I paused.
Einstein looked at his pipe, thinking, no doubt, to draw from it.
I said, “I will never quote you, Professor. But I feel as if things are going on that I need to know, and if I don’t know them, I’ll become part of a terrible deception.”
Einstein stared at his pipe a few moments more and then gently placed it on the makeup table, watching it all the way.
He lifted his eyes from the pipe but did not move them to me.
I turned my head to the mirror.
We looked at each other there.
He was silent still.
We continued to look at each other, our directness an illusion, bent together by the silvered surface.
His silence worried me. I decided to lead him a little. I said, “I realize that the same process produces explosives. Without limit.”
The face in the mirror looked away.
As did I.
And so our eyes met directly.
“Your intuition is correct, Mr. Hunter,” he said.
He did not let go of my gaze but he searched for words. I had to be patient now. I held very still.
“I am indebted to Professor Haber,” he said. “He brought me to the Institute. I have freedom here.”
He stopped.
I wanted badly to challenge any sense of loyalty he might have to Haber. Did he know how Haber spoke of him? But I waited.
Einstein said, “Do you like an irony? At this institute that bears the Kaiser’s name, within a country and a political system and a philosophy that reserves its right to repress whatever freedoms it chooses and that nurtures a violent disdain for the fundamental freedoms of anyone not of their nation, I am nonetheless free to think about what matters most. I suppose the deepest workings of the physical universe do not seem to them a threat.”
He stopped once more.
I held very still.
And then he said, “This does not have to do with the Haber-Bosch Process. This does not have to do with explosives. All of that is a matter for the industrialists now.”
He looked at his pipe, put his hand upon it. He said, “Fritz Haber has an excellent brain. But his nationalism is contemptible. He does not need a brain for that. The spinal cord would be sufficient.”
His hand returned to his lap. His eyes returned to me.
He said, “You know what happened in France in April.”
It took me only a moment. “Ypres.”
“Yes.”
“The German gas attack.”
“Chlorine gas,” he said. “A persuasive case could be made for the intrinsic moral superiority of physics over chemistry, judging them by their factors of risk, by the relative difficulty or ease of their doing terrible harm to humanity.”
He picked up his pipe now and brought it to his mouth.
My mind at this moment was suddenly like those Allied troops in the trench as the first pale-green cloud of chlorine gas drifted toward them across no-man’s-land. They knew this looked bad. But they had not yet been overwhelmed. They waited.
I waited.
He shrugged. “Ah, but no doubt physics will catch up someday. Humans will always find a way to pervert the beauty of knowledge. Our technology will soon exceed our humanity. No. I misspeak. It has done so already.”
Einstein drew in vain on his pipe. He took it from his mouth and looked at it. And as if making this observation to the object in his hand, he said, “Fritz Haber was responsible for the beginning of modern chemical warfare. This is his science now. This is who he has become.”
My own breath stopped. Briefly. I would put this all together later. Right now I had to focus on listening.
Einstein removed his matches once more and relit his pipe. “Do you know his wife committed suicide?”
“I heard.”
“Do you know why?”
“I do not.”
“She was herself deeply schooled in chemistry. She attained a doctorate degree in chemistry at the University of Breslau. She knew enough to adore Fritz. And enough eventually to despise him. She took her own life shortly after that unleashing of the beast in April in France. Against her pleadings, Fritz went to Ypres to personally observe the event. He returned exhilarated, unhappy only that the fools in command failed to understand this great opportunity. That they failed to have sufficient forces to take full advantage of the inevitable break in the front lines. Fritz thinks Germany could have won the war from this single, dramatic event if the military had been bolder.”
Einstein paused. Then he shook his head, very slowly. “For him to think like that, more brutally than the professional brutes. Oh how he and I have argued. So much so that there is nothing for it now but to be silent before him, before the madness. He proposes that making wars more monumentally cruel will shorten their duration. And he makes the proposition to me that in war, death is death. If it is by the suffering of the eyes and the lungs and the brain and the heart from chemistry, it is no different than the suffering of limbs and head and torso from metallurgy.”
Einstein drew in a deep draft of pipe smoke, taking it even into his lungs. He let it out slowly. And he said, “Clara put a bullet in her brain to advance the theory that Fritz was wrong.”
We let the silence sit between us for a time.
I allowed myself to take a shallow breath or two of the toxic reality: Stockman and Haber were working together on a poison gas attack.
Einstein was considering Clara’s theory. He said, “The isolated argument Fritz makes about the two modes of death is perhaps, in some ways, sound. Shrapnel and bullets and fire could be seen as already maximal in brutality. But he leaps to a ridiculous conclusion.”
His next silence brought a calm draw on the pipe. He’d said all that he assumed he needed to say.
I needed more.
I said, “So Doctor Haber is no longer in the business of feeding the hungry. But his present business. How does it go?”
“I am no chemist,” he said. “He and I collide at the Institute and interact and he always must tell me some little thing or other. I am afraid that in his mind my listening to him co-opts me into his work. But from respect to him personally, and from futility, I simply listen. He has moved beyond chlorine gas to phosgene. Phosgene is more toxic than chlorine. And it causes less coughing and so remains unexpelled from the lungs. He is quite proud.”
My mind worked and worked at all this, even as I kept my attention on Einstein’s words.
But I had to ask the right questions.
And I thought of the box in the export office.
“Has he spoken of bombs?” I said.
Einstein hesitated. He thought.
“Not artillery,” I said. “Something that a Zeppelin might deliver.”
He straightened abruptly. “More chemistry,” he said. “Those infernal machines filled with a chemist’s gas.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“In the light of Doctor Haber’s philosophy of war, would an aerial bomb be an advance?”
He thought for a moment. “I am no military man.”
“Just the science of it.”
“Of course,” he said. “The same wind sufficient to carry the poisonous gas across a battlefield also blows the gas quickly away. A bomb would greatly reduce the force of a necessary wind to a level just sufficient to stir things about.”
“Would such a bomb need a special design? Would any bomb do?”
Einstein puffed briefly at his pipe, considering this, his brightness returning a bit, I presumed in the pure scientific puzzle of it. “Not any bomb,” he said. “Certainly not. The perfect bomb would perhaps be something of a challenge. As I understand it, phosgene and similar gases boil at relatively low atmospheric temperatures, below the present summer temperature, for instance. So they will be transformed from the liquid inside the bomb to the killing gas immediately upon exposure to the air. However, there is the matter of the bursting charge. This would have to be carefully managed so that the shell will burst open but not, as well, consume the gas too quickly at the point of impact, which would greatly reduce the footprint of toxicity. And also so that the shell will not bury its striking end in the ground, trapping much of the liquid there unvaporized. The bomb maker would have to be very clever.”