old stone walls and towers of the university buildings that rose along the side of the road. The late-day sun touched the leaves, already edged in red and gold, and she could only imagine how beautiful they would be in another few weeks—provided, of course, that she and her father were still there to see them.

This part of the plan had not yet had time to gel in her mind. Too much had happened. In the harbor, the wounded soldiers had disembarked first—some limping under their own power down the gangway, others carried on stretchers to a fleet of ambulances, busses, and cabs lined up at the dock. Once their ranks had thinned out, Simone had taken her father by the elbow and navigated down the ramp, followed by the officious ensign whose arm she had snagged on the flooded deck of the Seward. He had since become her greatest admirer, and asked how long she would be staying in the city.

“I have shore leave for a week,” he volunteered.

“We’re not sure of our plans,” she’d said, not wanting to discourage him too much before their luggage had been unloaded from the ship.

He scrawled a phone number on a scrap of paper and assured her that if a woman answered, it wasn’t his wife. “It’s my mom’s place,” he said.

Simone saw a mountain of boxes and supplies piling up toward the bow of the ship, and looking up, watched a huge winch lowering a green net filled with yet more. After depositing her father and their bags in a taxi, and telling the driver he could run the meter until she got back, she ambled, as unobtrusively as she could, toward the spot where the cargo was being collected. Lurking between two stacks of cartons, she waited as the winch made one or two more drops. But how many, she wondered, would there be? She was sure to be noticed if she stood there for long: The last of the vehicles were now leaving the dock, bound for hospitals in the city, and she could see that the ensign who had asked her out had been dragooned into transporting some of the unloaded freight. In a minute or two, he’d pass right by her with his empty dolly.

The winch dipped down one more time, then, creaking loudly, swung out wide, with a wooden crate in its net. Even from here, she could see the red-lettered pouch affixed to its side, containing the elusive delivery instructions. A navy officer with a megaphone was waving directions to the operator up top, but the net seemed to catch in a sudden wind off the sea. The armature shivered, and the net twisted around and around, almost as if something were trying to escape from the box.

“No, slow it down!” the officer bellowed. “You’re going to lose it!”

But the net kept twisting and turning. Then the winch itself suddenly groaned and tilted over the bulwark.

“Watch out!” the officer shouted, leaping behind a flatbed truck.

The armature doubled over. The net swung like a pendulum across the dock, catching the ensign square in the chest as he turned around and looked up. He was knocked off his feet like a bowling pin, his dolly skittering across the cement. The net came halfway back again before the crate ricocheted off the hood of a truck with an awful scraping noise and stopped a few feet from the body of the sailor.

There was a moment of stunned silence on the dock, before Simone and a few of the stevedores raced to the ensign’s side, but it was clearly of no use. What was left of his chest looked like a squashed plum. The officer, his white uniform sprayed with blood, knelt over him, saying, “Jesus Christ . . . Jesus Christ,” over and over again.

How she could focus on anything but the tragedy, Simone didn’t know, but her head turned. On the side of the shipping crate, the duct-taped pouch had been torn loose, and its contents were spilling out. The breeze was catching the papers already; she reached out and snatched one that was hovering in the air like a butterfly. It was crumpled, but not so much that she couldn’t read the delivery instructions: “Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. Attn: Professor Lucas Athan.”

The cab pulled up outside a well-maintained hotel done in the Colonial style—red brick, white wooden shutters—but when they got out, Simone’s father wanted to simply sit on the bench outside for a few minutes and catch his breath. Worry filled her. The last few days had been too hard on his heart.

Simone followed their luggage into the lobby, and at the reception desk a young woman dressed in a frilly white blouse said, “How may I help you?” Her name tag read “Mary Jane.”

“I will need either two rooms, or, if you have it, better yet a two-bedroom suite. I’m traveling with my father.”

Mary Jane said, “Oh,” and after glancing at Simone again, started riffling through the pages of the reservation book. “Is this your first visit to Princeton?” she said, without looking up again.

“Yes.”

“Did you come a long way?”

It seemed an odd question, but Simone answered it, anyway. “Yes. All the way from Cairo, as a matter of fact.”

“Where?” the girl asked.

“Egypt,” Simone said.

“Oh,” Mary Jane said again, before excusing herself. “I’ll be right back. I just have to check on our availability.”

Simone looked around the lobby, appointed with Oriental rugs, brass lamps, and oil portraits of Revolutionary War heroes. The rooms would not be cheap, but money wasn’t an issue. Her mother’s family had largely cut their daughter off after she’d made the colossal faux pas of marrying an Arab, but her father’s family had been very successful cotton merchants for generations. Simone stepped outside to check on her father.

“Better now,” he said, using the cane to climb to his feet. “I would like to lie down and take a nap before dinner.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Simone said. She escorted him through the door and helped him into a wingback chair in the reception area. “They’re just checking on the rooms.”

A manager now stood behind the desk, wearing a burnt-orange jacket and matching slacks. He smiled at Simone as she returned to the desk, but she noticed that his eyes kept flicking over her shoulder to her father resting with his eyes closed and his ebony walking stick propped against an end table.

“Good evening, Miss . . . ?”

“Rashid. Simone Rashid.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Mary Jane tells me you are visiting America.”

Simone hadn’t said exactly that, but it wasn’t worth arguing about.

“Are you guests of the university?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she replied. Although no invitation had been extended yet, she certainly meant to weasel her way in. But what was this all about? Was security this tight in American hotels now?

“May I see your passport?”

Simone dug it out of the canvas shoulder sack she carried in place of a purse, and set it down beside the gleaming brass bell. Mary Jane glanced at its distinctive crocodile- green cover as if she’d never seen anything so exotic. The girl looked no more than seventeen years old, so maybe she hadn’t.

The manager flicked over the front pages of the passport, but his eyes returned to her dozing father, his face as brown and wrinkled as a walnut shell.

What was taking so long? “If you don’t have a suite, two rooms close to each other will be fine,” Simone reiterated.

“Exactly,” the manager said, turning a page of the ledger back and forth. “But I’m not sure we have anything like that available at this time.”

Simone hadn’t seen a single guest coming in or out.

“Might I recommend an inn just a few blocks from here? It’s called the Peacock, and if you’d like, I can telephone them and see if they have something free.”

And then, like a sledgehammer, it hit her. The hotel didn’t want them because it wasn’t one hundred percent sure that they were white. While Simone’s tan skin had given them pause, her father’s darker complexion had sealed their fate.

The manager was already picking up the telephone on the counter.

“You needn’t bother,” Simone said frostily, pressing the button down on the receiver. She would not be run off. “We’ll be staying right here.”

“Yes, well, we really have nothing suitable—”

“Then we’ll take something unsuitable.” She would sleep in a broom closet now, just to force the issue.

“There’s only one small room that—”

“We’ll take it,” she said, turning the registration book on its swivel and signing it on the first line left blank. “Send in a cot.”

The manager looked like he had no idea what to do next, and Mary Jane was studying him to see how she should handle awkward situations like this in the future.

“What’s the room number?” Simone asked brusquely.

“Don’t you want to know the room rate?” he asked. “It’s—”

“I don’t care. What’s the number?”

Reluctantly, he took a key from the board behind him and said, “Three fourteen.”

“Thank you,” she said, snatching the key and then banging on the brass bell herself. A Negro bellhop magically appeared. At least they allowed colored people to
work
there, though even he looked a bit confused as he picked up their bags. She gently shook her father to wake him, then followed the luggage trolley to the elevator. She was so angry she could barely breathe, but she was not about to let her father know of the shabby treatment they had just received. He had never been to the United States before, and she did not want to have to explain to him that while the world was fighting a so-called “master race” intent on ruthlessly exterminating people that they judged inferior or impure, America itself was still a stronghold of racism and discrimination. She just hadn’t expected to find it here, in a northern university town that was home to some of the leading intellectuals in the world, like Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel and Thomas Mann.

But so she had. As the elevator made its slow ascent, she slumped against the back wall, suddenly as weary as her father.