“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.
CHAPTER SIX
From New York Harbor to Grand Central Station, then onto a train to a place called Princeton Junction. Once there, Simone and her father had been shuttled to a single railcar that traveled on a short spur line, no more than a mile or two long, which terminated at the foot of the university campus. The only other passengers were three businessmen with loosened ties coming home from their offices, and some boisterous students plainly returning from a wild excursion to the city.
“Where to?” the taxi driver asked, piling their luggage into the trunk of the bright yellow car.
Simone didn’t know how to reply. There hadn’t been time to figure out where they would be spending the night. “We will need a hotel,” she said, and the driver said—“Sure thing”—and pulled away from the station.
Simone’s first impression of New Jersey was trees — great towering trees everywhere, making a canopy overhead, shading the old stone walls and towers of the university buildings that rose along the side of the road. The late-day sun touched the leaves, already edged in red and gold, and she could only imagine how beautiful they would be in another few weeks — provided, of course, that she and her father were still there to see them.
This part of the plan had not yet had time to gel in her mind. Too much had happened. In the harbor, the wounded soldiers had disembarked first — some limping under their own power down the gangway, others carried on stretchers to a fleet of ambulances, busses, and cabs lined up at the dock. Once their ranks had thinned out, Simone had taken her father by the elbow and navigated down the ramp, followed by the officious ensign whose arm she had snagged on the flooded deck of the Seward. He had since become her greatest admirer, and asked how long she would be staying in the city.
“I have shore leave for a week,” he volunteered.
“We’re not sure of our plans,” she’d said, not wanting to discourage him too much before their luggage had been unloaded from the ship.
He scrawled a phone number on a scrap of paper and assured her that if a woman answered, it wasn’t his wife. “It’s my mom’s place,” he said.
Simone saw a mountain of boxes and supplies piling up toward the bow of the ship, and looking up, watched a huge winch lowering a green net filled with yet more. After depositing her father and their bags in a taxi, and telling the driver he could run the meter until she got back, she ambled, as unobtrusively as she could, toward the spot where the cargo was being collected. Lurking between two stacks of cartons, she waited as the winch made one or two more drops. But how many, she wondered, would there be? She was sure to be noticed if she stood there for long: The last of the vehicles were now leaving the dock, bound for hospitals in the city, and she could see that the ensign who had asked her out had been dragooned into transporting some of the unloaded freight. In a minute or two, he’d pass right by her with his empty dolly.
The winch dipped down one more time, then, creaking loudly, swung out wide, with a wooden crate in its net. Even from here, she could see the red-lettered pouch affixed to its side, containing the elusive delivery instructions. A navy officer with a megaphone was waving directions to the operator up top, but the net seemed to catch in a sudden wind off the sea. The armature shivered, and the net twisted around and around, almost as if something were trying to escape from the box.