Free The Omega Theory by Mark Alpert Page A

said no, but then she remembered a series of phone messages. Seven messages, all in the same day, and all from a computer scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.”
    David was familiar with Hebrew University. Ten years ago, while he was researching his biography of Einstein, he’d spent a couple of months in Jerusalem going through the thousands of letters and manuscripts in the university’s Albert Einstein archives. The school also had a world-class computer science department.
    Lucille stared at Bennett. “What’s the name she gave you?”
    “It was so unusual, I couldn’t forget it—Olam ben Z’man.”
    “Shit,” David muttered. He’d learned some Hebrew during his summer in Jerusalem. “That’s very strange.”
    “Yes, I thought so, too,” Bennett said. “I was curious, so I looked it up in a Hebrew-English dictionary. The name means ‘Universe, the son of Time.’”

7
    MICHAEL AWOKE ON A BARE MATTRESS THAT SMELLED OF PUKE. HE SAT UP to get away from the smell and felt a dull pain in his shoulder. He reached under the sleeve of his T-shirt and touched a gauze pad taped to his skin. Then he remembered the trip in the airplane and the shiny needle at the end of the syringe.
    He wasn’t in the airplane anymore. The mattress lay on the floor of a dark, stuffy room. It was so dark he could barely see his own feet. He squinted and saw that he was still wearing his jeans and socks and sneakers. No one had undressed him while he slept, and he was glad about this—David Swift had told him many times that he shouldn’t let anyone touch his private parts, except a doctor, of course. But his underpants were damp because he’d peed in them during the night, and his T-shirt was sweaty. Also, his throat was sore. He was hungry and scared and wanted to go home.
    The mattress was in the corner of the room. Michael touched the walls, which felt gritty. He looked over his shoulder and thought he saw a piece of furniture on the other side of the room, but it was too dark to make out any details. The only illumination was a thin shaft of sunlight that squeezed through a chink in the concrete wall. About an inch wide, the shaft descended at a twenty-degree angle and made a yellow parallelogram on the floor. Michael deduced from the shallow angle of the sunlight that it was either early morning or late evening, but he couldn’t tell which. His watch was no help—the glowing hands pointed at eleven, which couldn’t be right. The airplane must have crossed several time zones, he thought. He found it very distressing not to know the correct time. It was even worse than not knowing where he was.
    He stood up and walked toward the chink. It was nearly six feet above the floor, but Michael was six feet and one and a half inches tall, so he could see through the hole if he stood on his tiptoes. Pressing his right eye against the wall, he peered through the chink as if he were looking through a telescope. At first he saw nothing but an aching brightness. But after a few seconds he saw a landscape of brown hills, rugged and treeless, stretching to the horizon. Two gray Toyota Land Cruisers were parked on the sand below the closest hill, and in front of the cars were twelve men in beige uniforms.
    The men stood in a line, shoulder to shoulder. They were soldiers, but they looked different from the animated figures in Warfighter and the other computer games that Michael played. Their uniforms were dirty and didn’t match—some were in a desert-camouflage pattern, others were plain khaki. One soldier had a brown beard and a red bandanna. Another wore a black turban. They carried a variety of weapons, too: M-4 carbines, Bizon submachine guns, AK-47 rifles. After a while a thirteenth soldier stepped into view, a large man wearing a black beret. He stopped in front of the others, clasped his hands behind his back, and shouted something Michael didn’t understand. The other soldiers turned to the right and marched off.