The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“Nein, nein,” Gödel said, impatiently wiping a string of figures off the blackboard with the sleeve of his tweed jacket. “How did you ever pass the polytechnic exam?”

“Easy,” Einstein replied from his easy chair. “I took it twice.”

“Ach.” Gödel quickly scrawled a new sequence of numbers and mathematical symbols on the cleared corner of the blackboard. “I’m surprised that was all.”

The rest of the board was still cluttered with complex field equations that Einstein had been working on for weeks. He knew that his calculations sometimes needed review by some fresh eye, but it was difficult to find anyone up to the task. Gödel, thank God, was perhaps the premier mathematician in the world — purer, in a way, than even the brilliant John von Neumann — and it was why Einstein had lobbied so hard for him to be allowed into America, and to join him in Princeton. Still, if Oppenheimer knew that even Gödel had been privy to some of this work, he’d throw a fit. It was all as highly classified as any information could be.

While Gödel silently assessed his own corrections, Einstein went to the window, streaked with rain, and peered out at his rear garden. Night had fallen hours ago and a lonely light in the alley revealed a swarm of brown leaves swirling against the doors of the old garage; as neither Einstein nor Helen Dukas could drive and relied upon friends to take them anywhere a bus didn’t go, the garage was used instead to store boxes of his unsorted papers from the Berlin Institute.

“So, what do you think now?” Gödel said, standing back. “Does this not resolve the difficulty you were in?”

Einstein studied the blackboard, squinting in the inadequate light from the torchiere by the door.

“Yes, that’s better. Thank you, Kurt. I should have seen that myself.”

Although Einstein had long prided himself on his thought experiments — his ability to imagine fantastic scenarios and, by doing so, arrive at remarkable conclusions — it was in the more mundane areas of mathematics that he sometimes tripped over his own feet. Once he had achieved some illuminating insight, he was not so interested in explaining the thousand steps by which he had come to it. He wasn’t even sure he knew. His mind was already extrapolating from the new concept — which he accepted intuitively to be right — and racing onward.

From downstairs, he could smell spaghetti sauce simmering in the pot, and hear the chatter of Helen talking to Adele Gödel as they prepared the meal and set the table. He glanced at the clock; it was nearly nine. No wonder he was hungry. As if on cue, Adele called from below, “Enough, you two. This is not Berlin — in America we eat at a decent hour.”

Gödel, still focused on the blackboard, didn’t move, and Einstein had to get up and put a hand on his narrow shoulder to get his attention. Even a gesture that small, and coming from his closest friend in the world, made the man flinch.

“We can finish later,” Einstein said gently. “Let’s have some dinner.”

He shepherded Gödel down the creaking steps and into the dining room, where the anxious Austrian sat down in his chair like a man about to undergo a Gestapo interrogation. His wife made a show of helping Helen to bring in the bowls of pasta and sauce, and then ladling them herself onto Kurt’s plate. He watched her like a hawk, and Einstein exchanged a quick and subtle glance with Helen, who, equally familiar with the couple’s strange protocols, pointedly paid no attention while lifting the lid off a tureen of steamed asparagus.

Even so, Gödel waited until he had seen Adele dig into her own dinner before he cautiously lifted his fork.

“Eat, mein strammer bursche,” she said, using her pet name for him. Strapping lad, it meant, and it always brought a tiny smile to his thin lips. “I made this sauce myself, from the tomatoes from our garden.”

Adele, who wore her hair in curly gold-and-red ringlets, was as natural and outgoing as her husband was reserved. But she doted on her husband, and fiercely protected him from as many of the vicissitudes of life as possible. Back in Vienna in 1937, she had even fought off some teenage Brownshirts who, mistaking Kurt for a Jew, had attacked the couple on their way home from the Nachtfalter, the popular club where she performed. She had kicked and beaten them with her furled umbrella until they ran for cover. Kurt had been traumatized for months.

“You two boys work too hard,” Adele said, putting some asparagus on her husband’s plate, and then cutting the stalks into shorter segments. “I am going to get you some marbles to play with,” she said with a laugh that made her earrings jangle.

“Ah, Kurt will win every time,” Einstein said. “He is the sportsman, not me.”

Gödel, inspecting a bit of the asparagus, beamed; he enjoyed this kind of banter, as it made him feel included without his having to make jokes himself. And he plainly knew it was all in good fun.

Einstein nursed a paternal feeling toward his younger colleague, in part because he had a son of his own, Eduard, who suffered from mental illness. Like Gödel, Eduard had immense talents — he was a technically accomplished musician and a fine writer — but his abilities were so entangled in a skein of neuroses and phobias, fears and delusions, that he could not function outside the confines of the Swiss facility where he lived. It was the greatest sorrow of Einstein’s life that he could not help his son, and it made watching over Kurt seem like a kind of penance.

“Kurt has been trying to convince me — again — that there are psychic elementals that are as real as any physical properties,” Einstein said, as he could not share what they had actually been doing. “If we’re not careful, he will be able to use his mental energy to levitate this table.”

Adele planted her elbows on the cloth. “He’d better not try. Helen has put out her best china.”

Helen smiled, and Gödel, dabbing at his lips with the linen napkin, launched into another of his ontological proofs. Even as far back as his days in the Vienna Circle, he had rejected the positivism of Bertrand Russell and his cohorts for taking much too dim a view of intuition. Gödel freely admitted that the intuition of a concept was not proof; he argued that it was the opposite. “We do not analyze intuition to see a proof, but by intuition we see something without a proof.” Recently, however, he’d gone beyond that conclusion, too, and asserted that there must then logically be a realm unknowable to our simple senses, where ultimate truth resided. Although Einstein found such mystical speculation unpersuasive, its proponent was not so easy to dismiss out of hand. After all, whose portrait did he himself have hanging on a nail in his study upstairs? Isaac Newton, who had devoted countless hours to the lunatic aims of alchemy.

“If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning,” Kurt said, his head down as he carefully lifted a single strand of spaghetti from his plate, “then there must be such a thing as an afterlife. Otherwise, what is the meaning of this one?”

“Oh, Kurt,” Adele said, “why must everything have a meaning? Maybe we are just here to eat spaghetti and talk and laugh and,” she paused, replenishing her glass and raising it to her host, “drink good wine.”

“You said it yourself, Albert,” Kurt persisted.

“What did I say?”

“That God does not play dice with the universe. The cosmos cannot simply be a game, designed at random and made without reason.”

“But perhaps He is playing some other game,” Einstein said. “A game we don’t know yet, with rules we can’t understand.”

“But every game has rules — you will concede that much, ja? Let us take this quantum physics.”

“You may have it.”

“You do not like it because you cannot accept this notion of — what is it you wish to call it? — spooky action at a distance.”

“A particle, in two places at one time? No, I am not yet convinced of that.”

“And I will not try to convince you. Still, there must be a consistency to it all. The problem is simply that we have not been able to discover — at least not yet — the invisible hand that moves these particles about.”

“Is there an invisible body to go with this invisible hand?” Einstein joked, but once Gödel was on a tear, it was tough to distract him.

“At present, they may seem to move in a fundamentally illogical way—”

“That they do.”

“And thus you regard this as less than optimal.”

“I do.”

“But what might appear to be optimal to you may not appear to be optimal to such particles, operating as they do in a system we do not comprehend.”

“Now there I do agree,” Einstein said, twirling a thick clump of the spaghetti around his fork. “It is a system I do not comprehend. And that is why, like Don Quixote with his lance, I will continue my quest.”

“For your Dulcinea?” Adele interjected.

“Yes. And the unified field theory will prove just as beautiful. Oh, I know what all the young Turks think of it, and of me. But I have always proceeded as much by what I feel here,” he said, patting his belly, “as I do here.” He pointed at his temple with the loaded fork.

“My point exactly,” Gödel said. “Intuition, you feel it in your gut.”

“Albert, you’re going to get spaghetti in your hair,” Helen clucked.

“Too late,” Adele said, reaching over with her napkin to disengage an errant strand.

“You’re as bad as a child,” Helen said, and Einstein laughed.

“I think I need to start my life all over again,” he said. “I should have learned better manners as a boy.”

“According to your own theory, you still can do that,” Gödel said, but before he could elaborate, there was a scratching at the dining room window, and when they all looked, a pair of green eyes flashed behind the glass.

“Oh, my,” Helen said, swiftly rising from her chair and going into the foyer.

“What is it?” Kurt asked nervously.

“It’s nothing,” Adele said. “Eat your dinner before it gets cold.”

The front door opened, and a gust of autumn air blew into the house, then it closed again and Helen returned with the tabby cat in her arms. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I’ve been leaving a bowl of milk for her after Albert leaves for work.”

Although he hadn’t been aware of this particular phobia, Einstein realized that he should have guessed — Kurt was frozen in his chair, staring at the cat as if it were a tiger about to pounce. What wasn’t the man afraid of?

“Now, Kurt, it’s just a little pussycat,” Adele said, smoothing his arm with the palm of her hand. “Remember how much you liked the cat I kept at the nightclub?”

“I’m sorry,” Helen said, “I didn’t know—”

“But maybe you could take the cat into the kitchen,” Adele urged, hoping to avert a crisis.

As Helen did so, Einstein asked, “Why did you say that my theory could help me to learn better manners?”

“That is not what I meant,” Kurt said, still plainly perturbed.

“So, you approve of my manners? That is good to know.”

“What I meant,” Kurt said, taking slow breaths and keeping his eyes riveted to his plate, “was that if you accept the premises of general relativity—”

“I certainly do.”

“—and if you succeed in wedding them to the gravitational field equations on which we have worked—”

“Go on. Go on.”

“Then you must, logically, assume that it would be possible to travel in time… and in that way to go back to your own boyhood.”

“Ach, I’m too old for that. Once was enough.”

“What have I missed?” Helen said, returning to her seat.

“My Kurt is explaining how we can grow younger,” Adele said.

“Then I am all ears.”

“If the universe and everything in it rotates, like a vast cosmic whirlpool, then it follows that time cannot be a straight linear sequence of events — first this happens and then that — no, it must instead bend like the universe itself. It must follow the curve, ja, and space-time projectories must therefore be able to loop back on themselves. How could they not? In theory, they must be able to return to the very places that they have already been.”

“So how do I get back to my sixteenth birthday?” Adele said. “That is what I’d like to know.”

“You would need a rocket ship,” Einstein said, joining in the speculation. “And it would have to travel very fast indeed.”

“But, theoretically, if you went fast enough, and if the curve was wide enough,” Kurt said, “you could visit any time at all — past, present, or future.”

“Oh, no,” Adele said, “the future can wait. I don’t want to get older any faster than I have to.”

“Nor do I,” Helen said, starting to clear the table. “Who wants coffee?”

As Helen and Adele prepared coffee and dessert, Einstein questioned Gödel further — he did not agree with all his conclusions, in part because they could never be empirically proven, but he was fascinated, as always, by the manner in which a mind as astute as Kurt’s could tease out such implications from his own theories. He would have to think on it, hard, if he wished to find the fallacy or fault in Gödel’s logic.

By the time Kurt and Adele took their leave, it was nearly midnight and Helen, exhausted from the long day, went up to her room. Einstein was ready to turn in himself, but as was his ritual, he went into the kitchen first, to have a glass of warm milk. Looking in the icebox, he found only an inch or so left in the bottle.

When the cat rubbed up against his pant leg, he understood why. “Ah, so you’re the one who’s been drinking my milk.”

He bent down and rubbed his knuckles under the cat’s chin, and said, “Where are you going to sleep tonight?” His former wife, Mileva, had had a cat that looked like this. But by now it was surely gone. And even Mileva, judging from her last letters from Zurich, was in declining health. Time was no illusion; it was a relentless force, and he felt its sharp fingers digging into the small of his back as he tried to straighten up.

The cat trotted to the back door and waited there.

“It’s a cold night,” Einstein said, but the cat stayed put, turning its head and meowing loudly.

“All right then,” he said, opening the door, “if that’s what you want.”

The cat bolted out into the yard, and Einstein stood in the doorway looking out at the tree branches bending in the wind. Dead leaves scuttled across the back steps, and the wooden doors to the garage banged and rattled. He was just about to go back inside when they banged again, and he realized that the latch must have slipped. If he didn’t resecure it, the noise would keep him up half the night.

Descending the stairs with one hand on the rail — his back complaining with every step — he shuffled across the yard. The harvest moon hung low and yellow in the sky. At the garage, he found that the latch had indeed been thrown. Before closing it again, he pried the door open and had a glance inside.

Boxes were stacked to the rafters, along with rusty rakes and shovels. But the darkness was nearly impenetrable.

“Anyone there?” he asked. “Last chance.”

Then he pushed the door closed, dropped the latch into place, and picked his way through the dead leaves and up again to the back door. It was only as he took one last survey of the yard, checking to see if the cat had changed her mind, that he thought he saw, at the tiny smudged window of the garage, a flicker of life. Of movement. As if something had been watching him, and ducked out of sight a fraction too late.

Was this, then, the cat’s lair? Well, if she could find a way in, he thought, then she could find a way out again. And it was too dark and cold to make another trip across the yard. He would check in the morning. For now, he would drink what milk was left in the bottle, and go to bed. Dinner with the Gödels was always stimulating, but seldom ended early.

It was only hours later, long after he’d retired, that he was awakened by a strong wind battering the windows, and thought he heard a screech in the yard. He stumbled out of bed and closed the window tight before peering out into the darkness. Apart from the fact that the garage door had blown open again — the latch must need to be replaced; he would have to tell Helen in the morning — there was no sign of anything amiss, and he put it down to a bad dream.