The Einstein Prophecy

by Robert Masello

the top of a pile of ruins, feeling his way over broken bricks and burnt timbers and shattered glass. His brown shirt was in rags, and his laceless shoes threatened to fall off at any second. But he moved with the agility of a mountain goat, nimbly making his way to the top of the rubble, where he stretched out one thin arm to claim his prize and wave it overhead in triumph. Other boys, younger and less courageous—or foolhardy—watched from the cratered pavement of the street as the boy draped the strip of gleaming tinfoil around his neck and started down again. “They’ll salvage anything,” Private Teddy Toussaint observed from the driver’s seat of the jeep. “When I was a kid, we collected bottle caps.” “Baseball cards for me, but that was another time.” That time, Lieutenant Lucas Athan thought, seemed a thousand years ago and a million miles away. “Yep, you can sure say that again,” Toussaint drawled, “and back then nobody was taking potshots at me.” From his front pocket, he removed a packet of Red Man chewing tobacco and gnawed off a hunk. “Lieutenant?” he said, extending the wet stub. “No thanks.” Lucas watched the boy hop back onto the street and hold out the tinfoil for his friends’ inspection. The kid reminded him of his boyhood friend Paulie, showing off an arrowhead he’d unearthed on a school field trip. Above, dozens of other ribbons hung from the tops of bombed-out houses and barren trees. The foil had been dropped like confetti by German planes to confound Allie...