The Einstein Prophecy Read Free Page A

top-secret OSS mission was altogether another. The boy’s eyes were fixed on the candy bar, and he already had one hand out to grab it when he tripped over something hidden in the dirt.
    Those shoes need laces, Lucas thought—just before the land mine detonated with such force that he was lifted off his feet and hurled through the air, his back slamming up against one of the carts so hard that his bones rattled, and he saw a blanket of exploding stars. Then everything went as black as midnight in the thick of a fairy-tale forest.

CHAPTER TWO

    SEPTEMBER 2, 1944
    People were kind. Too kind.
    Now that he was no longer Lieutenant Lucas Athan but merely a college professor again, all he wanted to do was to slip unnoticed into civilian life.
    Even out of uniform, however, and wearing a rumpled brown corduroy suit and carrying a battered briefcase, he stood out from the crowd. How could he not? The black patch where his left eye had once been, the telltale scar along his forehead where a sliver of shrapnel had been embedded, made it plain he was a soldier who had done his patriotic duty, and been honorably discharged.
    And everyone he met wanted to acknowledge his sacrifice.
    At restaurants, people tried to pay his check for him. On buses, youngsters offered their seats. Once, in Central Park, a man in a homburg clasped his hands, and said that Lucas reminded him of his own son, lost on Omaha Beach, and that if he ever wanted to see a Broadway show, he should let him know. “Any show at all, you name it, and there’ll be two tickets waiting at the Will Call window.” The man tucked his business card into Lucas’s shirt pocket, and later, when Lucas finally looked at it, he saw that the man was the owner of a prominent theater chain.
    He never took any of them up on their offers.
    After the surgeries at New York Hospital, he spent the next couple of weeks in the city, living with his parents above the family’s diner, the Olympus, in Queens. It was a typical Greek diner, but his father, Stavros Athanasiadis, had built it from scratch. As so many immigrants did, his father had abbreviated the family name: “We’re American,” he’d often declared when Lucas was a boy, “and now we start over with a new American name.”
    But Lucas hadn’t gone to all the trouble of getting his PhD so that he could live above the diner. He even had the distinct feeling that his father’s fondest wish, now that he was home and in almost one piece, was that he’d take over the place. And, truth be told, what could be better for business than a wounded soldier at the cash register?
    Only it wasn’t going to be Lucas.
    He was just beginning to wonder what his next move should be when, out of the blue, he received a letter from Princeton University saying that if he wished to resume his teaching duties at the beginning of the fall term, they would welcome him back. The university motto, as you know, is “In the Nation’s Service,” and the faculty and trustees are proud to acknowledge that service in every way afforded us. The dean helpfully mentioned that his old rooms were available in town.
    It was like receiving an answer to his prayers.
    At the little train station situated at the foot of campus, he disembarked from the train, loaded his bags into the trunk of the town cab, and returned to the Victorian boardinghouse on Mercer Street where he’d lived before being drafted. A black limousine, not the kind of thing normally seen in this quiet tree-lined neighborhood, idled at the curb across the street, but before he could give it any thought, Mrs. Caputo was scurrying across the front porch, wiping her hands on her apron, then rushing down the steps to embrace him. Tony Caputo was still serving somewhere in the Pacific, and Lucas knew that the hug, and the flood of tears, were meant as much for her absent husband as they were for him. Although she was only a few years older than Lucas, maybe thirty-three or thirty-four, she had