Caught (Missing) (25 page)

“Do . . . welcome forgiveness,” he murmured in an agonized voice. “It’s just . . . the pain . . .”

“Of course,” Mileva said. “I should have thought. Here. This will help.”

She reached into her dress pocket for something—a miniature syringe, maybe? Jonah thought he saw the glint
of a needle as she lowered her hand toward Albert’s arm.

“No more morphine,” Albert said, trying to fend her off with a shaking hand. “Morphine makes me . . . stupid. Want last moments . . . lucid.”

Mileva barely hesitated.

“Oh, this isn’t morphine,” she said. “I don’t want you to be stupid for this conversation either. I so wanted another conversation with the brilliant Johnnie I fell in love with all those years ago.”

“He’s gone . . . dying . . . Now I’m just a foolish old man that the youngsters in the field make fun of,” Albert murmured. “My search for a unified field theory . . . just tilting at windmills, they say . . .”

Mileva brushed her hand against Albert’s arm.

The change in Albert was instantaneous. He sat up straight.

“What
was
that?” he asked, his voice normal again, no longer weighed down by pain.

“Oh, never mind the technicalities,” Mileva said. “You never did have much patience with chemistry. I can just tell you that it’s a painkiller I picked up for you in the future . . .”

“The future!” JB exploded. “How many extra time periods did she visit? And bringing back medicines . . . that’s illegal! Why didn’t we detect this?”

Hadley was already hunched over his Elucidator.

“I’m not finding evidence of that,” he said, frantically scanning screenfuls of information. “She must have hidden her footprints really, really well.”

“Or maybe she’s not telling the truth?” Emily suggested in a thin, reedy voice. “Maybe she’s counting on a placebo effect—fooling him into thinking he feels better?”

As far as Jonah could tell, Albert seemed to have undergone a full recovery. He was craning his neck, flexing his arm muscles—and reaching out for Mileva as if he planned to hug her.

Mileva took a step back.

“Albert, no,” she said. “I just want to talk. To tell you the secrets I had to hide from you for almost fifty years. And . . . to reveal the answers you’ve been trying to find for the past few decades.”

JB’s hand slammed into the side of his chair.

“That’s it!” he cried. “She’s going to ruin everything!”

“Calm down,” Hadley said. “Don’t you think she had a reason for waiting until an hour before his death to talk to him?”

JB glowered at Hadley, but didn’t do anything else.

On the screen Albert leaned forward eagerly.

“My unified field theory? It is possible—it can work?”

Mileva tilted her head and regarded him very seriously.

“We’re not newlyweds anymore,” she said. “I no longer worship the ground you walk on. I’m going to tell you what’s important to me first. That way, even if we run out of time, you’ll hear what I want you to know.”

“But—,” Albert began. Then he caught himself and shrugged grudgingly. “That’s fair,” he admitted. “After all, you’re the one who traveled through time to get to me.”

Mileva nodded and sat down on the edge of the bed. She smoothed the expanse of hospital blanket that lay between her and Albert.

“First of all,” she said. “Our Lieserl didn’t die in 1903.”

Albert gaped at her. Then he began blinking frantically—blinking back tears.

“What?” he cried. “Our Lieserl—still alive? But how—and why didn’t you tell me?” He started desperately gazing all around the room. “Is she here with you? Can I finally meet her? What would she be now—fifty-three? You kept this a secret from me for more than fifty years?”

He looked positively injured at the thought of all those years of deception.

“I had to,” Mileva said softly. “And—she’s not fifty-three yet.”

Jonah heard Katherine let out a nervous giggle beside him, but she quickly fell silent.

Mileva began telling Albert the whole story of what
had happened with Lieserl. When she got to the part about her and Jonah copying over Albert’s tracer papers and convincing him that that was his current work, he wrinkled his brow in confusion.

“But—why didn’t you tell everything?” he asked. “Why didn’t you tell the whole world? You could have claimed credit for discovering time travel! You could have claimed credit for
my
discoveries. Why didn’t you?”

“Albert, our children,” Mileva murmured. “It would have endangered our children.”

Albert only stared at her. She reached out and took his hand.

“And I think you’ve enjoyed your fame so much more than I would have,” she said. She patted his hand. “And they were
your
discoveries. I couldn’t steal them from you.”

“You’re . . . amazing,” Albert murmured.

He pitched forward and drew Mileva into a hug.

This time she let him.

“Fifty-three years,” he said into her hair. “Fifty-three years and you never told a soul.”

“Well, it’s only been forty-five for me,” Mileva corrected. “Since I’m coming from 1948. Relative time and all that, remember?”

Albert laughed as he let go of her, and she sat back.

“Oh, it’s good to talk to you again,” he said. “Really
talk, like we used to do before you grew so sullen and silent . . .” He seemed to realize what he was saying. “Is
this
why you started acting so depressed? Because you couldn’t tell anyone what you knew?”

“It gets complicated,” Mileva said. “I would have been truly depressed without my secret. I mean, really, Albert, moving us to Prague with all that sooty air when you knew Tete had those lung problems, and—” She stopped herself. She waved her hands as if trying to erase everything she’d just said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to restart old fights. I really have forgiven you.”

“Tete,” Albert said. He rubbed the hospital sheet between his fingers. “Hans Albert was here, watching over me all day—he’s such a son to be proud of. But Tete . . . I haven’t communicated with Tete in years. He’s had such a sad life . . . with all your secret maneuverings, why couldn’t you help our Tete, too?”

A happy expression burst out over Mileva’s face, and for a moment she looked young and optimistic, not old and beaten down.

“Oh, Albert, I so wanted you to ask about Tete,” Mileva whispered. “I told myself I wouldn’t take the risk of telling you unless you actually asked. Unless you cared!”

“Of course I care about my own son,” Albert muttered. “I just never knew how to help. Mental illness is so . . . ”

“Misunderstood in the twentieth century,” Mileva
finished for him. “So I helped Tete the only way I knew how. I took him to the future. To a time period where they knew how to cure him.”

“What?” JB exploded.

“Shh!” Jonah, Katherine, Emily, and Angela all said at once. Jonah noticed that all of them were sitting on the edge of their seats.

“No, no, Tete’s still here,” Albert said, screwing up his face in befuddlement. “Back in Switzerland. I still pay for his care. His—confinement.” He said the last part bitterly.

“That’s another young man,” Mileva said. “I knew everyone had to think Tete was still in this century, still alive, so I borrowed this other man from the distant past, when madness was even more misunderstood. And . . . when those who succumbed to madness were routinely murdered. I saved this young man’s life so I could send Tete to the future, to save his sanity. I made the swap when Tete was still a teenager. I only regret I couldn’t save the fake Tete’s sanity too, because he’s such a delightful youth when he’s lucid. But at least I managed to give him a better life than he would have had . . .”

Jonah missed Albert’s reply because JB was screaming so loudly: “How could she have? That’s two time periods she could have ruined! Why didn’t we see this? How did she cover everything up so well?”

He began typing furiously on his Elucidator. Hadley was doing the same thing.

“Let’s focus on the more dangerous change first—what time period could she have taken Tete to?” Hadley asked.

“This could lead to such a major paradox,” JB complained, stabbing at his Elucidator as fiercely as if it were a weapon and he was at war. “People found the cure for mental illness before they figured out time travel—we’re just going to have to undo this whole visit between Mileva and Albert, go back and erase Jonah giving her the Elucidator—”

“Undo? Erase? You can’t do that!” Jonah complained. “Can you?”

“Aye, lad,” Hadley answered. “It’s true, nothing quite like that has ever been tried, and it’d be incredibly risky given the proximity to stopped time, but—”

“Can’t we at least see how the rest of their conversation goes?” Emily asked.

JB and Hadley both looked at Emily. They seemed to remember all at once that these were Emily’s birth parents they were watching, Emily’s brother they were searching for.

“All right,” JB said grudgingly. “Unless things get too dangerous.”

Jonah realized that he’d missed a huge chunk of the conversation between Albert and Mileva.

“—and that’s what you were missing in your unified field theory,” Mileva was saying.

“I knew it would be something that simple,” Albert said. He beamed at Mileva. “Thank you. Thank you. I just wanted to know that so much.”

He started to reach for something on his bedside table: paper. Pen and paper.

Mileva shoved his hands away.

“Surely you understand why you can’t write that down,” Mileva whispered.

“But—the world would want to know,” Albert said. “Other scientists . . . some of them are seeking this as earnestly as me.”

“Then let other scientists find it out for themselves,” Mileva said. “Albert, you’ve discovered so much. Why don’t you leave this one to someone else?”

Albert started to answer, then lay back, groaning.

“That . . . painkiller . . . more . . . ,” he whispered.

“I know, Albert, it’s wearing off,” Mileva said. “I’m sorry—the nurse is about to come back. I can’t give you another dose. Shall I tell you how it all ends? You’re going to say something in German—it really doesn’t even matter what you say, because the nurse isn’t going to understand.”

“Maybe tell . . . dirty joke?” Albert muttered.

“If you want, Albert,” Mileva whispered, leaning close. She looked over her shoulder, probably checking to make sure the nurse hadn’t come back already. “But when you
die, people are going to find two things on your bedside table that you’d been working on. One is a speech for Israeli Independence Day—”

“Right . . . over . . . there,” Albert said, struggling to point.

“Yes, I see it, Albert,” Mileva said, glancing toward the table. “I like your line, ‘I speak to you today not as an American citizen and not as a Jew, but as a human being’—very nice, Albert, very consistent with your beliefs about humanity.”

“Thank . . . you,” Albert muttered. “I was always a better . . . defender of humanity than . . . a husband.”

“We’ve already been over that, Albert,” Mileva said. “Don’t worry about it now.”

“What . . . other thing . . . I’m supposed to leave?” Albert asked.

Mileva picked up a piece of paper from the table.

“A math calculation you wrote out earlier this evening,” Mileva said. “People will like it that you kept looking for answers right up until you died.”

“Always a seeker,” Albert murmured. “Wish I could tell world . . . what I finally found.”

“You can’t always tell everyone everything you know,” Mileva said.

She put the piece of paper back down on the nightstand,
angling it exactly the same way it’d been before. Jonah wanted to tell JB,
See? See? She’s being careful to preserve time.
But he was afraid he’d miss something else.

“Shall I tell you what happened to Tete in the future?” Mileva asked, as she smoothed Albert’s hair back from his face.

“Yes . . . please,” Albert whispered.

He seemed barely conscious now, barely aware of Mileva’s words. Strangely, she had her head turned half away from him, as though she were trying to speak to someone else as well. Jonah peered carefully at the corners of the hospital room, but there was no one there.

“I arranged Tete’s transfer to the future the same way Lieserl’s worked,” Mileva murmured. “Through time travel he became a baby once more, so he had no memories of me or you or the twentieth century.”

“At least she took that precaution,” JB harrumphed.

“He was adopted by a very nice set of parents—better parents than you or me, I’m happy to say,” Mileva continued. “He received a vaccine for his schizophrenia. So the thing that took over his twentieth-century life became as nothing for him, a momentary pinprick that he instantly forgot. He thrived in the future, and grew up happy, and you might say that he went into the family business—”

“Physics, you mean? Like you and me?” Albert mumbled. “Engineering, like my father and uncle and Hans Albert? Or—”

“Time,” Mileva said firmly. “He became a time agent.”

Now Jonah was certain that Mileva was trying to talk to someone besides just Albert. She had her head turned completely away from him, and seemed to be staring directly into the time hollow where Jonah and the others sat.

Could she know we’d be watching?
Jonah wondered.
Is she trying to talk to
us
?

“Nooooo,” JB moaned. “Tete couldn’t have become a time agent. That situation is just ripe for paradoxes. It shouldn’t have been allowed. It—”

“I even met our son once, in his capacity as a time agent,” Mileva was saying. “In a manner of speaking. Time was stopped then, and I didn’t know who he was until later, but—”

Wait—I met Mileva during stopped time!
Jonah thought.
Is she saying
I
was the real Tete Einstein? Mileva and Albert’s second son? Am I Emily’s brother?

It wasn’t possible. Nobody had developed a schizophrenia vaccine in this part of the twenty-first century. And Mileva wouldn’t call him a time agent. She knew he was just a kid who’d gotten caught up in the time-travel mess. So . . .

Around him, Katherine and Emily and Angela were gasping and exclaiming. But JB and Hadley had fallen silent. They were staring at each other in a very strange way. Their faces had gone pale; Jonah realized that both of them had dropped their Elucidators.