The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Get out of here!” Andy Brandt shouted at the kids gathered around the Caithness Man’s display case. “Go to school!”

“Make us!” one of them retorted.

“It’s a Saturday!” another one said.

But they did disperse, scooting around him and out the door of Guyot Hall, hooting and hollering as they skipped down the front steps. Those damn kids treated the collection of artifacts as if they were a freak show, and Andy longed for the chance to give a couple of them a good swat.

He couldn’t risk getting into any trouble with the university, however. It had taken a lot of cunning and a lot of time, to get securely situated there, and anything that called undue attention to him, or his work, would be dangerous to everyone involved. Most of all, to Andy.

Besides, he thought, as he unlocked the door to his cluttered first-floor lab, he had other, more immediate problems.

For one, he had felt like crap since sneaking into the conservation room with the key he’d secretly copied off of Delaney’s ring. From his perch behind the crates and easels stacked by the door, he’d only been able to see bits and pieces of what was going on. But he’d seen enough to know that it was an undertaking of great significance.

A movie camera had been set up, with that Egyptian woman running it, and although what Lucas and Delaney said to each other had been largely inaudible to him, he could hear their grunts and groans as they had sawed through the chains and removed the lid from a white stone chest. An ossuary, to be precise — the one his superiors back in Berlin had been tracking.

It was pure luck that Brandt had already been safely ensconced at Princeton when the thing arrived on campus. For purposes the Reich chose to keep secret, his original mission had been to keep a close eye on the radio isotope experiments being conducted in Delaney’s lab; no fool, Andy had surmised the reason had something to do with the invention of new weaponry. Then, out of the blue, this ossuary had shown up, and virtually overnight, all of the priorities had changed. It was enough to make Andy’s head spin.

“The artifact was stolen from the Führer’s own collection,” the encoded telegraph message had said. “It is critical to the war effort.”

A box of old bones?

“Alert us to any developments. Procure and immediately transmit any information relating to its study, disposition, or relocation.”

Okay, he’d thought. He would do as he was told.

Only, something very odd had happened the moment the box was opened. A chill wind had inexplicably sprung up out of nowhere, as if there were air filters or fans hidden around the room. He’d hunkered down, afraid that the easels might topple over and blow his cover, but something even more troubling had occurred instead. He’d felt certain that there was something in that wind, something sentient, though invisible — how crazy was that? — and that it was careening around the room, like a wild beast desperately searching for a way out of a trap. He’d been knocked flat, shivering, and when he could get back on all fours, he’d made a mad scramble for the door. Running through the dark gallery, he’d been sure something was following close on his heels, but he’d been too afraid to stop, or even look back.

All the way to his apartment, one dingy room on Harrison Street, where the grad students and preceptors lived, he’d had that same sense of something nipping at his heels. Once or twice, he had even imagined he heard a weird gibbering at his ear. Home, he’d slammed the door shut, thrown the bolt lock, and then slumped, utterly out of breath, against the edge of the bed, where his transmitter was cleverly concealed inside a compartment cut into the box spring.

But whatever sense of relief or safety he’d expected, it had not come. He didn’t feel that he had locked anything out.

On the contrary, he felt that he had locked something in.

Under the shower, even with the hot water running at full blast, he couldn’t get warm. After making his brief and surreptitious nightly broadcast to his foreign contact, he had gotten into bed with every blanket and sheet he owned piled on top of him. What the hell was wrong with him? Had he suddenly caught the flu, or some bizarre disease carried on that wind out of nowhere? It wasn’t like he’d be able to ask any of the others — Delaney, Lucas, or that Simone somebody — if they were feeling ill themselves. To do that, he’d have had to admit he’d been there in the first place.

The next morning, he’d awakened feeling even worse, so bad he’d contemplated going to the campus infirmary. He hadn’t felt like himself. Brushing his teeth, he hadn’t felt it was his own hand, under his own control, holding the brush. Shaving, he’d been wary of holding the blade close to his own neck. His eyes had a faint yellowish cast, like jaundice, and more than once he’d had the bizarre impression that someone else was looking out of them.

Even his actions had felt slightly… remote. Delayed. His mind had gone to a terrible place, to fatal diseases of muscular degeneration. He’d dropped to the floor and done a set of pushups, just to be sure that he still could. Then he had jogged in place with the radio news on. The war wasn’t going so well for the Axis powers on the Western Front. The four-hundred-mile long Siegfried Line, built by Hitler in the late 1930s to protect the borders of the old German empire, was under attack. A CBS reporter announced, “With any luck, the German redoubts are going to fall like dominoes. It won’t be easy — nothing in war ever is — but it looks like it will just be a matter of time before the Stars and Stripes are flying over the Fatherland.”

What, he had wondered, would happen to him when the war ended? In victory, his future would be assured… but in defeat? Would he wind up marooned in America?

But then, in a stroke of luck he could never have foreseen, Lucas and Delaney had dropped into his lap exactly what he wanted — a batch of bones and bone fragments that Andy knew had come straight out of that ossuary.

Pretending ignorance, he’d asked, “Where did these come from?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Lucas had replied.

“It does to an anthropologist.”

“Okay, then, from an anonymous donor. I just need you to tell me, as soon as possible, everything you can about their origin and anatomy.”

Sorting through them, Andy had seen a femur and a fibula, a tibia, a patella, a scapula, assorted odds and ends, and two skulls, one plainly misshapen.

“I’m especially interested,” Lucas had said, “in what they’re from — human or animal — and in how the creatures died. I also want to know if there are any signs of violence or disease having played a part. Can you do that for me?”

Not wanting to betray his eagerness, Andy’d said, “Well, I do have a lot of prep work to do for my senior seminar in—”

“Skip it. Do this first.”

And so he had. So he had.

Drawing the stool up to the lab counter now, he picked up where he had left off the day before — with the last fragment he had been working on. It was a nub of yellowed bone the size of a fat thumb, with a blunt base and sharpened end — and he held it again under the high-intensity lamp.

A knock sounded, and the door opened just enough for Lucas to put his head in. Andy had always meant to ask him how he’d lost that eye.

“Glad to see you’re hard at it,” Lucas said, coming in.

“That’s what you do when you don’t have tenure.”

“If it’s any comfort, I don’t either.”

“Maybe so, but they’re not going to let a combat veteran like you, a war hero, go.”

Lucas didn’t take the bait and divulge anything. Coming close enough to see the stub that Andy was studying, he asked, “That is one of the bones I gave you, right?”

“Yep.”

“So, what’s the verdict?”

Andy put it down. “I can tell you what it isn’t,” he said. Even then, he had to wonder if he should be sharing his findings so freely. After all, it wasn’t like Lucas and Delaney were his allies.

“Why don’t you start by telling me what you do know about the bones.”

But if he didn’t share what he had learned, he might find himself cut off from any further teamwork on this project — a project his superiors deemed of the utmost importance. “What I do know is that we’ve got a pretty eclectic selection here.” For the time being, he decided to err, if err it was, on the side of cooperation. Gesturing at the human skull and some other bones arranged on a worktable in the corner, he said, “Over there, we’ve got one almost complete skeleton.”

“Of what?”

“A man, on the tall side, and, putting aside the evident antiquity of the bones, very elderly. I know Delaney has some other samples — has he figured out anything of their actual age?” he asked innocently.

“They’re old. Maybe a couple of thousand years. Go on.”

“Okay,” Andy said, drawing the word out.

“Do you know what he died of?”

“Hard to say with any certainty. I can tell you that he led a hell of a hard life. There’s evidence of extreme nutritional deficiencies, along with more marks of physical violence than I can count, ranging from scratches and bites to fractures and bone breaks. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy had been a soldier or a gladiator or maybe even a slave. In any case, he took a lot of beatings.”

Lucas nodded, absorbing it all.

“I mean, by the end of his life, the guy had maybe six fingers and three teeth left, and judging from the indentation of the right zygomatic bone, I’d be surprised if he still had that eye at all.” He paused before adding, “Sorry, I guess you know how that goes.”

Ignoring the apology, Lucas said, “What about the other skull and fragments?”

Andy shrugged and turned on his stool to face the counter right behind him. “This one’s much more of a puzzle.”

“Why?”

He held up the smaller skull with its sloping brow, broad nasal plane, and unusually elongated mouth, to which several pointed incisors still clung. “You might think it’s human — and it’s close — but there are enough substantial anomalies to rule that out. I assumed it was one of our close simian cousins, maybe one of them that had died young, before it had grown to its full proportions.”

“And is it?”

“The contours of the bones and some of the tiny cartilaginous remnants are what you might expect to find in a sample like that,” Andy conceded, “but then there are some things that you definitely wouldn’t.”

“Such as?”

“Such as this,” he said, picking up the nubbin he’d been studying when Lucas came in.

“It looks like a shard of stone to me.”

“Oh, no, it’s not that. It’s definitely organic.”

“Is it a finger? You said the other skeleton was missing several of them.”

“It’s not that, either.”

“I don’t have all day, Brandt. What are you getting at?”

“A horn. It’s a piece of horn, like from a goat.”

“Okay, it’s from a goat.”

“Only it’s not. And it’s not from a bull or a rhino or anything else I can think of offhand.” He twirled it under the lamp. “Of course, it might help if you could provide me with some salient information on how and where you found it.” It was time, he thought, for a little quid pro quo. He wanted to hear, from Lucas himself, what he already knew about the ossuary. He wanted to elicit at least that one small vote of trust.

“I told you, it doesn’t matter,” Lucas replied distractedly. “Just put down everything you’ve told me in a written report, right away. I need it.”

“Who for?”

Now Lucas looked irritated. “Has it ever occurred to you simply to do what you’re asked?”

“Has it ever occurred to you that you’re not my boss?” Andy shot back, before he could stop himself. “You’re not even in my department. I’m the one doing you the favor.”

Lucas couldn’t argue with that, and Andy knew it. Still, it wasn’t a smart move to piss him off; he should have held his tongue.

“You’re right,” Lucas replied, in an even tone of voice that Andy could see was costing him. “Slip it under my study door at your earliest convenience.”

Well, that had not been the most fruitful exchange, Andy thought — he’d given out plenty, and he’d received nothing in return, except for the renewed sense that these bones were important — very important — and it behooved him to figure out why.

For the next couple of hours, he worked on the written report, while sipping hot tea one moment to warm himself up, and a glass of cold water the next to cool himself down. It was as if his body was at war with itself. Outside, he could hear the occasional sound of a tuba or a trombone blaring as a marching band member made his way down toward the stadium. There was a football game that afternoon, though he could not recall the opponent. Was it Columbia, or maybe Dartmouth? On the one hand, he tried to participate in all these collegiate events; he wanted to give the impression he was devoted to the school and to his employment there, however tenuous. In truth, though, he couldn’t stand all this rah-rah nonsense. At Heidelberg, the university had been a temple dedicated to things of the mind, not the body, and that was just one of the myriad ways in which the German system, in his estimation, surpassed the American.

He was getting too tired to see straight. The notes he was typing up were rife with misspellings, and his back was killing him from sitting on the stool. Shutting down the lab, he put on his coat, locked the door behind him, and went out into the dim exhibition hall.

Tucking in his scarf on the way to the front doors, he noticed that something was lying on the floor at the base of the Caithness Man’s display case, and went over to pick it up.

It was an open pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum, which had no doubt fallen out of the pocket of one of those brats he’d chased out of the building earlier. Oh well, it was his own good fortune now, as the pack was nearly full. He took out a stick, and was about to put the rest in his pocket, when, in jest, he offered one to the Caithness Man.

“Gum?” he said, but the word froze in his throat as he stared at his own reflection in the glass — or what should have been his own reflection. What he saw there instead, pressed up against the glass, was the face of a leering gargoyle with beady golden eyes and a slash of mouth that stretched from ear to pointed ear. He reared back, and as he did, the image — the hallucination — evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. Now it was only the Caithness Man again, lashed to his stake.

Bumping into a rack of primitive tools behind him, and still keeping his eye on the display case, he stumbled to the doors, and then outside onto the sunlit steps.

Somebody blasted a trumpet, and some others laughed, on their way to the game.

Andy clung to the railing with both hands, the blood thrumming in his veins, and his thoughts in turmoil. This work was getting to him in a way nothing else had ever done, enough to make him wonder, just what had he been studying in his lab?

And what, perhaps, had been studying him?