The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

After rummaging around in the bottom of the sack one more time, his stowaway found another relic — a long yellowed bone that the professor could swear he had once seen littering the floor of his garage — held it up for closer inspection, then tossed it overboard like a gnawed drumstick.

Einstein heard the splash, but his eyes remained riveted on his unwelcome passenger. He was a hulking brute, with a dark, vacant gaze and a strange way of moving. All his gestures and actions were herky-jerky, as if he might suffer from multiple sclerosis, or some other neurological disease. Whatever the cause, it lent him the air of a human marionette. Einstein suspected he had seen this man before, not out at the Institute for Advanced Study but somewhere around the university campus. Still, he couldn’t exactly place him, and when he’d asked him for his name, the man had made a bad joke of it, replying in a gravelly tone, “Call me Beelzebub.”

Lord of the Flies. Mankind’s oldest adversary. Clearly, the man was mad — the disease must have already infected his brain as well as his body — but he was just as plainly a deadly menace. He had emerged from under the canvas like a bear coming out of hibernation, dragging a sack after him. His body smelled like a corpse. Perched on the side of the boat, he’d sniffed at the air as if for the first time, and studied the increasingly turbulent sky with eyes so devoid of fellow feeling that Einstein was reminded of the brown-shirted thugs he had seen in the news reels, strutting through the streets of Berlin, or driving in open cars past the burning ruins of the Reichstag that they had set ablaze.

Off to the east, thunderclouds were approaching, but the dangers of being caught out on the lake in a storm were nothing, he realized, compared to what confronted him in the tiny boat. With a thick finger and bloodied nail, the passenger had pointed in one direction, then another — wordlessly — for the purpose, it seemed, of guiding the boat away from any shore. Einstein, a middling sailor at best, had simply done what he could do to comply and keep the man pacified. But how could he ever contrive to get back to dry land safely?

The passenger’s head was down as he peered into the open sack, removing one bone or artifact after another, and then, after close scrutiny, plunking it over the side. Einstein, always the most inquisitive of men, wanted to ask him why, but knew better than to challenge him in any way. Maniacs could be as volatile as nitroglycerin — even his own institutionalized son, Eduard, could go off like a bottle rocket — and his best bet was to humor him until such time as the sailboat could be maneuvered back toward the dock. If only he had listened to his sweetheart Marie Winteler, and all the others throughout his life, who had begged him to learn how to swim…

Too late now.

The bag apparently empty at last, the man scrunched it up and tossed it, too, into Lake Carnegie. Einstein watched as it drifted away, bobbing up and down on the churning waves. Only one thing remained in the boat — a long wooden staff with an iron handle. A shepherd’s crook, like the ones he had seen the farmers use in the valleys of Switzerland. To this lunatic, however, it seemed to be of especially great interest; he turned it this way and that, testing its heft, running his fingers down the shaft and gripping the crooked handle in different ways.

“There is a storm coming,” Einstein hazarded.

The man grunted, as if he had ordered it up himself.

“And I am not a very good captain. We should turn back while there is time.”

“It makes no difference. We are done.” Why was there such a strange disjunction, though, between the man and the voice that came out of his mouth? It was as if not only his movements, but his very words, were emanating from some foreign source.

“Done with what?” Einstein said, confused now as well as frightened. “What are we done with?”

The man looked up with a feigned expression of surprise. “Our work. We are done with our work.”

Now he recognized the man’s voice at last. It was the voice he had heard the night before while working in his office with the cat on his lap. He was stroking the animal’s back, and puzzling over the last unsolved problems in the creation of an atomic bomb, but the whole time it was as if some mysterious interlocutor had been murmuring in his ear, directing his thoughts, revealing one solution after another and urging him on to completion. What he had taken to be inspiration, he now realized, might have been something far darker. His hand had been scrawling equations on the blackboard in his office, or onto the sheets of the notepad, without hesitation, as if he had simply been a scribe taking dictation.

Who, however, had he been taking them from? Nuclear fission was a remarkably difficult and dangerous endeavor, one that could, according to some physicists’ calculations, ignite the very atmosphere. It was a devil’s brew, one that he had long warned against, and which he would never have even considered, were it not for the unthinkable possibility of its coming under the control of humanity’s worst enemies first. Now he had to wonder: Had his hand been guided by the Devil himself?

The man smiled, for all the world as if he were reading his thoughts. And that was when Einstein realized his greatest mistake — this was no ordinary man, it was quite possibly not a man at all. Hadn’t he said as much when he’d introduced himself?

Beelzebub.

A cold spray flew up from the bow of the boat, wetting Einstein’s wild white hair and bushy moustache. His hands were so slick, and shaking so hard, they could barely hold the tiller. “So, what more do you want from me?” he asked, using every ounce of his courage to speak in an even tone.

“Nothing.”

A bolt of lightning crackled across the sky, and in that split second, it was if a blinding flashbulb had gone off over a newsman’s camera. In that minuscule fraction of time, Einstein glimpsed beneath the brute’s face another one that was even worse — a face with sunken yellow eyes, a protruding brow, a mouth crammed with sharp and overlapping teeth. He had seen such a visage in antique works of art — from Dürer, Doré, Bosch. It was the kind of face worn by the soldiers of Hell.

The sun was entirely gone, eclipsed in an instant by a boiling black cloud. The wind made the sails snap like firecrackers.

And in the passenger’s vacant stare, Einstein saw the terrible truth. With this creature’s unholy complicity, he had been goaded toward the unleashing of Armageddon. The first drops of rain spattered on the deck and the top of his head.

But in doing so, hadn’t he helped the Allies to win the war one day? Why on earth would the Devil, or his minions, want to help defeat a scourge as brutal as the Third Reich? Wouldn’t a monster like Hitler be Satan’s most favored son?

“To us, the victor doesn’t matter,” the passenger said, again as if it were intuiting his thoughts. “Given the tools, your kind can be trusted to use them to destroy yourselves.”

The packet that Einstein had sent off to Los Alamos that morning would help pave the way — which left but one awful question hanging in the air. What further use could there be for one old, cold, and increasingly decrepit physicist?

Especially, he realized with mounting dread, one that had been allowed this plain view of humanity’s most ancient foe?

Obscured now by a light veil of gray rain, the creature was appraising him as if he were simply the next niggling detail that needed to be dealt with.

“Not that we are not grateful,” it said, rising from its seat and stepping toward him. “We could not have done it without you.”

Einstein reared away, but where was there to go other than over the side? Even if he could swim, he’d never make it to shore in these turbulent waters. Still, he was ready to take his chances in the lake — what other choice did he have? — when he heard a voice shouting behind him.

“Duck, Professor! Duck!” A dripping oar suddenly snagged the rope of the sail and yanked it backward over his head.

Something thudded up against the stern of the boat, and when he dared to turn around, he saw Lucas holding a wet paddle and pulling hard on the line while teetering on a rocking canoe.

A moment later, just as the canoe flipped over, Lucas leapt into the sailboat, falling against Einstein so hard that he was knocked off his seat. Before his wet hands could secure a grip on the tiller or anything else, the professor tumbled overboard, arms flailing and legs buckling, into the frigid waters of the lake.