—Fine, said Szilard. —We woke up, fine. Put it any way you want.
—And how did you know where to find each other?
—I found Dr. Szilard, said Ann. —And he knew where to find Dr. Oppenheimer.
—I actually ran into Fermi weeks before that, in a so-called Mexican restaurant that makes a very weak chili, said Oppenheimer.
—How about the logistics? asked Ben. —I mean how do you, uh, support yourselves as dead physicists?
—I have means, said Oppenheimer. —My old bank has been honoring my checks. The account dates from the ’40s of course but it does contain funds. It took some doing to track it down, of course. The bank has changed names several times.
—You’re living off “Oppenheimer’s” savings?
—For the present, yes I am, said Oppenheimer. —I had apparently left funds in a minor account from my days at the ranch, before the war. On the site we were not permitted offsite bank accounts. Postal orders only. But I had a passbook in my wallet and I took it in. The funds were not inconsiderable. They had accrued interest. Believe me, I was amazed to discover it too. But I can hardly be defrauding myself.
—Oppie and Fermi think all this is a delusion, said Szilard. —Personally I have not formed an opinion.
—We’re all still recovering from shock, said Oppenheimer. —We speculate about the situation, but we’re not on familiar territory. It has been suggested that this is a projection of sorts, I use the term loosely, a psychological product, as it were, not an objective reality. But we don’t know. So for the sake of argument, to get through the day, as it were, we’re pretending this is the world, and we’re in it. We’re acting as though this is real. And why not?
—So you admit you’re deluded.
—Clearly, said Oppenheimer.
—What else, said Szilard. —Are we supposed to believe in time machines or reincarnation or something? I like H.G. Wells as much as the next guy, but please. We are men of science.
Ben sat without moving. There was quiet around the table, and Ann reached out and slid her hand into his. From across the room the waiter was moving toward them with a tray.
—My rump roast! exclaimed Szilard, with the joy of a child.
4
So an egg hatched in 1945 and out of it, preening, crawled a bird that would never stop flying.
It should have been apparent to him always, Ben told himself when the dead scientists first arrived, that his way of loving her was primitive and simplistic and would serve him only under a clear blue sky, not in adverse weather conditions. He began to understand that she was not a guarantee of herself.
She could slip away without leaving him.
And only a few days into this, only a few days along in her investigation of the alleged dead scientists, her obsession, call a spade a spade, with these ostensibly deceased masters of the physical universe, he was working in the mansion’s gardens, he was resting for a minute, dizzy from standing suddenly, and aimlessly rubbing a bud off the trunk of a young maple with his thumb when it came to him that this, in fact, this itself was going to be his task, his test, the unquestioning and blind leap of faith. This was him waiting in the rocket ship, preparing for zero gravity.
Szilard has been described by some historians as a “happy warrior” and by others as “selfless.” “His lack of self-interest,” an economist friend once wrote of him, “evokes mistrust.”
He was also described variously as “bossy,” “a genius,” and “an ass,” while Oppenheimer has been called a “suffering computer.”
But Oppenheimer was also described as a “magnificent” person—a person who, even as he was effectively managing the largest enterprise of physical science the world had ever seen, managed to make himself deeply admired and beloved by many of those who worked for him.
Opinion is sharply divided on Oppenheimer. It was Oppenheimer, after all, who was the celebrity.
As for Fermi, because his pronouncements on science were held to be infallible, as a young man he was known to his fellow physics students in Italy merely as “the Pope.”
Ben’s first impulse was to rebellion, even derision, but he knew he could only be generous. It was strategic. Anything else would drive a wedge between them. He was hoping that his collusion in the fantasy would set her free to be bored.
And that was how the short, fat man calling himself Leo Szilard first came to live with them.
—Dr. Szilard is homeless at the moment, Ann told him after their first lunch with the scientists.
They were driving home in separate cars and talking on their phones. Ben could see her car ahead of him, the neat oval of her small head over the driver’s seat.
—Between apartments? asked Ben.
—Hotel rooms, said Ann. —He’s about to be kicked out of his motel. I think he’s run out of money, if he had any in the first place. I know this is a lot to ask, I know it seems like a risk, but it’s important to me: can he stay with us for a while?
For a second as he drove he was conscious of the other cars on the road being far away. He felt his arms reaching for the wheel spiderlike, segmented and nearly detached from the main bulk of his body.
Faced with the end of history people tend to ignore it. But Szilard was not one of these.
From the first he led the physicists’ opposition to using the bomb. While he was working for the Met Lab in Chicago in 1945, Szilard tried to arrange to see Truman to convince him not to drop the bomb on Japan. Despite the high regard in which physicists were held by the White House, Szilard was blocked by Truman’s new secretary of state.
An overheard conversation—possibly apocryphal—between Szilard and a security guard at Oak Ridge, where plutonium nitrate was being manufactured, is said to have gone
