The clock tower in Bern struck two.
Bong. Bong.
Inside the Swiss Patent Office, dust motes danced in the afternoon sun. The room smelled of old paper, ink, and boredom.
Albert Einstein sat at his desk, staring out the window.
He was twenty-six years old. His hair was a black, chaotic mess that defied gravity and combs. His vest was dusted with chalk.
He wasn't looking at the street below. He was looking at the train moving along the track in the distance. He was imagining what would happen if he were riding a beam of light alongside it.
"Herr Einstein?"
Albert blinked. The beam of light vanished.
He turned.
A man stood in the doorway. He was dressed in a suit that cost more than Albert's yearly salary. He held a leather briefcase and looked completely out of place among the piles of technical drawings.
"I am busy," Albert lied. He gestured to a stack of patent applications for improved sewage pumps. "If you have a better mousetrap, leave it on the desk. I will reject it next week."
"I don't have a mousetrap," the man said.
He walked into the room. He moved with a strange, predatory confidence. He didn't look like an inventor. He looked like a banker who had just bought the bank.
"I have a question about gravity," the man said.
Albert sighed. "The office handles technical patents, mein Herr. Not philosophy. If you want to discuss Newton, go to the university. They love dead Englishmen there."
"Newton is wrong," the man said.
Albert froze.
He slowly swiveled his chair around.
"Excuse me?"
The man reached into his pocket. He didn't pull out a patent form. He pulled out a scrap of paper—a napkin from a coffee shop.
He placed it on Albert's desk, right on top of a drawing for a potato peeler.
Albert looked at it.
It was a single equation.
Albert stared.
His breath caught in his throat.
It wasn't standard calculus. It was tensor calculus. Non-Euclidean geometry applied to spacetime.
He had been struggling with this exact concept for months. The idea that gravity wasn't a force, but a curvature. A bending of the fabric of the universe.
But he hadn't solved it yet. The field equations were a mess in his head.
And yet, here it was. Written in blue ink on a napkin. Elegant. Simple. Terrifying.
"Who are you?" Albert whispered. He looked up, his dark eyes wide.
"My name is Ezra Prentice," the man said. "And I know that time is relative, Herr Einstein. Especially when you're wasting it here approving toilets."
Albert grabbed the napkin. His hands shook slightly.
"This math..." Albert muttered. "It implies that mass tells space how to curve. And space tells mass how to move."
"Exactly."
"Where did you get this? This isn't published. Lorentz doesn't know this. Poincaré doesn't know this."
"I know it," Jason said.
He pulled up a chair and sat down uninvited.
"You are bored, Albert. You are the smartest man in Europe, and you are rotting in a bureaucratic box. You send papers to the Annalen der Physik and the old men laugh at you because you don't have a PhD."
Jason leaned forward.
"I'm here to offer you a way out."
The Café Bollwerk was loud, smoky, and smelled of sausages and beer.
Albert Einstein ate like a starving man. He shoveled sauerkraut into his mouth while staring at Jason across the small wooden table.
"You are not a physicist," Albert announced, wiping mustard from his lip.
"No," Jason admitted. He sipped his black coffee. "I'm a capitalist."
"Then how?" Albert pointed a fork at him. "How do you know the math? I tested you. You know about the photoelectric effect. You know about the energetic nature of matter. You even know about..."
Albert lowered his voice, looking around the café.
"...the frozen stars. The points where gravity becomes infinite. Black holes."
"I read a lot," Jason smiled.
"Bullshit," Albert scoffed. "You don't derive these things. You talk about them like... like you remember them. Like a song you heard once and are trying to hum."
Albert leaned back. He studied Jason's face.
"You are a puzzle, Herr Prentice. And I like puzzles."
"Good," Jason said. "Because I have a big one for you."
Jason reached into his briefcase. He pulled out a check.
He slid it across the beer-stained table.
Albert looked at the number.
Fifty thousand dollars.
"What is this?" Albert asked.
"Your salary," Jason said. "For the first year."
"Doing what? Building oil drills?"
"Thinking," Jason said. "I am building a campus in America. In New Jersey. Princeton. It will be called the Institute for Advanced Study."
Jason gestured with his hand, painting a picture in the smoky air.
"No students. No teaching duties. No patent applications. Just a house, a blackboard, and unlimited funding. You can sit in a garden and think about the universe all day."
Albert looked at the check. It was more money than he could make in ten lifetimes at the patent office.
"Why?" Albert asked. "Capitalists don't buy thoughts. They buy things."
"I want the patents," Jason said. "Anything you discover belongs to the Institute. But the publishing rights are yours. The Nobel Prizes are yours."
"Nobel Prize?" Albert laughed. "I am a clerk!"
"Not for long."
The door of the café opened.
A tall, stiff man in a grey suit walked in. He scanned the room, spotted Einstein, and marched over. He clicked his heels together.
"Herr Einstein," the man said in clipped, aristocratic German.
Albert looked up, annoyed. "Yes?"
"I am Doctor Von Laue. sent by Professor Max Planck from Berlin."
The man ignored Jason completely. He handed Albert a formal letter sealed with wax.
"The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute invites you to Berlin. A full professorship. You will work with the greatest minds in the Fatherland. Planck. Nernst. Haber."
Von Laue looked at Jason with disdain.
"You should not waste your time with Americans, Herr Einstein. They are a crude people. Europe is the center of science."
Albert looked at the letter from Berlin. It was prestigious. It was validation. It was the acceptance he had craved for years.
Then he looked at Jason's check.
"Berlin wants you," Jason said quietly. "But why?"
Jason turned to Von Laue.
"Tell him, Doctor. What is the primary funding source for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute?"
Von Laue stiffened. "The Imperial Government supports the advancement of German science."
"The Imperial Army," Jason corrected.
Jason turned back to Albert.
"They want you to build weapons, Albert. They see your math and they see ballistics. They see poison gas. They see a bigger bomb."
"And you?" Albert asked Jason. "What do you see?"
"I see the future," Jason said. "I don't want you to build a gun for the Kaiser. I want you to unlock the energy of the stars."
Albert looked from the stiff German to the relaxed American.
Berlin offered prestige. But it came with a uniform.
Princeton offered money. And freedom.
Albert hated uniforms. He hated authority. He hated the rigid, marching cadence of German academia.
He looked at Von Laue.
"Tell Professor Planck I am honored," Albert said.
He picked up the Berlin letter. He crumpled it into a ball and dropped it into his empty beer mug.
"But I do not like the food in Berlin. Too heavy."
Von Laue turned purple. "You are making a mistake! This is career suicide!"
"Perhaps," Albert shrugged. "But the geometry of my career is non-Euclidean."
Von Laue spun on his heel and marched out.
Albert turned to Jason. He picked up the check.
"America," Albert mused. "Do they have good beer?"
"We'll import it," Jason promised.
"Then I accept."
Albert tucked the check into his vest pocket, right next to his chalk.
"But tell me, Ezra," Albert said, his eyes narrowing. "You say you don't want weapons. But the math... the energy density..."
He looked at Jason with sudden, piercing clarity.
"If we unlock that door... if we split the atom... do you realize what comes out?"
Jason looked at the young genius. He saw the shadow of the mushroom cloud in Albert's eyes, even if Albert couldn't fully see it yet.
"Fire," Jason said. "The fire of the gods."
"And Prometheus?" Albert asked. "Do you remember what happened to him?"
"The eagle ate his liver," Jason said.
He stood up and offered his hand.
"I'm willing to pay that price, Albert. Are you?"
Albert looked at Jason's hand. He hesitated. He sensed the danger. He sensed that this man was leading him down a path that ended in ash.
But the curiosity was too strong. The puzzle was too beautiful.
Albert shook his hand.
"Let the eagle come," Albert said. "I want to see the fire."