The woman’s forehead knotted with skepticism. “But that’s… The Holocaust was sixty years ago. That’s just not possible!”
“Kobinski was a genius,” Aharon told her.
“And you got this from Bible code? Really, Nate!”
The boy gave Aharon an apologetic look. “I think you need to see this for yourself. Rabbi?”
On the plane ride over here, thank god, he had thought to copy out the meaningful keywords in English, anticipating just such an encounter. He pushed the list across the coffee table to Dr. Talcott. She leaned forward reluctantly. One fingernail went into her mouth to be chewed as she scanned the list. Her other hand worked at the nub of the sofa. The woman had so much bottled up it could only come out through her hands, Aharon thought.
kobinski—400
auschwitz—200
quantum physics—30
weapon—200
law of good and evil—8
heaven—40
hell—40
equation—26
weapon of obliteration—5
from him the weapon—3
book of torment—30
weapon of torment—5
weapon of terror—4
weapon of evil—4
the great weapon—5
demons—20
weapon loosing demons—4
angels—20
weapon loosing angels—4
Talcott—40
Dr. Jill Talcott—25
If he was not mistaken, he saw a flush of fear on that freckled little face. But—typical!—she went into denial immediately.
“This is ridiculous! Nate, we don’t know who this man is or what he’s trying to do. What if he’s the Mossad? What if there is no Mossad in all this? Who’s to say this list of words isn’t completely fabricated?”
“You think I’m inventing this?” Aharon huffed.
The boy held up his hand to stop the argument. He was a good boy for a non-Jew; Aharon liked him. It was true, he looked very strange with his hair so weird and that earring in his ear. But he had a good heart. He listened at least, had a brain in his head, maybe.
Nate took the list from the woman, sighed. “Doesn’t this strike you as being… well, awfully relevant to our research? And how would anyone besides us know these phrases were relevant?”
“Those phrases have nothing to do with our research.”
“ ‘Dr. Jill Talcott’? ‘Weapon of obliteration’? ‘Quantum physics,’ ‘law of good and evil,’ ‘equation’…”
“ ‘Angels,’ ‘demons’? Gee, Nate, I must have missed it the day angels and demons showed up in our lab!”
“I think you’re being too literal.”
“ ‘Law of good and evil’? What does that mean?”
Nate took a deep breath, looked nervous about what he was going to say. “The one-minus-one. It is the law of good and evil.”
Dr. Talcott stared at him, her brow troubled but in her eyes… something knowing, something shocked. The boy stared right back. There was a profundity in the moment that Aharon didn’t really understand, but he leaned forward, his pulse quickening.
“Yes,” Nate urged her quietly. “The one-minus-one is in the very fabric of space-time. And we discovered, through our trials, that when we pushed it more toward the ‘one’ side, there were positive results—life prospered. And when we pushed it toward the ‘negative one’ side, bad things happened; our virus died; systems broke down.”
Dr. Talcott shot an unfriendly look at Aharon, as if she didn’t like him listening to their secrets. She was right not to like. He was eating up every word. He was a sponge.
“So let’s take the admittedly wild leap of wondering if the crest in the one-minus-one represents the creative urge in the universe, the impulse for life and growth. And the trough represents the destructive urge, the tendency to decay and chaos.”
Dr. Talcott opened her mouth to protest, shut it again. “The law of good and evil.” Her voice was ironic, but there was something not quite so mocking in it, too.
“That’s right.” Nate’s young face was serious. “What if… what if we’ve discovered a physical law of creation and destruction? Remember the mice, how eager they were to procreate under the one pulse? And the virus, too?”
Dr. Talcott nodded tersely.
“What if we’ve discovered the underlying physical law of life itself, Jill? Not how two parents biologically create an offspring, Darwin’s law, but why—why our universe creates things at all, and why everything must decay back to dust. It’s not just about time, about the momentum from order to chaos. It’s the nature of space-time itself, creation and destruction. And it’s not just about life and death, but everything—every little thing—is influenced by either a creative or destructive impulse, good or evil, crest or trough. And they’re exactly paired, fifty-fifty.”
So blithely a boy could say such a thing, Aharon thought with a stab of pain. That the world could be capable of as much evil as good—it was blasphemous to even suggest it. Yet having been immersed in Kobinski’s world, Aharon could no longer deny the strength of evil. And that alone was enough to make his faith tremble like a branch in a heavy wind.
For a moment there was a thick silence, but Dr. Talcott was clearly chewing things over in her head and also, as it happened, was literally chewing on her fingernails again. Such a habit!
“Let’s just say,” heavy doubt in her voice made it clear she didn’t really believe this, “that was the case. The crest in the one-minus-one is a creative impulse and the trough a destructive impulse. How does it actually impact us… things? It seems to me that the impact the one-minus-one has on all matter is to pull everything more toward fifty-fifty.”
“That’s right!” Nate leaned forward intently. “It’s like a moderator. I’ve been trying to think of examples… For instance, it’s not just matter that’s affected—not just bananas or even our physical bodies, which are obviously governed by growth and decay. When an event happens in the world—say the signing of a peace treaty—that event has to have a wave pattern, too, doesn’t it? After all, it takes place in space-time, where everything is energy waves.”
“Yeesss…” Dr. Talcott agreed reluctantly. “Though an event is probably more like an entire group of waves.”
“Fine. So let’s see how the one-minus-one would affect an event. Let’s take something simple: say you give a homeless person on the street five dollars. That action has a wave pattern and that wave pattern is made up of crests and troughs. So let’s say giving the money to a homeless person is eighty-twenty—eighty percent crest or ‘good’ and twenty percent trough or ‘bad.’ The good part is obvious—you’re doing a kind deed. The bad twenty percent may be because at some level the act is done out of ego or a fear of retribution from God or social guilt.”
“Hmmm…” Dr. Talcott said, a deep frown between her brow.
“Now that act doesn’t stay eighty-twenty because it interacts with the one-minus-one. Basically, there are a lot more troughs in the one-minus-one than there are in our eighty-twenty act, right? So the net result would be to ‘tame down’ the goodness of our act. The resultant interference pattern would be more like seventy-thirty.”
“But what, exactly, would that additional ten percent trough be?”
“Some negative side effect that we can’t predict. Maybe the homeless person uses the money to buy alcohol that further deteriorates his liver, or maybe it keeps him from going to a shelter that night and he winds up getting mugged. But something negative will come of it, even if it’s minor. We all instinctively know this is how life works. That’s why we say ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ or ‘there’s always a catch,’ right?”