The Einstein Prophecy (21 page)

Whatever was going on, Lucas couldn’t wait any longer. As Andy looped the rope handle of the sack around his neck again, Lucas stepped out of the shadows and said, “Leave it there.”

Paying no attention at all, Andy straightened up and shifted the sack to fit neatly between his shoulder blades.

Had he heard him? “I said, leave it there.”

This time Andy glanced up from under the hood, but the look in his eyes was of utter incomprehension. For Lucas, it was like staring into the eyes of a beast, not a man.

Lucas repeated his order a third time, and Andy tilted his head to one side, as if out of curiosity. His eyes blinked furiously, uncontrollably, and then a light seemed to flicker on behind them. A yellow gleam, like a bolt of sunlight glancing off tarnished bronze. A gleam like the one Lucas had seen in the empty eye sockets of the skull.

As he watched in horror, a smile creased Andy’s lips, widening until it seemed almost to split his face, baring his teeth and projecting no mirth at all, only malice. Then he turned around and jumped with blinding speed directly at the doors to the museum, wrenching them entirely off their hinges and shattering the glass into a thousand pieces. As the shards, tinkling like tiny bells, rained down on the floor around him, Lucas saw Andy land on all fours on the walkway outside, shake the fragments of glass loose from the rain slicker, and then scramble with his rucksack into the night.

Lucas leaped through the jagged hole where the doors had been, and ran after him. In the dark and the rain, it was hard enough just to see him. To make matters worse, his quarry was loping along, close to the ground, like a wolf, dodging from one side to another, following no clear course, but gradually making his way up campus, and toward the lights of the town. There was a scream of terror as an unsuspecting student, heading home from the library, was bowled over. Lucas found him lying on his back in a puddle, his wire spectacles twisted on his face, mutely pointing in the direction that his attacker had fled. Lucas hurried on, gaining ground slowly but surely. In the distance, he could hear the commotion of traffic in town, and he could see that Andy was losing steam. Lucas picked up his own pace, and when he found himself within striking distance, lunged for the bottom of the rucksack. He tugged on it, hard, and Andy lost his footing on the damp grass, slipping onto his side. In the light of the lamppost, his face now was unrecognizable—it was a mask of pure depravity, frozen in the rictus of that agonizing smile.

“Stop!” Lucas shouted as he felt the stitches in his arm pop loose.

Then Andy was up on his feet again—or was it his paws?—and galloping with the sack toward a low stone wall that ran along the perimeter of the lawn on Washington Road. Lucas expected him to change directions and stick to the darkness of the campus, but instead, he took a mighty leap over the wall and skidded on all fours into the busy lanes of the street.

The first car he dodged, and the second, too, but a moment later a yellow bus slammed into him, sending his body flying, the black slicker spreading like the wings of a bat. The bus careened into a flimsy newsstand that disintegrated like a pile of twigs. Horns blared, people screamed, loose newspapers were picked up and blown around in the wind and rain. By the time Lucas got there, the bus driver was standing in the wreckage, saying, “Where’d he go? I know I hit somebody.” He bent down and ran his finger along the dent in his front fender. “And see? There’s blood.”

Lucas looked up and down the street, blazing with the headlights of stopped cars. Shielding his one good eye from the rain, he searched for any sign of Andy.

But the man and his rucksack had vanished into the night.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Edward R. Murrow was doing his regular 8:00 p.m. broadcast on the radio, reporting this time from a pitched battle in a place called the Hürtgen Forest, when Simone heard a knock on her hotel room door. More cautious now than she had ever been in her life, she didn’t remove the chain or even look through the peephole before asking, “Who is it?”

“It’s me.”

Sliding back the chain and turning the lock, she threw the door open to find Lucas, soaked to the skin in his bomber jacket and leaning against the doorjamb as if too exhausted even to stand. He was holding his left arm with his hand.

“What’s happened to you?” she said, drawing him into the room and locking the door behind him.

“I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?’

But he didn’t answer—he sounded as if he barely had the breath to speak.

“Let me get you some water.”

“You wouldn’t have anything stronger, would you?”

She was about to say no, when she remembered that the hotel management, still trying to make amends for all of the tragedy that had befallen her under their roof (though how could they?) had sent up a basket of fruit and a decanter of fine brandy. She poured him a glass, and he tossed it down, wincing.

“Is it your arm?” she said, and he nodded. She helped him to remove the wet jacket, and then his shirt, draping them on the radiator to dry. The bandages were pink where several of his stitches had popped. “Oh my God, let me take care of this.”

Of the many things she had learned from her late father, one was never to travel anywhere without a first aid kit. Retrieving it from the bathroom cabinet, she poured him another generous shot of the brandy, then sat him down in the desk chair and said, “Now stay still.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“How did you do this?” she said as she knelt in front of him, intent as any surgeon, using Q-tips and antiseptic and fresh washcloths to clean up the area. She had never been this intimately close to him, never seen his bare chest or arms, never smelled his sweat or felt his breath on the back of her neck as she bent to her task. She tried to concentrate on the work at hand, dabbing at the wound, cutting and applying a strip of sterile bandages, but she was finding it hard to focus.

“I went by Andy Brandt’s apartment,” he began, and when she looked up inquiringly, he continued, telling her about his suspicions and what he had seen there, including the missing blue folder. He told her how he had chased Andy to the art museum, and from the museum, across the campus and on into town. The bus accident, the absent body. And now, here he was, making sure that she was safe and sound.

“I had to see for myself,” he said in a tight voice, “that you were all right.”

Simone, sitting back on her haunches, was moved by the emotion evident in his tone, and stunned by all that he had just told her. Although she realized that the accident with Brandt should have been the most troubling part of Lucas’s story—the man could be lying dead somewhere—that wasn’t the part that truly mattered to her. “How do we get the folder back?” she said.

“I had to give a police report at the scene,” Lucas said. “The cops know who was hit.”

“But even if they go to his apartment, that doesn’t mean they’ll surrender any of his property to us—even if we say it was stolen.”

“Actually, it does.”

“Why?”

“Because I made a call from the lobby. To Colonel Macmillan.”

“Oh,” she said, “of course. You had to.” Their entire mission had just gone up in smoke. She gathered up the supplies and stood before his chair.

“I had to tell him that the bones and artifacts had been stolen.”

Simone could well imagine the kind of reaction that the colonel, ill-tempered under the best of circumstances, had displayed. “Was it bad?”

Lucas cocked his head and gave her a wry smile. “Let’s just say I won’t be getting any medals soon. But he’ll have started the wheels turning, that much I can guarantee. Do you think I could have another shot of that brandy?”

She handed him the glass and the bottle, and went to the bathroom to put the first aid kit away. Resting her hands on the sides of the sink, she stared at herself in the mirror of the medicine chest, wondering who she was, who she had become over the past few weeks. She had circles under her eyes from lack of sleep, her long black hair was tangled and unbrushed. Her father was gone forever; she was staying in a strange hotel in a foreign country in the middle of a war. All of her possessions were stuffed into a couple of battered suitcases. And she didn’t seem to be any closer to figuring out the ossuary’s secrets or ensuring its return to Egypt. Even on a desert island, she doubted she could have felt more marooned.

Compounding the problem was the shirtless, wounded, and weary man sitting at her desk in the next room. What did she want from him? she asked herself. What could he give her?

And what was she prepared to offer in return?

In the mirror, she saw his face appear over her shoulder. His chin was sooty with stubble; his black patch glistened from the rain. She felt his hands turning her around, then pulling her close. His fingers went under her chin, tilting her face up toward his own, and though she knew full well what was happening, she felt immobilized, unsure, confused. She simply let him touch his lips to hers. She let him steal her breath as if it were his own. She let his scruffy face scratch her cheek.

Then he kissed her again, harder. Longer. More insistently.

She felt his hands coursing down her body, as if sculpting every inch, and before she could stop it—even if she had wanted to—something inside her, like a dam too swollen to hold fast, gave way, bursting wide open. Her lips pressed against his, tasting the sweet burn of the brandy, and her arms went up around his bare shoulders.

On the bed, he laid her sideways, her shoes thumping softly onto the carpet, her tousled hair fanning out on the cream-colored coverlet. Flicking off the lamp, he knelt beside her, his hands roughly unfastening the buttons of her blouse and tossing it aside, followed by the rest of her clothes. Above the drumbeat of her heart, she heard Murrow’s voice, scratchy with static, and the hissing of the radiator. Wherever Lucas touched her—and it was as if he were touching her everywhere at once—his fingertips left an electric trail. She let her mind follow that trail, let her thoughts evaporate, let her hands and lips go where they wanted . . . and when she felt his body on top of hers, firm and urgent and all enveloping, she could no longer tell where her own skin ended and where his began.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“
Nein, nein
,” Gödel said, impatiently wiping a string of figures off the blackboard with the sleeve of his tweed jacket. “How did you ever pass the polytechnic exam?”

“Easy,” Einstein replied from his easy chair. “I took it twice.”

“
Ach
.” Gödel quickly scrawled a new sequence of numbers and mathematical symbols on the cleared corner of the blackboard. “I’m surprised that was all.”

The rest of the board was still cluttered with complex field equations that Einstein had been working on for weeks. He knew that his calculations sometimes needed review by some fresh eye, but it was difficult to find anyone up to the task. Gödel, thank God, was perhaps the premier mathematician in the world—purer, in a way, than even the brilliant John von Neumann—and it was why Einstein had lobbied so hard for him to be allowed into America, and to join him in Princeton. Still, if Oppenheimer knew that even Gödel had been privy to some of this work, he’d throw a fit. It was all as highly classified as any information could be.

While Gödel silently assessed his own corrections, Einstein went to the window, streaked with rain, and peered out at his rear garden. Night had fallen hours ago and a lonely light in the alley revealed a swarm of brown leaves swirling against the doors of the old garage; as neither Einstein nor Helen Dukas could drive and relied upon friends to take them anywhere a bus didn’t go, the garage was used instead to store boxes of his unsorted papers from the Berlin Institute.

“So, what do you think now?” Gödel said, standing back. “Does this not resolve the difficulty you were in?”

Einstein studied the blackboard, squinting in the inadequate light from the torchiere by the door.

“Yes, that’s better. Thank you, Kurt. I should have seen that myself.”

Although Einstein had long prided himself on his thought experiments—his ability to imagine fantastic scenarios and, by doing so, arrive at remarkable conclusions—it was in the more mundane areas of mathematics that he sometimes tripped over his own feet. Once he had achieved some illuminating insight, he was not so interested in explaining the thousand steps by which he had come to it. He wasn’t even sure he knew. His mind was already extrapolating from the new concept—which he accepted intuitively to be right—and racing onward.

From downstairs, he could smell spaghetti sauce simmering in the pot, and hear the chatter of Helen talking to Adele Gödel as they prepared the meal and set the table. He glanced at the clock; it was nearly nine. No wonder he was hungry. As if on cue, Adele called from below, “Enough, you two. This is not Berlin—in America we eat at a decent hour.”

Gödel, still focused on the blackboard, didn’t move, and Einstein had to get up and put a hand on his narrow shoulder to get his attention. Even a gesture that small, and coming from his closest friend in the world, made the man flinch.

“We can finish later,” Einstein said gently. “Let’s have some dinner.”

He shepherded Gödel down the creaking steps and into the dining room, where the anxious Austrian sat down in his chair like a man about to undergo a Gestapo interrogation. His wife made a show of helping Helen to bring in the bowls of pasta and sauce, and then ladling them herself onto Kurt’s plate. He watched her like a hawk, and Einstein exchanged a quick and subtle glance with Helen, who, equally familiar with the couple’s strange protocols, pointedly paid no attention while lifting the lid off a tureen of steamed asparagus.

Even so, Gödel waited until he had seen Adele dig into her own dinner before he cautiously lifted his fork.

“Eat,
mein strammer bursche
,” she said, using her pet name for him.
Strapping
lad
, it meant, and it always brought a tiny smile to his thin lips. “I made this sauce myself, from the tomatoes from our garden.”

Adele, who wore her hair in curly gold-and-red ringlets, was as natural and outgoing as her husband was reserved. But she doted on her husband, and fiercely protected him from as many of the vicissitudes of life as possible. Back in Vienna in 1937, she had even fought off some teenage Brownshirts who, mistaking Kurt for a Jew, had attacked the couple on their way home from the Nachtfalter, the popular club where she performed. She had kicked and beaten them with her furled umbrella until they ran for cover. Kurt had been traumatized for months.

“You two boys work too hard,” Adele said, putting some asparagus on her husband’s plate, and then cutting the stalks into shorter segments. “I am going to get you some marbles to play with,” she said with a laugh that made her earrings jangle.

“Ah, Kurt will win every time,” Einstein said. “He is the sportsman, not me.”

Gödel, inspecting a bit of the asparagus, beamed; he enjoyed this kind of banter, as it made him feel included without his having to make jokes himself. And he plainly knew it was all in good fun.

Einstein nursed a paternal feeling toward his younger colleague, in part because he had a son of his own, Eduard, who suffered from mental illness. Like Gödel, Eduard had immense talents—he was a technically accomplished musician and a fine writer—but his abilities were so entangled in a skein of neuroses and phobias, fears and delusions, that he could not function outside the confines of the Swiss facility where he lived. It was the greatest sorrow of Einstein’s life that he could not help his son, and it made watching over Kurt seem like a kind of penance.

“Kurt has been trying to convince me—again—that there are psychic elementals that are as real as any physical properties,” Einstein said, as he could not share what they had actually been doing. “If we’re not careful, he will be able to use his mental energy to levitate this table.”

Adele planted her elbows on the cloth. “He’d better not try. Helen has put out her best china.”

Helen smiled, and Gödel, dabbing at his lips with the linen napkin, launched into another of his ontological proofs. Even as far back as his days in the Vienna Circle, he had rejected the positivism of Bertrand Russell and his cohorts for taking much too dim a view of intuition. Gödel freely admitted that the intuition of a concept was not proof; he argued that it was the opposite. “We do not analyze intuition to see a proof, but by intuition we see something without a proof.” Recently, however, he’d gone beyond that conclusion, too, and asserted that there must then logically be a realm unknowable to our simple senses, where ultimate truth resided. Although Einstein found such mystical speculation unpersuasive, its proponent was not so easy to dismiss out of hand. After all, whose portrait did he himself have hanging on a nail in his study upstairs? Isaac Newton, who had devoted countless hours to the lunatic aims of alchemy.

“If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning,” Kurt said, his head down as he carefully lifted a single strand of spaghetti from his plate, “then there must be such a thing as an afterlife. Otherwise, what is the meaning of this one?”

“Oh, Kurt,” Adele said, “why must everything have a meaning? Maybe we are just here to eat spaghetti and talk and laugh and,” she paused, replenishing her glass and raising it to her host, “drink good wine.”

“You said it yourself, Albert,” Kurt persisted.

“What did I say?”

“That God does not play dice with the universe. The cosmos cannot simply be a game, designed at random and made without reason.”

“But perhaps He is playing some other game,” Einstein said. “A game we don’t know yet, with rules we can’t understand.”

“But every game
has
rules—you will concede that much,
ja
? Let us take this quantum physics.”

“You may have it.”

“You do not like it because you cannot accept this notion of—what is it you wish to call it?—spooky action at a distance.”

“A particle, in two places at one time? No, I am not yet convinced of that.”

“And I will not try to convince you. Still, there must be a consistency to it all. The problem is simply that we have not been able to discover—at least not yet—the invisible hand that moves these particles about.”

“Is there an invisible body to go with this invisible hand?” Einstein joked, but once Gödel was on a tear, it was tough to distract him.

“At present, they may seem to move in a fundamentally illogical way—”

“That they do.”

“And thus you regard this as less than optimal.”

“I do.”

“But what might appear to be optimal to you may not appear to be optimal to such particles, operating as they do in a system we do not comprehend.”

“Now there I do agree,” Einstein said, twirling a thick clump of the spaghetti around his fork. “It is a system I do not comprehend. And that is why, like Don Quixote with his lance, I will continue my quest.”

“For your Dulcinea?” Adele interjected.

“Yes. And the unified field theory will prove just as beautiful. Oh, I know what all the young Turks think of it, and of me. But I have always proceeded as much by what I feel here,” he said, patting his belly, “as I do here.” He pointed at his temple with the loaded fork.

“My point exactly,” Gödel said. “Intuition, you feel it in your gut.”

“Albert, you’re going to get spaghetti in your hair,” Helen clucked.

“Too late,” Adele said, reaching over with her napkin to disengage an errant strand.

“You’re as bad as a child,” Helen said, and Einstein laughed.

“I think I need to start my life all over again,” he said. “I should have learned better manners as a boy.”

“According to your own theory, you still can do that,” Gödel said, but before he could elaborate, there was a scratching at the dining room window, and when they all looked, a pair of green eyes flashed behind the glass.

“Oh, my,” Helen said, swiftly rising from her chair and going into the foyer.

“What is it?” Kurt asked nervously.

“It’s nothing,” Adele said. “Eat your dinner before it gets cold.”

The front door opened, and a gust of autumn air blew into the house, then it closed again and Helen returned with the tabby cat in her arms. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I’ve been leaving a bowl of milk for her after Albert leaves for work.”

Although he hadn’t been aware of this particular phobia, Einstein realized that he should have guessed—Kurt was frozen in his chair, staring at the cat as if it were a tiger about to pounce. What wasn’t the man afraid of?

“Now, Kurt, it’s just a little pussycat,” Adele said, smoothing his arm with the palm of her hand. “Remember how much you liked the cat I kept at the nightclub?”

“I’m sorry,” Helen said, “I didn’t know—”

“But maybe you could take the cat into the kitchen,” Adele urged, hoping to avert a crisis.

As Helen did so, Einstein asked, “Why did you say that my theory could help me to learn better manners?”

“That is not what I meant,” Kurt said, still plainly perturbed.

“So, you approve of my manners? That is good to know.”

“What I meant,” Kurt said, taking slow breaths and keeping his eyes riveted to his plate, “was that if you accept the premises of general relativity—”

“I certainly do.”

“—and if you succeed in wedding them to the gravitational field equations on which we have worked—”

“Go on. Go on.”

“Then you must, logically, assume that it would be possible to travel in time . . . and in that way to go back to your own boyhood.”

“
Ach
, I’m too old for that. Once was enough.”

“What have I missed?” Helen said, returning to her seat.

“My Kurt is explaining how we can grow younger,” Adele said.

“Then I am all ears.”

“If the universe and everything in it rotates, like a vast cosmic whirlpool, then it follows that time cannot be a straight linear sequence of events—first this happens and then that—no, it must instead bend like the universe itself. It must follow the curve,
ja
, and space-time projectories must therefore be able to loop back on themselves. How could they not? In theory, they must be able to return to the very places that they have already been.”

“So how do I get back to my sixteenth birthday?” Adele said. “That is what I’d like to know.”

“You would need a rocket ship,” Einstein said, joining in the speculation. “And it would have to travel very fast indeed.”

“But, theoretically, if you went fast enough, and if the curve was wide enough,” Kurt said, “you could visit any time at all—past, present, or future.”

“Oh, no,” Adele said, “the future can wait. I don’t want to get older any faster than I have to.”

“Nor do I,” Helen said, starting to clear the table. “Who wants coffee?”

As Helen and Adele prepared coffee and dessert, Einstein questioned Gödel further—he did not agree with all his conclusions, in part because they could never be empirically proven, but he was fascinated, as always, by the manner in which a mind as astute as Kurt’s could tease out such implications from his own theories. He would have to think on it, hard, if he wished to find the fallacy or fault in Gödel’s logic.

By the time Kurt and Adele took their leave, it was nearly midnight and Helen, exhausted from the long day, went up to her room. Einstein was ready to turn in himself, but as was his ritual, he went into the kitchen first, to have a glass of warm milk. Looking in the icebox, he found only an inch or so left in the bottle.