The Einstein Prophecy

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.