Three Days to Never (34 page)

Einstein argued passionately against using this new movie in this way, and he hinted at the effect such an undertaking had had and was still having on himself.

He didn't convince Chaplin, but the premiere wouldn't be for another two weeks, and Einstein and Lieserl took a train to Palm Springs in the Mojave Desert, where they stayed with an old friend of Einstein's, Samuel Untermeyer. Palm Springs was a village scattered across a few dozen acres of the vast springtime desert between the Little San Bernardino Mountains to the northeast and the San Jacinto Mountains to the southwest, and its social center was the Spanish mission–style resort hotel El Mirador, with its square four-story tower that could be seen for miles over the pink sea of wild Desert Verbena blossoms.

Einstein had gone for long walks alone at dawn across the flat mountain-ringed landscape, and Tony Burke of the El Mirador had driven the old physicist far out into the Mojave Desert, as far as the desolate Salton Sea—and when Einstein appeared cheerful in the El Mirador at dinner one evening, even picking up a violin and joining the string trio
in the hotel lobby, Lieserl knew why. He had lost Caliban—he imagined that he had exorcised the intrusive spirit in the desert wastes.

But Lieserl knew what had become of that fugitive soul. The thing had come to her in a dream, and in her childless grief she had let it in.

At the premiere of Chaplin's movie, Einstein was able to induce the theater's manager to interrupt the film at the end of the third reel; the house lights were turned up while an announcer asked the audience to pause and admire the theater's architecture. Chaplin lunged from his seat beside Einstein and charged up the aisle to force the resumption of the film, but the escalating chain of symbols—the bald man wearing the star hat, the man throwing himself into the river, the blind flower seller whose sight would be restored—had already been broken, and Chaplin's dead son had not been summoned.

That had been on January 30, 1931. Chaplin didn't again try to use the movie as an invocation, but that was because Lieserl, with the help of the ghost in her mind, was assembling a new version of Einstein's
maschinchen
in the shed behind her house.

She did an exploratory run with it on March 9, 1933, and dismissed as a coincidence the small earthquake that followed. Then, with Chaplin as a nervous observer, she used it the following day. In her hand she was clasping the broken lens from a pair of reading glasses she had had to replace in 1930.

And she found herself in Berlin, watching her three-years-younger self feeding baby Derek by gaslight in a narrow upstairs kitchen.

Her younger self didn't know yet that she was pregnant, and learning it while feeding a quarrelsome two-year-old in a shabby apartment shouldn't have made the prospect of motherhood look attractive; but the older Lieserl's tearfully passionate description of the postabortion dreams, and the impressive fact of her having come back through time just to deliver this message, proved to be enough to convince the younger Lieserl that she should not abort her child.

When Lieserl had arranged some gold coins on the floor and let the recoil take her back to 1933, she had stepped into noisy confusion.

Chaplin had experienced some kind of involuntary astral time-dislocation himself, and had found himself pressing his hands into the wet cement in front of the Chinese Theater in 1928—an event that had hitherto been a disquieting blind spot in his memory; this had panicked him, and so had the fact that the ground was still shaking and the power lines still swinging in a major earthquake, and even more so the fact that the yard was now scattered with naked infant girls.

Within seconds the infants had disappeared, but it took half an hour for Lieserl to get Chaplin calmed down, and only afterward was she able to call up the new memories of her revised time line, and remember that the baby she'd been pregnant with had miscarried in the late summer of 1930.

And even in this new time line, she remembered having let Caliban into her head in Palm Springs more than two years ago, in December 1930. In this time line she had had no abortion to atone for, but Caliban had come to her in a dream as a lost child, and she had not been in a state to say no to a child wanting to be let in.

She called Chaplin's chauffeur and got him to pick up his shaken employer. Early radio reports said that more than two hundred people had been killed in the earthquake. She was physically sick with guilt, but in her dreams that night Caliban was giddy and singing.

M
arrity was leaning back against the headboard with his eyes shut, but the hand he was clasping was Charlotte's, smooth and warm.

Frankie,
came his grandmother's remembered voice in his head.
Have I been talking in my sleep?

Yes, Grammar,
he thought.
Go back to sleep.

Did I burn the shed?
It was her voice, but she had no German accent now.

You did your best.

Okay. You take care of that little girl of yours.

The contact was gone, but he thought, I will, Grammar.

Marrity could still hear Mishal asking questions in German—but now Marrity could hear faint answers being spoken between the questions, and again it was Einstein's hand he was holding in his left hand.

Marrity opened his eyes and shifted them to the left. Between himself and Lepidopt was the old man himself, with the resigned pouchy face and the disordered white hair and mustache. Then it was the middle-aged man he had seen on the mountain trail in the snow, and then it was a bright-eyed, dark-haired child sitting beside him. Einstein's ghost was cycling through all the ages he'd ever been. When the figure glanced sideways at him and smiled, it was a young man in his late twenties, and the young man's face was that of Marrity's long-lost father, just as Marrity remembered him from the age of three.

Marrity had reflexively clasped the young man's hand before he remembered that he hated his father, and a moment later recalled that his father had been killed in 1955—and then he reminded himself that in any case this was Albert Einstein, the original of whom Marrity's father had been a copy deposited on a snowy trail in the Swiss Alps for Lieserl to rescue.

Old and white haired again, Einstein spoke in Marrity's mind, in English.
What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?

It was one of Prospero's lines from
The Tempest.

I need to rescue my daughter,
thought Marrity,
from Caliban, the boy you brought back from oblivion.

This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,
said Einstein.
There are yet missing of your company some few odd lads that you remember not.

These too were lines of Prospero's.

How can I save my daughter?
thought Marrity desperately.

But he blinked, and he was back at the El Mirador Hotel
in Palm Springs on a cool December evening in 1932. Everyone had climbed out of the green-lit pool or hurried out of the dining room and now stood around the cactus garden below the tower, for a young woman was up in the north arch of the tower's belfry, sobbing and waving a revolver that glittered in the last slanting rays of the sun.

Einstein, puffing and sweating in a rumpled white dress shirt, had climbed the three flights of wooden stairs inside the tower and now stepped up at last to the open fourth-floor belfry.

The girl had been looking down at the crowd on the pavement and the grass, but now she turned to look at him. Her fair hair was blowing around her face and her skirt fluttered in the evening breeze.

“You're Albert Einstein,” she said.

“Yes,” he panted. “Listen to me, you mustn't—”

“You're too late.”

And she stepped out through the arch onto the narrow cornice, and leaned backward with her hips against the railing. Then she put the revolver barrel to her temple and pulled the trigger.

As a dozen voices screamed and the girl's body toppled backward, Einstein rushed to the railing and looked down—but he was not looking at the girl's body but at the chair by the pool where he had hung his dinner jacket.

When he spied the jacket, he projected himself to it, and touched the glossy fabric of it and felt under him the canvas straps and the rubber-tipped legs of the chair on the poolside concrete, and from this difference in height between his two points of view, he launched himself out into the timeless state in which lifetimes were streaks across a blank absence.

From this perspective the tower was a wall that extended into the past in one direction and into the future in the other.

In closer focus he could perceive the girl's lifeline curled up the tower stairs and abruptly dispersed at this point.

One or more of the entities that existed on this plane were now clustered around—had through eternity been clustered around—the end of her lifeline. Einstein couldn't help but be
overlapped with the alien thing or things, and though he sensed life in the ridged or droning thoughts, and even something like hunger, he had no basis from which to understand them.

Einstein laid his attention across the girl's lifeline at a point
before
the dissolution that was her death, and by drawing on the energy latent in the total vacuum of this place, he was able to pry her lifeline out of the four dimensions it occupied—he hoped, in effect, to break off the section of it that was her death.

But instead, to his horror, her lifeline simply disappeared. The static arrangement of vast arching ropes or sparks didn't include her lifeline now, had never included it.

He recoiled back into sequential time.

Einstein was leaning over the balcony, looking down, but there was no crowd below. There had been no dramatic disruption of this evening, and the people in the pool were splashing around and laughing.

Before he collapsed and retracted the astral projection of himself that was still sitting in the chair by the pool, he stepped out again into the fifth-dimensional perspective, and there was a new feature now in the tower wall as it extended into the future: a kink like a ripple in glass in the arch where he had been leaning over the rail, a lens effect that didn't damp out as it receded into the blur of the future. The burst of vacuum energy he had pricked up here would apparently always occupy this volume of space, in the El Mirador tower's western arch. Mercifully it would be imperceptible and unusable by anyone not astrally occupying two time shells at once and focusing on this place.

He inhaled the projection by the pool. In the twilight nobody noticed Einstein up in the tower, and so he slowly trudged back down the stairs, knowing that he had left a blade, in the space back up there in the belfry, by which anybody could be cut right out of existence.

His mind was numb, thinking over and over again, But I was trying to help her.

Who was she?

Nobody, ever—not even imaginary.

What drove her to suicide?

Nothing that ever happened to anybody.

Beside Marrity, the ghost of Einstein sighed.
These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.

Never born. Derek had never been born either, though he had lived and had children.

Einstein had always avoided the boy Derek, even though—or especially because—the boy was a physical duplicate of himself, created out of excess energy when Einstein had shed fifth-dimensional velocity in returning from 1911 to 1928. Lieserl had eventually adopted the boy from Grete Markstein in 1936, when Derek had been eight years old. By that time Einstein had settled in Princeton, never to return to California.

But Derek visited Einstein, in the Princeton hospital, in April 1955. Einstein was clearly dying then, of a burst aneurysm of the abdominal aorta.

Only days earlier Einstein had met with the Israeli ambassador to the United States and a man from the New York Israeli consulate. The state of Israel was to celebrate its seventh anniversary on April 27, and they feared some attack. Isser Harel, now director general of the Mossad, had not forgotten the water glass with the impossibly young Einstein's fingerprints on it—actually Derek's fingerprints—and wanted once more to ask Einstein about possible tactical uses of time.

Einstein had agreed to discuss it, but then the aorta had burst and he was taken to the hospital.

Derek had got in by claiming to be a son of Einstein's first wife, and after apologizing to the dying old man, he asked Einstein who had been his father and mother.

Einstein simply stared at the young man. “I don't know,” he said finally, wearily. “Ask Lieserl. She is the person who found you.”

“But I'm related to you,” said Derek. He was pleading. “It shows in our faces. I have two children—who were their father's parents?”

“I am watched, all of the time,” said Einstein. “The FBI
knows I am having more to tell, because Israel wants to hear it, so obviously. Another group, also, which has followed me into this exile of mine from Europe. I have ways, you do not, of pushing them away from myself.” He sighed and closed his eyes. “They all have seen you now, and they want to know who you are. Even what you are. If they know you are no connection with me, you are safe—if you know no answers, you have no object in being questioned. Go home to your children.”

Did he arrive home in safety?
asked Einstein now, his frail hand barely tangible in Marrity's left hand.

No,
thought Marrity bleakly.
No, he never came home to us.

Oh weh.
It was a sigh of despair.

Marrity looked at him, and again it was the dark-haired young man who was identical to Marrity's memories of his father.

Frankie,
said this apparition, and Marrity knew that this really was his father, not another appearance of Einstein.