Moreover, while he had arrived in Montana with his hair dyed ebony, gradually allowing it, over the decades, to return to its natural salt-and-pepper (he had learned a few tricks in his millennium), fifty whole years had passed, and curiosity was rising among neighboring ranchers. The same old problem alas, that back around 1031 had ejected him from Constantinople just ahead of a mob. It was time to move along.
So, Alobar sent away to New York for citron and jasmine, and, from inquiries, pinpointed where Minnesota beet fields would be ripening in a matter of weeks. He had never actually concocted a single drop of K23 since the original batch, but he was confident that he could reproduce it.
Ah, but then, a fortnight before he was to set off for Minnesota to procure the beet pollen, an outhouse copy of Reader's Digest called his attention to the news that geneticists at Princeton University seemed to be on the verge of discoveries that could more than double human life span. Toward the end of the article one of the scientists was quoted as saying that if the experiments panned out, he imagined that the White House would assume direct control, assuring America's leaders primary access. Federal grants, after all, were funding much of the research.
Small wonder that Alobar was alarmed. Consider the prospect of Ike, John Foster Dulles, and Dick Nixon indefinitely preserved. Consider the prospect of the Eisenhower Years going on forever.
Such frightening thoughts might have been by themselves enough to motivate him. However, it was the promise that he had made to Lalo the nymph nine hundred years earlier that caused Alobar to cancel his trip to the beet fields, sell his spa, desert his current mistress, and head for Princeton to become Einstein's janitor.
“Someday,” Lalo had said, “there wilt be men who seek to defeat death by intelligence alone.” She warned that huge evil would result if those men should attain immortality, or rather, “false immortality,” since true immortality requires advancement of heart and soul as well as mind.
Were the Princeton geneticists the false immortalists of whom Lalo had prophesied? To find out, Alobar wrangled a job as assistant custodian at the Institute for Advanced Study, where the geneticists had their offices and lab. Assigned originally to boiler room duties, Alobar had to bribe the chief custodian to be allowed to clean the wing in which the geneticists worked. Upon finding documents that proved White House and Pentagon interest in the experiments, Alobar began to throw monkey wrenches at the delicate machinery. He flicked drops of dirty mop water into culture dishes, waxed the guinea pig's protein pellets, unplugged incubators, and altered figures on charts. Once he fed a prize long-lived white rat one of Einstein's cigar butts. The rat was kaput by morning.
Professor Einstein's office was down the hall from the genetics area. It was a mess. And not just a common two-plus-two-equals-four mess. Einstein's office was a genius equation mess. (A disarray in which Priscilla might have felt at home.)
Books, reports, binders, sheaves, scrolls, periodicals, letters, and uncashed checks were piled, layers deep, all over the floor and furniture, making it virtually impossible to sweep or dust. It was especially frustrating because the place sorely needed a sweeping. In amongst the piles of paper were strewn orange peels, banana skins, Dixie cups, chalk sticks, pencil nubs, sweater lint, violin strings, and drifts of cigar ash (the snows of El Producto). To make matters worse, Einstein himself was usually in the office until well past midnight, and should so much as a sheet of paper be disturbed, he became agitated.
Alobar began postponing the cleaning of Einstein's office to the very end of his shift, but still the professor was there, 2:00 A.M., slumped in his chair, looking like a musical teddy bear with its springs and stuffing flying out. By and by, Einstein confessed that he waited for Alobar so that the two of them might talk. His wife mothered him, he complained, and denied him his cigars. Mrs. Einstein thought that a pipe was more dignified. Her favorite topic of conversation was bowel productivity.
They had some fine discussions, Alobar and Einstein. The special theory of relativity, the general theory of relativity, the unified field theory, they were what Einstein was famous for, but they were not his best work, he said. Einstein told Alobar that he had thought of many more wonderful things than relativity, but he wasn't going to let “der kats out of der bag” because he didn't trust politicians to put his ideas to moral uses.
Upon hearing some of the unpublished theories, Alobar agreed that they were wonderful, if difficult, and had best be saved for a more enlightened age. Made bold by Einstein's revelations, the janitor told the professor some secrets of his own.
Whether Einstein actually believed the janitor's stories is questionable, but he relished them. He was fascinated by Alobar's views on life and death. His depression was relieved by Alobar's cheerful nature and strongly regal bearing. When Alobar disclosed, cheerfully, that his financial nose was in the mud, Einstein dropped to his knees, rummaged in his papers until he found a royalty check from The Physical Review, and promptly endorsed it to his late-night friend.
The reason Alobar was short of cash was because he was being blackmailed. The chief custodian, suspicious of the new janitor from the onset, eventually had caught him tampering with experiments in the genetics lab. Soon he had extorted from him every penny of the proceeds from the spa sale and was demanding the bulk of his salary. It was expensive business, keeping a promise to a nymph.
That the longevity experiments at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study were terminated in 1956 probably was due as much to faulty procedures on the part of the geneticists as to Alobar's sabotage. In trying to increase human life span by building virus-resistant cells in rodents and dogs, the scientists were barking up the wrong chromosome. In any event, by the time the custodian turned in Alobar to the police, nobody cared very much about the experiments. Alobar was questioned and released. He lost his job, of course. It was just as well. His buddy was dead.
Einstein's office was now a museum. It was very clean and very tidy. There was a rack of pipes on his desk.
Alobar hadn't been allowed to visit Albert in the hospital. He was hanging around the waiting room, however, when word came that the professor had refused surgery for the rupturing aorta that was wiping his personal equation off the blackboard of life. “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially,” Einstein had told his physicians.
Alobar's reaction was summed up ten years later by a British fashion designer named Mary Quant, who, in a different context, announced, “Good taste is death. Vulgarity is life.”
Saddened by Albert's decision, disappointed that his own philosophy had had no stronger influence upon his friend, Alobar returned to the institute to mop and mope. The following week, after the funeral (which Alobar, on principle, refused to attend), he heard a local radio interview in which the nurse who had ministered to Einstein on his deathbed attempted to re-create the German that the patient had mumbled with his last breath.
Alobar seized his broom and danced it around the boiler room. His laughter echoed through the heat ducts of the Institute for Advanced Study. No wonder they didn't understand Einstein's last words! Einstein's last words weren't in German at all. Einstein's last words were in the language of an obscure and long-lost Bohemian tribe, and had been taught to him by Alobar.