Lionel Goettreider wasn’t famous when he died, his cremated remains scattered into a high wind off the Golden Gate Strait and blown out to the Pacific. So, initially, nobody thought to record his opinions on anything beyond technical specifications for the Engine itself. Later, of course, a magnificent global industry of assertion and abstraction sprung from every utterance remembered by his few social acquaintances and professional peers, people who wanted to be known to have known him.
Born in Aarhus, Denmark, in 1923—in my world there are, like, fifteen different Danish holidays devoted to him—Lionel Goettreider grew up in a middle-class home with a Danish mother, a Polish father, and two younger brothers, a warm and pleasant childhood marred only by his father’s occasional spasms of delusional paranoia. When the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940, his father’s paranoia became rather less delusional—someone really was out to get him. But life continued, as it does. At age seventeen, Lionel received a scholarship to the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, and so, while the Danish government submitted to Nazi rule and his father’s mind went septic with fear, Lionel moved to Copenhagen to live with his aunt and study under the institute’s founder, Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr, his scientific idol.
On September 29, 1943, Bohr got an early warning that the Nazis planned a mass raid of Denmark’s Jews on October 1, assuming they’d all be home for the Rosh Hashanah holiday. Bohr immediately left for Sweden, where, legend has it, he convinced the Swedish king, Gustaf V, to coordinate with the Danish king, Christian X, to rescue Denmark’s Jews. Among the more than 7,000 Jewish people spirited across the Oresund Strait in fishing ketches, rowboats, and kayaks to Sweden was Lionel Goettreider. His rescue was a boundless gift to the world, but a bitter personal tragedy.
Five months earlier, his father heard from friends in Poland that Jews had been rounded up and promised asylum if they cooperated, only to be interred at concentration camps. His father convinced his mother that the family had to escape Denmark before it was too late. Lionel, busy with his studies and convinced the Danish king would protect him because Bohr insisted it was true, refused to join his parents and brothers when they paid fishermen to smuggle them across the North Sea to Scotland. Lionel never heard from them again. After the war, he found out a German patrol intercepted the boat and his family was sent to the Chelmno extermination camp, not far from his father’s birthplace in Lodz, Poland. And so Lionel Goettreider was saved by trusting a man in a crown.
A few days after arriving in Sweden, believing his family was safe in Scotland rather than already buried in a mass grave in the Rzuchow forest, Lionel Goettreider lay in a field outside the farmhouse where he was staying, staring up at the stars on a cold, clear night. He thought about how the war seemed like the end of the world but, in fact, no matter what people did to each other the Earth’s movement through the solar system was entirely unaffected, its orbit unchanged and unchangeable, constant, forever. He felt utterly powerless, alone in a foreign country, but he took comfort in that eternal spin. Not just comfort—power.
And in that moment Lionel Goettreider had an idea.
After the war, he did his master’s degree at Oxford and his doctorate at Stanford, remaining in San Francisco until his death in 1965. That’s where the Goettreider Institute for Advanced Physics was founded in 1972 and began training the world’s most brilliant and ambitious young scientists to become even more brilliant and ambitious, including Victor Barren, who completed two of his three PhDs there. If I had to pinpoint the moment my father wrote me off completely, it was the day my application to the Goettreider Institute was rejected. He was considered among their most esteemed alumni and yet an exception would not be made for his only child. I moved out of my parents’ housing unit into the 184th-floor condo and attended the University of Toronto instead.
When asked about his wartime experiences, all Lionel Goettreider would say is that Niels Bohr saved his life. He returned to Denmark only once, for Bohr’s funeral in 1962. And it seems he never really trusted anyone else again. His few friends were just polite colleagues. He lived by himself. He never married or had children. What he had, instead of other people, were the infinite possibilities of his own mind and a relentless drive to build a better world.
At least that’s what they teach at every school on the planet.
46
In 1965, Lionel Goettreider was forty-two years old. He wasn’t some wizened High Priest of Science. He was a man, not young, but not all that old either.
He had a long, angular face, sharp cheekbones, a crooked nose that looked like it had been broken in a long-ago fistfight, full, bow-shaped lips, thick curly brown hair, and wiry eyebrows that bristled above his glasses, each lens smudged with fingerprints around the edges. His eyes had three-colored irises: a ring of blue, a ring of green, a ring of brown. He had long eyelashes and a permanent ridge of glabellar creases. He stood just over six feet tall, broad shouldered but gangly, arms and legs too long for his torso.
These are some of the things you notice when you’re standing right in front of the most important person in human history and he can’t see you because you’re cloaked with a disruption field that warps photons around your body, rendering you invisible to camera and eye.
But here’s something I hadn’t considered: scent.
Lionel Goettreider’s nose crinkles. He inhales sharply, his eyes darting around the lab. He smells something out of place. I take a step back, jarred, because what he’s smelling is—me.
It’s inconceivable that my father could’ve neglected something as elemental as smell, but then I remember—I’m supposed to be immaterial. My molecules should be disembodied, intangible, and, consequently, unsmellable. But I neglected to go into the defusion sphere before coming back in time. That means, despite my invisibility, I can touch things. Not even deliberately. The molecules of my body can interact with the molecules around me. If I was immaterial, the volatilized airborne compounds swirling off of me would safely pass right through the olfactory receptors in Lionel Goettreider’s crooked nose. But I’m not immaterial.
My whole life, everyone waited for me to do something spectacular. To prove I was my father’s son. Well, I finally did it—it just turned out to be spectacularly stupid.
I have made a very, very bad mistake.
As I step away from him, I bump into a console, jostling the mug of coffee sitting on it. The oily black liquid inside sloshes over the rim. A runny finger of coffee slides down the white porcelain, trailing onto the console’s green-gray metal surface.
Goettreider sees it too. The crinkle in his nose spreads to his eyebrows, those glabellar creases folding even deeper. Coffee pools around the base of the mug. He picks it up, wipes away the liquid with his hand, and dries it on his starched white lab coat. He looks around, troubled.