In Search of Klingsor
Jorge Volpi
Already an international bestseller, ‘In Search of Klingsor’ traces an American physicist’s thrilling search to unmask Hitler’s chief science advisor, the man whose work on the German atomic bomb threatened Allied security.In 1946, Francis Bacon, a brilliant young American physicist, is pursuing research under the guidance of Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel and other great minds of modern science. But because of a series of personal indiscretions he is forced to accept an altogether different, more sinister, assignment: uncover ‘Klingsor’, Hitler's foremost advisor on the atomic bomb. But who is Klingsor and where might he be found?Bacon’s efforts to expose the truth take him to Germany and to Gustav Links, a survivor of the failed attempt to kill Hitler in 1944. With Links at his side, Bacon is able to reconstruct a map of European maths and physics and embark on a journey that will lead him to some of the greatest scientific thinkers of the time, including Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Böhr, all of them suspects. As the search for his seemingly omniscient adversary intensifies, Bacon is drawn deeper and deeper into the secrets and lies of post-war Europe and into a complicated relationship with a mysterious and alluring woman whose motives are unclear.Part mystery, part psychological puzzle, part spy story, ‘In Search of Klingsor’ is already an international bestseller. It has been compared with Umberto Eco's ‘The Name of the Rose’ in its ability to fuse its many elements – science, metaphysics, mathematics, philosophy – into a single compelling narrative and will delight anyone with an enquiring mind.
IN SEARCH OF KLINGSOR
Jorge Volpi
Translated by Kristina Cordero
DEDICATION (#ulink_2113c79a-ee03-5aeb-a468-8cd1653b4a00)
FOR ADRIAN, ELOY, GERARDO, NACHO, AND
PEDRO ANGEL, MY FELLOW CONSPIRATORS
CONTENTS
Cover (#u7b3217b6-ce21-5ff8-be46-bae7d103d444)
Title Page (#u9f0fc6ff-72dd-56bb-9cfd-65f364605264)
Dedication (#u3562f0ca-f8fe-5253-b612-32c8d30fb23a)
Epigraph (#u966c8efd-89ee-5f1f-832b-c51e810cfc35)
Preface (#ulink_d65868c0-8898-5077-abfe-40bf6269a525)
BOOK ONE
Laws of Narrative Motion (#ulink_1c5a106a-a3f5-5872-8382-08deb020c716)
LAW I: All narratives are written by a narrator
LAW II: All narrators offer one, singular truth (#ulink_7c495e55-2e77-5cfa-ad64-199d35478292)
LAW III: All narrators possess a motive for narrating (#ulink_67f68b8d-a788-5c30-a4f0-0dc2ee775dac)
Crimes of War (#ulink_f43b5901-1daf-5733-ad40-c13e08fe5fa5)
Hypotheses: From Quantum Physics to Espionage (#ulink_6f49c784-b7db-5cf0-9cd2-23ae2f8ac952)
HYPOTHESIS I: On Bacon’s Childhood and Early Years
HYPOTHESIS II: On Von Neumann and the War (#ulink_a4618353-fdd9-5171-89de-481725f28707)
HYPOTHESIS III: On Einstein and Love (#ulink_62098c0b-566f-5bc5-aaf3-af64bfe1d03c)
HYPOTHESIS IV: On Gödel’s Theory and Marriage (#ulink_8c68ba1a-e656-5624-9430-e9c2820552df)
HYPOTHESIS V: On Bacons Departure for Germany (#ulink_db437998-4864-5650-bf6c-ca1896489212)
Brief Autobiographical Disquisitions: From Set Theory to Totalitarianism (#litres_trial_promo)
DISQUISITION I: Infancy and the End of an Era
DISQUISITION II: Youth and Irrationality (#litres_trial_promo)
DISQUISITION III: The Arithmetics of Infinity (#litres_trial_promo)
DISQUISITION IV: Liberty and Lust (#litres_trial_promo)
DISQUISITION V: The Search for the Absolute (#litres_trial_promo)
The Uranium Circle (#litres_trial_promo)
Parallel Universes (#litres_trial_promo)
The Quest for the Holy Grail (#litres_trial_promo)
BOOK TWO
Laws of Criminal Motion (#litres_trial_promo)
LAW I: All crimes are committed by a criminal
LAW II: Every crime is the portrait of a criminal (#litres_trial_promo)
LAW III: Every criminal possesses a motive (#litres_trial_promo)
Max Planck, or a Lesson in Faith (#litres_trial_promo)
Reasons for Discouragement (#litres_trial_promo)
Johannes Stark, or a Lesson in Infamy (#litres_trial_promo)
The Game of War (#litres_trial_promo)
Werner Heisenberg, or a Lesson in Sadness (#litres_trial_promo)
The Dangers of Observation (#litres_trial_promo)
Erwin Schrodinger, or a Lesson in Desire (#litres_trial_promo)
The Laws of Attraction (#litres_trial_promo)
The Liar’s Paradox (#litres_trial_promo)
The Dimensions of Affection (#litres_trial_promo)
Niels Bohr, or a Lesson in Will (#litres_trial_promo)
Chain Reaction (#litres_trial_promo)
The Uncertainty Principle (#litres_trial_promo)
Hidden Variables (#litres_trial_promo)
Kundry’s Curse (#litres_trial_promo)
BOOK THREE
Laws of Traitorous Motion (#litres_trial_promo)
LAW I: All men are weak
LAW II: All men are liars (#litres_trial_promo)
LAW III: All men are traitors (#litres_trial_promo)
Dialogue 1: On Those Forgotten by History (#litres_trial_promo)
The Conspiracy (#litres_trial_promo)
Dialogue II: On the Rules Governing Chance (#litres_trial_promo)
The Bomb (#litres_trial_promo)
Dialogue III: On the Secrets of Destiny (#litres_trial_promo)
The Realm of the Occult (#litres_trial_promo)
Dialogue IV: On the Death of Truth (#litres_trial_promo)
The Betrayal (#litres_trial_promo)
Dialogue V: On the Privileges of Insanity (#litres_trial_promo)
Klingsor’s Revenge (#litres_trial_promo)
End Note (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
EPIGRAPH (#ulink_45b9bf12-d786-5d98-8dbe-2ac370571454)
Science is a game—but a game with reality, a game with sharpened knives … if a man cuts a picture carefully into 1,000 pieces, you solve the puzzle when you reassemble the pieces into a picture; in the success or failure, both your intelligences compete. In the presentation of a scientific problem, the other player is the good Lord. He has not only set the problem but also devised the rules of the game—but they are not completely known, half of them are left for you to discover or to determine. The experiment is the tempered blade which you wield with success against the spirits of darkness—or which defeats you shamefully. The uncertainty is how much of the rules God himself has permanently ordained, and how much appears to be caused by your mental inertia, while the solution generally becomes possible only through freedom from this limitation. This is perhaps the most exciting thing in the game. For here you strive against the imaginary boundary between yourself and the Godhead—a boundary that perhaps does not exist.
—ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER
PREFACE (#ulink_6fb355c2-5de4-5fa5-abd8-8bdae8efa385)
On September 5, the day they came for me, I was in my house on Ludwigstraße preparing some equations that Heisenberg had sent to me a few weeks earlier. Ever since July 20, when Hitler announced over the radio that the coup attempt had failed and that his life had been providentially spared, I knew that I didn’t have much time. My anguish grew as I listened to the subsequent news reports: the execution of Stauffenberg and of his close friends, the preparations for the trials in the People’s Court, and the massive wave of arrests that were made in the coup’s aftermath.
Well aware that I could easily be the next in line, I tried to remain calm. But when I learned that Heini—Heinrich von Lutz, my childhood friend—had been arrested, I knew for sure that my days were numbered. But what could I do? Flee Germany? Hide? Escape? We were right in the middle of the very worst months of the war. It would have been impossible. All I could do was wait, quietly, for the SS or the Gestapo to break into my house. If I was lucky.
Just as I had imagined, the thugs wasted little time. A few days later, the Gestapo arrived at my house, handcuffed me, and I was taken straight to Plötzensee.
On July 20, 1944, a select group of officials of the Wehrmacht, the Armed Forces of the Third Reich, aided by dozens of civilians, had made an attempt on Hitler’s life while the Führer was presiding over a meeting at his headquarters at Rastenburg, about six hundred kilometers east of Berlin. The leader of this group was Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, a young colonel who had been wounded in the line of duty in North Africa. That day, Stauffenberg placed a pair of bombs in a briefcase, which was then deposited underneath the Führer’s desk. Stauffenberg waited for the bombs to go off, the signal for the coup to begin, the coup that would put an end to the Nazi regime and, possibly, the entire Second World War.
The tiniest, most infuriating logistical error foiled Stauffenberg’s plan. Either one of the bombs hadn’t been activated or the suitcase had simply been placed too far from where Hitler had been sitting. The Führer escaped with a few scrapes and not a single one of the high commands of the party or the army was seriously wounded. Despite the failure of their first operative, the conspirators fully intended to move ahead with their plan, but by the early hours of the next day the Nazis had regained control of the situation. The main orchestrators of the coup—Ludwig Beck, Friedrich Olbricht, Werner von Haeften, Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim, and of course, Stauffenberg—were detained and killed that night in the general headquarters of the army, on the Bendlerstraße in Berlin. Hundreds of others were quickly arrested following the strict orders of the Reichsführer-SS and the new minister of the interior, Heinrich Himmler.
The news of the plot came as a shock to military insiders and civilians alike, thanks to the startling scope of people implicated: military officers, businessmen, diplomats, members of the army and the naval intelligence forces, professionals and merchants. In the aftermath, Himmler had all the conspirators and their relatives arrested, on the theory that the source of evil travels through bloodlines. By the end of August of 1944, some six hundred people had been arrested—some for aiding and abetting the conspirators, others simply for being related to them.
Hitler was livid about the coup, and unleashed his vengeance upon all the people who had turned against him during the very worst moments of the war. Scarcely a few weeks had passed since the Allied invasion of Normandy, and already there were people ready and willing to do away with him and place the entire Third Reich in jeopardy. So, just as Stalin—his enemy—had done in Moscow in 1937, Hitler decided to stage a great trial so that all the world could see just how vicious his enemies really were. Before it began, Roland Freisler, the chief justice of the People’s Court of the Greater German Reich, and the executioner who would carry out the punishments were summoned to his headquarters, the “Wolf’s Lair.” There, Hitler advised them of the following: “I want them hanged, strung up like butchered cattle!”
The trials began on August 7, in the great hall of the People’s Court in Berlin. On that day, eight defendants accused of conspiring against Hitler’s life were brought before the court: Erwin von Witzleben, Erich Hoepner, Helmuth Stieff, Paul von Hase, Robert Bernardis, Friedrich Karl Klausing, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, and Albrecht von Haden. They were not permitted to wear ties or suspenders, and their own lawyers even urged them to declare themselves guilty. Flanked on either side by two enormous Nazi flags, Freisler ignored their protests, one after the other. Their crimes were so patently evil in nature that any and all declarations were inadmissible. Without flinching, Freisler condemned each of the eight defendants to death. He directed his gaze upon them:
“Now we can return to our life and to the battle before us. The Volk has purged you from its ranks and is pure now. We have nothing more to do with you. We fight. The Wehrmacht cries out: ‘Heil Hitler!’ We fight at the side of our Führer, following him for the glory of Germany!”
By February 3, 1945, the day I was to appear before the People’s Court on Bellevuestraße, Freisler had already delivered scores of death sentences. That day five of us were to stand trial. The first among us to face the judge was Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a lawyer and reserve lieutenant who had served as a liaison between various resistance leaders. He had been captured shortly after July 20, and since then had been held at the Dachau and Flössenburg concentration camps. As was his habit, Freisler interrupted him regularly, to ridicule him and the rest of the defendants, calling us pigs and traitors and proclaiming that Germany would emerge victorious—victory in 1945!—if he were able to successfully eliminate scum like us.
But then something happened, and if I hadn’t witnessed it myself, I would have thought it some kind of miracle or hallucination. Suddenly, the antiaircraft signal rang out, loud and clear, and a red light went off in the hall. After a second of total silence, we heard a loud roar followed by what seemed like an endless series of explosions that reverberated through the courthouse. Bombings had become a daily fact of life in Berlin during those months, so we tried to remain calm and waited for it to end. We would never have guessed that it was anything other than a typical air raid, but it turned out to be the most intense bombing the Allies had launched since the start of the war. Before we even realized what was happening, a powerful crash blasted through the roof of the People’s Court. Plaster fell from the walls like giant blocks of talcum powder, and a torrent of smoke and soot swept through the courtroom as if it had suddenly begun to snow. The plaster fell from the walls in chunks, but that seemed to be the extent of the damage. Either we would wait for the proceedings to continue or the judge would call a recess until the next day. When the smoke cleared a bit, we saw that a heavy chunk of stone had fallen onto the judge’s bench, and next to it lay the head of Judge Roland Freisler, split in half, with a river of blood spilling down his face and staining the death sentence Schlabrendorff had just received. Other than Freisler, no one was injured.
The court security guards ran to the street in search of a doctor and after a few minutes returned with a little man in a white jacket who had sought shelter from the bombs in the courthouse vestibule. As soon as he approached the body, the doctor announced that nothing could be done: Freisler had died instantly. The rest of us remained exactly where we were, dumbfounded, as the security guards glared at us with hatred in their eyes, not knowing what to do next. That was when we heard the doctor’s firm voice: “I won’t do it. I refuse. I’m sorry. Arrest me if you want, but I won’t sign that death certificate. Call someone else.” Later on we found out that the doctor, a man by the name of Rolf Schleicher, was the brother of Rüdiger Schleicher, who had worked in the Institute for Aerial Legislation before being condemned to death by Freisler a few weeks earlier.
Following Freisler’s death, the trial was postponed again and again as the Allied bombings continued to destroy the city. In March 1945, I was transferred from one prison to another until an American regiment finally liberated us shortly before the Nazis surrendered in May. Unlike most of my friends and fellow conspirators, I survived.
On the afternoon of July 20, 1944, a stroke of luck saved Hitler’s life. If Stauffenberg’s second bomb had gone off on that afternoon, or if that briefcase had been placed just a bit closer to Hitler, or if there had been a chain reaction, or if Stauffenberg had made absolutely certain to plant himself closer to Hitler … On the morning of February 3, 1945, a similar kind of luck saved my own life. If I had been tried on some other day, or if that bomb hadn’t dropped precisely when it did, or if that piece of rock had fallen a few centimeters to the left or to the right, or if Freisler had dodged the blow or run for cover somewhere … I still don’t know how logical—or sane—it is to establish a connection between these two events, but I do. Why do I insist, so many years after the fact, to connect these two unrelated incidents? Why do I continue to present them as one, as if they were two manifestations of one single act of will? Why do I refuse to admit that there is nothing hidden behind them, that they are no different from any other human misfortunes? Why do I cling so obstinately to these ideas of destiny, fate, and luck?
Perhaps because other unforeseeable circumstances, no less terrible than these, have forced me to write these words. Perhaps I string together these seemingly unrelated events—Hitler’s salvation and my own—because this is the first time that humanity has been such a close witness to such catastrophic destruction. And our era, unlike other historical moments, has been largely determined by such twists of fate, those little signs that remind us of the ungovernable, chaotic nature of the realm in which we live. I propose, then, to tell the story of the century. My century. My version of how fate has ruled the world, and of how we men of science try in vain to domesticate its fury. But this is also the story of several lives—the one that I have endured for over eighty years and, more important, those of people that, once again by uncontrollable acts of fate, became intertwined with my own.
Sometimes I like to think that I am the thread that connects all these stories—that my existence and memory and these very words are nothing more than the vertices of the one all-encompassing, inevitable theory that brought our lives together. Perhaps my goal seems overly ambitious, or even insane. It doesn’t matter. When your everyday existence becomes marked by death, when all hope is lost and all you see is the long road to your own extinction, this is the only thing that can justify your remaining days on Earth.
PROFESSOR GUSTAV LINKS
MATHEMATICIAN, UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG
NOVEMBER 10, 1989
BOOK ONE (#ulink_3a851269-f8bd-5c83-b024-ed380183873b)
LAWS OF NARRATIVE MOTION (#ulink_80bebfb0-e591-560c-bd65-059e0a073670)
LAW I:All narratives are written by a narrator (#ulink_108ed580-6fbe-5988-bc63-6c72e02d2785)
At first glance, this statement may appear not only paradoxical but decidedly stupid, yet it is more profound than it may seem. For years, we have been led to believe that when we read a novel or a story written in the first person—and I say this simply to illustrate a point, since this book is not a work of fiction—nobody is there to guide us through the plot and its various riddles. The plot, instead, presents itself in an almost magical manner, as if it were life itself. Through this process, we sense that a book is a parallel world which we make the active decision to enter. Nothing could be further from the truth. If there is one thing I cannot abide it is the cowardice of those authors who attempt to hide behind their words, as if nothing of their true selves filters into their phrases and verbs. They numb us with their overdoses of supposed literary objectivity. Obviously I am not the first person to identify this deceitful game, but I do want to make clear that I fully disagree with this scandalous method that certain authors employ in an effort to cover the tracks of their crimes.
COROLLARY I
For the reasons mentioned above, I should clarify that I, Gustav Links—a man of flesh and blood just like you—am the author of these words. But who am I, really? You can easily see this simply by glancing at the front cover of this book. But what else do you know? Forget about me for a moment and look at the cover once again. For one thing, this volume was finished—not written but finished—in 1989. And what else do you know, aside from the little that I have already told you: that I participated in the failed plot to overthrow Hitler on July 20, 1944, that I was arrested and tried, and that a twist of fatum finally intervened and saved my life?
Nevertheless, I hope you don’t think I would be so presumptuous as to subject you to the story of my life. This has never been my intention, and as many others before me have said, I simply hope to serve as a guide who will walk you through this story: I will be a Serenus, an old, deaf Virgil who promises, from this moment on, to accompany and guide the reader. As the result of an act of luck, of the inevitable, of history, of chance, of God—call it what you like—I was forced to participate in the events I am about to describe. But I can assure you that my only goal is to gain your trust. Because of this, there is no way I could possibly trick you into thinking that I don’t exist and that I haven’t participated in the transcendental events I am about to describe.
LAW II:All narrators offer one, singular truth (#ulink_10fef7bd-0702-5677-bd0c-7a4cbd150b23)
I wonder if you have ever heard of a man named Erwin Schrödinger. Aside from being the celebrated physicist who discovered wave mechanics, he was also an inspired soul and one of the protagonists of this drama, a kind of Don Juan in the body of a wizened, old professor (of course, only now do I allow myself to describe him with such familiarity; when I first met him I never would have dared). He used to wear the most endearing pair of little round eyeglasses, and was forever surrounded by beautiful women … but that is beside the point. I only mention these details as an afterthought, out of chronological order, and only because I must. Although the notion of subjective truth certainly occurred to the Sophists in ancient Greece and to Henry James in the nineteenth century, it was our good friend Erwin who established the scientific foundations of such a theory, and his theory is one I find particularly satisfying. I won’t go into detail, but I will point out one of its more unexpected consequences: I am what I see. What is this statement trying to communicate? A platitude: that truth is relative. Every observer, whether contemplating an electron or an entire universe in motion, unwittingly completes what Schrödinger called a “wave packet” released by all objects under observation. When subject and object make contact, what emerges is a jumbled mixture of the two, which then leads us to the none-too-surprising conclusion that, in practice, each mind is a world unto itself.
COROLLARY II
The ramifications of the previous statement must seem as transparent as a drop of morning dew; in fact, it’s the oldest excuse in the book. The truth, it claims, is my truth, and that is that. The quantum wave functions that I complete with my act of observation are unique and immutable—and this is supported by a litany of theories I don’t particularly wish to elaborate on right now (the uncertainty principle, the theory of complementarity, the exclusion principle, among others). In essence, they state that no one has the authority to declare his truth as superior to that of someone else. I am telling you this, I repeat, as a way of laying my cards out on the table. If this comes across as unbearable, deceitful, or even manipulative, please know that it is not my intention but rather the consequence of a physical law I cannot help but obey. As such, I feel no need to apologize for this.
LAW III:All narrators possess a motive for narrating (#ulink_a5e0d500-34a0-5607-96d5-53d78c04b59a)
The problem with axioms is that they always seem so tediously obvious that many people think they could easily be mathematicians themselves. It’s inevitable. But to recapitulate: If we agree with Laws I and II, that all texts must have an author, and that said author possesses a single, exclusive truth, then the next declaration will seem even more tedious. It states that if things do not appear from nowhere, it is because someone has specifically intended for it to be that way. I realize that this axiom does not apply to the world itself—at least, it seems highly unlikely that we will soon understand why someone chose to create the world as we know it—but I am not responsible for the uncertainties that exist outside these pages. We must banish the terrible theological temptation by which literary critics and scientists declare ordinary texts to be modern-day version of the Bible. No author is God, or anything like God—believe me—and no single page comes close to being even the worst imitation of the Tablets of the Law or the Gospel. And obviously, men of flesh and blood have little in common with the men we read of in books. Our metaphorical tendencies can sometimes get us into very big trouble. Here, then, is the real mystery of all mysteries: Unlike what occurs in the natural universe, books are always written with a motive, and these motives can often be quite petty indeed.
COROLLARY III
Don’t assume, however, that it will be so easy to discern my motives. Scientific research, the kind that I performed for years—the kind that you will soon undertake—is much more complicated than baking a cake from an old family recipe. I only wish it were that simple! So don’t get unduly excited: I have no intention of revealing my reasons in one fell swoop. I may be aware of them myself, but even I don’t know if I have fully made sense of them. With a bit of patience, perhaps you will be the ones to disentangle them. Remember what Schrödinger said: For a true act of recognition to occur, an interaction must take place between observer and observed, and now I find myself in the latter (and somewhat less comfortable) category. I hope that you enjoy studying these incidents and hypothesizing upon their possible causes—a task that I have realized so many times in the past, though under very different conditions. In the world of science, this is the key to success. I could make your work easier by saying that I shall present my version of the facts and my conclusions to the world, that I will tell my own, personal truth. But at this stage of my life—I am over eighty—I am still not fully convinced by my own reasons. If you had asked me forty or even twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have wasted a second in subscribing to the above-mentioned theories. No, now it is different: I see how my old, sinister friend lies in wait for me. I see how every breath requires a superhuman effort, and I see how the most trivial of human activities for you—eating, bathing, defecating—have become nothing less than minor miracles for me. And so I don’t quite know if my beliefs have remained the same, either. If you are willing to accept the challenge—how pompous; let’s call it a game instead—you can be the one to decide whether I am right or wrong.
CRIMES OF WAR (#ulink_dd699c40-56b2-5ab8-af9c-d26d4d2a2a1b)
When Lieutenant Francis P. Bacon, former agent of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, and scientific adviser to the U.S. forces stationed in Germany, arrived at the Nuremberg train station at 8 A.M. on October 15, 1946, nobody was there to greet him. Gunther Sadel, officer of the counterintelligence unit attached to Brigadier General Leroy H. Watson, chief of the North American forces, was to have picked up Bacon and taken him to the gallows where the Nazi war criminals were to be executed. But when Bacon alighted from the train, Sadel was nowhere to be found. The train station was virtually empty.
Bacon waited for a few moments but quickly lost patience and asked two military policemen guarding the train depot what was going on. Nobody knew. A sudden silence fell upon them. Aside from a few railway workers—mainly POWs—whose job was to keep the train tracks in working condition, nobody there seemed to move an inch. In the distance, Bacon spotted a couple of officers and, a bit farther on, the railway station manager, but he figured they wouldn’t be much help. His only option was to walk to the Palace of Justice.
Bacon was furious. The autumn wind blasted against his face. The streets remained deserted as ever, as if people were still expecting air raids. Offended and annoyed, Bacon didn’t even bother to gaze at what remained of the city. At one time, it may have been the cradle of the great Meistersänger and, until recently, the proud home of the Nazi headquarters, but the war (and eleven Allied bombing raids) had reduced it to a city in ruins. Little piles of stones now lay where churches once stood; houses and buildings were now nothing more than minor, annoying obstacles in Bacon’s path—all these things well-deserved losses that were hardly worth mourning. Not far off—though it hardly even crossed his mind—was the museum that had once been Germany’s most important, as well as the house where Albrecht Dürer lived until his death in 1528. Now, of course, both were reduced to ashes and rubble.
As far as Bacon saw it, Nuremberg was nothing more than one of the hateful Nazi havens where thousands of young people had flaunted their gray shirts, waved their banners emblazoned with eagles, and brandished their giant torches with pride. There, they had paid homage to Hitler and venerated the swastikas which, just like prehistoric spiders perched upon their little eggs, crawled along the red ribbons that hung down from the public buildings of Germany. Every September, Nuremberg had been host to the Nazi party’s annual festival, and in 1935 the Führer chose this city as the site from which he would enact his anti-Semitic laws. Nuremberg, in addition, was also the repository of the Reichskleinodien and the Reichsheiligtümer, the ancient imperial heirlooms—and symbols of Nazi power—that he had stolen from the Hofburg in Vienna after the annexation of Austria. The celebrated Lance of Longines was among these treasures, all of which eventually became emblems of Aryan authority. As far as Bacon (and the International Military Court) was concerned, tears of sorrow and shame should be shed over the Jews who perished in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps—not the justified punishment of one of the bastions of the Third Reich.
Bacon was on the verge of turning twenty-seven, but from the moment he arrived in Europe, in February of 1943, he had made a concerted effort to appear older, stronger, and more imposing than he was. He wanted to wipe the slate clean of all the weakness that had tortured him so in the past and which, to some degree, had forced him out of the United States. He could no longer even try to be the same respectable, reasonable, sincere man he had been before. By accepting this mission—and giving up his job as a scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton—he could not only exercise his desire for vengeance but also prove to himself that he was now a new man. He was determined to prove that he was on the side of the winners, and so he exhibited not even the slightest morsel of compassion for the defeated.
From a distance, Bacon was barely distinguishable from the handful of American soldiers patrolling the area: dark brown hair worn in a military-style haircut, pale eyes, and an angular nose which he rather liked. He fancied himself as a man who wore his uniform with panache (actually, he was a bit stiff), and he went to great pains to display his various decorations, despite the physical discomfort they produced. Upon his shoulder he bore a bulky military backpack that contained almost all his earthly possessions: a few changes of clothing, some photographs (which he hadn’t dared look at since leaving New Jersey), and some old copies of Annalen der Physik, one of the more important journals in his field, pilfered from some or other library he had passed through.
In reality, Bacon had not gone to Nuremberg specifically for the executions. Initially, only thirty people had been granted permission to witness the event, but then General Watson invited him a bit later on, and he accepted enthusiastically. Bacon had been referred to Watson by General William J. Donovan, founder of the OSS and, for a few weeks, special assistant to the U.S. chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson. (Not long before, in the wake of an acrimonious misunderstanding with Jackson, a veteran justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Donovan had been forced to resign for having interviewed Hermann Goering without Jackson’s permission.) Bacon, however, was on a different, perhaps more pedestrian mission: His job was to study the recorded minutes of the copious testimonies relating to scientific research under the Third Reich, and ferret out any and all “inconsistencies,” to use the term favored by his superiors—that is, contradictions in the many statements made by the defendants.
The Palace of Justice was one of the few public buildings in Nuremberg that had survived the wartime bombings, and had recently been restored by Captain Daniel Kiley, a young Harvard architect also under the command of the OSS. Upon reaching the city center Bacon had little trouble identifying the building: Once protected by an ample plaza filled with trees, the large group of buildings featured archways on the ground floor, huge picture windows, and a series of pointed towers. The prison, located toward the back of the building, consisted of four rectangular blocks set in a half-moon, its exterior protected by a high semicircular wall. The Nazi prisoners were housed together in cell block C, steps away from a small chamber that was once a gymnasium but was now a gallows.
It was 9:15 when Bacon finally reached the security guards at the entrance to the Nuremberg military prison. After reviewing his credentials, the soldiers announced that they were under orders to bar all access to the building—most specifically, the gymnasium—until the executions were over. Bacon tried to explain that he had come on General Watson’s invitation, but the guards were impassive, and refused his request to summon Gunther Sadel: “General Rikard’s orders” was their only response.
Scores of journalists swarmed about the scene. Aside from the International Military Tribunal’s official photographer, only two reporters—chosen by lottery—were granted access to the gymnasium. All the others were forced to wait, just like Bacon, for the press conference that would announce the deaths of the war criminals. In an effort to scoop the story, several newspapers had already published early editions. The New York Herald Tribune, for example, had given the news a full, eight-column headline:
11 NAZI CHIEFS HANGED IN NUREMBERG PRISON: GOERING AND HENCHMEN PAY FOR THEIR WAR CRIMES
The executions were scheduled to take place in the afternoon, so Bacon still had a few hours to locate someone who might help him get in. Before anything else, however, he would go to the Grand Hotel, where a room had been reserved in his name. But bad luck seemed to dog his every step; when he arrived at the hotel, the manager declared that there were no rooms available. After patiently explaining that he was there on a special mission, Bacon asked to speak to the supervisor in charge, and a pompous bell captain cleverly rose to the occasion, becoming the de facto hotel manager for a moment, and quickly solved the problem: The hotel had not expected Bacon until the following day, when several rooms would be vacated (“The show ends today, you know?”). Since it was only for one night, however, room number 14—“Hitler’s room”—could be made available.
Bacon climbed the stairs and settled into the immense suite. The luxurious appointments of the Nazi days were long gone, but they were nevertheless the most sumptuous accommodations Bacon had been offered in recent months. Although it did seem like some kind of bad joke that the walls now surrounding him had stood guard over the dead body of Adolf Hitler. Who would have ever thought? What would Elizabeth say? Oh … it was useless to even think about that: For better or for worse, Elizabeth wanted nothing to do with him. Bacon flung himself onto the bed, but it produced an illicit, morbid sensation, as if he were desecrating a sacred space. The idea of urinating on all the furniture crossed his mind, but then he thought better of it: Why should the hotel’s housekeeping staff have to pay for his capricious behavior? He got up and walked into the bathroom. He studied the spacious tub, the sink, the toilet, the bidet. Hitler’s greasy skin had surely rubbed up against all those shiny surfaces. He could just picture Hitler, naked and defenseless, admiring his flaccid member before submerging himself in the water; Bacon could even see the Führer’s defecations, sliding down the hole that he now found himself peering into….
Bewildered, Bacon studied himself in the mirror. Two large circles under his eyes dominated his face; not only had he matured, but he seemed to have grown old. He ran his hands through his hair and, in an attempt to concentrate on something, located one or two gray hairs and decided they were proof of his imminent decline. He was no longer a boy wonder, a child prodigy, or any of those things that had always kept him at the margins of society. As he began to take off his uniform, he mused at how very different it was from the one he used to wear. Trapped within the privileged walls of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he had very nearly married a woman he didn’t love. There, his life had been a sheltered one, protected from the outside world, just like that of an insect pinned to the inside of a glass case in a museum. His departure from Princeton had been nothing less than a spectacular scandal, but it was also a miracle, a revelation. For the first time ever he sensed that life was a tangible presence that he could feel upon his skin, far from all the desks and blackboards, and the tedium of all those conferences and colloquia. He never would have dreamed that he would derive such satisfaction as a soldier fighting for his country, but now he was certain that he had made the right choice. He would have plenty of time, at some point in the future, to return to the world of science—but then it would be as a hero, not as a fugitive.
He turned on the faucet and waited for the hot water to pour out, but nothing more than a weak stream of lukewarm droplets emerged from the tap. “The Führer wouldn’t have stood for this,” he laughed to himself, and proceeded to bathe with the help of a towel and a freshly opened, pungent cake of soap. When he was finished, he went back to the bed and, before he knew it, fell into a deep sleep, though the unsettling dream he had nearly asphyxiated him: There he was, in the middle of a dark, rainy forest, when suddenly Vivien appeared out of nowhere. Vivien, the young black woman from Princeton with whom he had maintained a secret relationship for so long. Ruefully, he noted that his life was strewn with puddles and potholes; in fact, it seemed to have evolved into something more like a moldy, threatening swamp. In the dream, he tried to kiss Vivien when suddenly he found himself face-to-face with his ex-fiancée Elizabeth instead. “There’s lipstick on your mouth,” she said to him, and proceeded to wipe it off with a handkerchief. “You shouldn’t do that,” she reprimanded him. “It’s bad, very bad.” By the time Bacon managed to extricate himself, it was too late: Vivien had already disappeared.
It was almost three in the afternoon when he awoke. He kicked himself: This was the worst possible thing he could have done. Not only had he neglected his work, but he had done so thrashing about in Hitler’s bedsheets! He quickly put on his clothes, scurried down the stairs, and ran as fast as he could to the pressroom at the Palace of Justice.
A few hours later, he was informed of the news which would soon travel to the rest of the world like an infectious disease. From the crumbling streets of the ancient medieval burgh, the communiqué was sent out that the Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering—the highest-ranking Nazi prisoner sentenced by the International Military Tribunal—had been found dead in his cell a few hours before Sergeant John Woods was to carry out the hanging for which he had been sentenced. According to the rumors, Goering had ingested a capsule of cyanide, a cruel, eleventh-hour joke which allowed him the last laugh over the judges’ decision. “One day there will be statues of me in every plaza and little figurines in my likeness in every home in Germany,” the Reichsmarschall had once arrogantly proclaimed, so certain he was that he would be redeemed in the eyes of posterity. After his death, a stack of letters was found in his cell (number 5, cell block C), all of them written with the same small, precise lettering. The first of these letters explained the reasons for his suicide:
To the Allied Control Council: I would have had no objection to being shot. However, I will not facilitate the execution of Germany’s Reichsmarschall by hanging! For the sake of Germany, I cannot permit this. Moreover, I feel no moral obligation to submit to my enemies’ punishment. For this reason, I have chosen to die like the great Hannibal.
On another sheet of paper, addressed to General Roy V. Rickard, member of the Quadripartite Commission in charge of supervising the executions, Goering confessed that he had always kept a capsule of cyanide close by. He also wrote a letter to his wife: “After serious consideration and sincere prayer to the Lord, I have decided to take my own life, lest I be executed in so terrible a fashion by my enemies…. My last heartbeats are for our great and eternal love.” Henry Gerecke, the Protestant pastor who ministered to the German prisoners, was the last recipient in this small pile of letters. In his note to Gerecke, Goering asked for pardon and explained that the motivation for his actions had been purely political.
The next day, Gunther Sadel told Bacon all he knew about the matter. At 9:35 the previous evening, October 14, the guard had informed the necessary officials that the prisoner was resting peacefully in his cot after Dr. Ludwig Pflücker had administered him a sleeping pill. Just like every night, a soldier was stationed at the door to Goering’s cell, specifically to keep close watch over him until the early dawn; after all, it was to be his last night under prison surveillance. Colonel Burton Andrus, the chief officer of the prison, had suspended all external communications with the outside world as a special precaution. The guards’ only source of outside contact was a telephone line connecting them to the staff at the central offices, who continually updated them, inning by inning, with the score of the World Series, which was under way at the time.
All of a sudden, someone began calling for Pastor Gerecke’s aid. It was the voice of Sergeant Gregori Timishin: Something was wrong with Goering. The chaplain ran toward the cell of the once plump Reichsmarschall, but when he arrived, he knew instantly that any resuscitation attempt would be pointless. Goering’s face, which had seduced so many thousands of men and women, the same face whose glare had inspired both fear and fury among his captors, was now focused on a spot somewhere far off in the distance. Only one obstinate eye remained open. His rosy complexion had turned greenish, and his body, though twenty-five kilos lighter since his imprisonment, lay like a bale of hay, impossible to move. The cell smelled like bitter almonds. Gerecke took his pulse and said, “Good Lord, this man is dead.” By the time the other members of the Joint Staffs arrived, it was already too late: Out of either cowardice or pride, Goering had foiled them.
Bacon could hardly believe it: At the very last moment, that miserable fiend had gotten away with it. And Bacon was not alone. The general feeling among the Allied forces was one of bitter disappointment, and several newspapers even dared publish the following headline: GOERING CHEATS HIS EXECUTIONERS.
“Where the hell did he get that pill?” Bacon asked Sadel.
“That’s what everyone wants to know,” Sadel responded. “They’ve already launched a full-blown investigation, though for the moment are not pointing the finger at anyone. Andrus is shattered,” he added, referring to the prison director. “A lot of people think it’s his fault, but you know, Goering wasn’t the first prisoner to commit suicide. I don’t think anyone could have prevented it.”
“But Goering! The day before his execution! It’s unbelievable.” Bacon shook his head, incredulous. “Could it have been that German doctor?”
“Pflücker? I doubt it,” said Sadel. “It would have been too difficult. The guards always searched him carefully before he entered each cell, and the pill he gave Goering was only a tranquilizer…. No, the Reichsmarschall must have had it hidden among his things, in the storage room, and someone must have brought it to him.”
“But who would want to help that pig?” Bacon asked, cracking his knuckles.
“Well, it’s not as simple as it may seem. I never had contact with him, but several people have said that Hermann was quite a character. During the trial proceedings not only Germans but Americans actually sympathized with him. He was just too cynical and biting to hate.”
A strange explanation, thought Bacon, especially coming from such a young man like Sadel, who was half Jewish and at age thirteen had been forced to flee Germany to find his father in the United States. Since then, he knew nothing of his mother’s whereabouts or whether she was alive or dead, for she had been forced to divorce his father and remain in Berlin. When he returned to Germany with General Watson, Sadel was given permission to search for her, and when he finally found her, she agreed to be one of the witnesses for the prosecution.
“Tex Wheelis is the prime suspect,” Sadel continued. “He was the officer in charge of the storage room. They say that he and Goering had become friendly, and that he might have been the one to help him. But we want to be able to find out for certain. The men in charge want to put this issue to bed. Their opinion is that it was an accident, and they feel the case should be treated as such.”
“An accident?” Bacon was getting more and more heated. “Hundreds of people worked for months to have him hanged and at the last minute he managed to escape. Was Hitler’s suicide in Berlin another ‘accident’? And what about the Final Solution? Doesn’t that make you feel as if all of this has been useless? That we fought against an evil that got the best of us in the end?”
“The purpose of the trials was to uncover the truth, Lieutenant. To expose the truth about the Third Reich to the entire world, and to ensure that no one can ever justify the kind of atrocities that were committed. Who can deny the horror of the Nazi regime, the gas chambers and the millions of deaths, after seeing all those photographs?”
“But given the situation, do you think the truth will ever come out? The only truth we have is the one we are capable of believing.”
The following morning, Lieutenant Bacon watched from a distance as the dead bodies of the eleven Nazi chiefs—Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister of the Third Reich; Hans Frank, governor-general of Occupied Poland; Wilhelm Frick, governor of Bohemia and Moravia; Alfred Jodl, chief of operation staff of the High Command of the Wehrmacht; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich Main Security Office and second-in-command to Himmler; Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the Wehrmacht; Alfred Rosenberg, official philosopher of the regime and minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories; Fritz Sauckel, plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment; Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reich commissioner of the Netherlands; Julius Streicher, editor and publisher of the newspaper Der Stürmer; and of course, Hermann Goering, Reichsmarschall and chief of the Luftwaffe and second-in-command to Hitler—were transported in military trucks to the cemetery in Ostfriedrichhof, in Munich, where they would be cremated. He stared at the long caravan of cars and armed guards that followed the trucks. The bodies had been placed in individual sacks, each one tagged with a false name. The Germans in charge of the ovens were told that the bodies were those of American soldiers who had died during the war; it was a precaution the authorities took to ensure that nothing of the cremations would ever resurface in the form of Nazi mementos. For this reason, no one was to associate those ashes with the Nazi leaders condemned to death by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.
Almost instantly the oppressive tension gripping the city seemed to lift. The work was finally finished, despite the fact that nobody was satisfied with the results—especially the Soviets, who never hid their displeasure with the course the trials had taken; at one point they even accused the American and English forces of allowing Goering to commit suicide. There were still many minor Nazi functionaries waiting for their day in court, though the eyes of the entire world were not likely to remain as permanently transfixed upon the halls of the Palace of Justice.
But as I said before, Lieutenant Francis P. Bacon had not come to Nuremberg to attend the executions. His mission was of an entirely different nature, having much more to do with his insights and talents as a man of science.
About halfway through the war, while working at the Institute for Advanced Study, Bacon decided to enlist in the army. He was sent to England to make contact with the British scientists there, and in 1945 he joined the Alsos mission, led by the Dutch physicist Samuel I. Goudsmit, who was responsible for archiving all available information relating to the German scientific program, and to the Germans’ work on the atomic bomb. He was also the official who ordered the capture of the German physicists who were working on it.
Once his tour of duty was over, Bacon could have returned to the United States, but he chose to continue working as a scientific consultant to the Allied Control Council, the entity responsible for governing Occupied Germany. Finally, in early October of 1946, a few days after the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg handed down its sentences to the Nazi defendants, Bacon was summoned by the Office of Military Intelligence to review some of the documents from the trial archives. From this research he would produce a report illustrating the points he felt most relevant to his assigned task of searching for the inconsistencies in the war criminals’ testimony. Of his report, one small detail emerged which caught the attention of his military commanders.
On July 30, 1946, in the main hall of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, seven German organizations went on trial: the Nazi party leadership; the cabinet of the Reich; the security police, known as the SS; the secret police, known as the Gestapo; the Security Service, or SD; the Storm Troops, or SA; and the Military High Command of the Third Reich. In the weeks leading up to the trials, the tribunal announced that the trial proceedings were to be broadcast throughout Germany so that anyone who had been affected by any of the accused groups might step forward and offer his or her testimony. More than 300,000 responses flooded the Palace of Justice. From this pool, 603 members of these organizations were brought to Nuremberg to testify. In the end, the court admitted the testimony of some 90 people—mostly pertaining to the SS—who had refused to commit dishonest actions in the fulfillment of their duties.
One of these testimonies caught the attention of the U.S. Intelligence Services. During this process, a little man named Wolfram von Sievers, president of the Society for German Ancestral Heritage (and, as was later discovered, the head of an office of the Ahnenerbe, the SS office of scientific investigation). Von Sievers was an extremely nervous witness; during his long hours sitting on the witness bench, he never stopped rubbing his hands, and his cheeks were perpetually drenched in perspiration. He stumbled over his words, repeated certain phrases over and over again, and, as if that weren’t enough, he was also a stutterer, which further complicated the jobs of the extensive network of simultaneous translators who, for the first time in history, performed their task in the courtrooms of Nuremberg.
While being interrogated by one of the Allied prosecutors, Von Sievers made the first in a series of controversial declarations. According to an agreement signed by the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the SS regularly sent skulls of “Bolshevik Jews” to Von Sievers’s laboratory so that he might perform experiments on them. When Von Sievers was asked if he knew how the SS obtained those craniums, he replied that they came from the prisoners of war at the Eastern Front, who were assassinated specifically for this scientific research. The prosecutor pressed on: “And what was the objective of your ‘research’?” Once again Von Sievers stumbled over his words, incoherent and stuttering. Finally, after persistent pressure from the judges, he gave in and delivered a long, wildly digressive speech on phrenology and the physical development of ancient civilizations, covering everything from the Toltecs and Atlantis to Aryan supremacy and mystical shrines like Agartha and Shambhala. More specifically, however, he explained that his own task had been to establish the biological inferiority of the Semitic people, to become intimately familiar with their physiological development over the ages, which presumably would enable him to ascertain the best way to eliminate their defects.
When he was finished speaking, Von Sievers looked like one of the skulls he claimed to have been studying, and his hands were now trembling uncontrollably. The prosecutor, however, was getting fed up; he had only interrogated Von Sievers to prove that the SS and the Nazi regime in general had indeed committed atrocities. He certainly hadn’t intended this to be an exposé of the repulsive scientific investigation undertaken by Von Sievers, who, it turned out, would one day be tried and convicted for crimes against humanity.
“Where did you obtain the funding for this research, Professor Von Sievers?”
“From the SS, as I have already stated,” he stammered.
“Was it common procedure for the SS to commission you to perform this type of research?”
“Yes.”
“And did you say that the SS provided the financing for it?”
“Yes, directly.”
“What do you mean when you say ‘directly,’ Professor?” The prosecutor sensed that he had finally hit upon a lead that might actually get him somewhere.
Von Sievers attempted to clear his throat.
“Well, all the scientific research undertaken in Germany first had to be cleared by the supervision and control centers of the Research Council of the Third Reich.”
The prosecutor had hit the nail on the head. This was exactly what he wanted to hear. The Research Council, just like so many other dependencies of the Third Reich, fell under the supervision of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering.
“Thank you, Professor. That will be all,” the prosecutor concluded.
Von Sievers, however, added one more rather unexpected statement which, by order of the judges, was stricken from the record at the defense lawyers’ request. Nevertheless, the statement did appear in the transcript Bacon received from the Office of Military Intelligence, and the lieutenant studied it closely, as it was highlighted in red ink. It said: “Before any funds could be released, each project had to be approved by Hitler’s scientific adviser. I never did find out the identity of this person, but according to rumor, it was a well-known figure. A man who enjoyed a prominent position in the scientific community, and who operated under the code name Klingsor.”
A few days later, on August 20, the courtroom was packed, a sure sign that Hermann Goering, the Great Actor in this theater of justice, was to make his appearance. He arrived dressed in a white jacket—in his glory days, he had been known for wearing this uniform. Ruddy-faced and volatile, Goering was the heart and soul of the trials. Acerbic and straightforward, he had that special kind of impertinence that comes from years of giving orders without ever hearing a single protest. He faced his interrogators as if he were dictating his memoirs. In his best moments, he displayed an acidic, penetrating sense of humor, and in his worst, he was like a caged monster, ready and waiting to take a bite out of anyone, even Otto Stahmer, his own defense attorney. Stahmer was responsible for directing this short scene:
“Did you ever issue an order to carry out medical experiments on human subjects?” he asked. Goering took a deep breath.
“No.”
“Are you acquainted with a Dr. Rascher, who has been accused of performing scientific research on human guinea pigs at Dachau, for the Luftwaffe?”
“No.”
“Did you ever issue an order authorizing anyone to carry out unspeakable experiments on prisoners?”
“No.”
“As president of the Research Council of the Reich, did you ever order plans for the development of a system of mass destruction?”
“No.”
Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, the British prosecutor, rose from his seat.
“You were a great pilot,” he said courteously, “with an impressive service record. How is it possible that you cannot remember those experiments, which were performed so as to verify the resistance of the uniforms used by the air force?”
“I had many tasks to attend to,” Goering explained, with the same civility as his interrogator. “Tens of thousands of orders were issued in my name. Justice Jackson has accused me of having ‘fingers in every pie,’ but it would have been impossible for me to keep track of all the scientific experiments undertaken by the Third Reich.”
Maxwell-Fyfe then presented as evidence a series of letters between Heinrich Himmler and Field Marshall Erhard Milch, Goering’s right-hand man. In one of these letters, Milch thanked Himmler for his assistance in facilitating Dr. Rascher’s experiments with high-altitude flights. One of these experiments involved a Jewish prisoner who was flown to twenty-nine thousand feet without oxygen. The subject died after thirteen minutes.
“Is it possible,” continued Maxwell-Fyfe, “that a high-ranking official directly under your command—such as Milch—could have been aware of these experiments even though you were not?”
“The areas under my control were classified in three categories,” Goering explained, almost smiling. “‘Urgent,’ ‘Important,’ and ‘Routine.’ The experiments performed by the medical inspector of the Luftwaffe fell under the third category and did not require my attention.”
Never again was mention made of the scientist whose job was to approve the Third Reich’s scientific projects. Never again was Klingsor’s name mentioned. Goering certainly didn’t bring it up, and Von Sievers himself, upon a second interrogation, denied ever having uttered the name. This one dubious mention was all Bacon had to go on.
The lieutenant slammed the dossier shut.
HYPOTHESES: FROM QUANTUM PHYSICS TO ESPIONAGE (#ulink_b17f2c7b-309f-55a3-81f4-b197d73f2101)
HYPOTHESIS I:On Bacon’s Childhood and Early Years (#ulink_366e672d-dc05-56ad-a6b2-3927dfe67a6e)
On November 10, 1919, the New York Times ran the following front-page headlines:
LIGHTS ALL ASKEW IN THE HEAVENS
Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations
EINSTEIN THEORY TRIUMPHS
Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry
A BOOK FOR 12 WISE MEN
No More in All the World Could Comprehend It, Said Einstein When His Daring Publishers Accepted It
Albert Einstein was forty years old, and this was the first time his name had ever appeared in the New York Times. His first article on special relativity, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which included the famous equation E=mc
, had been published fourteen years earlier, in 1905, and four years had passed since his last revision to the general relativity theory. Nevertheless, this was the moment when the public first became aware of Einstein and his significance. Einstein would become something of an oracle, the symbol of a new age, and almost every word he uttered would hereafter be recorded and reprinted by newspapers all over the world. The Treaty of Versailles had been signed only a few months earlier, putting an end to the Great War, and the world was now a different place. People everywhere seemed to sense that humanity was at the dawn of a new era, and Einstein was its prophet, a man whose advice and wisdom should be heeded. In a letter sent to his friend Max Born (one of the first interpreters of the relativity theory), Einstein actually lamented his newfound circumstance, with the modest self-confidence that he was famous for: “Just like the fairy-tale hero who transforms everything he touches into gold, everything I touch turns into scandal for the newspapers.”
From 1916 to 1917, Einstein had been developing a proof that could establish the validity of the general relativity theory. Unfortunately, there were few methods that could conclusively prove his assumptions were accurate. One of them was to gauge the curvature of light as it moved closer to a sufficiently large object, but this could only be done during a solar eclipse. Unfortunately for Einstein, Europe was mired in war at the time, and communications between German scientists and the outside world had come to an abrupt halt. As such, few physicists even knew of Einstein’s project, and he was forced to wait for the war to end before he could find someone who would be able to confirm his findings.
Long before the Great War started, Einstein had struck up a correspondence with Sir Arthur Eddington, and once Einstein was able to resume contact after the war ended, the illustrious English physicist immediately jumped at the chance to test the relativity theory in an experimental setting. They quickly set the date: May 29, 1919, just a few months after the armistice was signed. On this day, they would be able to observe a spectacular solar eclipse from any point close to the equator. In early 1919, Eddington secured the necessary financing—one thousand pounds—from the Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Dyson, which enabled him to prepare two expeditions to the equator. One, which he led, would go to the island of Principe, off the west coast of Africa, and the other group would set off for Sobral, in the north of Brazil. According to Eddington’s calculations, both were ideal points from which to measure the shift that would occur when rays of starlight approached the sun. This, following Einstein’s calculations, would be 1.745 seconds of arc—double the estimate produced by traditional physics. With Dyson’s support, Eddington left for Príncipe in March.
On May 29, the day of the eclipse, Eddington arose at dawn and discovered, to his dismay, that a stubborn layer of clouds was now perched directly over the island and seemed determined to ruin his plans. After all his preparations and hard work, Nature herself seemed poised to betray her students. There was the hope, however, that the team in Sobral would be able to obtain results, but even that wasn’t enough to lift the astronomer’s spirits. Eddington cared not for the glory that the experiment could bring him, but the pride of being the first to prove this radical, new notion of what the world was. It was as if fate had played a cruel practical joke at his expense: After a few minutes, the clouds gave way to one of the most violent thunderstorms Eddington had ever seen in his entire life. The thunder reverberated in his ears like dry claps of artillery fire. If things kept going like this, the only curvature they would measure would be that of the stooped-over palm trees fighting the hurricane winds. The telescopes, the cameras, and all the other measuring instruments remained where they were, exposed to the elements, useless and defenseless against the explosions that rained down from the heavens.
By 1:30 in the afternoon, Eddington, despondent, was about ready to surrender. That was when the miracle occurred: Suddenly the clouds began to disperse, aided by a cool breeze. With only eight minutes to go before the eclipse, Eddington quickly rallied his group, all of them inspired by the sensation that they had been granted the great privilege of observing the history of the universe compressed into a few brief seconds. The sun appeared, radiant and soaring, only to be devoured moments later by the shadows of its rival, the moon. Amid this inconceivable noontime darkness, the dumbstruck birds quickly flew back into their nests while the monkeys and lizards settled in for an early night’s sleep. The momentary twilight seemed enveloped in a magical, white silence. In perfect harmony, the cameras captured the moment.
During the three days that followed, Eddington locked himself away in an improvised darkroom to develop the sixteen photograms that he had taken in order to carry out the necessary calculations. The instant Eddington spied the first images taking shape from beneath the photographic solution, like lost spectra floating in the water, he knew that success was his. After double-checking the calculations several times, Eddington emerged from his inner sanctum with the pride of a bishop prepared to crown anew king. The result was conclusive, despite the tiniest margin of error: Einstein had been triumphant! It took a few weeks for the news to travel the globe, and it wasn’t until November 10, 1919, almost six months after the experiment, after new measurements were taken, that it appeared in the New York Times.
At 7:30 that very same morning, in a small hospital in Newark, New Jersey, not far from Princeton, a baby was born. This child, in a way the first inhabitant of a new universe, would be baptized Francis Percy Bacon, son of Charles Drexter Bacon, owner of the Albany Department Store chain, and his wife, Rachel Richards, the daughter of banker Raymond Richards, of New Canaan, Connecticut.
One June afternoon several years later, Bacon’s mother decided to teach her son how to count. She placed him in her lap and in the same indifferent voice she used for reading him bedtime stories about angels and monsters, she revealed to him the secrets of mathematics, whispering each numeral as if it were a station of the cross or a psalm inserted into her prayers. Just outside the window, a tree struggled against the first summer thundershower, and the violent gusts of wind and rain reminded them of God’s presence and mercy. That day, Frank found a solution to the tempests and discovered, moreover, that numbers are sometimes better companions than people. Unlike human beings—he was thinking of his father’s sudden fits of temper and his mother’s cool, distant reserve—you could always rely on numbers. They are constant, he thought, and they didn’t suffer from mood swings. They didn’t ever cheat or betray, and they didn’t pick on little boys for being scrawny and weak.
Years went by before he realized, during an intense bout of fever, that all sorts of disorders and neuroses were hidden behind the great world of numbers. Contrary to what he had initially thought, he soon realized that numbers did not belong to such a simple, unemotional realm. As the doctor bathed Frank’s feverish, delirious body in ice cubes, the young patient’s secret passions were suddenly awakened for the very first time. Frank watched in awe as the numbers fought among themselves with a determination that refused to surrender—just like many of the real-life men he had read about. He studied their varied behavioral patterns: They loved one another within parentheses, they had illicit sex in multiplication, they annihilated one another in subtractions, they built palaces with their Pythagorean solids, they danced from place to place on their Euclidean planes, they dreamed of Utopias with differential calculus, and condemned one another to death in the vortex of square roots. Their hell was far worse than what awaited humans: Rather than languishing somewhere below zero, in the negative numbers—a stupid, infantile simplification—numbers could fall into paradoxes, anomalies, tautologies, and the painful limbo of probability.
From that moment on, numerical inventions were Frank’s best friends. To him, they were the last vestige of real, existential truth. Only those people who were unfamiliar with them—like his father and the doctors—could think they were perverse, opportunistic creatures. They were wrong—numbers didn’t devour the brain or turn life into a sluggish lump of mathematical conjecture. Anyway, Frank hadn’t renounced the laws of man in favor of the dictums of logic; he was just reluctant to abdicate the kingdom of geometry, for that would force him to return, dolefully, to the miserable routine of his home life.
Frank was five years old when he was first seduced by the demons of algebra. His mother had found him in the basement of their New Jersey home, numb from the November frost, mesmerized by the pipes that ran around the perimeter of the room. A thick, frothy saliva bubbled at his lips, and his body had become stiff as a bamboo shoot. After consulting with a neurologist, Frank’s doctor determined that the only medicine was patience. “It’s as if he were sleeping,” he added, unable to explain the state his patient was in, somewhere between hypnotic and autistic. It took a day and a half before Frank fulfilled the doctor’s prediction. Just as the doctor had said, Frank began to paw at his bed rail, like a butterfly trying to break out of its cocoon. His mother, who had maintained a bedside vigil throughout the episode, embraced her son, convinced that her love for him had rescued him from death’s door. Minutes later, however, when he finally began to move his lips, the young boy put this wayward notion to rest. “I was just trying to solve an equation,” he confessed, to everyone’s surprise. Then he smiled: “And I did.”
In his whole life, Frank received only one gift from his father, and the memory of this occasion would always be a special, private treasure for him. He must have been about six years old when, one Sunday afternoon, without any previous warning, the old man got up from his chair and handed his son a dusty black leather box. For years he had kept it hidden away in a closet, like a secret inheritance, the greatest lesson he could pass on to his son. To Frank’s shock and delight, Charles Bacon removed a most curious collection of figurines from this box: dragons, samurai, bonzos, and pagodas, which he insisted upon calling horses, pawns, bishops, and rooks. He also took out a beautiful ebony and marble board which he then placed upon the parlor table.
Frank, at first, didn’t quite understand his father’s momentary euphoria, nor did he comprehend why his father was suddenly so interested in taking the time to show him the way to execute checks, count the horses’ moves, and construct those bizarre, labyrinthine schemes known as castlings. At his age, how could he have possibly known that this game was the one thing that allowed the aging Charles to relive a bit of his former glory? Those harmless, board-game battles, of course, were really nothing more than a simple imitation of the battles he waged among his employees at the department store.
“Very well, then. If you think you understand the rules, how about playing a little game?”
“Yes, sir,” Frank responded quickly.
Despite the fact that this was supposed to be a harmless pastime, Charles focused all his energies on the game; the square chessboard became a battlefield of honor and dignity upon which he delivered martial orders against his little six-year-old son. From the minute they began, Charles weighed every move with painstaking caution, as if he really should have been consulting territorial maps or discussing strategy with the imaginary chiefs of staff who greeted him each day in his equally imaginary military headquarters. It troubled Frank to see his father like that, and he had difficulty concentrating on the baby steps of his chess game. His father’s hands, covered with liver spots and bulging veins, grabbed the chess pieces with thunderous force, as if uncorking giant wine bottles. Every time he made a move Frank feared that the little plaster geishas and mandarins would go exploding into thousands of little pieces. That afternoon, Frank’s father mercilessly beat his son seven times in a row, availing himself of a rather outrageous move known as the “fool’s mate.” Charles’s chess etiquette, of course, forbade him from winning games on the basis of cheap tricks, but if his son wanted to become a real man, he would have to be able to accept legitimate defeat with humility. He needed to learn how to survive in the battlefield of life, to emerge from the trenches and face his enemies. That’s what Charles Bacon thought.
“My mistake,” Charles mumbled upon losing to his son for the first time. He even lit a cigar to display his sporting attitude, and added, “Although you didn’t play too badly yourself.” The next day, however, he didn’t wait for his son to suggest a game. When Frank returned from school—he was about eight years old by now—he found his father setting up the chessboard and carefully wiping down each chess piece as if inspecting a squadron of subordinate officers.
“Shall we begin?” he asked his son. Frank nodded. He tossed his book bag onto the floor and prepared to enter into far more than a mere battle: This was a fight to the death. After several hours of play, it was safe to say that young Frank had outfoxed his father, winning the first, third, fourth, and fifth games. The befuddled Charles managed to take the second and the sixth, and he did have the consolation of winning the final round, at which point he decided that it was rather late and that he had other, more important things to do.
That day, Frank learned the meaning of the words Pyrrhic victory firsthand, thanks to his father’s rather typical display of self-indulgence. Not long after, Charles suffered a series of misfortunes, which would fuel his bitterness and aggravate the chronic depression that set in months later. After Frank won the game, he saw the impotent look on his father’s face and couldn’t help savoring this vindication. But his father’s temperament would not permit this kind of humiliation. After only one more year of chess games, in which his percentage of losses grew higher than that of his son, Charles simply decided not to play against Frank anymore. A few months after that, he died of a heart attack.
Before he was six years old, Frank’s name never bothered him. His mother always called him Frank or Frankie; it was her way of trying to inject a bit of the New Jersey spirit into the boy. Since the death of Frank’s father, nary a mention was made of that awful “Percy” which had found its way onto his baptismal certificate. No, it only appeared on the most official of documents, and then only as P, like some kind of scarlet letter that he prayed no one would ask him about. But in school everything changed. His first-grade teacher was the first to notice:
“Francis Bacon?” she exclaimed loudly, almost laughing.
“Yes,” he replied, not understanding quite what she meant. Little did he know that from that moment on, his hopes of remaining anonymous would be dashed forever. Suddenly he found himself transformed into an object of curiosity and ridicule for students and teachers alike, sacrificed to a ritual that would repeat itself over and over again at the beginning of each school year.
At first, it wasn’t such a terrible thing to discover that his name was not so original. He was consoled, in fact, by all the Johns and Marys and Roberts he saw. His mother’s second husband was called Tobias Smith, and he didn’t seem at all troubled by the fact that he had to share his name with thousands of his compatriots. But the taunts were what bothered Frank the most: “Bet you think you’re some kind of genius, don’t you, Mr. Bacon?” they asked. He did; that was the worst thing of all. Who would ever believe that there could be another brilliant scientist named Francis Bacon? The first coincidence seemed to make the second one virtually impossible. He tried defending himself by proving to everyone how talented he was, but the arrogance with which he presented his results only elicited bouts of laughter from his teachers. It was as if they thought his intellectual abilities were nothing more than an anomaly or an eccentricity rather than true genius. In any event, they never failed to compare him with the “real” Bacon, as if he were nothing more than the unfortunate, apocryphal copy of a long-dead original.
Bacon’s childhood and adolescence were lonely. Hypersensitive about the qualities that set him apart from the other children, he recoiled from all human contact apart from the unavoidable. He was hardly the easiest person to live with, either, due to the persistent migraines that plagued him, sending him into nearly catatonic states in which the slightest bit of light or noise was all but unbearable. He would spend hours on end locked away in his room, dreaming up formulas and theorems until his stepfather would knock on his door, practically dragging him downstairs to supper. By this point, his mother almost regretted ever having taught him how to count: Not only had he become intransigent and rude, but he also was increasingly intolerant of anyone less intelligent than he.
The hateful games people played at his expense gradually receded from his thoughts and he found himself more and more captivated by the English scientist who had caused all the trouble to begin with. He needed to know who that fateful ancestor was, the person whose mere name had made his life a living hell. With the same dedication of a teenager who inspects himself in the mirror day after day for the most infinitesimal signs of his metamorphosis into adulthood, Francis doggedly pursued his namesake. To avoid the displeasure of reading his name in print over and over again (since it always referred to someone else), Frank chose to immerse himself in the obsessions of his “ancestor.” And in the process of learning about the original Bacon’s great discoveries, Francis made one of his own, the kind of vague realization that emboldens a person to take a leap of faith across the great unknown. This discovery, rather than fulfilling the predictions of his detractors, was the thing that led Frank to discover his vocation. In spite of the apparent happenstance of their shared name, Frank was inspired by the discoveries of the first Francis Bacon, and began to believe that his destiny was somehow linked to that of the old, dead scientist. Maybe it wasn’t exactly a reincarnation—he couldn’t think about things like that—but he felt sure it was some sort of calling, a circumstance that was too obvious to have been an act of pure coincidence.
The life history of Baron Verulam, the first Francis Bacon, transformed the life of our Francis. The more Frank learned about the baron, the more he felt that he had to continue, in some way, the work of the original Francis Bacon. As unpleasant as he had been toward those around him, Francis Bacon had managed to achieve immortality. Young Francis felt a bond with him, for he, too, felt misunderstood by his contemporaries, and he comforted himself by thinking that one day his mother, stepfather, and schoolmates would be sorry for the shoddy treatment they subjected him to. He felt especially proud of sharing his last name with a man to whom Shakespearean plays had been attributed. Just like Sir Francis, Frank had become a learned person for a variety of reasons, including curiosity, the search for truth, plus a certain amount of natural talent for his studies. But in the end Frank easily admitted that the greatest source of inspiration had been the same one Sir Francis cited: rage. For him, a happy coexistence with the precise, concrete elements of mathematics was the only solution to confronting the chaos of the universe, whose destiny was utterly independent of his. Adapting a little saying made famous by his Elizabethan hero, Frank would have said for himself: “I have studied numbers, not men.”
In school, his standoffishness toward his peers gradually dissipated as the result of a growing appreciation for the natural laws, which included, at least in theory, a certain admiration for humanity in general. Although perhaps not everything that occurred in the world could be explained by reason, science at least offered a direct track to solid knowledge. And, most important, the person in possession of that knowledge—that is, a clear understanding of the laws governing the world—also possessed a power which he could then exert over other people. Francis never fully abandoned his original mistrust of others, but rather placed it in a far corner of his memory, a place he visited less and less frequently.
One morning he woke up in a most broad-minded and accepting mood. Without understanding precisely why, Francis had decided to give up theoretical mathematics, that labyrinth of abstractions and impenetrable formulae, and decided to test the slightly more solid, concrete ground of physics. This decision hardly pleased his mother, who wanted him to become an engineer, but at least it was a step closer to a world she understood. Rather than mixing and matching numbers like a schizophrenic frantically jumbling his words, his job now was to immerse himself in the basic elements of the universe: matter, light, energy. Perhaps this would be the path to satisfying his mother’s hope that he make himself useful to the world around him. Unfortunately, however, he would not be able to fulfill this maternal desire: He simply couldn’t manage to concentrate on such concrete problems. Instead of becoming a disciple of the realm of electronics, for example, Frank found himself drawn to perhaps the most experimental, fragile, and impractical branch of physics: the study of atoms and the recently unveiled quantum theory. Once again, there was nothing very tangible there. The names of the objects he analyzed—electrons, matrices, observable phenomena—were labels for a motley group of creatures as bizarre in nature as numbers.
In 1940, after several years of struggling with this discipline against the wishes of his mother and stepfather, Frank received his bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in physics from Princeton University, having written his senior thesis on positrons. He was twenty years old and his future was filled with promise: As one of the very few specialists in his field, various state universities had extended invitations to him to conduct graduate-level research in their facilities. Three offers in particular stood out: one from the California Institute of Technology, where Oppenheimer worked; one from Princeton University, his alma mater; and one from the Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton as well. All considered, this last offer was the most tantalizing. The institute was founded in 1930 by the Bamberger brothers (owners of the eponymous Newark-based department store), but didn’t really open its doors until 1933. Unlike the graduate departments of the great American universities, the institute was unique in that it neither granted degrees nor expected its professors to carry burdensome teaching schedules. Their only job was to think, and to give occasional lectures on their chosen fields of study. It rapidly became one of the most important centers of scientific research in the entire world. Albert Einstein, who decided to remain in the United States after the Nazis won the general election in Germany, was a professor there, as were the mathematicians Kurt Gödel and John von Neumann, to mention only a handful of the more famous names.
As he walked along the ample footpaths of Princeton University on his way to visit the chairman of his department, Bacon had no idea that what he was about to do would have a decisive effect on his future. The ash trees that lined the walkways were as immobile as the columns of a temple whose roof was slowly chipping away with age. A sharp wind blurred the edges of the buildings that housed the different academic departments. The faux-medieval style of the architecture—copied directly from Cambridge and Oxford—looked even less authentic than usual in the bright sunlight. Prisoners in their uncomfortable gray suits, professors and students sought refuge inside the anachronistic buildings, escaping from the frigid air that sent their hats flying off their heads. Bacon knew the dean had summoned him to tell him something quite important, but for some reason he wasn’t nervous at all. He trusted that the path of modern science would carry him to the best possible place in the world. And anyway—this was the best part of all—he had finally made a rather big life decision, thanks to a certain telephone call he had received two days earlier from the Institute for Advanced Study.
The new dean was a short, loquacious little man who quickly ushered Bacon into his office. Seated behind a great desk that obscured a good half of his chest, the man couldn’t seem to stop fidgeting with his salt-and-pepper beard, as if trying to untangle the threads of destiny. He offered an outstretched hand to Bacon and invited him to have a seat. He then removed a folder among the many piled high upon his desk and, without looking twice at Bacon, began to read from its contents.
“Francis Bacon … of course. How could I forget a name like that? Let’s see … summa cum laude … ‘Excellent student, detailed analyses, slow at decision-making but an extraordinary theorist … In short, one of the most talented students of his generation.’ So, what do you make of all this?” he asked, in a voice which reminded Bacon of the whistle of a child’s toy locomotive. “There is nothing but praise here for you, my boy! Remarkable, truly remarkable.”
Bacon barely heard what the dean was saying; he was too busy eyeing the collection of German physics journals—Annalen der Physik, Zeitschrift für Physik, Naturwissenschaften—that lined the bookcases of the tiny office. Apart from the magazines, little glass cases and flasks were the predominant decor of this office, which seemed more like an entomologist’s laboratory than a physicist’s administrative office. Amid the disarray, Bacon spied a photograph of the dean standing next to Einstein. In the photo, the dean stood proudly beside the discoverer of relativity like a squirrel waiting anxiously to climb a sequoia tree.
“I’m very flattered, Professor.”
“I want you to know that this is not my opinion that I am sharing with you here; I am merely reading from your academic file. I would have liked to have known you better, but I guess that wasn’t meant to be, and so I can’t praise you quite as well as some of my colleagues can. Nothing to be done about that. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get to the point. I have called you here today to tell you something that you probably know better than I do.”
“I think I know what you’re about to tell me, Professor.”
“Following the recommendation of Professor Oswald Veblen, the Institute for Advanced Study has invited you to join their team.” Bacon couldn’t help cracking a smile. “Of course, we would prefer that you would remain here with us, but you have the final say in the matter. If you’d like to go off and join our neighbors, I can’t tell you not to. But I have to warn you that at the institute you will only be eligible for the title ‘assistant,’ and not ‘doctoral candidate.’ You are aware of what that means, aren’t you? Do you think, perhaps, you’d like to give it some more thought, or have you already made up your mind?”
In the beginning, the institute’s offices were housed in Find Hall, in Princeton’s mathematics department, while the money was raised to build a proper home for the organization. From 1939 on, its main offices were located in Fuld Hall, a giant red-brick box that actually looked more like a mental institution or a government building of some sort. The new headquarters allowed the institute to distance itself a bit from the university, although there was still a bit of bad blood between the two institutions. When the institute was just getting started, its director, Abraham Flexner, had promised not to invite Princeton professors to join its ranks, but Oswald Veblen and the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, both originally at Princeton, ultimately decided to sign on at the institute.
“I’m planning to accept the institute’s offer, Professor.”
“That’s what I thought,” said the dean.
Bacon had already carefully weighed the advantages and disadvantages of the offers he had received. He knew that at the institute he would not be granted the title of doctoral student, but he also knew that there he would have access to some of the greatest physicists and mathematicians in the world. He didn’t doubt his decision for a second.
“Very well,” said the dean. “Then I suppose there’s nothing left to say. How old are you, my boy?”
“Twenty.”
“You’re still so young … too young. Perhaps you’ll still be able to set things right sometime in the future. But don’t waste time; the early years are essential for physicists. It’s one of those unwritten rules, unfair as they may be, but you must know it by heart: After turning thirty, a physicist is through. Through. I’m telling you this from experience.”
“Thank you for your advice, sir.”
His appointment with Professor Von Neumann, on Tuesday at three in the afternoon, flashed through Bacon’s mind, but the dean quickly interrupted his reverie:
“All right, then, get out of here.”
HYPOTHESIS II:On Von Neumann and the War (#ulink_c3af8b99-57c7-560d-8f81-0f47bfff0943)
“My name is Bacon, Professor. Francis Bacon.”
Frank had arrived at the institute at the agreed-upon hour. He had put on one of his best suits, rat-gray, and a tie with a pattern that looked like little giraffes.
“Oh, yes, Bacon. Born January 22, 1561, at York House. Died 1626. A lunatic, unfortunately. But, oh, yes, what a fertile mind. Did you know I could recite the entire Novum Organum for you, line by line, right now if I wanted? But I suppose that would be rather boring for you. Anyway, I have another appointment that I don’t want to be too late for.”
Of all the men of modern science, nobody seemed able to warm up to the cunning, turbulent nature of numbers quite as John von Neumann had. As a young scholar at Princeton, where he spent a few months as a professor of mathematics, he had acquired a reputation for being one of the most intelligent men in the entire world—and, at the same time, one of the worst professors imaginable. His name in Germany was Johannes, a transliteration of the original Hungarian Janós, and so he had little apprehension about translating it into English in order to adapt to the more casual way of his adopted country. Born in Budapest in 1903, he became Johnny von Neumann in the United States, which made him an odd mix of Scotch whisky and Czech beer. He was now only thirty-seven, but his career as a child prodigy had catapulted him early on into the pantheon of contemporary mathematics. For the past few months, he was also the youngest member of the Institute for Advanced Study. Bacon had never taken any of his courses, but the Princeton campus was rife with tales of the professor’s many eccentricities, and Bacon was familiar with all of them. As he would soon hear for himself, Von Neumann had a peculiar accent that was not precisely the result of his Central European provenance—in fact, many people said he had simply invented it himself. He always wore the same uniform, a neat, coffee-colored suit that he never varied, not even during the summer or for excursions into the nearby countryside. In addition to his gift for rapid-fire mathematical calculations, he also had a photographic memory: After merely scanning a page of text or quickly reading through a novel he could recite it by heart, from start to finish without committing a single error. He had done this several times with A Tale of Two Cities.
Impatient by nature, Von Neumann despised his students; he abhorred their slow minds and the countless unnecessary repetitions he was often obliged to parcel out, like a country farmer feeding his chickens. Worst of all, however, were the expressions of shock and fear that registered upon his students’ faces whenever they attempted to decipher one of his elegant, eloquent equations. Nobody, but nobody, was able to understand his lectures, simply because of the absurd speed at which he gave them. By the time a student had begun to copy out some labyrinthine formula Von Neumann had quickly scratched out on the blackboard, the surprisingly nimble professor had already grabbed his eraser and leapt into the next problem, as if the blackboard were a giant Broadway billboard. During Von Neumann’s tenure at Princeton, only one graduate student had managed to finish his thesis under Von Neumann’s direction, and after that experience, the professor knew he would never again put himself through the tedium of rereading poorly written proofs and decoding someone else’s muddle of arithmetic nonsense. When Abraham Flexner invited Von Neumann to join the institute, he was quick to mention that Von Neumann would have no teaching obligations whatsoever, just like all the other professors there. The mathematician gladly accepted the offer; this way, he would be forever free from the bothersome plague of busybody coeds who couldn’t even tell Mozart from Beethoven.
“I have to go now. A meeting with the inner sanctum, if you know what I mean. Tea and cookies and all those illustrious names. Well, not quite as illustrious as yours, but prominent enough that I shouldn’t be late, you know?” He stopped for a second. He was stocky, even slightly chubby, with a greasy double chin hiding beneath his rounded beard. His accent was truly impossible to place. “What are we going to do with you, Bacon? I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, I didn’t expect … Well, you tell me what to do.” Bacon tried in vain to say something. The way Von Neumann carried on a conversation reminded him of the caterpillar’s erratic, long-winded pronouncements in Alice in Wonderland. “All right, all right, that’s a fine idea, Bacon. Listen, tomorrow I’m throwing a little party, you know. I try to do that every so often; this place can be so boring sometimes. I’m always telling my wife that we should open a bar here, like the kind in Budapest, but she never listens to me. All right, I have to go now. I’ll expect you then, at my house tomorrow. Five o’clock, before the other guests arrive … One of those receptions, you know? To keep us from dying of boredom. I suppose you’ve heard about them. All right, I have to go. I’m sorry. Five o’clock, then. Don’t forget.”
“But, Professor …” Bacon tried interrupting him.
“I told you already, we’ll discuss your problem later on. At length, I promise. Now, if you’ll be so kind …”
After several minutes battling with an obtuse secretary to obtain the professor’s home address, Bacon finally arrived at Von Neumann’s house, at 26 Westcott Road, punctual as always. A pair of waiters were busy unloading trays of sandwiches from a catering truck parked in front of the main door to the house, carrying them methodically to the kitchen, like a team of laborers preparing to feed an ant farm. Bacon would never have admitted it, but of course he had heard about Von Neumann’s receptions. His guest list was like a Who’s Who of the Princeton intellectual scene; even Einstein was rumored to have dropped in on occasion. During this particular time, an atmosphere of war hovered over everything—after all, in less than a year Pearl Harbor would be bombed. But here, people seemed intent upon acting as if the world were the same as ever. Or perhaps people simply wanted to enjoy the last moments of calm before the storm hit.
Bacon rang the doorbell and waited a few seconds, but nobody answered. Emboldened, he entered the house along with one of the waiters and began timidly whispering, “Professor? Professor Von Neumann?” in a voice so low that nobody would have heard, even if standing three feet away. After a few minutes, a maid finally noticed him and went upstairs to announce his arrival to Von Neumann. Then the professor appeared, half dressed, with his jacket on and a tie slung over his arm.
“Bacon!”
“Yes, Professor.”
“You, you again!” He sat down in one of the living room chairs and signaled for Bacon to do the same. He began buttoning his shirt with his little fingers, fat as grapes. “Your persistence doesn’t bother me at all, no, not at all, but have some manners. I’m about to throw a party, you know? Wouldn’t you agree that this isn’t exactly the best moment to have a discussion about physics?”
“But you asked me to come, Professor.”
“Nonsense, nonsense, Bacon.” Now he was struggling with his tie. “Well, now that you’re here, it wouldn’t be right for you to leave empty-handed, would it? Manners, my friend, that’s what’s wrong with the Americans. Now, that’s nothing personal, I assure you, but it is beginning to bother me.” Von Neumann studied him, like a pathologist performing an autopsy. “I suppose that I am to decide whether you will be accepted at the institute, is that correct? Your future, sitting here in my hands. It’s a terrible responsibility, my friend, just terrible. How should I know whether you’re a genius or a fool?”
“I sent you my CV, Professor.”
“You’re a physicist, is that right?”
“That’s correct, sir.”
“Have you ever heard of such foolishness?” Von Neumann muttered. “Just because I wrote that tiny little book on quantum theory, why should that mean I have to review the file of every silly fool who decides to take up physics, right? Don’t look at me like that, my friend, I’m not talking about you, of course not. Well, I’m afraid that those imbeciles have sent me nothing.” Von Neumann got up from his chair in search of a mushroom vol-au-vent. When he located the tray, he picked it up and took it with him; he offered one to Bacon, who declined. “Can you believe it? Nothing. And the worst of all is that I bet it’s time for me to present my evaluation of you to the committee, Bacon. What can I do about it?”
“I don’t know, Professor.”
“I’ve got it!” he shouted, excited by his sudden revelation. “You are aware, are you not, that we are about to enter a war?”
Bacon didn’t seem to understand Von Neumann’s quick change of subject.
“Yes,” he said, just to say something.
“Mark my words, Bacon, we are going to war with Adolf and the Japs.”
“So many people oppose the idea of a war—”
“Are you afraid, is that what you’re trying to say? That you don’t want to save the world from the clutches of that monster?”
Bacon didn’t understand exactly where Von Neumann was headed; it almost seemed as though he was making fun of him, and so Bacon just tried to keep his answers noncommittal.
“Tell me, Bacon, what is a war?”
“I don’t know, a confrontation between two or more enemies?”
“But what else than that?” Von Neumann was getting agitated. “Why do they fight, Bacon, why?”
“Because they have contradictory interests,” Bacon spat out.
“For God’s sake, no; it’s precisely the opposite!”
“Because they have common interests?”
“Of course! They have the same objective, the same goal, but it is only available to one of them. That is why they go to war.”
Bacon was confused. Von Neumann, meanwhile, was trying to calm himself down with more mushroom sandwiches.
“Let me give you a simple example. Let’s take the Nazis and the British: What is their common objective? The same pie, Bacon: the Europe pie. Ever since Hitler took control of Germany in 1933, all he’s done is ask for pieces. First he wanted Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland, Belgium, Holland, France, Norway. Now he wants the whole pie. At first, the British tolerated his expansion, like they did at that abominable conference in Munich, but then they realized that Germany had too much. You see?”
“I follow you, Professor. War is like a game.”
“Have you read my little article on the topic, the one published in 1928?” Von Neumann inquired, narrowing his eyes.
“‘On the Theory of Games of Strategy,’” replied Bacon. “I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t read it yet.”
“Right,” the professor mused. “All right. Suppose, then, that the war between Churchill and Hitler is a game. I will add one other condition—something that in the real case isn’t necessarily true at all, but in any event—the players that intervene in the game do so rationally.”
“I think I understand,” ventured Bacon. “They will do whatever it takes to obtain the result they desire: victory.”
“Very good.” Von Neumann finally smiled. “I’m working on a theory right now together with my friend, the economist Oskar Morgenstein. The theory states that all rational games must possess a mathematic solution.”
“A strategy.”
“You’ve got it, Bacon. The best strategy for any game—or war—is the one that leads to the best possible result,” Von Neumann cleared his throat with a swig of whisky. “Now, to my understanding, all games fall into one of two categories: zero-sum games and everything else. A game can only be considered zero-sum if the competitors are fighting over a finite, fixed object and if one person necessarily loses what the other one wins. If I only have one pie, each slice that I obtain represents a loss for my rival.”
“And in the non-zero-sum games, the advantages earned by one player don’t necessarily represent a loss for the other,” Bacon pronounced, satisfied.
“Right. Therefore, our war between the Nazis and the British …”
“… is a zero-sum game.”
“Correct. Let’s use it as a working hypothesis. What is the current status of the war? Hitler controls half of Europe. England barely puts up a fight. The Russians are holding out, waiting to see what happens, chained to their nonaggression pact with the Germans. If this is what things look like, Bacon, you tell me: What will be Hitler’s next move?” Von Neumann asked excitedly, his chest heaving up and down like a water pump.
It was a tough question, and Bacon knew there was a catch to it. His response shouldn’t reflect his intuition, he reasoned, but rather the mathematic expectations of his interrogator.
“Hitler is going to want another piece of that pie.”
“That’s exactly what I was hoping to hear!” Von Neumann exclaimed. “We’ve said that to Roosevelt over and over again. Now: Which piece, specifically?”
There were two possibilities. Bacon didn’t even flinch.
“I think Hitler’s going to start with Russia.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the weakest of all his potential enemies, and he can’t allow Stalin to continue building his war chest for much longer.”
“Perfect, Bacon. Now comes the hard part.” Von Neumann was enjoying the young man’s astonishment. “Let’s take a look at our position on this issue, that of the United States of America. Right now we’re not involved, so we can be more objective. Let’s try to decide, rationally, what our course of action should be.”
Bacon and Von Neumann sat talking for over half an hour. In the meantime, the maid busied herself placing the plates and tablecloths in their proper places in the dining room, next to the drawing room. After a while, Klara, the professor’s wife—his second wife, actually—called out to Von Neumann from the staircase, chastising him for being late for his own party. Von Neumann waved his hand dismissively and signaled to his companion to stay where he was. Although he felt a bit silly, Bacon was enjoying the conversation; its dry humor and fast-paced exchanges reminded him of those chess games with his father so many years before. Beneath the apparent simplicity of this intellectual challenge, Bacon had the feeling that he was actually waging a most unusual battle against the professor. This was the kind of conversation he could imagine taking place between two spies from enemy countries, or two lovers unsure of one another’s affections. Each move was an attempt to get ahead of the next one, and so on and so on, and both men had to perform two tasks at once: They each had to carefully guard their own strategies, and at the same time figure out the other’s plan of attack. The conversation itself was a kind of game.
“My theory is the following,” said Von Neumann, as he took a sheet of paper from the coffee table and began outlining a neat, precise diagram. “The game we are playing with the Germans is not zero-sum because it involves the division of an even larger pie—the world—and there is a wide range of values ascribed to the different pie pieces that each side wants to keep for itself. This means that there are two strategies at play here, and four possible outcomes. The United States can decide to enter the war or not. The Axis countries can decide to attack us or not. What, then, are the four scenarios?”
Bacon responded with confidence:
“First, we attack them; second, they attack us by surprise; third, both sides attack simultaneously; fourth, things stay the way they are.”
“Now let’s consider the outcomes of each case. If we declare war, we have the potential advantage of surprising them, but many American lives would no doubt be lost in the process. If, on the other hand, they attack us first, they will possess that surprise margin but then they will be forced to wage a war on two fronts (provided that we are correct in assuming that they will attack the Reds at any time). Now, if we follow the third scenario and attack simultaneously, and go through all the obligatory declarations of war, etc., etc., both sides will have forfeited the surprise element, and both will suffer similar human losses. Now, if we opt for the last scenario, in which both sides leave things as they are, the likely outcome is that Hitler will take control of Europe and we will take North America, but in the long run, a conflict between the two sides will still be inevitable.”
“I like your analysis, Professor.”
“Thank you, Bacon. Now I’d like you to assign values to each of the possible outcomes, for our side and for theirs.”
“All right,” said Bacon, and he began to write on the piece of paper:
1. The United States and the Axis attack simultaneously: USA, 1; Axis, 1.
2. The United States launches a surprise attack against the Axis: USA, 3; Axis, 0.
3. The United States waits, and the Axis launches a surprise attack: USA, 0; Axis, 3.
4. The situation remains the same as it has been until now: USA, 2; Axis, 2.
Then Bacon drew the following diagram:
“The question is,” said Von Neumann, more excited than ever, “what should we do?”
Bacon contemplated the diagram as if it were a Renaissance painting. He found its simplicity as beautiful as Von Neumann did. It was a work of art.
“The worst-case scenario would be for us to wait and then get attacked by surprise. We would get a zero, and Adolf would come out with three. The problem is that we don’t know what that monster has planned. From that angle, I think the only rational solution is to attack first. If we can surprise the Nazis, then we earn a lovely three. If we simply engage in a simultaneous war, at least we’d get a one and not the zero that we’d deserve for being overly indulgent,” Bacon concluded, convinced. “That’s the answer. This way, at least, the outcome will depend on us.”
Von Neumann seemed even more satisfied than his student. Not only had Bacon proven his grit, but he and Von Neumann agreed about what decision President Roosevelt should make regarding the war. Ever since the discovery of uranium fission in 1939, Von Neumann had been one of the staunchest advocates for the establishment of a large-scale nuclear research program in the United States. An atomic bomb, if such a thing were possible, would not only take the Germans and the Japanese by surprise, but it could also end the war once and for all. Unfortunately, however, his message of warning had not seemed to have much effect on President Roosevelt.
“I think I shall have no other choice than to tolerate your tedious presence in the corridors of Fuld Hall,” Von Neumann announced, slowly rising from his chair. “But don’t go thinking this is paradise, Bacon. I am going to make you work like a mule until you end up despising every last equation I give you to solve. Be at my office next Monday.”
Von Neumann walked toward the staircase. The irritated voice of Klara Dan once again came bounding down from the second floor. Before retiring to his upstairs quarters, Von Neumann turned to Bacon one last time.
“If you don’t have anything better to do, you can stay for the party.”
In December of 1941, John von Neumann’s prediction came true, and the United States of America had no other choice but to enter the war. President Roosevelt had decided to remain neutral until the last possible moment, and the Japanese executed the best possible strategy: the surprise attack. The American public was shocked and outraged. Citizens from every walk of American life were angered and horrified.
HYPOTHESIS III:On Einstein and Love (#ulink_bab35280-bc77-5330-9d1e-62351a0e81e3)
By the time he had settled into his life in the United States, toward the end of 1933, Einstein was already something of an international genius, his mere image capable of inspiring even those unable to comprehend the slightest bit of physics. Having achieved this mythic status, the author of relativity amused himself by responding to his admirers’ innocent questions with riddles and paradoxes, brief as Buddhist parables. With his long, tangled mane of graying hair and his eyes, encircled by a frame of wrinkles, he was a hermit delivered to save the modern world, so desperately in need of his help. Journalists flocked to his home on Mercer Street seeking his opinion on every topic under the sun. A modern-day cross between Socrates and Confucius, Einstein obliged them with the serene benevolence of a teacher addressing the timid ignorance of his pupils. Stories of these press conferences quickly began to circulate from one end of the country to the other, as if every one of his answers were some kind of Zen koan, a Sufi poem, or a Talmudic aphorism. On one occasion, a reporter asked Einstein the following question:
“Is there such a thing as a formula for success in life?”
“Yes, there is.”
“What is it?” asked the reporter, impatient.
“If a represents success, I would say that the formula is a=x+y+z, in which x is work and y is luck,” explained Einstein.
“What is z, then?” questioned the reporter.
Einstein smiled, and then answered: “Keeping your mouth shut.”
These stories, brief and concise, only served to enhance his prestige, but at the same time, they fueled the ire of his enemies. In those days, the world was divided into two camps: those who adored Einstein and those who, like the Nazis, would have done anything to see him dead.
In 1931, when Einstein was in Pasadena to deliver a lecture at the California Institute of Technology, Abraham Flexner first approached him to join the Institute for Advanced Study, which was soon to be inaugurated at Princeton University. Flexner would make the same proposal to Einstein once again, when the two men found themselves at Oxford University in 1932.
“Professor Einstein,” he said as they walked through the gardens of Christ Church College, “it is not my intention to dare to offer you a position at our institute, but if you think about it and feel that it might meet your needs, we would be more than disposed to accommodate whatever requirements you might have.” Einstein replied that he would think about it, and in early 1933 the political climate in Germany forced him to accept the offer.
By the early 1930s, members of Hitler’s party were winning more and more seats in the Reichstag. In the 1932 elections, for example, more than two hundred Nazi deputies joined the ranks of the Reichstag, which was now under the control of the artful, cagey Hermann Goering. Around that time, Einstein and his second wife, Elsa, realized that sooner or later they would have to flee Germany. A third telephone call from Abraham Flexner, this time to Einstein’s home in Caputh, in the outskirts of Berlin, convinced the couple to cross the Atlantic. Taking advantage of the new season of conferences and lectures in the United States, Einstein promised Flexner that he would pay a visit to the institute, which would allow him to finally make a decision regarding the offer. Upon leaving their home, Einstein looked at his wife’s careworn face and in the admonishing tone he reserved for truly tragic moments, he said to her: “Dreh’ dich um. Du sieht’s nie wieder.” That is, “Don’t turn around. You’ll never see it again.” In January of 1933, Einstein was at the conference in Pasadena when Hitler was named chancellor of the Reich by President Von Hindenburg. In one interview, Einstein confirmed the prediction he had recently made to his wife: “I won’t be going home.”
Taking care not to go anywhere near Germany, Albert and Elsa returned to Europe, where Einstein still had several academic commitments to fulfill. Goering, in the meantime, wasted no time in denouncing the communist conspiracy behind “Jewish science” during one of his incendiary speeches in the Reichstag, disavowing Albert Einstein as well as his life’s work. Several Nazi assault units broke into the physicist’s home in Caputh, in search of the armaments that they were certain the communists had stored there.
Einstein then paid a brief visit to the Belgian coast, and upon ensuring that Flexner was indeed prepared to agree to his conditions—an annual salary of $15,000 and a position for one of his assistants—he accepted the appointment at Princeton. On the seventeenth of October 1933, he disembarked from the steamship Westmoreland on Quarantine Island, New York, and from there he took a motorboat that whisked him away, incognito, to the New Jersey shore and then straight to the Peacock Inn, in the town of Princeton.
The new institute seemed to have been created exclusively for Einstein. In Flexner’s own words, it was a haven that would allow scholars and scientists to work “without being carried off in the maelstrom of the immediate.” Contrary to the current trend at universities all over the world, the study of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study was to be purely theoretical; no classes at all would be offered. At the institute, Einstein would have no other obligation than to think. A new koan would come to epitomize his life in the United States. The same—or maybe it was another—reporter asked the wise man:
“Professor, you have developed theories that have changed the way we see the world, a giant step forward for science. So tell us, where is your laboratory?”
“Here,” replied Einstein, pointing to the fountain pen that peeked out from his jacket pocket.
Einstein had a method, a practice he resorted to frequently which enabled him to contemplate certain scientific issues that otherwise would have been impossible to envision. This technique was known as Gedankenexperiment, or “mental experiment,” and despite its contradictory-sounding name, it was common practice in the days of ancient Greece. All modern science, especially physics, was based upon the use of practical experiments to prove hypotheses. A theory was considered valid if and only if reality did not betray it, if its predictions could be fulfilled rigorously and without exception. Nevertheless, since the close of the previous century, very few pure physicists were amused by the idea of locking themselves in laboratories to battle against increasingly sophisticated machinery that, in the end, only proved things they already knew. The gulf between the theorists and the experimental physicists grew wider and wider, fiercer even than the rift between mathematicians and engineers. Due to this mutual animosity, the two camps only made contact when the circumstances absolutely required it. Though they were, in fact, mutually dependent, they did all they could to avoid one another, inventing the most far-fetched excuses to get out of attending one another’s seminars and conferences.
One of the most important—and controversial—of Einstein’s mental experiments was the EPR Paradox of 1935, which took its name from the initials of the three scientists who worked together on the experiment: Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. Based entirely on a mental experiment (since the instruments to prove it didn’t exist), the EPR Paradox was an attempt to refute, once again, the quantum physics that so irked Einstein—the same quantum physics he himself had helped bring about. As defended by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation, quantum mechanics posited, among other things, the notion that chance was no accident at all, but rather a perfectly integral feature of the laws of physics. Einstein, of course, could not accept this idea. “God does not play dice with the universe,” he said to the physicist Max Born, and the EPR Paradox was a way of demonstrating certain aspects of quantum mechanics that he felt were scientifically unacceptable. Bohr and his followers, in turn, insinuated that Einstein had lost his mind.
Bacon belonged, as did Einstein, to the theoretical camp. Ever since the awakening of his youthful passion for theoretical mathematics, he had done everything possible to distance himself from concrete problems, focusing instead on formulas and equations that were increasingly more abstract, and in most cases exceedingly difficult to explain in real-world terms. Rather than struggle with particle accelerators and spectroscopic methods, Bacon chose instead to hide himself away in the far more pleasant realm of the imagination. There, he never ran the risk of dirtying his hands with things like radioactive waste, or exposing himself to dangerous X rays. To carry out his research, all that was required of him were perseverance and ingenuity. It was an approach to physics that, in a way, was a lot like chess.
Princeton, despite being one of the country’s great centers of academia, was an insipid place: too small, too American, too clean-cut, and too hypocritical. And contrary to the supposed “university tradition,” or perhaps because of it, a kind of stiff formality, a sameness, an uncomfortable kind of morality seemed to infect all the relationships one might cultivate there. The university itself was known for having a history of racism and anti-Semitism. To make matters worse, people felt even less able to express any kind of natural, day-to-day happiness, what with the war raging in Europe.
In order to escape these inconveniences, Bacon convinced himself very early on that the one area in which the theoretical world was useless and perhaps even perverse was sex. Theory, when you came down to it, was just fantasy. The tragedy was that almost nobody in the town of Princeton seemed able or willing to accept this basic idea—not the dean, the ministers, the mayor, the professors’ wives, the policemen, the doctors, not even the students themselves. No, they all insisted on performing endless mental experiments on the topic, and in the most unthinkable of places: in church, in lecture halls, in the eating clubs, at family gatherings, while taking their children to nursery school, as they walked their little dogs at sunset. And just like the men at the Institute for Advanced Study, the opaline community of Princeton limited itself to thinking about the pleasures no one dared consummate. For this very reason, Bacon detested his neighbors; they were insincere, provincial, and prudish. In this matter, Bacon could not be pacified with abstraction and fantasy: no intellect—not even that of Einstein—could come close to revealing the abundant diversity of life that was the female gender. Rational thought was fine for articulating laws and theories, for formulating hypotheses and corollaries, but it could never capture the infinite array of aromas, sensations, and pure intoxication swept together in a moment of passion. In other words: Because he was utterly incapable of relating to women of his own social class, Bacon had decided to invest his money in the world’s oldest profession.
In a moment of weakness, he met Vivien. He rarely spoke with her. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about her life or what she had to say—there were lots of women he cared little about yet tolerated long conversations with them. He just wanted to hold on to the idea that there was something mysterious and terrible about this woman. Her eyes, framed by a little halo that shone like a moon in eclipse, had to be hiding some kind of ancient secret, or maybe an accident or a crime, that could explain her evasive nature. Perhaps it wasn’t that at all—he never dared to ask—but he liked holding on to that illusion of living with a difficult soul; he treasured the trepidation he felt whenever he was in her presence. He envisioned Vivien, and with her he felt he could lose himself in a new, unknown land.
This was the closest he had ever come to love. Despite the passion he felt for her, however, Bacon took great pains to ensure that nobody ever caught sight of him walking through the streets of Princeton with Vivien. He always insisted on seeing her at his house, where she arrived with a ritual precision, as if offering up some kind of weekly sacrifice to the gods. Bacon, with the childish pleasure of committing a sin, of breaking an ironclad law, found himself in an emotional state the likes of which he had never known. He threw himself into proving this theory on Vivien between the sheets of his bed, with the tenacity that is the pride of the experimental physicist. Vivien, on the other hand, allowed herself to be manipulated with a serenity bordering on indolence; she had worked at a newsstand for a long time and, given all the alarming news she read daily, nothing could shock her. Vivien’s lovemaking was languorous and sweaty, like dancing to the blues. Her temperament reminded Bacon of that of a quiet little guinea pig or those calm, lazy caterpillars nestled in their moth-eaten leaves, indifferent to their predators lurking above.
As soon as she was finished undressing, Bacon would place Vivien facedown on the bed on the crisp, white sheets and turn on all the lights so he could study that optical antithesis, unbothered, for several minutes. When he was done, he would rest his body on top of hers and cover her with kisses. Every step of the way his lips tested the perfection of those beautiful little spherical equations that he knew he could never resolve. When he was through, he would turn her over as if she were a rag doll, and only then did he undress. Carefully he would separate Vivien’s thighs, and he would then nestle his face in the warm, welcoming space between her legs. This prelude was a kind of axiom from which several theorems emerged each time they came together, and this was where his analytic prowess was evident: this prelude, or groundwork, occasionally led him to Vivien’s tiny feet and, other times, to her nipples, her eyelashes, her belly button. It was more than mere lust: Bacon was studying sex in all its different incarnations, and was observing his own pleasure as it grew and evolved. In the end, the orgasm was just the logical, necessary consequence of the calculations he had mapped out earlier.
“I think it’s time for you to go,” he said to her, once he had recovered.
Maybe he did truly love her, but he just couldn’t stand the idea of her staying in his bed for very long, or having to kiss her when it was all over. By then, the heat they had created and the droplets of sweat that dotted her skin like translucent eyes made him sick—a repulsion as strong as the ecstasy he had just experienced. Suddenly, inevitably, he would become acutely aware of the animal quality of it all, and he couldn’t help imagining them as a couple of pigs rolling around in their own filth. His theory proven, he allowed Vivien just enough time to put herself back together and then he would simply ask her to leave. With the same indifference that, in some way, he sensed in her as well, he would watch her gather up her clothes and dress in silence as if watching an inanimate object or a doll. Once he was finally alone, Bacon felt nothing but sadness, quod erat demonstrandum, and usually fell into a dreamless slumber.
Despite having been raised with the proper manners of a New Jersey society boy, Bacon had made little contact with girls of his own age. The girls he always felt attracted to were, inevitably, the ones who ignored him: carefully coiffed, religious and austere, unattainably beautiful. At first, Bacon tried to act as though it didn’t bother him. To fend off potential rejection, he would tell himself, a priori, that they were all so stupid they probably thought a square root was some kind of orchid bulb. After many fruitless efforts at maintaining a conversation that lasted longer than five minutes, Bacon gave up on them, frustrated and depressed. He felt that he would never find someone who could understand, much less love him. This was the kind of thinking that led him, for the first time, to one of the non sanctos establishments that one of his loudmouth classmates had suggested he try. There he would never have to make small talk or feign interest in the weather, parties, or fancy designer dresses. According to his friend, at these places everything was reduced to a silent, discreet procedure, a release of pleasure that implied absolutely no obligations of any sort. The first time he tried it, Bacon was terrified: He tried to concentrate on mathematical formulas in an effort to hide his discomfort and to allow his body to respond the way he wanted it to. He selected a thin, timid girl—it made him feel better to think that she was even more nervous than he—who turned into an emotionless machine when she got into bed. She took her clothing off all at once, displaying a microscopic pair of nipples that seemed to protrude directly out of her chest, and which she allowed Bacon to lick briefly before she took over. When it was over, he felt no remorse, and no emptiness, either. In fact, he had rather enjoyed it. He had really enjoyed it. In fact, it had been even better than his fast-talking classmate had said it would be. This was the perfect thing for chasing away the demons of lust, for it allowed him to concentrate harder on more important things, like quantum physics. Whenever this bodily urge arose, all he had to do was lay out a few dollars. And like a true scientist—they all have a bit of the entomologist in them—he certainly appreciated the diversity. He was constantly surprised at the unbelievable variety he found from woman to woman. The smallest details became an inexhaustible source of arousal for him: a new beauty mark, a curve he had never seen before, a slightly misshapen belly button. They all filled him with a pleasure that, until now, he had only ever felt before when solving algebra problems. He explored those specimens with the eagle eye of the collector, and somehow this always prevented him from ever coming close to anything like tenderness.
For some reason, Vivien was not like the other girls. It had been several months since Bacon had first laid eyes on her brave, sad face. Later he would try to remember the exact date of their first encounter, to identify the precise starting point of their relationship, but for some reason he never managed to mentally retrieve the information. He couldn’t even remember if it had been summer or fall, or if it had been before or after his twentieth birthday. All he could remember was the distant sound of his voice when he finally spoke to that young woman who seemed little more than a girl. That day, instead of grabbing the New York Times from the pile and leaving the coins on top of some women’s fashion magazine, as he usually did, Bacon looked straight at Vivien and asked her for the paper himself. As she handed it to him, Bacon noted a stifled expression of pain in her eyes. The exchange may have lasted only a few seconds, but it was enough time for her somber, delicate face, like a pin stuck into a piece of cloth, to pierce his imagination and remain imbedded in his mind. This woman possessed a certain kind of beauty that he had never appreciated until just then. From that day onward, he would go to the newsstand every Sunday hoping to find her there and, perhaps, learn a bit more about her.
The way the young woman looked at him made him feel both uncomfortable and intrigued. One day he tried striking up a conversation with her, commenting on some aspect of current events—the war was always a good pretext—but she didn’t take the bait. All she did was smile wanly, without even opening her lips, and then returned to whatever she had been thinking about.
“Cat got your tongue?” asked Bacon in a playful tone that he immediately regretted. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Seventeen,” she responded. Her voice was low and deep.
Bacon paid for the paper and slowly walked away, as if he was waiting for her to call out to him at the last minute. She, on the other hand, didn’t even seem to have noticed the anonymous face that had just asked her age. The next day, Bacon returned. His legs trembling, he somehow managed to speak in a neutral, firm tone of voice.
“Would you like to go to the movies with me?” he asked her.
For the first time, she looked up at Bacon, displaying a set of teeth that made the newsprint in front of her look yellow and old. She watched him with imploring eyes. Was this some kind of joke?
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t.”
“Are you afraid?”
“No.”
This scene would be repeated over and over again during the months that followed. Bacon would stop by, pay for his New York Times, and tell her about the various movies playing at the nearby theaters, in the hopes of finally eliciting a yes from her. But she always just shook her head violently from side to side, as if trying to scare away a bothersome fly. Bacon refused to be discouraged, however; from his perspective, the situation was slowly evolving into a weekly routine. He was genuinely surprised, then, when one morning, she finally granted his request. At the end of the day, he met her in front of the box office of one of the local movie theaters, a highly undesirable place, it was said. The movie was (how could he forget?) Gone With the Wind, which had just recently opened, and was the first film Bacon had ever seen in color. Later on he would remember little of the plot, having been far more interested in sneaking covert glimpses of his companion’s profile, silvery blue in the light reflecting off the movie screen. He did, however, manage to memorize both the name and the gestures of the film’s starring actress, Vivien Leigh. And that was the name with which he chose to baptize his new lady friend. Later on, she told him her real name, but he stated quite plainly that he preferred calling her Vivien. By doing this, he had invented a new creature, blessed with the qualities and characteristics that he saw fit to imbue her with.
The following Sunday they repeated the scene from the previous week, even seeing Gone With the Wind again, as if testing the full range of laws of inertia. Again, they spoke very little. It was as if they had signed a tacit agreement to spend time together, nothing else. Their first kiss took place on the way to the movies. Just like almost everything Bacon ever did, this kiss was inspired by a curiosity that was more scientific than romantic. After a few weeks, they added a twist to their incipient tradition: the small cottage in the country that was the one thing Bacons father had left him when he died. Even there, they never spoke more than they absolutely had to. But he would have liked to know, for example, if she felt the same pleasure he did, or if she was subjecting herself to this intimate physical activity just to make him happy. He really had no idea of the emotions that they felt for one another; to speak frankly and openly about their relationship, prohibited and precarious as it was, would have been an unnecessary provocation. And as the days stretched on, he slowly accepted that his relationship with Vivien could exist only by observing this vow of silence.
One day, Bacon was just returning home from a statistics class when he received an unexpected visitor: his mother, who now called herself Rachel Smith. After her husband’s death, she had become a wealthy, haughty woman. She dressed like a New Yorker: tailored black dresses, an anachronistic gamine haircut, and a grayish animal wrapped around her neck, his dead eyes a pitiable sight. Though born into middle-class America, she had managed to find her place among the local aristocracy, thanks to her second marriage. She considered herself an equal to the women around her, and she carefully noted and copied all their habits and idiosyncrasies. For a long time Bacon didn’t even notice this new attitude, until one day when she happened to unleash her venom on the city sanitation workers.
“How can you humiliate me this way?” she implored as she burst through Bacon’s front door, on the verge of tears, as her turquoise-colored purse fell upon his desk. Her tone was timid, almost inaudible, despite her worldly appearance. “I had to learn from one of my friends that instead of studying, my son uses the money he inherited from his father to go out on dates with a whore. Is this true?”
“She’s not a prostitute, Mother.”
“Don’t be coy with me, Frank.”
They argued for several minutes until, worn down by his mother’s histrionics, Bacon swore that he would stop seeing Vivien for good. Of course, he didn’t really intend to keep the promise, at least not fully. The next time he saw Vivien, he simply told her that he would rather not see her out of doors. Vivien’s eyes filled with tears when she heard this, but just as he had imagined, she said nothing. Not one single reproach or protest, just the same sadness. Nor did Vivien say anything when Bacon refused to go to the movies with her the following week. From that day on, they never went out together again. Bacon didn’t even have to explain why: Vivien knew the reason all too well, and the last thing she needed was the additional humiliation of being lied to. Finally, when Bacon mentioned something about a job in a newsstand being beneath the dignity of a girl like her, Vivien began working in a cafeteria.
It didn’t take Bacon long to realize that when you despise the woman you love, the love becomes a cruel, solitary vice. He trusted her, but he was also aware of the hatred that was slowly building up behind the wall of her submissiveness. Vivien, however, acted as though she had no idea of what was going on in her lover’s head, behaving as if nothing at all had changed between them. She continued visiting his house, twice a week at least, with the apathy of a rabbit who allows himself to be fattened up, knowing full well that the day will soon come when he will have to take his place on his master’s dining room table.
One day, at one of the little social gatherings she loved to organize, Bacon’s mother introduced her son to a perky, freckled young woman from “one of the best families in Philadelphia,” as Bacon’s mother noted with great pride. When the girl actually seemed interested in what he had to say, young Frank decided it wouldn’t be so terrible to dance with her, or tell her that he was currently unattached. Vivien didn’t even cross his mind; she had evolved into something of a sexual phantom that appeared at his bedside like a figure from one of his erotic dreams. Vivien, in fact, did materialize at Bacon’s apartment several times over the next few weeks, but she never found him there; he had failed to mention that he had made a number of dinner dates with the parents of his spectacular new girlfriend.
“Don’t leave me” Vivien said to him the next time they were together, in a quiet, firm, determined voice.
“This was going to have to end sooner or later, Vivien. I’m sorry, really I am.”
“Why?”
“There’s no other way.”
“I promise not to tell anyone about us.”
The more Vivien talked, the more Bacon despised her—and loved her, in some odd, inexplicable way.
“There’s something I haven’t told you,” he added, looking away. “I’m engaged.” His voice trailed off. “It couldn’t be any other way, you have to understand.”
Of course she could understand. Bacon knew she would—he could predict her reactions by now, otherwise he wouldn’t have told her, or at least not so abruptly. Perhaps Vivien would surprise him and actually get angry, and leave him for good. But Bacon suspected that she would do none of those things; he was betting that she would come back to him, and that once again they would love one another wordlessly, reverting to the same wretched habits they had maintained for so long.
“All right, Vivien. Whatever you wish.”
The Institute for Advanced Study was a moldy, dismal place. It had neither laboratories nor noisy, impertinent students, and the professional tools of its occupants were reduced to the bare minimum: a few blackboards, chalk, paper. If mental experiments were what you wanted, this was the place to perform them. There, safely tucked away behind the thick walls of Fuld Hall, some of the greatest minds in the world were at work: professors Veblen, Gödel, Alexander, Von Neumann, plus a handful of celebrated thinkers who made regular pilgrimages to the institute as a stop on the university lecture circuit. This, of course, was to say nothing of the institute’s most famous occupant, the patron saint of theoretical physics, Albert Einstein himself. Nevertheless, Bacon was bored.
Bacon had been working with Von Neumann for only three months, but he was already bothered that he hadn’t found anything that really excited him. It wasn’t that he disliked his work with the Hungarian mathematician—it was rather effortless, and after all, there was no better place to continue his education. But in his heart, he had discovered that something was pulling him away from the field of pure theory, or at least from the wordless science that was practiced at the institute. A few times, he had tried approaching the professors who gathered together for tea and cookies at three in the afternoon every day, but his attempts at striking up conversations were always frustrated by their utter lack of interest in him. Worn-out from being alone with their thoughts, they talked among themselves about such pressing scientific topics as baseball scores, the best way to acquire European wines, or the greasy quality of North American cuisine. The serious questions Bacon was trying to pose always dissolved amid a flurry of nervous titters and sudden, distracted gestures. Although he respected Bacon, Veblen limited their interactions to a condescending nod before moving away as quickly as possible. Von Neumann managed to tolerate him, as Bacon had suspected he would, but all the other scientists, the ones he scarcely knew, didn’t even acknowledge his existence.
Bacon, who was accustomed to excelling at all his academic endeavors, felt himself plummeting into a state of despondence at this lack of attention, a sensation that felt a lot like the depressions he had suffered while living with his family. In these moments, he wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off somewhere else, Caltech, maybe, where at least he would have been working on more pressing issues. Despite the fact that Von Neumann had published one of the most important documents of modern physics, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, in 1932, it was all too clear that he was now primarily concerned with his game theories and, even worse, the programming of mechanical calculators. Neither of these subjects compelled Bacon in the least; his mentor’s ingenious formulations were occasionally entertaining, but they weren’t enough to sustain Bacon’s interest.
In addition to all this, Bacon’s relationship with Elizabeth was growing more and more serious with each passing day, and the prospect of a formal engagement caused him nothing less than total panic. At first, he had treated their relationship as a test—after all, this was the first time a woman from his social class had ever declared her love for him. But he never imagined that it would all happen so fast. On the other hand, there was no way he could publicly formalize his relationship with Vivien: The ensuing scandal would alienate him from everyone, even in the academic world. The brilliant future that he had laid out by joining the institute suddenly seemed like a trap, and he saw no way out. But he couldn’t give up on it, either; he had to hold out for at least a year before he could even think of going to Caltech.
“What’s wrong with you, Bacon?” Von Neumann asked him one day, blunt and direct as always. “Is something the matter? Oh, I think I know what it is. Women, right? Men are forever in torment at the hands of women. That is the quintessential problem of the age we live in, Bacon. If we took one quarter of the time we spend resolving romantic problems and applied it instead to physics or mathematics, why, scientific progress would advance in geometric proportions. But it is one of life’s great pleasures, isn’t it?”
“Pleasure and pain, Professor,” mumbled Bacon.
“Of course, of course! That’s what makes it so very fascinating! I have to confess, I also spend hours thinking about this subject. I’m a married man, you understand. You even met my wife, Klara, at the party the other day. But I’m still young. I have a right to wonder if I will ever know another woman’s body, wouldn’t you agree?” Von Neumann’s cheeks grew pink, livened by the topic of conversation. “Why don’t we have a little drink at the end of the day, to talk more? Yes, let’s do it, Bacon. In the meantime, let’s get to work.”
As the afternoon wore on, the sun transformed the red-brick exterior of the institute into a wall of fiery rose and violet, breaking through the somber cloud cover that normally settled in above the building. Once again, Von Neumann told Bacon to meet him at his home. Klara had gone out to play bridge with one of their neighbors, so they had the house to themselves and could talk freely. Bacon was beginning to feel more and more at home in that drawing room.
“When they first told me that alcohol was forbidden in the United States, I thought it was a joke,” said Von Neumann as he removed two glasses from the bar. “You can imagine how horrified I was when I found out it was true. Truly insane, those Americans. I tell you, I only accepted the position of visiting professor at the university under the condition that I could return to Europe each summer and replenish this drought.” He took out a bottle of bourbon and expertly poured the honey-colored liquid into two tall glasses. “Thank God they realized their mistake. Water? I take mine neat. All right, here you are … So, tell me, Bacon, what’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know,” Frank lied. “I guess it would be different if …” He tried to correct himself: “It’s not that I’m unhappy at the institute, Professor, it’s just that I’m afraid that it might not be the right place for me right now.”
“Well, where else would you want to be?”
“That’s my problem. On one hand, I can’t think of any other place I’d rather be. Everyone is here. But for that reason, I get the feeling that my own work will never be very important at the institute.”
The professor shook his head, as if he was sincerely distressed. “I’ve always said that one’s mathematic capacity begins to decline after age twenty-six, so let’s see, you have how many years left?”
“Four.”
“Four! It’s terrible, isn’t it? Well, anyway, I am thirty-eight, though I think I hide it rather well.” He took a few sips from his glass, then wiped his lips with a linen napkin. “Nevertheless, I get the sense that the institute isn’t the only thing on your mind. You’ve got a problem with the girls, don’t you?”
Bacon was grateful for his tutor’s advice, but he wasn’t altogether convinced that he wanted to discuss his private life with him. The truth was, he didn’t like discussing his private life with anyone.
“So tell me, what’s the matter?”
“Well, it’s about two women….”
“I knew it! See what a good nose I’ve got, Bacon? People think that mathematicians are completely out of touch with the real world, but it’s just not true. Sometimes we are even better observers than regular people. We see things that others don’t.” He paused. “Do you love them both?”
“In a way, yes. I’m not sure. One of them is my fiancée. She’s a fine girl, very sweet.”
“But you don’t love her.”
“No.”
“So then marry the other one.”
“I can’t do that, either. I … I wouldn’t know how to explain it to you, Professor.” Bacon took a gulp of bourbon to fortify himself. “The other girl is very different. I don’t even know if I truly know her, much less love her. We barely even talk.”
“That’s a problem, that’s for sure … you’ve got a real problem on your hands,” Von Neumann mused. “Do you see how, once again, I was right? These are the issues that affect us all the time, even if we can’t admit it to ourselves. But don’t think that mathematics doesn’t come in handy at times like this.” The professor finished his drink and immediately poured himself another. Aside from his one sip, Bacon had barely touched his. “That’s why I’m so taken with game theory. Or did you just think it was some eccentricity of mine, passing the time with heads and tails and poker games? No, Bacon, what makes these games truly fascinating is that they mimic the behavior of men. And they serve, above all, to clarify the nature of three very similar issues: the economy, the war, and love. I’m not kidding. These three activities effectively represent all the battles we men wage against one another. In all three, there are always at least two wills in conflict. Each one attempts to take the greatest possible advantage of the other, at the least possible risk to himself.”
“Like in your war example.”
“Exactly, Bacon. Now, recently I have been more worried about the economic application of this theory, but your case would be a fine exercise to test. Let’s see. There are three players: you and your two girlfriends, whom we will call—in the interest of discretion—A and B. You will be C. Now you tell me what each person wants.”
Bacon’s hands grew clammy, as if he were preparing for confession. “The first one, the one you call A, is my fiancée. She wants us to get married. She’s always hinting at it and pressuring me—it’s all she thinks about. Girl B, on the other hand, only wants to be with me, but that, obviously, will be impossible if I agree to marry A.”
“Understood. And you, what do you want?”
“That’s the worst part of it. I don’t know. I think I’d like to keep things just as they are right now. I don’t want things to change.”
Von Neumann got up from his chair and began to pace around the room. He clapped his hands, as if he were applauding something, and then contemplated Bacon with a paternal, ever so slightly condescending look in his eyes.
“I’m afraid that you are trying to bet on inaction, perhaps the most dangerous thing you can do in a case like this. You can try, of course, but even the laws of physics would be against you on this one. In games, one always attempts to move ahead, to advance to new objectives, and slowly destroy the adversary. That’s how your two women are behaving. Both of them are trying to corner you, bit by bit, while you simply assume a defensive stance.” Von Neumann returned to his chair and rested his fat hand upon Bacon’s shoulder. “As your friend, I have to warn you that your strategy is doomed to fail. Sooner or later, one of them is going to wear you down. In fact, they don’t even realize it but they are actually competing with one another. You’re not a player in this, boy! You’re only the prize!”
“So what should I do, then?”
“Oh, dear Bacon. I’m only referring to game theory, not real life. Reason is one thing—as you so astutely observed in our last discussion—but human will is an entirely different animal. All I can say is that if I were in your shoes, there would only be one thing to do.”
“And are you going to tell me what that is, Professor?”
“I’m sorry, Bacon. I’m a mathematician, not a psychologist.” From somewhere deep beneath Von Neumann’s flushed countenance, an almost imperceptible, feline smile began to emerge across his lips.
Bacon knew that Einstein, ever since his Berlin days, loved to go on walks. Every day he would set out on the path between his house and the institute, and he particularly enjoyed chatting with a walking companion. The talks never lasted more than a few moments, but his companions treated them as if they were precious pearls of wisdom. Many illustrious physicists visited Princeton specifically to catch the professor on one of these walks, because it was during those moments that his mind was at its most relaxed and fertile.
One day Bacon decided to wait for Einstein outside of his office, cubicle 115 of Fuld Hall, hidden behind the staircase landing. He was scared, secretly embarrassed, like someone who chases after a movie star in the hopes of getting an autograph. That was the reason he was in Princeton, after all—to get to know men like Einstein, not to listen to Von Neumann’s eccentric psychology, and certainly not to put up with the indifference of his older colleagues.
Just like the journalists who had dedicated themselves to popularizing—or, rather, misinterpreting—Einstein’s theories, Bacon quickly learned the meaning of relativity. The seconds crawled by, agonizingly slowly; it was as if all the underground arteries connecting the universe were somehow, maddeningly, all blocked up. He had been waiting for about forty minutes now. Like a spy or a sentinel, or someone waiting for a miracle to happen, he maintained his vigil, waiting for the physicist to emerge from his office. Each time someone walked past him, Bacon waved hello timidly, and then raised his hand to his head as if to indicate that he had finally remembered the reason that had brought him there, and then walked in the opposite direction until he was certain the coast was clear. He felt like some kind of inept bodyguard, the anachronistic sentry of the Institute for Advanced Study.
Finally the door opened, and Einstein emerged, walking straight toward the exit. He wore a black suit and his hair, Bacon noticed, wasn’t nearly as white or as messy as it appeared in photographs. This was the moment he had been waiting for. But at the last minute Bacon faltered, and that one moment was all it took. Einstein scurried past him down the staircase. The great physicist hadn’t even noticed Bacon as he ran downstairs; he simply went on his way, indifferent to that dim shadow. By the time Bacon realized his mistake, it was too late. The professor was already out of the building. There was no way he could run and catch him by surprise; the idea was to make the encounter appear casual. If it seemed premeditated, Einstein would just get rid of him as quickly as possible. Bacon was furious at himself, but he was not about to give up so quickly. In an almost dreamlike state, Bacon began to follow Einstein—at a prudent distance, of course—digging deep into his coat pockets, leaving Fuld Hall behind.
Determined and giddy, Bacon was barely conscious of what he was doing, and of what an absurd endeavor it was. He was too focused on hiding behind the cars and ash trees that lined the streets to realize exactly what he was getting himself into. As Einstein advanced down the street, Bacon followed him. Finally, Einstein arrived at number 112 Mercer Street, where he lived with his secretary, Helen Dukas. Upon seeing Einstein disappear into his house, Bacon breathed a sigh of relief. Using his shirtsleeve, he wiped the perspiration from his forehead and headed back toward the institute.
The next day, Bacon was prepared to make up for his previous ineptitude. Today he would face Einstein for real, and if the circumstances allowed, he would confess his earlier conduct. It was said that the professor had a good sense of humor, and perhaps this would be the best way to break the ice with him. Just after noon, Bacon returned to his spot, like a soldier determined to fulfill his mission. Only moments after Bacon had reassumed his position at the stairwell, Einstein emerged from his office, once again at full speed. Bacon was unprepared for this surprise attack and, once again, the professor sped past him toward the exit, barely noticing Bacon.
His pursuit of the professor eventually evolved into yet another one of his daily routines, just like the calculations he executed for Professor Von Neumann, the phone calls he received from Elizabeth, and Vivien’s evening visits. Even if he were bold enough to confess it to anyone, who would believe him? That he was pursuing Einstein, like a spectrum, a wave that kept trying to move closer to the author of relativity? Out of the question. In the meantime, Bacon worked on his technique; as time went by he felt surer and surer of himself, certain that he was becoming nearly invisible…. Slowly, the walk toward 112 Mercer Street became as natural as afternoon tea, or the solution of a couple of matrices; he did it out of necessity, or like a bad habit. Einstein almost always walked home alone, although every so often someone would join him—old or young, famous or unknown, each occupied the spot that was supposed to belong to Bacon, the most devoted of his disciples.
Only once did Einstein notice him. A thick fog hung in the air that lay like a greasy film covering the faces of the passersby with an unbecoming, yellowish tint. The birds’ chirping rang through the air like a fire alarm signal sent out from one nest to the other. Suddenly, without any warning, Einstein turned on his heels and fixed his gaze squarely on Bacon, who was now frightened as a deer. It looked as though his sophomoric game was up. Bacon had lost.
“Do you work at the institute?” Einstein said upon recognizing him.
Perhaps this was the moment he had been waiting for, Bacon thought: the chance to initiate a friendship, albeit distant, with the man whose story he had followed more than any other, and to whom he felt connected by a profound, almost mysterious sense of awe and admiration.
“Yes, I do,” Bacon replied, breathlessly awaiting the professor’s next pronouncement, as if hanging on to the words of an oracle.
“It’s cold,” exclaimed Einstein, dazed.
That was all he said. Nothing more, no revelation, no prophecy. He didn’t even ask Bacon’s name. He bent his head slightly, as if to say good-bye, and continued on his way alone, absent, beneath the weak light whose structure intrigued him so. Now—finally!—Bacon could boast to the rest of the world that yes, he had received a dose of the genius’s wisdom, and he would treasure those marvelous words as if God himself had bellowed them: It’s cold. Bacon laughed to himself, still trembling, and waited for Einstein’s gray silhouette to recede, like the brilliant glow of the stars which he spoke of so eloquently. The next day, Bacon resumed his pursuit of the professor, but now with the serenity of a man who had completed his mission.
HYPOTHESIS IV:On Gödel’s Theory and Marriage (#ulink_955c5ab7-073b-51d0-979c-aac6cf35185b)
When her soul was tranquil, Elizabeth’s eyes were the color of olives. But Bacon could always be sure that the tranquillity would soon give way to thunder whenever they began to acquire a slightly coppery tone. At those times, all he could do was remain quiet and wait for the angry torrent of words to come pouring out of Elizabeth’s mouth, dying down to a trickle only after a few minutes. Her wrists were so slender that he could hold them between his thumb and pinky, and her neck was as strong and firm as a sunflower’s stem, but when she became incensed—a fairly frequent occurrence—her diminutive proportions grew exponentially, like those of a cobra in heat. All the innocence and courtesy she so carefully exhibited during social functions would evaporate, replaced by a torrent of fiery reproaches and menacing threats, a snit of such proportions that by the time it was over, she had nearly asphyxiated herself. Only then would she begin to feel remorseful, and as she allowed sweet tears to rain down on her cheeks, Bacon, moved by such a show of emotion, would have no other choice than to caress her delicate chin and run his fingers through her tousled hair, calming her down until she could muster enough strength for her next attack.
Elizabeth was the kind of woman who always looked as if she had just stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine: Her dresses were fitted, her jewelry took the form of tiny insects, and her hats sprouted feathers the likes of which Bacon had seen only in the movies. Her violet eye shadow and colorful rouge only enhanced her childlike complexion, reminding Bacon of a little girl trying to be like her mother by stealing and applying globs of her makeup. Bacon was always touched by this curious spectacle; in that inharmonious combination of lust and innocence, vanity and naïveté, he saw evidence of the sensitivity his fiancée hid behind her haughty appearance.
Aside from Elizabeth’s undeniable beauty and artistic talents (she was a student at an art academy in New York), there was something else about her that appealed to Bacon’s mother: her aristocratic lineage. Elizabeth, she explained to her son, was the only daughter of a rich banker from Philadelphia whose greatest desire was to see his daughter happy. When he saw her for the first time at a French restaurant on Fifth Avenue, Bacon knew that she would play an important role in his life—though not for any of the qualities his mother had mentioned. It was the tiny adolescent figure, the cascade of curls that tumbled out from under her hat, and the way that, in spite of her well-cultivated manners, she couldn’t help twisting and untwisting her fingers in her lap. Bacon had always appreciated that rather aggressive quality found in many spoiled girls, for he sensed it was simply their way of masking their inability to solve the problems of day-to-day life. In short, he liked Elizabeth because she was the opposite of Vivien.
That afternoon, somewhere between the lobster and the chocolate cake, Elizabeth made a confession—that is, she recited the words she assumed a liberal scientist like Bacon would want to hear from a girl: She was a painter. She spoke eloquently of the importance of art and freedom, and explained that money, to her way of thinking, was simply one among many means to happiness. The significance of her declarations was largely lost on Bacon—the champagne they drank took care of that—and Elizabeth worked hard to soften her sharp, grating voice into something closer to sensual. Meanwhile, Bacon’s mind was mainly focused on discerning the shape of her breasts beneath the cherry-colored blouse and the fine European lingerie that (he was certain) lay beneath it. He never once lifted his gaze to meet her eyes, but Elizabeth continued on, undeterred, with her detailed lecture on the history of art, convinced that a promising young scientist like Bacon couldn’t help falling in love with a woman of such great intellect.
One day, Bacon grabbed her hand and attempted to kiss her in the middle of the street. Elizabeth, employing her family’s old husband-catching technique, slapped him hard on the cheek, hard enough to call the attention of several passersby. She then told him to behave like a gentleman, and asked him to please walk her home. Once again, the tactic proved highly effective: Dazzled by this flash of temper, Bacon asked when he could see her again. After considering the idea for a few moments, Elizabeth accepted. From then on, they averaged about two dates a week, generally on Saturday mornings and Sunday afternoons, although almost an entire month went by before she would allow Bacon’s lust-filled lips to settle upon her own tightly pursed pair.
In theory, Bacon despised Elizabeth’s games, and he continued sleeping with Vivien about three times a week, though without the slightest trace of any sort of courtship ritual. Yet he nevertheless remained enthusiastic about the progress of his relationship with Elizabeth, precisely because she refused to let him touch her. In one of nature’s absurd paradoxes, he would dream of Elizabeth’s tiny body while savoring the largesse of Vivien; he yearned for Vivien’s silence as he endured Elizabeth’s insufferable discourses.
Bacon knew that the laws of civilized society—inspired by the laws of classical mechanics—were inflexible. Sooner or later, his double life would have to end; he could have only one of them. And it would have to be Elizabeth. His mother, his friends, his professors, his fellow graduate students—none of them would forgive him if he abandoned the delightful young lady who they always assumed would become his wife for a cafeteria worker. Resigned to a fate that seemed beyond his control, Bacon went out and bought a ring with a tiny blue diamond and gave it to Elizabeth one windy evening in March of 1942, beneath the moonlight, as prescribed by the laws of romantic love.
They hadn’t settled on a wedding date, but from that day forward, Elizabeth did little more than visit bridal shops to study the endless array of available wedding dresses. Each time she saw her fiancé she would describe, with the very same patience she dedicated to her lectures on surrealism and the avant-garde, the complicated floral patterns of each model, since she found herself incapable of deciding on one single gown. The decision, Bacon quickly realized, was going to be as agonizing as determining the quadrature of a circle.
Aside from Elizabeth’s new obsession with gowns, fabrics, veils, and laces, another idiosyncrasy came to light during this prewedding period: her ever-increasing jealousy. Marriage, to Elizabeth, was nothing less than complete and total surrender. Soon she began demanding more frequent visits from him. In addition to his usual Saturday and Sunday trips to New York, he now found himself traveling there several days a week, often to be with her for no more than a few hours. Unfortunately for Bacon, these trips offered no opportunity for increased intimacy. Bacon, then, was reduced to coming and going at Elizabeth’s behest, like a yo-yo in the hands of a child.
As a kind of punishment for his disobedience, Elizabeth began to demand, sometimes with shrill cries and other times with gentle caresses, a detailed report of his daily activities. “Where did you go?” “Why?” “With whom?” were the three basic questions, the tenets of a belief system she practiced with the fervent devotion of the recent convert. Any sudden observation, pointless comment, or unexpected turn of conversation would instantly become the motive for an interrogation that could last hours. She acted as though any activity that didn’t specifically focus on her represented a crime against their love. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, Bacon’s schedule of conferences, classes, and work assignments at the institute were little more than transparent alibis aimed at hiding his infidelity.
The most surprising thing of all was that Bacon responded to Elizabeth’s inventory of complaints with sweet nothings and apologies. Over and over again during those months he would ask himself exactly why he was subjecting himself to this military discipline which, in the end, was going to kill his spirit. The answer, alas, was simple: guilt. He knew that in spite of her temper tantrums, Elizabeth trusted him. And he also knew that her suspicions—though exaggerated at times—were not entirely unfounded. As he had explained to Professor Von Neumann, Bacon tried to maintain the relationship as it was by drawing Elizabeth’s attention to such banal topics as his oppressive job, so as to prevent her from inferring the real reason for his occasional absences. But gradually he learned that a man with a double life is a man condemned—not simply to lying but to inventing and defending half-lies, as if his world could be divided into two separate spheres, incompatible and complementary at the same time.
In late March of 1942, Von Neumann informed Bacon that Kurt Gödel, the eminent mathematics professor, would be coming to the institute in a few days to present one of his recent papers to a private audience. Unfortunately, this was to take place on the same day that Bacon had promised Elizabeth they would travel to Philadelphia. When Bacon told her, he explained the importance of the event and assured her they would make the trip the following month. Elizabeth, however, simply told him to go straight to hell. This wasn’t the first time she had threatened him—in fact, she was usually the one who would run back to him. But Bacon resolved not to give in this time. He was too determined to meet Gödel to let one of his fiancée’s idle threats get in the way. In fact, he thought, this might just be the perfect excuse to take a rest from her for a few weeks, to be alone and to think about his future.
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” he told her over the telephone, “but I have to be there.” He was suddenly aware that these final few days of freedom were nothing more than a brief prelude to a lifetime of indentured servitude, so he decided to take advantage of the time.
Professor Gödel was a short, taciturn man with the body of a flagpole; his general appearance called to mind an opossum or a field mouse, certainly not a genius of contemporary logic. Yet, it was true. He had become affiliated with the institute two years earlier, eight years after writing an article that overturned the foundations of modern mathematics.
In the course of over two millennia, mathematics had evolved in a disorderly fashion, like a tree with wild branches, twisting and wrapping around one another. Thanks to the discoveries of the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Indians, as well as the advances made in the modern West, mathematics had become something of a monster with a thousand heads, a discipline whose true nature nobody could even begin to understand. Mathematics was the most objective and evolved scientific instrument known to mankind, used daily by millions to resolve practical problems of everyday life. But amid all that infinite diversity, nobody knew for sure if mathematics might contain, somewhere within itself, a germ in decomposition, a fungus or a virus capable of refuting its own results.
The Greeks were the first to recognize this possibility in their discovery of the paradox. As Zeno and subsequent arithmetics and geometry scholars would prove, the strict application of logic occasionally produced impossibilities or contradictions that were not so easily resolved. The notion of the paradox went as far back as classical antiquity, in the dialogues of Achilles and the Tortoise, which refuted the notion of movement, or Epimenides’ paradox, which said a statement could be proven and refuted at the same time. Yet it wasn’t until the late Middle Ages that these irregularities began to multiply like malignant tumors. This heresy, which escaped the Pythagoreans as well as the fathers of the Church, proved that science indeed could be proven wrong, contrary to previous belief.
To put an end to this chaos, legions of scientific thinkers attempted to systematize mathematics and the laws that governed them. One of the first people to do so was Euclid. In his Elements, he attempted to derive all the rules of geometry from five basic axioms. Later on, philosophers and mathematicians like René Descartes, Emmanuel Kant, George Boole, Gottlob Frege, and Giuseppe Peano tried to do the very same thing in fields as far-flung as statistics and infinitesimal calculus, although their results were hardly conclusive. In the meantime, new paradoxes were emerging as well, such as those introduced by Georg Cantor in his set theory.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the situation was more bewildering than ever. Conscious of Cantor’s theories and the aberrations they produced, the English mathematicians Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead joined forces in an effort to reduce the entire scope of mathematics to a few basic principles, just as Euclid had done two thousand years earlier. Together they devised something they called the type theory, which led to the publication, in 1919, of a monumental treatise entitled Principia Mathematica, which was based on an earlier tract by Russell. The purpose of the Principia Mathematica, which they worked on from 1903 to 1910, was to erase all the uncomfortable contradictions known to contemporary mathematics.
Unfortunately, the work was so vast and complex that in the end, nobody was truly convinced that all mathematical statements could be reduced to their theories without falling into contradiction at some point or another. Just a few years earlier, in 1900, a mathematician at the University of Göttingen named David Hilbert had presented a paper at the opening session of the International Conference of Mathematicians in Paris, which explained a theory that would thereafter be known as Hilbert’s Program. In this treatise he laid out a list of all the great unresolved mathematical problems, as a kind of blueprint for future mathematical research. One of these conundrums was the so-called axiom of completeness, which questioned whether the system later described in the Principia—or any axiomatic system, for that matter—was comprehensive, complete, and free of contradiction. Could any arithmetic proposition be derived through his postulates? Hilbert thought the answer was yes, as he said to his colleagues gathered together in Paris: “All mathematical problems are solvable, we all agree with that. After all, when we set out to solve a mathematical problem, one of the primary things that draws us in is that calling we hear inside: Here’s the problem, it needs a solution. And this can only be found through pure thinking, because in mathematics there is no such thing as ignorabimus.”
“Hilbert’s Program became the bible of mathematicians and logicians of the world,” Von Neumann explained to Bacon one day. “To solve even one of his equations would mean instant fame. Can’t you just picture it? Hundreds of young minds, in every corner of the world, banging their heads to solve one of the pieces of Hilbert’s great puzzle. Maybe, as a physicist, you can’t grasp the magnitude of the challenge, but everyone wanted to prove himself. Everyone wanted to show that he was the best of them all. And it wasn’t just a race against unknown rivals, either; it was a race against time. It was madness.”
“I’m supposing you had tried to solve one of Hilbert’s problems,” Bacon interjected, knowing in advance what the answer would be, but giving Von Neumann a chance to unleash his vanity like a hungry tiger.
“Well, of course I tried it, Bacon, we all tried it. In fact, we’re still trying. For months I became obsessed by the completeness axiom and the challenge it presented.” Von Neumann scratched his chin reflectively and lowered his voice a notch, as if he were narrating a great suspense novel. “Just as Professor Gödel did later on, though he had more success with it than I. At first, I thought I had found the correct approach. My intuition told me that the goal was not impossible to achieve, as I had previously thought. Have you ever had that feeling of your skin tingling, like when someone scratches their nails against a blackboard? It was incredible.”
“And so what happened?”
“All of a sudden, I was stopped cold, as if a brick wall had suddenly appeared in the middle of the road.” Von Neumann rubbed his hands as if he were about to explode. “My mind was frozen, paralyzed. I fell to pieces. The depths of failure, you know. The only thing I could do was get into bed and go to sleep until the next day. Then, when I woke up, I realized that something truly amazing had occurred: In my dreams, I had found a way to advance my equations. I had dreamed it, Bacon, like a prophet inspired by the voice of the Creator! I was frantic, and I plunged back into my papers. Now I felt certain I had it.” His hands seemed to curl around an imaginary trophy. “But then, once again, as I reached the last little bit, the inspiration vanished. Again. Just like that. And there I was again, just like the time before. Stuck.”
“Oh, wow!” Bacon knew that he was supposed to utter an exclamation of enthusiasm and beg Von Neumann to go on with the story. “So then what happened?”
“Well, I waited until nighttime, and just as I had figured, I fell into yet another deep sleep.”
“And you found the missing link?”
“Exactly! It was a kind of miracle. My proof followed a complicated, perfect line of reasoning. I was convinced that with one of Hilbert’s problems on my CV, I would become famous.”
“So why didn’t it happen that way, Professor?”
“My good friend Bacon,” said Von Neumann, his thick, dry lips breaking into a smile, “it was a great stroke of luck for the world of mathematics that I did not dream a thing that night!”
When Gödel finally solved the problem in 1931, he was still a young, unknown mathematician. His paper, entitled “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems, 1,” was like a bucket of cold water soaking the optimism of Hilbert’s ideas. In his article, Gödel showed that the Principia Mathematica allowed for the existence of propositions that were true yet unprovable—that is, “undecidable.” He then went even further by proving that this phenomenon would hold true in any axiomatic system, in all existing or future fields of mathematics. Against what all the experts had predicted, Gödel had proved beyond a doubt that mathematics were incomplete.
With shockingly simple reasoning, Gödel refuted the romantic notion that mathematics could fully interpret the world, free of the contradictions inherent in philosophical inquiry. His paper was so successful that he didn’t have to write the follow-up chapter he had originally planned. His explosive mission was over. The most astonishing aspect of Gödel’s achievement, however, was its simplicity. Reformulating Epimenides’ ancient paradox—of course, the bedrock of all mathematical paradoxes—he had hit upon the theorem which proved his hypothesis. It said:
To every w-consistent recursive class k of formulae there correspond recursive class-signs r such that neither v Gen r nor Neg (v Gen r) belongs to Flg(k) (where v is the free variable of r)
An approximate translation of this might be: “All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions.” In simpler terms, Gödel said the following: “The system of Principia Mathematica offers no proof for this statement of number theory.” A possible expansion of the same: “This proposition of number theory has no proof within number theory,” which might also be stated in the following manner: “This logical proposition is unprovable by the very laws of logic.” The statement could even be extended to the realm of psychology: “It is impossible for me to prove this idea I have about myself.”
To recapitulate, Gödel stated that in any system—scientific, linguistic, mental—there will always exist statements that are true but unprovable. No matter how hard one tries, no matter how perfect a system one creates, there will nevertheless exist unprovable holes and voids, paradoxical arguments that behave like termites and devour the things that seem most solid. Gödel did for mathematics exactly what Einstein’s relativity theory, Bohr’s quantum theory, and the discoveries of their collective disciples did when they proved that physics was no longer an exact science—that is, an amalgam of absolutes. Nobody was safe in a world that was suddenly dominated by uncertainty. Thanks to Gödel, truth became more slippery and elusive than it had ever been before.
Vivien’s body stretched out again across Bacon’s bedsheets like a sinewy brown stain. She had arrived at his apartment just after dusk. Her long, bare arms were now lost in the darkness of the night, coated with a kind of dew from the persistent rain that fell outside. Only three days had passed since Bacon’s acrimonious telephone conversation with Elizabeth. As he began to kiss Vivien’s earlobes, he remembered that he had considered leaving her, too. But the moment she had arrived at his house, he knew that he would be unable to resist the temptation of possessing her once again.
As if freed from a prison sentence, for the first time in a very long time Bacon was overcome by the desire to be tender with his lover. Suddenly she seemed fragile and innocent, not pained and mysterious, and he wanted to make up for his many months of betrayal. Perhaps he was simply projecting the love he wanted for himself, but instead of watching her with cold eyes, he now decided to undress her, bit by bit, as if preparing a little girl for her bath. Then he kissed her on the lips slowly and tenderly (an indulgence he normally avoided) and stroked her curly black hair. And then, finally, he made love to her with the kind of tenderness usually reserved for love affairs with virgins. The only aspect of his routine that remained unchanged was the stubborn silence he maintained while penetrating her body.
“Do you love her?”
Nestled amid the sheets, Vivien looked like a drowning woman trying to defend herself against an enormous wave crashing down upon her. Bacon was lying on her back, and as he stretched himself on top of her body, he wondered if he had become the wave she was struggling against.
“No, well, I don’t know,” Bacon stammered.
“Are you going to marry her?”
“Yes.”
“Why, if you don’t love her?”
“Don’t ask me those questions. That’s just the way it has to be, I suppose. There are things a person has to do: get married, have children, die. Listen, from the beginning you knew. I never led you on, Vivien.”
“You don’t even remember my name. How could you possibly lead me on?” Vivien moved away from Bacon and got up from the bed. She didn’t seem angry, or even disappointed. She began gathering up her clothes, strewn across the floor.
Bacon looked at her as if he were staring at an ancient armoire that had suddenly sprung open, emptying bundles of photographs and lost memories onto the floor.
“Can I ask you something?” he finally said to her, haltingly, not even rising from the bed. “Just this once, Vivien, don’t go. Stay with me tonight. It’s raining. And I want to see your face in the morning.”
The next day, Bacon woke up very early, doubly vexed: by the unfamiliar presence of Vivien, and by the conference that Professor Gödel was to give that morning. For a few seconds he remained still, contemplating Vivien’s body as she continued sleeping peacefully. In the early morning light, she seemed lovelier than ever to him. Without making a noise, Bacon arose from the bed and got ready for the day. As he showered, he couldn’t shake the strange feeling of peace that he felt upon opening his eyes and finding Vivien at his side. He told himself he had to forget about her, but her perfume clung stubbornly to his skin. Much as he tried, he could not rub out her scent with soap and water.
During the past few days, Bacon had begun to read up on Gödel’s life, as if he were planning to discuss the man’s biography at some later date. All the professors at the institute seemed to admire and respect him, even if they often dropped hints indicating that his personality was as difficult as his theorems. But he was one of Einstein’s close friends.
Gödel had first come to the institute as a visiting professor in 1933, while still a professor at the University of Vienna. His lectures at that time (obviously) focused on the incompleteness of mathematics, and he tended to inspire intense (verging on obsessive) interest among those who came to hear him speak on the topic. Very few men of science, with the possible exception of Einstein, could boast of such an attentive audience. Oswald Veblen, who organized the event, was delighted by the enthusiastic turnout. And though Gödel used the very weakest voice to expound upon the fundamental theories of logic, the students devoured his sentences, as if deciphering them was an additional privilege that would grant them greater and deeper access to their master’s incredible conclusions.
Everything had gone according to schedule until one morning, when Gödel announced to Veblen that he had to return to Europe immediately. He would not be able to finish his lecture series. Unable to invent an excuse, he simply said that he felt a pressing need to return home, that he was terribly sorry but he couldn’t do a thing about it. After apologizing to the other professors at the institute, Gödel returned to Europe. Later on, in the fall of 1934, it was discovered that upon his return he had checked into the West-end Sanitarium, on the outskirts of Vienna, for psychiatric treatment, the victim of a profound clinical depression.
A year after this panic attack, Gödel reestablished ties with the academic community in Princeton and embarked upon another series of conferences. In 1939, shortly after Hitler had annexed Austria to the Third Reich, Gödel lost his position at the University of Vienna. To make matters worse, he was soon called into active duty by the Austrian authorities, despite his fragile state of health. In January of 1940, he and his new wife, Adèle Nimbursky, decided to leave for the United States. It was, however, the strangest sort of odyssey. Instead of traveling across the Atlantic, which they felt was too dangerous, Gödel and his wife set out for Russia, where they boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway headed for Japan. At Yokohama they set sail for San Francisco, where they arrived on March 4, 1940. A few days later, Einstein welcomed them to Princeton.
Bacon arrived at the institute and sat down in one of the last rows of the auditorium to await Gödel’s arrival, feeling the same anticipation he often felt before Vivien’s visits. He watched the mathematician enter and it seemed to him that the thirty-six-year-old professor looked more like a priest or a rabbi than a mathematician. His nose looked like the tiny protuberance on a turkey’s beak. His little eyes, shielded by thick, dark glasses, didn’t seem to radiate any particular intelligence. Nevertheless, Bacon and the others present were convinced that the skinny, bedraggled soul before them was a prodigy, a melancholy genius whose talent clearly came at the expense of his own mental health.
One of the unexpected revelations of Gödel’s theorem was the confirmation of the idea that genius and insanity are inextricably linked. If all mathematical systems contain statements that are true yet unprovable, couldn’t the same be true for the realm of the human mind? Just like mathematics, the mind is incapable of protecting itself in the face of chaos and confusion. It is impossible to discern one’s own sanity or insanity because there exists no such external mark of reference outside one’s own brain to prove the truth definitively. The insane person can judge himself only through the logic of the insane, and the genius, through the logic of genius.
On this occasion, Gödel gave a speech that was nothing more than a compulsive variation on the original theme he had sketched out during his previous lecture series at Princeton. He read his speech in an erratic, weak voice, offering little in the way of professorial showmanship, and the examples he provided were skimpy, pale sketches of his brilliant metaphors. In short, he was the polar opposite of Von Neumann, whose explications overflowed with wit and cleverness. Gödel’s reflections were somber and serious, as gray and boring as his personality. At the end of the lecture, Bacon went up to him, along with some other members of the institute, and, as planned, Von Neumann made all the introductions.
“Kurt,” he said, “you won’t believe me when I tell you this young man’s name.”
Gödel made a gesture indicating he wasn’t especially interested. Bacon tried extending his hand, but the professor did not even seem to notice the gesture.
“Francis Bacon. Can you believe that?” Von Neumann laughed. “Nothing less than Francis Bacon. Only this one, as opposed to the original, is a physicist.”
“I don’t believe in the natural sciences,” Gödel responded, in a tone that wasn’t trying to be condescending, but simply rational.
“But don’t you find it amusing, Kurt?”
Gödel’s eyes rested on Bacon’s for a moment, but rather than scrutinize him, Gödel was trying to understand this strange joke his American friends were making. Finally, Von Neumann took him by the arm, as if he were a stone sphinx on loan from a foreign art museum, and the others hurriedly dispersed. Only Bacon stood where he was, in the middle of the corridor, nonplussed by the mathematician’s listlessness.
When Bacon returned home that evening, Vivien was there. He was the one who had needed her so badly the night before, and now it was her turn to expose her weakness, against both her better judgment and their mutual agreement never to do such a thing. Just as she had done so many times before, Vivien was sprawled out on the bed, though this time dressed in a violet-colored blouse and black skirt, waiting for him with the serenity of a woman waiting for her executioner to arrive.
“What are you doing here?” was all he dared to ask. He let his briefcase fall to the floor with the subtlety of an anvil.
“I knew you wouldn’t like it.”
Bacon moved closer to Vivien, as cautious as a panther waiting to pounce on a deer. She didn’t even have time to sit up. Unable to hold back, Bacon began to kiss her bare feet, her legs, and, finally, after peeling off her clothes like the skin on a piece of tropical fruit, his lips found their way to her belly and then her breasts. He was certain that this was a mistake (even worse: this was the second time he had made the same mistake), but he didn’t care. He melted into Vivien’s warm skin, and would have happily stayed there for at least another night. After a few hours, however, it was Vivien who put an end to it all.
“I have to go now,” she said, still lying in his arms.
“Why?”
“It’s getting late.”
“So what? You can stay if you want.”
Vivien knew as well as he did that it wasn’t true, that they were deceiving one another, but there is nothing more false than an unwanted truth. It was better to imagine that the future was nothing more than one among many possibilities, a potential reality as nonexistent as the past. Just as adamant as Bacon had been in deciding not to see Elizabeth for the duration of Gödel’s lecture series, he was determined to savor this time with Vivien, like the derelict who squeezes his last orange down to the very last drop of juice.
For several weeks, Elizabeth had been unable to sleep more than a few hours at a time. For her, the inclement nights had turned into a kind of prolonged torture in which images of her fiancé passed before her eyes like a movie reel. She envisioned him involved in all sorts of terrible activities, most of them incompatible with marriage. She began to lose her appetite, and soon realized that if she carried on like this, she would end up a skinny, desperate woman. The first few days of their separation, she wanted to teach him a lesson, and resisted the temptation to track him down. She was too sure of herself to doubt, even for a moment, that he would swallow his pride and come back to her. Once he realized how pigheaded he was being, Francis would begin to woo her in earnest, and then she would lay down the law once and for all, and spell out the conditions which would govern their future together. Her present hardships and deprivation were worth it; they were the guarantee of a glorious future that lay ahead.
They had never been apart for such a long period. And with each passing day it became more and more difficult. It was a kind of race, and the winner would simply be the one whose willpower and tenacity held out longer (later on, Bacon would liken it to the race between Achilles and the Tortoise, his fate being that of the Tortoise). Fully aware that this challenge would determine the course of the rest of her adult life, Elizabeth decided she was prepared to go the distance. Whenever a bout of anxiety would weaken her resolve and tempt her to call him, she consoled herself with the reminder that he was surely suffering the very same anguish as a result of their separation.
A nightmare was what finally broke her will. In it, she fell victim to a horrible sickness, and instead of lamenting her death, Bacon went out and celebrated it! Elizabeth woke up in tears, convinced that her dream was a sign that her strategy was failing. What if he didn’t come after her? If he never really loved her in the first place? For the first time in her life she regretted her intransigence and hot temper; perhaps she had demanded too much of him. She loved him. She loved him more than before, more than she ever had. She thought of how stupid she had been. Why wait and become embittered by this separation? Why had she tested their love at all, when all she wanted was to have him by her side? Pride and vanity had no right to keep them apart! But there was still a chance to make amends for her mistake.
The morning after her nightmare, Elizabeth decided it was time to make peace with Bacon. By the time she arrived at Bacon’s house, it was eleven in the morning—he would be at the institute, naturally. She could barely move as she struggled beneath the packages piled high in her arms. From a distance, her slow, teetering walk evoked that of a robot in a science fiction movie. In her arms she carried wine and cheese, fruit, balloons, and even an adorable model train. In spite of the fact that she had never before set foot in Bacon’s apartment (she preferred him either to visit her at her home or to meet her at cafeterias and restaurants), from the beginning of their relationship she had insisted that he give her a key. Now she was ready to use that little device to surprise him, to delight him, and to convince him that the time had come for their reconciliation.
The lecture hall was filled to capacity. Bacon was certain, however, that only a small fraction of the audience would be able to understand the true significance of the words that fell from Kurt Gödel’s lips with such surprising ease. Veblen and Von Neumann were sitting in the first row, watching as Gödel shuffled around with the grace of a hippopotamus, scrawling formulas onto the blackboard like a caveman making stick drawings of a buffalo on a cave wall. The mathematician looked frightened, and he made every effort not to look directly at his audience, losing himself in the infinity point above the back wall of the room. That day, Gödel had turned his attention, and that of his audience, to the problem known as the continuum hypothesis, sketched out by the mathematician Georg Cantor in his set theory.
“Cantor’s continuum hypothesis,” he said softly, as if he were the only one in the auditorium, “can be reduced to this simple question: How many points are there in a straight line on a Euclidean plane?” Gödel waited for a moment, as if to allow the question to seep into his mind before tossing it back out like a giant marble. “Obviously, this question is only possible when we extend the concept of the word number to infinite sets.”
All of a sudden, Gödel stopped cold in his tracks, unable to comprehend why someone would interrupt his lecture. A heavy wooden door opened and then slammed shut, producing a resounding thud that destroyed the otherworldly mood that had settled over Gödel’s audience. Veblen and the other professors rose from their seats, while all eyes focused on the woman who had suddenly burst into the lecture hall.
“Where are you?” she screamed, unfazed by the strangers witnessing the scene. Every last bit of Elizabeth’s beauty had evaporated and what was left was a cold scowl as she scanned the rows for the face of her double-crossing fiancé. “You lied to me! Admit it!”
Seated in the back row, Bacon made out the silhouette of Elizabeth. He didn’t know what to do, whether to stand up and try to calm her down, or try to hide from her wrath altogether. Elizabeth, meanwhile, remained utterly indifferent to the suddenly uncomfortable atmosphere in the auditorium. Gödel was horrified.
Veblen quickly admonished her: “For goodness’ sake, miss, I don’t know who you are or whom you are looking for, but this is a university lecture. I must ask you to leave immediately, so the professor may continue his presentation.”
Elizabeth did not hear a word. She was too busy searching for her terrorized victim.
“Don’t try to hide!” she screamed. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out? That you could keep seeing that whore? How stupid do you think I am?”
“Elizabeth, please,” begged Bacon. Painfully aware of his audience, he tried his best to placate his fiancée. “We’ll fix all this later.”
“Later? Forget about later! I’m not going anywhere until you start explaining!” And she began to advance toward him, her face stained with tears that were as hot as the anger Bacon was beginning to feel.
“Mr. Bacon,” said Veblen pointedly, gesturing toward the exit. “Would you please explain to this young lady that we are in the middle of a very important lecture? Do you understand?”
By this time, Elizabeth was face-to-face with her fiancé. When he took her by the arm and tried to direct her toward the back of the lecture hall, she responded with a resonant slap across the face. The entire audience—with the exception of Gödel—breathed a prolonged oh! at the sound made by her hand, like that of a flyswatter slamming against a windowpane. Unable to endure any more humiliation, without even thinking, Bacon responded in kind. His blow was much less powerful but, due to an unfortunate matter of acoustics, much louder.
“This is unacceptable, Bacon!” Veblen exploded, though next to him Von Neumann let out an amused chuckle. “I will ask you again to please leave this room so we can go on.”
Elizabeth, stung by the slap, was not aware of what was happening around her. She had single-handedly caused a most disastrous scene which now felt more like a hazy, chaotic nightmare. The only thing she wanted was to embrace Bacon and fall into a long, deep sleep by his side. At the front of the lecture hall, Gödel watched the scene unfold in a state of complete and utter shock.
“You let her into your house,” Elizabeth sobbed as Bacon guided her toward the exit amid the stares of his colleagues. “You had that whore in your house.”
The last thing Bacon was able to see before leaving the auditorium was the furious face of Professor Veblen, which wordlessly told him that his currently favorable position and his no less brilliant future at the institute were both ruined. As he supported the exhausted body of his fiancée (now his ex-fiancée, he told himself), Bacon could scarcely begin to fathom the manifold consequences of the scene. Suddenly the three stable elements of his life—Elizabeth, the institute, and, yes, even Vivien—had crashed into each other like runaway trains. What would Von Neumann think of this, the unforeseeable outcome of his romantic games? Bacon led Elizabeth to a nearby room and sat her down in a chair. He remained there for a while, not touching or hugging her. He waited for a few minutes more. When she came to, she insulted him again and then, still trembling, got up and left the institute alone.
Meanwhile, back in the auditorium Professor Gödel made the announcement that he would be unable to continue with his lecture, and then he began to cry uncontrollably until Von Neumann walked up to the lectern to console him.
HYPOTHESIS V:On Bacons Departure for Germany (#ulink_2bf93719-92e3-5943-8f8b-aaf113473117)
When Bacon returned to the institute a few days later, he went straight to Frank Aydelotte’s office. Aydelotte, the institute’s director and Flexner’s successor, had been looking everywhere for Bacon. Bacon had no idea what fate this meeting would hold for him, though he was reasonably certain it was nothing positive. He figured it to be somewhere between a strong reprimand and unequivocal expulsion. To make matters worse, he had another of his terrible migraines. He felt as if a knife were lodged in his skull, splitting his cranium in two: One side was healthy and resilient while the other was trembling with the frenetic, uncontrollable energy of a piston charging at full blast. These headaches were always precipitated by nerves or a great shock, and they came on with lightning force, like a shooting star in the night sky. As soon as he saw the lights twinkling, followed by the ominous symptoms of vertigo and nausea, Bacon knew that the pain wasn’t far off. It was useless to try and resist it. He had tried household remedies like tea (which only made him more jittery), or ice cubes on his neck (which only made him feel like a filet of sole on display at a fish market), or the useless, bizarre massages of his earlobes or pinky finger. They never provided even a moment’s relief. And then the inevitable pain would come. Just as inevitable as the merciless tongue-lashing that he was about to receive from Aydelotte.
It was ten in the morning, and his body was already at the breaking point. The rays of sunlight sliced through his contracted pupils like splinters, and the faraway noises of the Princeton streets reverberated loudly in his atrophied eardrums. The vermilion walls of Fuld Hall looked like gelatin to him. Bacon breathed in, trying to pull himself together, and announced himself to the director’s fat secretary. The director ushered him in immediately; without getting up from his desk, he indicated a chair, the location of Bacon’s imminent torture. Behind Aydelotte, a tall man dressed in gray, burly as a football player, studied him expectantly.
“Sit down,” Aydelotte said.
Bacon obeyed. He didn’t want to make his discomfort too apparent, but he also didn’t want to seem too inhibited. The role of the punished child was unpleasant enough; he certainly did not wish to exacerbate it with an explanation of his physical ills.
“Relax, Bacon,” the director said generously. “This isn’t a court-martial, nor is it a firing line.”
“Before anything, I want to apologize,” Bacon interrupted abruptly. “I never meant for my personal problems … Could I at least see Professor Gödel to apologize to him myself?”
Aydelotte gave him a reproachful look.
“Slow down, Bacon. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Professor Gödel had another one of his nervous episodes. He’s a very sensitive man.”
“Is he unwell?”
“Let’s just say that this is not one of his better moments. I suppose it will pass. But for the moment, he has decided to stay inside for the week.” Aydelotte coughed, on purpose, indicating the end of that part of their conversation. “I told him, Bacon, that the situation was truly an embarrassment. Can you imagine the impression it left on the other assistants? Professor Veblen has initiated a rather heated campaign against you, Bacon. Do you follow what I’m saying?”
“I would do anything at all to make up for what happened.”
“Anything at all,” repeated Aydelotte in a severe tone of voice. “It’s a shame, Bacon. I have examined your file carefully and I must tell you the truth. It’s quite impressive. First as an undergraduate and then here, you have performed your duties with brilliance and discretion—two qualities I admire immensely, especially in men of science.”
As Bacon watched him, it seemed that Aydelotte’s lips moved too much; they looked like two eels wrestling with each other.
“In any event, Professor Von Neumann has taken up your defense. He says that you are one of our most gifted colleagues. Moreover, he said he is certain that in the future, once you’ve gained the maturity that comes only with time, you will doubtless make great contributions to the field of physics.” A slight exaggeration, Bacon thought, but Aydelotte continued, “As you can imagine, your situation here is a difficult one, though not hopeless. You have so many points in your favor that one little episode such as that of the other day is hardly fatal.”
Bacon wasn’t completely sure if this solemn, officious tone of voice was a figment of his imagination or if it was just Aydelotte’s way of getting rid of him in the nicest way possible.
“Don’t worry, Bacon, I’m not saying all this as a prelude to firing you,” Aydelotte said. He stopped looking at Bacon and concentrated instead on screwing and unscrewing the cap of his fountain pen. “Of course, I do have to say what must be said, son: You no longer have a place at the institute. Your behavior the other day only confirmed this unfortunate fact.” Bacon felt a shock, as if the director had just poked him in the eye. “We have been delighted to have you here with us, yet I think—and correct me if I am mistaken—that you feel you are being wasted. Your talents are not very well suited to our style of work.”
Aydelotte turned briefly to look at the man in the gray suit behind him. His face impassive, the man nodded to indicate his approval. Aydelotte continued.
“I don’t mean to suggest you become an experimental physicist. Rather, I am trying to say that your character is—how can I explain it? Too curious. We feel that if things were to continue as they are now, you would eventually leave the institute without making any of the great achievements we all feel are within your grasp. You need more action, son. More life.”
“I … I don’t know what to say,” stuttered Bacon. “I promise, if you’d simply let me—”
“I’ve already told you, what happened during Gödel’s lecture was unfortunate but not a determining factor.” Aydelotte was starting to grow irritated. “Allow me to introduce you to Mr. Bird.”
The man in gray offered the faintest hint of a smile.
“Mr. Bird works for the government. A few weeks ago he contacted me, inquiring if I might recommend someone with the qualities necessary to carry out a special mission. The government needs a young person who also happens to be a competent physicist. When I learned the details of the request, I spoke with Professor Von Neumann and he couldn’t think of a better candidate than yourself.”
Aydelotte’s words burned in Bacons ears, for they carried the sting of what amounted to an invitation to resign. After the ambiguous introduction, Bacon contemplated the man before him, a man with a firm, formidable constitution. He was slightly burly, like a former athlete retired for several years. Bacon guessed that he was in the military, perhaps an ex-marine.
“I want you to know, dear Bacon”—Aydelotte was clearly uneasy using this uncharacteristically personal epithet—“that we would be very happy if you would work with Mr. Bird, but of course it is not an order. We’d just like you to listen to his ideas and then decide—under no pressure at all—what would be most appropriate. I think this could be a dignified solution for everyone involved.”
As he finished his speech, Aydelotte got up and, with forced enthusiasm, offered his hand to Bacon. Mr. Bird coughed slightly, indicating the end of that part of the conversation, and walked toward the door.
“Why don’t we go for a walk,” he said to Bacon, in a voice that clearly wasn’t about to take no for an answer. Bacon followed him. Aydelotte’s talk was like an electric charge that made him forget about his headache.
“Good luck, Bacon,” said the director.
Just as had occurred with his migraine, that one single sentence seemed to be a sign telling Bacon that he would not see Aydelotte—or the institute—for a long, long time.
“Have you ever visited here before?” Bacon asked Mr. Bird to break the ice.
“Once or twice, yes.”
They started their walk as good friends would, going nowhere in particular. Mr. Bird did not seem to be in a rush; he would occasionally stop to admire the daisies and the decorative shrubs along the way, as if he were an amateur horticulturist.
“So, you work for the government?” Bacon asked, starting to feel nauseated again. “Is there somewhere specific you’d like to go?”
“No.”
They walked through the entire campus and when they were finished, started over again. One thing was certain: Mr. Bird had all the time in the world. But then, all of a sudden, he stopped and looked Bacon squarely in the face, as if he finally deigned to reveal the purpose of his visit.
“Is it true that Einstein discovered the fourth dimension?”
At first, Bacon wasn’t sure he understood the question. He wondered if his headache was making him hear things.
“No, not exactly,” he said after a few seconds. “In his theory, time is the fourth dimension. Human beings live within a four-dimensional universe, one of space-time.”
“What about the formula that was published in the newspapers—does it prove the existence of the human soul?”
“No. All it says is that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared.”
Mr. Bird scratched his head theatrically. Then, as if he had merely asked the question to set the scene for his own monologue, he launched into his theory.
“I’m not so convinced about that relativity theory. I think there are certain things that simply aren’t relative. Good and evil, for example, are not relative. That line of reasoning only leads to crime, don’t you think? I know too many scoundrels who use the idea of relativity to try and escape punishment. Can you imagine what would happen if we all thought everything was relative and that every single one of us could do as we pleased? There is nothing relative about being a traitor. There’s nothing relative about being a murderer. To start a war that kills millions of people, as Hitler has done, why, there’s nothing relative about that.”
Bacon felt intimidated.
“I agree with you. But what you’re talking about doesn’t have anything to do with the relativity theory or with Einstein,” Bacon replied. “He was only speaking in terms of physics, not human nature.”
“To me it’s the same thing.”
“No. Einstein asserts that movement is relative only for those observers who are in motion themselves (as we are walking, for example, the women walking toward us seem to be advancing faster than they really are). He states that light is the only objective point of reference, since its velocity always remains the same, independent of where we are when we measure it. Moral issues have nothing to do with these facts, Mr. Bird.”
“And do you consider this a truly important discovery?”
“Of course I do.”
“I apologize for my insistence, but I have to disagree. If things were that way, wouldn’t we all realize it? I don’t believe there exists a fourth dimension, nor do I believe in atoms or any of those things, because I have never seen them for myself.”
“You aren’t the only one,” Bacon replied resignedly. He was beginning to get exasperated. Discussing physics with a man who probably didn’t even know the meaning of Π was ridiculous. And Mr. Bird seemed too convinced of his own beliefs to be persuaded that Einstein might know more than he did.
“Is this what you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Oh, no. I’m sorry, it was just a curiosity of mine.” Bird suddenly seemed chagrined by the digression. “I have met so many men like you that I’ve often wondered what in God’s name you think about all the time. Physicists spend hours and hours just thinking. They do it while running around their offices, when they’re at home, in the shower, before going to bed. I bet they even think about all those numbers while they make love to their wives.”
“We’re not all like that,” Bacon said, hoping to lighten the mood. “But why do you know so much about physicists and their habits?”
“I have had to familiarize myself with you. It’s my job.”
“You still haven’t told me exactly what your job is, Mr. Bird.”
“I will, in due course. Why don’t you start off by telling me why you have been following Professor Einstein every day.”
Over and over again in his dreams, Bacon had imagined someone asking him this very question. He had even invented several possible explanations, although they all flew out of his head when confronted by Bird’s question.
“Please, don’t try to deny it,” Mr. Bird assured him in a velvety voice, the kind you hear in the movies. “You have been following Professor Einstein, and we have been following you.”
“So who are you, then?”
“You haven’t answered my question, Professor.” Bird’s voice grew more menacing.
“You won’t believe my answer,” said Bacon, trying to smile.
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that.”
“I swear to you I don’t know why. One day I thought I would try to strike up a conversation with him as he walked home for lunch, but I didn’t have the nerve, so I decided just to walk with him … from afar.”
“Walk with him from afar. And you decided to do that every day?”
“Yes. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s the truth.”
“And do you think Professor Einstein never saw you doing this?”
“Well, once, but I didn’t think he noticed.”
“And what would you say if I told you Professor Einstein had alerted the police?”
“You’re not serious.” Bacon started to perspire. “It was a harmless thing, I mean, I never meant—”
“These are difficult times, Professor,” said Bird, returning to his previous courtesy. “You do know that the Nazis despise Professor Einstein, and they are not the only ones. There are so many deranged people in this world. The United States is his new home and the United States must ensure the security of its citizens. Especially the security of someone like Professor Einstein, wouldn’t you agree?”
“So you’re a policeman?” Bacon asked, growing alarmed.
“Not exactly,” Bird said, in a voice that attempted to inspire confidence. “At least not in the usual sense. Let’s just say that I am in charge of making sure Professor Einstein feels at home. That no one bothers him. I’m his shadow, so to speak.”
“You were watching me, then? So you must know it was just a game, right?”
“Yes, I know. Still, we were forced to take the proper precautions. It took me some time to investigate it, but, thank goodness, I didn’t find anything suspicious.”
“Well, now that you know I’m not a murderer, may I go?”
“I’m afraid not.” Mr. Bird remained firm. “They tell me you’re a very competent physicist. Commendable record. Commendable behavior—well, aside from your problems with women, although that doesn’t bother me. It was for precisely that reason that we agreed with professors Aydelotte and Von Neumann when they approached us about you. We think you are just the person we need to carry out a very delicate mission that has us very concerned.”
“What can I possibly do?”
“A lot, Professor. You’re young, you’re a competent scientist, you certainly court danger, you speak German fluently, and, as it turns out, you’re now without a job and without obligations. We think you’re the ideal candidate.”
“Ideal for what?”
“I’ve already told you: for working with us. An investigation, if you will. You care deeply about your country, do you not?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then it’s time you did something for it. Don’t forget, Professor, we’re in the middle of a war. Priorities tend to get shifted around at a time like this.”
“I suppose there’s no way I can refuse you.”
“You won’t. You owe a good deal to this country and the moment has finally arrived for you to give back a little bit of what you’ve received. Doesn’t that seem fair? In addition, as Professor Aydelotte mentioned, you don’t belong to the institute anymore. Your staying on at the institute would only cause problems, not to mention the ones you already have before you. I think you know what I’m talking about.” Bird spoke to Bacon as if he were a small child who needed to hear the reasons for doing his chores. “Obviously, I must have total confidentiality. You mustn’t discuss this with anyone, and I’m afraid you’ll only be permitted to say good-bye to those closest to you, and without many details as to the reasons for your departure.”
“How can I tell them if I don’t know anything myself?”
“Tell them you’re enlisting in the army. That you’ve finally decided to do it. Later on, if things calm down, you can write to them and tell them the truth.”
“This is awfully strange. I’ll have to think about it.”
“I’m sorry, Professor Bacon, but there isn’t time for that. You’ll have to trust us—just as your country trusts you.”
Bacon knocked loudly on Von Neumann’s door, as desperate as a dying man looking for a priest to issue his last rites. His headache had disappeared entirely, replaced by a feeling of unreality, possibly brought on by his fever.
“What’s going on?” Von Neumann asked him as he opened the door, brusque as usual. Bacon walked into his office without waiting to be invited in.
“I’ve come to thank you for your recommendation,” he announced. “And to say good-bye.”
Von Neumann sat down in his chair and studied Bacon for a few moments. A paternal expression came over his face. As always, his initial surly attitude gave way to a mellow friendliness.
“I’m glad you took the offer, my friend. You made a good decision.”
“You already knew, didn’t you?”
“After the … incident, Aydelotte called me into his office. Veblen was demanding that you be expelled immediately from the institute. I simply told them the truth: that you’re an excellent physicist but that your future doesn’t lie here. Aydelotte thought it over and then told me that perhaps there was a better opportunity for you, a ‘research trip,’ he called it.” Von Neumann allowed himself a slight, acidic smile. “In the age we find ourselves in, my dear Bacon, we all have to make sacrifices. You are an intelligent man, one who can do a great deal of good for his country—but somewhere else, not here in Princeton, in this ivory tower. I know you’re anxious and upset, but I can’t say any more than this: You were chosen to participate in an important mission because you’re a physicist. You won’t be an ordinary soldier; your work is going to be terribly important.”
“I would have rather made the decision under less pressure.”
“But in a way you did make the decision, my boy. The circumstances worked in your favor. Don’t you remember our last conversation?” Von Neumann patted Bacon’s shoulder affectionately. “You yourself told me about your romantic problems, about your dilemma with those two women. I tried to explain to you that game theory also works when applied to romantic strategies. Do you follow me so far?”
“Of course.”
“Ever since that day, I knew that if you insisted on maintaining your life as it was, allowing nothing to change, that eventually you would lose everything. Instead of solving your problem, you would only make it worse. And that is exactly what happened.”
“I suppose so. You told me that I was caught in the middle of a rivalry between Vivien and Elizabeth and that the moment would inevitably arrive in which I would be forced to choose between the two. It was either that or the inverse: that one of them would leave me.”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you that I wasn’t mistaken.”
“Even so, I think you fell short. You saw what happened. In the end, they came face-to-face, and the end result is that I lost both of them.”
“That’s what I expected.” There was a touch of compassion in Von Neumann’s voice that Bacon had never heard before. “It makes sense. To fall in love with two women—which is very different from sleeping with two women—is the worst thing that can happen to a man. At first you think of it as a blessing, as a sign of virility, but in fact it’s more like a calamity, of biblical proportions at that. The truth always comes out in the end, and by that time you don’t know how or why you ever got involved in the game to begin with. It’s hard enough to love one woman, Bacon, let alone two.” Von Neumann seemed to be recalling his own turbulent romantic history. “The competition established between two women in love with the same man is a zero-sum game. If one woman wins, the other necessarily loses, and vice versa. It is impossible to satisfy both. No matter how fair he tries to be, the man in question always ends up betraying both women. In the long run this behavior provokes suspicion and in the worst cases (like your own), a confrontation between the two rivals. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, Bacon.”
“But you told me that there might be a logical solution to this mess.”
“There is!” It amused Von Neumann to play the role of the deus ex machina. “Once all three trains have collided, so to speak, the only possible strategy is to abandon the game altogether and begin another. That’s it.”
“Leave them both?”
“Once and for all.”
“That’s why you recommended me for the position?”
“Well, that was the catalyst. I hope you’re not upset. In all honesty, I do believe this is your only option. It isn’t running away, but rather saving what little you have left. Or would you rather stay in the little hell that seems to have swallowed you up?”
Bacon was silent. He was still reeling from the effects of the recent chain of events—Elizabeth’s pain and subsequent rage; Vivien’s abrupt disappearance; the scandalized murmurs in the hallways of the institute. He could barely think about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Maybe Aydelotte, Von Neumann, and Mr. Bird were right. Maybe the best thing was for him to forget about them before they could forget about him—or hunt him down.
“So … should I be thanking you?” Bacon asked, slightly incredulous.
“Not right now, but someday. It’s a rare opportunity to fight for a good cause. But don’t be sad—I’m afraid you and I have no choice but to remain in contact.”
“What do you mean?” asked Bacon.
“Mr. Bird may be a decent naval attaché, but he isn’t exactly an exemplar of wisdom.”
“You know him?”
“Of course I know him! But that’s not important right now. I’m going to tell you a secret, Bacon, because I trust you. I work for them as well.”
“You?”
“It’s one of my side projects. Perhaps not the most interesting, but one of them. In my house, I keep a small suitcase packed with clothes and, of course, a bulletproof vest. I’m only allowed to bring what’s absolutely essential. When Klara’s not looking, I can usually sneak a good medieval history book in there. Anyway, at any given moment they can summon me, and the flights to London can be very tedious.”
“London!”
“That may be the next place we see each other, Bacon. That’s where you’ll be going. At the very least we can get together for a nice cup of tea.”
“So I’m going to London?”
“You’re quick, Bacon. Yes, you’re going to Europe, under the auspices of the United States Navy. You’ll know war by then. You’ll know the world, and I promise you, you’ll be much happier than you have been here.”
Bacon sat still for a few moments, digesting Von Neumann’s words. He was going to be an agent in the service of the United States in Europe. He repeated this to himself several times over until it finally sank in and he actually believed it.
“The one thing that still troubles me is Professor Gödel,” Bacon suddenly said. It was the only aspect of his conversation with Aydelotte which he hadn’t discussed with Von Neumann. “I think that the incident had a terrible impact on him.”
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