The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER FOUR

Because of the Labor Day holiday, Lucas wasn’t required to report to the university until Tuesday. Leaving the house, he passed Professor Einstein’s place, where the front door was open, letting the breeze in through the screen door, and he could hear the clacking of typewriter keys and a woman’s voice, speaking to someone in German again. Would he ever be able to hear that language without feeling, as he did now, a prickling of his skin?

It was a beautiful day, the end of summer and the start of fall, and as he walked, he had to shield his one good eye from the sun. The route was familiar, and so were most of the storefronts along Nassau Street. Many of them had been built in the faux Tudor style, brown timbers crisscrossing the white walls, and provided the usual array of college-town establishments — newsstands, diners, haberdasheries, a radio repair, an ice cream parlor. The owners who remembered him came rushing out to shake his hand and offer him a free newspaper or breakfast anytime, and Lucas thanked them, but, holding up his briefcase as if to prove it, said he had to get to class.

“The offer’s good any time,” Gus, who owned the luncheonette, assured him. “Now you go teach those kids what we’re fighting for.”

Even in a class on Greek and Roman art, Lucas thought, the point could be made — what the Allies were fighting for was civilization itself. “Sure thing,” he replied.

Quaint and lovely as the town was, it was nothing compared to the splendor of the university campus. Lucas entered under the ornate black iron FitzRandolph Gate, and stopped for a moment at the foot of the gravel path leading to Nassau Hall, where the college had first been housed in 1756. Its walls, fashioned from pale yellow sandstone, bore proud pockmarks where they had been struck by cannonballs during the Revolutionary War, and two bronze tigers, the official mascot, guarded the double doors. The white cupola housed a bell whose clapper the freshmen, in keeping with tradition, were required to steal at the commencement of classes each year. The administration always looked the other way, and the clapper was always dutifully returned.

A student in a seersucker jacket stepped up and handed him a flyer for a bond rally. “If you’ll excuse my saying so, sir, it looks like you’ve already done your part.”

Lucas glanced at the flyer, then slipped it into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. His wasn’t as lightweight, or as nicely tailored, as the student’s, and even Mrs. Caputo hadn’t been able to get all the wrinkles out. As for his shoes, no matter how carefully he’d polished the brown brogues, the scuff marks were still evident, and the heels were worn.

The gravel crunched under his feet as he followed the path around one side of the hall and into the even quieter and more serene precincts of the campus. The lawns were wide and well manicured, the trees were ancient and old, the buildings constructed in the Gothic style, with mullioned casements, cloisters, and archways. Lucas had been told that the model had been Cambridge University in England, and it was easy to imagine oneself there. From a window in Witherspoon Hall, a hulking dormitory named after the Scottish theologian who had presided over the college in the late 1700s, Lucas heard the incongruous sound of a radio blaring the recent Woody Herman hit, “It Must Be Jelly.” The music drifted on the September breeze, over the heads of the young men — and only men were allowed to enroll in the college — hurrying to find their first classes, with their sleeves rolled to the elbow and notebooks under their arms.

Although he was not more than ten or twelve years older than most of them, how impossibly young they looked to Lucas now.

He stopped in first at the departmental office, where he introduced himself to Mrs. Clarke, the middle-aged woman now running things there. She was so harried, she barely had time to look up and say hello before shoving a sheaf of papers into his hand and wishing him luck.

It was only when he got to the main lecture hall in the McCormick Art Museum — a tiered amphitheater, open and airy, where he could easily see all of the students, and they could see him, that he realized how much things had changed. Before the war, the hall would have been full; now only forty or fifty of the two hundred seats were occupied. Most of the students looked like underclassmen, and the upperclassmen, if they were here at all, had probably been awarded 4-F status, for anything from asthma to flat feet. That, or they were in a field of study, such as civil engineering, in which the armed forces needed to cultivate a new crop. Nearly all of them wore glasses, some with lenses as thick as Coke bottles, and most were either scrawny or overweight and out of shape. Lucas could only imagine what his master sergeant, back in boot camp at Fort Dix, would have made of them.

After he had dropped off his box of slides with the projectionist — an elderly man who had been sitting in that tiny booth since the dawn of cinema — he stepped to the podium, introduced himself, and announced, “This is the first session of Art History 101: Classical Art and Architecture. If anyone is in the wrong room, you still have time to make your getaway.”

“Nuts,” he heard a student mutter, then gather up his books and flee up the aisle. There was always at least one on the opening day of the semester.

Besides the makeup of the student body, the other thing that had changed was his attitude. It wasn’t so many years ago that he’d had butterflies in his stomach every time he had to stand in front of the podium for the first time and command the attention of a new class. But no more. Once you had faced aerial bombardments, oncoming tanks, and the ever-present threat of getting shot, any fears of public speaking evaporated pretty quickly.

He passed out the syllabi, still warm from the mimeograph machine, took attendance, and tried to put a face to each name he called out. A fair number of the names were from prominent American families, the East Coast elite that hailed from Park Avenue in New York and the Main Line of Philadelphia, and the Southern aristocracy. Many of the names were emblazoned on the halls and dormitories, stadiums and playing fields of the university. When he was done, one of the students raised a hand, and asked, “If I may ask, sir, where did you serve?”

It wasn’t what Lucas had been expecting, but he answered anyway, just to move on. “Western Europe.”

“Army, or marines?”

“Army.” But that was as far as he was willing to go with it; he was not about to delve into his work for the CRC. He knew that the students, if left to their own devices, would happily lead him down the garden path for the rest of the period. “Now, if those of you sitting closest to the windows could please lower the blinds, we can get started.”

Once the room was suitably darkened, Lucas signaled the projectionist to dim the remaining lights, lower the screen at the front of the room, and cue up the first slide. A slightly dim and scratched image of one of classical antiquity’s most renowned sculptures, the Discobolos, appeared to the right of the podium.

“When we talk about classical art,” Lucas said, “we are talking about a golden age, dating from 480 BC, when Athens rose to prominence and the Greek empire expanded, to 323 BC. That was when Alexander the Great perished in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. It was a turning point, a time when artists had mastered the art of carving in marble and produced a host of exquisitely rendered sculptures. One of the most famous is this, the Discus Thrower; for the first time, sculptors had learned to capture the human body in motion. Their figures weren’t stiff and unyielding and fixed in a formal posture anymore. Instead, they came alive as three-dimensional entities, free and unrestrained and even, at times, joyous.”

He could hear the pens scrawling notes in the shadowy hall, and he went on with his lecture, calling up slide after slide — briefly sketching in the seven great periods of Greek sculpture, from the Mycenaean of 1550 BC to the Hellenistic, which flourished on the mainland hundreds of years later. Fortunately, he had almost no need of his written notes; he knew this material cold. But he had not reckoned on the difficulties he would have reading with only one eye in such a dimly illuminated space. He found that he had to bend his head to the podium to see what the next topic was, and in order to see the images projected on the screen, he had to repeatedly turn sideways. It might be wise, he thought, to bring a flashlight with him to the next lecture.

When the bell in the university chapel, just across the quad, rang the hour, the projectionist raised the lights and screen, the students near the windows lifted the blinds, and Lucas looked up, blinking. Already, someone in a navy blue Windbreaker and baggy trousers was hastily exiting the last row and ducking out into the hall. Had the lecture been that boring?

“I assume you all have the syllabus,” he called out, “and will have read the first two chapters of Greco-Roman Antiquity before the next class. My study is downstairs, here in the museum, and my hours will be posted on my door this afternoon.” At Princeton, offices were called studies, just as seminars were called precepts.

Half the class was already streaming up the aisle.

“And be sure to sign up for at least one private conference before the end of the semester.”

And then they were gone, the light in the projection booth was out (did the old man ever come out for air, Lucas wondered?) and he gathered up his notes in the empty hall. It all seemed surreal somehow. Now that he was actually standing at a podium again, it was hard to imagine that only weeks before, he had been dodging bullets, digging through rubble in war-torn towns, and searching for iron mines and hidden loot.

If he ever forgot, he had the dull ache in his head from the shrapnel wound, not to mention the glass orb concealed beneath the black patch, to remind him.

Crossing the museum lobby, he waved to Wally, the janitor, running a mop around the floor.

“Welcome back, Prof,” Wally called out. “Glad you made it back in one piece.”

Or nearly, Lucas thought; he was not about to debate the point.

It wasn’t just that the memories were often hard ones — Lucas would never forget the German boy, Hansel, accepting the Hershey’s bar a split second before his foot triggered the land mine. It was also the fact that words did not seem capable of doing justice to horrors like that, and a thousand others he had witnessed. If you had never seen war up close, it was an easy thing to be brave and bellicose about it. But if you had, it was hard not to despair. What men could wantonly do to each other, in the name of nation or faith or ideology, was unthinkable.

In a courtyard outside, students were hanging around, smoking and talking, and killing time before their next class began. A few undergraduates were gathered under a tree, gawking up at a window in Fine Hall, the venerable building that housed the Mathematics Department. Lucas, wondering what was so interesting, followed their gaze and saw, perched in a window seat behind a lead-paned window adorned with a mathematical symbol in stained glass, the indistinct form of a man. He appeared to be writing with great concentration on a pad in his lap.

Around his head there was a wild corona of white hair, and one hand came up to absentmindedly brush a thick moustache.

“I saw him getting an ice cream cone in Palmer Square,” one said.

“I said hello to him, on Washington Road.”

“Did he say hello back?” a third asked.

“I don’t think he heard me. I’m not even sure he saw me. He was off in a cloud.”

Although it wasn’t Lucas’s first sight of Albert Einstein — on one occasion he had seen him strolling through a snowstorm toward the separate office he maintained at the Institute for Advanced Study — it was still thrilling to see the man who had revolutionized physics with equations that challenged, and overturned, the long-accepted ideas of space and time. He had become a celebrity, on a par with Joe Louis, Judy Garland, and Gene Kelly. Who would ever have thought that such a thing could happen to a scientist, much less one whose discoveries were incomprehensible to all but a select few?

At the faculty lounge in Chancellor Greene, Lucas picked up his mail from the pigeonhole with his name on it in the front foyer — it looked like even more university paperwork to fill out — and then, inside, was greeted with a booming “Hail the conquering hero!” from Patrick Delaney, who bounded up from his leather chair like a man half his considerable size, and wrapped Lucas in a bear hug. Delaney was the one-man Department of Mineralogy and Geophysics, whose research into radio isotopes was about as understandable to a lay audience as Einstein’s work, though his fame extended no farther than the wainscoted walls of the lounge. Lucas had always had the sense that some of Delaney’s research was secretly supported with government funds. Taking in the eye patch, he gave Lucas’s shoulder a consoling squeeze, then said, “You do know, right, that the ladies are going to love that patch? Very dashing.”

“I’ll let you know how it works.”

“You won’t need to.”

“How come?”

“Have you forgotten that you’re back in Princeton, the only place on earth where news travels faster than the speed of light?”

“Speaking of which, I just saw the man himself.”

“Herr Professor?”

“I see they’ve got him on display, up in the tower of Fine Hall.”

“Why not — top study for the top dog,” Delaney said, going to the sideboard and pouring two cups of coffee from a dented percolator. “Cream and sugar?” he asked.

“No, black, thanks.”

“That’s good. We don’t have any cream or sugar.”

They both laughed, and Lucas said, “Someone didn’t ration his coupons carefully.”

“Yeah, if you ask me, that bastard Hitler’s got a lot to answer for.”

The table in the center of the lounge was cluttered with ashtrays filled with cigarette butts, and newspapers stained with coffee rings. Not a thing had changed here, Lucas reflected, dropping into a worn leather chair opposite Delaney’s. “Where is everybody?” he asked.

“ ‘Everybody’ isn’t what it used to be,” Delaney said, scratching at the scruffy brown beard he trimmed himself. He also cut his own hair, which was pretty much evident to anyone he met. “Now that the student body’s been reduced, the faculty’s been thinned to a skeleton crew, too. It’s a tribute to your utility that you’ve been taken 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.