'It is — ' Freud stopped in mid-sentence. His voice changed altogether. He spoke evenly and very quietly, looking straight at Jung. 'It is now too late.'
An extremely awkward pause ensued. Then Freud went on. 'Do not look down, either of you. Jung, you will turn around and walk just in front of me. Younger, you will be on my left. No, on my left. Walk directly to the elevator. Go.'
Thus arranged, we made a stiff procession to the elevators. One of the clerks stared at us; it was irritating, but I don't think he suspected. To my astonishment, Jung would not stop talking. 'Your Count Thun dream — it is the key to everything. Will you let me analyze it?'
'I am hardly in a position to refuse' was Freud's reply.
Freud's dream of Count Thun, the former Austrian prime minister, was known to everyone who had read his work. Reaching the elevator bank, I tried to leave them. To my surprise, Jung stopped me. He said he needed me. We let one car go; the next we had to ourselves.
Inside the elevator, Jung went on. 'Count Thun represented me. Thun: Jung — it could not be clearer. Both names have four letters. Both share the un, whose meaning is obvious. His family was originally German but obliged to emigrate; so was mine. He is of higher birth than you; so am I. He is the picture of arrogance; I am accused of arrogance. In your dream, he is your enemy but also a member of your inner circle; someone you lead, but someone who threatens you — and an Aryan, decidedly an Aryan. The conclusion is inescapable: you were dreaming of me, but you had to distort it, because you did not want to acknowledge that you regard me as a threat.'
'Carl,' said Freud slowly, 'I dreamt of Count Thun in 1898. That was more than a decade ago. You and I did not meet until 1907.'
The doors opened. The corridor was empty. Freud walked briskly out; we followed. I could not imagine what Jung was thinking or what his response would be. It was this: 'I know it! We dream what is to come as well as what has passed. Younger,' he exclaimed, his eyes unnaturally bright, 'you can confirm it!'
'I?'
'Yes, of course you. You were there. You saw the whole thing.' Suddenly Jung seemed to change his mind and addressed Freud again. 'Never mind. Your enuresis signifies ambition. It is a means of drawing attention to yourself — as you did just now, in the lobby. It appears whenever you feel you have an enemy, an opposite number, an un you must overcome. I am now that un. Hence your problem has reappeared.'
We reached Freud's room. He fished in his pocket for the key — a task uncomfortable for him at present. In the end, the key dropped to the floor. No one moved. Then Freud picked it up. When upright again, he said to Jung, 'I doubt very much I enjoy Joseph's gift of prophecy, but
I can tell you this: you are my heir. You will inherit psychoanalysis when I die, and you will become its leader even before that. I will see to it. I am seeing to it. I have said all this to you before. I have told the others; I say it now again. There is no one else, Carl. Do not doubt it.'
'Then tell me the rest of your Count Thun dream!' cried Jung. 'You have always said there was a part of that dream you did not reveal. If I am your heir, tell me. It will confirm my analysis; I am certain of it. What was it?'
Freud shook his head. I think he was smiling — ruefully, perhaps. 'My boy,' he said to Jung, 'there are some things even I cannot divulge. I should never have any authority again. Now leave me, both of you. I will join you in the dining room in half an hour.'
Jung turned without a word and strode away.
The Manhattan Bridge, nearing completion in the summer of 1909, was the last of the three great suspension bridges built across the East River to connect the island of Manhattan with what had been, until 1898, the City of Brooklyn. These bridges — the Brooklyn, the Williamsburg, the Manhattan — were, when constructed, the longest single spans in existence, extolled by Scientific American as the greatest engineering feats the world had ever known. Together with the invention of spun-steel cable, one particular technological innovation made them possible: the ingenious conceit of the pneumatic caisson.
The problem to which the caisson responded was this. The massive support towers for these bridges, necessary to hold up their suspension cables, had to rest on foundations built underwater, almost a hundred feet beneath the surface. These foundations could not be laid directly on the soft riverbed. Instead, layer upon layer of sand, silt, shale, clay, and boulder had to be dredged, broken, and sometimes dynamited until one reached bedrock. To perform such excavation underwater was universally regarded as impossible — until the idea of the pneumatic caisson was hit upon.
The caisson was basically an enormous wooden box. The Manhattan Bridge caisson, on the New York City side, had an area of seventeen thousand square feet. Its walls were made from countless planks of yellow pine lumber, bolted together to a thickness of over twenty feet and caulked with a million barrels of oakum, hot pitch, and varnish. The lower three feet of the caisson were reinforced with boiler plate, inside and out. The weight of the whole: over sixty million pounds.
A caisson had a ceiling but no man-made floor. Its floor was the riverbed itself. In essence, the pneumatic caisson was the largest diving bell ever built.
In 1907, the Manhattan Bridge caisson was sunk to the river bottom, water filling its internal compartments. On land, enormous steam engines were fired up, which, running day and night, pumped air through iron pipes down into the great box. The forced air, building up to enormous pressure, drove out all the water through boreholes drilled in the caisson's walls. An elevator shaft connected the caisson to a pier. Men would take this elevator down into the caisson, where they could breathe the pumped, compressed air.
There they had direct access to the riverbed and hence were able to perform the underwater construction work previously considered impossible: hammering the rock, shoveling the mud, dynamiting the boulders, laying the concrete. Debris was discharged through ingeniously devised compartments called windows, although one could not see through them. Three hundred men could work in the caisson at one time.
An invisible danger lay in wait for them there. The men who emerged from a day's work in the very first pneumatic caisson — employed for the Brooklyn Bridge — frequently began to feel a strange light-headedness. This was followed by a stiffening of their joints, then by a paralysis of the elbows and knees, then by an unendurable pain throughout the entire body. Doctors called the mysterious condition caisson disease. Workmen called it 'the bends,' because of the contorted posture into which its sufferers were driven. Thousands of workers had their health ruined by it, hundreds endured paralysis, and many died before it was discovered that slowing the climb back to the surface — forcing the men to spend time at intermediate stages as they ascended the shaft — prevented the disorder.
By 1909, the science of decompression had advanced impressively. Tables had been drawn up prescribing exactly how long a man needed to decompress, which depended on how much time he had spent down in the caisson. From these tables, the man preparing to enter the caisson just after midnight on August 31, 1909, knew he could spend fifteen minutes down below without requiring any decompression at all. He had no fear of the underwater descent.
He had made the trip many times. This trip, however, would be different in one respect. He would be alone.
He had driven one of his automobiles almost down to the river itself, navigating around machinery, lumber, tilting corrugated-tin shacks, fifty-foot rounds of steel cable, and piles of broken stone. The construction site was deserted, the night watchman had completed his final rounds, and the first crews of workmen would not arrive until dawn. The tower of the bridge, virtually finished, cast a shadow over his car in the moonlight, making him all but invisible from the street. The steam engines were still roaring, pumping air down to the caisson a hundred feet below and masking all other sound.
From the back of his car, he removed a large black trunk, which he carried onto the pier to the mouth of the caisson shaft. Another man would not have been able to manage the feat, but this man was strong, tall, and athletic. He knew how to hoist a heavy trunk over his back. It made an incongruous sight, since the man was wearing black tie and tails.
He unlocked the elevator and entered it, dragging the trunk in with him. Two jets of blue flame provided light. As the elevator made its journey downward, the roar of the steam engines became a distant throbbing. The darkness became cooler. There was a deep, dank smell of earth and salt. The man felt the pressure building in his inner ear. He negotiated the air lock without difficulty, opened the caisson hatch, forced the trunk down a ramp — it echoed monstrously as it fell — and descended to the wooden planks below.
