The Call-Girls (6 page)

In 1936, he became the youngest Assistant Professor at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin-Dahlem, where some of the illustrious heroes of his Pantheon had worked. Now those still alive had dispersed to England and America. They could not bear the book-burnings, Jew-beatings, the feel of darkness falling from the air. Nikolai stuck it till 1938, partly because he was still hunting for the elusive myatron, partly because he was having, after many pleasant short-lived episodes, his first serious affair with a beautiful and passionate Jewish pianist. Although she could no longer appear in public concerts, she refused to emigrate because of her aged parents who lived in a small Bavarian town and would not move. During the pogroms of the celebrated
Kristall-Nacht,
a troop of drunken Brown Shirts in that idyllic little town dragged three orthodox Jewish elders to their barracks and had much fun in forcing them to clean the latrines with their long beards. The father of Nikolai's girl, who refused, was beaten so savagely that he died the next day. The news, and the details, reached her in a roundabout way, a week later. They were included in the farewell letter she wrote to Niko. He had a key to her flat; he found the letter on the piano and the girl in her bathtub, her wrists gaping wide open like an illustration in an anatomy book, her head submerged in the pink water, her face far from beautiful.

Before that event, Niko had regarded the regime with an aloof distaste; now its archaic horror struck him with its full, savage force. He never forgave himself for having listened to Ada's passionate outbursts against it with the poise of the detached scientist, suspecting her of exaggeration and hysteria. He left Germany a few days later, but he could not leave memory behind with the soiled linen in his flat.

The evening in Geneva when he discovered the harmony of the spheres had been the first turning point in his life; the
Kristall-Nacht
became the second. The third was Hiroshima.

* * *

He had been working at the Cavendish when Einstein wrote his letter to the President. When the invitation came to join the Project at Los Alamos, he accepted without hesitation, in the belief that it would expunge his guilt. It did not bother him at first that most of his colleagues did not seem to need such justification – they regarded it as an exciting exercise in a very advanced type of engineering.

He became one of the five or six chief architects of the fission bomb; his earlier work on the myatron provided some essential clues. He only realized what he had been doing when the newspaper reports on what had happened on that Japanese island came in, followed by the more detailed, classified intelligence reports.

The coveted accolade in every scientist's life came soon afterwards. It intensified his guilt. No Nobel prizes were handed out for Hiroshima; yet the theoretical discoveries for which they were given had paved the road to it.

He joined the group of influential physicists who opposed the development of thermonuclear weapons, and resigned his post just in time before being dismissed as a security risk. It enhanced his international reputation, and made him a prominent figure in the call-girl circuit. His still fluent Russian, the language his parents had talked at home, enabled him to find some human contacts with colleagues from the East at international conferences, but this only added to his discouragement. Most of them entrenched themselves behind the barbed wire of officialese; and when occasionally one of them opened up a little, over a bottle, reasonably safe from being overheard, Nikolai detected in his voice an echo of his own mood of despair.

What kept him going through his forties and fifties was partly Claire and the two children, partly his new field of research: the use of radioactive isotopes in the therapy of malignant diseases. He devised several improvements of existing techniques – for he could not help drawing a spark from whatever his fingers touched – but none of them represented a major breakthrough. Even so, one of the sparks he drew cost him dearly. Through a combination of faulty
equipment and lack of caution, his left hand was exposed to an overdose of an experimental type of hard radiation. The left ring finger had to be removed in successive instalments, and he could not be sure whether the last instalment had yet been paid. A German proverb says: give the devil a finger and he will grab the whole hand. He even suspected the devil of some psychosomatic machinations. He developed a habit of hunching up his powerful shoulders as if carrying an invisible weight. The happy self-confidence of his youth had been eroded, together with his belief in the ultimate harmony behind the veil of appearances – but the disconcertingly innocent glance had survived. Doggedly he trained himself to play the piano with nine fingers, and published a paper in a medical journal on the neuro-muscular readjustments which this involved. The paper led to some minor innovations in orthopaedic surgery.

In spite of his growing depression, he paradoxically preserved his rather schoolboyish sense of humour, and the faculty of enjoying the small pleasures of life – a melancholy hedonist, as Claire was so fond of saying. She had been one of his laboratory assistants, and she had from the first moment reminded him of Ada – though no one else could possibly have seen a resemblance between Ada's Assyrian type of beauty and this Southern belle chastely camouflaged in a white laboratory smock. Both had passionate temperaments – but Ada's emotions were spontaneous and sometimes hysterical, Claire's controlled, and restrained by irony.

Clairette, now happily married, took after her. Grisha was their only son. He had inherited Nikolai's innocent eyes and as much success with the girls as Nikolai had had in his time. He was to study anthropology and live with the doomed tribes of Indians on the Amazon, before the last ones succumbed to genocide. Now he was crawling on all fours in another type of jungle, fighting nobody's war in nobody's land.

At 9 AM, on the dot, they were all seated at the long conference table of polished mountain pine, each with a writing pad and a dossier in front. The dossier was to have contained abstracts of all the papers to be delivered, but most of them, as usual, had failed to prepare them. Separated from the conference table, along the wall, sat Claire, who acted as secretary, Miss Carey, who operated the tape-recorder, the Director of Programmes from the Academy, Dr Helen Porter and three other ‘auditors' – as such underdogs without the full status of participants were called, who had not been invited to deliver papers but were allowed to chime in during the discussions. They sat on austere upright chairs; those of the participants had arm-rests. The ubiquitous mountains behind the plate-glass windows stood watch in their calm glory; one could even see the distant glaciers.

Solovief felt glad that he had insisted on a small number who could sit along a table, all face to face. With larger numbers you had to have rows of chairs and a raised lectern. The man behind the lectern would be addressing an audience, which tended to bring out the actor in him. People around a table, on the other hand, were addressing each other as individuals. It made all the difference.

Two of the chairs were empty. Vinogradov, the Soviet geneticist, had sent a telegram saying that unexpected circumstances prevented him from attending the Symposium. That obviously signified that the authorities had at the last minute refused his exit permit; the empty chairs of Soviet delegates were a permanent fixture of international symposia. The other absentee was Bruno Kaletski, last year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace; he had wired that he
was delayed by urgent business and would arrive later in the morning. That sort of thing, too, inevitably happened among the call-girls. Some were always late, some had to leave before the end of the conference, some came only for one day, delivered their papers, collected their fee, and dashed off again. Nikolai had insisted that for ‘Approaches to Survival' you either came for the whole course or not at all. As for Kaletski, it was likely that the only reason for his being late was the need to impress on the others what a busy and important person he was. He was in fact both, but also an incurable show-off, all the time ham-acting the role which he actually played in life.

Nikolai was on the point of opening the proceedings when the clock in the nearby church tower struck nine and the church bells started to toll. They were powerful old bells, the pride of the village, and as they were only a couple of hundred yards away, their majestic booming made conversation difficult. Miss Carey had put on her earphones and was recording the booms with a rapt expression. ‘A happy omen,' Wyndham said, giggling through his dimples. ‘What do you say, Tony?' ‘My favourite pop music,' said Tony.

The bells stopped, and Solovief got up: ‘I declare this conference open.' Head lowered, he glanced at the faces along the table with a belligerent expression. ‘I shall spare you the ceremonial blah-blah and proceed with my opening statement. It will take twenty minutes…'

He sat down heavily, lit a cigar, and began to deliver his address, elbows on the table. Claire noted with approval that he kept his shoulders squared, without the trace of a stoop; while Helen, listening with a prim expression to that resonant bass-baritone, was reminded of a remark of Harriet's: ‘Women don't listen to Niko's voice with their ears – it goes straight to their uterus.' On two occasions during the talk von Halder, who sat at the opposite end of the table, was heard to remark ‘old hat' in an audible whisper. The second time Harriet, who sat next to him, whispered back even more audibly: ‘Rot. He is putting it quite neatly.' The others thought so too, including Halder himself, though he was
prepared to die rather than admit it. In a little less than twenty minutes Solovief, speaking in an informal but precise manner, reminded them of the principal factors which made the survival of the human species an unlikely possibility, counting them one by one on his long nicotine-stained fingers.

First, the situation prevailing since the middle of the twentieth century was without precedent in history, inasmuch as prior to that date the destructive potential of man had been confined to limited areas and limited populations, whereas subsequent to that date it embraced the entire sublunary sphere, i.e. the planet itself, its surrounding atmosphere, and the totality of its flora and fauna, excepting perhaps some radiation-resistant strains of micro-organisms. Second, rapid progress in the manufacturing methods of both types of ultimate weapons, nuclear and biochemical, made their spreading inevitable and their control impracticable. The absurdity of the situation was illustrated by the fact that, according to the last available statistics, the existing stockpiles in nuclear weapons equalled one Hiroshima-sized device for every one of the earth's three and a half billion people. Third, the annihilation of distance through the increasing speed of communications was in mathematical terms equivalent to a contraction of the planet's surface to an area smaller than England measured by steam-age standards. Mankind was unprepared for this situation, unable to adapt to it, and largely unaware of its consequences. Fourth, this shrinking of the planet relative to the travelling speed of missiles and men was paralleled by a simultaneous contraction of the available living space and food resources relative to population size, which was now doubling every thirty-three years and quadrupling within the lifetime of a single generation. Fifth, leading this Lemming-race were the culturally backward strata of the population. Sixth, the world-wide migration from rural to urban areas resulted in the cancerous growth of cities, where more and more people were piling up in less and less space. Seven, an inevitable by-product of these runaway processes was the physical
poisoning and aesthetic pollution of land, water and air, resulting in a general degradation of human existence, the corruption of values, the erosion of meaning. Eight, just as the conquest of the air and the subsequent annihilation of distance, instead of knitting the nations into a single world-community, exposed them to mutual deterrence at gun-point, so the conquest of the ether by the media of mass-communication, instead of promoting understanding between nations, had the inverse effect of sharpening ideological and tribal conflicts by demagogic propaganda. Nine, in the first twenty-five years since the inauguration of the nuclear age, about forty regional and civil wars had been fought by conventional means, and on two occasions the world had been on the brink of nuclear war. There were no indications that would permit one to assume that the next twenty-five years would be less critical. Yet the danger of man's self-annihilation as a species was not confined to the next twenty-five years; it was from now onward a permanent aspect of the human condition. Ten, in view of man's emotional immaturity compared to his technological achievements, the probability of his self-induced extinction was approaching statistical certainty. The task of the conference, as he saw it, was threefold: to analyse the causes of man's predicament, to arrive at a tentative diagnosis of his present condition, and to explore the possible remedies …

Solovief paused and looked accusingly at his audience, as if they alone were to blame for the sorry state of the world. Then, after a glance at Claire, he continued, trying to sound casual:

‘That is about all – except that I would like to remind you of a certain letter Albert Einstein wrote, in August 1939, to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was a short letter, abominably written, which began:

‘“Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard which has been communicated to me in manuscript leads me to expect that the element Uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future … A single bomb of this type … exploded in a port… might
very well destroy the whole port, together with the surrounding territory.…”

‘This may well have been the most important letter in human history. I think the situation today is no less critical than it was when Einstein wrote it. The instigators of it were an Italian, Fermi; two Hungarians, Szilard and von Wiegner; and Einstein himself was German. They had formed a sort of action committee. Of course it is easier to achieve unanimity in physics than in the social sciences. I wonder nevertheless whether it is Utopian to believe that this conference might result in the formation of such a committee of action with an agreed programme, determined on a direct approach to the powers that be … What the Einstein letter achieved might be called a miracle – a miracle in black magic. I wonder whether a miracle in white magic of a similar magnitude is beyond the reach of science… I realize that I shall be accused of black pessimism and rosy optimism at the same time. Let us start the discussion …'