Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  The doctors had warned her that if she inserted any foreign object beneath the cast, it could fuse with her skin. But what did doctors know? And even if they were right, she could claim it was an intentional body modification.

  As for why her arm had multiple fractures, she blamed Nikola Tesla, who seemed able to predict everything that would happen around his diabolical machine years before it happened.

  During school hours, she now went to the Accelerati’s underground headquarters for her education. Theirs was an eclectic and unusual curriculum to be sure, but it was far more practical than anything she could learn in a regular classroom.

  She was training at the right hand of the new Grand Acceleratus, watching as world-changing decisions were made right before her eyes. It sure beat math work sheets.

  After school she went home, just like always. Her parents didn’t have a clue about what was going on.

  “Honey, I have your dinner,” her mother said, coming into her room with a tray.

  While Petula was perfectly capable of walking into the dining room to eat dinner, she insisted that her meals be served to her in bed, because the trauma of spending time with her family was just too much after the trauma of the fall.

  Her mother seemed to take great joy in the fact that she had to cut Petula’s meat again. Indeed, she got so absorbed in the nostalgia that she began serving her daughter’s meals on the little plastic baby plates she had saved from Petula’s early childhood.

  Petula was now subjected to Care Bears and Disney princesses gazing up at her from beneath her precut food. She took pleasure in spreading ketchup all over them to make it look like they were bleeding.

  Shortly after the doorbell rang, she heard her mother threatening to call the police, so Petula knew the visitor must be for her.

  “I’ll handle it, Mom,” Petula said from the hall when she saw Caitlin on the porch.

  Reluctantly, her mother stepped inside, and Petula, in her bulky cast and brace, awkwardly brushed past her to go out.

  Petula maintained a safe distance from the intruder. “You’re violating the restraining order,” she pointed out. “I could have you arrested, and you’d spend the rest of the school year in juvie.”

  Caitlin held up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “I just want to talk.”

  “Fine,” Petula said. “As long as you start with an apology.”

  Caitlin shook her head incredulously. “For what?”

  Petula shrugged as best she could in a shoulder cast. “It doesn’t matter. Hearing you apologize for anything is reward enough in itself.”

  Caitlin sighed. “I’m sorry, Petula.”

  And although it sounded like a poor imitation of sincerity, Petula accepted it. “You may proceed.”

  “I just want to know if Nick’s okay.”

  “He’s better off without you, if that’s what you mean.” She watched as Caitlin balled her hands into fists, then released them.

  Caitlin took another deep, slow breath. “The Accelerati wanted to kill him. I just want to make sure they haven’t.”

  “You don’t have a clue what the Accelerati want or don’t want.”

  “Well, Jorgenson wanted him dead.”

  Petula looked down her nose at Caitlin. “Jorgenson isn’t running things anymore.”

  Caitlin gasped. “Then it’s true. You are one of the Accelerati.”

  Now Petula got a little cagey. “I didn’t say that. What makes you think I said that?”

  “You didn’t have to. It’s obvious.”

  “Maybe I should call the police after all.”

  “Don’t bother, I’m leaving. But just tell me. Please. Is Nick okay?”

  “No,” Petula told her. “He’s not okay. He’s dead.”

  Then she slammed the door heavily in Caitlin’s face, and returned grumpily to her room to eat precut meat off of smiling princesses.

  Caitlin’s miserable little exchange with Petula could have left her full of grief and despair, except for the fact that it was Petula.

  Petula saying that Nick was dead was definitive proof that he was alive. And now Caitlin was even more determined to find him. She could only imagine the horrors the Accelerati had been inflicting on him.

  I’d offer you a glass of Dom Pérignon,” Edison called from the far end of the table, pouring himself a glass of the champagne, “but you’re underage.”

  Nick was dining in style. He sat at the opposite end of the long table, which was set with fine china and sterling silverware. They were having lobster (which he liked) and escargots (which he did not). His hands had mostly healed, making eating a whole lot easier than it had been.

  “Coke is fine,” Nick said, taking a sip from the crystal goblet in front of him.

  “Thank you for all your hard work these past two weeks,” Edison said, raising his glass toward Nick.

  Nick’s instinct was to say, “You’re welcome,” but he didn’t, because he didn’t feel Edison was really welcome to anything Nick had done. The fact was, Nick’s helpful nature was sabotaging all his attempts to sabotage the Accelerati.

  First of all, the engineers working with Nick were nothing like the pompous, smug thugs Jorgenson had employed. Mark was all about his kids, and Cathy reminded Nick a little bit of his mother. As much as he tried, it was hard not to like them.

  They seemed pretty smart, but they were often bewildered by things that were obvious to Nick. In the first few days, Nick had offered them as little help as was humanly possible. They failed to crack the mystery of the toaster, and Nick watched as they struggled to figure out what Tesla’s “clothes dryer” did. They measured its dimensions, and the electrical field it generated when it was turned on. Then they put various objects inside it and were stymied when nothing happened.

  Finally, after observing half a day’s worth of failed experiments, Nick couldn’t stop himself from telling them what he knew. “It’s got to be wet,” he said. “It’s a dryer, remember? Whatever you put in has to be wet.”

  So Mark and Cathy put in a wet towel, and in less than a minute, it shrank to the size of a dollar bill.

  Their excitement was contagious. Nick began to forget they were working for the Accelerati.

  Edison, of course, was thrilled with the discovery, which left Nick disgusted with himself.

  “Once we figure out how the thing works,” Edison told him when he first saw the shrunken towel, “it will have a thousand applications. Imagine, we’ll be able to shrink tumors.”

  “And armies and bombs,” Nick added, knowing that was the more likely Accelerati use for it.

  Edison was unfazed. “We can’t choose the way the world will use the things we invent.”

  “We didn’t invent it,” Nick reminded him. “Tesla did.”

  And yet, in spite of himself, Nick couldn’t help but look forward to working with Mark and Cathy each day, solving problems, figuring out the objects that the Accelerati had snagged from Nick’s neighborhood before he could find them: the pump vacuum that sucked all the oxygen out of a room, the old chain saw that cut holes in the fabric of space-time, and the sewing machine that mended those holes.

  Mrs. Higgenbotham entered the dining room, removed Nick’s lobster shells and untouched snails, then set in front of him a large silver bowl containing a hot fudge sundae.

  “’Ere you are,” she said. “Everything a young Acceleratus could need.”

  Suddenly Nick’s lap of luxury felt as icy as the silver bowl. Is that all he was now? A young Acceleratus?

  In a burst of frustration, Nick swiped his arm across the table, flinging the bowl of ice cream to the floor.

  Mrs. Higgenbotham was not at all perturbed. “My, aren’t you the irascible child today!”

  “What I need,” Nick said to Edison at the other end, “is to see my father and my brother.”

  Edison laid his hand gently on the table. “I have given you every assurance that they’re fine.”

  “But I don’t believe your a
ssurances. I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to do. I want to see them for myself.”

  Edison reached into his jacket and pulled out an after-dinner cigar. He put it to his lips, and Mrs. Higgenbotham scurried to the far end of the table to light it.

  “It wouldn’t be in your, or their, best interests,” the old man said between puffs.

  “That’s not for you to decide,” Nick said.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, boy. Everything about you is for me to decide. It would be fitting for you to show some gratitude for all I’ve done, and all I will do, for you. I’ll hear no more about it.”

  Mrs. Higgenbotham moved toward the ice cream on the floor, but Edison held up a hand.

  “No!” he said sternly. “Let the boy clean his own mess. It’s time for my bath.”

  Mrs. Higgenbotham wheeled the old man out of the room.

  Alone, Nick stared down at the overturned silver bowl and the creamy rivulets that were already seeping into the antique Persian carpet. Finally, he grabbed a napkin, stooped down, and began to mop it up.

  Tesla knew as well as anyone the consequences of experiments gone awry—because for every grand success, there was at least one miserable failure. Take his resonant oscillator—better known as his “earthquake machine.” When he turned it on, it nearly shook down his laboratory and an entire city block in New York before he smashed the thing to pieces with a sledgehammer. Then there was the power surge from his Colorado Springs lab that knocked out all power in the city for days.

  Any scientist will tell you that great achievement can only come through trial and error—something about which both Edison and Tesla were in perfect agreement. The cost of that error, however, can be devastating.

  Nick was in the break room of Edison’s workshop complex when the alarms went off. Emergency in Laboratory Four.

  That was the lab Cathy and Mark were in.

  Currently they were attempting to reverse-engineer the weight machine. On this Nick had offered them little assistance, other than suggesting that all sharp objects be removed from the room, because screwdrivers and such become a real problem when weightless. And even more so when gravity suddenly returns.

  The day before, Mark had proposed that the range of the antigravity field might increase if they could get the piston on the weight machine to pump faster.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Nick had told him. Tesla’s objects all did exactly what they were meant to do, at the exact pace they were meant to do it. Nick instinctively knew that messing with things was a recipe for disaster. But then, what were they here for, if not to mess with things? That was what the Accelerati did. If they managed to blow themselves up, Nick would usually say that it served them right. Except this was Mark and Cathy.

  When the alarm began to blare, the room went into lockdown. Now Nick could only peer in from the hallway, through the small window in the door.

  “Turn it off! Turn it off!” Nick heard Cathy scream from somewhere above. He craned his neck and saw that she was plastered to the ceiling, along with everything else that had been in the room. Her face was stretching farther than seemed possible.

  “I can’t reach it!” Mark shouted. He was pressed against the far back wall, his own body enduring wave after wave of gravitational deformation, unable to move.

  When Nick and Caitlin retrieved the weight machine from the obese man who had bought it at Nick’s garage sale, they’d merely had to deal with an absence of gravity. If they didn’t move, they floated in place.

  What Cathy and Mark were facing now was worse: true antigravity; a repulsive force many times more powerful than the relatively weak pull of Earth. In the middle of the room stood the weight machine, connected to a hydraulic pump that forced it to piston at ten times its normal speed—and with each pump a surge of spatial distortion expanded outward, warping space with muscular gravitational waves. Chairs were pressed against the walls, their frames bending and breaking. The desk—which had been bolted to the floor as a precaution, had torn loose from its moorings and was in pieces against the ceiling—along with everything that had been inside the drawers. Wrenches, pliers, hammers, and, yes, screwdrivers. All the things that Nick had warned them to put away before turning on the antigravity machine. They would be deadly if and when the machine was turned off.

  As for Mark and Cathy, the two engineers were pressed to the ceiling and far wall with what must have been the equivalent of ten G’s. They were barely able to breathe, much less move.

  Around Nick, other Accelerati scientists, engineers, and techies had begun to gather, but none of them took any action. They seemed content to gawk through the window and share worried glances.

  “We have to help them! We’ve got to get in there!” Nick yelled.

  “That’s a lead-lined lab,” one of the scientists pointed out. “Those walls are the only thing protecting the rest of the building. If we open that door…”

  Nick knew he was right, but also knew he couldn’t leave Mark and Cathy to die—and they would. The human heart could only withstand ten G’s for a few minutes before it would collapse from its own weight.

  Nick watched the gravity waves in the room expand in spherical pulses, one pulse every second.

  And then he remembered something.

  He turned to highest-ranking Accelerati scientist there: a Kenyan woman known to everyone as “Z.”

  “The Accelerati have a time-slower-downer-thingy, right?” Nick asked. “Is there one here?”

  She looked at him, confused.

  “You know—the thing you use to build a Starbucks overnight.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Z. “The Selective Time Dilator.”

  “Do you have one?”

  Another scientist stepped forward. “There’s one in my office!” And he hurried to retrieve it.

  Inside the lab, Mark and Cathy continued to struggle against punishing waves of artificial antigravity. In between waves they were able to breathe, but trying to do anything more than that was futile.

  The scientist quickly returned with a device that looked something like a flashlight and handed it to Nick.

  Clearly no members of the Loyal Order of the Accelerati were going to volunteer to enter the lab. It was all up to him.

  “Set it for wide beam, and aim it at the area where you want time to slow down,” instructed the scientist. “It can only stay on for three seconds before it needs to be recharged.”

  “Three seconds?”

  “In objective time,” Z explained in her musical Swahili accent. “But for you, and all things in the field, those three seconds will be closer to three minutes.”

  Z had security clearance to override the lockout. As she prepared to swipe her ID card and open the door, she said, “I have to warn you: this may not work. You could very well end up as they are.”

  Tell me something I don’t know, thought Nick, but he only said, “Got it.”

  “Stand back, everyone,” ordered Z, then she said to Nick, “I will have to shut this again immediately, or we will all fall victim to the gravity field.”

  Nick nodded, and held the time-thingy tightly. Z swiped her card, and the door swung open violently under the force of its own weight. One overcurious Acceleratus, who had been leaning in to get a look, was caught by the antigravity waves and thrown backward against a wall.

  The effect on him was horrifying. On each wave, the man’s wrinkled skin stretched back on his face and his eyes sank in, making his head look like a skull shrouded in thin, cloudy cellophane. He groaned with the pain of it.

  Nick took a deep breath and started counting the pulses, realizing this was like leaping into a moving jump rope. Then he aimed the time device toward the machine and hit the button.

  Suddenly everything seemed to stop—but not entirely. The Accelerati struggling to close the door behind him were still moving, but in extreme slow motion. And inside the lab, the next gravity pulse had just formed in the machine and was expanding slowly o
utward like a balloon.

  Nick ran toward the middle of the room and promptly fell over sideways. The antigravitational force dipped between waves but didn’t go away entirely.

  It took him a moment to get his bearings; when he did, he cautiously put his hands flat out on the floor like a lizard and began inching his way toward the machine.

  The gravity shift seemed to be about forty-five degrees, so crawling across the floor was more like climbing up the slope of a pyramid while weighing three hundred pounds. Not impossible, but not as easy as just walking up to the machine and pulling out the pin.

  Nick spent most of that first minute pulling his way toward the machine, but as he neared it, the expanding balloon of the next gravity wave caught him.

  He couldn’t avoid it, and as it slowly hit him, he was lifted up. He felt his skin stretch back across his face, just like Mark and Cathy and the man outside. But worse, he felt pain in every cell of his body, now swelled by its own immense weight. He felt like the stretched skin of a drum that had been sliced by razor blades.

  Nick spent that entire second minute suspended in midair, caught by the expanding wave, until he was slammed against the wall behind him. He knew he didn’t have time to recover from the pain or the disorientation. He had to be faster. And so he began to climb the floor again, this time as quickly as he could possibly move.

  He reached the weight machine just as it began to generate the next gravity wave. The time-thingy was beeping and blinking red, about to run out of power. This would be his only chance. He thrust his hand forward, grabbed the pin, and allowed the gravity wave to push his hand back—but this time, his fingers held the thin metal rod.

  The instant the pin was pulled out, the time dilator failed, and his world was brought back to full speed. Without the pin, the weights crashed down, and the machine stopped.

  Mark crumpled to the floor; Cathy fell from the ceiling—and so did everything else that was stuck there. Nick dodged knives and pens and hammers, but a piece of the broken desk hit his shoulder, cutting a gash two inches wide.