Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  “We all did,” said a tall black kid. “I’m still waiting to regain consciousness in my dorm room.”

  “Who are you?” Nick asked the stranger.

  “Brandon Gunther’s alligator,” said Mitch, making Nick wonder once more if he had knocked himself out.

  “We’ll explain later,” Caitlin said.

  Nick remembered what was in his jacket pocket. He reached in, grabbed the velvet sheath, and slid out the vacuum tube with the prism at its center. Luckily, it hadn’t broken. He didn’t know what he would have done if it had.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Caitlin asked.

  “Yeah,” Nick said, “I got the man who bought it to give it up.” But he didn’t tell her how.

  “That’s fantastic!” Caitlin said. “Now we can make sure the Accelerati never get it.”

  “Um,” Nick said, “it’s not that simple.”

  Mitch took a step closer to him. “Nick, is that a pin on your collar…?”

  “It’s not what you think,” said Nick, backing up slightly, but he didn’t sound convincing even to himself.

  Caitlin stepped forward and flipped up his collar, revealing the Accelerati pin hidden there. She gasped. “Nick, no!”

  “So he’s one of them too,” said Zak.

  “No!” Nick said. “It’s not like that. Really, it’s not.”

  “Then prove it,” Caitlin said, and she held out her hand. “If you haven’t switched sides, give me the prism and let’s get out of here.”

  Part of him wanted to give it to her; part of him wanted to give it to Edison. Part of him just wanted to drop it and run, and yet another part wanted to keep it for himself. He needed time to think. He held the prism up, just out of Caitlin’s reach…

  …and up above, through the series of ducts leading to his attic, a shaft of sunlight poured down and hit the prism. In a flash of light, Nick found himself surging down a tunnel away from everyone.

  But it wasn’t just one tunnel; it was many tunnels at the same time. And Nick instinctively knew he was in trouble.

  Caitlin shielded her eyes from the sudden surge from the prism. The room swam with a rainbow of colors for an instant, and when she looked again, the prism was lying on the ground, just outside the beam of sunlight. Nick had disappeared.

  “Nick!” she called. “Where are you?” She craned her neck around, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “I think I saw him,” Zak said, pointing. “He was running down that tunnel.”

  “No,” Mitch said, pointing to a different tunnel, “it was that one!”

  Then, up above, they heard angry voices.

  “He went this way!”

  “Look, there’s a shaft!”

  “He must have gone down that duct!”

  “Nick!” Caitlin called again, but no answer came from any of the tunnels.

  Up above, one of the Accelerati was already starting to shimmy through the narrow opening, blocking the sunlight.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” said Zak, “or—”

  And Mitch finished for him, “—or else.”

  Zak grabbed the phone, Caitlin scooped up the prism, slipping it back into its protective sleeve, and Mitch found the tunnel that he had marked when they entered.

  “This way!” he said, and they hurried into the dark.

  But when they got to the far end, they found the strangest thing: a baby sat before the old wooden door at the end of the tunnel, wrapped in a blanket and crying, as if he had been left there only seconds earlier.

  Nick, dazed and disoriented, found himself wandering around the lowest level of a parking garage, wondering where he’d left his car. Then he realized he didn’t have a car, although he should have one. He ran his fingers through his thin, graying hair, and knew that something was wrong, but he couldn’t quite comprehend what it was.

  Nick, uneasy and unstable, burst out of an abandoned barn, annoyed at whatever practical joker had left him in there. He stroked his trim goatee, adjusted his shades, and walked out into the bright light of day.

  Nick, troubled and teetering, wandered through a secret passageway in the town dump. Wrecks and old appliances were piled up all around him. He was frightened to be alone in such a scary place, and he started to whimper, wishing his daddy would come get him.

  Nick, bewildered and bemused, climbed the drainage tunnel beneath Uncle Wilbur Fountain in Acacia Park. He pulled himself up the metal ladder as best he could, but his aged arm muscles were weak, and his legs ached. He stroked his long gray beard with thin, wrinkled fingers and wondered how he had gotten here, and where he had left his teeth.

  Nick, fearful and flabbergasted, emerged from a manhole. A car honked and swerved to avoid him as he stood up on the street and staggered away, feeling something like Rip Van Winkle, as if he had been asleep for twenty years.

  Nick, stunned and shocked, stumbled out of a cave in the hills overlooking Colorado Springs, at least a mile away from where he’d been just a moment ago. He looked himself over. On the outside he was exactly the same, and yet he felt shredded in a way he could not define. Something dreadful had happened, and he was afraid to find out what it all meant.

  And the baby just cried.

  All the world’s a stage…” wrote Shakespeare, “and one man in his time plays many parts.”

  He then went on to enumerate seven deeply unflattering stages in a man’s life: the puking infant; the whiny schoolboy; the lovesick teen; the angry young man; the harried businessman; the graying windbag; and finally, the toothless codger entering a second infancy before he dies.

  Cheerful, Shakespeare was not.

  But the bard did not invent the concept of these different stages. He was relaying in coded form a truth hailing back to ancient days, when Aristotle proposed this immutable law: every human being is composed of the braided strands of several distinct identities.

  This perfectly balanced composition was what Nikola Tesla had apparently sought to shatter with his prism. But Nick Slate had no clue about that.

  Not a single one of him.

  Petula was not skilled at damage control. She was the one usually causing the damage that someone else had to control.

  So when the Accelerati within the perimeter of Nick’s ruined house started shouting to one another, panicking that they couldn’t find him, she closed the door of the SUV and instructed the driver to put on loud music.

  Fact: She was supposed to watch Nick.

  Fact: Even though she had tried, the other Accelerati would not let her through the electrified fence into the restricted area.

  Fact: She had specifically requested that Nick leave the tube-encased prism with her, but neither Ms. Planck nor Edison had given her the authority to command him to do so.

  Probable fact: The Accelerati within the restricted zone were morons. Right now they were no doubt terrified of alerting the Grand Acceleratus that Nick had disappeared. Ms. Planck was not one to shoot the messenger, but she would aim wherever the messenger was pointing. Which meant that whoever notified her first and cast the blame elsewhere would be in the clear. So Petula phoned her and told her as clearly and succinctly as she could, “Nick went into his old house and your bozos lost him.”

  Certainly there would be more Accelerati to be “disciplined” for this. It was comforting to know she would not be among them.

  Ms. Planck arrived on the scene with an entourage of pearlescent Bentleys instead of SUVs, because, with $750 million as collateral, she could.

  Jorgenson’s problem was that he thought too small. Soon all the Accelerati would be equipped with similar vehicles. And people everywhere, without even knowing who they were, would be aware that there was a group of individuals out there who were better than them.

  Petula was waiting dutifully at the fence when Ms. Planck stormed forward, fury in her eyes.

  Petula took the offensive. “They wouldn’t let me in because I didn’t have security clearance,” she said. “If I had, Nick would st
ill be here.”

  “And the prism?” Ms. Planck asked.

  “He took it with him,” Petula told her. “And I didn’t rank high enough to stop him.”

  Ms. Planck ordered the guards to open the gate, and beckoned to Petula.

  “Now you do,” she said simply, and together they walked toward the disaster zone.

  All around them, Accelerati were scrambling, looking under every bit of rubble, as if Nick might be playing hide-and-seek.

  “Edison’s going to be mad,” Petula said, twisting the knife ever so slightly.

  “It’s his own fault for trusting the boy,” Ms. Planck said.

  Petula shrugged. “True. But you’ll get blamed.”

  Ms. Planck threw her a dagger-gaze to deflect the twisting knife, but she couldn’t deny that the girl was right.

  A nervous Acceleratus approached them. “There are tunnels beneath the house,” he said, out of breath, as if he’d just run a marathon. “We’ve sent teams down each one to find him.”

  “They won’t,” Planck said. “He’s smarter than any of you. But we can’t let this halt our operation. The helicopters are already on their way.”

  “Helicopters? Why?” asked Petula.

  “You’ll see soon enough,” Ms. Planck answered.

  And in the distance, they could hear the steady thwap-thwap-thwap of rotating blades. Four heavy-lifting Chinooks flew toward them, all of them pearlescent white.

  It was an operation that could not be done stealthily. The best the Accelerati could do was coerce the media to look the other way, as they had when the meteorite had landed in Danny’s glove.

  Neighbors for miles around came to gawk as the four helicopters, with the help of four massive harnesses, rose in unison, lifting the shiny titanium ring, ten feet tall and one hundred feet in diameter. For a moment the ring hovered above the wreckage of Nick’s old house like a silver halo, and then the helicopters spirited it away to the east.

  In the desert twenty miles away stood a building large enough to hold the ring inside. From some angles the building looked like an overly tall airplane hangar. But from other angles it gave the distinct impression of being a giant clothes dryer.

  When Caitlin’s mother opened the door to see her daughter holding a baby and standing next to a boy she didn’t know, her response was the same as any mother’s would be:

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Mom,” Caitlin said, “this is Zak.”

  The young man reached out to take her hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said.

  “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Westfield once more.

  Coming up the walk was a boy she did know—Mitch, holding what looked like a very old telephone. “Hey, Mrs. W!” he said.

  And so, with no explanation forthcoming, she asked the obvious question.

  “Caitlin, honey, why are you holding a baby?”

  “Oh, this?” Caitlin said, as if noticing it for the first time. “It’s not a baby.” At which the baby smiled. “I mean, it is a baby. But it’s for a school project.”

  “Yeah,” said Zak. “For our Life Skills class. Everyone volunteers their infant siblings for a day.”

  “It was Principal Watt’s idea,” Caitlin added.

  And although it sounded ill-advised, who was Mrs. Westfield to question the wisdom of a middle school administrator?

  She let them in and the kids went straight to Caitlin’s room and closed the door, to perform whatever experiments on the baby the project required.

  Once they were in the room, Mitch set the old telephone on Caitlin’s desk.

  “How do you know it was Tesla on the other end?” he asked.

  Caitlin shrugged. “He said so, and he sounded very Tesla-ish.” She laid the baby on her bed.

  “Better be careful,” Zak said, “that baby has no diaper.”

  “What do you mean? Babies always have diapers.”

  “Not this one,” said Zak. “That’s just a blanket.”

  “Actually,” said Mitch, “I don’t think it’s a blanket.”

  And he was right. The baby was wrapped in a blue polo shirt.

  The baby looked around and cooed obliviously.

  “Oh. My. God,” said Caitlin, a girl who generally despised people who said “oh my God.” “Nick, is that you?”

  The baby just coughed once and put his fist in his mouth, then turned his head. If he was Nick, he didn’t seem to know it. He just knew his fist tasted good.

  “Are you saying that thing made him regress into infancy?” asked Zak, his voice dripping with either wonder or sarcasm, it was hard to tell.

  “Maybe…” said Caitlin. She suspected there was more to it than that, though she couldn’t figure out what.

  “But I told you,” Mitch said, “I saw Nick running down a different tunnel.”

  “Well, whatever the prism did, there’s got to be a way to reverse it,” Caitlin said, checking to make sure it was still in her pocket. “Somehow…”

  They looked at one another, unsure what to do, until Zak said, “Gee, if only we had a mysterious device that would let us talk to the man who invented it.”

  Caitlin scowled at him. “You think you’re so smart.”

  Once again she picked up the receiver, put her finger in the single hole, and dialed.

  Just as before, she reached a nasal-sounding operator, who connected her, only to be met with a busy signal.

  “I’m sorry, your party is not available,” the operator said, and hung up.

  When one is shredded into seven different versions of oneself, there is really only one place to go for comfort-food consolation: Beef-O-Rama.

  Since Nick was still, in most ways, Nick, the various versions of him all had the same idea. While the youngest was incapable of leaving Caitlin’s room, and the oldest, for the life of him, couldn’t remember where Beef-O-Rama was, the other five converged on the spot, not even knowing the others existed.

  It wasn’t as if they all felt like Nick at fourteen. To the older Nicks, being fourteen seemed like it was many years ago, and yet they had no memories between then and now—just a sense of amnesia clouding all the years of their adult lives.

  The seven-year-old Nick could only remember dreaming of being a teenager, because for him it hadn’t yet happened. The only one who felt fully at home in his own skin was the one-seventh of himself that actually was fourteen, and yet deep inside he felt an unpleasant thinning, as if he were made of little more than foam that could wash away in the rain.

  At first they didn’t recognize one another. They each took a seat at the counter, until all five of them were sitting side by side. It was only when they saw that they had all ordered the same thing—a chocolate malt and cheese fries—and looked around, that they figured something was up. Especially when they realized they were all wearing the same clothes.

  “I’m scared,” said the youngest Nick, his seven-year-old eyes beginning to tear up.

  The hipster-looking Nick, age twenty-something, put his hand on little Nick’s shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay,” he said.

  The Nick in his thirties asked the waitress for a booth in the corner, and the five piled in to make sense of their fractured existence.

  Very quickly it became evident that they needed to find a new way of identifying themselves. Never was the word Nick-name more appropriate.

  Fourteen-year-old Nick remained just Nick, while the seven-year-old became Little Nicky. “My mommy calls me Nicky,” he said. “But…I think something bad happened to her…didn’t it?”

  The others chose not to answer.

  The hipster twenty-something with the goatee answered to BeatNick.

  The thirty-something, who sported a full but well-trimmed dark beard, chose to call himself Nicholas.

  And the opinionated Nick in his fifties, with thinning gray hair and horrifying bushy muttonchops, was dubbed Nickelback, because no one particularly liked him.

  Recalling there were seven tunnels, they quickly deduced that two
of them were missing and roughly estimated what their ages would be—a very old man, and a baby (whom they agreed to call Old St. Nick and SputNick respectively).

  “We need to find them,” said Nick.

  “Maybe they’ll find us,” said Nicholas.

  “Not likely, especially not the baby,” said Nickelback.

  Their conversation, as one might expect among the various factions of oneself, was heated and animated.

  No other patrons were listening, as they were too concerned with the protesters outside chanting against nutria meat. But had people been listening—this is what they would have heard:

  NICKELBACK: As the most senior of us, I’ll be in charge.

  BEATNICK: Nice try, old man.

  NICHOLAS: This ought to be a democracy. We all get an equal vote.

  LITTLE NICKY: I’m too young to vote.

  NICK: Listen, we need to let Caitlin and Mitch know what happened.

  NICKELBACK: What we need to do is get back to the Accelerati before they tear the town apart looking for us!

  NICK: Looking for me, you mean. They don’t know about “us.”

  LITTLE NICKY: My shake’s all melted, can I get another?

  NICKELBACK: You need more sugar like a hole in the head.

  BEATNICK: Listen, mutton-man, you are not his father. Go ahead, Nicky, order as many shakes as you want.

  NICHOLAS: Can we please stay on point? We have a lot to discuss.

  NICK: Like how we’re all going to become one again.

  NICKELBACK: If that’s even possible.

  LITTLE NICKY: But I don’t want to be you. I don’t want to be any of you.

  NICK: We can’t change who we’re going to be. Just how we get there.

  NICHOLAS: Well said.

  NICKELBACK: No one’s going to get anywhere if we don’t reunite ourselves. I say we take it to the Accelerati. Edison will know what to do.

  BEATNICK: Is that all you ever want to do? Feed the power back to the Man?

  LITTLE NICKY: Can I get a sundae?