The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER TEN

“What have you got now?” Delaney asked, and the ever-eager Andy Brandt, a young preceptor in the Anthropology Department, said, “Guess.”

“I’m not an anthropologist,” Delaney said, gingerly taking the tiny skull and peering at it this way and that. “Or a paleontologist, for that matter.” Brandt also worked in Guyot Hall, but downstairs, on the main floor where the university displayed its eclectic collection of dinosaur bones and petrified artifacts gathered from expeditions all over the world.

He seemed to spend the bulk of his time, however, prowling the geophysics labs, and pestering Delaney. He was forever hanging around, antsy as a five-year-old, and asking as many questions.

“It’s not from the dinosaur collection,” Brandt reassured him, “if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s from the mammal drawers.”

Not much better, Delaney thought; Andy shouldn’t be removing specimens from the collections at all. Shrugging, he said, “I don’t know — maybe it’s from an ancestor of the common cat. Or even a skunk. This is more your field than mine.”

“But how old do you think it is?”

“Who cares?” he replied, though he knew full well what Brandt was getting at. He wanted Delaney to conduct another one of his experiments to determine the age of the specimen. If Brandt spent half as much time on his own research as he did poking his nose into Delaney’s, he’d have a full professorship by now.

But Delaney wasn’t interested in trying out his new process like it was some sort of game; he knew it could be extremely important, in ways that even he could not yet fully envision, and he wanted to make sure that every trial he did, every test he conducted, brought him closer to perfecting the technique. Although the research into radio isotopes and their relative rates of decay had begun in 1941 while Professor Willard Libby had been working at Princeton under a Guggenheim grant, Libby had since been recruited by Columbia, where he was now involved on a top-secret project. Consequently, it was up to Delaney to carry the torch.

Only the day before, he had been given direct orders, by an officer of the OSS, to do just that.

“So, what do you think?” Brandt asked, with an encouraging grin. “Can you do it?” With his perfect white teeth and his blond cowlick, he looked like a kid out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

“Do what?” Delaney said, pretending not to follow.

“Date it.”

“Is this just another one of your fishing expeditions, or do you actually need this information for some valid, scientific purpose?”

“Scientific purpose,” Andy said, trying to look suitably sincere. “Scout’s honor.”

For all Delaney knew, the kid still was an Eagle Scout. “Leave it on the counter,” he said, “and if I have time, I’ll run some tests.”

Andy put it down next to the microscope, saying, “But let me know when you’re doing them. I’d like to observe.”

Given the chance, Delaney thought, he’d probably like to observe him shaving, too. In a way, it was flattering — Andy had plainly adopted him as his unofficial mentor — if only he could ignore the guy’s pushiness.

As if sensing that he might have gone too far, Andy adopted a more casual tone, and said, “So, you heard about what happened last night at the art museum?”

“No. I’ve been too busy working.” The implicit admonition was lost on Andy.

“The janitor was attacked by a flock of bats.”

“What?”

“In the museum. The conservation wing.”

“Jesus. Is he okay?”

Andy’s fingers riffled idly through the mail lying on the counter — including the OSS packet. “He’s at the hospital in town.”

“Leave those alone,” Delaney said, moving the missives out of reach.

“Sure, sorry. But I hear it’s not looking good. Might be rabies, might be something even worse.”

Rabies could be bad enough. A boyhood friend had died of it. But bats, attacking a human en masse? And inside a campus building? It seemed impossible.

He hastily wrapped up his work, stashed most of his important papers in a double-wide green metal locker bolted to the wall, then ushered Andy out into the hall. Shutting the door after him, he said, “Don’t take any more specimens out of the downstairs labs unless you first get permission from your department chair.”

Andy gave him a mock salute and headed back to his department. Delaney rushed down the stairs and over to the art museum, wondering if Lucas had heard the news. The campus, always quiet between classes, was unusually so now, given the sparse enrollment. He saw almost no one, apart from a loiterer or two outside Fine Hall, where they were no doubt hoping to catch a glimpse of Einstein.

At the entrance to the museum, one of the university’s campus police was standing guard with a walkie-talkie clipped to his lapel. “Sorry,” he said, “the museum’s closed for the day.”

“I’m faculty,” Delaney said, flashing his laminated ID card.

“Closed to everyone.”

“And I have this,” he added, drawing the OSS clearance letter from the inside pocket of his Windbreaker.

The proctor looked it over, but this decision was undoubtedly beyond his pay grade.

“I have to get started,” Delaney said. “I’m expected in the conservation wing.”

With some hesitation, the proctor let him pass, and Delaney made his way through the deserted galleries, lined with classical statuary, and into the European painting and fine arts galleries. Nowhere did he see any sign of a bat attack. Bursting through the rear door marked “CONSERVATION: Authorized Personnel Only,” he saw a janitor in gray coveralls bent over a bucket, wringing out a mop. “Excuse me,” he said, “have you seen Professor Athan?”

Straightening up, the man said, “Last I noticed, he was mopping this floor.”

Delaney looked appropriately bemused. “Since when did you join the custodial staff?”

“Somebody had to do it,” Lucas said, glad to have the company. “Security’s so tight now, only I could get in.” He’d been at it for an hour, and his back was as tight as a drum. “In fact, how the hell did you manage it?”

“You forget,” Delaney replied, waving the OSS letter. “I’m on this job, too.”

“So you’ve met with the charming Colonel Macmillan?”

“Right after you did. The seat was still warm.” He looked around the room. “I heard about what happened last night, but I still can’t believe it.”

“Nobody can. There were exterminators in here earlier to give us the all-clear, and even they said they’d never heard of anything like it.”

“I hope that Wally pulls through okay.”

Lucas nodded in agreement and gestured at the tarp loosely draped over something large mounted in the middle of the room. “That damn thing has brought nothing but bad luck everywhere it’s gone.”

“What do you mean?”

He tapped his eye patch and said, “This happened about a minute after I’d found it.”

“I didn’t know.”

“How could you?” Lucas hadn’t told him the whole story, nor had he mentioned the German boy blown to bits, or Private Toussaint, who had lost a leg. Or, for that matter, the ship that had almost been sunk transporting it to the United States; he’d noted the name of the USS Seward on the transportation papers.

“All I’ve seen so far is a faint photograph. You want to show me what all the fuss has been about?”

Lucas couldn’t think of any reason to refuse, but at the same time he could hardly bear to expose the ossuary. The whole time he’d been cleaning up in the conservation room, he’d done his level best to avert his eyes from the hulking shape beneath the tarp. He had hoped never to see the thing again, and now, here it was, not only deposited on his doorstep, but requiring his diligent study.

Leaning the mop against the wall, Lucas stepped to the platform and took hold of the tarp. What was he so afraid of? It was just a box of bones. Taking a deep breath, and with a grand gesture like a magician completing a trick, he pulled the tarp away. “Behold… the eighth wonder of the world.”

The photo hadn’t done it justice, nor had his own memories. A great white chest — calcite alabaster, if he had to guess — its gabled roof and elaborate carvings had been largely worn away by time. But it was clear that a lot of trouble had been gone to in order to create this thing, and there was something that was still unnervingly potent about it.

“I found it at the bottom of an iron mine outside Strasbourg. Thirty seconds later, a land mine went off, and I was flying through the air. When I came to, I was bumping along in the back of an army ambulance.” Only the mayor, standing outside the ring of ore carts, had been spared. He’d applied the tourniquet to Toussaint’s leg and come to their rescue.

Delaney stepped up the ramp and ran his finger over the smooth surface of the lid. “Why’s it so damn cold?”

“Isn’t that more your department?” Lucas replied, touching the ossuary himself. The stone was cold, colder than the ambient temperature of the room, and what little he could make out of the figures was confusing. On one side of the lid, it looked like a shepherd with a staff, herding animals, presumably sheep, but on the other side, the figure looked more like a monkey, with long arms dangling down and a curled-up tail. Words and symbols, some of which resembled Egyptian hieroglyphs, had been incised into the sides of the stone. One looked like a diamond tilted on its axis.

To top it all off, the box had been bound shut with several crudely wrought iron chains. Cutting through them, Lucas thought, was not going to be easy.

“You know what’s inside it?” Delaney asked.

“Bones, for sure. But maybe something else, too. Coins, jewelry. Judging from the glyphs, this one’s probably Egyptian. But ossuaries found in the Roman catacombs have contained everything from the occupant’s cosmetic tools to her house cat.”

“We’re going to need a blowtorch or a hacksaw to get these chains removed.”

“I’ve already put in a request to the campus maintenance department.”

Lucas’s instructions from Colonel Macmillan had been to gauge the age and origins of the box, employing Delaney’s latest research into radio isotopes wherever useful. Any organic remains inside would be especially susceptible to his techniques. But he could see, just from the expression behind Delaney’s scruffy beard, that something was bothering him. “You okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” Delaney said, though he had promptly removed his hand from the cold stone. “I just had kind of a weird feeling.”

“Of what?” It was comforting to Lucas to hear that someone else felt it, too.

“The calm before the storm. When I was growing up in the Midwest, you could always tell when a tornado was brewing. The air would get really still, the birds would stop singing, and the sky… the sky would turn this kind of sickly green.” He rubbed his fingers together, as if to remove any residue from the stone.

“How much of a sample are you going to need?” Lucas asked, and it took Delaney several seconds to refocus. “To do your carbon-14 tests?”

“Oh, right — not much. Just a sliver or two of bone, whatever you can spare. Desiccated flesh, too, if there’s anything left of it.”

“There probably won’t be much. Traditionally, corpses in northern Africa and the Middle East were first thrown into a ditch and left there for wild animals and the elements to strip away all the meat. When only the skeleton remained, the pieces were picked up — the skull most importantly — and consigned to the box. You should have plenty of bones to choose from, especially given the royal treatment these remains received.”

“Do you mean that literally?” Delaney asked. “Was this the sarcophagus of a king?”

“Hard to say. There’re a lot of markings on it — a lot more than you usually see on these things, so I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

“I see a monograph getting written, with full tenure not far behind.”

“Not likely,” Lucas replied. “The OSS will never let this project become public knowledge. I’ll be lucky if they don’t bury me with it.”

Delaney nodded, turned away, and stepped down the ramp. “Got a precept to lead. Thanks for the tour.”

But even if he hadn’t had a class to teach, Lucas could tell he was eager to leave. So was Lucas, though he found himself riveted for several more minutes, examining the bizarre markings. Then he picked up the tarp, and though there was no real reason to cover it up again, threw it over the ossuary. Retrieving the mop, he hastily wiped up the remaining mess on the floor, got out of the janitor’s coveralls, and made for the exit himself.

When he closed the door behind him, he leaned his back against it, face tilted toward the ceiling, and deeply exhaled. But he couldn’t shake the feeling, completely irrational, that something else was breathing, too, right on the other side.