Dante's Equation Part 9

"Huh? Oh. Radio waves. Well, they're sine waves which have a gentle rolling pattern. So there'd probably only be random instances where a sine would collide in just the right way with the one-minus-one to alter it by much. And you'dhave to alter it quite a bit to notice anything unusual out here in the material world, because matter waves are interacting with the one-minus-one in subtle ways all the time."

"Exactly!" Jill looked at him with such a triumphant, resolved expression that he was sure he was supposed to have gotten more out of what he'd just said than he actually did.

"So . . ."

"So I know how we can conduct our experiment!"

Nate waited, squinting at her.

"If we used a wave pulse thatwasn't a rolling sine wave," she explained energetically, "but was instead a steadypulse- a fullone pulse or a fullminus onepulse-"

Nate whistled in appreciation. "It would have the maximum possible impact on the one-minus-one!"

"Exactly!"

She smiled at him, looking about as happy as Jill Talcott ever looked, which meant to say that she looked unpreoccupied, present in the moment, and enormously pleased with herself.

"Yeah, but . . . do you think that's smart?" Nate asked.

Jill's smile vanished. Her eyes sparked with annoyance. "You said yourself, there's no way we canpermanently alter anything."

Nate wasn't sure that made him feel any better. "What do you think it would do, Dr. Talcott? I mean, say we figured out the power requirements, set up our equipment, sent out our pulse . . . what would the results of altering the one-minus-onebeout here in the physical world?"

Jill went around her desk and sank back in her chair, a curl of antic.i.p.ation on her lips. "Well, that's exactly what we're going to find out, isn't it?"

4.2. Aharon Handalman

JERUSALEM.

A month after his visit to Yad Vashem, Aharon had mostly recovered. It was like digesting a bad meal-when enough time has pa.s.sed you get an occasional belch, which brings with it a puff of bad air and a smell that reminds you of things you would rather forget, but other than that you don't feel so sick.

But Yad Vashem had left a dis-ease that transferred itself from the Holocaust museum to the Kobinski array project in general. Aharon could shake the dust of Yad Vashem from his shoes, but from his heart? Not so easy. Besides, he didn't know what to make of the pages he had copied from Yad Vashem. He didn't care for Kobinski's ideas, period, but especially he didn't care for that business about a rabbi being like n.a.z.is. Ridiculous! What could Kobinski mean by making such a comparison? Still, he was willing to admit that what he'd read was brief and that Kobinski could not have been at his best when he wrote it. As for all the mathematical notations in the margins? Aharon neither knew nor cared.

If that wasn't enough, if you had to be greedy about it, as Rosa used to say, the whole Yad Vashem excursion had not evenbought him anything. Aharon had made a list of new keywords:Isaac Kobinski, Anna Kobinski, gevorah, binah, n.a.z.i, and so on. The results? Precious little. He found a number of instances ofgevorah in the Kobinski arrays, but it wasn't such a rare word in Hebrew ELS, and in any case, what did it mean? Nothing.

On the other hand . . . There were still 400 Torah arrays with the name Yosef Kobinski in them. Like an overbearing mother-in-law, this fact could not be avoided. So he and Binyamin continued to pore over them. Only Aharon had begun to think of other things again, his students (G.o.d forbid). If they were lackl.u.s.ter, if they were behind in their studies, whose fault was that? They say, "If the baby is ugly, don't expect a beautiful mother." It was time to knock a few heads together, get the brains working in a few young men, get them filled with fire about Torah.

And perhaps because he no longer cared so much, he finally had a breakthrough.

It was an unusually rainy June morning in Jerusalem. The soft drops on his face as he said his morning prayers at the wall were like G.o.d's own tears. Afterward, comfortable and dry in his office, he picked up the binder and flipped to a random array . . . and saw it.

He had stared at this sequence over many months, and it had not clicked in his brain. This morning it

did: It was such a small word. Perhaps that's why his eye had always skimmed over it: .Weapon.

He stroked his beard, made a clicking noise with his tongue that was the equivalent of a cat switching its tail. He turned the page. The thing about it was he thought . . . yes, it was in the array on the next page also, the same word. He began to search in earnest, circling each instance with a pencil as he found it. When Binyamin knocked, an hour later, Aharon had gone through five arrays-and had found the word right next to the name Yosef Kobinski in every single one.

"Do you believe in miracles?" was what he greeted the boy with. "Because wonder of wonders, I found something."

"What is it?"

"Look for yourself."

Binyamin looked at the binder, blinked at him blearily. "Weapon?"

"I found it in four other arrays also." Aharon showed the boy his circled words with growing authority. "Listen, we'll do a computer search later. For now have a seat and start from the front; I've already started from the back."

It seemed appropriate that they should dig this treasure by hand. It was a communion with the text, the way Aharon might put his fingers on the Scripture as he read it, as if his touch would earn him additional insight and blessings. Binyamin was not so readily harnessed.

"What do you think it means, 'weapon'? Why would that be in Rabbi Kobinski's arrays?"

"It's obvious. He was a physics professor in Warsaw in the early nineteen-twenties. Maybe he did some work which led to nuclear fission; did you ever think of that?"

Binyamin admitted that he hadn't.

"So?" Aharon continued, eyes alight. "Who invented atomic bombs? Wasn't it Eastern European scientists? Born when?"

"I don't know."

"Think! The bomb was invented near the end of World War Two, so the scientists who invented it must have been born around 1900, same as Kobinski. Maybe theyknew Kobinski.Maybe he had something to do with it." Aharon went back to his array, but he was feeling infinitely self-admiring.

Binyamin scratched at himself. "So that might be why he's in the Torah so many times?"

Aharon held up both hands in an "of course" gesture. "If he had something to do with the discovery of atomic bombs, what could be more important than that?"

"Cool."

Aharon was in too good a mood to correct the boy's lingo. He had an urge to share the discovery with someone else, but who? The yes.h.i.+va's dean? No, Dean Horowitz and he were oil and water; the man was too liberal. Besides which, Horowitz had never been a true advocate of the code. Someone else then. There was his contact at the Mossad-so often he'd avoided Aharon's phone calls. This would change his tune.

"Um . . . Rabbi Handalman?"

"Eh?"

"Found something."

Binyamin marked the find lightly with a pencil underline, as Aharon had taught him to do, and pa.s.sed the binder. Aharon looked at it. The boy had found the wordweapon on a diagonal, but it didn't end there. The encoded phrase continued:

Weapon loosing demons.

The flesh on Aharon's arms stood up in ridges. Seeing it hidden in the text that way, text he had stared at for so long, was like seeing an evil face appear outside your bedroom window. "Is that talking about the atomic bomb, do you think, Rabbi?" "It must be," Aharon answered gruffly. "Yes, it could be. I could see that. Keep looking." But as he went back to search, Rabbi Handalman was no longer quite so sure.

*** Aharon used the school's phone to place a long-distance call to a synagogue in Warsaw. The rabbi put Aharon in contact with a synagogue member who taught at the university, a man named Lestchinsky. Lestchinsky was pleased to help. A week later, he e-mailed Aharon the details.

Kobinski had enrolled at the University of Warsaw in 1918. His hometown was listed as a smallshetl near Brezeziny. In 1924 he'd earned his degree and begun to teach. He was employed by the university only a few short years, leaving unexpectedly in 1927. Aharon a.s.sumed that was when he decided to study kabbalah with Eleazar Zaks.

From the records, it appeared that Yosef Kobinski was an exceptionally brilliant student. Certainly he was the best of his cla.s.s, though a Christian won top honors the year Kobinski graduated, naturally. After 1924, he taught in the physics department. Kobinski was listed in the annual reports as specializing in the "quantum theory of atoms." As far as Lestchinsky could tell, there was no research related to atomic fission going on in Warsaw during those years. None at all.

Aharon was disappointed, but the news didn't come as a big shock. While waiting for the professor's reply, he and Binyamin had searched on the keywordsnuclear ,atomic ,fission , andbomb . They found no hits within the Kobinski arrays. So Aharon had checked some history books. Fermi's work did not begin in earnest on atomics until the mid-1930s. Uranium fission was not discovered until 1939, over ten years after Kobinski had left the University of Warsaw, and then it was discovered by Germans. That was not to say that a smart Jew in Warsaw couldn't have been ten years ahead of German scientists or even that they might not have stolen his work. But the news from Lestchinsky combined with a lack of confirmation in the arrays . . . Aharon had to admit, it didn't look good.

But. But. If Kobinski hadnot contributed to the invention of the atomic bomb, then what weaponwere the arrays talking about? It came down to that; that was the thing.What weapon?

4.3. Denton Wyle

CAPECOD, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS.

Denton's mother met him in the foyer and air-kissed his cheeks. He had a compulsion, as he always did, to s.h.i.+ft, force her lips to make actual contact with his actual skin. But she'd ignore it, and he'd look childish. He refrained.

"Denton, it's so lovely to see you."

His mother looked more plastic than usual. She must have had another face-lift and/or eye job. Her expensive black pantsuit couldn't hide her anorexic dimensions. Her patrician blond beauty, so like his own, had not aged well. It was depressing.

She led the way to the white-and-gold reception room and called Carter to serve tea.

"How are you, sir?" Carter asked Denton, pausing before leaving the room.

"Great! It's nice to see you."

Carter returned the sentiment with genuine feeling.

Jeez, his mother should get the number of Carter's plastic surgeon. The man hadn't changed in twenty years. It really was a kick seeing him. When Denton was young he'd been convinced Carter was a cat burglar. It was the silent, fluid way he had of moving, never making so much as a footfall. Denton had followed him for months around the house while his parents were gone, sneaking behind him with Carter patiently ignoring him. It all made so much sense at the time. Denton smiled.

"Will you stay for lunch?" his mother asked. "I'll be out, I'm afraid. I have an appointment at noon; then I'm luncheoning with friends. But I'm sure Carter can whip something up."

Denton felt a grinding resentment, fleeting and futile. "If you're not going to be here, Mother, why invite me to stay?"

"I thought you might be hungry."

"I can feed myself. They taught me that at NYU."

Denton liked mentioning NYU because his mother was disappointed he hadn't gotten into one of thebetter schools. Well, his grades hadn't cut it-his parents' fault for traveling so much.

"As you wish." Mother used her polite, put-upon voice.

Denton's anger soured. "Whycan't you stay?"

"I have a fitting. You wouldn't believe how difficult they are to get."

"Well, I appreciate you having Carter send me your itinerary so that if I decide to take the trouble to fly across the country to see you, I can get half an hour of your time!"

"Don't be dramatic. If you don't give me notice, what do you expect? Besides, I've visited you in LA."

"During layovers. I appreciate it."

Mother fiddled with her teacup, her face distant. She was no fun to fight with. She just refused to engage. And the worst part was, in a half hour she'd be off again and he'd not see her for the rest of the year, and he would have wasted what little time they had.

Denton's resentment s.h.i.+fted into clutching anxiety. "I'm sorry."

Her face lightened. "So . . . are you still writing for that magazine?"

He was pathetically eager to tell her. "Wait till you hear-something very big has come up. I was working on an article, and I came across a Polish rabbi who died at Auschwitz, right? He was writing a book calledThe Book of Torment , and he had tohide the pages around the camp. Isn't that cool? I got a section of it through this antique dealer in Zurich, and it's this amazing thing. . . ."

Denton babbled on like an agitated sports commentator. His mother's expression was slightly puzzled or slightly disapproving or slightly troubled, or she thought there was something wrong with tea-he couldn't tell which. He hardly ever knew what she was thinking.

". . . It'sso major. I'm thinking I might . . ." He bit his lip slyly, like a naughty boy. His vision of what he wanted to do with the Kobinski material had come to him slowly, but it was indeed monstrously huge. "I might try to gather the complete ma.n.u.script and publish it-publishThe Book of Torment . You know, give it a 'lost treasure of the Holocaust' spin. Isn't that great? There might even be a movie deal in it. It's got a lot more human interest thanSchindler's List . Don't you think so? Huh? I think so."

"Oh, Denton," his mother sighed. "The Holocaust! How depressing."

Denton's enthusiasm withered, instantly. He swallowed and a hot, aching feeling coursed down his body, as if someone had poured molten lead over his head. He drank some tea, blinking rapidly.

"That's, um, why I came to see you, Mother. I need the name and number of that agent you used when you were collecting those antique filigree things. If I'm going to track down the rest of the ma.n.u.script I need someone good."

He'd meant it cruelly, paying her back in kind. He waited for her to look hurt that he'd only come to see her to get a name. It didn't even register.

"Fleck, I think. Carter has the information somewhere. He'svery good, but expensive. I don't suppose your precious magazine is paying for any of this? Of course not. What they pay you in salary wouldn't buy a decent meal, and you don't have to tell me you cover all your own expenses. Why bother? Or if youmust do this journalism business, why don't you find a legitimate publication? Maria Shriver works for CNN. Or is it NBC?"

"What does this have to do with Maria freakingShriver ?" he shouted.

"Don't curse at me. And don't use that tone of voice!"

"Ididn't curse! 'Freaking' is not a curse."

His mother only looked put upon and dropped the subject. "Well . . . if it makes you happy."

Mother poured herself more tea, dosed it with milk. She mainlined tea-always had. It was what she did instead of putting food, like,in her body. Meanwhile, she had dismissed the conversation and Denton sat in his exquisite chair trampled into the dust, his eyes ground into b.l.o.o.d.y sockets by her high heels.

He wanted to defend the Kobinski project . . . but he couldn't. His obsessions come and went too frequently for him to claim special deference for this one. He knew it, and he had enough crumbs of objectivity besides to admit that the Kobinski project might sound, to any rational human being, a little unfeasible.

Of course, his gut told him itwas feasible. And even if it wasn't, he didn't give a rat's a.s.s.

"This is important to me, Mother. I wish you could be more-"

"Important! How could it be important? You're not Jewis.h.!.+ Really, Denton, I don't understand your predilection for morbid things. Is it because your childhood was too easy? Do you have to seek out ugliness and . . . and craziness because we didn't give you any? There aresuch nicer things you could do with your time."

She shook her head in incomprehension. Denton was silent for a minute, his anger and self-pity gathering like clouds.