Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  “No, under Disneyland,” Caitlin said.

  “Actually, that’s not true,” Zak added. “I personally debunked that myth about Walt.”

  “We believe Tesla’s coming back,” said one of the fanatics, with eyes and a hairdo that made it look like he’d been struck by lightning. “The electromagnetic pulse proves it.”

  “Isn’t that why you’re here?” asked the man in the tinfoil hat.

  And it occurred to Caitlin that their reason for being here wasn’t all that different from the loonies’. Who’s crazier, she thought, those who believe in the outlandish, or those who live it?

  “We’re determined to stay here until the dude who owns this house releases Tesla’s frozen head to us.”

  “Ri-i-ight,” said Caitlin. She wondered if it had occurred to these people that cryonic head freezing wasn’t around when Tesla was alive.

  She looked at the house, and from behind the curtains a man peered out nervously, probably wondering why his Realtor had never told him his house had been built on sacred ground.

  Zak turned to Mitch. “Got any clue why we’re here with the crazies, Magic 8 Ball? Do we gotta slap you around some more to get an answer?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mitch. “It’s the right place, but I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do.”

  While Caitlin and Mitch were baffled, Zak had an inkling of what needed to be done. The crazies had such a limited point of view, it was as if they had blinders on. They couldn’t see the forest for the trees, or the lamppost for the bulbs, as it were. What was required was an out-of-the-box thinker, and that was Zak’s specialty. He looked beyond the crazies to all the homes down the street that they weren’t bothering.

  “What we need is a wider perspective,” he said. Then he moved away from the Tesla groupies, sat on the edge of the curb a dozen yards away, and pulled out his laptop.

  Mitch and Caitlin sat beside him, trying to see what he was up to.

  He accessed a satellite map of Colorado Springs, then zoomed in closer. “There’s Memorial Park; here’s where we are. Sometimes, you can see the remains of old buildings easier from up above—the outline of foundations, rows of trees that were planted years and years ago, marking boundaries that no longer exist.” He shifted the angle of the view. “Look here.” He pointed. “All these homes are built on a normal grid. But check out this old low wall running behind them. And this long hedge—it cuts at an odd angle and then continues across the street.”

  He pulled a stylus across his screen. It was like connect the dots. “And this pylon in this backyard.” He drew another line. “All these things predate these homes.” When he was done, they were looking at a seven-sided figure.

  “Hmm,” said Zak. “A heptagon.”

  Mitch gasped. “I’ve seen that before! It’s one of the symbols that was on my Shut Up ’N Listen.”

  “These were the property fences around the lab. It was bigger than just this one house.” Zak drew a dot right in the middle of the heptagon. “This is the center.”

  And that center wasn’t the house that the Tesla groupies were harassing. It was a different house, three doors down.

  So Zak, Caitlin, and Mitch knocked on that door instead.

  The woman who opened the door was plump and friendly, and while not old, seemed somewhat well established, like the tree in her front yard that was pushing up the sidewalk. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “We’re sorry to bother you,” said Caitlin, in her nicest possible voice. “This might sound crazy, but…”

  The woman looked at them warmly and said, “I’ll bet you’re looking for the secret tunnel!” She smiled and took a step back. “I’ll show you. Wipe your feet on the way in.”

  The woman led them to a wardrobe in her basement. “I’ve always known it was there, of course,” the woman said. “But no one ever came to ask about it. Instead they bother that poor man down the street.”

  “So you’re telling me it’s through the wardrobe?” Zak asked, incredulous. “Are we going to encounter a lion and a witch?”

  “No, of course not. The tunnel’s behind it.”

  “Have you ever gone down it?” Mitch asked.

  “Heavens no. I wouldn’t want to get bitten by rabid rats or something.”

  Caitlin and Zak both looked at Mitch, as if somehow all diseased rodents were suddenly his fault. Then, together, the three kids pushed the wardrobe aside to reveal a wooden door.

  “I figured it was something left over from the mining days,” the woman went on. “It gets a bit drafty here in the winter. But most of the time I just forget it’s there.”

  They pulled open the door, and a gust of earthy air breathed out.

  “Do you really want to do this?” asked Zak.

  “I think we have to,” said Caitlin.

  Zak, because he was the oldest, chose to lead the way.

  “Oh, this is so exciting!” the woman said. “Tell me if you find anything interesting in there. Like dead bodies.” Then she closed the door behind them, leaving them in total darkness.

  They turned on their flashlight apps and held their phones in front of them. The tunnel was roughly hewn out of the earth but perfectly straight.

  They slowly ventured forward.

  “If we find Tesla’s frozen head,” said Zak, “I’m so outta here.”

  Nikola Tesla’s head was not, in fact, frozen.

  His ashes are in a golden sphere—Tesla’s favorite geometrical shape—at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia.

  In 2014, the historic Church of St. Sava formally requested that the ashes be moved there to join the remains of other Serbian heroes—and to protect Tesla’s remains from “suspected devil worshipers.” The request caused great consternation among scientists, who insisted that his remains belonged in a museum. It sparked a heated “Leave Tesla Alone” Internet campaign.

  Tesla himself remained silent on the matter.

  Caitlin was not a fan of dark tunnels. In the movies, they usually heralded the untimely death of secondary characters. They were full of booby traps, or zombies, or booby-trapped zombies, and, of course, the aforementioned rabid rats.

  If she had known what she was looking for, she would have felt a little bit better about pushing forward into the darkness. But Mitch’s prophecies were always open-ended, and always led to more questions than solutions.

  After about two hundred yards, Zak said, “There’s something up ahead.”

  A dozen yards farther, the tunnel opened into a circular room with six other tunnel openings, all heading out like spokes on a wheel. There was no question that this was a structure Tesla had built, and it had lain hidden all these years.

  “Mark which tunnel is ours,” Caitlin told Mitch. “We need to remember the way we came in.”

  Mitch scratched a line in the dirt with his shoe, and they moved to the center. There, in a shaft of light, stood a dark lump that didn’t look at all inviting.

  Caitlin inched closer, shining her phone’s flashlight at it. It was a badly rusted metal platform narrower at the top than at the bottom. And sitting on top of it was a black object with ancient cobwebs covering it like a shroud. Caitlin brushed them away to reveal—

  “A telephone?” said Zak.

  “No way!” said Mitch.

  It was an odd-looking thing, not square or rectangular, but circular, with a thick, curly wire leading to a heavy handset attached to the side. Six large vents were cut into the sides, presumably to let out heat, and a crank stuck out of the back. On its face was a round dial with a single finger hole, and the dial was surrounded by a series of silver notched, concentric circles.

  “I’ve seen something like this in the Princeton computer lab,” said Zak. “It’s one of the first telephones. But it didn’t have all of those silver rings around the dial.”

  All the retro-phones Caitlin had seen had ten finger holes in the dial, not just one. There was something ominous about that single hole, as disturbing a
s the eye of a Cyclops.

  “What’s it doing here?” Mitch asked. “And where is here, anyway?”

  “No idea, and no idea,” said Caitlin. This was most certainly a Teslanoid object, yet not part of the machine. Her best judgment told her to leave it alone, but judgment was a weak force when pitted against curiosity. She began turning the hand crank, generating visible sparks through the vent holes.

  “You probably shouldn’t touch it until you know what it does,” said Zak, always the sensible one.

  “I know what it does,” Caitlin said. “It’s a phone.”

  After giving it a few more cranks, she lifted the receiver. Even though it didn’t seem connected to anything, there was a dial tone loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “Hmm,” said Mitch. “Wireless.”

  “That can’t be right,” Zak said. “They didn’t have wireless back then.”

  “Wrong,” said Caitlin. “Tesla was experimenting with it decades before the rest of the world.”

  “But,” Mitch said, “why would it be down here instead of—”

  Caitlin realized the answer at the exact same moment as Mitch: they were directly beneath Nick’s house.

  She tried to peer up through the narrow shaft, which went up and up. This chamber was a part of the machine, she realized, even if the telephone wasn’t.

  Caitlin put the receiver to her ear and put her finger in the dial hole.

  “Should I?” she asked.

  “No!” said Zak.

  “No,” said Mitch.

  But Caitlin did it anyway.

  The dial spun around and clicked back. Then a very nasal woman’s voice spoke through the receiver. “Please hold while I connect you with your party.”

  On the other end, the phone began to ring. Once…twice…three times.

  Finally someone picked up, and a heavily accented voice said, “I’m very busy today. What do you want?”

  “Who is this?” asked Caitlin.

  And the voice said, “This is Nikola Tesla.”

  Time travel is an irritating endeavor. Paradoxes and advance knowledge of the future are only the minor headaches.

  Which is why time tends to protect itself. As Petula noted with the box camera, you can only become part of the picture and not change it, lest our universe be destroyed, leaving behind cranky splinters of reality. The kind of places where your nightmares eat you.

  Although the laws of physics might actually allow for time travel, it’s improbable, and a real pain in the black hole.

  Communication with another time, however, is an entirely different matter. If you’re not convinced, ask yourself this: Have you ever spoken on your phone, only to hear your own voice echo back at you a split second later? And did you get the uncanny feeling that you were hearing what you said before you said it?

  Perhaps there’s a reason for that.

  Ten minutes before Caitlin made her phone call through time, Nick decided to visit his wrecked house.

  It hadn’t been his original intention to stop by the house. There was really nothing there for him now. But after retrieving the prism, when the SUV neared his old corner, he happened to glance at the ruins. He saw all the yellow excavation equipment—Caterpillars, backhoes, and the like—and he found himself tweaked by a morbid curiosity. More than that, he felt a longing for a simpler time before things got so complicated. He had to take a closer look, if only to say good-bye to the place that had been, for such a short time, his home.

  “We have an appointment with Ms. Planck,” Petula reminded him.

  “Yeah,” said Nick. “I bet she wants to take credit for getting the prism. I thought I knew her, but I guess I don’t know anybody, do I?”

  “She’s better than Jorgenson,” Petula said, but she couldn’t look him in the eye as she did.

  “Pull over,” Nick ordered the driver with as much authority as he could muster. “As I’m the highest-ranking Accelerati here, you have to do as I say.”

  The driver couldn’t argue with that, and neither could Petula.

  All the homes in the immediate vicinity of the shattered Victorian had been evacuated. Police crime-scene tape prevented access, and for those not held back by the tape, an electrified fence had been erected.

  “Why don’t you leave the prism with me,” Petula said, reaching out her good hand.

  “Forget it. Nobody touches it but me, until I give it to Edison.”

  “Have it your way,” said Petula. “As always, I was just trying to be helpful.”

  When Nick stepped out of the SUV, the lone Acceleratus standing guard didn’t quite know what to do.

  “The Old Man told me to inspect the site and give him a progress report,” Nick told him, and he let Nick through. Easy as that.

  From this angle, it looked like all the heavy equipment was digging a massive moat around the house. But when he looked closer, he could see they had completely exposed the enormous metal ring that his father had found while planting a tree. The ditch encircled the entire property, even going beyond the boundaries a bit.

  The ring was shiny, in spite of the fact that it was covered in mud and dirt. It was almost a foot thick, and at least ten feet tall. Nick assumed they would take it, like everything else, to Edison’s lab in New Jersey, but how exactly they would transport such a huge thing was beyond him.

  The house now looked like a broken-down castle on its own island. The attic listed sideways, having fully collapsed into the second floor, and half of the second floor had collapsed into the first.

  There was a makeshift plank bridge over the ditch allowing access to the house. But no one seemed interested in the structural remains anymore. Nick imagined they would eventually bulldoze it, leaving no sign that it had ever been there.

  Poor Great-Aunt Greta, he thought as he approached the threshold. All her fine things trampled by science.

  “Hey, don’t go in there!” one of the construction workers shouted. But Nick ignored him, pushed his way through the front door, which was off its hinges, and regarded what was left of his living room.

  Much of the furniture had been removed by the Accelerati so it could be searched for other hidden artifacts. Rains over the past few weeks had ruined what was left.

  Nick, filled with a sense of melancholy and loss, moved through the broken timbers and crumbling plaster. He didn’t know why he should feel this way; he had lived here for less than two months. He guessed that being in the house reminded him of the much deeper disaster that had taken the life of his mother and ruined his lifelong home in Florida.

  Two homes destroyed in the same year. Twice his life had been thrown into upheaval. He still didn’t know where things would settle, but he knew he had to find a way to leave it behind him.

  There was someone behind her….

  He forced the thought away. Reliving that horrible night, even with this new uncertain wrinkle, would bring him nothing but misery. There were more important things to be done right now. Moving forward was his only choice.

  The door to the basement was in splinters, but Nick made his way down the staircase, which was still intact. What little they had salvaged from their house in Tampa was down there in boxes, still smelling like smoke.

  He took one box off a shelf and began to sift through it. Singed pictures. A baseball trophy Nick had won, the plastic ballplayer on top half melted, yet still his father had chosen to save it. His father who could no longer remember him.

  Who am I now? Nick wondered. Not the person I was a year ago, not the person I was a month ago, not the person I’ll be tomorrow. Today, all Nick could feel was the void of transition between being one Nick and becoming another.

  As he stood there in silence, pondering his place in the universe, he heard voices coming from somewhere beneath his feet. And as he listened, the voices became clearer. Was it his imagination, or was that Caitlin?

  There was a grate in the concrete floor; its screws had long since rusted, so he was able to pull it out eas
ily. As he leaned over the hole, he noticed that he cast a shadow. He looked up to see that light was streaming down on him from the grate in the floor above, and the grate above that one, leading all the way up to the ruins of the attic.

  There was a vertical shaft under him that led to someplace beneath the basement. A sewer perhaps? No, because there was definitely someone speaking, and it definitely did sound like Caitlin. Nick leaned over farther, and farther still. Then, like Alice at the rabbit hole, he lost his balance and fell in.

  What lay below was anything but Wonderland.

  “Could you please repeat that?” Caitlin said, her heart pounding as she held the old phone. “I don’t think I heard you right.”

  “I said this is Nikola Tesla.”

  Caitlin Westfield was not the kind of girl to freeze. Deer in the headlights was simply not a part she played. She was quick thinking, quick acting, and prided herself on her ability to keep her head while others panicked. But at that moment, Caitlin could do nothing but hold the phone to her ear, with an abiding inability to speak.

  “Hello,” said Tesla, “are you there? Who is this? As I said, I’m very busy. If you have business with me, then speak up.”

  Finally, she found her voice. “Hello, Mr. Tesla,” she said very slowly.

  Mitch and Zak gasped.

  “My name is Caitlin Westfield, and I need your help.”

  Just then, a figure came crashing through the grate up above, landing on the phone and disconnecting the call.

  Nick fell onto something hard that dug into his side. He yelped in pain, and suddenly Caitlin was there, helping him up, as amazed to see him as he was to see her.

  “Nick!” she shouted, throwing her arms around him before he even knew where he was.

  “No way!” said Mitch, who was also there, patting him on the back. “It is you!”

  But then Caitlin looked at the object he had fallen on. “You disconnected the call!”

  “What call?” said Nick.

  “I was just talking to Tesla!”

  Nick considered that this might not really be happening. It could be the result of a concussion. “Am I dreaming?” he pondered aloud. “Did I knock myself out?”