Nothing So Strange (29 page)

He didn’t look surprised. He said: “I knew that. At least we were told so
at Oak….” He stopped. “Oakland…. I was there when I heard about it.
Peenemünde’s the place on the Baltic where the Germans had their experimental
station for V-2S. That wasn’t much in his line. God, what fools they were,
not to give him a free hand. Drop all the theoretical stuff—that was
the cry at the beginning. Then afterwards it was too late to catch up. He
probably fought them as long as he could, but I guess he didn’t win. He made
too many enemies.”

“And you didn’t kill him.”

“No, I left that for the R.A.F. I told him a lie instead, which certainly
killed him in one sense if it sent him to Peenemünde. But perhaps it
didn’t—so much could have happened in the interval. But I do know
Peenemünde wasn’t where he should have been. It was some other place—in
Norway—where they were making heavy water.”

“Heavy water?”

He nodded. “That was his idea all along if they’d given him a free hand.”
He added, changing the subject with marked abruptness: “By the way, Newby
called this afternoon.”

“What did he want?”

“To look me over. To see how I was getting on. To hear if I’d had any more
dreams. Perhaps to see you if you’d been in. I told him I still dreamed of
being a skywriter but I’d changed the word I wanted to write. I spelled it
out for him. It was a German word that Framm used a lot—not a nice word
at all. Newby didn’t know that, but when he gets back he’s going to ask
someone who understands German and that’ll fix him for a while. I think of
the darnedest ways to keep that man interested, don’t I?”

“You shouldn’t,” I said. “It isn’t worth wasting time on.”

“What else should I waste time on while I’m waiting?”

“Waiting for what?”

“Something we’re all waiting for.”

“Something good, I hope.”

He shrugged.

I said: “It may be very trite and old-fashioned of me, but what I’m
waiting for is the end of the war—victory and peace—all
that.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Don’t you think we’ll get them?”

“We’ll get victory.”

“But not peace?”

“Depends. We shall see.”

“I wish I knew what you think we shall see.”

He said glumly: “Maybe a bad word written in the sky.”

I sat down next to him; he was in swimming trunks and had been in the
pool, because the towel near him was damp. His body (which I had never seen
so near nude before) was slim and muscular, though he could well have taken
on a few more pounds. The desert air had browned him, the mountain air was
now adding a clear gloss. He looked fine, except for his eyes, which offered
a minority report on his general recovery.

I asked what the lie was he had told Framm.

He replied: “Call it twice two are five.”

“If you say things like that I shall bring out a mathematics textbook and
ask you to give me lessons.”

That made him laugh. I didn’t like the laugh either. And I didn’t like the
thought that Newby had been around. I suddenly felt a deep urgency in what
was beginning to dominate me—I must find out what was on his mind
quickly … before it was too late. The idea of no time to be wasted came to
me unarguably, yet with frightening sureness.

He began to talk about the work he and Framm had been busy on in Berlin
until the outbreak of the war. It was concerned with the mathematics of
nuclear structure; the construction of a field theory to account for certain
phenomena already noted experimentally; but also, if the theory were correct,
to point the way to phenomena
that had not yet been observed
, because
adequate experimental technique lagged behind. The theoretical work had been
in progress for months, with Framm giving it all the time he could spare, and
Brad with him as an equal, except that he saved Framm’s time by doing all the
laborious computations. There was nothing remarkable in the apparent slowness
of the procedure, but to some of the high-up Nazis it was hard to explain or
defend. They lacked sympathy with anything so unproductive; visionary stuff
was not truly Germanic; Hitler was planning for a short war, and a single new
weapon in the blueprint stage was worth a whole territory of long-range
speculation.

Then events moved fast on all sides. The Danzig crisis boiled up into the
actual imminence of war, which meant that the intrigues of Framm’s rivals to
have his department reorganized under a more “practical” head rose to an
equal climax. And also … something stirred inside the private world of
experiment and visionary analysis, so that Hugo Framm and his assistant began
to discuss, like conspirators, the chance that they were on the edge of
something big— something that would not only widen the scope of
theoretical knowledge, but could in due course affect the practical character
of life on earth. As scientists they were intensely skeptical of all such
dreaming, yet as humans they could not forbear to tiptoe a few paces into the
unguessable, just far enough to send them back to work with rueful anxiety.
For the thing was not even yet at a beginning—it was only at the
beginning of a beginning. In those talks with Brad, Framm revealed the
curious division of his soul. Part of him, perhaps the deeper part, was the
pure researcher, impatient of other people’s impatience, willing to devote
years to an inch’s extension of the mind’s territory, willing even for that
inch itself to be unknown to all save the few initiates. Never had Brad heard
him trounce more scathingly the “practical” scientists who had grown to high
favor with the regime by setting teams of underling scientists to work on
some immediate problem of industry.
Engineers
, he sneered. “One of
these days you and I will write all we have discovered on the back of an old
envelope and send it to them. In a few years they will begin to learn what it
is all about. Then after a few more years Siemens will be interested in the
patent rights. And meanwhile you and I will still be fighting those who would
close down this laboratory and turn it into a gymnasium for teaching storm
troopers how to crack skulls.”

That repeated “you and I” gave Brad a feeling that was not a qualm, but a
nudge of reminder inside himself. “So we must continue our work,” Framm went
on. “One of these days the world will wake up to what we have done.”

Brad did not care for this sort of magniloquence. “The world won’t do
anything of the sort,” he said. “A few scientists in other countries will
read about it in the technical journals and you’ll probably be asked to
deliver some lectures.”

“You are forgetting there will be no communication with foreign scientists
during the war.”

“Oh, they’ll manage to exchange ideas through Sweden or Switzerland
somehow or other.”

“Not this time.” Framm was emphatic. “There is already the rule of secrecy
in operation.”

“But surely that doesn’t apply to mathematics.”

“Perhaps it doesn’t, but perhaps also it should and must.”

“If it did, then don’t forget I’m foreign myself.”

Framm put on the roguish smile that was the sign of an approaching display
of charm, but which Brad had learned to recognize as less charming in what it
often concealed or preluded.

“Perhaps we shall have to make a German citizen of you then…. Or perhaps
since you are American it does not matter. Americans have no ambition to
conquer.”

“What’s that got to do with it? Why should they? Why should anybody?”

“I think I must prepare a number of answers to your question, Bradley. But
the argument should be at Berchtesgaden, not here. It would be interesting to
demonstrate that by a proper application of quantum mathematics Germany can
become the first master of the world.”

“That sort of thing ought to appeal—at Berchtesgaden,” Brad said
dryly.

“Ah, but only if it could be done in six months. That man is obsessed with
Blitzkrieg
. You have no idea how impossible it is to talk to him of
serious matters. Planck could not. Haushofer could not. Anything that he
cannot understand is no use, and he can understand so little. He has pushed
his luck too far. Bradley, there are times when the second-rate mind is
criminal. And there are things that history will not forgive unless they are
done once only to achieve world conquest. The end can only justify the means
if the end is large enough.”

“You see world conquest as a real possibility?”

“Provided other countries are not already ahead of us in these matters.
And provided our
Quatschkopf
can be persuaded to look further than the
end of one of his long howitzers.”

“What makes you think the world would gain by being under German
domination?”

“Bradley, I think there must be a world order if there is to be any world
worth living in. I can see no possibility of world order unless it is imposed
on those who would be too selfish or too stupid to submit voluntarily. I can
think of no country with both the power and the will to perform this task but
Germany…. And Germany is now at the mercy of a crystal-gazer!”

He seemed after that to regret having been so outspoken, and there was a
barrier between them, as if he could sense in Brad’s attitude some new
dimension of hostility.

Dan brought us cocktails and Brad said: “Dan, these are
always so good.
Where did you learn to make them like this?”

“In San Francisco,” Dan replied. “I used to mix drinks at the Seacomber
bar there.”

“Ever been in Houston?”

“No, sir. You wouldn’t get a drink like this in any bar in Texas. They
don’t sell hard liquor.”

After he had gone, Brad said: “I keep on thinking I’ve seen Dan somewhere
before…. Maybe not…. Where was I?”

I said: “You were telling me what Framm said about Germany.”

“Oh yes…. Well, I decided then there was no more time to waste. The
truth was, I’d been postponing things because I’d been so damned interested
in the work we’d been doing.”

He sipped at the drink and looked at me over the rim of the glass. “Would
you want any more proof?”

“Of what?”

“Of the state of my mind. How I hated that man and loved the work I did
with him. I hated him more than I’d ever hated anybody—more than I’d
ever loved Pauli, for that matter.”

“How can you compare love and hate?”

“Hell, I don’t know, but you can.” He went on: “He was away, out of
Berlin, wrangling as usual with the big shots. So I didn’t get any
chances…. I think I told you before that we often worked all night, when
the building was practically empty—only janitors and guards who knew us
well and never came near…. But he was
away
…. You see how it
was?”

I caught the rising excitement in his eyes; I said quietly: “Yes, I
see.”

“Actually, he did go to Berchtesgaden, though I didn’t learn that till
later. Everything was racing to a climax. The British were threatening war if
Poland were attacked. Framm’s personal enemies were closing in on
him—he was in the doghouse, the way it looked. Mostly his own
fault—too many tricks and treacheries had caught up with him. But it
was also the war emergency that put him in a real spot—because the
mounting hue and cry was for less theory, more practice—for results
certain and immediate, not distant and problematical. That gave his enemies
just the weapon they needed, so that his last chance became his only
chance—to sell some enormous novelty in the very highest market, and
entirely on trust. If he could pull it off it would be a master stroke, but
from the point of view of sober science, it was all far too premature. Some
of our earlier checks had been encouraging, but there was a crucial one still
to come. I was working on that while Framm was at Berchtesgaden, or perhaps I
should rather say on
those
because it included a statistical analysis
of all the checks. Nothing absolutely accurate was either expected or
conceivable, but 95 per cent would be encouraging, 80 per cent would leave us
still in doubt, and less than 70 would put us back where we’d been before we
started. It was an especially delicate part of our calculations that was
involved—something speculative and—if you can imagine that in
mathematics—a bit
inspired
. I’ve been trying to think of a
rather wild parallel—not to the thing itself—but to the kind of
wild-goose chase it was. Suppose that by sheer chance in reading a certain
chapter of the Bible you discovered that the forty-ninth word from the
beginning was “Shake” and the forty-ninth word from the end was “spear.”
Suppose some mad genius told you that this wasn’t a coincidence, but a secret
clue to the meaning of the universe provided you could find other poets’
names embedded similarly in other books. Suppose you were crazy enough to
try, by picking up books and counting words at random in a public library.
Then suppose some even madder genius offered a formula for taking you
directly to a certain page of a certain book on a certain shelf. So you tried
it, and there, counting up and down, you found the words ‘bitter’ and ‘nut.’
But you’d never heard of a poet called Bitternut— his name wasn’t in
any of the encyclopedias—maybe he was only a very minor poet indeed….
Does all that sound
too
fantastic?”

“Probably less so than the mathematics would.”

“Well, anyhow, it was the sort of question I’d got as far as—How
much of a poet was Mr. Bitternut? Was he even a poet at all? All night I
tried to find out, alternating between the laboratory and my office desk,
assembling the results and fitting them into place. I was very
tired—I’d been on the job, more or less, for two days and two nights. I
hadn’t even gone back to my rooms in Wilmersdorf, but had snatched a few
intermittent hours of sleep on the couch in Framm’s office. And meanwhile, if
I looked through the window, I could see ominous signs of
events—armored cars rattling by, men in field-gray scampering along the
pavements. The radio, whenever I turned it on, gave fresh news of the crisis,
instructions for mobilization, rationing, air-raid precautions. It was all
cold and efficient, with no jubilant crowds, cheers, or flag waving. Never,
it seemed to me, had a country moved to war with less enthusiasm—yet
the lack of it had its own peculiarly frightening quality. During the evening
the sirens shrieked and a few minutes later a rather agitated janitor rushed
into the room to order me to the air-raid shelter in the basement. I told the
old man I’d rather stay where I was, I was very busy—which wasn’t
bravery, by the way, but just my own guess that it could only be either a
false alarm or a practice drill. The janitor finally compromised by saying I
could stay there provided I put out all the electric lights. I said all
right, I could work by candlelight. So I did, and when he’d gone, with the
city blacking out all round me, I ate a sandwich and drank some cold coffee.
Then I got down to the job again. Within an hour, I reckoned, I should have
pushed the results to a point where success or failure could be tentatively
applied to the work of many months. The calculations were not only fairly
difficult, but extremely laborious. Towards four o’clock (I had been too
optimistic in my forecasting) I came to the last calculation. It was one in
which two sets of figures, neither of them predictable,
should—according to the theory—bear an algebraic relationship;
the final process was the plotting of positions on a graph. As the minutes
passed and I got closer to what I knew must be the finish, I couldn’t have
imagined anything in the world more dramatic than my own solitary behavior in
that lonely room, working by candlelight in the middle of the night at the
outbreak of a world war—and yet I suppose most people would have
reckoned it, compared with events outside, a very dull business. Even by
technical standards it didn’t look much of a climax. There were no color
changes on litmus paper, no test tubes held up to the light, no retorts
bubbling over Bunsen burners, none of the rigmarole of magazine-ad science
… even the X-ray machine, which usually made noises, had been switched off
into silence. All I had to do was to sit at a desk and put a few pencil
points on paper. I did so, then joined them up to make a curve. The curve
bulged to a position that gave a reading, by a prefigured scale, of three-
point-five-seven-five-five; the predictable reading, based on theory alone,
had been three-point-five-five-nine-three. It was near enough. Mr. Bitternut
was a poet.”