Question 7, page 8
It was the first time I ever knew someone die for a belief and the belief was a river, a lake, an idea become a place, and now places, in turn, had become new ideas—of life, of freedom, of hope. One last wild river remained and was to be dammed next, a tributary of the Gordon called the Franklin River, and in turn it became a symbol. At thirteen I made my own kayak, taking the first steps that led to my death at twenty-one, finding myself kayaking not so much rivers as journeying ever deeper into the wonder that first filled my brother’s eyes.
13
I phone him to ask why he wanted to build a kayak. He’s an old man now. He can’t remember anything about his kayak dream. As we talk he recalls a lift home to Rosebery for the holidays sixty years earlier from his Catholic boarding school, later to acquire a notorious name for its roll call of paedophilic priests, that school that hurt so many, with a friend whose father is an old Pole. Heading into Hellyer Gorge the snow begins to fall, softly, then heavily, enveloping the solitary car and its passengers in an otherworldly time and place. He feels it as an embrace, knowing he is soon going to be warm and loved once more. With the old Pole at the wheel, a man who has seen so much, he knows no matter how heavily it snows he is safe.
As an old man he still remembers the freedom and security of being driven through that wildland as the snow continued falling, journeying through its white wonder, homeward bound. Comforted. Amazed. He tells me that an old schoolfriend whose life was destroyed by the sexual abuse he suffered at the school is coming to see him this weekend for the first time since they were children. His friend is dying of cancer.
And then he is talking of the ancient snowing world so many decades before, white-mantled manferns bowing, myrtle leaves shining, a beauty that as an old man he understands as the goodness of this world welcoming him safely home.
Five
1
Water was for Leo Szilard both a terror and a blessing. Even the indolent waters of Oxford’s Isis frightened him. When invited, he refused to go punting with a girl there. Unable to overcome his childhood terror of the violent cataract of water that erupted from the nineteenth-century cast-iron water closets of Budapest, he would forever after refuse to pull the chain or empty his baths. These habits, less than endearing, led to his eviction from his rooms at the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club in 1945, while later saving his life when an oncologist using the toilet after him saw blood and diagnosed bladder cancer. He would prescribe his own radiation treatment and be cured, but of the strange polarity of his intense emotion about water there was to be no cure.
For Leo Szilard perversely loved baths.
And on a long-ago morning in the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, which boasted its variety of baths and hydropathic devices—from Russian vapour baths to Turkish baths to Aix and Vichy douches—as the very finest and most comprehensive in London, a naked Szilard stood watching as water flowed, steam rose and the tub filled below his garlic bulb torso—plump, portly disarray even at his young age. It was 12 September 1933. There was nothing portentous whatsoever about one more London day that was overcast, grey and drizzling. The Hungarian-Jewish refugee recently fled from Nazi Germany continued staring downwards, lost in thought, flaring his nostrils to better inhale the soothing steam.
2
His girlfriend had left him to work with the poor in India. He was jobless. He was so wretched with a head cold that the day before, he had abandoned his plan to train to Leicester, dashing his hope of hearing speak there the man who while working with Frederick Soddy had famously first divined the mysteries of the atom, the Nobel laureate and the most famous scientist in the land, Lord Ernest Rutherford.
Leo Szilard was too a sort of scientist, but one of an independent cast. He felt his talents were not always helped by the torpor and ardour of a laboratory. His favoured method of scientific research had at its apex the habit of long walks and longer baths, baths necessarily replete with daydreaming reveries, baths so long that a chambermaid once thought he had drowned. It was said that ideas flowed from him as water from a fountain. Certainly it was immersed in water that Leo Szilard felt he had his best ideas. Many years later he would write a story in which dolphins with minds like his, and an irrational belief in the power of rationality like his, remade the world as a peaceful place. He lowered his doughy body into the tub. As he sank back into the hot water it felt, as it always did, that water was his true, natural medium.
3
In his fictions Leo Szilard’s great influence was his favourite novelist, H. G. Wells, who bowed not before the dark and irrational but looked towards the hope of science and the light of reason to liberate the world.
George Orwell believed that up until 1914 Wells was ‘a true prophet’. ‘Thinking people who were born at the beginning of the century are in some sense Wells’ own creation,’ he wrote in a 1941 essay on Wells’s legacy that could just as well have been written about Leo Szilard’s destiny. ‘The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.’
If Wells was the prophet, Leo Szilard had for some years prior to his bath in the Imperial Hotel been a disciple, attracted both to Wells’s scientific prophecies as well as to his vision of a ‘new world order’ (a typically sweeping and enduring Wellsian trope that equally typically came to mean the opposite of what he intended) based on rational thought and led by scientists and intellectuals.
While visiting London in 1929, Szilard met Wells at a London dinner. The young Szilard, as enchanted with Wells as the young Rebecca West had once been, returned to Berlin where he threw himself into making real the idea of a Wellsian intellectual and scientific elite that would, over some generations, help guide German society to a better place. For a time he even had a small coterie of followers—whom he called the Bund—involved in the idea.
When asked his opinion of Szilard and his Bund, Albert Einstein replied that Szilard was ‘a genuinely intelligent man, not generally inclined to fall for illusions. Perhaps, like so many such people, he tends to overestimate the role of rational thought in human life.’
Einstein and Szilard were friends, and together invented a refrigerator without mechanical parts to help the poor. They first met in 1920 when Szilard moved to Germany after being thrown down a set of steps leading to the Budapest University by anti-Semites and realising that it was time to leave Hungary. An outstanding student, Szilard had trained as an engineer, but in Berlin, the epicentre of modern physics, he pursued the new science.
4
It was later said that in Berlin he had walked with gods. He certainly had no issue with arguing with the immortals he met along the way. On meeting Max Planck, Germany’s greatest physicist and a Nobel laureate, in the year Szilard arrived, the unknown twenty-two-year-old student announced, ‘I only want to know the facts of physics. The theories I will make up.’
In the very first class he took with Einstein, Szilard had the temerity to challenge the great man on a matter of physics that led Einstein to reconsider and finally agree with his young usurper. Within two years of arriving, he had a doctorate from the University of Berlin. Einstein had at first listened in disbelief to his young student presenting his thesis on the second law of thermodynamics before grasping the ideas Szilard had formed in baths and over long walks. A second paper on thermodynamics, written six months after his doctorate, was to prove a key influence decades later in the development of information theory. Erwin Schrödinger, the inventor of wave dynamics and no slouch when it came to profundity and originality, wrote that Szilard ‘was always profound and original’.
He was also lazy, charmed many and frequently irritated more. Even then he was mysterious, mercurial and impossible to pin down in time or space, simultaneously in this country or the next, patenting seemingly odd inventions such as linear accelerators and cyclotrons—devices that would allow physicists to further study the atomic nucleus—and coming up with ideas for everything from electron microscopes to a Wellsian new world order over coffee and cake at the Romanisches Café while discussing the quantum mechanics of Heisenberg or the growing political chaos engulfing the Weimar Republic.
Leo Szilard believed that in science the greatest thoughts are the simplest. Yet his abilities sometimes seemed more mystical than rational. He embraced unlikely connections and implausible paradoxes, combining contradictory instincts with an almost eerie prophetic gift, predicting at the Great War’s outset the collapse of the German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. He was sixteen.
And so when Hitler was made German chancellor in January 1933 Leo Szilard once more foresaw Europe’s fate at a time when many others could not. His desperate entreaties to his friends and family to leave before it was too late were for the most part ignored. He fled Germany in March 1933 and, several months later, in the Imperial’s dining room, over a cup of risible English coffee, breakfasting on several spoons of orange marmalade while reading The Times, his dreaming eyes alighted on something that interested him more than several depressing articles about the current world situation: a report of the talk he had missed in Leicester the day before.
Owlish face expressionless, he absent-mindedly alternated sips of coffee with spoons of the sticky orange rind as he read how Lord Rutherford, discussing the recent success of two British scientists in splitting the atom through particle bombardment, dismissed any talk of such discoveries leading to ‘the release of atomic energy on an industrial scale’ as ‘moonshine’.
Szilard knew Rutherford was in good company in his conclusion. Both Niels Bohr and Einstein regarded particle bombardment as scientifically important but practically useless. A hugely inefficient process, it took vastly more energy to split the atom than the energy that was released in consequence. Had not Einstein himself compared particle bombardment with ‘shooting birds in the dark in a country where there are only a few birds’? The analogy accorded with the known facts, thought Leo Szilard. But what about all that was unknown?
5
As steam played over the bath waters, his heavy head full of contradictory thoughts he needed to tease out, Leo Szilard found it pleasant to let his ideas off the leash. In this way he passed some hours, a bespectacled porpoise surfing in the wake of others. Rutherford was undoubtedly an expert. But what was an expert? Someone focused on what little was known and not the much greater sum of what wasn’t? Someone who knew only what could not be done but not what might be possible? But then these ideas drifted away with the wisps and drifts of steam wafting around his hairy waist until snagging on a memory: a novel by Wells he had read the previous year. The title escaped him. There were so many books and pamphlets by Wells that it was hard to remember even a fraction of the ones he had read. It was not well known. What was it called? He recalled that he had experienced that strange excitement of a reader who has accidentally stumbled into what feels like the deeper, private recesses of a favoured author’s mind, almost a frisson of intimacy.
And then he remembered.
The World Set Free.
Abruptly his mind filled with visions of mass atomic war in all its horror: a world in flames, cities boiling, millions killed. Wells’s visions, formed in his flight from love. His thoughts scudded this way and that, a welcome sweat broke out on his forehead. The World Set Free—a book about what wasn’t known that nevertheless revealed just what the liberation of atomic energy on a large scale might mean.
What if Rutherford were wrong?
As he lay back in his tub that autumnal London morning, Leo Szilard wondered why the forecasts of writers sometimes prove to be more accurate than those of scientists. Admittedly he had done little work in atomic physics. This struck him as an advantage. He was unburdened by knowing things. The theories he could make up. He told himself that science was above all a product of the subconscious. The creative scientist, he felt, had much in common with the artist and the poet.
His mind slid off with the bath mist into other things—the work he was doing helping other refugee scientists fleeing Nazism, moonshine, his girlfriend, masturbation, particle bombardment and pilots gazing down on cities below boiling up and swirling around electrons and neutrons when everything was abruptly scattered by a knock on the door and a voice asking when the bathroom might be free given it had already been two-bloody-hours? Raising his feet above the bath’s end, Leo Szilard slid along his back and let his face sink beneath the water. Only when he resurfaced to a world of white fog did he realise that he had forgotten to take off his spectacles.
6
Wiping his glasses with a wet finger, Leo Szilard decided to pursue his irreconcilable thoughts by walking London’s streets. But he had scarcely left his hotel that dreary damp day when, approaching the flank of Russell Square heading towards the British Museum, he was stopped from crossing the road by a red stoplight on Southampton Row.
One light goes out and another lights up, thought Szilard.
And after that?
As he stared at the traffic light’s three coloured circles, one illuminated, two dimmed, all other things—traffic, pedestrians, smog, buildings, drizzle—abruptly receded into oblivion.
For several critical seconds nothing else existed in the world—
—and when the world returned it was a world forever changed.
7
One light goes out and another lights up and then another—and another! And another, and another.
These banalities struck Leo Szilard with the force of mystical revelation. But for a moment what that revelation was eluded him. Szilard could see and know but he was unable to say exactly what it was he saw and knew.
What if there were a country where there were many birds? Where every bird shot magically produced two more bullets killing two more birds in turn, and those two dead birds produced four more bullets killing four birds and producing eight bullets? And what if that eight became sixteen and sixteen thirty-two? What then?
Leo Szilard felt a sudden and overwhelming vertigo. The traffic lights swirled all around, multiplying before him as three lights became nine and nine eighty-one. Knowledge collided with imagination to produce a fever of ideas that in turn released more energy into Szilard’s suddenly cascading thoughts.
The lights changed.
As he crossed the street he continued staring at the lights. If there were an element which when split by one neutron emitted two neutrons, it would only need massing enough of that element together to sustain more of the same as more atoms were split by more neutrons, creating new, unlimited energy as they continued multiplying.
No one before had ever thought of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction.
8
The idea of a nuclear chain reaction was only the beginning of the revelations Leo Szilard had as the lights changed. If a nuclear chain reaction was possible it would be possible to create atomic energy on an industrial scale. And if atomic energy were possible then an atomic bomb was also possible. But his vision didn’t stop there, for it was simultaneously theoretical and political, at once ecstatic and agonising.
A crack opened in his mind and in the universe and immediately began widening. What the owlish young man saw as he found himself falling through it was terrifying. Fiction was transforming into physics and physics into the future in front of the Southampton Row traffic lights, and he saw that future as the abyss that exists before birth and after death, an oblivion at the beginning and end of all human consciousness. If it was possible to build an atomic bomb then it was possible that Hitler could build an atomic bomb and, not only that, given German pre-eminence in physics, be the first to build it and use it to enslave the world.
Leo Szilard had seen that dismal grey morning what no one else had or for a long time would as the traffic light’s red circle ceded to a green—the spectre, huge and terrifying, that would haunt the rest of his life. And at that moment of existential horror he understood what others witnessing the monstrous explosion at Los Alamos twelve years later would only realise too late: that they had become death, destroyers of the world.
9
Within months of his vision in Russell Square Szilard patented the atomic chain reaction. ‘Knowing what it would mean,’ he wrote, ‘and I knew because I had read H. G. Wells—I did not want this patent to become public.’ He assigned the patent to the British Admiralty so that it might remain secret.
Seeking to quarantine his terrifying revelations, he attempted to persuade eminent colleagues such as Niels Bohr and the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi that atomic weaponry was feasible, and that their nuclear research should therefore be kept secret to ensure Nazi Germany did not get the bomb first. They ignored him. His warnings were seen in equal part as fanciful nonsense while insulting to the notion of an open, international community of scientific scholarship.
Having opened Pandora’s box, and aware of the horror that might ensue, Szilard could not help himself. He delved ever deeper inside, pursuing the mystery of the atom while never quite admitting to himself or to others what his research meant and where, inexorably, it was leading. Working hand to mouth through institutions as various as London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital and Cambridge University, something of an intellectual vagabond, almost a philosophical troubadour, taking tribute when offered and accepting patronage when it turned up but refusing to be bound by it, Szilard spent the next five years seeking to prove his theory.
Yet his determination not to alert Nazi scientists doomed his approaches to leading industrialists when pursuing investment in his research. He would tout the commercial applications of nuclear energy as the reward yet refuse to show potential investors the scientific evidence to back up his claims, keeping the necessary information secret. When pressed, he sometimes quoted from The World Set Free, saying that Wells’s predictions were likely to prove more accurate than those of the scientists who dismissed atomic energy. Businessmen, less than keen to invest in a failed fiction from Edwardian England seemingly no more plausible than a time machine, never ponied up the money Szilard sought.
