“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?
CHAPTER NINE
Wally was the superstitious sort, and although he was always glad to have a little extra money for overtime, he wasn’t eager to spend too much time in the museum after dark. There were too many life-size sculptures standing around on pedestals, and he always had the feeling that they only stopped moving the second he looked at them. Even the shadows in the galleries seemed like they didn’t belong where they were. But when he’d received word, straight from President Dodds’s office, to stay however long was needed to clean up the refuse left in the conservation wing, he couldn’t very well say no. All afternoon, he’d heard the sounds of crates being ripped apart, floorboards being replaced, nails being hammered, and he didn’t know what to expect when he finally did turn on the overhead lights.