Read Online The Einstein Prophecy by Robert Masello - Free Book Online Page B

happen next?”
    Virtually every hand went up—graduates of elite private schools, these boys had been well tutored in The Iliad and The Odyssey —and Lucas allowed Percy Chandler to dilate on the death of Hector, the unseemly dragging of his body behind Achilles’s chariot, the subsequent plea from King Priam to allow his son’s body to be returned for proper burial. The gallery itself was a long, relatively narrow space, lined with pedestals on which a few dozen fine examples of ancient statuary and artifacts were illuminated by a broad skylight. The day had dawned gray and cloudy, and had stayed that way, so the light that suffused the gallery was soft and muted. And although it was open to the public, only two other people were perusing the collection—an older man with an ebony cane, and judging from the solicitous way in which she tended to him, his daughter.
    “But Achilles had violated the laws of proper conduct,” Chandler was saying, “and the gods were unhappy with him. Zeus had supported the Greeks up until then, but he sent Apollo down to protect the body from any further damage.”
    The older man was plainly an Arab, and his daughter was striking, with patrician features, a lean frame, and a mane of glossy black hair falling to her shoulders. She would look at home, Lucas thought, on the back of a white stallion, in a pair of jodhpurs and gleaming boots. Glancing his way, she must have caught him staring, and he quickly looked away.
    “Thank you, Percy,” he said, interrupting the introduction of the Trojan horse into the story, “but while we have a few minutes left, let’s move on to the statue of Socrates lifting the cup of hemlock . . . yet another example, as you will see, of imminent action.”
    Lucas ushered the students farther down the gallery, deliberately not looking back. When he finally did turn around in the middle of elaborating on the ancient philosopher’s ill-fated struggle with the Athenian state, the woman and her father were gone.
    After dismissing the class, he went downstairs to fulfill the hours regularly set aside for private conferences with students. His study was a tiny room with all the charm of a dungeon cell and a horizontal window just above ground level that let in a modicum of fresh air and natural light. If he looked outside, he could see people’s ankles going by on the walkway.
    Wally had just mopped the hallways; the smell of linseed oil was overpowering. Under his door, he found an envelope with the crest of the university president, Mr. Harold W. Dodds, stamped on its seal. To his surprise, it turned out to be a rather peremptory request to come to Prospect House, the president’s mansion, straight away. The semester had barely begun; had some complaint already been lodged against Lucas? He could not imagine for what.
    On the way to the house, he noticed that an army truck had pulled up outside the loading bay of the museum. Three soldiers were overseeing the delivery of something he couldn’t see, but which was apparently quite unwieldy—a donation from an alumnus with an impressive military connection?
    “No, no, you’re gonna drop the damn thing again!” one called out.
    “Keep your shirt on!” someone replied.
    The president’s mansion, an enormous Italianate house originally built in 1849 for a gentleman farmer, was immured in five acres of gardens in the center of the campus, and surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence erected by Woodrow Wilson to keep the students from stomping through the flowerbeds like a marauding army on football days. Colorful and luxuriant in summer, the gardens were lovely even now, as the branches of the yew and American beech trees shed their leaves on the winding gravel footpaths. Little brown birds flitted among the treetops, moving so rapidly that Lucas could barely make them out.
    The sky, still overcast, bathed the scene in an autumnal glow as Lucas straightened his tie and stepped under the front portico. A