The Einstein Prophecy (31 page)

EPILOGUE

At 1:15 in the morning on April 18, 1955, Albert Einstein, suffering from a ruptured aneurysm in his abdominal aorta, abruptly sat up in his bed at Princeton Hospital and blurted out several words in German. Unfortunately, it was a language that neither of the night nurses understood. Then, he gasped for breath, twice, and died. He was seventy-six years old.

As he had directed, his body was cremated, though not before his brain had been surgically removed for further study. His ashes were scattered to the wind on the wooded grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Days later, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell received in the mail the last communication that Albert Einstein had signed before his death. It was a letter authorizing Russell to append his name to, and make public, a document that came to be known as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. Published in London on July 9, 1955, the manifesto was a stark declaration of the menace posed by the prospect of thermonuclear war, and at the same time, a dire prophecy of what might occur if the people of all nations did not find some way to live together in peace. In its closing, Einstein appealed to humanity’s higher instincts, asking the world to ignore its petty differences and quarrels in quest of wisdom and happiness instead. “If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise,” he predicted. “If you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, I am in debt to my indefatigable agent, Cynthia Manson, for her encouragement throughout this long endeavor.

And I would also like to thank my brilliant editor, Caitlin Alexander, and my very supportive publisher, Jason Kirk, for helping me in so many ways to bring the book to its full fruition. For his help as a translator, I wish to express my gratitude, too, to Mr. Christoph Haas-Heye.

Although much of the book is true to the historical record, some of it is speculation, too—most notably, Einstein’s involvement in the creation of the atom bomb. His discoveries may have laid the groundwork for the atomic age, and he did indeed alert President Roosevelt to the danger of nuclear weapons, but he was later denied a security clearance to work on the Manhattan Project, and there is no evidence to suggest that he had a practical hand in the actual process of developing the bomb. Nor were the Nazis all that far along; although they’d made a good start, once Hitler was warned by his scientists that a nuclear reaction could conceivably backfire and immolate the Reich itself, he decided to prosecute the war the old-fashioned way—with tanks and planes and battleships.

I have also taken some liberties—chronological and geographical—with the Princeton campus, the progress of the war in Europe, and the creation of the Cultural Recovery Commission; modeled on the Monuments Men, this particular group did not exist.

Overall, and as a way of accounting for all my other sins of both omission and commission, I would simply emphasize that this novel is, of course, a flight of fancy (dark fancy at that), and I am very grateful to you, the reader, for coming along.

AN
EXCERPT FROM ROBERT MASELLO’S
THE SECRET JOURNAL OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Editor’s
Note: This is an uncorrected excerpt and may not reflect the final book.

PROLOGUE

2 November
1894

From: Robert Louis Stevenson,
Vailima House, Samoa

To: W.E. Henley, 18 Maybury Road,
Old Woking, Surrey, England

Dear Henley—

What I must tell you
now, I tell you with dread.

It has happened again.

What we thought—what we
prayed
—we had left behind us, in the back alleys and darkened doorways
of Whitechapel, has, I fear, awakened from its awful slumber.

It has struck
again, right here, in what I had foolishly thought might be Paradise.  

But had you not warned
me?

To you alone, my oldest
friend—you who know so much of the story, and played such a brave and crucial part
in it—can I entrust this final account, which I will send you by way of the
next packet boat to leave the island. Who else, I must ask myself, would
believe it?

Last night, as I sat
upon my verandah, lighting a pipe and contemplating the face of the full moon
(sometimes it hangs so close to this mountaintop, it is like a silver watch fob
dangling in front of my eyes), I saw a flicker of light emerging from the
jungle and making straight for the house. For a moment, I thought it might
finally be one of the
aitus
—evil spirits—that the natives believe haunt
the tangled slopes of Mount Vaea, but then it resolved itself into the burning
end of a torch. Someone was running across the cleared land, torch held high,
and I could hear, above the soughing of the wind in the banyan trees, a voice
shouting, “Tusitala! Come quick!”

Tusitala—“teller of
tales”—is how I am known in the native tongue, and now I could tell that it was
the voice of one of my boys, Malaki, who has helped clear the brush and dig the
well. He came panting to the foot of the porch, his bare brown legs
crisscrossed with so many tattoos that they look as if he wears lace breeches,
only partly concealed by the drooping folds of the pareu wrapped around his
waist.

“Keep your voice down!”
I warned. “The house is asleep.”

“Come quick,” he
repeated, though in a lower tone. “And bring gun.”

“Why?”

Pausing to catch his
breath again, he merely said, “Gun,” and it was then that I took note of the
stain on his clothing. In the moonlight, it had at first appeared to be dirt or
even perhaps red wine—though the Samoans have no taste for wine—but its crust
and gleam now revealed it to be dried blood.

A sight that you and I,
my friend, know all too well.

“Are you hurt?”

He glanced down at
the scrap of yellow cloth covering his loins. “Blood not mine.”

Asking for no
further explanation, I hurried inside and up to the aerie in which I write. As
you know from previous letters, the house has no doors, the better to let the
trade winds play through its many rooms, but the servants sleep willy-nilly on
the floor, wherever they choose to throw down their grass mats, and so I had to
tread lightly, and with care. In my haste, I stumbled over one or two of the
houseboys, who grumbled and rolled over, and once in my study, I unlocked the
case that holds the Colt rifle. Unreliable as it is, it still affords the best
and only means of protection from threats more dire than a hot word or native
curse. I loaded the black powder and two .44-caliber rounds into its chambers—my
fingers shaking, I am not ashamed to say—and by the time I had returned to the
porch, Malaki was pacing the ground like a horse before a steeplechase.

“This way,” he urged,
trotting, torch in hand, toward the trail leading into the jungle. The villagers,
who built this path for me in gratitude for past services, call it “The Road of
the Loving Father.” Even in the daylight, it is not easily navigable, twisting
and turning, as it must, down the steep and overgrown hillside. More than once,
Malaki had to wait impatiently as I—in my loose canvas trousers and shirt, the
rifle slung across my back by a leather strap—had to disentangle myself from a
bush or bramble or a particularly tenacious liana vine. Truth be told, I would
barely have been able to keep up anyway, my capacity for such exertions being
limited, to say the least. Had it not been for the beacon of the torch, I might
have lost sight of him altogether.

But so long as we
were making our way down, I felt that we could not go far wrong, and as the crashing
of the surf grew louder, I knew that the most arduous part of our journey must
be coming to an end.

But what awaited
me then?

Breaking free of the suffocating
trees and brush, we came upon the crescent strip of sand, strewn with pebbles
and shells, which runs along the harbor front. Malaki gestured for me to come
closer and, lowering the torch toward the sand, pointed out what were
unmistakably two sets of footprints—one made by dainty bare feet, the other by
a man’s tackety boots, hobnails protruding from the heels. As we tracked them
down the beach, and in the direction of the dock, I could not help but note
that, judging from the impression of his steps, the man must have been a
bandy-legged sort. That, or an ape had donned a pair of boots and gone for a
nocturnal stroll.

“Where are we going?” I
whispered. “What did you want me to see?”

Malaki just shook his
head, and waved me on. “Follow. Follow.”

As we drew near the
pier, he bent low and ushered me under the wet timbers. Stooping over, I crept
after him, the smell of kelp and rotting fish joined by something else,
something that transported me, however reluctantly, to that grim little room at
13 Miller’s Court.

“See,” Malaki said,
slowly waving the torch, its flame nearly extinguished, over a tide pool, where
a clump of long and dark strands, which at first I took for seaweed, washed
back and forth in the water.

It was then that I saw,
still adorning the black hair, the bright pink hibiscus blossom that was
tucked, as the married women do with it in these islands, behind the left ear. She
was lying with her face in the water, and when I moved to turn her over, Malaki
stepped back in fear. From bosom to hem, her puletasi had been ripped wide open—as
had she—and all I could utter in horror was, “Did you do this?”

But I knew the answer
even before he vigorously shook his head in denial. “I turn body. No more.”

A crab scuttled over
her shoulders, pincers extended, and I brushed it aside. “Let’s get her out of
the water.”

But Malaki would
not help.

I dragged her, as best
I could, above the tideline. She looked like a girl of twenty or so, someone I
had seen once or twice, weaving baskets in Apia. I drew the ragged ends of her
dress together and unwound a strand of sea grapes that had made a ghastly
necklace around her throat. The trail of the hobnailed boots ended at the
waterline—plainly her murderer had followed, or perhaps lured, the girl here—but
they picked up again on the dry sand. Though the torch was out, by the light of
the moon I could see that the prints continued toward the customs house, which
was mounted on caissons not thirty yards off.

“You stay here,” I
whispered, though there was little enough chance of his following me into any
greater danger.

Crouching low, I
followed the telltale prints to the foot of the ladder, and once I had climbed
the rungs, skirted the barrels of copra and coffee beans and positioned myself
on the narrow deck outside the door of the house. I unslung the rifle from my
back. There was a small, smudged window, encrusted with salt spray, but through
its quarter-panes I could detect a vague silhouette, shifting about.

Putting my ear to the
warped wood of the door, I could hear sounds, too—muffled and low, but
anguished nonetheless. The moaning of a tormented creature locked in a cage.

I cocked the rifle, and
had no sooner readied myself to break inside when the door was flung open, so
violently that I instinctively fell back. The weapon was knocked from my hands,
the cartridge exploding in the chamber with a shower of orange sparks and blue
smoke, as a force like the wind toppled me over the railing. I landed on my
back, stunned, as something dropped with a thud onto the sand at my side, and
then, black and swift as a bat, shot past me. All I could see of it was a blur,
escaping into the maze of empty fish stalls and weigh stations.

But it was enough, old
friend.

Enough to tell me
that the nightmare had not ended in the squalid streets of Whitechapel, but had
traveled halfway around the globe, ten thousand miles, to resume its dreadful
enterprise.

Robert
Masello’s
The Secret Journal of Robert Louis Stevenson
is forthcoming
from 47North in 2016.