Caught

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “Didn’t everything work out in the end with Albert and Mileva, too?” Jonah asked. His voice had gone shrill again, but he decided to ignore it. “And—for you? You’re not actually wishing that you were stuck in a mental institution in the twentieth century, are you?”

  JB’s toying with the place mat had become so intense that he almost flipped the whole thing over. He stopped himself and laid both hands down, one on top of the other.

  “Of course I’d rather be me, in my own time—what I think of as my own time, what I think of as my real self,” he said. “And, yes, it does appear that Mileva covered all her bases, and fixed time completely. And somehow she managed to keep everything secret until it was too late to stop her. But . . . it shouldn’t have been possible, how all that worked out! How did we get through all those layers of cause and effect in so many centuries without destroying time? Was it all just fate? Was everything just meant to be?”

  “After Katherine and I got back from the sixteen hundreds, you told me we shouldn’t feel like Second just manipulated us into everything,” Jonah said. “You said we still made our own choices.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” JB said, shrugging away this explanation. “But how did I have any choice when I had to be frozen in that time hollow when you went back in time with Mileva—just so I could become who I really am? So I could become the person who was frozen in that time hollow? Don’t you see how circular all of this is?”

  “I’m not stupid,” Jonah said.

  He saw that JB had begun twisting his hands together, the right hand squeezing the left, the left squeezing the right . . . His moment of letting his hands lie peacefully on top of the Thanksgiving place mat was over.

  “I’m not accusing you of stupidity,” JB said. “This has the smartest time experts of my era tearing their hair out.”

  “Just because everything fits?” Jonah asked.

  “Because things that should have been random were absolutely necessary to make everything fit,” JB said. “We thought it was random that you and Katherine were sucked back to 1903—just a side effect of the time chaos, and an accident of you holding the Elucidator.”

  “But . . . you sent Emily back in time,” Jonah said hesitantly. He cleared his throat. “Right? That wasn’t random. You did that yourself.”

  “Yes, but that was only because things had gotten so freaky in the time hollow,” JB said. “Objects were appearing and disappearing at will—we thought Einstein was the key. Sending Emily back was a last-ditch effort, the only way I could think of to stabilize time.”

  “You told me you weren’t going to return any more missing children to history,” Jonah said stubbornly.

  “Can you see why I had to change my mind?” JB asked. “And didn’t get a chance to warn you?”

  Reluctantly, Jonah nodded. “But things still got freakier,” he added. “Time freezing, even in the time hollow—”

  “Which everyone used to think was impossible,” JB interrupted.

  “And then Hadley appearing out of nowhere,” Jonah said. “And his Elucidator appearing and disappearing—”

  “The random results of time instability,” JB said. “It had to be random!”

  He’d stopped twisting his hands together only so he could wave them uselessly at Jonah.

  Jonah was still trying to catch up. He suddenly realized why it mattered so much that JB had been frozen in the time hollow, randomly or not.

  “If you hadn’t been frozen, you would have stopped me from going back with Mileva,” Jonah said. He meant it as a question, but the words came out more as an accusation. “You would have stopped her from learning about time travel. You would have stopped me from handing her that Elucidator.”

  “Of course!” JB said. “So, tell me, how did I have any choice in the matter? How did you?”

  It was so weird, JB being the one with all the questions, not the answers. But Jonah thought he saw a way to try to explain.

  “Katherine and I both started reading about Einstein’s theories,” Jonah said. “And I don’t understand all of them, but maybe this whole free will versus fate thing is kind of like what Einstein thought about light. When he was starting out, everyone thought light moved in waves. Then Einstein came along and said, ‘Nope, it moves in packets called quanta.’”

  “Max Planck actually thought of quanta first, but so far I’m with you,” JB said.

  “But then later on,” Jonah continued, “Einstein himself said, ‘You know what, guys? Light really is kind of waveish, after all. So how about if we say it’s both, waves and quanta all at once? Doesn’t that make the most sense?’”

  “You’re saying our lives are like light waves/quanta?” JB asked. “We have fate and free will all at once?”

  “Exactly!” Jonah said.

  JB was rubbing his forehead.

  “I’d have to double-check to see what scientists in this time period think about light, to really know how to answer you without ruining time,” JB said. “The problem is, if you don’t know if you’re riding a wave or a quantum packet of light, how do you make your choices? How do you decide how to live your life? How do you know what’s important?”

  “Well, it seems like things work out best when time travelers try to help people,” Jonah said, shrugging.

  He thought about how long it’d taken him to realize that he should give Mileva the Elucidator. Back in 1611 he’d been slow about figuring out how to help too. And in 1600 he’d been a total idiot about his priorities.

  “But which people are you supposed to help?” JB asked, sounding as if he really wanted to know. “I’ll go back to the Einstein analogy you used before, about the bowling ball on the trampoline, changing the paths of the little marbles around it. Time travelers always thought Einstein was the huge bowling ball and Mileva was just one of the inconsequential marbles orbiting around him. But it turns out she was a bowling ball in her own right.”

  “I hope you don’t ever use that as a pickup line, trying to meet girls,” Jonah said. He slipped into an imitation of some stupid, sleazy guy in a bar. Or maybe in a middle-school cafeteria. “Hey, babe, you’re not just some inconsequential marble.” He pretended to stick his thumbs in imaginary suspenders, then flipped both hands forward like guns. “You, babe, are a real bowling ball!”

  JB laughed. He ran his hand through his hair so it stood up almost as dramatically as Albert Einstein’s.

  “What if it turns out that everyone’s important?” JB asked. “Everybody that’s ever lived, in all of history?”

  “What if it does?” Jonah said. He gulped. “And, speaking of history . . . ,” His voice sounded weird again, but maybe that was just because his ears were ringing. He forced himself to keep talking. “Who am I? I mean, who was I originally?”

  JB froze. Then, very deliberately, he slipped his hands from above the table to beneath it. He seemed to be forcing himself to act casual.

  It didn’t work much better than Jonah trying to force himself to act normal.

  “You want to know your other identity now?” JB asked quietly. “After weeks of avoiding every hint of it?”

  Jonah nodded. “It’s because of Albert Einstein,” he admitted. “Your . . . dad . . . was a great man in so many ways, but he was kind of a coward, too, don’t you think? When Mileva tried to tell him things he didn’t know how to deal with, he just kind of tuned them out, you know? Avoided the truth? I just—” He looked down, then forced himself to look back up. “I don’t want to be like that.”

  JB lifted his hand to his chin and rested it there.

  “Interesting timing,” he muttered. “Very interesting.”

  “So, will you tell me?” Jonah asked impatiently.

  “No,” JB said, shaking his head. “Not yet.”

  Jonah sagged against the pantry door.

  “Do you know how hard it was for me to get up the courage to ask?” he said.

  JB looked at him steadily.

  “Yeah, I kind of do,” he admitted
. “And I’m proud of you for that. But there’s too much up in the air right now, too much in flux. I did take an oath to protect time, to the best of my abilities. And that’s what I’m still trying to do.”

  JB stood up.

  “Wait, where are you going?” Jonah asked. “I’ve still got, like, ten million questions!”

  “I know,” JB said. “But I don’t have ten million answers.”

  “Am I going back in time again anytime soon?” Jonah asked. “What am I supposed to do? Will Katherine or Chip go with me? Are Emily and Angela and Hadley okay? And—”

  Jonah saw that JB had picked up one of the Einstein books from the table and begun leafing through it.

  “Here, this is the best I can do for you right now,” JB said. “Read what Einstein had to say.”

  He handed the book to Jonah, and pointed to a sentence near the top of the page that quoted Einstein:

  We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.

  “I wasn’t asking anything about God,” Jonah complained.

  “Yeah, you kind of were,” JB said. “If there is fate, who else would control it?”

  Now JB was confusing him even more. It looked as if JB was about to leave, so Jonah rushed over and put his hand on JB’s arm.

  “Can’t you tell me anything else?” Jonah begged.

  JB looked at him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Have the Apple Jacks.”

  “What?” Jonah asked.

  “When I arrived, you were trying to decide which cereal to have, weren’t you?” JB asked. “Well, that’s my advice. You like Apple Jacks the best. And, believe me, that sugary stuff doesn’t taste nearly as good once you’re an adult.”

  Dimly, Jonah realized that this was JB’s way of telling him the same thing he’d said after Jonah returned from the 1600s: Have fun . . . while you still can. Maybe it wasn’t such an ominous message. Maybe it was just the only way anyone could enjoy any part of life, knowing there could always be plenty of heartache and difficulty ahead.

  “You’ll be back soon, won’t you?” Jonah asked.

  “Yes,” JB said. “I’m afraid so.”

  JB shook Jonah’s hand off his arm. A second later the time traveler vanished.

  Jonah felt foolish just standing there watching an empty space. Eventually he walked over to the pantry and pulled out the box of Apple Jacks. He poured the cereal in a bowl, added milk, grabbed a spoon, and sat down at the table with his snack and the Einstein book.

  There was still so much he still didn’t understand—so much he might never understand.

  But he knew at least one thing that JB had told him was true.

  The Apple Jacks really were delicious.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Lieserl Einstein was both a missing child of history and—for decades after her 1902 birth—a very, very well-kept secret.

  As described in this book, she was the first child of Albert Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maric Einstein. Albert and Mileva met and fell in love when they were both students at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich. They seem to have shared a fascination with physics and a faith in Albert Einstein’s genius at a time when many others looked at him and saw only a bumbler.

  Albert’s later accomplishments are well known, and the facts of his life have become something of a modern myth. The man whose name would become synonymous with brilliance was very slow to learn to talk as a child, but careful biographers have found no evidence that he ever flunked math, as is often alleged. He did follow an unorthodox path to scientific fame: He left high school in Germany at fifteen because he had such a problem with the strict, autocratic system. He tried but failed to qualify to skip directly to university, so he attended a more relaxed high school in Switzerland to prepare. He barely managed to graduate fourth out of five in his class at the Zurich Polytechnic, and then he constantly ran into obstacles for the next few years as he tried to get a job, earn a doctorate, and win the scientific establishment’s attention. By the summer of 1903, the time of most of the action of this book, he was twenty-three, and his job as a clerk in the Swiss patent office probably seemed like proof to most people that he would never be a scientific all-star.

  Mileva’s early life isn’t as well documented, but the details that are known mark her as extraordinary in her own right. As the daughter of a woman from a well-off family and a Serbian peasant who had done quite well for himself, Mileva seems to have been a particularly beloved child. She was born with a dislocated hip, which gave her a lifelong limp and may have made her think that marriage and children were less likely to lie in her future. With her father’s strong encouragement, she focused on academics much, much more than most females of her time and place. And, at least in the beginning, she excelled at them.

  After blazing a trail through various schools as the family moved around what was then the Hungarian section of Austria-Hungary, Mileva got special permission to enroll at the all-male Royal Classical High School in Zagreb, in what is now Croatia. (Her family’s hometown of Novi Sad is now part of Serbia but was part of Austria-Hungary between the late 1800s and the end of World War I. However, because the Marics and their friends would have regarded themselves as Serbs, not Hungarians, that is how I refer to them in this book.) Although Mileva also had to get special permission to study physics, she ended up having the highest exam scores in her class in that subject, and in math as well.

  Unlike Albert, who seemed certain that he wanted to focus on physics, Mileva wavered somewhat between academic interests. She first moved to Zurich to study medicine, then quickly switched to physics and math at the Polytechnic. She was only the fifth woman to be admitted in the school’s history, and the only one in her class. However, she stayed there only a year before leaving to study at Heidelberg University in Germany instead—even though Heidelberg only let women audit classes, not actually earn degrees. Some biographers speculate that she left Zurich because she was falling in love with Albert and recognized that that was most likely a path to heartache. It’s impossible to know if that’s true or not, but Albert begged her to return. And, after a semester, that’s exactly what she did.

  Still, her stellar academic accomplishments seemed to come to an end as she grew more involved with Albert. In 1900, the year that both of them were scheduled to graduate from the Polytechnic, Mileva’s dismal exam grades left her last in the class—the only student that year who didn’t do better than Albert. Her grades were actually not that much worse than his, but the difference led to vastly different outcomes. With the help of a little rounding up, he passed, and earned his diploma.

  Mileva failed.

  Part of her problem might have been that she was still scrambling to catch up after spending time away from Zurich, following a different course of study in Heidelberg.

  Some Einstein scholars speculate that Albert was also a bad influence on her—he could skip class and borrow a friend’s notes and still eke out a passing grade; maybe she was trying that approach too, with less success. Or maybe the contempt he showed for some of their professors rubbed off on her, and it reflected even more in her grades than his.

  Personally, I wonder if discrimination against her as a female scientist played a role as well. At a time when so few European universities even admitted females, and so many scientists were on record as claiming that females’ brains just weren’t capable of comprehending physics (a view that Einstein himself came awfully close to espousing later in life), it seems likely that a female would have had to work twice as hard and come across as absolutely flawless to get any credit at all.

  Mileva was clearly not flawless.

  She took the news of her failure hard, but vowed to study more and take the exams again the following year.

&nbs
p; By then she was pregnant with Lieserl.

  From the letters that Albert and Mileva exchanged, it appears that both of them fervently wanted to get married even before the pregnancy. But financial problems and Albert’s family were working against them.

  According to Albert’s letters, his mother was absolutely scathing in opposing the match. Even before the two women met, when Albert told his mother in July 1900 that he wanted to marry Mileva, Albert says:

  Mama threw herself onto the bed, buried her head in the pillow, and wept like a child. After regaining her composure she immediately shifted to a desperate attack: “You are ruining your future and destroying your opportunities.” “No decent family will have her.” [And, presciently] “If she gets pregnant you’ll really be in a mess.”

  Later in the same letter he describes his mother’s active campaign to get him to break up with Mileva, and his stalwart resistance to it:

  The only thing that is embarrassing for her is that we want to remain together always. Her attempts at changing my mind came in expressions such as: “Like you, she is a book—but you ought to have a wife.” “By the time you’re 30 she’ll be an old witch,” etc. But now that she’s seen that for the time being her efforts only make me angry, she’s refrained from giving me the “treatment” for a while.

  The more Albert’s family opposed the relationship, the more Albert wrote gushing declarations of his love for Mileva, such as:

  How was I able to live alone before, my little everything? Without you I lack self-confidence, passion for work, and enjoyment of life—in short, without you, my life is no life.

  And:

  You are and will remain a shrine for me . . . ; I also know that of all people, you love me the most, and understand me the best . . . When I see other people, I can really appreciate how special you are!

  And perhaps most interestingly:

  I am so lucky to have found you, a creature who is my equal, and who is as strong and independent as I am! I feel alone with everyone except you!