“We are all working night and day,” Oppenheimer had told him the moment they had closed his study door, “but we have to get there faster. We have to solve these problems more quickly than we have; we have to move on to the manufacturing stage.”
“And deployment?” he had blurted out.
Oppenheimer had pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit the first of many. “If it comes to that.”
If it comes to that.
If Einstein had believed that prayers could be heard, he’d have dropped to his knees and prayed then and there.
If it comes to that.
Such simple words, encompassing a holocaust all their own. One would think that the world had already seen enough of man’s tragic folly. The Battle of the Somme, during the First World War, had done that for him — half a million men dead, and all for six square miles of mud.
“Can we not go faster?” Gödel said as the wind picked up and the waves began to crash over the side of the boat. Gödel was soaked, and the lenses of his little round glasses were coated with water, too. The boathouse was still a quarter mile off, though Einstein could make out its orange-and-black Princeton pennant fluttering at the top of the flagpole.
“Not unless we want to tip over,” Einstein said.
“No, no,” Gödel quickly said, “then go just as we are.” He cast a nervous look back at the oncoming storm.
The white clouds had fled to the east, replaced now by bulky thunderheads lumbering toward them like tanks. Einstein did not want to show his own growing concern. The little sailboat had already taken on a fair amount of water, and it was heeling before the wind at a more precipitous angle than he liked.
More than anything, he did not want to be out on the lake — a lone boat with a single mast — when lightning struck. The university’s rowing coach had warned him about that the very first day the Tinef had been brought to the boathouse.
“Jersey storms blow in like squalls. You won’t see ’em coming, but trust me — they’ll see you.”
Now he knew what the coach had meant — it did feel as if the storm had been conjured up out of nothing and was pursuing him with some malicious intent.
“Can I do anything that would help?” Gödel asked, his frail voice almost lost in the wind.
“No, you are a fine first mate,” Einstein said, in as reassuring a tone as he could muster. “Just don’t go for a swim.”
Gödel gave him a weak smile.
“Soon you will be home with Adele,” the professor said, “and she will be tasting your dinner for you.” Normally, he would not have made this little joke about Kurt’s idiosyncratic behavior, but at this moment he could think of no better distraction.
Gödel took it in stride. “She will be serving fish tonight. The house reeked of it.”
“What kind?”
“I never notice.”
The first raindrops began to dapple the surface of the lake, and the trees along the shore began to bend before the rising wind. Leaves blew loose and scudded across the water.
Einstein pulled in even harder on the mainsheet, and the sailboat tacked sharply toward the wooden pier of the boathouse. The sculls were mounted and secured, upside down, on the racks. “Just hold on tight,” he said, though from the look of Gödel’s white knuckles, he couldn’t hold on any harder if he tried.
The sailboat skimmed the remaining distance, driven by the wind and waves, and narrowly missed the end of the pier, before bumping up roughly against its side.
“Grab the dock line and tie us up,” Einstein said, but Gödel had already leapt into action. As the professor dropped and stowed the sail, Kurt lashed the boat to the dock, then leaned over to offer a cold and trembling hand as Einstein stepped up and out of the stern. The rain came across the water in a sheet, and they were only halfway down the dock when it drenched them both. A zigzag of lightning crackled across the sky, and a second later the thunder boomed like a cannon. Soaked and stumbling — oh, how he could remember running with no hitch in his gait, back in the days when he and his friends from the Bern patent office had gone on summer hikes — Einstein followed Kurt into the shelter of the boathouse. The two men shook themselves off like a pair of dogs.
Inside, it was warm and dry and smelled of old cedar and fresh beeswax. An open cabinet held a pair of binoculars, a starting pistol, a first aid kit, and, blessedly, a stack of dry blankets.
Einstein tossed one to Gödel, who, of course, failed to catch it. But he picked it up and wrapped it around his shivering shoulders.
“You look like a dripping dachshund,” Einstein said.
“And you, a wet sheepdog.”
They both laughed as the rain pelted the windows. A sudden thunderclap, loud as the apocalypse, hit the roof like a giant fist crashing down. Dust drifted from the rafters, the floorboards rattled underfoot, and they were both chastened into a momentary silence, awaiting — as indeed the entire world seemed poised to do these days — the possible impact of another crushing blow.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The day had begun bright and sunny, with a light breeze and a blue sky, but by noon, the Indian summer had abruptly ended. Fall had come in with a vengeance. A chill wind was blowing, and as Lucas left the house on Mercer Street, Mrs. Caputo called out to him, “Don’t forget your umbrella. The radio says there’s going to be another thunderstorm today.”
The radio, as usual, was right.
The campus lawns were soaked with rain, the walkways were submerged beneath puddles of water and piles of soggy dead leaves. The floorboards of the lecture hall in the art museum were slippery from the wet shoes and galoshes of his students. Lucas himself had nearly taken a tumble off the steps to the podium, and several of the less-hardy students had already caught their first colds of the season. As he took the class around the galleries to observe some of the statues and urns, the squelching of their shoes was accompanied by a chorus of honking and coughing and bleating into handkerchiefs.
So far, however, Lucas had remained impervious to contagion, in large part because he spent so much of his time alone, sequestered in the conservation wing with the ossuary, or in the university library trying to make sense of whatever he had gleaned.
Making sense of it all was a herculean task. He had taken copious notes, rolls of photographs, several rubbings, but he was no closer to identifying the precise origin of the box, or the identity of its occupant, than he had been before. Normally, a sarcophagus bore few markings, and those that were there hewed to a simple theme — identifying the name of the deceased, perhaps his occupation in life, and maybe a word or two about his relation to some other known person or family. “John, son of Joseph. Merchant.” And always in just one language, whether it be Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew.
Not this one.
This one had vague, faintly incised inscriptions in several tongues, as if by a committee, or else by someone who was intent on issuing his admonitions in every conceivable way. In addition to the traditional Egyptian glyphs, probably carved by some Coptic stonemason, there were enough eroded but legible letters to lead Lucas to brief passages in both the Old and New Testaments.
As for the ancient Greek lettering — assuming he was making it out correctly — this took on a more martial air: “Eternal victor, vanquished foe.” Could the box contain the bones of mutual antagonists? That would be a first, and might suggest some reason why the Third Reich had been so interested in it. But the time for suppositions was fast disappearing, and the time for answers was here. He’d received a strongly worded communiqué only that morning from Colonel Macmillan at the OSS.