The library at Kykuit, which used to be a retreat of muted intellection, was Ezra's workroom of future history. The air, which once was stagnant and scented with old books and lemon varnish, seemed to throb with a soundless, hysterical energy. The ponderous folder labelled GERMAN RE-ARMAMENT & IG FARBEN lay spread out upon the large table, but this was only a beginning, one piece in a puzzle-box that depicted a picture of the end of the world at Armageddon.
Ezra wasn't reading at all. He was inventing. On clean, crisp pieces of stationery, he sketched things that haunted his 21st-century mind, and he described them in the engineering parlance of the 1930s. On one page, a long, cigar-shaped tube with fins stood straight up, with tongues of flame coming out of its bottom. He labeled it 'Long-Range Artillery Rocket.' It was a V-2. On another, he described in cross-section an engine that made no use whatsoever of any propeller but depended solely upon a turbine and a nozzle to generate thrust. He labeled it'Gas Turbine Propulsion.' It was a Messerschmitt Me 262. On a third, most terrifying of all, he drew in rough outline: a large circle labeled 'U-235' being struck with a small one labeled'n' (for neutron), with the big one exploding and shedding others of the same size that in their turn knocked against others of the same size. It was the simple, terrifying chain reaction of nuclear fission.
They were no inventions. They were pen and ink illustrations of prophecy. They were preparations for some future war so technically advanced, so qualitatively different from the last one, that no one in this era was even capable of envisioning its horrors.
He was sent for to Senior's study that evening. There was a different feeling in the room this time. The testing was completed. The trials and public questioning were at an end. There was no inquisitive patriarch overseeing some bright young upstart anymore. There was a war council between the old king and his unusual new grand vizier.
Senior sat in his familiar throne, the constant blanket in his lap, but his gaze was keen, intense, adamant. He did not bother to waste any time.
"The men in Washington are idiots," the old man began, his voice a dry rasp. "They sign treaties and pacts like they believe bits of paper will keep a bullet from moving. The Kellogg-Briand Pact has 'outlawed war.' A fantasy for a child." He looked at Ezra. "You, however, believe that some grand war is not only likely but inevitable. I want you to describe it to me. Not the sides. Not the politics. The war itself."
Ezra stood before him, feeling the tremendous burden of the moment he was to utter. He was to delineate a future that would be like fiction, yet he was to present it in a manner that it was as true and as inescapable as dawn.
"Sir," he began, his voice even, "to understand the next war, first we must accept this one proposition: it will be nothing like the last one."
He took one step closer. "The Great War was attrition and trench warfare. It was a slow, static war that was defined by men, mud, and machine guns. It was won and lost by whichever nation placed the largest number of corpses in the meat grinder. The next war," he summed up, his voice dipping lower, "would be a war of speed. It will be a war of oil, aluminum, and wireless waves."
"It will be waged not with static infantries of men, but with rapid, mechanized armies. With scores of tanks moving not to support men, but to function like armored horsemen and blast holes clear through enemy territory. They will be directed with wireless and will move faster than any army in history, a tactic that will no doubt be termed a 'lightning war' by the German High Command. Blitzkrieg."
Senior's eyes, that had seen the age of the auto and airplane, closed in understanding. This was a vocabulary of industrial might that he recognized.
"It will be won and lost in the air, too, this war," continued Ezra. "Not with the rickety wood-and-canvas zip-wings of the last war, but with squadrons of all-metal bombers, going higher and faster than any we have today. They will not engage other airplanes; they will be a weapon of strategy to leap clear of armies and fleets to shatter the enemy's resolve to resist by exploding his cities, his industries, his homes."
He paused and let the ghastly image stand before him. "And that is where the document you drew up on IG Farben comes in. They are no more manufacturers of dyes and chemicals than that. They are the engine of a new kind of military-industrial complex. They are synthesising in secret quantities of synthetic rubber and synthetic oil. Why? Because Germany has no tropical colonies for rubber and no great oilfields. A nation that desires to fight a war of speed must have tires for trucks and fuels for aircraft and tanks. IG Farben is making Germany self-sufficient in the war they are to wage."
Senior nodded once, slowly and deliberatively. He'd built his empire based upon the primacy of one key resource. He knew its value to his strategy better than any living man.
"But, all of that," Ezra clarified, his voice becoming even more solemn, "the tanks, the airplanes, the chemicals... that will just be the next logical step. It will be the nation that succeeds in the laboratory that will ultimately win this coming war."
He described the young technologies he'd been sketching. "There are men in Germany experimenting with jet propulsion, engines which will make a fighter plane go a hundred miles an hour faster than any propeller plane we can build. There are men developing long-range rockets that can throw a ton of TNT a hundred miles. And in Britain, a group of scientists are developing something they're calling Radio Direction Finding. It's a way of using radio waves to detect coming aircraft fifty or even a hundred miles away. Just imagine it, sir. The ability to see an enemy you can't see." Radar.
He took a deep breath and made his final, scariest forecast. He would not utter the word 'atomic bomb.' There existed no such word yet. He would have to invent the concept from scratch.
"Finally, sir, there's one more thing. It's pure theory at present. It's in the chalk-dust equations on scientists' blackboards in Berlin, in Cambridge, and in Copenhagen. Men you've likely never heard of—Einstein, Fermi, Bohr, Szilard. They're working with the basic nature of matter. They believe... they've demonstratively shown, in theory... that, in the atom itself, lies a tremendous, virtually unimaginable power."
He chose his words with careful thought. "They believe that if they can find a way to split the atom of some sort of massive element, like uranium, that will release a flood of energy. But more than that, the splitting will release particles that in and of themselves will split other atoms, and this will be a chain reaction of uncontrollable speed and brutality. They believe that one device, a bomb small enough to be dropped from one of the aircraft I described, will release more destructive energy than all the bombs and shells shot in the entire history of the Great War."
He left the stillness suspended, the raw, mind-warping size of his words echoing through the study in silence.
"The first country to build this tool will not only win the coming war. It will own the world. It will become God, with creation and destruction powers in its hand."
Senior was utterly still. He, a man who ruled the oil world, was being presented with the concept of a new, ultimate source: the atom itself. Prospects were dizzying, disastrous, and to a mind like his, thrilling. The world that he knew, the one he ruled, was to become old-fashioned.
He sat still in total silence for a minute, his old eyes staring into a future that perhaps only Ezra would see. Then he turned to his son-in-law.
"The government is blind," he muttered. "The British are idiots. Even my boy is a pacifist who thinks that mankind is good." His eyes turned cold. "This family, and this nation with it, must be prepared. We cannot be second."
With a slow, deliberate motion that seemed to require Herculean strength, he dipped his hand into his waistcoat pocket and produced a small, exquisitely carved golden key. He deposited it in a lock in a small, unobtrusive drawer in the side of his massive desk. He twisted the key and the drawer creaked open with a soft clicking noise.
Out of his desk drawer, he pulled a single thick, leather-bound book. It wasn't a company account book. There were scrawled comments, trust diagrams, and lists of dominant shares and secret industrial collaborations. It was the actual black book of the Rockefellers' major holdings: the source code of the empire.
He slid it across the very highly polished top of the desk. It came to a stop just in front of Ezra's hands.
"Where should we invest our money?" asked Senior.
It wasn't a request. It was a decree. An abdication. It was the keys to the kingdom, handed not to the responsible son, but to the ruthless prophet.