Czytaj książkę: «In Search of Klingsor»

EPIGRAPH

Science is a game—but a game with reality, a game with sharpened knives … if a man cuts a picture carefully into 1,000 pieces, you solve the puzzle when you reassemble the pieces into a picture; in the success or failure, both your intelligences compete. In the presentation of a scientific problem, the other player is the good Lord. He has not only set the problem but also devised the rules of the game—but they are not completely known, half of them are left for you to discover or to determine. The experiment is the tempered blade which you wield with success against the spirits of darkness—or which defeats you shamefully. The uncertainty is how much of the rules God himself has permanently ordained, and how much appears to be caused by your mental inertia, while the solution generally becomes possible only through freedom from this limitation. This is perhaps the most exciting thing in the game. For here you strive against the imaginary boundary between yourself and the Godhead—a boundary that perhaps does not exist.

—ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER

PREFACE

On September 5, the day they came for me, I was in my house on Ludwigstraße preparing some equations that Heisenberg had sent to me a few weeks earlier. Ever since July 20, when Hitler announced over the radio that the coup attempt had failed and that his life had been providentially spared, I knew that I didn’t have much time. My anguish grew as I listened to the subsequent news reports: the execution of Stauffenberg and of his close friends, the preparations for the trials in the People’s Court, and the massive wave of arrests that were made in the coup’s aftermath.

Well aware that I could easily be the next in line, I tried to remain calm. But when I learned that Heini—Heinrich von Lutz, my childhood friend—had been arrested, I knew for sure that my days were numbered. But what could I do? Flee Germany? Hide? Escape? We were right in the middle of the very worst months of the war. It would have been impossible. All I could do was wait, quietly, for the SS or the Gestapo to break into my house. If I was lucky.

Just as I had imagined, the thugs wasted little time. A few days later, the Gestapo arrived at my house, handcuffed me, and I was taken straight to Plötzensee.

On July 20, 1944, a select group of officials of the Wehrmacht, the Armed Forces of the Third Reich, aided by dozens of civilians, had made an attempt on Hitler’s life while the Führer was presiding over a meeting at his headquarters at Rastenburg, about six hundred kilometers east of Berlin. The leader of this group was Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, a young colonel who had been wounded in the line of duty in North Africa. That day, Stauffenberg placed a pair of bombs in a briefcase, which was then deposited underneath the Führer’s desk. Stauffenberg waited for the bombs to go off, the signal for the coup to begin, the coup that would put an end to the Nazi regime and, possibly, the entire Second World War.

The tiniest, most infuriating logistical error foiled Stauffenberg’s plan. Either one of the bombs hadn’t been activated or the suitcase had simply been placed too far from where Hitler had been sitting. The Führer escaped with a few scrapes and not a single one of the high commands of the party or the army was seriously wounded. Despite the failure of their first operative, the conspirators fully intended to move ahead with their plan, but by the early hours of the next day the Nazis had regained control of the situation. The main orchestrators of the coup—Ludwig Beck, Friedrich Olbricht, Werner von Haeften, Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim, and of course, Stauffenberg—were detained and killed that night in the general headquarters of the army, on the Bendlerstraße in Berlin. Hundreds of others were quickly arrested following the strict orders of the Reichsführer-SS and the new minister of the interior, Heinrich Himmler.

The news of the plot came as a shock to military insiders and civilians alike, thanks to the startling scope of people implicated: military officers, businessmen, diplomats, members of the army and the naval intelligence forces, professionals and merchants. In the aftermath, Himmler had all the conspirators and their relatives arrested, on the theory that the source of evil travels through bloodlines. By the end of August of 1944, some six hundred people had been arrested—some for aiding and abetting the conspirators, others simply for being related to them.

Hitler was livid about the coup, and unleashed his vengeance upon all the people who had turned against him during the very worst moments of the war. Scarcely a few weeks had passed since the Allied invasion of Normandy, and already there were people ready and willing to do away with him and place the entire Third Reich in jeopardy. So, just as Stalin—his enemy—had done in Moscow in 1937, Hitler decided to stage a great trial so that all the world could see just how vicious his enemies really were. Before it began, Roland Freisler, the chief justice of the People’s Court of the Greater German Reich, and the executioner who would carry out the punishments were summoned to his headquarters, the “Wolf’s Lair.” There, Hitler advised them of the following: “I want them hanged, strung up like butchered cattle!”

The trials began on August 7, in the great hall of the People’s Court in Berlin. On that day, eight defendants accused of conspiring against Hitler’s life were brought before the court: Erwin von Witzleben, Erich Hoepner, Helmuth Stieff, Paul von Hase, Robert Bernardis, Friedrich Karl Klausing, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, and Albrecht von Haden. They were not permitted to wear ties or suspenders, and their own lawyers even urged them to declare themselves guilty. Flanked on either side by two enormous Nazi flags, Freisler ignored their protests, one after the other. Their crimes were so patently evil in nature that any and all declarations were inadmissible. Without flinching, Freisler condemned each of the eight defendants to death. He directed his gaze upon them:

“Now we can return to our life and to the battle before us. The Volk has purged you from its ranks and is pure now. We have nothing more to do with you. We fight. The Wehrmacht cries out: ‘Heil Hitler!’ We fight at the side of our Führer, following him for the glory of Germany!”

By February 3, 1945, the day I was to appear before the People’s Court on Bellevuestraße, Freisler had already delivered scores of death sentences. That day five of us were to stand trial. The first among us to face the judge was Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a lawyer and reserve lieutenant who had served as a liaison between various resistance leaders. He had been captured shortly after July 20, and since then had been held at the Dachau and Flössenburg concentration camps. As was his habit, Freisler interrupted him regularly, to ridicule him and the rest of the defendants, calling us pigs and traitors and proclaiming that Germany would emerge victorious—victory in 1945!—if he were able to successfully eliminate scum like us.

But then something happened, and if I hadn’t witnessed it myself, I would have thought it some kind of miracle or hallucination. Suddenly, the antiaircraft signal rang out, loud and clear, and a red light went off in the hall. After a second of total silence, we heard a loud roar followed by what seemed like an endless series of explosions that reverberated through the courthouse. Bombings had become a daily fact of life in Berlin during those months, so we tried to remain calm and waited for it to end. We would never have guessed that it was anything other than a typical air raid, but it turned out to be the most intense bombing the Allies had launched since the start of the war. Before we even realized what was happening, a powerful crash blasted through the roof of the People’s Court. Plaster fell from the walls like giant blocks of talcum powder, and a torrent of smoke and soot swept through the courtroom as if it had suddenly begun to snow. The plaster fell from the walls in chunks, but that seemed to be the extent of the damage. Either we would wait for the proceedings to continue or the judge would call a recess until the next day. When the smoke cleared a bit, we saw that a heavy chunk of stone had fallen onto the judge’s bench, and next to it lay the head of Judge Roland Freisler, split in half, with a river of blood spilling down his face and staining the death sentence Schlabrendorff had just received. Other than Freisler, no one was injured.

The court security guards ran to the street in search of a doctor and after a few minutes returned with a little man in a white jacket who had sought shelter from the bombs in the courthouse vestibule. As soon as he approached the body, the doctor announced that nothing could be done: Freisler had died instantly. The rest of us remained exactly where we were, dumbfounded, as the security guards glared at us with hatred in their eyes, not knowing what to do next. That was when we heard the doctor’s firm voice: “I won’t do it. I refuse. I’m sorry. Arrest me if you want, but I won’t sign that death certificate. Call someone else.” Later on we found out that the doctor, a man by the name of Rolf Schleicher, was the brother of Rüdiger Schleicher, who had worked in the Institute for Aerial Legislation before being condemned to death by Freisler a few weeks earlier.

Following Freisler’s death, the trial was postponed again and again as the Allied bombings continued to destroy the city. In March 1945, I was transferred from one prison to another until an American regiment finally liberated us shortly before the Nazis surrendered in May. Unlike most of my friends and fellow conspirators, I survived.

On the afternoon of July 20, 1944, a stroke of luck saved Hitler’s life. If Stauffenberg’s second bomb had gone off on that afternoon, or if that briefcase had been placed just a bit closer to Hitler, or if there had been a chain reaction, or if Stauffenberg had made absolutely certain to plant himself closer to Hitler … On the morning of February 3, 1945, a similar kind of luck saved my own life. If I had been tried on some other day, or if that bomb hadn’t dropped precisely when it did, or if that piece of rock had fallen a few centimeters to the left or to the right, or if Freisler had dodged the blow or run for cover somewhere … I still don’t know how logical—or sane—it is to establish a connection between these two events, but I do. Why do I insist, so many years after the fact, to connect these two unrelated incidents? Why do I continue to present them as one, as if they were two manifestations of one single act of will? Why do I refuse to admit that there is nothing hidden behind them, that they are no different from any other human misfortunes? Why do I cling so obstinately to these ideas of destiny, fate, and luck?

Perhaps because other unforeseeable circumstances, no less terrible than these, have forced me to write these words. Perhaps I string together these seemingly unrelated events—Hitler’s salvation and my own—because this is the first time that humanity has been such a close witness to such catastrophic destruction. And our era, unlike other historical moments, has been largely determined by such twists of fate, those little signs that remind us of the ungovernable, chaotic nature of the realm in which we live. I propose, then, to tell the story of the century. My century. My version of how fate has ruled the world, and of how we men of science try in vain to domesticate its fury. But this is also the story of several lives—the one that I have endured for over eighty years and, more important, those of people that, once again by uncontrollable acts of fate, became intertwined with my own.

Sometimes I like to think that I am the thread that connects all these stories—that my existence and memory and these very words are nothing more than the vertices of the one all-encompassing, inevitable theory that brought our lives together. Perhaps my goal seems overly ambitious, or even insane. It doesn’t matter. When your everyday existence becomes marked by death, when all hope is lost and all you see is the long road to your own extinction, this is the only thing that can justify your remaining days on Earth.

PROFESSOR GUSTAV LINKS

MATHEMATICIAN, UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG

NOVEMBER 10, 1989

BOOK ONE

LAWS OF NARRATIVE MOTION
LAW I: All narratives are written by a narrator

At first glance, this statement may appear not only paradoxical but decidedly stupid, yet it is more profound than it may seem. For years, we have been led to believe that when we read a novel or a story written in the first person—and I say this simply to illustrate a point, since this book is not a work of fiction—nobody is there to guide us through the plot and its various riddles. The plot, instead, presents itself in an almost magical manner, as if it were life itself. Through this process, we sense that a book is a parallel world which we make the active decision to enter. Nothing could be further from the truth. If there is one thing I cannot abide it is the cowardice of those authors who attempt to hide behind their words, as if nothing of their true selves filters into their phrases and verbs. They numb us with their overdoses of supposed literary objectivity. Obviously I am not the first person to identify this deceitful game, but I do want to make clear that I fully disagree with this scandalous method that certain authors employ in an effort to cover the tracks of their crimes.

COROLLARY I

For the reasons mentioned above, I should clarify that I, Gustav Links—a man of flesh and blood just like you—am the author of these words. But who am I, really? You can easily see this simply by glancing at the front cover of this book. But what else do you know? Forget about me for a moment and look at the cover once again. For one thing, this volume was finished—not written but finished—in 1989. And what else do you know, aside from the little that I have already told you: that I participated in the failed plot to overthrow Hitler on July 20, 1944, that I was arrested and tried, and that a twist of fatum finally intervened and saved my life?

Nevertheless, I hope you don’t think I would be so presumptuous as to subject you to the story of my life. This has never been my intention, and as many others before me have said, I simply hope to serve as a guide who will walk you through this story: I will be a Serenus, an old, deaf Virgil who promises, from this moment on, to accompany and guide the reader. As the result of an act of luck, of the inevitable, of history, of chance, of God—call it what you like—I was forced to participate in the events I am about to describe. But I can assure you that my only goal is to gain your trust. Because of this, there is no way I could possibly trick you into thinking that I don’t exist and that I haven’t participated in the transcendental events I am about to describe.

LAW II: All narrators offer one, singular truth

I wonder if you have ever heard of a man named Erwin Schrödinger. Aside from being the celebrated physicist who discovered wave mechanics, he was also an inspired soul and one of the protagonists of this drama, a kind of Don Juan in the body of a wizened, old professor (of course, only now do I allow myself to describe him with such familiarity; when I first met him I never would have dared). He used to wear the most endearing pair of little round eyeglasses, and was forever surrounded by beautiful women … but that is beside the point. I only mention these details as an afterthought, out of chronological order, and only because I must. Although the notion of subjective truth certainly occurred to the Sophists in ancient Greece and to Henry James in the nineteenth century, it was our good friend Erwin who established the scientific foundations of such a theory, and his theory is one I find particularly satisfying. I won’t go into detail, but I will point out one of its more unexpected consequences: I am what I see. What is this statement trying to communicate? A platitude: that truth is relative. Every observer, whether contemplating an electron or an entire universe in motion, unwittingly completes what Schrödinger called a “wave packet” released by all objects under observation. When subject and object make contact, what emerges is a jumbled mixture of the two, which then leads us to the none-too-surprising conclusion that, in practice, each mind is a world unto itself.

COROLLARY II

The ramifications of the previous statement must seem as transparent as a drop of morning dew; in fact, it’s the oldest excuse in the book. The truth, it claims, is my truth, and that is that. The quantum wave functions that I complete with my act of observation are unique and immutable—and this is supported by a litany of theories I don’t particularly wish to elaborate on right now (the uncertainty principle, the theory of complementarity, the exclusion principle, among others). In essence, they state that no one has the authority to declare his truth as superior to that of someone else. I am telling you this, I repeat, as a way of laying my cards out on the table. If this comes across as unbearable, deceitful, or even manipulative, please know that it is not my intention but rather the consequence of a physical law I cannot help but obey. As such, I feel no need to apologize for this.

LAW III: All narrators possess a motive for narrating

The problem with axioms is that they always seem so tediously obvious that many people think they could easily be mathematicians themselves. It’s inevitable. But to recapitulate: If we agree with Laws I and II, that all texts must have an author, and that said author possesses a single, exclusive truth, then the next declaration will seem even more tedious. It states that if things do not appear from nowhere, it is because someone has specifically intended for it to be that way. I realize that this axiom does not apply to the world itself—at least, it seems highly unlikely that we will soon understand why someone chose to create the world as we know it—but I am not responsible for the uncertainties that exist outside these pages. We must banish the terrible theological temptation by which literary critics and scientists declare ordinary texts to be modern-day version of the Bible. No author is God, or anything like God—believe me—and no single page comes close to being even the worst imitation of the Tablets of the Law or the Gospel. And obviously, men of flesh and blood have little in common with the men we read of in books. Our metaphorical tendencies can sometimes get us into very big trouble. Here, then, is the real mystery of all mysteries: Unlike what occurs in the natural universe, books are always written with a motive, and these motives can often be quite petty indeed.

COROLLARY III

Don’t assume, however, that it will be so easy to discern my motives. Scientific research, the kind that I performed for years—the kind that you will soon undertake—is much more complicated than baking a cake from an old family recipe. I only wish it were that simple! So don’t get unduly excited: I have no intention of revealing my reasons in one fell swoop. I may be aware of them myself, but even I don’t know if I have fully made sense of them. With a bit of patience, perhaps you will be the ones to disentangle them. Remember what Schrödinger said: For a true act of recognition to occur, an interaction must take place between observer and observed, and now I find myself in the latter (and somewhat less comfortable) category. I hope that you enjoy studying these incidents and hypothesizing upon their possible causes—a task that I have realized so many times in the past, though under very different conditions. In the world of science, this is the key to success. I could make your work easier by saying that I shall present my version of the facts and my conclusions to the world, that I will tell my own, personal truth. But at this stage of my life—I am over eighty—I am still not fully convinced by my own reasons. If you had asked me forty or even twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have wasted a second in subscribing to the above-mentioned theories. No, now it is different: I see how my old, sinister friend lies in wait for me. I see how every breath requires a superhuman effort, and I see how the most trivial of human activities for you—eating, bathing, defecating—have become nothing less than minor miracles for me. And so I don’t quite know if my beliefs have remained the same, either. If you are willing to accept the challenge—how pompous; let’s call it a game instead—you can be the one to decide whether I am right or wrong.

CRIMES OF WAR

When Lieutenant Francis P. Bacon, former agent of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, and scientific adviser to the U.S. forces stationed in Germany, arrived at the Nuremberg train station at 8 A.M. on October 15, 1946, nobody was there to greet him. Gunther Sadel, officer of the counterintelligence unit attached to Brigadier General Leroy H. Watson, chief of the North American forces, was to have picked up Bacon and taken him to the gallows where the Nazi war criminals were to be executed. But when Bacon alighted from the train, Sadel was nowhere to be found. The train station was virtually empty.

Bacon waited for a few moments but quickly lost patience and asked two military policemen guarding the train depot what was going on. Nobody knew. A sudden silence fell upon them. Aside from a few railway workers—mainly POWs—whose job was to keep the train tracks in working condition, nobody there seemed to move an inch. In the distance, Bacon spotted a couple of officers and, a bit farther on, the railway station manager, but he figured they wouldn’t be much help. His only option was to walk to the Palace of Justice.

Bacon was furious. The autumn wind blasted against his face. The streets remained deserted as ever, as if people were still expecting air raids. Offended and annoyed, Bacon didn’t even bother to gaze at what remained of the city. At one time, it may have been the cradle of the great Meistersänger and, until recently, the proud home of the Nazi headquarters, but the war (and eleven Allied bombing raids) had reduced it to a city in ruins. Little piles of stones now lay where churches once stood; houses and buildings were now nothing more than minor, annoying obstacles in Bacon’s path—all these things well-deserved losses that were hardly worth mourning. Not far off—though it hardly even crossed his mind—was the museum that had once been Germany’s most important, as well as the house where Albrecht Dürer lived until his death in 1528. Now, of course, both were reduced to ashes and rubble.

As far as Bacon saw it, Nuremberg was nothing more than one of the hateful Nazi havens where thousands of young people had flaunted their gray shirts, waved their banners emblazoned with eagles, and brandished their giant torches with pride. There, they had paid homage to Hitler and venerated the swastikas which, just like prehistoric spiders perched upon their little eggs, crawled along the red ribbons that hung down from the public buildings of Germany. Every September, Nuremberg had been host to the Nazi party’s annual festival, and in 1935 the Führer chose this city as the site from which he would enact his anti-Semitic laws. Nuremberg, in addition, was also the repository of the Reichskleinodien and the Reichsheiligtümer, the ancient imperial heirlooms—and symbols of Nazi power—that he had stolen from the Hofburg in Vienna after the annexation of Austria. The celebrated Lance of Longines was among these treasures, all of which eventually became emblems of Aryan authority. As far as Bacon (and the International Military Court) was concerned, tears of sorrow and shame should be shed over the Jews who perished in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps—not the justified punishment of one of the bastions of the Third Reich.

Bacon was on the verge of turning twenty-seven, but from the moment he arrived in Europe, in February of 1943, he had made a concerted effort to appear older, stronger, and more imposing than he was. He wanted to wipe the slate clean of all the weakness that had tortured him so in the past and which, to some degree, had forced him out of the United States. He could no longer even try to be the same respectable, reasonable, sincere man he had been before. By accepting this mission—and giving up his job as a scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton—he could not only exercise his desire for vengeance but also prove to himself that he was now a new man. He was determined to prove that he was on the side of the winners, and so he exhibited not even the slightest morsel of compassion for the defeated.

From a distance, Bacon was barely distinguishable from the handful of American soldiers patrolling the area: dark brown hair worn in a military-style haircut, pale eyes, and an angular nose which he rather liked. He fancied himself as a man who wore his uniform with panache (actually, he was a bit stiff), and he went to great pains to display his various decorations, despite the physical discomfort they produced. Upon his shoulder he bore a bulky military backpack that contained almost all his earthly possessions: a few changes of clothing, some photographs (which he hadn’t dared look at since leaving New Jersey), and some old copies of Annalen der Physik, one of the more important journals in his field, pilfered from some or other library he had passed through.

In reality, Bacon had not gone to Nuremberg specifically for the executions. Initially, only thirty people had been granted permission to witness the event, but then General Watson invited him a bit later on, and he accepted enthusiastically. Bacon had been referred to Watson by General William J. Donovan, founder of the OSS and, for a few weeks, special assistant to the U.S. chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson. (Not long before, in the wake of an acrimonious misunderstanding with Jackson, a veteran justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Donovan had been forced to resign for having interviewed Hermann Goering without Jackson’s permission.) Bacon, however, was on a different, perhaps more pedestrian mission: His job was to study the recorded minutes of the copious testimonies relating to scientific research under the Third Reich, and ferret out any and all “inconsistencies,” to use the term favored by his superiors—that is, contradictions in the many statements made by the defendants.

The Palace of Justice was one of the few public buildings in Nuremberg that had survived the wartime bombings, and had recently been restored by Captain Daniel Kiley, a young Harvard architect also under the command of the OSS. Upon reaching the city center Bacon had little trouble identifying the building: Once protected by an ample plaza filled with trees, the large group of buildings featured archways on the ground floor, huge picture windows, and a series of pointed towers. The prison, located toward the back of the building, consisted of four rectangular blocks set in a half-moon, its exterior protected by a high semicircular wall. The Nazi prisoners were housed together in cell block C, steps away from a small chamber that was once a gymnasium but was now a gallows.

It was 9:15 when Bacon finally reached the security guards at the entrance to the Nuremberg military prison. After reviewing his credentials, the soldiers announced that they were under orders to bar all access to the building—most specifically, the gymnasium—until the executions were over. Bacon tried to explain that he had come on General Watson’s invitation, but the guards were impassive, and refused his request to summon Gunther Sadel: “General Rikard’s orders” was their only response.

Scores of journalists swarmed about the scene. Aside from the International Military Tribunal’s official photographer, only two reporters—chosen by lottery—were granted access to the gymnasium. All the others were forced to wait, just like Bacon, for the press conference that would announce the deaths of the war criminals. In an effort to scoop the story, several newspapers had already published early editions. The New York Herald Tribune, for example, had given the news a full, eight-column headline:

11 NAZI CHIEFS HANGED IN NUREMBERG PRISON: GOERING AND HENCHMEN PAY FOR THEIR WAR CRIMES

The executions were scheduled to take place in the afternoon, so Bacon still had a few hours to locate someone who might help him get in. Before anything else, however, he would go to the Grand Hotel, where a room had been reserved in his name. But bad luck seemed to dog his every step; when he arrived at the hotel, the manager declared that there were no rooms available. After patiently explaining that he was there on a special mission, Bacon asked to speak to the supervisor in charge, and a pompous bell captain cleverly rose to the occasion, becoming the de facto hotel manager for a moment, and quickly solved the problem: The hotel had not expected Bacon until the following day, when several rooms would be vacated (“The show ends today, you know?”). Since it was only for one night, however, room number 14—“Hitler’s room”—could be made available.

Bacon climbed the stairs and settled into the immense suite. The luxurious appointments of the Nazi days were long gone, but they were nevertheless the most sumptuous accommodations Bacon had been offered in recent months. Although it did seem like some kind of bad joke that the walls now surrounding him had stood guard over the dead body of Adolf Hitler. Who would have ever thought? What would Elizabeth say? Oh … it was useless to even think about that: For better or for worse, Elizabeth wanted nothing to do with him. Bacon flung himself onto the bed, but it produced an illicit, morbid sensation, as if he were desecrating a sacred space. The idea of urinating on all the furniture crossed his mind, but then he thought better of it: Why should the hotel’s housekeeping staff have to pay for his capricious behavior? He got up and walked into the bathroom. He studied the spacious tub, the sink, the toilet, the bidet. Hitler’s greasy skin had surely rubbed up against all those shiny surfaces. He could just picture Hitler, naked and defenseless, admiring his flaccid member before submerging himself in the water; Bacon could even see the Führer’s defecations, sliding down the hole that he now found himself peering into….

Bewildered, Bacon studied himself in the mirror. Two large circles under his eyes dominated his face; not only had he matured, but he seemed to have grown old. He ran his hands through his hair and, in an attempt to concentrate on something, located one or two gray hairs and decided they were proof of his imminent decline. He was no longer a boy wonder, a child prodigy, or any of those things that had always kept him at the margins of society. As he began to take off his uniform, he mused at how very different it was from the one he used to wear. Trapped within the privileged walls of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he had very nearly married a woman he didn’t love. There, his life had been a sheltered one, protected from the outside world, just like that of an insect pinned to the inside of a glass case in a museum. His departure from Princeton had been nothing less than a spectacular scandal, but it was also a miracle, a revelation. For the first time ever he sensed that life was a tangible presence that he could feel upon his skin, far from all the desks and blackboards, and the tedium of all those conferences and colloquia. He never would have dreamed that he would derive such satisfaction as a soldier fighting for his country, but now he was certain that he had made the right choice. He would have plenty of time, at some point in the future, to return to the world of science—but then it would be as a hero, not as a fugitive.

He turned on the faucet and waited for the hot water to pour out, but nothing more than a weak stream of lukewarm droplets emerged from the tap. “The Führer wouldn’t have stood for this,” he laughed to himself, and proceeded to bathe with the help of a towel and a freshly opened, pungent cake of soap. When he was finished, he went back to the bed and, before he knew it, fell into a deep sleep, though the unsettling dream he had nearly asphyxiated him: There he was, in the middle of a dark, rainy forest, when suddenly Vivien appeared out of nowhere. Vivien, the young black woman from Princeton with whom he had maintained a secret relationship for so long. Ruefully, he noted that his life was strewn with puddles and potholes; in fact, it seemed to have evolved into something more like a moldy, threatening swamp. In the dream, he tried to kiss Vivien when suddenly he found himself face-to-face with his ex-fiancée Elizabeth instead. “There’s lipstick on your mouth,” she said to him, and proceeded to wipe it off with a handkerchief. “You shouldn’t do that,” she reprimanded him. “It’s bad, very bad.” By the time Bacon managed to extricate himself, it was too late: Vivien had already disappeared.

It was almost three in the afternoon when he awoke. He kicked himself: This was the worst possible thing he could have done. Not only had he neglected his work, but he had done so thrashing about in Hitler’s bedsheets! He quickly put on his clothes, scurried down the stairs, and ran as fast as he could to the pressroom at the Palace of Justice.

A few hours later, he was informed of the news which would soon travel to the rest of the world like an infectious disease. From the crumbling streets of the ancient medieval burgh, the communiqué was sent out that the Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering—the highest-ranking Nazi prisoner sentenced by the International Military Tribunal—had been found dead in his cell a few hours before Sergeant John Woods was to carry out the hanging for which he had been sentenced. According to the rumors, Goering had ingested a capsule of cyanide, a cruel, eleventh-hour joke which allowed him the last laugh over the judges’ decision. “One day there will be statues of me in every plaza and little figurines in my likeness in every home in Germany,” the Reichsmarschall had once arrogantly proclaimed, so certain he was that he would be redeemed in the eyes of posterity. After his death, a stack of letters was found in his cell (number 5, cell block C), all of them written with the same small, precise lettering. The first of these letters explained the reasons for his suicide:

To the Allied Control Council: I would have had no objection to being shot. However, I will not facilitate the execution of Germany’s Reichsmarschall by hanging! For the sake of Germany, I cannot permit this. Moreover, I feel no moral obligation to submit to my enemies’ punishment. For this reason, I have chosen to die like the great Hannibal.

On another sheet of paper, addressed to General Roy V. Rickard, member of the Quadripartite Commission in charge of supervising the executions, Goering confessed that he had always kept a capsule of cyanide close by. He also wrote a letter to his wife: “After serious consideration and sincere prayer to the Lord, I have decided to take my own life, lest I be executed in so terrible a fashion by my enemies…. My last heartbeats are for our great and eternal love.” Henry Gerecke, the Protestant pastor who ministered to the German prisoners, was the last recipient in this small pile of letters. In his note to Gerecke, Goering asked for pardon and explained that the motivation for his actions had been purely political.

The next day, Gunther Sadel told Bacon all he knew about the matter. At 9:35 the previous evening, October 14, the guard had informed the necessary officials that the prisoner was resting peacefully in his cot after Dr. Ludwig Pflücker had administered him a sleeping pill. Just like every night, a soldier was stationed at the door to Goering’s cell, specifically to keep close watch over him until the early dawn; after all, it was to be his last night under prison surveillance. Colonel Burton Andrus, the chief officer of the prison, had suspended all external communications with the outside world as a special precaution. The guards’ only source of outside contact was a telephone line connecting them to the staff at the central offices, who continually updated them, inning by inning, with the score of the World Series, which was under way at the time.

All of a sudden, someone began calling for Pastor Gerecke’s aid. It was the voice of Sergeant Gregori Timishin: Something was wrong with Goering. The chaplain ran toward the cell of the once plump Reichsmarschall, but when he arrived, he knew instantly that any resuscitation attempt would be pointless. Goering’s face, which had seduced so many thousands of men and women, the same face whose glare had inspired both fear and fury among his captors, was now focused on a spot somewhere far off in the distance. Only one obstinate eye remained open. His rosy complexion had turned greenish, and his body, though twenty-five kilos lighter since his imprisonment, lay like a bale of hay, impossible to move. The cell smelled like bitter almonds. Gerecke took his pulse and said, “Good Lord, this man is dead.” By the time the other members of the Joint Staffs arrived, it was already too late: Out of either cowardice or pride, Goering had foiled them.

Bacon could hardly believe it: At the very last moment, that miserable fiend had gotten away with it. And Bacon was not alone. The general feeling among the Allied forces was one of bitter disappointment, and several newspapers even dared publish the following headline: GOERING CHEATS HIS EXECUTIONERS.

“Where the hell did he get that pill?” Bacon asked Sadel.

“That’s what everyone wants to know,” Sadel responded. “They’ve already launched a full-blown investigation, though for the moment are not pointing the finger at anyone. Andrus is shattered,” he added, referring to the prison director. “A lot of people think it’s his fault, but you know, Goering wasn’t the first prisoner to commit suicide. I don’t think anyone could have prevented it.”

“But Goering! The day before his execution! It’s unbelievable.” Bacon shook his head, incredulous. “Could it have been that German doctor?”

“Pflücker? I doubt it,” said Sadel. “It would have been too difficult. The guards always searched him carefully before he entered each cell, and the pill he gave Goering was only a tranquilizer…. No, the Reichsmarschall must have had it hidden among his things, in the storage room, and someone must have brought it to him.”

“But who would want to help that pig?” Bacon asked, cracking his knuckles.

“Well, it’s not as simple as it may seem. I never had contact with him, but several people have said that Hermann was quite a character. During the trial proceedings not only Germans but Americans actually sympathized with him. He was just too cynical and biting to hate.”

A strange explanation, thought Bacon, especially coming from such a young man like Sadel, who was half Jewish and at age thirteen had been forced to flee Germany to find his father in the United States. Since then, he knew nothing of his mother’s whereabouts or whether she was alive or dead, for she had been forced to divorce his father and remain in Berlin. When he returned to Germany with General Watson, Sadel was given permission to search for her, and when he finally found her, she agreed to be one of the witnesses for the prosecution.

“Tex Wheelis is the prime suspect,” Sadel continued. “He was the officer in charge of the storage room. They say that he and Goering had become friendly, and that he might have been the one to help him. But we want to be able to find out for certain. The men in charge want to put this issue to bed. Their opinion is that it was an accident, and they feel the case should be treated as such.”

“An accident?” Bacon was getting more and more heated. “Hundreds of people worked for months to have him hanged and at the last minute he managed to escape. Was Hitler’s suicide in Berlin another ‘accident’? And what about the Final Solution? Doesn’t that make you feel as if all of this has been useless? That we fought against an evil that got the best of us in the end?”

“The purpose of the trials was to uncover the truth, Lieutenant. To expose the truth about the Third Reich to the entire world, and to ensure that no one can ever justify the kind of atrocities that were committed. Who can deny the horror of the Nazi regime, the gas chambers and the millions of deaths, after seeing all those photographs?”

“But given the situation, do you think the truth will ever come out? The only truth we have is the one we are capable of believing.”

The following morning, Lieutenant Bacon watched from a distance as the dead bodies of the eleven Nazi chiefs—Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister of the Third Reich; Hans Frank, governor-general of Occupied Poland; Wilhelm Frick, governor of Bohemia and Moravia; Alfred Jodl, chief of operation staff of the High Command of the Wehrmacht; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich Main Security Office and second-in-command to Himmler; Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the Wehrmacht; Alfred Rosenberg, official philosopher of the regime and minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories; Fritz Sauckel, plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment; Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reich commissioner of the Netherlands; Julius Streicher, editor and publisher of the newspaper Der Stürmer; and of course, Hermann Goering, Reichsmarschall and chief of the Luftwaffe and second-in-command to Hitler—were transported in military trucks to the cemetery in Ostfriedrichhof, in Munich, where they would be cremated. He stared at the long caravan of cars and armed guards that followed the trucks. The bodies had been placed in individual sacks, each one tagged with a false name. The Germans in charge of the ovens were told that the bodies were those of American soldiers who had died during the war; it was a precaution the authorities took to ensure that nothing of the cremations would ever resurface in the form of Nazi mementos. For this reason, no one was to associate those ashes with the Nazi leaders condemned to death by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

Almost instantly the oppressive tension gripping the city seemed to lift. The work was finally finished, despite the fact that nobody was satisfied with the results—especially the Soviets, who never hid their displeasure with the course the trials had taken; at one point they even accused the American and English forces of allowing Goering to commit suicide. There were still many minor Nazi functionaries waiting for their day in court, though the eyes of the entire world were not likely to remain as permanently transfixed upon the halls of the Palace of Justice.

But as I said before, Lieutenant Francis P. Bacon had not come to Nuremberg to attend the executions. His mission was of an entirely different nature, having much more to do with his insights and talents as a man of science.

About halfway through the war, while working at the Institute for Advanced Study, Bacon decided to enlist in the army. He was sent to England to make contact with the British scientists there, and in 1945 he joined the Alsos mission, led by the Dutch physicist Samuel I. Goudsmit, who was responsible for archiving all available information relating to the German scientific program, and to the Germans’ work on the atomic bomb. He was also the official who ordered the capture of the German physicists who were working on it.

Once his tour of duty was over, Bacon could have returned to the United States, but he chose to continue working as a scientific consultant to the Allied Control Council, the entity responsible for governing Occupied Germany. Finally, in early October of 1946, a few days after the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg handed down its sentences to the Nazi defendants, Bacon was summoned by the Office of Military Intelligence to review some of the documents from the trial archives. From this research he would produce a report illustrating the points he felt most relevant to his assigned task of searching for the inconsistencies in the war criminals’ testimony. Of his report, one small detail emerged which caught the attention of his military commanders.

On July 30, 1946, in the main hall of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, seven German organizations went on trial: the Nazi party leadership; the cabinet of the Reich; the security police, known as the SS; the secret police, known as the Gestapo; the Security Service, or SD; the Storm Troops, or SA; and the Military High Command of the Third Reich. In the weeks leading up to the trials, the tribunal announced that the trial proceedings were to be broadcast throughout Germany so that anyone who had been affected by any of the accused groups might step forward and offer his or her testimony. More than 300,000 responses flooded the Palace of Justice. From this pool, 603 members of these organizations were brought to Nuremberg to testify. In the end, the court admitted the testimony of some 90 people—mostly pertaining to the SS—who had refused to commit dishonest actions in the fulfillment of their duties.

One of these testimonies caught the attention of the U.S. Intelligence Services. During this process, a little man named Wolfram von Sievers, president of the Society for German Ancestral Heritage (and, as was later discovered, the head of an office of the Ahnenerbe, the SS office of scientific investigation). Von Sievers was an extremely nervous witness; during his long hours sitting on the witness bench, he never stopped rubbing his hands, and his cheeks were perpetually drenched in perspiration. He stumbled over his words, repeated certain phrases over and over again, and, as if that weren’t enough, he was also a stutterer, which further complicated the jobs of the extensive network of simultaneous translators who, for the first time in history, performed their task in the courtrooms of Nuremberg.

While being interrogated by one of the Allied prosecutors, Von Sievers made the first in a series of controversial declarations. According to an agreement signed by the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the SS regularly sent skulls of “Bolshevik Jews” to Von Sievers’s laboratory so that he might perform experiments on them. When Von Sievers was asked if he knew how the SS obtained those craniums, he replied that they came from the prisoners of war at the Eastern Front, who were assassinated specifically for this scientific research. The prosecutor pressed on: “And what was the objective of your ‘research’?” Once again Von Sievers stumbled over his words, incoherent and stuttering. Finally, after persistent pressure from the judges, he gave in and delivered a long, wildly digressive speech on phrenology and the physical development of ancient civilizations, covering everything from the Toltecs and Atlantis to Aryan supremacy and mystical shrines like Agartha and Shambhala. More specifically, however, he explained that his own task had been to establish the biological inferiority of the Semitic people, to become intimately familiar with their physiological development over the ages, which presumably would enable him to ascertain the best way to eliminate their defects.

When he was finished speaking, Von Sievers looked like one of the skulls he claimed to have been studying, and his hands were now trembling uncontrollably. The prosecutor, however, was getting fed up; he had only interrogated Von Sievers to prove that the SS and the Nazi regime in general had indeed committed atrocities. He certainly hadn’t intended this to be an exposé of the repulsive scientific investigation undertaken by Von Sievers, who, it turned out, would one day be tried and convicted for crimes against humanity.

“Where did you obtain the funding for this research, Professor Von Sievers?”

“From the SS, as I have already stated,” he stammered.

“Was it common procedure for the SS to commission you to perform this type of research?”

“Yes.”

“And did you say that the SS provided the financing for it?”

“Yes, directly.”

“What do you mean when you say ‘directly,’ Professor?” The prosecutor sensed that he had finally hit upon a lead that might actually get him somewhere.

Von Sievers attempted to clear his throat.

“Well, all the scientific research undertaken in Germany first had to be cleared by the supervision and control centers of the Research Council of the Third Reich.”

The prosecutor had hit the nail on the head. This was exactly what he wanted to hear. The Research Council, just like so many other dependencies of the Third Reich, fell under the supervision of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering.

“Thank you, Professor. That will be all,” the prosecutor concluded.

Von Sievers, however, added one more rather unexpected statement which, by order of the judges, was stricken from the record at the defense lawyers’ request. Nevertheless, the statement did appear in the transcript Bacon received from the Office of Military Intelligence, and the lieutenant studied it closely, as it was highlighted in red ink. It said: “Before any funds could be released, each project had to be approved by Hitler’s scientific adviser. I never did find out the identity of this person, but according to rumor, it was a well-known figure. A man who enjoyed a prominent position in the scientific community, and who operated under the code name Klingsor.”

A few days later, on August 20, the courtroom was packed, a sure sign that Hermann Goering, the Great Actor in this theater of justice, was to make his appearance. He arrived dressed in a white jacket—in his glory days, he had been known for wearing this uniform. Ruddy-faced and volatile, Goering was the heart and soul of the trials. Acerbic and straightforward, he had that special kind of impertinence that comes from years of giving orders without ever hearing a single protest. He faced his interrogators as if he were dictating his memoirs. In his best moments, he displayed an acidic, penetrating sense of humor, and in his worst, he was like a caged monster, ready and waiting to take a bite out of anyone, even Otto Stahmer, his own defense attorney. Stahmer was responsible for directing this short scene:

“Did you ever issue an order to carry out medical experiments on human subjects?” he asked. Goering took a deep breath.

“No.”

“Are you acquainted with a Dr. Rascher, who has been accused of performing scientific research on human guinea pigs at Dachau, for the Luftwaffe?”

“No.”

“Did you ever issue an order authorizing anyone to carry out unspeakable experiments on prisoners?”

“No.”

“As president of the Research Council of the Reich, did you ever order plans for the development of a system of mass destruction?”

“No.”

Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, the British prosecutor, rose from his seat.

“You were a great pilot,” he said courteously, “with an impressive service record. How is it possible that you cannot remember those experiments, which were performed so as to verify the resistance of the uniforms used by the air force?”

“I had many tasks to attend to,” Goering explained, with the same civility as his interrogator. “Tens of thousands of orders were issued in my name. Justice Jackson has accused me of having ‘fingers in every pie,’ but it would have been impossible for me to keep track of all the scientific experiments undertaken by the Third Reich.”

Maxwell-Fyfe then presented as evidence a series of letters between Heinrich Himmler and Field Marshall Erhard Milch, Goering’s right-hand man. In one of these letters, Milch thanked Himmler for his assistance in facilitating Dr. Rascher’s experiments with high-altitude flights. One of these experiments involved a Jewish prisoner who was flown to twenty-nine thousand feet without oxygen. The subject died after thirteen minutes.

“Is it possible,” continued Maxwell-Fyfe, “that a high-ranking official directly under your command—such as Milch—could have been aware of these experiments even though you were not?”

“The areas under my control were classified in three categories,” Goering explained, almost smiling. “‘Urgent,’ ‘Important,’ and ‘Routine.’ The experiments performed by the medical inspector of the Luftwaffe fell under the third category and did not require my attention.”

Never again was mention made of the scientist whose job was to approve the Third Reich’s scientific projects. Never again was Klingsor’s name mentioned. Goering certainly didn’t bring it up, and Von Sievers himself, upon a second interrogation, denied ever having uttered the name. This one dubious mention was all Bacon had to go on.

The lieutenant slammed the dossier shut.

HYPOTHESES: FROM QUANTUM PHYSICS TO ESPIONAGE
HYPOTHESIS I: On Bacon’s Childhood and Early Years

On November 10, 1919, the New York Times ran the following front-page headlines:

LIGHTS ALL ASKEW IN THE HEAVENS

Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations

EINSTEIN THEORY TRIUMPHS

Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry

A BOOK FOR 12 WISE MEN

No More in All the World Could Comprehend It, Said Einstein When His Daring Publishers Accepted It

Albert Einstein was forty years old, and this was the first time his name had ever appeared in the New York Times. His first article on special relativity, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which included the famous equation E=mc², had been published fourteen years earlier, in 1905, and four years had passed since his last revision to the general relativity theory. Nevertheless, this was the moment when the public first became aware of Einstein and his significance. Einstein would become something of an oracle, the symbol of a new age, and almost every word he uttered would hereafter be recorded and reprinted by newspapers all over the world. The Treaty of Versailles had been signed only a few months earlier, putting an end to the Great War, and the world was now a different place. People everywhere seemed to sense that humanity was at the dawn of a new era, and Einstein was its prophet, a man whose advice and wisdom should be heeded. In a letter sent to his friend Max Born (one of the first interpreters of the relativity theory), Einstein actually lamented his newfound circumstance, with the modest self-confidence that he was famous for: “Just like the fairy-tale hero who transforms everything he touches into gold, everything I touch turns into scandal for the newspapers.”

From 1916 to 1917, Einstein had been developing a proof that could establish the validity of the general relativity theory. Unfortunately, there were few methods that could conclusively prove his assumptions were accurate. One of them was to gauge the curvature of light as it moved closer to a sufficiently large object, but this could only be done during a solar eclipse. Unfortunately for Einstein, Europe was mired in war at the time, and communications between German scientists and the outside world had come to an abrupt halt. As such, few physicists even knew of Einstein’s project, and he was forced to wait for the war to end before he could find someone who would be able to confirm his findings.

Long before the Great War started, Einstein had struck up a correspondence with Sir Arthur Eddington, and once Einstein was able to resume contact after the war ended, the illustrious English physicist immediately jumped at the chance to test the relativity theory in an experimental setting. They quickly set the date: May 29, 1919, just a few months after the armistice was signed. On this day, they would be able to observe a spectacular solar eclipse from any point close to the equator. In early 1919, Eddington secured the necessary financing—one thousand pounds—from the Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Dyson, which enabled him to prepare two expeditions to the equator. One, which he led, would go to the island of Principe, off the west coast of Africa, and the other group would set off for Sobral, in the north of Brazil. According to Eddington’s calculations, both were ideal points from which to measure the shift that would occur when rays of starlight approached the sun. This, following Einstein’s calculations, would be 1.745 seconds of arc—double the estimate produced by traditional physics. With Dyson’s support, Eddington left for Príncipe in March.

On May 29, the day of the eclipse, Eddington arose at dawn and discovered, to his dismay, that a stubborn layer of clouds was now perched directly over the island and seemed determined to ruin his plans. After all his preparations and hard work, Nature herself seemed poised to betray her students. There was the hope, however, that the team in Sobral would be able to obtain results, but even that wasn’t enough to lift the astronomer’s spirits. Eddington cared not for the glory that the experiment could bring him, but the pride of being the first to prove this radical, new notion of what the world was. It was as if fate had played a cruel practical joke at his expense: After a few minutes, the clouds gave way to one of the most violent thunderstorms Eddington had ever seen in his entire life. The thunder reverberated in his ears like dry claps of artillery fire. If things kept going like this, the only curvature they would measure would be that of the stooped-over palm trees fighting the hurricane winds. The telescopes, the cameras, and all the other measuring instruments remained where they were, exposed to the elements, useless and defenseless against the explosions that rained down from the heavens.

By 1:30 in the afternoon, Eddington, despondent, was about ready to surrender. That was when the miracle occurred: Suddenly the clouds began to disperse, aided by a cool breeze. With only eight minutes to go before the eclipse, Eddington quickly rallied his group, all of them inspired by the sensation that they had been granted the great privilege of observing the history of the universe compressed into a few brief seconds. The sun appeared, radiant and soaring, only to be devoured moments later by the shadows of its rival, the moon. Amid this inconceivable noontime darkness, the dumbstruck birds quickly flew back into their nests while the monkeys and lizards settled in for an early night’s sleep. The momentary twilight seemed enveloped in a magical, white silence. In perfect harmony, the cameras captured the moment.

During the three days that followed, Eddington locked himself away in an improvised darkroom to develop the sixteen photograms that he had taken in order to carry out the necessary calculations. The instant Eddington spied the first images taking shape from beneath the photographic solution, like lost spectra floating in the water, he knew that success was his. After double-checking the calculations several times, Eddington emerged from his inner sanctum with the pride of a bishop prepared to crown anew king. The result was conclusive, despite the tiniest margin of error: Einstein had been triumphant! It took a few weeks for the news to travel the globe, and it wasn’t until November 10, 1919, almost six months after the experiment, after new measurements were taken, that it appeared in the New York Times.

At 7:30 that very same morning, in a small hospital in Newark, New Jersey, not far from Princeton, a baby was born. This child, in a way the first inhabitant of a new universe, would be baptized Francis Percy Bacon, son of Charles Drexter Bacon, owner of the Albany Department Store chain, and his wife, Rachel Richards, the daughter of banker Raymond Richards, of New Canaan, Connecticut.

One June afternoon several years later, Bacon’s mother decided to teach her son how to count. She placed him in her lap and in the same indifferent voice she used for reading him bedtime stories about angels and monsters, she revealed to him the secrets of mathematics, whispering each numeral as if it were a station of the cross or a psalm inserted into her prayers. Just outside the window, a tree struggled against the first summer thundershower, and the violent gusts of wind and rain reminded them of God’s presence and mercy. That day, Frank found a solution to the tempests and discovered, moreover, that numbers are sometimes better companions than people. Unlike human beings—he was thinking of his father’s sudden fits of temper and his mother’s cool, distant reserve—you could always rely on numbers. They are constant, he thought, and they didn’t suffer from mood swings. They didn’t ever cheat or betray, and they didn’t pick on little boys for being scrawny and weak.

Years went by before he realized, during an intense bout of fever, that all sorts of disorders and neuroses were hidden behind the great world of numbers. Contrary to what he had initially thought, he soon realized that numbers did not belong to such a simple, unemotional realm. As the doctor bathed Frank’s feverish, delirious body in ice cubes, the young patient’s secret passions were suddenly awakened for the very first time. Frank watched in awe as the numbers fought among themselves with a determination that refused to surrender—just like many of the real-life men he had read about. He studied their varied behavioral patterns: They loved one another within parentheses, they had illicit sex in multiplication, they annihilated one another in subtractions, they built palaces with their Pythagorean solids, they danced from place to place on their Euclidean planes, they dreamed of Utopias with differential calculus, and condemned one another to death in the vortex of square roots. Their hell was far worse than what awaited humans: Rather than languishing somewhere below zero, in the negative numbers—a stupid, infantile simplification—numbers could fall into paradoxes, anomalies, tautologies, and the painful limbo of probability.

From that moment on, numerical inventions were Frank’s best friends. To him, they were the last vestige of real, existential truth. Only those people who were unfamiliar with them—like his father and the doctors—could think they were perverse, opportunistic creatures. They were wrong—numbers didn’t devour the brain or turn life into a sluggish lump of mathematical conjecture. Anyway, Frank hadn’t renounced the laws of man in favor of the dictums of logic; he was just reluctant to abdicate the kingdom of geometry, for that would force him to return, dolefully, to the miserable routine of his home life.

Frank was five years old when he was first seduced by the demons of algebra. His mother had found him in the basement of their New Jersey home, numb from the November frost, mesmerized by the pipes that ran around the perimeter of the room. A thick, frothy saliva bubbled at his lips, and his body had become stiff as a bamboo shoot. After consulting with a neurologist, Frank’s doctor determined that the only medicine was patience. “It’s as if he were sleeping,” he added, unable to explain the state his patient was in, somewhere between hypnotic and autistic. It took a day and a half before Frank fulfilled the doctor’s prediction. Just as the doctor had said, Frank began to paw at his bed rail, like a butterfly trying to break out of its cocoon. His mother, who had maintained a bedside vigil throughout the episode, embraced her son, convinced that her love for him had rescued him from death’s door. Minutes later, however, when he finally began to move his lips, the young boy put this wayward notion to rest. “I was just trying to solve an equation,” he confessed, to everyone’s surprise. Then he smiled: “And I did.”

In his whole life, Frank received only one gift from his father, and the memory of this occasion would always be a special, private treasure for him. He must have been about six years old when, one Sunday afternoon, without any previous warning, the old man got up from his chair and handed his son a dusty black leather box. For years he had kept it hidden away in a closet, like a secret inheritance, the greatest lesson he could pass on to his son. To Frank’s shock and delight, Charles Bacon removed a most curious collection of figurines from this box: dragons, samurai, bonzos, and pagodas, which he insisted upon calling horses, pawns, bishops, and rooks. He also took out a beautiful ebony and marble board which he then placed upon the parlor table.

Frank, at first, didn’t quite understand his father’s momentary euphoria, nor did he comprehend why his father was suddenly so interested in taking the time to show him the way to execute checks, count the horses’ moves, and construct those bizarre, labyrinthine schemes known as castlings. At his age, how could he have possibly known that this game was the one thing that allowed the aging Charles to relive a bit of his former glory? Those harmless, board-game battles, of course, were really nothing more than a simple imitation of the battles he waged among his employees at the department store.

“Very well, then. If you think you understand the rules, how about playing a little game?”

“Yes, sir,” Frank responded quickly.

Despite the fact that this was supposed to be a harmless pastime, Charles focused all his energies on the game; the square chessboard became a battlefield of honor and dignity upon which he delivered martial orders against his little six-year-old son. From the minute they began, Charles weighed every move with painstaking caution, as if he really should have been consulting territorial maps or discussing strategy with the imaginary chiefs of staff who greeted him each day in his equally imaginary military headquarters. It troubled Frank to see his father like that, and he had difficulty concentrating on the baby steps of his chess game. His father’s hands, covered with liver spots and bulging veins, grabbed the chess pieces with thunderous force, as if uncorking giant wine bottles. Every time he made a move Frank feared that the little plaster geishas and mandarins would go exploding into thousands of little pieces. That afternoon, Frank’s father mercilessly beat his son seven times in a row, availing himself of a rather outrageous move known as the “fool’s mate.” Charles’s chess etiquette, of course, forbade him from winning games on the basis of cheap tricks, but if his son wanted to become a real man, he would have to be able to accept legitimate defeat with humility. He needed to learn how to survive in the battlefield of life, to emerge from the trenches and face his enemies. That’s what Charles Bacon thought.

“My mistake,” Charles mumbled upon losing to his son for the first time. He even lit a cigar to display his sporting attitude, and added, “Although you didn’t play too badly yourself.” The next day, however, he didn’t wait for his son to suggest a game. When Frank returned from school—he was about eight years old by now—he found his father setting up the chessboard and carefully wiping down each chess piece as if inspecting a squadron of subordinate officers.

“Shall we begin?” he asked his son. Frank nodded. He tossed his book bag onto the floor and prepared to enter into far more than a mere battle: This was a fight to the death. After several hours of play, it was safe to say that young Frank had outfoxed his father, winning the first, third, fourth, and fifth games. The befuddled Charles managed to take the second and the sixth, and he did have the consolation of winning the final round, at which point he decided that it was rather late and that he had other, more important things to do.

That day, Frank learned the meaning of the words Pyrrhic victory firsthand, thanks to his father’s rather typical display of self-indulgence. Not long after, Charles suffered a series of misfortunes, which would fuel his bitterness and aggravate the chronic depression that set in months later. After Frank won the game, he saw the impotent look on his father’s face and couldn’t help savoring this vindication. But his father’s temperament would not permit this kind of humiliation. After only one more year of chess games, in which his percentage of losses grew higher than that of his son, Charles simply decided not to play against Frank anymore. A few months after that, he died of a heart attack.

Before he was six years old, Frank’s name never bothered him. His mother always called him Frank or Frankie; it was her way of trying to inject a bit of the New Jersey spirit into the boy. Since the death of Frank’s father, nary a mention was made of that awful “Percy” which had found its way onto his baptismal certificate. No, it only appeared on the most official of documents, and then only as P, like some kind of scarlet letter that he prayed no one would ask him about. But in school everything changed. His first-grade teacher was the first to notice:

“Francis Bacon?” she exclaimed loudly, almost laughing.

“Yes,” he replied, not understanding quite what she meant. Little did he know that from that moment on, his hopes of remaining anonymous would be dashed forever. Suddenly he found himself transformed into an object of curiosity and ridicule for students and teachers alike, sacrificed to a ritual that would repeat itself over and over again at the beginning of each school year.

At first, it wasn’t such a terrible thing to discover that his name was not so original. He was consoled, in fact, by all the Johns and Marys and Roberts he saw. His mother’s second husband was called Tobias Smith, and he didn’t seem at all troubled by the fact that he had to share his name with thousands of his compatriots. But the taunts were what bothered Frank the most: “Bet you think you’re some kind of genius, don’t you, Mr. Bacon?” they asked. He did; that was the worst thing of all. Who would ever believe that there could be another brilliant scientist named Francis Bacon? The first coincidence seemed to make the second one virtually impossible. He tried defending himself by proving to everyone how talented he was, but the arrogance with which he presented his results only elicited bouts of laughter from his teachers. It was as if they thought his intellectual abilities were nothing more than an anomaly or an eccentricity rather than true genius. In any event, they never failed to compare him with the “real” Bacon, as if he were nothing more than the unfortunate, apocryphal copy of a long-dead original.

Bacon’s childhood and adolescence were lonely. Hypersensitive about the qualities that set him apart from the other children, he recoiled from all human contact apart from the unavoidable. He was hardly the easiest person to live with, either, due to the persistent migraines that plagued him, sending him into nearly catatonic states in which the slightest bit of light or noise was all but unbearable. He would spend hours on end locked away in his room, dreaming up formulas and theorems until his stepfather would knock on his door, practically dragging him downstairs to supper. By this point, his mother almost regretted ever having taught him how to count: Not only had he become intransigent and rude, but he also was increasingly intolerant of anyone less intelligent than he.

The hateful games people played at his expense gradually receded from his thoughts and he found himself more and more captivated by the English scientist who had caused all the trouble to begin with. He needed to know who that fateful ancestor was, the person whose mere name had made his life a living hell. With the same dedication of a teenager who inspects himself in the mirror day after day for the most infinitesimal signs of his metamorphosis into adulthood, Francis doggedly pursued his namesake. To avoid the displeasure of reading his name in print over and over again (since it always referred to someone else), Frank chose to immerse himself in the obsessions of his “ancestor.” And in the process of learning about the original Bacon’s great discoveries, Francis made one of his own, the kind of vague realization that emboldens a person to take a leap of faith across the great unknown. This discovery, rather than fulfilling the predictions of his detractors, was the thing that led Frank to discover his vocation. In spite of the apparent happenstance of their shared name, Frank was inspired by the discoveries of the first Francis Bacon, and began to believe that his destiny was somehow linked to that of the old, dead scientist. Maybe it wasn’t exactly a reincarnation—he couldn’t think about things like that—but he felt sure it was some sort of calling, a circumstance that was too obvious to have been an act of pure coincidence.

The life history of Baron Verulam, the first Francis Bacon, transformed the life of our Francis. The more Frank learned about the baron, the more he felt that he had to continue, in some way, the work of the original Francis Bacon. As unpleasant as he had been toward those around him, Francis Bacon had managed to achieve immortality. Young Francis felt a bond with him, for he, too, felt misunderstood by his contemporaries, and he comforted himself by thinking that one day his mother, stepfather, and schoolmates would be sorry for the shoddy treatment they subjected him to. He felt especially proud of sharing his last name with a man to whom Shakespearean plays had been attributed. Just like Sir Francis, Frank had become a learned person for a variety of reasons, including curiosity, the search for truth, plus a certain amount of natural talent for his studies. But in the end Frank easily admitted that the greatest source of inspiration had been the same one Sir Francis cited: rage. For him, a happy coexistence with the precise, concrete elements of mathematics was the only solution to confronting the chaos of the universe, whose destiny was utterly independent of his. Adapting a little saying made famous by his Elizabethan hero, Frank would have said for himself: “I have studied numbers, not men.”

In school, his standoffishness toward his peers gradually dissipated as the result of a growing appreciation for the natural laws, which included, at least in theory, a certain admiration for humanity in general. Although perhaps not everything that occurred in the world could be explained by reason, science at least offered a direct track to solid knowledge. And, most important, the person in possession of that knowledge—that is, a clear understanding of the laws governing the world—also possessed a power which he could then exert over other people. Francis never fully abandoned his original mistrust of others, but rather placed it in a far corner of his memory, a place he visited less and less frequently.

One morning he woke up in a most broad-minded and accepting mood. Without understanding precisely why, Francis had decided to give up theoretical mathematics, that labyrinth of abstractions and impenetrable formulae, and decided to test the slightly more solid, concrete ground of physics. This decision hardly pleased his mother, who wanted him to become an engineer, but at least it was a step closer to a world she understood. Rather than mixing and matching numbers like a schizophrenic frantically jumbling his words, his job now was to immerse himself in the basic elements of the universe: matter, light, energy. Perhaps this would be the path to satisfying his mother’s hope that he make himself useful to the world around him. Unfortunately, however, he would not be able to fulfill this maternal desire: He simply couldn’t manage to concentrate on such concrete problems. Instead of becoming a disciple of the realm of electronics, for example, Frank found himself drawn to perhaps the most experimental, fragile, and impractical branch of physics: the study of atoms and the recently unveiled quantum theory. Once again, there was nothing very tangible there. The names of the objects he analyzed—electrons, matrices, observable phenomena—were labels for a motley group of creatures as bizarre in nature as numbers.

In 1940, after several years of struggling with this discipline against the wishes of his mother and stepfather, Frank received his bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in physics from Princeton University, having written his senior thesis on positrons. He was twenty years old and his future was filled with promise: As one of the very few specialists in his field, various state universities had extended invitations to him to conduct graduate-level research in their facilities. Three offers in particular stood out: one from the California Institute of Technology, where Oppenheimer worked; one from Princeton University, his alma mater; and one from the Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton as well. All considered, this last offer was the most tantalizing. The institute was founded in 1930 by the Bamberger brothers (owners of the eponymous Newark-based department store), but didn’t really open its doors until 1933. Unlike the graduate departments of the great American universities, the institute was unique in that it neither granted degrees nor expected its professors to carry burdensome teaching schedules. Their only job was to think, and to give occasional lectures on their chosen fields of study. It rapidly became one of the most important centers of scientific research in the entire world. Albert Einstein, who decided to remain in the United States after the Nazis won the general election in Germany, was a professor there, as were the mathematicians Kurt Gödel and John von Neumann, to mention only a handful of the more famous names.