Unknown 9 Layton Green (reading e books TXT) 📖

wall, was a replica of a device called a chronovisor. It resembled a tabletop stereo covered with cathode ray tubes, dials, and levers. Father Pellegrino Ernetti, a Catholic priest and physicist said to have built the original chronometer with a team of scientists—including Enrico Fermi—as a tool for seeing into the past. A time-travel machine of sorts. The device had received some press over the years, and had been the subject of all sorts of conspiracy theories. Remarkably, to Dr. Corwin’s knowledge, Fermi—a Nobel Prize recipient—had neither affirmed nor denied his participation. The original device was said to be hidden somewhere beneath the Vatican.

Allegedly, the chronovisor worked by receiving, decoding, and reproducing radiation and sound waves left behind by past events. In theory, it would function similar to a television or a radio, though instead of receiving wave transmissions from nearby stations, it picked up electromagnetic markers “imprinted” on the fabric of reality. A Society team had carefully reproduced a blueprint someone had smuggled out of the Vatican, though no one, Dr. Corwin included, had managed to get the replica to function.

Needless to say, he had his doubts as to whether the original worked any better.

But the claims were not as outlandish as they seemed. Vinyl records perform a similar function, the vibrations of sound waves caught and etched onto their surface. Cameras trap images of light and preserve them for eternity. Telescopes allow astronomers to see billions of years into the past and map the history of the universe. Even the everyday mirror could be considered a chronovisor of sorts: our reflections are not real-time images, but snapshots of the recent past, since it takes light a few millionths of a second to travel to the mirror and back.

The nineteenth-century inventor Charles Babbage had once pondered if sound and other electromagnetic waves were somehow preserved. Did the present harbor echoes of the past, inscribed in a quantum diary for future generations?

And why not? Time as we know it does not seem to exist in the quantum realm.

So many mysteries remained. Yet most of all, Dr. Corwin thought, as he stared at a flickering fireplace set into the wall beside the chronovisor, the connection of the strange contraption to Enrico Fermi—a former colleague of Ettore Majorana—had stoked another set of flames: the furnace in which Dr. Corwin’s obsession for Ettore had burned ever since he left Cartagena.

The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced Ettore was hiding something important. Why else risk traveling to a clandestine meeting in South America with Tesla and a nuclear physicist?

Dr. Corwin had conducted more research. While Ettore had alienated himself from his friends and family in the months preceding his departure, and his father had died that same year, Ettore had also withdrawn five months’ worth of his salary in the days leading up to that fateful night at sea. Hardly the actions of a suicidal man.

Then there was the letter to a colleague sent by Ettore just before he boarded the ship to Palermo.

Dear Carrelli,

I made a decision that has become unavoidable. . . . I realize what trouble my sudden disappearance will cause you and the students. . . . I also ask you to give my regards to all those I learned to know and appreciate in your Institute, especially Sciuti: I will keep a fond memory of them all at least until 11:00 tonight. Possibly later, too.

What a bizarre letter. Possibly later? What did Ettore think might or might not happen? Suicide was a rather conclusive matter.

Dr. Corwin also couldn’t stop thinking about Ettore’s unnerving response to his fellow physicists in Rome concerning their decision to bombard uranium with slow neutrons.

Physics is on the wrong path, Ettore had said. We are all on the wrong path.

What had Ettore meant? Was he worried about a new form of weapon? Working with Tesla and Taylor on a project that involved the mysterious Fold? Both?

Dr. Corwin had to know.

With a sigh, he pushed to his feet and drained the last sip of Scotch. He had an afternoon class to teach.

Dr. Corwin lived above a flower seller on the Upper West Side. The fragrant tropical plants carted out to the street every morning in summer always reminded him of his native Jamaica. Later that night, he left his fifth-story apartment to participate in a mandatory Society conclave held in a safe house accessed via the catacombs beneath Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Over the years, many of the tunnels, basements, grottoes, abandoned subway routes, wine cellars, and sunken old buildings riddling subterranean Manhattan had been mapped and repurposed by the Society. Some of the clandestine meeting sites were quite posh, including the basement of the former mausoleum near Saint Patrick’s, which resembled a Victorian parlor with high-tech touches—such as a collection of personal computers not yet available to the public. Dr. Corwin found them quite fascinating.

It was a gloomy October night, pregnant with atmosphere. The skyscrapers of Midtown loomed above him like ghostly sentinels, their heights lost in a dreamlike merger of fog and streetlight. Dr. Corwin had left early so he could stop at his favorite dive bar on the way. The purpose of the Society meeting was to discuss the growing power of the Ascendants, including their incursions into New York City. The meeting would be as charged with conflicting opinions as the Vietnam War protests and race riots rocking the country. He was going to need a drink before he walked in the door.

The hole-in-the-wall tavern near Sixth Avenue and Fiftieth Street was heralded by a neon sign flickering in a blacked-out window. The establishment consisted of a long bar along a brick wall covered in concert posters, opposite a succession of red seating booths. Working-class patrons, men with shaggy hair and faded jeans, and women in tight blouses and bell-bottoms all rubbed shoulders in the tight space between the bar and the booths.

Sticky tile floors. The reek of stale beer. “Brown Sugar” by the Stones on the radio.