The Einstein Prophecy by Robert Masello Read Free Book Online Page B

back.”
    “What utility could I possibly have?”
    “You’re a testament to our fighting men.”
    “Not anymore, I’m not.”
    Delaney shrugged. “Maybe they figure somebody’s got to be around to remember all the cultural achievements that are now being systematically destroyed. Either way, you’re here.”
    Oddly enough, it wasn’t until this moment that Lucas realized it was at all unusual to have been so readily reappointed. Hadn’t his invitation cited “Princeton in the nation’s service”—the motto that had been bestowed upon it by Woodrow Wilson, president of the college from 1902 to 1910—as the reason?
    “Ed Randall’s still here, and he said to remind you that you still owe him five bucks,” Delaney said, before running through a litany of who else was still on faculty—most of them older men, several of whom had served in the First World War—and bringing him up to date on changes in the town. “The Garden Theater finally got a concession stand with decent popcorn, the hoagie shop’s closed—oh, and there’s a good Chinese laundry now, where the shoe repair used to be.” Funny, how life had gone on.
    Glancing at the newspapers, Lucas saw a headline on Newark’s Star-Ledger —“Navy Convoy Torpedoed in North Atlantic”—followed by a subhead, “USS Van Buren Sunk by U-Boat.” He picked up the paper and scanned the front page, where there was a picture of another ship, the USS Seward, with a red cross painted on its side, safely in the dock.
    “Yeah, bad news today,” Delaney said. “You hear about that submarine attack yet?”
    “No, I hadn’t seen the papers till now,” he said, reading quickly.
    “The Germans sank a destroyer. The amazing thing, though, is that the ship with the wounded on board got hit, too, but somehow managed to make it to port.”
    The article went on to say that the Nazi submarine, hit by a depth charge, had exploded directly under the Seward, blowing a breach in its bow and causing it to take on water. Turning to an inside page for the rest of the story, Lucas saw a couple of photos of wounded soldiers being carried off the ship on stretchers, along with a shot of sheet metal haphazardly riveted over what was presumably the gaping hole in the hull. “How the pumps kept up with the flood,” the captain of the Seward was quoted, “is nothing short of a miracle. It felt like the hand of God must have been under us, keeping the ship afloat.”
    “So much for the Geneva Conventions,” Delaney said, slurping his coffee. “The Seward was clearly marked as a Red Cross ship.”
    In a short sidebar, the paper mentioned that there had been a freak accident in the harbor, resulting in yet another death, when a heavy crate, being lifted from the hold under tight security, broke loose and fell onto the loading dock. Sometimes, it seemed to Lucas, death was everywhere you looked—or didn’t look—and he wondered if his own close call had somehow immunized him. Wishful thinking. But in wartime, wishes were sometimes all you had.

CHAPTER FIVE

    It was the furtive knock on his study door that finally brought him down to earth again. And he was lucky it had.
    Einstein knew that sitting in the window seat was not a good idea—the seat was hard, and he had a tendency to sit too long in one position—but he liked the way the sunshine filtered through the stained-glass obelus, the mathematical sign for division, and spread the colors of a rainbow across the notebook in his lap. It reminded him of one of his first thought experiments, conducted when he was only fourteen and pictured himself riding on the back of a beam of light. Even his most complex and profound theorems had been rooted in just such flights of fancy.
    The knock was not repeated, though he was perfectly aware of who it was. He and his young colleague, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, had an understanding: they knew that either one of them might be so deeply absorbed in thought that any