by Wendy Mass
I slump a bit in my seat. “But how am I supposed to figure that out?”
He gestures behind him for James to come forward with the small brass telescope. I wonder how long he’s been standing there.
“It just so happens,” Mr. Oswald says, taking the telescope and holding it out to me, “that today you’ll be meeting someone who just might know the answer.”
Lizzy groans. “Is it too late to pick up trash in Central Park?”
We’ve been in the car for less than ten minutes when James pulls up in front of the Museum of Natural History and neatly backs up into a spot. “Everyone out,” he says over his shoulder.
“But aren’t we going to return the telescope to—” I glance down at the envelope on my lap. We hadn’t even gotten a chance to open it yet. “To Amos Grady? The kid from Kentucky?”
James nods. “He’s now Dr. Amos Grady, a prominent astronomer. You’re going to bring the telescope to him at his office in the museum.”
“Hey, I remember this place,” Lizzy says, peering at the large banner hanging from the roof of the building. “We came here in sixth grade to see that show at the planetarium. I fell asleep, and you pinched me so hard I bruised! Remember, Jeremy?”
It all came flooding back to me. “You were snoring! I still don’t understand how anyone can fall asleep watching the birth of a star in a distant galaxy!”
“How could anyone not?” she counters. “I’m tired just looking at the museum from out here!”
Before I say something I might regret, I pick up the telescope, which we’d wrapped in bubble wrap, and get out of the car. James plunks eight quarters into the meter. Lizzy steps out and makes a big show of yawning.
“She’s hopeless,” I complain to James as we climb the stairs to the front entrance.
James shakes his head. “If everyone were interested in the same things, imagine how boring life would be. What if everyone wanted to be a chef? There’d be lots of people making meals, but no one growing the food, delivering it to the market, stocking it on the shelves. Right?”
“Still,” I grumble. “It was a new star.”
The museum is full of parents dragging kids by the hands or hurrying to catch up with them. One boy sits cross-legged on the floor, wailing that if he can’t see the dinosaurs again he’s not moving from that spot. James walks up to the security desk, and we hang back and look around.
A mom drags the screaming dinosaur kid past us. Balancing the heavy telescope in my arms, I say to Lizzy, “See? Now that kid is showing the right amount of enthusiasm.”
She puts her hands over her ears. “If I were his mother, I’d leave him here.”
“Mothers don’t leave their kids somewhere just because they cry.”
“Oh, really?” she asks, not looking at me. “Why do they leave them?”
I should have seen that one coming a mile off. I rarely think about Lizzy’s mom, and Lizzy almost never mentions her. I feel like a jerk.
“Sorry,” I mumble, reaching out my foot to tap the toe of her sneaker.
“Don’t worry about it,”she mumbles back.
James marches back over. “I used the security guard’s phone to speak with Dr. Grady. He’s expecting us in the astrophysics lab downstairs. Follow me.” James consults a map in his hand and heads across the main level toward the archway that says ROSE CENTER above it.
My heart leaps, and I almost trip over my own feet in my hurry to follow him. We’re going to a real science lab! In the greatest museum in the world!
“Whoa, there, nerd boy,” Lizzy says, coming up from behind. She lifts the telescope out of my arms. “You’re so giddy you almost dropped this.”
I don’t know which bothers me more, being called nerd boy, or giddy. “All great scientists were nerds,” I tell her. “If Albert Einstein had played football, do you think he would have come up with the theory of relativity?”
“Am I supposed to know what that is?”
“I can’t explain it to you now,” I reply. “But it’s very important!”
We pass under the archway and into a large open space with a tall winding stairway full of charts and graphs about the universe. The ceiling and the walls of the room are all made of glass. It’s completely different from the rest of the museum.
“Hey, do you have this guy’s envelope?” Lizzy asks as we follow James into the room.
I pat the pockets of my shorts until I find it. “I can’t believe we almost forgot to read this.” I slit open the top, narrowly avoiding a paper cut, and quickly unfold the piece of paper. I read the details out loud, taking care not to bump into anyone while I read.
Oswald’s Pawn Emporium
Date: April 3, 1944
Name: Amos Grady
Age: 15
Location: Brooklyn
Item to Pawn: Telescope
Personal Statement of Seller: This telescope used to belong to my grandfather. Looking in it was his favorite thing to do in the world. He left it to me in his will. I need the money for my track team uniform. The cleats are very expensive and my parents can’t afford it. I need to run track in order to get the scholarship to MIT next year. My grandfather would understand. I know he would. I am almost certain.
The photo shows a boy with very curly hair grasping the telescope in his arms. I peer a little closer. I think those are tears in his eyes.
Under the photo it says:
Price: $45.00 (Forty-Five Dollars)
Signed by: Oswald Oswald, Proprietor
I fold the letter back up and stick it in the envelope. I don’t want Lizzy to see that young Amos was crying.
“What does his picture look like?” Lizzy asks. “Is he cute?”
I stop where I am. James is already halfway across the exhibit, but I figure he won’t go too far without us. “Why would you ask that?”
She shrugs. “Track runners are usually cute. Track and baseball have the cutest guys. Football and hockey, not so much. Everyone knows that.”
“Keep in mind,” I tell her, “this particular track runner would be in his seventies now.”
Lizzy snorts. “I didn’t say I wanted to date him.” Then she says, “Don’t move, and look down.”
I freeze in place and slowly look down, unsure of what I’m expecting to find. All I see at first are numbers flashing up at me in red: 18 LBS. It turns out I’m standing on top of a scale, which is built right into the floor. Ah ha! So they can build scales into the ground. I knew it!
“Wow,” Lizzy says. “I knew you were skinny, but I didn’t think you were that skinny!” I look around for an explanation of the scale, but I don’t see one.
A man with wild white hair, a white lab coat, and big round glasses approaches. He has a little skip to his step. He reminds me of a poster of Albert Einstein my old science teacher had hung on the wall. To my surprise, James is with him.
The old man points down at the scale and says, “That’s what you would weigh if you stood on the moon. Less gravitational pull.”
My eyes widen. “Cool!”
“Let me try,” Lizzy says, thrusting the telescope into my arms and stepping on the scale herself. “Seventeen pounds!” she announces.
“If you stood on the sun,” the old man says, “you’d weigh over a ton.”
“Wow,” Lizzy says, nodding. “No one would mess with me then!”
James clears his throat. “This is Dr. Grady,” he announces. “Dr. Grady, this is Jeremy Fink and Lizzy Muldoun. The good doctor apparently couldn’t wait for us to get to his lab.”
Dr. Grady smiles sheepishly. “You’ll have to forgive my impatience. We scientists are a curious bunch. A man gets a cryptic call saying two young people have something that belongs to him, and, well, he can’t just sit in his office and wait.”
“You guys know the drill,” James tells Lizzy and me. “I’ll be waiting in the dinosaur exhibit. Come meet me when you’re done.”
“See ya, James,” Lizzy replies. I don’t say anything. I’m to
o busy staring at Dr. Grady in his white lab coat. A real scientist! The things he must know about the world!
“Is that it?” Dr. Grady asks.
I must look puzzled, because he reaches over and taps the telescope in my arms.
“Oh!” I exclaim, reddening. “Yes, this is it.” I pass the telescope to him, and he sits on a nearby bench to unwrap it. He stops after uncovering the top half. To my surprise and horror, he drops his head in his hands and begins to weep. Lizzy’s eyes look like they’re about to pop out of her head.
“What do we do?” she whispers in a low voice.
I shake my head, at a total loss. The only time I’d seen a grown man cry was my dad during an episode of Antiques Roadshow, when the copper pot some guy bought at a yard sale turned out to have belonged to Benjamin Franklin.
This is very different.
With one final heave of his shoulders, Dr. Grady wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’m sorry, children,” he says. “I’ve always been a crier. The kids at school used to tease me mercilessly.”
I hold the envelope out to Dr. Grady, and he slowly reaches up for it. The occasional whimper sneaks out of him as he reads the letter.
I blame my inability to comfort him on Mom not letting me have a real pet.
Dr. Grady tucks the letter in his coat pocket and turns his attention back to the telescope. “I never dreamed I’d see this again,” he says, eyeing it lovingly. “You must tell me how it came to be in your possession.”
I open my mouth to answer when Lizzy says, “We’ll tell you on one condition.”
I glare at her. What does she think she’s doing?
Dr. Grady looks amused. “And what would that be?”
“That you tell us the meaning of life,” she says plainly.
I shake my head at her.
“No, wait,” she says. “I mean the purpose of life. That’s what I mean, right?”
I shake my head again. Dr. Grady turns his head back and forth between us.
“Oh, right. Duh!” Lizzy says. “I mean, why are we here? That’s what I want to know.”
I sigh. “What she means to say is, how are we here? Why is there something instead of nothing? Mr. Oswald thought you might know.”
His eyes widen. “Old Ozzy is still alive? Impossible! He was ancient when I was a boy!”
“No, no,” I assure him. “Our Mr. Oswald is his grandson.”
Dr. Grady pushes himself off the bench. “Well, that’s a relief,” he says. “For a second there I thought Old Ozzy fashioned himself a time machine.”
My ears perk up. If anyone would know how to build a time machine, it would be Dr. Grady.
“Go on,” Lizzy says, reading my mind as usual. “Ask him. You know you want to.”
“Ask me what?” Dr. Grady says, carefully lifting the telescope. “Something more important than how we all got to this backwater edge of the Milky Way?”
I can’t seem to make myself ask the question. All of a sudden, it just sounds silly.
“He wants to know how to build a time machine,” Lizzy reveals. “He’s been trying to do it for five years.”
“Not trying, exactly,” I hurry to explain. “Mostly reading about it. About going back in time, that is. Not to the future or anything like that. I don’t think that’s possible.”
He smiles. “I’m sorry to say that time travel is still theoretical at this point. But you’re right, all the known laws of physics indicate that travel to the future is likely impossible. Travel to the past though, well, I’m not writing that off. But since there would be no way to return to the future, there would be two of you in the past and none of you here in the present. Theoretically of course. Very messy. Quite impractical. Now why would a young man like yourself want to do such a thing?”
My throat tightens. Thankfully Lizzy doesn’t try to answer for me.
“Why don’t you two wait here,” Dr. Grady says kindly. “I’ll run this back to my office and then I’ll show you around. We can chat some more.”
I nod mutely, and we sit down on the bench. I stare up at the huge metal ball hanging from the ceiling, with the words THE SUN printed on it. A tiny ball hangs beside it. THE EARTH. How did I miss those before? One snip of a chain and they would crush us. The sign hanging next to them says, MORE THAN ONE MILLION OF OUR EARTHS WOULD FIT INSIDE THE SUN.
I feel very small.
Chapter 14: Life, the Universe, and Everything
“Are you okay?” Lizzy asks. “You look a little freaked out. More freaked out than usual, I mean. I hope you didn’t mind me asking about the time machine. Did you understand all that mumbo-jumbo?”
I pull myself away from the models of the sun and earth and take a deep breath. “Basically, he told me that even if I found a way to go back in time to save my father, I couldn’t really save him. I couldn’t bring him back with me. And if I could never get back, then I’d be leaving my mom without both my dad and me.”
“But, hey, there would be two Jeremy Finks in the past. That wouldn’t be so bad, right?”
I shake my head. “One of me is plenty.”
“But maybe the other Jeremy could do your math homework while you—the real Jeremy—hung out with me. Two Jeremys would mean there’d be one more person on earth who could stand to be around me.”
“First off,” I reply, “I like math. But thanks for trying to make me feel better. And I’m not the only person who likes you. Your dad, for one.”
“He has to, I’m his daughter.”
“Well, Samantha seems to like you.”
Lizzy shrugs. “I heard her tell Rick she thinks I’m ‘entertaining.’ ”
“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.”
Lizzy makes a face. “Dogs are entertaining.”
I shrug. “Not all of them.”
Lizzy smiles. At that moment Dr. Grady appears. He has taken off his white lab coat, but still looks like Einstein. “Come on,” Lizzy says, pulling me to my feet. “Let’s go find out how we got to this—what did he call it?—backwater edge of the Milky Way.”
“I have reconsidered your question, Mr. Fink,” Dr. Grady says, clasping me on the shoulder. “There is, in fact, a way to see into the past whenever one wishes. I’m afraid it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but it is as good a place as any to start finding the answer to your first question—how we came to be here, and may even answer why. Follow me and keep in mind, this is just the scientific explanation based on what we can observe and measure with our current equipment.”
He leads us to the top of the winding ramp. Most people are going in the opposite direction, so we have to fight our way through. “You have heard of a light year I imagine?” he asks. I nod. Lizzy nods, too, but I think she would nod at anything if it meant not having to listen to an explanation. I don’t think Dr. Grady is convinced either, since he explains, “If an object—a star, for instance, like our own sun—is eight hundred light years away from Earth, it would take light leaving that object eight hundred years until it reached our eyes. So when you look at that object, you are seeing it as it appeared eight hundred light years ago, not as it looks today. It might not even exist anymore.
“Every time you look up at the stars,” Dr. Grady continues, “you are looking into the past.”
He points to a map of the night sky, and I recognize some of the constellations we learned about in school. He catches sight of Lizzy checking her teeth in one of the shiny display cases. “I’m not boring you, am I? We could just check out the gift shop if you’d prefer.”
I try to give Lizzy a kick, but she moves away too quickly. She nearly topples right into a model of the solar system. “Please, go on, Dr. Grady,” I urge.
“Okay, then. Roll up your sleeves, and I’ll give you a quick lesson in the history of the universe. Ready?”
“Um, we’re wearing short sleeves,” Lizzy points out.
“It’s an expression, my dear. Like, ‘It’s the journey, not the destination.’ Shall I
continue?”
“What journey do you mean?” Lizzy asks.
“Why, life, of course.”
“Oh,” Lizzy says. “Right.”
Dr. Grady takes a few steps down the ramp and points to a quote engraved on the wall. He reads it out loud: “ ‘The universe is queerer than we suppose, and queerer than we can suppose.’ This brings us back to your original question—how did we come to be here in this strange, mostly unknowable place? For the answer to that, we have to start at the beginning. About thirteen-point-seven billion years ago, there was nothing that we can measure. No space. No time. Then suddenly, there was something. This something is called a singularity—a point so dense and hot that it contained all the matter that will ever fill the universe. No one knows where it came from. Maybe a supreme being placed it there for all we know, or it came from some whole other universe we know nothing about. But we do know what came next.”
Before I can stop myself, my hand shoots up in the air. Lizzy laughs, and I quickly lower it. “The Big Bang?”
“Exactly!” Dr. Grady says, rubbing his hands together excitedly. “But don’t think of it as a bang, or an explosion, it was actually a massive expansion, like blowing up an unimaginably tiny balloon to an unimaginably huge balloon that is still expanding.”
Dr. Grady pauses, running his hands through his hair. It doesn’t do much good because it bounces right back up anyway. Lizzy begins to hum softly to herself. I elbow her in the ribs. She shoots me a dirty look, but stops humming. Dr. Grady doesn’t seem to notice.
“All the matter and energy in the universe,” he explains excitedly, “including us, are inside this balloon. The planets, the stars, you and I, we all came from the very same stuff, at the very same point in time, thirteen-point-seven billion years ago. The universe unfolded at many times the speed of light, spewing forth subatomic particles, and creating things like gravity and electromagnetism. Stars formed from gasses and dust clouds, and the debris and ice spun off to create the planets. With me so far?”
I nod, my brain spinning. So I wasn’t really born twelve (almost thirteen) years ago? I was really born 13.7 billion years ago? Mom owes me a lot of birthday presents!