“ ‘Everybody’ isn’t what it used to be,” Delaney said, scratching at the scruffy brown beard he trimmed himself. He also cut his own hair, which was pretty much evident to anyone he met. “Now that the student body’s been reduced, the faculty’s been thinned to a skeleton crew, too. It’s a tribute to your utility that you’ve been taken back.”
“What utility could I possibly have?”
“You’re a testament to our fighting men.”
“Not anymore, I’m not.”
Delaney shrugged. “Maybe they figure somebody’s got to be around to remember all the cultural achievements that are now being systematically destroyed. Either way, you’re here.”
Oddly enough, it wasn’t until this moment that Lucas realized it was at all unusual to have been so readily reappointed. Hadn’t his invitation cited “Princeton in the nation’s service”—the motto that had been bestowed upon it by Woodrow Wilson, president of the college from 1902 to 1910—as the reason?
“Ed Randall’s still here, and he said to remind you that you still owe him five bucks,” Delaney said, before running through a litany of who else was still on faculty — most of them older men, several of whom had served in the First World War — and bringing him up to date on changes in the town. “The Garden Theater finally got a concession stand with decent popcorn, the hoagie shop’s closed — oh, and there’s a good Chinese laundry now, where the shoe repair used to be.” Funny, how life had gone on.
Glancing at the newspapers, Lucas saw a headline on Newark’s Star-Ledger—“Navy Convoy Torpedoed in North Atlantic”—followed by a subhead, “USS Van Buren Sunk by U-Boat.” He picked up the paper and scanned the front page, where there was a picture of another ship, the USS Seward, with a red cross painted on its side, safely in the dock.
“Yeah, bad news today,” Delaney said. “You hear about that submarine attack yet?”
“No, I hadn’t seen the papers till now,” he said, reading quickly.
“The Germans sank a destroyer. The amazing thing, though, is that the ship with the wounded on board got hit, too, but somehow managed to make it to port.”
The article went on to say that the Nazi submarine, hit by a depth charge, had exploded directly under the Seward, blowing a breach in its bow and causing it to take on water. Turning to an inside page for the rest of the story, Lucas saw a couple of photos of wounded soldiers being carried off the ship on stretchers, along with a shot of sheet metal haphazardly riveted over what was presumably the gaping hole in the hull. “How the pumps kept up with the flood,” the captain of the Seward was quoted, “is nothing short of a miracle. It felt like the hand of God must have been under us, keeping the ship afloat.”
“So much for the Geneva Conventions,” Delaney said, slurping his coffee. “The Seward was clearly marked as a Red Cross ship.”
In a short sidebar, the paper mentioned that there had been a freak accident in the harbor, resulting in yet another death, when a heavy crate, being lifted from the hold under tight security, broke loose and fell onto the loading dock. Sometimes, it seemed to Lucas, death was everywhere you looked — or didn’t look — and he wondered if his own close call had somehow immunized him. Wishful thinking. But in wartime, wishes were sometimes all you had.
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?”