The Call-Girls by Arthur Koestler Read Free Book Online Page B

the bubble chamber like the condensation trail of a jet-plane. Solovief called his particle the ‘myatron’, and explained in the paper announcing the discovery that it was meant as a condensation of ‘maya’ and ‘metron’. Both words were derived from the same sanskrit root,
matr-,
and reflected the contrast between Eastern mysticism and Western science. The veil of Maya was the symbol of an attitude which regarded all appearances as illusions; while metron meant measure, the scientist’s hard, quantitative approach to reality.
    Niko shared both attitudes. He could never take himself, nor the myatron, quite seriously. He had predicted its existence and photographed its track, but he could not convince himself of its reality. Or rather, he could not persuade himself of the Reality of the scientist’s reality. An electron which was in two places at once could not be taken seriously. The French had an expression: ‘
c’est pas sérieux
…’ Niko keptrepeating it, applying it to modern physics, to Adolf Hitler alias Schicklgruber, to his affairs with various girls, and above all to himself.
    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