Einstein's Secret (14 page)

Eddie and I hiked back to the iron fence and down along it, toward the back of the Weldon property. When we made it to the woods directly behind the mansion, we waited. There was no reason to approach the house until it was well past midnight. Our plan was to break in and spend thirty minutes searching the study.

“If we don’t find anything, we head back to our time and plan out our next trip here,” Eddie said.

“It’s tough to head back if we don’t know how to use the portal. Who knows what time period we’ll end up in?”

“It worked out okay this time.”

“It didn’t work out okay when Alex was killed.”

“But what about running into Einstein? That wasn’t too shabby.”

He had a point. But it wasn’t enough to convince me to blindly jump in again. “Ending up in the fifties didn’t put us any closer to fixing anything.”

“It put us closer to Einstein’s secret, right?”

Chronologically speaking, he was right, but that was it. “Things are getting worse, not better. Running into my dad doesn’t seem right. Like history is changing more by the minute. I say we stay until we find Einstein’s secret.”

“You’re saying that Einstein’s secret and the instructions for using the portal are one and the same.”

“I didn’t come up with that idea; you did.”

“Huh?”

“The other you—the one who dragged me into this—thought that the secret had something to do with time travel.”

“What exactly did I say?”

“That was about it. I didn’t believe you so I didn’t press you.”

“You should’ve believed me.”

“I wish I had.”

*

A few hours later, at two a.m., we hiked up to the edge of the manicured lawn.

The house was completely dark.

We ran up to the French doors on the far right, where I turned the knob and gently pushed on the door. It opened. Richie had done his part.

The inside of the house was as dark and silent as the outside. We made it to the study without a hitch.

But here, we had to take one big risk, one that we could’ve avoided. We hadn’t secured a flashlight even though the drive-in had been loaded with them. Eddie blamed himself for this. He was the treasure hunter and knew the tools of the trade.

I flicked on the study light, and light spilled out under the door, into the hallway, and through the curtainless window into the yard. With our presence now literally spotlighted, Eddie and I quickly dove into the papers and folders on the desk. The small sculpture of the golden tiger watched us.

I was expecting to find mathematical equations, proofs, and theorems—and I did. They were there aplenty. But I was also expecting to find theories about how the portal worked.

There weren’t any.
Not a one.

I looked over to see how Eddie was doing. He was making his way through a stack of files, betraying no emotion.

“Anything?” I asked.

“If you mean have I found a set of operating instructions—Nope.”

I found more proofs and calculations, then finally came across some speculation, written out in longhand. I read through it, then riffled through more folders, and found more speculation.

As I read more and more, I began to pick out a pattern, and it wasn’t the pattern I wanted to see.

The speculation and mathematical proofs were all about the various theories of time travel. The fixed time theory, where you
can’t
change time, the dynamic time theory, where you
can
change time, and the multi-universe theory, where every change created a new timeline.

There wasn’t one bit of material about the portal itself and how it worked. And not only that, there were no conclusions about which theoretical time-travel model applied to the very real time-travel portal right there in the basement.

I started looking through the desk drawers.

The middle one had articles detailing Einstein’s mathematical proof that confirmed the existence of the Einstein-Rosen bridge, the forerunner of what was now called a “wormhole.” It predicted that “bridges” might exist between one period of time and another period of time.

This was undoubtedly why Weldon had sought out Einstein in the first place, and that was confirmed by what I found in the bottom drawer. It was packed with handwritten and typed letters. I dug through them and discovered that they were all replies from Weldon’s friends and business associates: replies to letters he’d written to them.

I kept digging because I knew that Einstein had been fond of writing letters, and sure enough, I found five letters from Einstein to Weldon. These letters were the stuff that made the careers of history professors.

I picked out the one with the earliest date and read it. Even without Weldon’s side of the correspondence, it was clear that he’d invited Einstein to visit the estate. Einstein politely declined the invitation.

In Einstein’s second letter back to Weldon, the scientist again declined. But Weldon must’ve added specific information to the second invitation because Einstein responded with the words “Whatever scientific phenomenon you have discovered requires proof, either mathematical or physical, if any scientist is to investigate.”

I was just about to read the third letter, curious to find out what Weldon eventually said to get Einstein to visit, when I heard footsteps.

It was hard to tell where they were coming from, but it wasn’t hard to tell that they were moving quickly.

“Time to cruise,” Eddie said.

I forced myself to heed the warning I’d given Eddie about taking memorabilia and stuck the precious letters back in the drawer. Then I headed for the window.

Eddie headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” I said.

“To the basement.”

“Going through the portal without knowing what the hell we’re doing is a mistake.”

The footsteps were louder and closer now. There was no time to argue. I opened the window, ready to climb out, and Eddie opened the study door, ready to run out, but neither of us ended up going anywhere—

Van Doran stepped into the study. “You gentlemen are in way over your heads.”

“That’s right,” I said. “We are. So why don’t you fill us in?”

“You know too much already.”

“We don’t know anything. That’s why we’re here. To find some answers.” I glanced at the blackboard of equations. Van Doran motioned to it and laughed.

“You want to ask him yourself?”

“You mean Einstein?”

“Who else would I mean? Maybe you can get him to confess his precious secret in person.”

My heart started racing wildly. Was he joking? Would my twelve-year quest lead to a direct conversation with Einstein, in person,
alive
?

I glanced at Eddie. There was a mixture of disbelief and dread on his face. “You sure that’s a good idea?” he said, and he wasn’t asking Van Doran. He was asking me.

And I guess he was thinking the same thing I was.
Oh, the things that could go wrong in this scenario.

Van Doran backed out into the hallway. “Albert! I found what you’re looking for.”

After a few seconds of silence, I heard approaching voices.

Van Doran turned toward them. “When it comes to reasons why we need to make progress faster, I’ve found Exhibit A, Albert.” He motioned into the room, indicating that we were Exhibit A. “If we don’t move faster, problems like this will multiply.”

Einstein stepped into the room after him, and this time my impression of the scientist was completely different than it had been the day before. Seeing him across the lawn had been like seeing him across the span of history—a faraway figure, an untouchable icon.

But up close, he was a flesh-and-blood man with sagging jowls, deep-set, rheumy eyes, and gray, unkempt hair. He didn’t look well, and I immediately realized this was because of his surgery and his aortic aneurism. His bad health had taken its toll.

Eddie and I were glued to the man, and what happened next was the least understandable and most horrific part of this nightmarish journey.

Van Doran stepped back into the room, pulled out a handgun, and, without so much as a hitch in his motion, shot Einstein in the back of the head—

There was a sudden burst of blood and flesh, and Einstein collapsed to the floor.

I was numb with shock. Eddie was frozen in disbelief.

Dark burgundy blood pooled around Einstein’s head and his unkempt gray hair started soaking it up, turning the gray plum red.

I was beyond thinking this nightmare was some kind of hallucination, but right then, it seemed that it had to be. This was too impossible to be reality.

Einstein had just been murdered.

Surely Van Doran would gun me and Eddie down next, so I told myself to make a run for it, but right then Clavin ran into the room.

He took one look at the horror in front of him and shouted at Van Doran, “What in God’s name have you done?”

“If he dies now, instead of in the hospital, he can’t write his deathbed confession.”

“What deathbed confession?”

Clavin hasn’t time traveled,
I thought, but before I could process the implications of that, Van Doran shot Clavin in the chest.

Clavin’s body reared back, and Van Doran shot him again. Clavin crumpled to the floor, blood blooming through his shirt.

Eddie must’ve anticipated that we were slated to be next because he was already three quarters of the way across the study when Van Doran wheeled back toward us—

Eddie slammed into him, sending him flying into the wall and down hard. I didn’t need to be prompted and was already following Eddie out into the hallway. History was repeating itself, but this getaway was much cleaner and faster.

As we ran down the hallway toward the kitchen, I didn’t try and talk Eddie out of using the portal. Under these conditions, it was the best escape route.

We sprinted into the kitchen and down into the basement. Eddie raced toward the wall, and as he went through, my strong reservations about using the portal again swept over me. We hadn’t found any answers, only more questions, and things had gotten worse. Much worse.

And that was the thought that carried me through the wall.

Chapter Fifteen

The white ocean surrounded me, and the heat was suffocating. I continued running until the oxygen disappeared, then I bent over and tried to suck in air. After a minute or so, I was able to catch my breath. The oxygen had returned to the room.

I used my shirt to wipe the sweat from my face as I checked my surroundings. Stone walls, a desk, and bookcases.

I was back in Alex’s carrel.

Then two things hit me simultaneously. Eddie wasn’t here, and though the furniture in Alex’s carrel was the same, Alex’s stuff was gone. The room was barren. As if Alex had moved out, or hadn’t moved in yet.

And what about Eddie? Where was he? The obvious guess was that he’d traveled to a different time period than I had, and wouldn’t that be just dandy. It would add another wild card to an increasingly chaotic distortion of history.

I looked back at the wall through which I’d arrived, and this time I saw it for what it was. Not a weird portal, but a wormhole. An Einstein-Rosen bridge. Theories postulated that it could exist, and those theories had turned out to be right.

With that one question answered, though the answer didn’t help me at all, I unlocked the carrel door, and stepped out into the tunnel.

The tunnel hadn’t changed. It was still dimly lit and unmarked. Using Alex’s key, which I still had, I locked the door behind me, and hoped my sense of direction would carry me to the trap door.

As I swung down tunnel after tunnel, I was reminded of the multiple-timeline theory of time travel. It was a messy theory, but at least it allowed for all histories to exist. One where Alex lived, and one where Alex died. The time travel that I was living through seemed far messier than this model or any of the other models. Anything could happen at any time. History was in flux.

That meant I had to double down on the history I knew. Time was counting on me forgetting, so I had to count on remembering.

Soon after that thought, I saw light spilling out from an open carrel up ahead. So far, I’d been lucky. I hadn’t run into anyone, nor passed an open carrel, so no one had called me out as a trespasser.

I thought about doubling back rather than risk walking by the open carrel, but decided to forge ahead. My sense told me that I was finally moving in the right direction.

I moved past the open carrel, when a woman’s voice called out, “Jacob?”

That didn’t stop me, even though I thought I recognized the voice.

“Jacob?” The woman had stepped out into the tunnel.

I glanced back and saw that it was Laura. Her short red hair was mussed and her hazel eyes seemed more golden in the dim light. I fell for her all over again.

“Oh… hi…” I said, rapidly processing how it was possible that we knew each other. I must’ve returned to some time after we’d had our first “date” on Jackson Hill. “Do you have a carrel down here?”

She shook her head. “I’m visiting a friend.”

“Invite him in here,” said a woman’s voice from inside the carrel.

Synchronicity was hard at work again. It had put Laura right in my path, even though she didn’t have a carrel down here. It was the vortex of Einstein’s secret, attracting everything it needed into its powerful orbit, changing facts and history as it pleased.

Laura motioned for me to enter the carrel, then introduced me to Mila, a lanky brunette with a gracious smile. “Jacob was a good friend of Alex’s from college. We met at Alex’s memorial service.”

The permutations zipped through my mind. Laura had met me at the memorial, so Alex had already been murdered. I’d traveled to the right era, but had arrived a little too late.

“I’m sorry,” Mila said. “He was a great guy.”

And I didn’t come back early enough to save him
. “It’s still hard to believe he’s gone,” I said.

There was an awkward silence until Mila filled it with the question that I’d been dreading. “Hey, how’d you get in here?”

“I came down with Eddie, and I got lost on the way back from the bathroom.” Hopefully, I hadn’t flubbed it and Eddie still had a carrel down here.