The Einstein Prophecy (6 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

“It’s called the moment of imminent action,” Lucas said, as the students gathered around a statue in the art museum’s central gallery. It was a piece from the first century BC, first unearthed on the island of Samos, and it depicted the Greek warrior Achilles raising his spear to deal the death blow to Hector, prince of Troy. “The Greek sculptors, and the Romans, too, were less interested in a deed that was done than they were in a deed that was about to be committed. Works like this one ask the spectator to imagine, to anticipate, and even in a way participate in, what is just about to occur. It is the moment of greatest suspense and the greatest dramatic possibility.”

Pens scratched away at open notebooks.

“Can anyone tell me what did happen next?”

Virtually every hand went up—graduates of elite private schools, these boys had been well tutored in The
Iliad
and The
Odyssey
—and Lucas allowed Percy Chandler to dilate on the death of Hector, the unseemly dragging of his body behind Achilles’s chariot, the subsequent plea from King Priam to allow his son’s body to be returned for proper burial. The gallery itself was a long, relatively narrow space, lined with pedestals on which a few dozen fine examples of ancient statuary and artifacts were illuminated by a broad skylight. The day had dawned gray and cloudy, and had stayed that way, so the light that suffused the gallery was soft and muted. And although it was open to the public, only two other people were perusing the collection—an older man with an ebony cane, and judging from the solicitous way in which she tended to him, his daughter.

“But Achilles had violated the laws of proper conduct,” Chandler was saying, “and the gods were unhappy with him. Zeus had supported the Greeks up until then, but he sent Apollo down to protect the body from any further damage.”

The older man was plainly an Arab, and his daughter was striking, with patrician features, a lean frame, and a mane of glossy black hair falling to her shoulders. She would look at home, Lucas thought, on the back of a white stallion, in a pair of jodhpurs and gleaming boots. Glancing his way, she must have caught him staring, and he quickly looked away.

“Thank you, Percy,” he said, interrupting the introduction of the Trojan horse into the story, “but while we have a few minutes left, let’s move on to the statue of Socrates lifting the cup of hemlock . . . yet another example, as you will see, of imminent action.”

Lucas ushered the students farther down the gallery, deliberately not looking back. When he finally did turn around in the middle of elaborating on the ancient philosopher’s ill-fated struggle with the Athenian state, the woman and her father were gone.

After dismissing the class, he went downstairs to fulfill the hours regularly set aside for private conferences with students. His study was a tiny room with all the charm of a dungeon cell and a horizontal window just above ground level that let in a modicum of fresh air and natural light. If he looked outside, he could see people’s ankles going by on the walkway.

Wally had just mopped the hallways; the smell of linseed oil was overpowering. Under his door, he found an envelope with the crest of the university president, Mr. Harold W. Dodds, stamped on its seal. To his surprise, it turned out to be a rather peremptory request to come to Prospect House, the president’s mansion, straight away. The semester had barely begun; had some complaint already been lodged against Lucas? He could not imagine for what.

On the way to the house, he noticed that an army truck had pulled up outside the loading bay of the museum. Three soldiers were overseeing the delivery of something he couldn’t see, but which was apparently quite unwieldy—a donation from an alumnus with an impressive military connection?

“No, no, you’re gonna drop the damn thing again!” one called out.

“Keep your shirt on!” someone replied.

The president’s mansion, an enormous Italianate house originally built in 1849 for a gentleman farmer, was immured in five acres of gardens in the center of the campus, and surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence erected by Woodrow Wilson to keep the students from stomping through the flowerbeds like a marauding army on football days. Colorful and luxuriant in summer, the gardens were lovely even now, as the branches of the yew and American beech trees shed their leaves on the winding gravel footpaths. Little brown birds flitted among the treetops, moving so rapidly that Lucas could barely make them out.

The sky, still overcast, bathed the scene in an autumnal glow as Lucas straightened his tie and stepped under the front portico. A maid in a white apron ushered him into the foyer, a solemn circle of polished marble, then up the wide staircase, past a grandfather clock ticking on the landing, and into a parlor where two men—one in a crisply laundered officer’s uniform, the other in his customary three-piece suit—were already seated, in deep discussion over cups of coffee and a plate of quartered sandwiches.

“Thank you for coming, Professor,” Harold Dodds said, rising from his chair and extending his hand. “This is Colonel Macmillan, attached to the Office of Strategic Services in Washington. He’s come up to Princeton expressly to meet you.”

Lucas shook his hand, not knowing what to expect next. The colonel gave the impression of a granite block. “I hope I’m not AWOL,” Lucas joked.

“You hope you’re not AWOL,
sir
,” Macmillan said, without a hint of humor. “But it’s unlikely. You’ve already been discharged.”

This was not a man, Lucas thought, who engaged in pleasantries.

“How much does the one eye interfere with your depth perception?” he asked bluntly.

“I get by.”

“Everything I’m about to say here is classified,” he went on, his curiosity apparently sated, “and President Dodds has assured me it will remain that way.”

What could be so important to national security, Lucas wondered, and yet call for his involvement? He’d only been a first lieutenant.

“In regard to your mission to the iron mine outside Strasbourg,” the colonel said, “the one where you received your injuries—”

“A very good soldier,” Lucas interjected, “Private Teddy Toussaint, was injured a lot worse than I was that day.”

“Yes, I’m well aware of that,” Macmillan said brusquely. “I saw in your report that you had submitted his name for a service medal, and it’s been taken care of.”

“Thank you,” Lucas said with a nod.

“But let me say that it was all in a good cause, because you two found one of the Nazis’ largest repositories of stolen art. On that, I commend you.”

Lucas needed no more acknowledgment of that. Many a night, when his head throbbed from the shrapnel wound, and his eye socket ached, he wished he had not been so lucky.

“Including a certain sarcophagus,” the colonel continued, “which I believe you called an ossuary in your notes.”

At the very mention of the word, the chilled air of the mine rose up around him. “Yes, we did. Although I was still in the hospital when I wrote up my notes, I think you’ll find a complete description of its discovery there.”

“Well, we’ve brought the damned thing here. To Princeton.”

“It’s being deposited in the conservation wing of the art museum even as we speak,” Dodds said.

Lucas was stunned. He had never known why, out of all the Nazi plunder, of all the treasures stolen everywhere from Lyons to Luxor, that particular item had been singled out. And now it had been transported all the way to New Jersey?

As if divining his thoughts, the colonel leaned forward in his creaking chair, and said, “You remember who it was addressed to, don’t you?”

“Of course.” He could no more forget that than the ring of ore carts protecting it, the hollowed out corpse, or the strange way in which the thing had seemed to bask in its own penumbra. “But there must be thousands of pieces reserved for the Führer.”

“True enough, but not that many that were specifically mentioned in communiqués, from Hitler himself to General Rommel.” He withdrew a telegram from his inside pocket and handed it to Lucas. “We intercepted this reply about a week before you were sent to the mine.”

Even with his rudimentary German, Lucas was able to read enough to understand its gist. Rommel was reassuring Hitler that the sarcophagus was safely hidden, and that he’d issued orders for it to be forwarded to the Eagle’s Nest under special guard as soon as the rail lines were secured.

But Lucas was still puzzled. “What do you expect to learn from it?”

“That’s your job,” Macmillan said, leaning back in his chair. “You found it—now we want you to tell us what makes this thing so special. If Adolf wants it that bad, we want to know why.”

“May I add something?” Dodds said, glancing at the colonel for the go-ahead. Once he’d gotten the nod, he said, “Are you aware of Professor Delaney’s work with radio isotopes?”

“I am.” Now Lucas’s suspicions were confirmed; Delaney’s work
was
being underwritten by the War Department.

“Good,” the colonel interjected. “I don’t profess to understand exactly how it’s done, but I’m told he’s developing something called radiocarbon dating that might also tell us something about how old the sarcophagus is, or how old its contents—whatever they turn out to be—are. Between the two of you eggheads, we want an accurate picture of what’s inside it, and if there’s any way we can use it in the war effort.”

“It’s not a weapon,” Lucas ventured. “It’s just a kind of casket. Probably about two thousand years old.”

Macmillan waved his words away. “Hitler may not know that. The son of a bitch is crazy, believes in all kinds of occult mumbo jumbo. He’s got an astrologer on staff, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he kept a crystal ball by his bedside.”

The idea that the Allies were up against a lunatic was even more terrifying than the prospect of battling a rational, though supremely evil, foe. At least you could try to outsmart a rational man; you could guess his next move and try to counteract it. A madman, on the other hand, couldn’t be relied upon to act in even his own best interest. “As far as this sarcophagus is concerned,” Macmillan said, “so long as he thinks it’s got some kind of voodoo attached to it, then let’s humor him, right?”

Lucas gave him a weak smile, but couldn’t—wouldn’t—speak what had just crossed his mind. He was a practical man, an empiricist, one who eschewed anything unfounded and unscientific. But he’d never forget his first sight of that box, or the way it had seemed to suck the very light out of the area around it.

“Let’s see if we can’t find a way to exploit that bastard’s lunacy,” Macmillan said, slapping his own thigh.

“Not that you would be asked to participate in any of that skulduggery,” Dodds quickly put in.

“Absolutely not,” the colonel agreed. “You just tell us what we’ve got. We’ve got people at the Pentagon who’ll do the rest.”

An awkward silence fell.

“When would you like me to start?” Lucas asked.

“The installation should be done shortly,” Dodds answered, “but we’re also making some modifications to the conservation rooms.”

“Courtesy of Uncle Sam,” Macmillan said.

“We’re reinforcing the floor,” Dodds continued, “reframing some windows, improving the lighting. Shall we say, first thing tomorrow?”

Although he had a morning lecture, now was not the time to mention it. “Fine.”

The grandfather clock on the staircase bonged the hour.

“We’re counting on you,” the colonel said, leaning forward in his chair, his several medals dangling from his uniform as if in emphasis. He extended a rough and meaty hand.

“Glad to do it,” Lucas replied, wondering how he’d feel about it tomorrow. “Sir.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Is the poor man going to be out there all night?” Einstein said, staring down into the backyard, where one of Robert Oppenheimer’s two bodyguards patrolled the area around the garage and alleyway. The other one was stationed in a parked car, in front of the house.

“Yes,” Oppenheimer replied. “That’s his job. Now will you please stop worrying about his welfare, and focus on our work.”

The work, Einstein thought; yes, the work. It had been one thing when his work remained theoretical, and its purpose was simply to extend the borders of human knowledge and crack the codes of the universe. It was altogether another when, as now, it was being driven by the exigencies of war, and when its goal was not elucidation but annihilation.

That, however, was where things stood, and it was the reason Oppenheimer had left his colleagues in Los Alamos, New Mexico—a place Einstein pictured as a desert waste—to consult with the man whose discoveries had unwittingly ushered in the Atomic Age. For hours now, they had been holed up in the professor’s upstairs study while Oppenheimer, in between finishing one cigarette and starting another, had shared with him the latest, and most secret, news of the Germans’ efforts to develop nuclear energy and thereby create an atomic weapon. It was possible that the Nazis had come a long way.

“The Reich minister for armaments and war production, Albert Speer, has reorganized their nuclear power project from top to bottom,” Oppenheimer was saying. “That intelligence is solid. Bernhard Rust is history, and he’s been replaced by Reich Marshal Hermann Göring.”

“So, they have replaced a scientist with a soldier. That is good news for us, no?”

“No, it’s not. It means that they’re getting serious again. Hitler trusts Göring—the son of a bitch has done a bang-up job with the Wehrmacht—and putting him in charge proves that he’s serious about getting the job done, and getting it done faster.”

“Ah, then, perhaps he rues the day he instituted his ridiculous
Deutsche Physik
.”

“Who cares what he rues? And by the way, I don’t think he’s ever rued a day in his life.”

Because the Nazis considered theoretical physics and quantum mechanics too abstruse and “Jewish,” they had replaced them years before with a more homegrown and homespun curriculum—the rudimentary
Deutsche Physik
—and as a result of the switch, half of the country’s nuclear scientists had been relieved of, or driven from, their posts. A plethora of the continent’s brightest lights had also taken flight. Not just Einstein, but Hans Bethe, Max Born, Erwin Schrödinger, Eugene Wigner, Otto Stern, Lise Meitner, Robert Frisch, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Maria Goeppert-Mayer—the list went on and on.

“We could waste our time trying to figure out why he does what he does,” Oppenheimer observed, “but what would be the point? Personally, I’d say he’s off his rocker. But it looks like he’s finally figured out his mistake. Now he knows that he’d better get the bomb before we do.”

That prospect, Einstein recognized, was unthinkable. A weapon created through fission would wreak havoc beyond anyone’s imagining. When the war first broke out, the Nazi party had swiftly annexed the Berlin Institute of Physics, which had, before the purge, done pioneering work in nuclear physics and isotope separation; that was one of the first warning bells of Hitler’s intentions. By the summer of 1939, Einstein’s friend, the Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd, had grown alarmed by the Nazis’ sudden, and suspicious, halt to the exportation of the uranium ore they had acquired from the mines in occupied Czechoslovakia; there could only be one reason for stockpiling uranium, a mineral essential to the creation of an atomic bomb. For fear that they might also get their hands on the huge deposits located in the Belgian Congo, Szilárd had come to Einstein with an urgent request. He begged him to write a letter to President Roosevelt, alerting him to the threat.

“My name won’t mean enough,” Szilárd had said. “But yours will. Yours will make him read it.”

Einstein had agreed. In his letter, he’d explained, as simply as he could, that it had now become conceivable, using a sizeable mass of uranium, to create a nuclear chain reaction—a reaction that would not only generate a large quantity of radium-like elements, but at the same time release an immense amount of power.

What, he wondered as he had issued this warning, had he unleashed upon the world when he had composed his famous formulae for energy and matter?

Using this discovery, the letter had continued, a new kind of bomb could be created, a bomb vastly superior to any yet built. Although too unwieldy to be dropped from a plane, such a bomb could, if transported to a harbor by boat, level the entire port, and a great swath of the surrounding area as well.

Even that last caveat about aerial delivery, according to what he had learned tonight, might soon be overcome. Oppenheimer was convinced that a bomb could be constructed, of a weight and on a scale that made it deployable by a specially equipped aircraft. But there were still daunting challenges to be surmounted—and it was only Einstein who might be able to surmount them.

The desk was covered with the materials Oppenheimer had brought with him—pages of equations, sketches of prototypes for nuclear reactors, even diagrams of possible bomb designs. What Einstein had, that most other physicists did not, was a dual pedigree—he excelled at the theoretical side, but at the same time, he evinced a penchant for the actual mechanics of a thing. His father had been an electrical engineer. The founder of one failed company after another, a businessman he was not, but he had given his son an appreciation for the practical, real-world manifestation of theoretical breakthroughs, an appreciation that had stood him in good stead in the years that he had worked as a clerk in the Swiss patent office. Even the Nobel Prize that had been awarded to him in 1921 had not been given in recognition of his revolutionary theory of relativity, but for his research into the more prosaic photoelectric effect.

“We know that they’re assembling the necessary materials,” Oppenheimer said through a haze of cigarette smoke. Oh, how it made Einstein long for his pipe. “And they’ve still got enough scientific expertise in guys like Werner von Heisenberg and Max Planck to put the whole thing together.”

“Not Max Planck,” Einstein said, with a pained expression. “Not Max.”

Oppenheimer blew out a cloud of smoke so thick Einstein had to sit back in his chair. “Why not Max?”

“He is too good a man.”

“And you’re too sentimental about your old teachers. If they didn’t get out of town while the getting was good, then they’re Nazis now, or at least working for them.”

But Einstein still could not believe it. In addition to being the acknowledged father of quantum theory, Planck was an elderly and honorable man who had comfortably worked side by side with Jewish colleagues all his life. In fact, he had confided in Einstein that he had met with the Führer himself in 1933 to try to explain that the National Socialist policies of anti-Semitism, coupled with
Deutsche Physik
, would undo decades of scientific progress. The Jewish scientists, the backbone of theoretical physics, would scatter themselves all over the globe, he warned, offering their expertise to other nations, even those whose aims might one day prove antithetical to those of the Fatherland.

“Let them!” the Führer had exploded. “Let them peddle their filthy goods in the streets! I don’t care! We don’t need them; we have German scientists, the best in the world, capable of doing whatever needs to be done without the help of traitors and vermin.”

“To my eternal regret, I remained silent,” Planck had admitted about that conference in Prague. “And when he was finished, I bowed and started to leave the room. One of his minions struck me on the shoulder to make me stop, then yanked my arm up in the proper salute. ‘Heil, Hitler!’ he shouted—I never saw a man’s face so red with anger—and so I mumbled it. ‘Heil, Hitler.’ I wasn’t enthusiastic enough, that much I could tell, but he let me go, anyway, slamming the door behind me.”

Einstein had seen the torment in Max’s eyes. For years, everyone in Europe had had hard choices to make, to give up their homes and their families and entire previous lives, or risk it all to take a moral and ethical stand. Most of those who took the risk wound up dead on a battlefield, murdered in a concentration camp, or, courtesy of the ubiquitous Gestapo, simply made to disappear without a trace from the face of the earth. Already, the letters from his cousins, such as Roberto Einstein, who lived outside Florence, Italy, had abruptly ceased; he had not heard a word from Roberto, his wife, or their two daughters in years now, and he dreaded to think what had become of them.

Oppenheimer, lean as a coyote and deeply tanned from his time in the Southwest, studied the blackboard on which they had been scrawling equations all night. It was covered with erasures and blots of chalk, and they had joked that they should have brought along a basic mathematician. While their ideas and insights were often right, laying out the actual trail, in a logical and numerical fashion, was something neither one of them had ever excelled in. It was the scut work that they could not slow down enough to do properly.

“But you see where the problem remains?” Oppenheimer said, tamping the ash from his cigarette into the saucer of the coffee cup he had already drained four times. Helen had simply made a pot and, after clearing a few inches on Einstein’s cluttered desk, left it there.

“
Ja
,” Einstein said, yawning widely, and plopping back down in his worn leather armchair. “I do. But this old man, I am afraid, needs his rest.”

Oppenheimer checked his watch. It was 1:30 in the morning. “Fine,” he said. “How much rest do you need?”

Einstein had to laugh. “I do not know. I awake when I awake. Don’t you ever sleep, Robert?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“You’re young still. One day you’ll want a nap.”

“When the war’s over, I’ll sleep.”

“But when will that be?” Einstein asked. “It could be years.”

“Or it could be tomorrow,” Oppenheimer replied. “Whoever cracks the atom bomb first will win the war overnight. No country will be able to stand up against it. That’s why we have to be the ones to do it. There’s no other choice.”

Einstein nodded. He knew it all was true. But he also knew that once such a terrible force was created, there would be no containing it. Some scientists even contended that once an atomic reaction was incurred, it could set fire to the entire atmosphere, blanketing the planet in clouds of flame. Although Einstein was not one of them, he had no doubt that the earth would be a vastly different place—a place where the sword of Damocles hung above it by only the most slender thread, forever after.

How long, he wondered, could such a thread endure in a world filled with scissors?