“Miss Victoria, I think he knows enough science and math to be a janitor here.” He smiled at Martha. “And you, ma’am?”

“I don’t know any of that, sir. I’m Martha Nagle.” She swallowed. “His wife.”

Matt tried not to react.

“We offer free classes for women, you know, in the evening. You should join a few and show him science isn’t all that hard.” He lifted a top hat off a rack by the door. “You can take care of it, Vic?”

“I will, sir.” She watched him leave, smiling. “Goodbye. ” There was no “sir” in her voice.

After the door closed, she pulled a sheet of paper, a printed form, out of a drawer, and carefully dipped a pen in a crystal inkwell. “Matthew Nagle—is that G-L-E?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Middle name?”

“None.” She wrote his name in a precise Spencerian hand.

“Birth certificate or some other identification?”

“That was in our luggage . . . which was stolen. Off the train.” Hoping MIT and Trinity didn’t compare notes.

“You’ve notified the police?”

“At the station. We’ll check downtown tomorrow. It seemed prudent to start looking for employment. My wallet and Martha’s purse were in there, and we’re—we have no money.”

“Really. It’s usually good advice, to put away your purse before you go to sleep on a train. But they took everything?”

“Everything,” Martha said.

She dipped the pen again. “Any address here?”

“No.”

She left the pen in the inkwell and opened a bottom drawer and lifted out a metal box. “You didn’t ask what the salary would be.”

“I assumed it would be fair.”

“I don’t know. This is not my usual function.” She opened the box and counted out ten silver dollars, then added two more. “I’ll make a note of this advance. Come in tomorrow at eight and I will introduce you to the supervisorof maintenance. You don’t mind working under the supervision of a Negro?”

“No. Of course not.” Vic slid the stack of coins over. “Thank you. This is . . . extraordinary.”

“Boston Tech is extraordinary.” She gave him a rueful smile. “I am President Crafts’s first line of defense, so to speak, and as such I am supposed to be a good judge of character. As I judge your character, there is a small chance you will take the money, and I’ll never see you again.”

“I—”

“There’s a larger chance that someday you will be one of my bosses. Now go and find a place to stay. The rooms on Commonwealth and Newbury are nicer; the ones on Boylston are cheaper and closer.”

“Thank you.” The twelve cartwheels rattled a heavy cascade into his pocket.

“Martha, this isn’t Ohio. They won’t let you stay with your husband unless you have a marriage license. Or at least a ring.”

She reddened, and evidently decided not to make up a story. “We’ll take care of that.”

She nodded perfunctorily and put away the cash box. “It was when you said, ‘Plus C,’ Matthew. Most of his undergraduates would just say ‘e to the x.’ ”

They walked all the way to the street in silence,before Matt brought it up. “You don’t have to marry me. We’ve only known each other—”

“Three million years or so.” She took his arm. “Matthew, in my time, love isn’t part of marriage. Sometimes it happens, and some people are happy and some are jealous. But our husbands are chosen by our parents, and we make the best of it.

“I think I love you, which is a better deal than I would have gotten at home. And really, in the time we’ve known each other, these few million years, we’ve done more together than most married couples ever do.”

He chuckled. “That’s true. Been more places, had more adventures.”

“Except the one.”

He stopped walking and looked her in the face. “I wonder how much a marriage license costs. I wonder whether we could get one today.”

22

Matt got a hundred-dollar bill for the Lincoln notethat had cost him ten thousand in 2079. He bought nice wedding rings for both of them, and had enough left over to buy some decent clothes and a fine dinner at the Union Oyster House, which they both remembered from their respective futures.

Matt was surprised to find that he enjoyed being a janitor, the slow and steady predictableness of it. But he wasn’t a janitor long. He took evening classes for one year, and of course drew attention.

The Lowell Institute funded free evening “lessons” in various science and engineering disciplines, and mathematics. His teachers in mathematics and physical science were amazed at the erudition of this autodidact from Ohio.

In Matt’s second year, he was hired by Lowell as a night instructor in algebra and calculus. They also gave him a stipend so he could quit his day job and pursue a degree.

Of course he had a huge unfair advantage over other students. He had the “foresight” to study German intensively, and when in 1900 Max Planck published Ь ber eine Verbesserung der Wienschen Spektralgleichun, the paper that eventually led to quantum mechanics, Matt was the first person at MIT to read it and explain it to others. In 1901, he earned his first physics degree, and his second in 1902. MIT sent him to Harvard to get his doctorate so they could ask him back to teach (even then, there was a tradition against an institution hiring its own new Ph.Ds). At Harvard he pored through Annalen der Physikand was the first to note the importance of Einstein’s four papers in 1905, including Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter K ц rper, which changed the world forever and gave Matt an impressive doctoral dissertation.

This was indicative of his life’s strategy. He could have beaten Einstein to the punch; as an undergraduate in 2050 he had been required to go to the whiteboard and derive the Special Theory of Relativity from first principles. But he couldn’t afford to become famous. People would be curious about his past, and find out that he had none.

Martha went to night school as well, working days as a chambermaid in the Parker House Hotel, and eventually got a degree in general science. Her accomplishment was more impressive than Matt’s, though only Matt knew why. She worked as an insurance analyst for two years, then had the first of their four children, and retired.

In 1915, the last year before MIT moved across the river, Matt made full professor. The next year, while the physics department was settling into the mudflats of Cambridge, Matt read Einstein’s Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativit д tstheorie, the Annalenarticle where he first described General Relativity. Of course, everyone had his eye on Einstein by then, but to most scientists the mathematics behind General Relativity was new and difficult. Not so to Matt; he’d had tensor calculus in 2051, and boned up on it in 1916, before the paper came out.

He was one of the most popular professors at MIT, for the students, though he was a puzzle to the faculty. He published papers with acceptable frequency, but they were “solid” work rather than brilliant—whereas in person he often wasbrilliant, making connections that no one else saw. In conversation he was years ahead of his time; in publication he was not. Carefully not.

Their marriage was so conspicuously happy that even their own children were impressed. It seemed as if all of life was amusing to them. Of course, no one knew that they were a conspiracy of two. Perhaps all great loves are that: a secret that can’t be shared.

Among his mathematical skills was arithmetic. He knew that his mother would be born in 1995, and so there was no chance that he would live long enough to go to Ohio and see her as an infant. Perhaps that was a good thing.

Matt lost Martha in 1952, when she was seventy-four. A professor emeritus at eighty-one, on his way back from the funeral he saw the headlines about the H-bomb the U.S. had exploded in the South Pacific. He went to his office that day, and as a way of dealing with grief he tried to spread hope: This is not the end of the world. The world is big and resilient.