The Einstein Prophecy

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 Bernhard Rust is history, and he’s been replaced by Reich Marshal Hermann Göring.”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?