December 1, 1911. 23:00 PM.
Einstein Family Apartment.
The air in the small street apartment smelled of strong pipe tobacco though cheap and somewhat coarse, damp diapers, and overcooked coffee. It was domestic space chaos that would have horrified any housewife, but for Albert Einstein, thirty-two years old, it was the only place where his mind could function.
The physicist sat at the kitchen table, with disheveled hair and unbuttoned vest, looking at an envelope of thick, creamy paper that stood out obscenely among his scribbled notes and unpaid electricity bills.
The broken red wax seal showed the Romanovs' double-headed eagle.
"It's madness, Mileva," Albert murmured, smoothing his mustache nervously. "Russia? It's the country of strikes and pogroms, where the Okhrana reads even thoughts. Do they expect me, a Jew with socialist sympathies, to work for the Autocrat of All the Russias? It would be like voluntarily entering a golden cage... or a noose."
Mileva Marić, his wife and intellectual companion, was rocking little Eduard's cradle with her foot while mending a sock. She had a tired face, marked by the frustration of brilliance drowned by motherhood and her husband's shadow.
"They're not asking you to work for the Tsar, Albert," Mileva said with her Serbian pragmatism. "They're asking you to work for the Imperial University of Saint Petersburg. And read the figure again."
Albert looked at the letter. It was written in impeccable academic German, but the signature at the end wasn't from a dean. It was a somewhat strange signature: A.N. Romanov.
"Ten thousand rubles in gold per year," Einstein sighed. "It's more than all the Polytechnic professors earn together. We could hire help for everything we must go through with our children. Dear... you could return to studying."
"It's not the money that tempts you, Tetel," Mileva said, using his intimate nickname. "It's paragraph three."
Albert reread the third paragraph. There was the letter's real hook that he had so ignored.
"We know you are working on a generalization of your special relativity theory. We know you seek an equation that links space-time geometry with matter distribution. But to prove such a theory, you'll need to measure stellar light deviation around a massive body."
Einstein felt a chill. Nobody, except his closest friends like Grossmann, knew exactly where his intuition was headed. How did they know in Russia?
"The Russian Empire puts the Pulkovo Observatory at your disposal, with its 30-inch refractor, and will finance expeditions to Crimea and the Caucasus to observe the next solar eclipses. You won't have to wait years. We'll give you the stars, Herr Einstein."
Albert stood up and walked toward the dark window of his room, sleeping under a layer of orderly, bourgeois-class snow. There, he was a respected professor, but limited by academic bureaucracy and lack of resources. In Russia... in Russia they offered him heaven compared to the earth he had.
"It's a barbaric regime," he tried to resist one last time.
"It's a regime that has just purged its bureaucracy to modernize," Mileva replied, standing up and putting a hand on his shoulder. "And if that sender knows so much about your work as to offer you a telescope, then perhaps they're not so barbaric. Perhaps they're the only ones who understand what you're about to do, love."
Albert looked at their reflection in the glass.
"The curvature of light..." he murmured. "If they're right, Mileva... if they give me the data... we could change the way humanity sees the universe. It wouldn't just be physics, it would be even in philosophy's foundations."
"Then sign," she said, passing him the pen. "Take their gold, use their telescopes, and give them the truth in exchange."
Albert Einstein took the pen. His hand hesitated a second over the imperial paper. Then, with a quick stroke, he signed.
. . . . . . .
Chemistry Laboratory, La Sorbonne, Paris.
December 2, 1911.
Paris, the City of Light, Europe's great city, that same one had become a prison of shadows for Marie Curie.
The French sensationalist press, fed by xenophobia and puritanism, was tearing her apart. Her romance with Paul Langevin, a married man (though separated), had been exposed with cruel virulence, frequent in old France.
They called her "the Polish homewrecker," "the foreign Jewess" (though she was Catholic). There were crowds shouting under her window. Even the Nobel Committee had discreetly suggested she not go to Stockholm to collect her second prize to avoid scandal.
Marie sat on a high stool in her laboratory, surrounded by the bluish glow of her test tubes. Her hands, burned and marked by radiodermatitis lesions that never fully healed, held a letter that had arrived by diplomatic pouch, avoiding ordinary mail that journalists intercepted.
Before her was Pierre, not her late husband, but a young, respectful Russian emissary who spoke French with a soft accent.
"Madame," the emissary said. "Russia doesn't read gossip newspapers, currently our Empire tries to marvel at science that can demonstrate God's existence."
Marie reread the offer.
"The Radium Institute of Saint Petersburg will be created under your exclusive direction. No committees, no press, no moral scrutiny. Only science."
But what made her scientific heart beat faster wasn't privacy. It was the attached inventory that came with that title.
"We've discovered massive uranium ore deposits in the Fergana Valley, Turkestan. The Radio-226 concentration is twenty times higher than Joachimsthal pitchblende. We put at your disposal ten tons of refined ore for your fractionation experiments."
Ten tons.
Marie had spent years boiling tons of industrial waste in a leaky shed to obtain a decigram of radium. And now, this letter offered her a mountain of God's sacred element.
"Why?" Marie asked, her voice hoarse from fatigue. "What does the Tsar want from me? Poisons?"
"Energy, Madame," the emissary responded. "The people, especially the Tsarevich, the future Tsar, believe that inside the atom is a fire that can heat the world without burning coal. He calls you madame, 'The Mother of Radiation' He says only you can teach us to hold that fire without burning our hands."
Marie looked at her own hands. Stiff fingers, with peeling skin. This was known as the price of knowledge.
In France, she was a pariah. A scandalous woman. In Russia, they offered her to be a Prometheus, a person who would go beyond where she had already gone.
She looked out the window toward Paris's streets, where newspaper vendors shouted headlines about her private life. She felt profound nausea at Western society's hypocrisy.
"I'll need to bring my daughter Irène, and my daughter Ève, and their grandfather, my husband's father," Marie finally said. "And my laboratory team."
"The private train is waiting at Gare du Nord, Madame. We'll leave at night. Nobody will see you depart."
Marie Curie left the letter on the slate table. She turned off the Bunsen burner. The blue flame extinguished, but another flame, much more powerful, was about to ignite in the north.
"Let's go," she said. "Paris doesn't deserve the Curies."
. . . . . . .
Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University, England.
December 3, 1911.
Niels Bohr, twenty-six years old, walked through Cambridge's Gothic corridors feeling like a giant trapped in a dollhouse. The young Dane had a mind that functioned in a way his English colleagues found disconcerting.
He was frustrated. His mentor, the great J.J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron, stubbornly clung to his "plum pudding" model of the atom. Bohr knew it was wrong. Rutherford in Manchester had demonstrated there was a nucleus, but Rutherford's model was mechanically unstable. According to classical physics, electrons should spiral fall toward the nucleus and matter should collapse in a flash of ultraviolet light.
But matter didn't collapse. Matter was stable in its environment.
"There must be rules," Bohr murmured in his native Danish while kicking dry leaves in the courtyard. "Rules... Fixed orbits where the electron doesn't emit energy."
"Mr. Bohr?"
A man in a bearskin coat and astrakhan hat blocked his way.
"I'm Agent Volkov, from the Imperial Russian Embassy in London. I have something for you."
Bohr took the envelope. He opened it right there, under the English drizzle.
The letter was direct.
"Dear Niels: We know Thomson doesn't listen to you. We know Rutherford has the data but not the theory, you yourself have the theory. You know energy is quantized inside the atom. Come to Saint Petersburg. We'll build you a theoretical institute where Classical Physics will be prohibited at the entrance. Help us draw the map of the invisible our world possesses, help us understand God's signature."
Bohr smiled. It was a wide smile, ear to ear. Someone had understood him. Someone had seen that Newton's old world was dead and young people were needed to bury it.
"When does the ship sail?" Bohr asked.
. . . . . . .
Telegraph Office, Winter Palace, Saint Petersburg.
December 5, 1911.
The Hughes telegraph clattered incessantly, spitting out perforated paper strips that accumulated in wicker baskets. It was the Empire's nervous system, connecting the brain in Saint Petersburg with the extremities in Warsaw, Vladivostok, and Helsinki.
Alexei stood next to the operator, reading the deciphered messages as they arrived.
"The familiar man confirms," Tatiana said, who was sorting the tapes. "Einstein has accepted. He requests visas for his wife and children, and a special car for his books, which he mentioned are dozens."
"Granted," Alexei said.
"Paris confirms," Tatiana continued, her voice trembling slightly with emotion. "Madame Curie has left France. She crossed the German border last night. She'll arrive at the Russian border in two days, though it seems she has stated she won't collect the Nobel prize."
"Excellent. Have the Cossacks escort her from the border. If any journalist tries to approach, break his camera."
"Cambridge confirms. Bohr is coming via Stockholm."
Alexei closed his eyes and exhaled. It had worked. He had drained Europe's brain, for now... While Germany built battleships and Great Britain protected its trade routes, Russia was hoarding the future.
"There's one more message, Your Highness," the operator said, tearing off a last strip of paper. "It's from the Urals. From Professor Tsiolkovsky."
Alexei took the tape.
"AIRSHIP-1 STATIC TESTS COMPLETE. MODIFIED NEVA ENGINES WITH BABBITT BEARINGS AND FORCED LUBRICATION FUNCTION STABLY AT 1800 RPM. OIL TEMPERATURE HIGH BUT CONTROLLABLE. READY FOR FIRST CARGO FLIGHT."
Alexei smiled. A predatory, satisfied smile.
H&A's blockade had failed. They had tried to asphyxiate Russian industry by denying it ball bearing perfection. But in doing so, they had forced Russian engineers to be ingenious, to use brute force and hydrodynamics to overcome lack of precision.
The engines were heavier. They consumed more oil. But they worked, which was what was important.
And now, with scientists on their way, the next generation of machines wouldn't need brute force. Einstein, Curie, and Bohr would give Russia the key to transcend matter.
"Tanya," Alexei said, putting the telegrams in his pocket. "Send a reply to Tsiolkovsky."
"What do I tell him?"
"Tell him: 'Take off. The sky is ours.'"
The Tsarevich turned toward the Europe map hanging on the wall. He stuck a red thumbtack near a distant country, another in Paris, and another in Cambridge. Then, he connected them all with a red thread that converged in Saint Petersburg.
The net was half complete... The war of 1914 would come, inevitably. But when it came, Russia wouldn't fight with nineteenth-century weapons. It would fight with twenty-first-century science, and, perhaps just perhaps... it would manage to steal more brains from this broken world.
. . . . . . . . . . .
A/N: If you've enjoyed this story and want to read ahead, I have more chapters available on my patreon.com/Nemryz.