The Einstein Prophecy (12 page)

“Say, who’s the looker in there with Professor Delaney?” Andy asked.

“No one you need to know,” Lucas replied as he headed downstairs, one hand on the railing to compensate for his partial vision. Around the Caithness Man’s display case, three grammar school kids stood holding spiral notebooks. True to what Brandt had said earlier, the smallest of them extended one trembling finger to the glass as another one urged him on. “Touch it—I dare you to! Touch it!”

The boy did, then fled out the door, screaming and waving his arms as if he’d poked a hornets’ nest. Lucas knew exactly how he felt.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Emerging from the bowels of the collegiate library, Dr. Rashid was met by a cold wet wind and a sea of puddles. He tucked his scarf around his sore throat and pulled up the collar of his overcoat, but not before another coughing fit had overtaken him. Once it had subsided, he gingerly made his way down the leaf-strewn walkway, the tip of his ebony cane testing each step before he took it. Even so, he was tired and catching another chill by the time he came beneath the great brooding hulk of the university’s Gothic chapel. A splat of rain on his shoulder decided him, and he went up the steps to the massive doors.

He had already passed through these doors days before, and noticed their unusual motif—Christ surrounded by the four beasts from the Book of Revelation. Each of the creatures—a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a winged man—represented a Gospel, and their depiction here strongly reminded him, as had probably been intended, of the west tympanum of Chartres Cathedral.

Once inside the narthex, he also noted, with amusement, the stained-glass window devoted to medicine, featuring the Persian physician al-Razi. Indeed, the windows of the chapel were a distinctly eclectic collection that ran the gamut from biblical scenes and theological themes to tributes to science and philosophy. He could not remember seeing an ecclesiastical homage to Kant, Spinoza, Ptolemy, Descartes, or Louis Pasteur anywhere else in the world.

The long and gloomy nave stretched out before him, and it appeared that only one other person occupied the vast interior of the cathedral. Like Rashid, this man, hunched down low, had sought a quiet spot for reflection in the pews, as well as a refuge from the weather outside. Rashid sat down on the opposite side of the main aisle, several rows ahead of him, so that they both might maintain their privacy.

Above him, an indigo-blue-and-purple window, faintly illuminated by the late afternoon light outside, showed Christ holding a scroll, and beneath him, in Greek, the inscription “Who is worthy to open the scroll?”

Who indeed, Rashid thought, removing his handkerchief to dab at his nose.

Since coming to Princeton, he’d been absorbed in the papyri, or the fragments thereof, retrieved from the cave of Saint Anthony. General Rommel’s henchmen may have been able to make off with the ossuary, but the contents of the urns had been unknown to them, and with the help of his daughter, Rashid had managed to abscond with the trove intact. Although they had suffered a bit from being haphazardly stuffed in his luggage on the voyage over, he had now been allowed access to a private carrel in the library where he could lay them out properly. The library had also provided a host of rare and useful materials: The early presidents of Princeton had nearly all been men of the cloth, deep-thinking theologians and ministers—Dickinson, Edwards, Witherspoon—whose books and papers had been donated to Princeton upon their deaths. In some ways, he could not have wound up in a more congenial and conducive environment.

If only his discoveries had been as comforting.

Despite the short amount of time he had been ensconced at the library—courtesy, again, of his daughter’s clever maneuverings—everything he had gleaned so far had only exacerbated his fears and suspicions. Many of the papyri referred to a period, roughly three hundred years after the death of Christ, in which the barbarous Roman emperor Diocletian had initiated what was commonly known as the Great Persecution. It was from this era that most of the well-known stories of Christians martyred in the arena to ravenous beasts, of saints being roasted over slow fires, of endless roads lined with teetering crosses bearing the bodies of the crucified, sprang. Diocletian himself had come to Egypt on one of his triumphal tours, and in Alexandria had torn down all of the Christian churches and burned thousands of holy texts. Anyone who refused to renounce this new and traitorous faith had had his right eye put out with a sword, and the tendons on his left foot severed, before he was enslaved and shipped off to die in the copper mines. “In these conflicts,” according to a scroll Dr. Rashid attributed to the church polemicist Eusebius, “the noble martyrs of Christ shone illustrious over the entire world . . . and the evidences of the truly divine and unspeakable power of our Saviour were made manifest through them.”

Those who converted were forced to prove it by making an animal sacrifice, and soon the skies over Egypt were filled with the smoke from burning ewes and calves, bulls and pigs and goats.

But one thing the history books had never settled was the reason for Diocletian’s hasty retreat around 304 AD. Most historians assumed it had something to do with the unceasing political struggles in the Roman senate—his rival Galerius had been restive, and it was plain he meant to seize the reins of power—and Diocletian may have felt the need to hurry back home to exert his control once again, though that theory was contradicted by his almost immediate retirement once he got there.

Dr. Rashid felt that something else might have been in play.

One document, in particular, set the hairs on the back of his neck prickling, and not only because of what it said.

Written in a crabbed and shaky hand, the firsthand account appeared to have been written by Saint Anthony himself. The fact that Dr. Rashid might have been holding a tattered parchment that the anchorite himself had once labored over in the solitude of his desert cave was enough to make his hands tremble.

“And when this emperor had come to the desert,” it read, “with his camels and chariots, with his army of soldiers and slaves, the sand itself arose in a great storm, blinding their eyes.”

It had taken him many hours, using magnifying glasses, high-intensity lamps, and the skills of a practiced jigsaw puzzler, to decipher the passages and put them together in the correct order. Then there was the matter of reading the almost vanished ink.

“But when he came upon the sacred place, I ventured forth from the cave, raising my
tau
”—a shepherd’s stick, with a curved iron handle—“and I felt a righteous power descend upon me. I struck the ground, and a bottomless chasm opened under their feet. Many were swallowed whole.”

It inevitably reminded Rashid of the parting of the Red Sea.

“From that pit vomited a swarm of demons, led by the Lord of Flies. I did strike him with my staff, but the demon was able to wrest it away. We fought all through the night, though despair was my greatest enemy.”

Here, Rashid felt sure, was the origin of the stories in which Saint Anthony was assailed by demons, with whom he struggled in hand-to-hand combat.

“When the dawn at last arose, the demon raised my staff to strike again, but I, too, took hold of it. I called upon the Lord to send me strength, and the devil was defeated by a fire from the Heavens. In Christ’s name, I bound him then, and kept him prisoner.”

How? Rashid had wondered. How did you keep a demon captive? And what would you do with him once you had?

“Seeing that their champion had been vanquished, the Roman army fled. On their heels followed a mighty pillar of flame, like a red rose with petals that spread in a burning cloud across the sky.”

Could Diocletian’s abrupt departure from power have been a result of his experience in the Sahara? Could he have been so terrified by what he had seen—the demonic powers, his sworn allies, defeated by an old hermit with a shepherd’s crook; his army decimated and pursued by a maelstrom of fire—that he had been shaken to his core? Surely that would be enough to give any man—even one as ruthless as Diocletian—reason to reconsider, if not repent, his ways. Was that, Rashid wondered, why he had willingly surrendered his earthly powers? Did he fear what unimaginable horror the tau might unleash upon him next—or was it his fear of the malevolent and unpredictable spirit the holy man might actually be keeping prisoner within the darkest recesses of the cave?

A tickle in his throat suddenly became a cough, and the cough became an unstoppable volley. He raised his handkerchief to his lips to muffle the sound, but the cough echoed around the stone walls of the immense chamber. Falling sick was the last thing he needed; there was work to do—work that might have grave consequences—and he could not afford to lose any time, especially having come this far.

But the coughing wouldn’t stop. Doubling over, he accidentally knocked his cane from the back of the pew in front of him, and it clattered onto the floor. When he bent down to pick it up, he heard a voice say, with a German accent, “Excuse me, I do not wish to disturb.”

Turning around, he saw that the other occupant of the chapel was now perched on the pew behind him. The face, with its unruly white hair and bushy moustache, was unmistakable.

“I do not wish to disturb,” he repeated, “but I think that these will help.” He was holding out a little packet of Smith Brothers cough drops.

“Thank you,” Rashid said, taking the packet and shaking one out.

“You may take them all. I have more.”

Before Rashid stuck one under his tongue, he said, “But you are—”

The man cut him off with an embarrassed “
Ja
,” adding, “And you, are you a professor at the university?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Rashid replied, taking the opportunity to introduce himself. “They allow me to use the facilities while I am here.”

“The facilities here are fine, but the weather . . .” Einstein trailed off with a laugh.

Rashid sucked on the lozenge, which quickly soothed his throat. When Einstein inquired about the subject of his research, Rashid simply said, “Early Christian texts. I am studying some antique examples in the collection of the university.”

“Ah, such things are of interest to me, too.”

“They are? But you are not even of the Christian faith.”

Einstein waved the contradiction away. “I attended Catholic schools when I was a boy. I found much to admire in the stories and philosophy.”

“Are you a believer then?”

“No, I would not say that, not at all. But I am often asked to expound upon God, as if physics could reveal not just natural laws, but a divine plan behind them.”

“What do you say to these questions when they are asked?”

“Whatever I say,” he replied with a shrug, “it is misinterpreted. I am called an atheist—and in this country that is considered a very dangerous thing indeed—an agnostic, a pantheist, and sometimes, I even get letters that address me as rabbi.”

“But do you believe in a single, unified God, a power of good set in eternal opposition to a power of evil?” The words of Saint Anthony—“I subdued the demon and in Christ’s name captured him”—still swirled in his thoughts.

“No, my search for unity does not extend that far,” he said with a small smile. “I believe that the
natural
forces, the ones we see all around us, have an underlying unity and order. I am spending my remaining years trying to find it—a unified field theory that can explain how everything in the universe has been organized and put in its place.”

“You make the universe sound like a library, where every book is on just the right shelf, waiting to be read.”

Einstein smiled, and said, “That is a good way to put it. But we are still like children in that library. We look around and see thousands of books on thousands of shelves. We know that someone or something must have written those books and put them there, but we do not know who or what that could be. There is an order to it all, that much we can tell, but that is really all we know. The rest is a mystery—a beautiful one—but a mystery, all the same.”

In the distance, the bell tolled in the cupola atop Nassau Hall.

“Ah, I must be going,” Einstein said, putting one hand on the back of the pew and levering himself to his feet. “I am sorry if I have disturbed you with so much talk.”

“Not at all. It was very interesting.”

“Ah, but it is just such talk that gets me into trouble,” the professor said with a chuckle. “I envy you your work.”

If only he knew, Rashid thought, that his own work spoke directly to many of the same issues. Where Einstein was pushing the boundaries of knowledge forward, in the hope of learning ever more, Rashid was studying the past, in the hope of gleaning from it what man might, to his sorrow, have forgotten. A chill coursed through his old bones. He knew from Simone that the physical examination of the ossuary was progressing. What would happen if, through some rash or hasty action, the secrets that the papyri only hinted at were acted upon? He was desperate to unravel the mysteries before some dreadful menace was unwittingly released.

As Einstein sidled into the aisle, Rashid considered leaving with him, but then thought better of it. He did not wish to presume too much. “Are you sure you don’t want these back?” he said, holding out the lozenges.

“A gift.”

As if to confirm his impression that Einstein lived with one foot in the material world and one in some other, Rashid couldn’t help but notice, as the scientist walked down the dimly illumined nave, that he passed from beams of light into patches of shadow, and that even on a day as chilly and wet as this, he wore no socks. No wonder he carried cough drops.