Dante's Equation Part 12

worth two," as the Talmud says. s.h.i.+mon turned pages, studying the arrays and their circled words intently. The binder was heavy. He pulled it onto his lap, moved back in his chair, propped the binder up against the edge of the deli table, and turned pages. Once or twice he wiped at his indecently clean upper lip. Aharon smiled smugly; he didn't have to feel that finger to know it was as cold as ice.

After ten minutes, s.h.i.+mon sat upright and closed the binder carefully on his lap. "Whois Yosef Kobinski?" "You can see the dates for yourself in the arrays. He was a Polish rabbi, caught up in the Holocaust. He was also a physicist at the University of Warsaw from 1918 to 1927. He wasalso a kabbalist."

s.h.i.+mon looked quizzical, said nothing. "But that's a good question," Aharon said emphatically. "Whois Yosef Kobinski? What weapon did he develop, s.h.i.+mon Norowitz? Whatever it is, I think it is something the state of Israel should know about,lo ?" s.h.i.+mon looked through the arrays some more, face pensive. "Do you know what he did at the University of Warsaw?" "Exactly! I looked into it, but there was nothing. No atomic research at that time in Warsaw, and nothing about it in thearrays , either."

"Is there anything else I should know about this?"

"That depends on what you plan to do."

Norowitz sucked his teeth, thinking or maybe just collecting corned beef fragments. "If you get me a copy of these arrays, I'll have one of my people take a look."

"That's it?"

"There's not much to go on, Rabbi. And this wordweapon -it must appear all over the Torah. It's only three letters long."

" 'Weapon of obliteration'-you think this is a fluke?"

"Don't misunderstand me; I'm interested. You'll continue to work on it, I hope. And keep us informed of your progress." He hesitated a moment, then took out a notepad. "I'll give you my direct line. If you find somethingimportant ," he looked up, emphasizing the word, "call me."

Aharon took the proffered bit of paper, knowing this was not an inconsiderable concession. Before, he'd always had to go through the switchboard and was easily put off that way. A direct line: so now he was somebody? Still he wasn't satisfied. He'd come feeling almost giddy with his discovery's importance. Now anxiety was creeping back in.

"Listen," he said, more confidentially. "I would appreciate some help on this. I-I'm not sure what else to do and I'm . . ." Norowitz was looking at him curiously. "So I'm a little frightened. This weapon, it has tomean something, and G.o.d has seen fit for me to find it and-"

"What is it you'd like me to do?" Norowitz handed back the binder and reclaimed his sandwich.

Aharon thought about it as he watched the beardless man gobble his food.His appet.i.te, at least, was not disturbed by the arrays. Yes, he wouldliketo advise Norowitz on what he should do, but he found he didn't know. All this effort to get the man here andthathe forgot to prepare.

"So I'll keep working," Aharon said.

5.4. Denton Wyle

FRANKFURT.

"The copy," the German said, "is nine pages long."

Denton nodded, trying to keep himself from salivating. This was the first piece of ma.n.u.script Mother's agent, Mr. Fleck, had uncovered. He'd promised that if any more of the ma.n.u.script was available for sale anywhere, he would find it. And he would, too. He would run it to ground like a terrier, because Denton had paid him a big fat retainer and he got a nice commission on everything Denton bought. Visions ofThe Book of Torment on bestseller lists danced in Denton's head like sugar plum fairies.

Except the Frankfurt antiquities dealer, Uberstuhl, had an expression that could only be described as sneaky. Denton didn't care for it at all. He removed his coat, hoping it was just a vibe he was getting from the dingy, mothball-smelling shop.

"So you told my agent on the phone. May I see them?"

"This way, please."

Uberstuhl took Denton back to his private office where a computer sat on a plain wooden desk. Denton looked around, still smiling, wondering if he was about to be felt up or something. Uberstuhl had a constipated expression.

"You know what it is we speak of, yes? You understand what the piece is?"

"Yes," Denton said carefully. "A Xerox copy of nine pages of a Hebrew ma.n.u.script written in Auschwitz by Yosef Kobinski."

"Richtig.Exactly." Uberstuhl glanced at his computer. Denton followed his gaze and saw that the man's E-mail in-box was up on the screen.

"So . . ." Uberstuhl said, clearing his throat. "Let me give you a price to think about while I go get the item. Twenty thousand U.S."

Denton squeaked out a laugh and gasp simultaneously. "I've, um, gotten similar pieces for around five."

"That would be a bit low in the best of circ.u.mstances. But inthiscirc.u.mstance . . ."

"What about this circ.u.mstance?" Denton asked, then sensed that this was where the rotten stink was coming from.

"Allow me to get the doc.u.ment, Mr. Wyle." The dealer gave another meaningful and lengthy gaze at his computer before exiting the room and leaving Denton alone.

Denton didn't need the man to call out the fire department to give him a clue. There were only a few messages in the in-box. It had no doubt been cleaned out for his benefit. The one he was supposed to notice was at the top. The return E-mail address was SSchwartz. Uttering a curse, Denton double-clicked on it to read the text.

Two years ago I purchased part of an Auschwitz ma.n.u.script from you. It was written by Yosef Kobinski in 1943. I would like to upgrade to an exclusive arrangement on this doc.u.ment. Please respond with the necessary details of the transaction as soon as you can.

S. Schwartz Denton gasped in outrage. Theb.a.s.t.a.r.d ! Schwartz had called Mr. Fleck a few weeks ago, wanting to know who was on to Kobinski and why. Apparently, Fleck had placed an ad in several international antiquities magazines and Schwartz had seen it. Mr. Fleck didn't tell him, of course (having money was really quite nice at times). And it seemed Schwartz had not connected the reporter who'd come into his office months ago with this mysterious new buyer.

What Schwartzhad done was utter dire warnings, something about how it was "dangerous" to publish Kobinski, yada, yada, yada. He'd even threatened to sic the Jewish League on them. Still, Denton was aghast that Schwartz would go to this length. Where was the man coming up with the additional cash? Some rich kabbalah n.a.z.i donor? Who did he think he was?

Thank G.o.d Uberstuhl was one greedy son of a b.i.t.c.h.

Denton heard the door open and got up quickly, forcing a smile. The German had a small flexible black binder with a neat label on the cover: "Kobinski ma.n.u.script, Auschwitz, 1943." Denton grew light-headed at the sight.

"Have you been thinking about the price, Mr. Wyle?"

"Yes. Yes, I have."

"And?"

Denton kept his smile fixed."I'll have to see the ma.n.u.script first."

"Naturally."

Uberstuhl sat down at the desk and motioned Denton to pull up a chair. He didn't hand Denton the ma.n.u.script but kept hold of it himself. He opened it delicately to the first page.

The Xerox was not perfect by any means. There was something dark about the surface, as if it had been copied from many generations before or, more likely, from a very poor original. But the Hebrew characters and even the notations in the margins were legible. Where they weren't someone had gone over them with a fine-tipped pen. All said, it was an exacting, professional job. It ought to be, for twenty grand. It ought to be written on gold tablets by the finger of G.o.d.

"And the other pages?"

Uberstuhl showed them briefly, only a few seconds per page. Long enough to confirm that the material was all there but not long enough to read. As if Denton could.

A full-fledged presidential debate was going on in Denton's head. He shouldn't buy it. Even his trust fund wasn't limitless. Did he really want to pursue this thing if the price was going to jack up like this? There was noguarantee he'd see a return. And Schwartz, Schwartz had threatened him. He was rather afraid of Schwartz.

"Um, what kind of paper was the original on?"

Uberstuhl flipped to the front inside cover. There was a photo of the original and a thick label giving all the details. "Two of the pages were heavy dark butcher paper. One was a waxed wrapper, and the rest were paper toweling used in the officers' toilets."

Denton leaned forward to peer at the label. Was that . . . Did he read there that some of the ink was identified as a mixture made withhuman feces ? He could see the shock on Barbara Walters's face as he mentioned it.

"I'll take it," Denton said.

While Uberstuhl went to check Denton's platinum card, Denton looked again at the E-mail. This time, he was no longer surprised and the weight of it sank in a little deeper. It was such a profoundly warlike thing to do-unfriendly, unfair. It struck Denton that he had a nemesis. Denton Wyle, easygoing rich guy and the best little brownnoser you'd ever care to meet, had his very own Moriarty. In a yarmulke. It was enough to make a bunny very ill indeed.

And he also saw what he had not seen the first time, sitting right in front of his eyes. First, that S. Schwartz was all the identification given. There was no hint that S. Schwartz was a rabbi. Fleck had warned Denton about the Holocaust artifact market. The last person a non-Jew seeking good money for an artifact would want to deal with was a rabbi. Rabbis and Holocaust museums and the like had a habit of trying to claim moral rights to such property and get out of paying at all. The fact that Schwartz was buying "incognito" might be turned to Denton's advantage someday.

The other thing was the TO line. Uberstuhl was not the only addressee on the E-mail. There were, in fact, three others.Denton had just found the sources of three more fragments.

Denton grinned. "Take that, Moriarty!"

FROMTHEBOOK OFTORMENTBYYOSEFKOBINSKI, 1943.

Consider: A star is nothing if not a war between the strong nuclear force and gravity. The intense fuel of the star wants to explode, expand outward. But gravity is working in exactly the opposite direction, forcing the star's energy down into itself.

Gevorah(restriction, judgment) is the gravitational force. Gravity is its embodiment. Andchesed(love, expansion) is the nuclear force-light. So there is a lesson for us in the stars, you see? Gravity and light must dance together, expansion and contraction, in balance, just like judgment and mercy. This is the dance of the spheres, of life.

Ifgevorahandchesedhave an equivalent in the physical realm, then so do good and evil. This is where the most critical aspect of my work has been done. I have found the physical correspondences of good and evil. The energy patterns of matter in the higher dimension, the fifth dimension, cannot be understood without them.

The Midrash says that for every blade of gra.s.s there is an angel who has the sole task of leaning over it and whispering, "Grow, grow." This is not far from the truth, although it would be more accurate to say that there is also a demon leaning over it saying, "Die, die." The life impulse and the death impulse: both exist in equal measure.

It is all there in my equation,theequation. Indeed, when my work becomes public there will be a revolution in the sciences such has not been seen since Galileo first trained a telescope at the stars. This is why the workmust notbe allowed to perish in this place.

But back to the point. At the subatomic level we can get close to a glimpse of the true nature of physical matter-energy. It is at this level that we find [Notation: Further pages of this entry missing]

Nearly all of my work for the past ten years has been concerned in some way with the fifth dimension. By exploring the three dimensions of s.p.a.ce scientists can only learnwhatand where. The fourth dimension of time allows us to learnwhen. But the fifth dimension . . . the fifth dimension will tell uswhy.

To visualize the fifth dimension first visualize one dimension by itself, NorthSouth, a line one atom wide. By adding a second dimension, EastWest, every atom on the NorthSouth line is repeated again and again for every atom in the EastWest dimension, forming a flat plane. The entire flat plane of NorthSouth and EastWest is multiplied again and again for every atom of UpDown, making a cube. And when you add the dimension of time, every atom of three-dimensional s.p.a.ce in that cube exists anew for each microsecond of time. This room I am sitting in, this chair-it is not the same room and the same chair as it was a second ago, and it will not be the same a second from now. Thus it stands to reason that in the fifth dimension every atom of three-dimensional s.p.a.ce in each microsecond of time exists over and over and over again-but repeated in what? What is the fifth axis?

According to kabbalists, the fifth dimension is the dimension of good and evil. To me it is the spiritual dimension, the dimension of meaning. The fifth dimension is: every atom of three-dimensional s.p.a.ce in each microsecond of timeconnected toevery other atom of three-dimensional s.p.a.ce in each microsecond of time. In other words, the fifth dimension is the living pattern. It is the dimension of interconnection, ofrelations.h.i.+ps, a tapestry of cause and effect.

If we could read the fifth dimension we would be able to see the pattern that leads up to every action. And if we could trace back every thread of that pattern, back and back, we would be able to identify every cause of that effect, and the causes of the causes, and the causes of the causes of the causes, back and back until all causes merge into a single cause at the start of time.

We would be able to answer the question "Why?"-not only for every individual action, but for the start of life itself.

While deep in meditation, on a night just before things changed forever in Brezeziny, I had a vision. I saw a ladder, Jacob's ladder. From the rungs of the ladder hung entire universes. To the right, the ladder grew increasingly bright until the end of the continuum was pure light. To the left, the ladder grew darker and darker until the end was so black it could only be described as the utter absence of light. Our own universe was exactly in the middle of the ladder, hanging from the middle rung. An angel pointed to it and said, "Only from here may souls escape."

Then I saw the ladder reshape itself until it was a wheel, a wheel of fire that was round like a globe and divided into four segments. Then it changed again, this time into the figure of a man, a man made of stars, of universes. The head of the man was bathed in solid light and his feet vanished into darkness. At the center of the man was the navel and an umbilicus of light and energy grew there, shooting up, up, into someplace beyond the material, even beyond the fifth dimension.

When I came back to myself, I knew I had been given a gift. Even in science, there is an iron veil between what we can learn-the facts of our own cage of s.p.a.ce-time-and what lies beyond. We are utterly cut off from knowing the Other except, perhaps, in such dreams.

But now that I have experienced Auschwitz I can only wonder, my Lord G-d, ifthisis the middleof the ladder, if our own world is in the center and to one side lie heavens and to the other lie h.e.l.ls, then how bad must h.e.l.l be?

Distance is not in heaven as it is here. Here is a limited distance and therefore measurable. There is it limitless and therefore immeasurable.

-Emanuel Swedenborg,Heaven & h.e.l.l, 1756

6.1. Jill Talcott

SEATTLE.

THE ONE PULSE, 75 PERCENT POWER.

Jill wasn't sleeping anymore. Nate wasn't, either. He had bruised circles under his eyes. On his olive-colored skin the circles were purple and sage, which she found herself staring at sometimes, marveling over the way the desert colors contrasted against his thick black lashes, like a midnight sunset.

Things could not be better. Most of the staff were on summer vacation and the physics department had received a large grant from Microsoft. Everyone was congratulating Grover and Chalmers: Grover because the quantum computer was the reason for Microsoft's generosity, Chalmers because he held the check. This kept both of them off her back. There was lots of talk about the Udub's physics program becoming world-cla.s.s. Jill smirked to herself and continued her subterranean journeys to the bas.e.m.e.nt lab. If they only knew.

Knew this: that the one-minus-one was the most important thing that had happened to science, ever. And it was hers, all hers.

She and Nate went over to her house, late every afternoon, to check and log the control group. It amused her that they would pull up to the curb in that una.s.suming neighborhood, where programmers in jeans or marketing types in Dockers were arriving home for the day. And she and Nate, toting her briefcase and his laptop, getting out like normal people and opening up the door to her little house, no one giving them the slightest glance. Some days she laughed out loud.

She tried to remain objective, tried not to allow herself to project too much on the subjects or antic.i.p.ate results. But there was no denying that altering the one-minus-one had an effect on the subjects in the bas.e.m.e.nt lab. Their mates in the control group at home, the mice and the virus and fruit, appeared normal when considered in their own right, but in comparison with their twins in the lab they were . . . dimmer somehow, as if existing in slow motion or with great apathy.

The lab mice were glossy and racing around, rising up on their hind legs and sniffing, copulating almost continually, even male on male when she and Nate separated the s.e.xes to give the poor females a break. The virus was flouris.h.i.+ng so rampantly they'd added more dishes. The original cultures in the lab were now in three dishes each, compared to the single dish at Jill's house. The fruitrefused to decay.

And then there were the human subjects. Her period had become heavier and about a day longer. She'd always had fine hair, but a thick new row of down on the edge of her forehead indicated abundant new growth. She had continual copious energy even without food or rest. Her mind calculated, organized, but often got fuzzy out of sheer overload. Emotionally, she was ecstatic but fragile, easily broke into tears of frustration at traffic jams or whining students, and was just as instantly elated when they made the slightest progress. All this she noted, too.

July 20. The takeout on the counter in the kitchen went unpacked. Neither she nor Nate had an appet.i.te these days, a fact Jill noted in her journal. She had begun stopping at a little teriyaki shop every night. And every night, after Nate went home, she'd dig out his take-out container from the trash and log just how much he'd eaten. For the past three days he'd barely touched it.

They finished logging the numbers on the subjects in her spare room at four o'clock. Jill should have been tired, because she hadn't slept in days, but she was still bursting with energy.

"What's the new total?" she asked Nate when she'd finished her last examination. She was hoping for a half a percent up from yesterday, at least. Only three more percentage points to go and they'd be at a 50 percent differential between the control and test groups.

When he didn't answer right away, she turned to look at him. Nate was panting, perched on the edge of a folding chair, the only place to sit in the crowded guest room. It was a warm night, and he had fine sweat on his face. "Think I'll . . . " he muttered weakly, and headed for the doorway.

Jill followed. "What's wrong?"

His laptop hung heavily from one hand, and when he landed on the sofa he let it drop to the floor beside him. He fell back against the cus.h.i.+ons, partially reclined. He looked like he couldn't move to either sit up or lie all the way down.

He looked seriously ill. That sparked fear and guilt in Jill about what she was doing, exposing him- exposing them both-to the altered one-minus-one. She mumbled something extraneous and went to the kitchen, wet a dish towel with cool water from the tap. His face was so white . . . her heart pounded violently, another overreaction. Knowing that didn't make it go away.