Edison's Alley

by Neal Shusterman

  “Ouch,” she said reflexively, then she touched her cheek, laughing.

  “Sorry,” Nick said, although he wasn’t sorry at all.

  Caitlin strode off quickly, not wanting Nick or the others to see her blush. Mercifully, Petula had been looking the other way, almost as if she had known the kiss was coming, but Vince stared with a creepy, detached amusement that had nothing to do with being undead.

  She found Mr. Slate in the backyard, digging—but he wasn’t exactly gardening. He was in the process of unearthing a huge steel slab.

  At least it looked like steel. Stainless, perhaps, because although it had been buried in the ground, it showed no signs of rust. Mr. Slate had exposed about eight feet of it—enough for Caitlin to see that it was more than a slab, it was the top edge of a band of metal, over a foot wide and slightly curved. The thing was so big that he hadn’t found the bottom yet.

  “Hi, Caitlin,” said Mr. Slate, not looking up from his work. “I keep thinking just one more foot and I’ll get to the end of it, but it keeps on going.”

  Following the curve with her eyes, Caitlin suspected that the band formed a perfect circle around the house.

  “Now it’s a mission,” Mr. Slate said cheerfully.

  Caitlin looked at him curiously. There was something about him that troubled her—and when he finally glanced at her, she saw something in his eyes that troubled her even more. She’d seen that vague gaze before. Meanwhile, up above, lightning arced between two clouds, oscillating like a jump rope.

  “Mr. Slate,” she said, “you shouldn’t be digging around something metallic. I mean, look at the sky.”

  “Yes.” He looked up, noted the massive sparks that volleyed between the clouds, then adjusted his baseball cap. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “But…” Caitlin couldn’t understand how the man could be so blasé, as if there was nothing unusual at all…

  She gasped when she realized the reason, and she turned back toward the house. “Nick!” she yelled, running. “Nick! Don’t go in the attic!”

  But Nick was already there, pulling the harp through the trapdoor.

  Vince pushed from below as he climbed the spring-loaded attic ladder, lifting his end of the harp through the opening. “So where does it go?”

  Nick knew with a single glance. “Move the weight machine to the side.”

  Vince took a deep breath. “Okay.” He rolled up his sleeves, put his hands on the weight machine, and pushed with all his strength. The machine didn’t budge.

  “Oh, right,” said Nick. He reached over and turned the weight machine on. “Now try.”

  Vince easily slid the machine out of the way then, and Nick put the harp into place. It actually clicked into position, fitting perfectly up against the tall stage lamp.

  Nick dragged the weight machine back so that its handles gently grazed the invisible strings of the harp. He could feel the resonance within him as those strings began to vibrate. But the vibration felt off somehow. He could sense a gaping absence at the center of the machine, the void left by the items still missing. He could reconnect the fan, bellows, and other items they had used in their assault on the Accelerati, but that wouldn’t change the fact that the core of the machine was mostly hollow. The completion of Tesla’s great design was so close, and yet was only as close as the farthest object. Wherever that was.

  It was painful to be this near to completion. So painful that his head hurt. But it hurt a whole lot more when he was hit from behind and knocked out.

  The clarinet was a heavy thing. Much heavier than an actual instrument. Perhaps that’s because it was made of a cobalt-molybdenum alloy. Not a conductor’s choice for an orchestra, but superb as a conductor of electricity.

  The Accelerati had wanted to weaponize it, but at the moment it was good enough as is. Good enough for clobbering Nick over the head, anyway.

  Petula hoped she hadn’t cracked his skull. She had practiced on some melons at home, and found the perfect combination of vector and force that would dent the melon without cracking it. She had to trust that Nick’s melon offered a similar level of resistance.

  “Hey,” said Vince, a bit slow to react, “what are you—”

  Petula ripped the sunglasses from his face, disconnecting him from the battery in his backpack. She wondered with an unpleasant shiver whether ending the life of someone who had already died multiple times could still be considered murder. Well, it wasn’t something she could stop to think about now.

  She lifted the backpack from his shoulders as he dropped. She hadn’t expected Vince to fall down the attic ladder, but he did—picking off Caitlin, who had been on her way up.

  “A twofer!” said Petula.

  “Petula! Help!” Caitlin screamed from below, clearly not yet grasping the full extent of the situation.

  “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” Petula said. Then she yanked up the spring-loaded attic stairs, slammed the trapdoor shut, and wedged the broken baseball bat through the spring so the stairs could not be pulled open from below. Now Caitlin and the re-dead Vince were locked out, and no longer her problem.

  When she turned, Jorgenson crawled out from under Nick’s bed, like the proverbial monster.

  “Well done,” he said as he stood up, towering over her. “Very well done.”

  While Jorgenson examined the machine, Petula checked Nick’s pulse. He was out cold, but still alive. His head wasn’t even bleeding. Score.

  Jorgenson regarded the invention with awe. “It was right under our noses all along. I was up here, but I didn’t see it for what it was.” He looked at Petula with very nearly the same regard. “I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”

  Twenty-four hours and five minutes earlier, when Petula had looked through the time-bending periscope and had seen them dragging the harp toward Nick’s front door, she knew there were only two possible scenarios:

  Either she would betray the Accelerati, as it had appeared she was doing…

  …or she could play the situation to her personal advantage.

  Then the periscope had revealed Nick giving Caitlin that awful little kiss, and she knew there was really only one choice.

  “What do you see?” Jorgenson had asked her.

  “See for yourself.” She stepped back and allowed Jorgenson to watch the scene through the periscope. After a quiet moment, he glanced over at her coldly, ready, she assumed, to call security and have her removed. But before he could say a word, she took the wind out of his sails.

  “Don’t bother locking me up,” she had told him. “If you’re seeing it, then it’s going to happen, no matter what you do.” Then she added, “But we can make sure that it happens on our terms.”

  And so—without even letting the other Accelerati know what he was up to—Jorgenson left the harp unattended in a shipping crate, with only a skeleton crew at headquarters to defend it. Then he went to Nick’s house, subdued Mr. Slate with a new and improved mind-numbing fob, and waited for the boy to return—which, of course, Jorgenson knew would happen, because he had already seen it.

  Had he kept watching through the periscope, however, he also would have seen what came next—and things might have been very different…

  “Do you know where the items go?” Jorgenson asked as he studied the machine in Nick’s attic.

  “I think…” Petula began. She put the clarinet where she had seen Nick place it before. Then she took the jack-in-the-box, sifter, and fan from Nick’s belt and added them as well. Once she was done, Jorgenson reached into his pocket and pulled out the time-bending lens. He secured it to the frame of the box camera—which was now aimed right into the bell of the clarinet.

  Up above, through the pyramid of glass at the apex of the attic, Petula could see the spidery-sparking asteroid thousands of miles above their heads.

  “The battery!” Jorgenson said. “Its leads must connect to these posts on the washboard!” With each passing moment he began to sound less like the reserved professor and m
ore like the mad scientist. His gray hair, teased by static, made the image complete. “It’s a primer engine!” he announced. “Don’t you see? It’s like the ignition of a car. And I can hot-wire it! I can turn it on!”

  “But it’s not finished!’ Petula reminded him.

  Jorgenson dismissed the thought with a wave of his good hand as he examined the machine, his eyes rapidly darting from piece to piece, his mind trying to take it all in. “It’s incomplete, but I believe there are enough components here for us to be able to see what it does.”

  Petula hesitated. She looked to the harp, remembering the feeling it had given her when she first plucked it. “But…but I must complete the circuit,” she told him.

  He turned his gaze to her with predatory smoothness. An owl eyeing a mouse. “I’ve been waiting my entire life for this moment,” he said. “Don’t even think of taking it away from me.”

  Petula pulled the battery from Vince’s backpack. “It can’t be you,” she told him, “You don’t understand—it has to be me! I complete the circuit!”

  She tried to hold the battery out of his reach, but he grabbed it from her, pushing her backward. She stumbled over Nick, who was beginning to stir, moaning his way back to consciousness.

  “Now we will know what Tesla knew!” Jorgenson took the battery’s leads in his hands. “Now we shall be the deity electric! The gods of power!”

  But Petula kicked him behind the knee, causing his leg to buckle, and he dropped the battery.

  “I complete the circuit!” Petula insisted. “The harp told me!”

  Jorgenson turned to Petula, ready to tear her apart for her insolence, but she was more than ready for the fight. After all, she had taken an online course; she was a black belt in theoretical jujitsu.

  Nick’s head pounded. His ears rang. He was dazed, but he understood the gist of what was going on. Somehow Jorgenson was here. He had knocked Nick out and Petula was valiantly trying to fend him off.

  Before him was the battery. Vince’s battery. And beyond that, the machine.

  The hissing, snapping sizzling sounds from the heavens had grown deafening—and that’s when Nick knew what he had to do. The machine was not finished, but even so, he had to turn it on. Even if it failed, even if it blew up, he had to do it. Because if he didn’t, everyone would be toast. Literally.

  While Petula battled Jorgenson, getting in some theoretically accurate martial-arts moves, Nick crawled to the machine. Through the pyramidal skylight, he could see the asteroid, its orbit having brought it directly overhead.

  Nick grabbed the negative and positive wires of the battery. Jorgenson, on his back, saw what he was about to do.

  “No!” Jorgenson yelled like a spoiled child. “Mine!”

  But the machine was not his. It would never be.

  Nick held his breath and hooked the electrified wires on the posts of the shimmering washboard.

  There are some who believe that the great Tunguska “comet” blast that leveled two thousand square kilometers of Siberia in 1908 was actually caused by one of Tesla’s experiments gone awry. According to this theory, he was attempting to transmit energy wirelessly via a massive Tesla coil—very much like the device that now filled Nick’s attic.

  While the inventor’s connection to the Tunguska incident remains speculative, it is verifiably true that he constructed a giant Tesla coil atop a tower 190 feet high in Shoreham, New York. He believed that Wardenclyffe Tower, as it was called, would create a resonant electrical pulse through the earth, thus providing free electricity to everyone on the planet. None of the rich businessmen who funded Tesla, however, were interested in anything that was free, so they killed the project before the world could see its potential.

  Tesla went broke, and what was arguably the greatest invention in the history of the human race was torn down and sold for scrap to pay off his debts.

  Legend has it, however, that in 1903, before the wrecking ball came a-calling, Tesla fired it up once, and only once. The glow from the great coil could be seen hundreds of miles away in Connecticut, across Long Island Sound, and some say they could feel the electrical charge as far as Paris. The New York Sun reported that bolts of electricity shot out in all directions, as if on some “mysterious errand.”

  The day Nick Slate turned on the unfinished machine, a new mysterious errand began.

  Danny, who had spent the day out with his teammate Seth, was riding home with Beverly Webb at the same moment Nick fired up the machine in the attic.

  The car had just turned on to Danny’s street, and he immediately knew something was wrong at home, perhaps because his house seemed taller than it was when he left it that morning.

  The attic was, in fact, rising.

  The levitating triangular shape looked something like the image on the back of a dollar bill: the pyramid with the glowing eye at its top. The attic didn’t have an eye, but it sure was glowing.

  Beverly saw it a moment later. “What on earth?”

  The sight must have absorbed all of her attention, because she began to veer into an oncoming car. She jerked the steering wheel and successfully avoided a collision, but she jumped the curb and killed a poor defenseless mailbox.

  Danny climbed out of the car, ignoring Beverly’s colorful language, and hurried toward his family’s supremely weird home. People who had already been outside to eye the troublesome sky were converging on his house to gawk.

  Now that he was closer, he could see that the attic wasn’t levitating at all. It was being lifted skyward by a series of gears, cranks, and support struts…?

  “That’s cool,” said Seth, coming up behind him. “I wish my house could do that.”

  Mr. Slate saw the attic rising, too. And he saw the steel band that he had unearthed in his yard begin to shimmer with static flashes.

  But, with the logic centers of his brain currently blocked by Accelerati technology, he found nothing unusual about this. An attic rising 190 feet above the rest of the house? Such things happened every day. Didn’t they?

  He wanted to return to his digging, but deep inside him, in a place he couldn’t quite reach, he had a nagging suspicion that he was missing something important.

  Then, when a massive and continuous bolt of lightning shot down from the distant asteroid and right through the glass skylight of his attic, it occurred to him what was wrong.

  He had been so busy digging, he had forgotten to eat lunch.

  Petula Grabowski-Jones was a great believer in self-preservation. Sacrificing herself—either for the benefit of others or the benefit of science—was not part of her psychological makeup. She firmly believed that others didn’t deserve it, and as for science—well, Jorgenson would be a far better sacrifice, him being a professor and all.

  And so, the moment Nick connected the battery and everything in the room began to shake, Petula decided it was time to make a quick exit. She unwedged the broken baseball bat and pushed open the attic stairs.

  To her surprise, she found that the attic stairs no longer reached the second-floor landing. The attic had begun to rise, and if she didn’t get out soon, it would be too far to jump.

  “Where’s Nick?” Caitlin yelled at her from below. “Petula! Where’s Nick?”

  Petula turned to see Nick standing by the machine. She might have grabbed him then and pulled him out with her, but the weight machine made gravity shift just enough for her to lose her balance.

  She fell down the ladderlike steps, until they ejected her like a playground slide ten feet above the rest of the house. Caitlin moved out of the way as she fell. Vince, still dead as a doornail, would have broken Petula’s fall, but she missed him and hit bare wooden floor, breaking her arm in three places.

  Jorgenson knew that turning on Tesla’s machine was a calculated risk—but it was his risk to take. Then Petula had attacked him, and now the Slate boy had wrested control. As the machine began to grind into action, Jorgenson pushed his way to his feet.

  This was, and had al
ways been, his destiny. His life had been spent searching for the machine before him. He would not let the boy steal his glory. The Jorgenson Power Transducer, as he would name it, would secure his place in history.

  As Jorgenson stumbled across the shaking attic, he didn’t notice the room rising. Or Petula falling. All he could see was the boy at the controls. As he gripped the boy’s shoulders, the electrical charge that had built up in the trillion-ton copper asteroid suddenly found a place to go, and it blew Jorgenson across the room.

  Down below, the gawkers took off in all directions when the powerful blast of lightning struck and the attic walls exploded. Beverly dragged Seth away, but Danny took off toward the house.

  He ran to his father in the backyard, who was now staring at the attic, slightly bemused, as bits and pieces of smoking lumber settled all around them.

  “Oh, hi, Danny,” he said.

  “Dad, what’s going on?”

  “Our attic just exploded,” Mr. Slate said cheerfully. “Hey, how about we go to Hometown Buffet? I feel like I could eat a horse.”

  Danny couldn’t quite believe what he’d heard, so he pretended he didn’t.

  “Where’s Nick? He’s not up there, is he?” Danny turned to see Petula running out of the house, grimacing as she gripped her weirdly dangling right arm—but Nick didn’t come out with her. “Dad!” Danny said, shaking his father. “Where’s Nick?”

  And at that moment, high above them, a key chain was blasted out of Alan Jorgenson’s pocket. It fell nearly two hundred feet into Danny’s now-roofless room and into his fish tank, where it immediately shorted out.

  Mr. Slate snapped out of his haze in an instant. His eyes filled with the dark dread of understanding as he looked at the scene before him.

  “Oh my God!” Then he raced into the house to save his son.

  Nick had no idea what had happened. All he knew was that a steady stream of electricity was shooting down from the sky into Tesla’s machine—and the machine was alive!