Nikolai turned the light on and made a note on the pad lying on the bedside table: ‘A school for Cassandras.’ He felt suddenly cheerful and full of energy. Claire folded her letter and came in, looked dazzled by the sudden change of illumination. ‘Oh dear, you won’t start working now?’ she said, neatly arranging her writing things in a drawer.
‘You have been working until now,’ Nikolai said meaningfully.
‘I have been writing to caro Guido,’ Claire said. ‘He feels very lonely, having temporarily lost a valuable member of his audience. Are you making notes for tomorrow?’ She dropped her dressing-gown and slipped into the other bed. As Nikolai watched her, he thought that a colour-print of Claire in her chaste black pyjamas would make an exciting change in the pages of Playboy.
‘I have been thinking,’ he said.
‘You have?’
‘About feelings of gloom and warnings of doom. These two attitudes must not be confused. It is a great mistake to confuse them. A warning serves a preventive, a positive purpose. Gloom does not. A warning must be life-affirming. The geese on the Capitol were not gloomy, Cassandra was. So the geese succeeded with their warning and Cassandra did not.’
‘Can our call-girls be turned into geese?’
Nikolai got out of bed and started bumbling about the room, bare-footed, pursuing his monologue.
‘That letter Einstein wrote to Roosevelt in 1939 was two hundred words long and changed the destiny of the world. It shows that it can be done. It can. I know, I know, that we shall fail; but that is better than not trying.’
He was beating the huge, soft eiderdown on her bed with his fists, more bear-like than ever in his rumpled pyjamas. He stopped and looked down at her, frowning; an idea seemed to be dawning on him.
‘I think I shall shack up with you,’ he said, transferring his huge bulk with surprising agility under the eiderdown.
‘Nice,’ said Claire. ‘But you don’t want to feel tired tomorrow.’
‘I can apologize in my opening address. “Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you will sympathize if I am a little worn out by the legitimate demands of my seductive wife.”’
‘That will do nicely to start the discussion,’ Claire said soberly but with a slightly throaty voice. It was their first resumption of what Burch’s textbooks called species-specific mating behaviour since caro Guido had entered the scene, and it went very well. Perhaps it was the effect of the Höhenluft.
‘I won’t go back home,’ said Nikolai, meaning his own bed.
‘Don’t,’ said Claire.
After a while he said: ‘About that Einstein letter. He and his buddies knew what the problem was, and were searching for the solution. We cannot even define the problem. Each one of us has a different definition. And that, precisely, defines our problem.’
But Claire had fallen asleep, and Nikolai nearly did too. Then the images came – Grisha wading knee-deep through a paddy-field in nobody’s land, Grisha crawling on his belly through a jungle which somebody had forgotten to defoliate. He gave in and took a sleeping pill.
Most of the call-girls did likewise. Most of them were middle-aged or elderly and had some trouble in readjusting their physiological clocks, thermostats, homeostats and other built-in equipment to local time, local food and the Höhenluft – the heady, ozone-rich air at 5,000 feet above sea level. Only Gustav, the weedy, ginger-haired character with the waxed moustaches, who had driven the special bus with the call-girls, was still awake, listening to the radio in the basement of the vast filing cabinet. He was the janitor, handyman and PRO of the Kongresshaus. His boots on the table, he was listening to the American Forces Programme to improve his English. Then he turned on the midnight news, for he knew that in the morning several participants, in the absence of foreign newspapers, would ask him jokingly whether the big war had started yet. As a matter of fact it sounded as if it might at any minute.
7
One of the reasons for Solovief’s chronic feelings of guilt was the fact that he had never known poverty. His father, a St Petersburg banker, had foreseen the shape of things to come and emigrated with his family to Geneva just in time before the outbreak of the First World War. Niko was born on the day war was declared, but his parents did not consider this a bad omen.
Nor did they have any reason to do so. At ten, he was regarded as a musical prodigy. At fifteen, he gave his first public piano concert, favourably reviewed in the Journal de Genève. But success did not go to his head. Nor the adulation of his two sisters and their adolescent girl-friends, which he endured with a certain gruff grace. He was a boy of dark good looks, given to sudden outbursts of temper which vanished without aftermath, rather childish for his age in some respects, precociously mature in others. The gawkiness in moving his huge frame about was in striking contrast to the nimble ease of his fingers working on the keyboard, as if to illustrate the mysterious control of mind over body. His apparent shyness was more a matter of good manners, which discreetly sheltered a considerable amount of self-assurance. At school his performance was mediocre, except in the Classics, and he particularly detested physics and chemistry both taught by elderly, somnolent masters.
A few months after the concert, he had a revelation which was to be decisive for his future. He was reading in his bedroom a history of Greek civilization. He was intrigued by the semi-legendary figure of Pythagoras – the only man, according to tradition, who could perceive, with mortal ears, the music of the spheres made by the planets’ motions in their orbits. Their swift revolutions caused a musical hum throughout the universe; and since each planet moved round the earth at a different speed, each hummed or sang at a different pitch. The musical interval between Earth and Moon was that of a tone; Moon to Mercury a semi-tone, Mercury to Venus a semi-tone, Venus to Sun a minor third, Sun to Mars a tone, and so on. The resulting musical scale – the Pythagorean scale – defined the ‘harmony of the spheres’. Ordinary mortals cannot hear it, because they are made of all too solid flesh; but to Pythagoras, who was half-divine, the universe was a musical box playing its nocturnes through all eternity.
Nikolai had a feeling of déjà vu: a passage in The Merchant of Venice, recently read at school, came floating into his mind:
‘Soft stillness and the night … Look, how the floor of heaven/is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;/there’s not the smallest orb which thou beholdst/but in his motion like an angel sings…’
Later on he was to discover that the Pythagorean fantasy of musical harmonies governing the motions of the stars had never lost its hold on mankind. Its echoes could be found in the poets of Elizabethan England; in Milton’s ‘Heavenly tune which none can hear/Of human mould with gross unpurged ear’; and eventually it produced one of the most astonishing feats in the history of human thought: Johannes Kepler, mathematician and mystic, built the foundations of modern astronomy on similar speculations about the affinities between planetary motions and musical scales.
Nikolai experienced the same kind of floating, entranced feeling which he knew from rare moments at the piano when one’s identity became extinguished, dissolved like a drop in the ocean. He had discovered that music, the most intimate of one’s experiences, was married to the stars by the abstract laws of mathematics. According to Greek historians, the marriage took place when Pythagoras took a walk on his native island of Samos, and stopped in front of a blacksmith’s workshop. Watching the sweat-glistening bodies at work, he suddenly realized that each iron rod, when struck by a hammer, gave out a different sound; that the pitch of each sound depended on the length of the rod; and that if two iron rods were struck simultaneously, the intimate sensual quality of the resulting chord depended on the ratio of their lengths. Octave, fifth, major and minor third, each had a different colour and feel; but that feel depended entirely on simple mathematical relations. It was a crucial discovery: the first step towards the mathematization of human experience.
But was it not degrading to reduce human emotions to a play of numbers? He ha
d always thought so; now he discovered that to the Pythagoreans and the Platonists it was not a degradation but an ennoblement. Mathematics and geometry were ethereal pursuits, concerned with pure form, proportion, pattern, not with gross matter; with disembodied ideas which lent themselves to profound insights and delightful games. The riddle of the universe was contained in the dance of numbers, reflected in the motions of the celestial bodies and in the melodies which Orpheus played on his lyre. The Pythagoreans had been worshippers of the Orphic mystery cult, but they had given it a new twist: they regarded geometrical forms and mathematical relations as the ultimate mystery, and their study as the highest form of worship, the true Orphic purge. Divinity spoke in numbers.
On that late evening in his room overlooking the Lake of Geneva, Nikolai experienced the two stages of the Orphic rite: ekstasis and katharsis. He sat down at the piano and tried to improvise a nocturne to be called Harmonice Mundi. After a while he realized that it was a bad imitation of Chopin. He laughed, munched a bar of his favourite Swiss chocolate and went to sleep. He did not make plans concerning the future and was unaware that it had already been decided.
He did not abandon his piano, but found less time to spare for it. His private Pantheon now contained two sets of heroes, amiably facing each other: in one row Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Schubert, Haydn, stopping at Schönberg; in the other row, Archimedes, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Planck and Einstein, Rutherford and Bohr. This second row was open-ended, and new figures were from time to time added to it: Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli. His parents were bitterly disappointed when, after passing his baccalauréat, he decided to study theoretical physics in Göttingen, instead of entering the Conservatoire. But they realized that it was a mature decision, and he had a way of having his way.
He now believed, with almost religious fervour, that the mystery of the universe was contained in the equations which governed the ballet of the tiny particles inside the atom, and in the Wagnerian grand opera performed by comets, stars and galaxies. Ironically, his student years in Göttingen and at the Cavendish in Cambridge fell into a period when leading physicists everywhere were abandoning that dream. A decade earlier it had indeed seemed that the universe was yielding up its ultimate secrets – that physics was close to reaching the rock-bottom of reality. But the rock turned into a bottomless mud-bank. Earlier on, each atom was thought to be a miniature solar system, consisting of a nucleus of protons surrounded by orbiting electrons, replicating the harmony of the spheres on a microscopic scale. The infinitely large and the infinitely small were dancing to the same tune. By the time Nikolai graduated, this beguiling vision had disintegrated into a mad Wonderland, where an electron could be in two places at once or in no place at all. All traditional, human notions of space, time and matter had gone overboard, followed by the sacred principles of logic which linked cause and effect; all certainties had vanished from the universe, to be replaced by statistical probabilities; space itself became curved, wrinkled, pockmarked with holes filled with anti-matter of negative mass; the harmony of the spheres had turned into a cacophony.
Nikolai found this situation both distressing and exhilarating. He belonged to that unorthodox minority of physicists who, like Einstein himself, refused to believe ‘that God plays dice with the universe’. He continued to believe that the harmony was there, hidden in the cacophony – the heavenly tune which ‘none can hear with gross unpurged ear’. His colleagues, who believed in ‘the world-a-game-of-craps’ philosophy, called him an incurable romantic (his first piano teacher had used the same expression); but they could not deny his brilliance. This was the time when the so-called elementary particles of matter began to multiply like mushrooms. Originally, there had been only two: the negative electron and the positive proton. Now every year more elementary particles were discovered in the laboratories, each with weirder attributes than the last, until there were almost a hundred different kinds of building-blocks of matter – neutrons, mesons, positrons, leptons, and what-have-you. The one discovered by Nikolai Solovief, which brought him the Nobel Prize while still in his thirties, was the weirdest particle of all – even weirder than the neutrino which travelled at the speed of light, had zero mass, and could penetrate the thickest armour like a bullet going through an omelette soufflée. Solovief’s particle had negative mass, was repelled by gravity, travelled faster than light, and thus, according to the Relativity Theory, backward in time. Fortunately, its life-time was so short – a fraction of a trillionth of a second – that it did not really matter. It was a ghostly particle, yet its track could be clearly seen in the bubble chamber like the condensation trail of a jet-plane. Solovief called his particle the ‘myatron’, and explained in the paper announcing the discovery that it was meant as a condensation of ‘maya’ and ‘metron’. Both words were derived from the same sanskrit root, matr-, and reflected the contrast between Eastern mysticism and Western science. The veil of Maya was the symbol of an attitude which regarded all appearances as illusions; while metron meant measure, the scientist’s hard, quantitative approach to reality.
Niko shared both attitudes. He could never take himself, nor the myatron, quite seriously. He had predicted its existence and photographed its track, but he could not convince himself of its reality. Or rather, he could not persuade himself of the Reality of the scientist’s reality. An electron which was in two places at once could not be taken seriously. The French had an expression: ‘c’est pas sérieux…’ Niko kept repeating it, applying it to modern physics, to Adolf Hitler alias Schicklgruber, to his affairs with various girls, and above all to himself.
In 1936, he became the youngest Assistant Professor at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin-Dahlem, where some of the illustrious heroes of his Pantheon had worked. Now those still alive had dispersed to England and America. They could not bear the book-burnings, Jew-beatings, the feel of darkness falling from the air. Nikolai stuck it till 1938, partly because he was still hunting for the elusive myatron, partly because he was having, after many pleasant short-lived episodes, his first serious affair with a beautiful and passionate Jewish pianist. Although she could no longer appear in public concerts, she refused to emigrate because of her aged parents who lived in a small Bavarian town and would not move. During the pogroms of the celebrated Kristall-Nacht, a troop of drunken Brown Shirts in that idyllic little town dragged three orthodox Jewish elders to their barracks and had much fun in forcing them to clean the latrines with their long beards. The father of Nikolai’s girl, who refused, was beaten so savagely that he died the next day. The news, and the details, reached her in a roundabout way, a week later. They were included in the farewell letter she wrote to Niko. He had a key to her flat; he found the letter on the piano and the girl in her bathtub, her wrists gaping wide open like an illustration in an anatomy book, her head submerged in the pink water, her face far from beautiful.
Before that event, Niko had regarded the regime with an aloof distaste; now its archaic horror struck him with its full, savage force. He never forgave himself for having listened to Ada’s passionate outbursts against it with the poise of the detached scientist, suspecting her of exaggeration and hysteria. He left Germany a few days later, but he could not leave memory behind with the soiled linen in his flat.
The evening in Geneva when he discovered the harmony of the spheres had been the first turning point in his life; the Kristall-Nacht became the second. The third was Hiroshima.
* * *
He had been working at the Cavendish when Einstein wrote his letter to the President. When the invitation came to join the Project at Los Alamos, he accepted without hesitation, in the belief that it would expunge his guilt. It did not bother him at first that most of his colleagues did not seem to need such justification – they regarded it as an exciting exercise in a very advanced type of engineering.
He became one of the five or six chief architects of the fission bomb; his earlier work on the myatron provided some essential clues. He only realiz
ed what he had been doing when the newspaper reports on what had happened on that Japanese island came in, followed by the more detailed, classified intelligence reports.
The coveted accolade in every scientist’s life came soon afterwards. It intensified his guilt. No Nobel prizes were handed out for Hiroshima; yet the theoretical discoveries for which they were given had paved the road to it.
He joined the group of influential physicists who opposed the development of thermonuclear weapons, and resigned his post just in time before being dismissed as a security risk. It enhanced his international reputation, and made him a prominent figure in the call-girl circuit. His still fluent Russian, the language his parents had talked at home, enabled him to find some human contacts with colleagues from the East at international conferences, but this only added to his discouragement. Most of them entrenched themselves behind the barbed wire of officialese; and when occasionally one of them opened up a little, over a bottle, reasonably safe from being overheard, Nikolai detected in his voice an echo of his own mood of despair.
What kept him going through his forties and fifties was partly Claire and the two children, partly his new field of research: the use of radioactive isotopes in the therapy of malignant diseases. He devised several improvements of existing techniques – for he could not help drawing a spark from whatever his fingers touched – but none of them represented a major breakthrough. Even so, one of the sparks he drew cost him dearly. Through a combination of faulty equipment and lack of caution, his left hand was exposed to an overdose of an experimental type of hard radiation. The left ring finger had to be removed in successive instalments, and he could not be sure whether the last instalment had yet been paid. A German proverb says: give the devil a finger and he will grab the whole hand. He even suspected the devil of some psychosomatic machinations. He developed a habit of hunching up his powerful shoulders as if carrying an invisible weight. The happy self-confidence of his youth had been eroded, together with his belief in the ultimate harmony behind the veil of appearances – but the disconcertingly innocent glance had survived. Doggedly he trained himself to play the piano with nine fingers, and published a paper in a medical journal on the neuro-muscular readjustments which this involved. The paper led to some minor innovations in orthopaedic surgery.