Three Days to Never: A Novel

by Tim Powers

  “Hold hands, all,” said Mishal. And when they were linked in a circle, he began reciting words in what must have been Hebrew; Malk and Lepidopt joined in with some formal responses. Twice Marrity caught the syllables of “Einstein.”

  Suddenly Marrity wished he had not drunk so much of the whiskey—sitting on the bed, leaning back against the headboard in the warm room, he was falling asleep. Oh, let ’em do it without me, he thought. I should rest up anyway, for exertions at dawn. Dawn? Of what day, what year? I’m one of five people holding hands around somebody’s gravestone, he thought, and his last blurry thought was, I wonder which of the five I am.

  Lepidopt’s right hand, clasped in Marrity’s left hand, seemed to change—the skin was cooler and looser over the bones, as if it were suddenly an old man’s hand—but Marrity didn’t have the energy to look to his left. He closed his eyes.

  He dreamed about Einstein, his great-grandfather. Einstein was young, with curly dark hair and a neat mustache, and he was sitting on the balcony of a second-floor apartment in Zurich with his friend Friedrich Adler. The sky was gray, and they were bundled up in coats and scarves, and with steaming breath they were discussing philosophy and physics—Schopenhauer and Mach—and Adler was very excited; he kept pushing his round glasses up on his nose, and his cold-reddened ears stuck out to the sides, and his mustache straggled over his mouth as he spoke. Both men were thirty-one years old, and Einstein’s son and Adler’s daughter were making a snow fort on the sidewalk below; Einstein could hear their happy shouts over the rattle of carriage wheels. Einstein had recently been hired as an associate professor at the University of Zurich, a post he had got because Adler, who had been the first choice of the Directorate of Education, had stepped aside and proclaimed that Einstein was the better man for the job. Adler’s father was Victor Adler, leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, and what Friedrich actually hoped to do was follow his father into politics.

  It was an idyllic several months, in Zurich in the winter of 1909. Adler and his family lived in the apartment directly below the Einstein family, and on Thursday nights after teaching a class in thermodynamics, Einstein would walk with the students to the Terrase café, and when the café closed he would take them back to his apartment with him, and Adler would join in the coffee-driven discussions.

  But in the spring of 1910, Einstein began corresponding with the German University in Prague, which offered him the chair of mathematical physics, which for his sake they would rename the chair of theoretical physics. The Austrian Minister of Education and Instruction, Karl Count Sturgkh, opposed it, but Count Sturgkh’s preferred candidate eventually withdrew; and so, after having taught only two semesters at the University of Zurich, Einstein moved his family to Prague in April 1911.

  Count Sturgkh eventually became prime minister of Austria, resigning in 1918 and retiring with his family to Innsbruck after the war.

  Einstein’s friends were baffled by his decision to move—the German University in Prague wasn’t one of the great universities, and Prague was divided into German, Czech, and Jewish quarters, mutually resentful. But Einstein had been working on his maschinchen, and had found that he needed to consult certain rabbis at the yeshiva, the Jewish school, in Prague.

  Einstein had offered to let Friedrich Adler have the position at the University of Zurich after all, but by this time Adler was editing the Social Democrat paper Volksrecht, and he let the appointment go. But the paper failed to satisfy him, and his political ambitions seemed stalled, and he wrote to Einstein in October 1911, pleading with him to visit him in Zurich.

  Einstein wrote back explaining that he could not come anytime soon, since he had committed to attend the Solvay Conference at the Grand Hotel Metropole in Brussels, where he would be meeting with all the great physicists of the world.

  When he returned to Prague one evening in November, Einstein learned that Friedrich Adler had fatally shot himself in the head on Halloween. Einstein spent the rest of that night in his office at the German University, staring out at the untended walled cemetery below his windows.

  Snow obscured Marrity’s dream, and when it blew away in gusts, he saw Einstein again, walking on a mountain path with a dark-haired young woman—and Marrity recognized her as his grandmother. She was frowning and her lips were pursed as she trudged through the snow flurries behind her father, but Marrity thought she looked like Greta Garbo.

  Einstein was older than he had been in the first vision—his hair was shaggier and beginning to gray, and the line of his jaw was sagging. Marrity knew it was 1928 now. Einstein was staggering along carrying something cylindrical wrapped in a blanket.

  When he set it down and pulled off the blanket, Marrity saw that it was a big glass tube mounted on a board with a car battery.

  They stopped, panting plumes of steam, and with gloved hands Einstein pulled a roll of gold wire out of his pocket and began straightening it and bending it, squinting against the wind as he peered down into the valley below.

  When Einstein had bent and cut the wire into a swastika, he laid it on the snowy path and knelt to connect it to wires from the glass cylinder; and then he sat down and took off his boots and socks while his daughter, Marrity’s grandmother, wrung her gloved hands. Finally the old man stood up barefoot in the snow and stepped onto the swastika. Something gleamed in his hand, and in the moment before he closed it in his fist, Marrity saw that it was a brass bullet shell. Einstein stared into the valley and closed his eyes—

  —and for a timeless moment he was rushing through a limitless space where lifetimes were visible as static ropes or sparks arcing across a void—

  —and then he was in Zurich again and it was the autumn of 1911, in the remembered attic where he and Adler had spent so many evenings talking by gaslight. Adler was sitting in a chair with a glass in his hand and a nearly empty bottle on the table beside him. Einstein hurried across the room to him, still barefoot, and began talking. They talked all night.

  The next morning, comfortable in borrowed boots and confident that he had rid his friend of the idea of suicide, Einstein waited until his young wife had taken their son out for a walk and his younger self had begun his two-hundred-yard walk down the Gloriastrasse toward the University of Zurich buildings. The older Einstein hurried up the stairs, broke the front-door lock, grabbed a gold chain of his wife’s, and, snapping it in two, arranged it in a swastika on the balcony; then, taking off the boots and staring at the receding back of his younger self, he closed his eyes.

  And the recoil hit him. He was back on the mountain in the gusting snow with Lieserl, but his heart seemed to have clenched shut and a pain like electrocution knocked him to the icy ground. His last sight was insanity—he seemed to see dozens of naked infants scattered across the frozen path.

  He woke in the house of the friend he’d been visiting, attended by a doctor who had actually dedicated a book on heart pathology to Einstein; and on a regime of no salt or nicotine, Einstein slowly recovered from what the doctor had diagnosed as acute dilation of the heart.

  But Einstein had two sets of memories now—in the original time line Friedrich Adler had shot himself in 1911; but in this new time line Adler had instead lived on, and in 1916 had assassinated the Austrian prime minister—fatally shot him in the head, as if he’d had to shoot somebody that way. And the man he killed, the man who was prime minister in 1916, was the same Count Strugkh who had given Einstein the professorship in Prague in 1911.

  In prison Adler wrote an irrational treatise attempting to disprove Einstein’s relativity theory.

  Einstein, recovering in his sickbed in the Alps, was the only person on earth who remembered the original version of history—and so it was to Einstein that Strugkh’s unconceived son came.

  In the original time line, Strugkh had had a son in 1918, who would have been ten years old now—but the son’s conception and birth were part of the time line that Einstein had canceled. Einstein met the dispossessed waif in his dreams, and, sick
ened with guilt at what his intervention had done, welcomed the lost creature into his mind.

  Lieserl also had found a waif to care for. She had snatched up one of the impossible babies from the snow as she had run to get help for her stricken father, and though the other infants were gone by the time she got back, the little boy she had taken in was healthy—Lieserl said he was too fat, and she told her father that she was worried about the angularity of the back of the baby’s head. Einstein felt the back of his own head, but said nothing. Lieserl named the boy Derek.

  Einstein began to have terrifying dreams, often a recurrent nightmare in which he felt as if he were falling—not just falling from that Alpine mountain ledge but falling right out of existence, so that Hermann and Pauline Einstein never had a son named Albert. He realized that this was his subconscious applying to himself what had happened to the orphan who now had never existed anywhere but in his head.

  In his dreams it said its name was Matt. Desperately Einstein told it stories, confided his mathematical speculations to it, played endless improvisations on his violin for its frail distraction—looked at the sky and told it about the sun and moon and stars.

  And then one night it was gone from his dreams, and in the morning Lieserl told her father that all night she had dreamed of a boy named Matt who wanted her to let him in; but she had sensed that he was dead, and had not complied.

  In horror Einstein had sent his daughter and the baby she had rescued to live with a woman he knew in Berlin, an old lover of his named Grete Markstein. For a while he sent money for their support.

  Marrity snapped awake with an embarrassed grin, but nobody was looking at him. At the foot of the bed, Mishal was speaking softly in German, clearly asking questions and then pausing.

  Marrity looked to the left—it was just Lepidopt who was holding his hand and staring at Mishal, but Marrity was sure it had been Einstein, or Einstein’s ghost, who had been holding his hand for the last minute or two.

  Charlotte squeezed his right hand, and he realized that she didn’t have to look at him to know that his eyes had been closed for a while.

  He didn’t sense any alarm from Daphne. Maybe one of her captors had gone to her and said, “Go away, Matt!”

  Marrity’s face went cold, for now he knew what Matt was, what Caliban was. It was the boy whom Einstein had inadvertently negated in 1928, just as the Vespers meant to negate Daphne; and he wanted to tell Charlotte that negation wasn’t necessarily the absolute oblivion she had volunteered for.

  He tightened his hand on hers—but it wasn’t Charlotte’s hand. Big knuckles, a blocky ring—

  Then he was dreaming again—he saw Lieserl and Einstein arguing in the familiar kitchen on Batsford Street in Pasadena. Lieserl was still as beautiful as she’d been in 1928, but Einstein’s hair had gone white since then. They were speaking German in what he knew in the dream was a Swabian dialect, and Lieserl wanted her father’s help in building another, better version of the machine he had used in the Swiss Alps three years earlier.

  She had—Marrity knew with the certainty of dreams—become pregnant, and had abandoned the infant Derek to the care of Grete Markstein, and had then got an abortion in Vienna. But since then she had been having dreams like the ones Einstein had had during his recovery in 1928, and now she wanted to go back in time and persuade her younger self not to have the abortion done.

  Einstein was emphatically refusing, and trying to convince her that the very physics of the machine was diabolical…and then the scene shifted, and Marrity saw the two of them and a third man, and they were seated around a table speaking English in what looked to Marrity like a medieval hall, with a beamed ceiling over second-floor arches high in the adobe walls. The third man was trim, full-lipped and handsome under prematurely gray hair, with prominent white teeth, and his gray suit, though it didn’t fit perfectly, looked expensive.

  The man’s first son had died twelve years earlier, in 1919, at the age of three days; the man mentioned bitterly that the undertakers had pressed the baby’s face into a smile, though in fact the little boy had never smiled while he’d been alive.

  The man was a movie director, apparently, and he had just finished filming a movie that he hoped would summon the boy’s ghost so that he could take the ghost into himself and let the boy experience his life, since the boy would never get one of his own.

  In 1926 he had made a movie that had been crafted to accomplish this, by using “depth-charge symbols,” as he put it, to evoke a powerful psychic response from audiences—but at the movie’s only screening, a private one, several of the seats and some cars in the parking lot had burst into flame, and Chaplin—yes, Marrity realized, this was Charlie Chaplin!—had never released that film, A Woman of the Sea, commercially. The potent symbolism in this new movie, titled City Lights, was much less compulsive.

  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 experience
d 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.

  Marrity 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.