She was dumbfounded. She became more so as she went along. There was her full equation, right there, and there it was again, embedded in longer sequences she didn’t recognize. There were cosines and functions that she remember vaguely from… astronomy? She thought she saw glimpses of relativity and theoretical time constructs.
After a while she stopped trying to decipher it and just let herself absorb it like another person might absorb a painting or music. Finally she put the manuscript down carefully on the floor beside her chair, along with her paper and pen. Her hands were shaking so badly she could no longer hold them. Her throat was constricted with emotion.
She’d always known that she was no genius, no child prodigy. But what she had just witnessed was a brain so much greater than her own that it provoked a stabbing pain, a kind of martyr’s wound.
The voices of the others buzzed in her ears. Nate placed his hand on the back of her arm, cupping her. The contact brought her down to earth. With some effort she got a grip. It was going to be okay. She might not be in Kobinski’s league, but she had worked the equation and discovered the one-minus-one all on her own, damn it. She’d fight all the demons of Hell before she’d give up her rights to this thing. Fortunately, these people couldn’t have a clue what it was they had. She straightened in her chair, pulling away from Nate.
Wyle was talking to Anatoli. The rabbi had the manuscript on his lap and was studying it, frowning, fingers stroking his beard.
“So,” said Handalman, closing the pages carefully. “What do we discuss? Should we discuss, maybe, the weapon?”
13.3. Denton Wyle
“I think a little background is in order first,” Anatoli said in his frail, wavering voice. “I was captured close to the Russian border. I was nineteen. The funny thing is, I was born a Jew, but my family was not religious. I even changed my name, but I got picked up anyway, as a Marxist.
“I arrived there a few months after Kobinski, at the end of 1942. It was so cold, you wouldn’t believe…”
Denton had already heard Anatoli’s story. It faded into the background as his mind wandered. He’d arrived only that morning and was in a fugue state: tired, buzzed from painkillers, barely mobile, and giddily excited. Anatoli had the complete manuscript of The Book of Torment. He had the Schwartz sections, which, apparently, Schwartz had been happy to send him when Anatoli wrote requesting them. (That stung a little, though of course Schwartz would kiss Anatoli’s butt. Big-time.) And he had the Kroll manuscript and the Yad Vashem section and lots of other pages no one had ever seen. Unfortunately, it wasn’t translated from the Hebrew, so Denton couldn’t just chug it down, but he’d managed to get the old man to translate some of it for him verbally. Better still, Anatoli had told him what happened the night Kobinski and his group had made their escape. It was everything he’d hoped for and more—and from a living eyewitness, too. He had his story!
Of course, he couldn’t publish it. Wouldn’t publish it. Anatoli didn’t want it published, and if Denton did publish he’d get another visit from Mr. Edwards. But… he wasn’t going to think about that. Life was long. He had money. He would think of something. The real fly in the ointment was that Anatoli, his lone eyewitness, was more than a few cards shy of a full deck. Heck, the deck was gone and the old man had been left holding the joker.
What Denton hadn’t figured out yet was how the others were involved. There was the rabbi—whom Denton couldn’t help but take an immediate dislike to vis-à-vis Schwartz. And the other two… Nate seemed cool, the sort of guy Denton would get along with usually, but he was protective of the woman. Obviously, he had a big thing for her. For her part (Denton sized her up, since no one was paying attention), she wasn’t bad. She had the librarian thing going, could use a serious salon day, but she had a cute figure and sexy freckles. Of course, she was snotty as hell, but that was standard in the brainy type. Ice queen. Nate was nuts if he thought he was getting anything off her.
“Kobinski opened my eyes,” Anatoli was saying. “I had been fervent about Marx. Now I became fervent about Yosef Kobinski. I made him teach me; I wouldn’t leave him alone.” Anatoli’s eyes were hazy with memory and more than a little unhinged. “I had some science, you see. It was a favorite of mine in school. But what he knew… He could have moved Heaven and Earth.”
“What were his ideas—can you give us a summary?” Dr. Talcott asked.
Anatoli sighed. “A summary… First, he founded everything on the kabbalistic Tree of Life, on the sephirot. Kobinski believed that the highest spiritual path was to balance your sephirot, to come into perfect alignment right down the center of the tree. It is like a stick, he said, which is all crooked. It cannot go through a narrow hole. In the case of the soul, there is also a narrow opening, at the navel, and the soul must be perfectly straight and smooth—without a bend or a bump—to pass through.”
“To pass through into what?” Denton asked, his interest picking up.
“To escape the lower five dimensions—the dimensions of good and evil.”
“You mean, to escape the cycle of reincarnation? Like achieving nirvana?” Denton had once written an article for Mysterious World on past lives.
Anatoli shrugged enigmatically. “In kabbalah it is called tikkun, the reclaiming of the sparks.”
“Can we get back to the physics part of it?” Dr. Talcott asked impatiently. Binah, definitely.
“It is all physics.” Anatoli’s voice trembled.
“Maybe what we’ve discovered will help,” Nate suggested.
He ran the group through an account of their experiments. Denton couldn’t follow everything, despite the fact that Nate was obviously simplifying quite a bit. But he followed enough. The physics side of Kobinski’s work came into focus with the force of an explosion. It wasn’t kabbalah magic at all… Jeez, how could he have been so stupid? It was math.
“Yes,” Anatoli agreed, excited. “That is the law of good and evil. The law of good and evil states that there is a force that influences everything. It tempers both the bad and the good. And the fifth dimension is where these energies interplay. The fifth dimension is vast; it stretches across all the multiverse.”
“What about the potential for a weapon?” the rabbi asked Anatoli. “Did Kobinski discuss that with you?”
Anatoli opened his mouth to speak and then sat still for several minutes, staring into space. Denton saw the two scientists glance at each other. Dr. Talcott rose to her feet, but Denton had seen Anatoli do this before and motioned her back.
Anatoli began, suddenly, like a skipped record finding a groove. “He did recognize the danger, but only at the end. At first he wanted to make certain the work would be saved. We spent months—him writing and us burying it for the future. But after Isaac… the rebbe was so brokenhearted, he no longer trusted humanity to have it. The night he left he made me promise to dig up the manuscript and destroy it. For many years I couldn’t bring myself to come back here. But twenty years ago I arrived and I have been here ever since. Many, many nights I broke into the grounds of the camp, trying to remember where we put the pages. Most nights I would dig and find nothing. But slowly, as you see, the whole thing has been recovered.”
“It’s all there,” Denton commented, looking jealously at the pages in Aharon’s lap. Trust the rabbi in the group to end up with his grubby hands all over it.