Three Days to Never (33 page)

“This Vespers crowd couldn't trace it,” Lepidopt said. “The phone line is routed through half a dozen cutouts; and they can't psychically fix on us, especially here.” He waved vaguely at the conical room.

After a pause, “
B'seder,
” said Mishal, “let's do it, we can begin the séance with that. We're all drunk enough. Here.” He stepped back to the desk and turned the top Einstein letter upside down, and an envelope fell out of the plastic
sleeve. Clumsily he shook out four more envelopes and handed them to Lepidopt, who passed one to each of the others. The envelopes were all tan with age, and each had Lisa Marrity's name and address on the front in Einstein's handwriting.

“Oren,” said Mishal, “break open your…holograph amulet. And everybody's got to crowd over to the other side of the bed, by the cement block.”

Charlotte and Marrity turned around on the bed while the three Mossad men shuffled around the foot of the bed and edged between the mattress and the block.

“One at a time, now,” said Mishal, “everybody press your right hand into the handprint in the cement.”

“It's cracked,” said Charlotte as she leaned forward to spread her fingers in the indentations.

“Your old friends shot at it this afternoon,” said Mishal.

Marrity was the last to do it, shifting across the bed to reach it, and he assumed that the warm dampness of the handprint had been imparted by the people who had touched it only moments before. When he lifted his hand away, a quarter-size flake of gray cement clung to his palm, and he closed his hand on it and shoved it into his pocket.

“Now,” said Mishal, “everybody lick the glue strip on the Einstein envelope you've got.”

“Ugh,” said Charlotte after she had licked hers. “It's like French-kissing a guy who's been dead thirty years.”

“Yes,” said Mishal, grimacing over his own envelope. “It's likely to catch his attention, though.”

“The envelopes were sticky,” said Marrity, “when I picked them up, Sunday afternoon. My grandmother must have been licking them too.”

“That's kind of touching, really,” said Mishal. “I guess she wanted to have a last chat with her father.”

Charlotte grimaced. “I French-kissed your grandmother too? This is getting revolting.” Marrity could hear tension as well as drunkenness in her voice.

“Stop being disgusting, my dear,” said Mishal. “Now if you would call your, ah, erstwhile employers again. I think
Bert's right, a conversation between Marrity and his older self might also help catch the old fellow's attention.”

Charlotte rolled back over the bed and stood up unsteadily. Marrity followed her and stared at the portable telephone case on the little table by the Einstein letters, and she picked it up smoothly. Then he leaned over her shoulder and stared at the keypad so she could punch in the number.

She handed him the phone, and only at that moment did he realize that he was very drunk, and that he had no idea what he wanted to say to his older self.

Mishal stepped up and pushed a button on the side of the telephone, and then the background hiss was clearly audible to everyone in the room.

“I'll let you talk to him,” Mishal said, “but not privately.”

Marrity nodded and set the phone down on the bedspread.

A moment later a strained voice from the speaker said clearly, “Yes? I'm told that this is Frank Marrity the Lesser.”

“Could I talk to myself, please,” said Marrity distinctly.

“You don't have to lean over it,” said Mishal. “Just stand and talk normally.”

The person on the other end of the line laughed weakly and then said, “Why not?” and added, away from the microphone, “It's for you.”

Marrity heard some furious whispering, and then heard again the voice of the old man who had spoken to him and Daphne in their kitchen yesterday morning.

“Hello?” the old man said belligerently.

“That dybbuk thing is bothering Daphne,” said Marrity. “Go to wherever you've got her and say, ‘Go away, Matt.' Don't let
her
talk at all. It might quote some lines from
The Tempest
at you—just respond with Prospero's lines. I assume you still remember them.”

“I don't have any idea what the hell you're talking about. I've tried very hard to help you—”

“By eliminating my daughter from the universe!
Your
daughter! You should be putting your life on the line to
protect
her. How can you have got so…so
depraved
in twenty years?”

He could hear the older man breathing heavily. “You may very well find out. Don't stand in back of any cars she's behind the wheel of.”

Marrity realized that the other man was drunk. Well, so was Marrity. The parallel frightened him. In what sense was the older man the “other” man?

He was aware of puzzlement from Daphne, and tried to project a reassurance he couldn't quite feel.

He said, “I could never decide to get rid of—”

“I couldn't either, at your age, with just the experiences you've had! Who do you think I
am
? The Harmonic Convergence cracked the continuity of our life, and in the
true
version of our life there was some, some variant stimulus and so you
didn't
do a tracheotomy! She died! She was
supposed
to die! When you get to where I am—”

“I'll never get to where you are. I'll make better choices.”

“Choices! You don't get choices, you get…situations that you react to—the actual cumulative
you
reacts, with whatever half-ass wiring you've got at the time, not some hovering ‘soul.' You're a mercury switch—if the spring tilts you to the right degree, you complete a circuit, and if it's got metal fatigue, it tilts you less, and you don't. You don't have free will, sonny.”

“Of course I do, of course
you
do, what kind of excuse—”

“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 / Enmesh 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.

W
hen 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.

When he set it down and pulled off the blanket, Marrity saw that it was a big glass tube mounted on a board with a car battery.

They stopped, panting plumes of steam, and with gloved hands Einstein pulled a roll of gold wire out of his pocket and began straightening it and bending it, squinting against the wind as he peered down into the valley below.

When Einstein had bent and cut the wire into a swastika, he laid it on the snowy path and knelt to connect it to wires from the glass cylinder; and then he sat down and took off his boots and socks while his daughter, Marrity's grandmother, wrung her gloved hands. Finally the old man stood up barefoot in the snow and stepped onto the swastika. Something gleamed in his hand, and in the moment before he closed it in his fist, Marrity saw that it was a brass bullet shell. Einstein stared into the valley and closed his eyes—

—and for a timeless moment he was rushing through a limitless space where lifetimes were visible as static ropes or sparks arcing across a void—

—and then he was in Zurich again and it was the autumn of 1911, in the remembered attic where he and Adler had spent so many evenings talking by gaslight. Adler was sitting in a chair with a glass in his hand and a nearly empty bottle on the table beside him. Einstein hurried across the room to him, still barefoot, and began talking. They talked all night.

The next morning, comfortable in borrowed boots and confident that he had rid his friend of the idea of suicide,
Einstein waited until his young wife had taken their son out for a walk and his younger self had begun his two-hundred-yard walk down the Gloriastrasse toward the University of Zurich buildings. The older Einstein hurried up the stairs, broke the front-door lock, grabbed a gold chain of his wife's, and, snapping it in two, arranged it in a swastika on the balcony; then, taking off the boots and staring at the receding back of his younger self, he closed his eyes.

And the recoil hit him. He was back on the mountain in the gusting snow with Lieserl, but his heart seemed to have clenched shut and a pain like electrocution knocked him to the icy ground. His last sight was insanity—he seemed to see dozens of naked infants scattered across the frozen path.

He woke in the house of the friend he'd been visiting, attended by a doctor who had actually dedicated a book on heart pathology to Einstein; and on a regime of no salt or nicotine, Einstein slowly recovered from what the doctor had diagnosed as acute dilation of the heart.

But Einstein had two sets of memories now—in the original time line Friedrich Adler had shot himself in 1911; but in this new time line Adler had instead lived on, and in 1916 had assassinated the Austrian prime minister—fatally shot
him
in the head, as if he'd had to shoot
somebody
that way. And the man he killed, the man who was prime minister in 1916, was the same Count Strugkh who had given Einstein the professorship in Prague in 1911.

In prison Adler wrote an irrational treatise attempting to disprove Einstein's relativity theory.

Einstein, recovering in his sickbed in the Alps, was the only person on earth who remembered the original version of history—and so it was to Einstein that Strugkh's unconceived son came.

In the original time line, Strugkh had had a son in 1918, who would have been ten years old now—but the son's conception and birth were part of the time line that Einstein had canceled. Einstein met the dispossessed waif in his dreams, and, sickened with guilt at what his intervention had done, welcomed the lost creature into his mind.

Lieserl also had found a waif to care for. She had snatched up one of the impossible babies from the snow as she had run to get help for her stricken father, and though the other infants were gone by the time she got back, the little boy she had taken in was healthy—Lieserl said he was too fat, and she told her father that she was worried about the angularity of the back of the baby's head. Einstein felt the back of his own head, but said nothing. Lieserl named the boy Derek.

Einstein began to have terrifying dreams, often a recurrent nightmare in which he felt as if he were falling—not just falling from that Alpine mountain ledge but falling right out of existence, so that Hermann and Pauline Einstein never had a son named Albert. He realized that this was his subconscious applying to himself what had happened to the orphan who now had never existed anywhere but in his head.

In his dreams it said its name was Matt. Desperately Einstein told it stories, confided his mathematical speculations to it, played endless improvisations on his violin for its frail distraction—looked at the sky and told it about the sun and moon and stars.

And then one night it was gone from his dreams, and in the morning Lieserl told her father that all night she had dreamed of a boy named Matt who wanted her to let him in; but she had sensed that he was dead, and had not complied.

In horror Einstein had sent his daughter and the baby she had rescued to live with a woman he knew in Berlin, an old lover of his named Grete Markstein. For a while he sent money for their support.

M
arrity snapped awake with an embarrassed grin, but nobody was looking at him. At the foot of the bed, Mishal was speaking softly in German, clearly asking questions and then pausing.

Marrity looked to the left—it was just Lepidopt who was holding his hand and staring at Mishal, but Marrity was sure it had been Einstein, or Einstein's ghost, who had been holding his hand for the last minute or two.

Charlotte squeezed his right hand, and he realized that she didn't have to look at him to know that his eyes had been closed for a while.

He didn't sense any alarm from Daphne. Maybe one of her captors had gone to her and said, “Go away, Matt!”

Marrity's face went cold, for now he knew what Matt was, what Caliban was. It was the boy whom Einstein had inadvertently negated in 1928, just as the Vespers meant to negate Daphne; and he wanted to tell Charlotte that negation wasn't necessarily the absolute oblivion she had volunteered for.

He tightened his hand on hers—but it wasn't Charlotte's hand. Big knuckles, a blocky ring—

Then he was dreaming again—he saw Lieserl and Einstein arguing in the familiar kitchen on Batsford Street in Pasadena. Lieserl was still as beautiful as she'd been in 1928, but Einstein's hair had gone white since then. They were speaking German in what he knew in the dream was a Swabian dialect, and Lieserl wanted her father's help in building another, better version of the machine he had used in the Swiss Alps three years earlier.

She had—Marrity knew with the certainty of dreams—become pregnant, and had abandoned the infant Derek to the care of Grete Markstein, and had then got an abortion in Vienna. But since then she had been having dreams like the ones Einstein had had during his recovery in 1928, and now she wanted to go back in time and persuade her younger self not to have the abortion done.

Einstein was emphatically refusing, and trying to convince her that the very physics of the machine was diabolical…and then the scene shifted, and Marrity saw the two of them and a third man, and they were seated around a table speaking English in what looked to Marrity like a medieval hall, with a beamed ceiling over second-floor arches high in the adobe walls. The third man was trim, full-lipped and handsome under prematurely gray hair, with prominent white teeth, and his gray suit, though it didn't fit perfectly, looked expensive.

The man's first son had died twelve years earlier, in 1919, at the age of three days; the man mentioned bitterly that the undertakers had pressed the baby's face into a smile, though in fact the little boy had never smiled while he'd been alive.

The man was a movie director, apparently, and he had just finished filming a movie that he hoped would summon the boy's ghost so that he could take the ghost into himself and let the boy experience
his
life, since the boy would never get one of his own.

In 1926 he had made a movie that had been crafted to accomplish this, by using “depth-charge symbols,” as he put it, to evoke a powerful psychic response from audiences—but at the movie's only screening, a private one, several of the seats and some cars in the parking lot had burst into flame, and Chaplin—yes, Marrity realized, this was Charlie Chaplin!—had never released that film,
A Woman of the Sea,
commercially. The potent symbolism in this new movie, titled
City Lights,
was much less compulsive.