"Bullshit. If—" The older Marrity was panting. "If a scientist could know every last detail of your physiology and life experiences, he could predict with absolute accuracy every 'choice' you'd make in any moral quandary."
Quandary! To Marrity the sentence sounded as if it had been prepared ahead of time. Not for talking to me, he thought, this old wretch couldn't have anticipated talking to me — he must have cooked it up for his own solace.
"Laplace's determinist manifesto," came another man's languid voice from the background. "It overlooks Heisenberg's uncertainty."
"Okay," said the older Marrity furiously, "then it's probability and statistics that dictate what we'll do! But it's not—"
"It's a sin," said Marrity, breathing deeply himself. To Daphne he projected a vague cluster of images — hugging her, holding her hand— and he was able to have more confidence in his reassurance now.
"Said the fourth domino to the twenty-first!" exclaimed the older Marrity, laughing angrily. "'Ah, wilt Thou with predestination round / Emesh me and impute my fall to sin?'" The older man audibly took a deep breath. "But listen, you and I need to talk — there are things I've got to tell you — you'll be rich—"
"I wouldn't take them," said Marrity, "from you. What you can do for me is right now go to Daphne and say 'Go away, Matt.'"
"Ahh — go buy crutches now while they're cheap."
The phone clicked, and then there was just a buzz.
Marrity stared at the inert telephone on the bed. He couldn't bring himself to look at any of the others, especially Charlotte, who had volunteered to take oblivion in Dahpne's place. The horrible old man on the phone had been himself.
As if she'd read his mind, Charlotte said, "He's not you. He never was." She smiled, her eyes unreadable behind the sunglasses. "He never met me, for one thing."
Marrity tried to smile back. "He never kissed you, anyway, I'm pretty sure," he said gruffly.
"Tilt the block over onto the bed," said Mishal, "carefully, and then we all stand around it and hold hands."
Marrity shoved the Einstein envelope into his pocket so that he'd have both hands free.
Twenty-five
When the slab was lying across the bed with its anonymous back face upward, Marrity and Charlotte sat cross-legged on the pillows while Lepidopt hunched between the wall and the edge of the block, Malk stood on the door side, and Mishal crouched on the foot of the bed.
Mishal caught Lepidopt's eye and nodded toward the cement surface, and Lepidopt reached into his shirt and pulled a little piece of folded paper from a broken locket. He unfolded the yellowed paper and set it carefully on the cement.
"This is a piece from a letter Einstein wrote in 1948, which was auctioned off to support the Haganah — precursor to the Israel Defense Forces," he added to Marrity and Charlotte. He pulled Marrity's matchbook from his pocket and struck a match.
He held the match to the paper, and a ring of blue flame quickly circled the crabbed words on it.
"Hold hands, all," said Mishal. And when they were linked in a circle, he began reciting words in what must have been Hebrew; Malk and Lepidopt joined in with some formal responses. Twice Marrity caught the syllables of "Einstein."
Suddenly Marrity wished he had not drunk so much of the whiskey — sitting on the bed, leaning back against the headboard in the warm room, he was falling asleep. Oh, let 'em do it without me, he thought. I should rest up anyway, for exertions at dawn. Dawn? Of what day, what year? I'm one of five people holding hands around somebody's gravestone, he thought, and his last blurry thought was, I wonder which of the five I am.
Lepidopt's right hand, clasped in Marrity's left hand, seemed to change — the skin was cooler and looser over the bones, as if it were suddenly an old man's hand — but Marrity didn't have the energy to look to his left. He closed his eyes.
He dreamed about Einstein, his great-grandfather. Einstein was young, with curly dark hair and a neat mustache, and he was sitting on the balcony of a second-floor apartment in Zurich with his friend Friedrich Adler. The sky was gray, and they were bundled up in coats and scarves, and with steaming breath they were discussing philosophy and physics — Schopenhauer and Mach — and Adler was very excited; he kept pushing his round glasses up on his nose, and his cold-reddened ears stuck out to the sides, and his mustache straggled over his mouth as he spoke. Both men were thirty-one years old, and Einstein's son and Adler's daughter were making a snow fort on the sidewalk below; Einstein could hear their happy shouts over the rattle of carriage wheels. Einstein had recently been hired as an associate professor at the University of Zurich, a post he had got because Adler, who had been the first choice of the Directorate of Education, had stepped aside and proclaimed that Einstein was the better man for the job. Adler's father was Victor Adler, leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, and what Friedrich actually hoped to do was follow his father into politics.
It was an idyllic several months, in Zurich in the winter of 1909. Adler and his family lived in the apartment directly below the Einstein family, and on Thursday nights after teaching a class in thermodynamics, Einstein would walk with the students to the Terrase café, and when the café closed he would take them back to his apartment with him, and Adler would join in the coffee-driven discussions.
But in the spring of 1910, Einstein began corresponding with the German University in Prague, which offered him the chair of mathematical physics, which for his sake they would rename the chair of theoretical physics. The Austrian Minister of Education and Instruction, Karl Count Sturgkh, opposed it, but Count Sturgkh's preferred candidate eventually withdrew; and so, after having taught only two semesters at the University of Zurich, Einstein moved his family to Prague in April 1911.
Count Sturgkh eventually became prime minister of Austria, resigning in 1918 and retiring with his family to Innsbruck after the war.
Einstein's friends were baffled by his decision to move — the German University in Prague wasn't one of the great universities, and Prague was divided into German, Czech, and Jewish quarters, mutually resentful. But Einstein had been working on his maschinchen, and had found that he needed to consult certain rabbis at the yeshiva, the Jewish school, in Prague.
Einstein had offered to let Friedrich Adler have the position at the University of Zurich after all, but by this time Adler was editing the Social Democrat paper Volksrecht, and he let the appointment go. But the paper failed to satisfy him, and his political ambitions seemed stalled, and he wrote to Einstein in October 1911, pleading with him to visit him in Zurich.
Einstein wrote back explaining that he could not come anytime soon, since he had committed to attend the Solvay Conference at the Grand Hotel Metropole in Brussels, where he would be meeting with all the great physicists of the world.
When he returned to Prague one evening in November, Einstein learned that Friedrich Adler had fatally shot himself in the head on Halloween. Einstein spent the rest of that night in his office at the German University, staring out at the untended walled cemetery below his windows.
Snow obscured Marrity's dream, and when it blew away in gusts, he saw Einstein again, walking on a mountain path with a dark-haired young woman — and Marrity recognized her as his grandmother. She was frowning and her lips were pursed as she trudged through the snow flurries behind her father, but Marrity thought she looked like Greta Garbo.
Einstein was older than he had been in the first vision — his hair was shaggier and beginning to gray, and the line of his jaw was sagging. Marrity knew it was 1928 now. Einstein was staggering along carrying something cylindrical wrapped in a blanket.