Einstein's Secret (18 page)

When I looked back up at Eddie, he gave me a smile and a nod of recognition. “I made it through a few minutes after you disappeared from the basement, then I passed out. When I came to, I had no idea where you were, but I was in bad shape.”

I
was
facing the original Eddie. “Van Doran’s shot hit you.”

“Don’t worry. That was nine months ago. I’m healthy as a horse now.”

“What happened?”

“I was lucky—that’s what happened. The shot went straight through. So as soon as I came to, I headed to the emergency room and they patched me up. But I had to stay in the hospital a couple of days to make sure there was no chance of an infection.”

He backed away from the front door and waved me inside. I walked in, plopped down on the couch, and leaned back in wonder and confusion at this bizarre turn of events.

Eddie sat down in an easy chair. “While I was in the hospital, I saw on the news that Alex had been killed in a hit-and-run. I figured it had to be related to us finding the time machine—”

“You figured right. I was with him… And it’s not a time machine. It’s a wormhole.”

“You’ve been doing some investigating, huh?”

“Investigating is kinda strong. More like stumbling around.”

Eddie rolled down his sleeve. “I’ve been doing some stumbling around myself. When I got out of the hospital, I went back to my carrel and looked through all my stuff and found something really weird. Not what was there, but what
wasn’t
there. Something that should’ve been.”

“The other you, the one that was already here, didn’t know anything about Einstein’s confession,” I said.

“Yeah. Sounds like your stumbling around paid off. That me should’ve already been into all of this, but he wasn’t. So I decided to find him—me—and see what else had changed about him. But I couldn’t track him down.”

“He was with me,” I said, and I had to give time, or history, or whatever it was, a hand. It had worked everything out perfectly. While this Eddie had been in the hospital, I’d already come and gone with the other Eddie.

“I thought he’d been murdered,” Eddie said. “Since Alex had been killed and you’d disappeared and there was no ‘other me’ around, I thought I was the lone survivor. I kept thinking the police would report my death any day, and while I was waiting for that, I found that Einstein’s death was gone from history. That, instead of dying, he’d disappeared without a trace in nineteen fifty-five.”

“That’s why you didn’t use the wormhole again.”

“Yeah. I knew that our one trip through had already screwed everything up—big time. But I
was
planning to use it again. Still am. Once I figure out what’s going on.”

“Eddie—Einstein didn’t disappear. Van Doran murdered him.”

Eddie cocked his head and couldn’t help but smirk. “Is that part of some conspiracy theory?”

“I wish it were, but I saw it myself. Van Doran murdered him right in front of me. He’s erasing Einstein’s secret, piece by piece, and the only way to keep it alive is to follow those trails. They’re our lifeline back.”

“But they’re disappearing.”

Einstein’s confession is the key
. “I can’t be sure about this,” I said, “but I have a theory about why. And it explains why the version of you that was here wasn’t researching Einstein. But it’s going to sound like some bullshit New Age thing—”

“Hey, don’t worry about that. I already believe in time travel.”

I laid out my crazy theory. “I think history helps. Sure, Van Doran wipes out evidence that Einstein left a confession, but history comes along and helps. It makes everything consistent.”

“And what about us?”

“I’d like to think we’re the exception, but my guess is that there
are
no exceptions. Van Doran hasn’t wiped us out yet and neither has history.”

“Yet…”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the folded magazine article. “Read this.”

“What is it?”

“A clue to fixing everything. I found it at Gray’s Cabin, through another former UVA grad student.”

“Gray’s Cabin? You mean you know Laura Metcalf?”

I nodded.

“We were in the history department together,” Eddie said, “but how did you end up meeting her?”

“We kind of went on a date the night before we drove up to see Clavin. But I’m talking about the Laura Metcalf that’s here now.”
And apparently I’ve been on a date with this Laura, too.
“She noticed one of those trails.”

It took him a second to realize what that meant. “She got sucked into this.”

“Because of you.”

“
I
never said anything to her.”

“She said you’d become a recluse and—”

“I’d become a recluse so that she wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t the other Eddie.”

“Well, that backfired. And now I think Van Doran might be trying to kill her, too.”

“So you’re blaming
me
for that?”

That reminded me of what Alex had claimed. That all of this was Eddie’s fault. Was it? No, it was Alex’s fault. He was the one who’d led me to that yard sale all those years ago. Or had he? I wasn’t sure now. But I was sure that all roads seemed to go through Eddie. After all, here I was with him, once again.

“Just read this,” I said.

He read the article, and then I filled him in on the Professor Marcus connection and the short story in
Galaxy
magazine.

“That seems like a stretch,” he said. “Even for me.”

“Do you have the magazine?”

“Yeah. I found it at a yard sale years ago, put it up in Eddie’s Emporium, but no one’s ever bought it.”

“Well, now you know why. It’s been waiting for us.” And I hoped it still was and hadn’t been cleaned up by history.

Eddie went into the bedroom to get it. After a few minutes, when he still hadn’t returned, I became convinced that it was gone.

Finally he walked back into the living room, holding a magazine wrapped in a plastic sleeve. “It wasn’t where I’d stored it.” He offered it to me. “You read it first. It’s your find.”

I took the magazine, slipped it out of the sleeve, and checked the table of contents. There it was:
Out Of Time
. I flipped to the story, started reading, and was hooked. The parallels to my life and my current dilemma left no doubt that I was headed in the right direction. The old history was asking me for help.

In the story, John Peary, the main character, is hiking up the Jackson Trail in the Adirondacks, wondering what to do with his life. His life hadn’t quite gone the way he’d wanted.

I wasn’t surprised to see “Jackson” turn up again, not to mention a guy whose life didn’t go the way he’d wanted.

On the trail, John Peary passes a cave—and, curious, he decides to go inside. The cave turns out to be a portal that transports him directly into the tunnels of the New York City sewer system.

I wasn’t surprised to see tunnels either.

John moves through the tunnels, searching for a way out, then gets increasingly desperate, until he comes across a metal ladder built into a wall. He climbs it, and it leads him up into a subway station. He then exits into Manhattan and begins to explore the city.

He discovers that he’s traveled ten years into the past. Since the story was written in the fifties, this means he travels back to the forties. He talks to various people, including a soldier who’s just come back from World War II. That soldier notices that there’s something odd about John, but can’t quite put his finger on it.

He tells John, “You’re like the foreigners I saw when I was stationed overseas. They were like me, but completely different.”

At the end of the day, after talking to a few more people, John heads back to that subway station, down into the sewers, and back to the future from whence he came.

Three weeks later, just as he’s settled back into his hometown life and starts thinking about using the portal again, a large man approaches him.

The man, who introduces himself as Ben, tells John he’s lost and can’t get back to his original life. In turns out that Ben has traveled through the portal so many times, he has no idea what his original life is anymore. He can’t keep anything straight in his mind and he needs help. He’s been trying to find a time traveler who’s only gone through the portal once.

If that traveler can tell him exactly what’s changed, then Ben figures he can change things back, one change at a time, until he ends up back in his original life.

Unfortunately, John says, “I haven’t noticed any changes in my life.” But that leads him to question himself:
Were
there changes? Changes he just hadn’t noticed? So he decides to go through the portal again, and this time pay closer attention to the changes when he comes back.

Bad move.

In the end, John ends up traveling through the portal so many times that he, too, can’t remember which life is his original life. And during one of those trips, he runs into that soldier again. This time John tells
him
the story of the time-travel portal. It’s John’s desperate attempt to remember which life was his original life. The soldier doesn’t believe that there’s a time-travel portal, so John takes him to it.

There, the soldier decides he wants to try it. John halfheartedly warns him, and as the soldier stands on the threshold, not sure whether to try it or not, we learn why John’s warning was so mild.

John is planning to wait right there until the soldier returns, and then go back out to Manhattan with him and ask him what’s changed. Like Ben, John hopes that he can get back to his original life by figuring out how the changes work.

Then, just as John admits to himself that his plan is exactly the same as Ben’s, and Ben’s didn’t work, the soldier goes through the portal.

The story ends with John realizing that the soldier could have helped him. The key was that the soldier was able to recognize John as a foreigner, a time traveler, without having to travel through time.

But it’s too late now.

*

As soon as I finished reading, Eddie asked me what I’d found.

I handed it to him. “You read it before I tell you.”

He started, and I ticked through the elements of the story, trying to figure out which applied and which didn’t. I suspected a couple of elements might apply, while others were nothing more than parts of a science-fiction story.

I was disappointed that there wasn’t a direct link to Einstein’s confession. On the other hand, why should there be? So far, no clue had been direct. It was part of the messiness of time travel.

When Eddie finished the story, he said, “It seems more like a warning than a clue. If you travel through time too much, you don’t know what your original life is anymore.”

“It’s definitely a warning. And from what I’ve seen so far, a totally legitimate warning. But I’m sure there’s also a clue in there. Something that we’re supposed to do.”

“Well, let me throw something else your way,” Eddie said. “Maybe you can make sense of it. I noticed it when I was looking through Alex’s stuff—”

“How’d you get to look at his stuff?”

“When his parents came, they weren’t too good about cleaning out his place.” Knowing how little they cared about their son, that didn’t surprise me. “I went through what they left behind, thinking I might find out how the portal worked. Instead, I found out who his next biography was going to be about—”

“Einstein.” That piece fell into place right then.

“Yep. And he’d already done a lot of work on it. But he needed more information. So he enlisted us.”

He went back to my sophomore year and took me to that yard sale.
Now I was sure about that.

“From his notes,” Eddie said, “I saw that he was going to focus on answering the one question that’d make his book a bestseller.”

“He was going to solve the mystery of Einstein’s disappearance,” I said, and as soon as I’d said it, the new history fell neatly into place as naturally as if it had been the correct history all along.

Einstein had
always
disappeared, and there’d always been hundreds of theories about what had happened to him. The history with the confession was the wrong history. It was the result of too much time travel.
It
was the phony history.

I looked down at the short story in Eddie’s hands, and seeing it stopped that freight train of thoughts. There was still a part of me that knew those facts were wrong. Those facts were the new facts, not the original ones.

But the new history was crushing the original one, and this short story could help the original fight back. This short story contained a clue. What
was
that clue?

“The soldier’s the clue,” I suddenly blurted out.

“What?”

“The soldier recognizes the time traveler, the foreigner, even though he hasn’t traveled through time himself.”

“And…”

“John realizes the soldier could’ve helped him.”

“But the soldier
doesn’t
help him.”

“He can’t. Once he goes through the portal, he’s tainted.

He can’t help anymore.”

“And how does that help
us
?”

“We need to find the soldier.”

“Okay…”

“And the soldier is someone who recognizes the time traveler, or the trails—”

“But who hasn’t traveled through time themselves.” Eddie was catching on.

“Exactly,” I said. “And there’s only one person who fits the bill—Laura.”

“Are you kidding? First you blame me for sucking her into this. And now you
want
to suck her into it?”

I didn’t want to. But I had to.

Chapter Eighteen

I found Laura ensconced in a hospital room on the third floor. She had a fresh cast on the lower part of her leg and a frown on her face. Before I could say anything, she asked, “Are you ready to tell me what’s going on?”

“It’s not safe yet.”

“But you need my help, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Then it sounds to me like you
can’t
wait until it’s safe. You’re going to have put your cards on the table now.”