“What did I say?”
“That God does not play dice with the universe. The cosmos cannot simply be a game, designed at random and made without reason.”
“But perhaps He is playing some other game,” Einstein said. “A game we don’t know yet, with rules we can’t understand.”
“But every game has rules — you will concede that much, ja? Let us take this quantum physics.”
“You may have it.”
“You do not like it because you cannot accept this notion of — what is it you wish to call it? — spooky action at a distance.”
“A particle, in two places at one time? No, I am not yet convinced of that.”
“And I will not try to convince you. Still, there must be a consistency to it all. The problem is simply that we have not been able to discover — at least not yet — the invisible hand that moves these particles about.”
“Is there an invisible body to go with this invisible hand?” Einstein joked, but once Gödel was on a tear, it was tough to distract him.
“At present, they may seem to move in a fundamentally illogical way—”
“That they do.”
“And thus you regard this as less than optimal.”
“I do.”
“But what might appear to be optimal to you may not appear to be optimal to such particles, operating as they do in a system we do not comprehend.”
“Now there I do agree,” Einstein said, twirling a thick clump of the spaghetti around his fork. “It is a system I do not comprehend. And that is why, like Don Quixote with his lance, I will continue my quest.”
“For your Dulcinea?” Adele interjected.
“Yes. And the unified field theory will prove just as beautiful. Oh, I know what all the young Turks think of it, and of me. But I have always proceeded as much by what I feel here,” he said, patting his belly, “as I do here.” He pointed at his temple with the loaded fork.
“My point exactly,” Gödel said. “Intuition, you feel it in your gut.”
“Albert, you’re going to get spaghetti in your hair,” Helen clucked.
“Too late,” Adele said, reaching over with her napkin to disengage an errant strand.
“You’re as bad as a child,” Helen said, and Einstein laughed.
“I think I need to start my life all over again,” he said. “I should have learned better manners as a boy.”
“According to your own theory, you still can do that,” Gödel said, but before he could elaborate, there was a scratching at the dining room window, and when they all looked, a pair of green eyes flashed behind the glass.
“Oh, my,” Helen said, swiftly rising from her chair and going into the foyer.
“What is it?” Kurt asked nervously.
“It’s nothing,” Adele said. “Eat your dinner before it gets cold.”
The front door opened, and a gust of autumn air blew into the house, then it closed again and Helen returned with the tabby cat in her arms. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I’ve been leaving a bowl of milk for her after Albert leaves for work.”
Although he hadn’t been aware of this particular phobia, Einstein realized that he should have guessed — Kurt was frozen in his chair, staring at the cat as if it were a tiger about to pounce. What wasn’t the man afraid of?
“Now, Kurt, it’s just a little pussycat,” Adele said, smoothing his arm with the palm of her hand. “Remember how much you liked the cat I kept at the nightclub?”
“I’m sorry,” Helen said, “I didn’t know—”
“But maybe you could take the cat into the kitchen,” Adele urged, hoping to avert a crisis.
As Helen did so, Einstein asked, “Why did you say that my theory could help me to learn better manners?”
“That is not what I meant,” Kurt said, still plainly perturbed.
“So, you approve of my manners? That is good to know.”
“What I meant,” Kurt said, taking slow breaths and keeping his eyes riveted to his plate, “was that if you accept the premises of general relativity—”
“I certainly do.”
“—and if you succeed in wedding them to the gravitational field equations on which we have worked—”
“Go on. Go on.”
“Then you must, logically, assume that it would be possible to travel in time… and in that way to go back to your own boyhood.”
“Ach, I’m too old for that. Once was enough.”
“What have I missed?” Helen said, returning to her seat.
“My Kurt is explaining how we can grow younger,” Adele said.
“Then I am all ears.”
“If the universe and everything in it rotates, like a vast cosmic whirlpool, then it follows that time cannot be a straight linear sequence of events — first this happens and then that — no, it must instead bend like the universe itself. It must follow the curve, ja, and space-time projectories must therefore be able to loop back on themselves. How could they not? In theory, they must be able to return to the very places that they have already been.”
“So how do I get back to my sixteenth birthday?” Adele said. “That is what I’d like to know.”
“You would need a rocket ship,” Einstein said, joining in the speculation. “And it would have to travel very fast indeed.”
“But, theoretically, if you went fast enough, and if the curve was wide enough,” Kurt said, “you could visit any time at all — past, present, or future.”
“Oh, no,” Adele said, “the future can wait. I don’t want to get older any faster than I have to.”
“Nor do I,” Helen said, starting to clear the table. “Who wants coffee?”
As Helen and Adele prepared coffee and dessert, Einstein questioned Gödel further — he did not agree with all his conclusions, in part because they could never be empirically proven, but he was fascinated, as always, by the manner in which a mind as astute as Kurt’s could tease out such implications from his own theories. He would have to think on it, hard, if he wished to find the fallacy or fault in Gödel’s logic.
By the time Kurt and Adele took their leave, it was nearly midnight and Helen, exhausted from the long day, went up to her room. Einstein was ready to turn in himself, but as was his ritual, he went into the kitchen first, to have a glass of warm milk. Looking in the icebox, he found only an inch or so left in the bottle.
When the cat rubbed up against his pant leg, he understood why. “Ah, so you’re the one who’s been drinking my milk.”
He bent down and rubbed his knuckles under the cat’s chin, and said, “Where are you going to sleep tonight?” His former wife, Mileva, had had a cat that looked like this. But by now it was surely gone. And even Mileva, judging from her last letters from Zurich, was in declining health. Time was no illusion; it was a relentless force, and he felt its sharp fingers digging into the small of his back as he tried to straighten up.
The cat trotted to the back door and waited there.
“It’s a cold night,” Einstein said, but the cat stayed put, turning its head and meowing loudly.
“All right then,” he said, opening the door, “if that’s what you want.”
The cat bolted out into the yard, and Einstein stood in the doorway looking out at the tree branches bending in the wind. Dead leaves scuttled across the back steps, and the wooden doors to the garage banged and rattled. He was just about to go back inside when they banged again, and he realized that the latch must have slipped. If he didn’t resecure it, the noise would keep him up half the night.
Descending the stairs with one hand on the rail — his back complaining with every step — he shuffled across the yard. The harvest moon hung low and yellow in the sky. At the garage, he found that the latch had indeed been thrown. Before closing it again, he pried the door open and had a glance inside.