Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  NICHOLAS: You just had a shake.

  NICK: Okay, fine, whatever we decide to do, we need to let Mitch and Caitlin know what happened to me. I mean, us. I mean, me!

  NICHOLAS: I think we’re all in agreement there.

  BEATNICK: Great. Now, who’s going to pay the bill for all this food?

  NICKELBACK: Didn’t any of you geniuses think to bring a credit card?

  Several minutes later, the five Nicks performed a monumental dine-and-dash, and headed for Caitlin Westfield’s front door.

  Upon hearing the doorbell, Mrs. Westfield opened the door to see a throng of old and young men on and around her welcome mat.

  “Hello, Mrs. Westfield,” Nick Slate said cheerfully, at the front of the throng. “This is my uncle, my cousin, my nephew, and my biological father. Can we talk to Caitlin?”

  Mrs. Westfield was still trying to process the crowd on her front porch when Caitlin, with the baby in her arms, came down the stairs, followed by Mitch and Zak. She froze for a moment when she saw them, but quickly regained her poise and continued down the stairs.

  When they spotted the baby, all five newcomers shouted, “SputNick!”

  “SputNick’s my…foster…baby…sibling,” said Nick.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Westfield. “So you’re the baby donor.”

  “Sure,” said Nick as Caitlin put the baby into his arms and it began to cry.

  “Nick’s whole family has traveled to Colorado Springs to support him,” Caitlin said, turning to her mom. “He lost his house, you know.”

  “Good to see you, Mrs. Westfield.” Nick waved as he and all the men in his family turned to go. He glanced back at Caitlin, Mitch, and Zak. “You’re coming with us, right?”

  “Of course,” Caitlin said.

  “Wait,” said Mrs. Westfield. “Where are you all going?”

  “They invited us to join them at…a big family reunion,” Caitlin said, and gave her mom a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll be back by ten.”

  And they all went off down the street.

  Mrs. Westfield watched them go. Should I be concerned about this? she wondered.

  She wasn’t convinced Nick was the best influence on Caitlin. After all, his house seemed to be the epicenter of an unexplained cosmic event. On the other hand, he was a solid young man, and even if he turned out to be the spawn of Satan, he was better than Theo.

  It was an unnatural thing to be confronted by the many ages of yourself. Nick could see why the man who bought the prism at the garage sale had been so bitter. The young selves look in despair at the worn-out old men they’ll become, and the old ones can only mourn the youth that they have lost.

  Nick was determined not to fall into that trap. There was something of value in each of his selves. He would learn to appreciate them all.

  They couldn’t go back to Beef-O-Rama, because of the way they had left, and with the Accelerati no doubt on the lookout for Nick, they couldn’t stay out in the open for long.

  It was Mitch who came up with the perfect place to lie low. “Vince’s house!”

  But Nick couldn’t say he looked forward to the prospect of hanging out there. Besides the enforced cheer, Vince’s mother had so many little figurines and fragile things he felt like he’d be six bulls in a china shop. And nothing would be baby-proofed.

  They found an unlocked window in back and let themselves in.

  Vince lived far enough from Nick’s house that it had been spared the worst of the electromagnetic pulse. Most of the appliances that had been plugged in at the time had burned out, but only half the lights were blown.

  Mitch settled in with the antique phone. He kept dialing it, but continued to get a busy signal every time. Caitlin, who had rocked SputNick to sleep, gently set him on a sofa cushion she had set up as a makeshift crib.

  “Our first order of business,” Nickelback said, always intent on taking charge, “is to track down Old St. Nick.”

  Caitlin then turned to Zak, whose part in all of this Nick had yet to understand.

  Zak looked up from the cards he was shuffling and glared at Caitlin. “I didn’t sign up for any of this weirdness. I want to find the money so I can save my mom, then go home and forget any of this ever happened.”

  Nick watched as Caitlin reached out and gently took the deck away from him.

  “Finding that seven hundred and fifty million dollars isn’t all there is to it,” she said. “The future of the world is at stake, and you’re part of this now. You have to see it to the end along with the rest of us.”

  Zak looked away for a moment, casting his anger to the wall. Then he grabbed his laptop and flipped it open. “Fine. We know where we found the baby,” he said. “If the rest of you tell me where you emerged, I can roughly estimate where Old St. Nick’s tunnel led.” Then he turned to Mitch, pointing. “And you! Hasn’t it dawned on you yet that the reason you keep getting a busy signal is because you’re calling Tesla at the exact same moment in time that Caitlin did? You can’t get through because Caitlin’s already talking to him! Figure out how to use those rings around the dial, and you’ll be able to call back at a different time.”

  “Well, you’re the numbers guy,” Mitch countered. “You figure it out.”

  “Do I have to do everything around here?” said Zak, and he went over to study the phone while Mitch took up the laptop and got input from all the Nicks as to where they had surfaced.

  The only area that didn’t seem to be covered was downtown Colorado Springs.

  “Maybe it was too much for him, he had a coronary, and croaked,” suggested Mitch.

  Various versions of Nick shot him a look. “Let’s keep our thoughts more positive,” said Nickelback, a sentiment that was reinforced by the artificially cheery house.

  Little Nicky had already taken down some of the more interesting figurines and was setting them up as armies to battle one another.

  Was I ever so easily amused? thought Nick. Well, if this was him, he must have been. He wondered how many figures Little Nicky would end up breaking, and if Vince’s mother would notice if and when she got back from Scotland. Of course she will, he decided. She was the type to take a daily tally.

  Nick went over to take them away, but Nicholas, having the same idea, got there first and removed them from Little Nicky’s sticky hands. The child protested, but only for a moment.

  “There must be a way to reverse the polarity or something,” said BeatNick. He took the vacuum tube from its velvet sheath and held it up to get a clearer look at the prism inside.

  “Careful,” said Caitlin, “if it catches the light again, it could make seven more of you.”

  BeatNick quickly put it down, away from all sources of light. Nick wondered if it was exponential, and if he was caught in the fragmented beam again, would there be forty-nine of him?

  “Whatever we do,” said BeatNick, “we can’t let the Accelerati have it.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” said Nickelback. “They’re the only ones who can reverse-engineer the thing and put us back together. They’ve used us; it’s time we used them for our own benefit.”

  Through the debate, Nick just listened. These, he knew, were all the voices in his own head. The pros and the cons, the fears and the hopes. They all had validity. Nickelback’s approach was practical, BeatNick’s was full of idealism, and Nicholas, always thoughtfully stroking his beard, was middle-of-the-road. Nick didn’t know where that left him.

  “Well, we’re not giving it to the Accelerati,” proclaimed Caitlin, “any more than we’d let them have Nick back. Right, Nick?”

  Nick found he couldn’t look at her, because his going back to the lab was not out of the question. He hadn’t even told her about Edison—he hadn’t told any of them. It was a story he didn’t know how to begin.

  “I can’t go against them. They have Danny and my father,” he said.

  Caitlin, it seemed, had developed a great deal more insight into herself and others since he’d first met her. She
took a step closer and looked at him more deeply than he thought he could bear. “It’s more than that, isn’t it? They’ve changed you.”

  Nick got angry at that. “They didn’t ‘change’ me.”

  “Yeah, they did. I have those memories too,” said BeatNick—the traitor! “Edison really did a number on us.”

  “Edison?” said Zak, looking up from the telephone. “The Edison?”

  “Nick, you couldn’t possibly mean Thomas Edison,” said Caitlin. “He couldn’t be alive…unless”—she gasped—“there’s another battery!”

  More than one of the Nicks groaned.

  “Look,” Nick said to Caitlin, “in order for us to be able to fight the Accelerati, life on Earth has to continue, right? Well, they’re the only ones who are anywhere close to discharging that satellite.”

  Mitch slowly shook his head. “I can’t believe it. Nick’s been seduced by the dark side.”

  “It’s not like that!” insisted Nick. “Nothing’s as simple as you’re trying to make it!”

  No one spoke for a moment. Then a tinkling of glass came from the corner where Little Nicky had just broken a tiny crystal unicorn.

  “Got it!” said Zak. He brought the phone over and plunked it down on the dining room table. “All the rings around the dial are kind of like a clock. The five outermost rings measure years, days, hours, minutes, then seconds. The next two, with letters, mark the old-fashioned exchanges, and the next five rings are for the actual phone number.” He pointed at the three innermost rings. “And these here have never even been used—but Tesla must have figured out that phone numbers would eventually have ten digits, like they do today.”

  Then he clicked the second ring one notch clockwise. “So if I’m right, your next call will catch Tesla one day later than your first call.”

  He cranked the handle to generate a charge, lifted the receiver, and held it to Caitlin. But she looked to Nick.

  “You should make this call,” she said.

  And no one, not even the other Nicks, disagreed.

  Nick took the receiver from Zak and held it to his ear, then he put his finger in the single hole, dialed, and held his breath.

  “Hold while I connect you to your party,” said the operator on the other end.

  He heard the phone ring once, then it was picked up before the second ring.

  “Hallo?” said a Serbian-accented voice on the other end.

  “Hello, Mr. Tesla?” said Nick, trying to sound like one of his older selves, and trying to keep his voice from quivering.

  “Ya, this is Nikola Tesla.”

  “My name is Nick Slate and—”

  “Do you call about the Columbian Exhibition? If not, you’ll have to call back at another time. All other business must wait until after I power the exhibition.”

  “No, it’s not about that,” Nick told him. “Actually, I’m calling from the future. We need help with your Far Range Energy Emitter.”

  There was silence for a long moment. Then Tesla said, “You think you are being funny? I am a busy man! I do not have time for this kind of joke. Bother me again and I will call the police!” Then he hung up.

  “So what did he say?” asked Mitch, expectantly. “Is he going to help us?”

  Nick hung up the phone. “I didn’t get that impression.”

  Having a phone line through time is pretty useless if you call its inventor years before he invented it.

  The nearest any of them could figure, they had reached him in March of 1893, while he was creating the electrical system that would power the Columbian Exhibition—the epic World’s Fair in Chicago. He was still a young man then, and most of his achievements were ahead of him. It was before the War of the Currents, years before he fulfilled his dream of building a hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls, and a full decade before Wardenclyffe Tower. No wonder he thought the call was a prank.

  If they were going to get what they needed from him, they would have to catch him at the exact right moment in his life, which was going to be very difficult indeed. Moving the time forward even as little as five years connected them to an ice deliveryman named Boris, who was already annoyed at getting calls for Tesla.

  “This is not his number anymore! I don’t know his new one,” Boris screamed at them, “and I don’t care! Leave me alone!”

  No amount of research could yield a newer phone number for Tesla. It had been lost to history.

  Yet even as they wrestled with the problem, in the back of Nick’s mind he was beginning to consider another use for that phone. One he wasn’t willing to share, even with his six other selves, although he was certain several of them must have been thinking the same thing.

  Since Zak needed a more powerful computer in order to continue chasing the stolen money, it was decided that he and Mitch would go to the University of Colorado, to access its mainframe.

  “We’ll go in the morning,” Zak said.

  Mitch invited Zak to have dinner and spend the night over at his house, considering the current crowd occupying Vince’s.

  “My mom won’t mind,” he said. “I’ll tell her you’re a really big eighth grader.”

  Zak reluctantly accepted. “It will be just one more in a long list of humiliations,” he said.

  “If we take that money,” Nickelback pointed out after they had left, “we’ll put the whole world in jeopardy. The Accelerati are the only ones who can finish the machine before the asteroid becomes lethal.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Nicholas. “We could let them finish the machine, and then hobble them by taking away their money—”

  “—and when they’re on their knees,” added BeatNick, “we crush them and take back what’s ours.”

  “Easier said than done,” said Nickelback.

  SputNick woke up just after sunset, screaming as only babies can.

  “He’s hungry,” Caitlin said.

  “So am I,” said all the Nicks in unison.

  Nicholas volunteered to go out and get formula and fast food, as long as Caitlin provided the money, since she was the only one who had any.

  “And I’ll go looking for Old St. Nick downtown before it gets too late,” Nickelback said.

  “I’ll go with you,” BeatNick chimed in, and sauntered out after them.

  Now it was just Nick, Caitlin, the baby, and Little Nicky, who was content to watch cartoons on the one TV that hadn’t been fried by the EMP. It all felt awkwardly domestic.

  Once Caitlin had calmed the baby down, she held him out to Nick. “You should hold him.”

  “He cries when I hold him.”

  “He’s you,” she pointed out. “It only makes sense that you hold him.”

  And so Nick sat down and let her put SputNick in his arms. To his amazement, the baby didn’t cry. He just looked up at Nick with those deep blue eyes that were so familiar.

  This is what my father saw, he thought, when he used to hold me….This is what my mother saw. The pain of thinking of his mom made him hold the baby closer, and the baby relaxed in his embrace.

  “It’s okay, little guy,” he said. “It’s all going to be okay.”

  Then Little Nicky sat beside him too, leaning his head on Nick’s shoulder. Nick put his free arm around the child and, for a moment, felt that they were both part of him again.

  Nicholas returned shortly after dark with formula for SputNick and an industrial-size bucket of chicken with fixings for everyone else—although, predictably, all the Nicks fought over the same side dishes, leaving the macaroni salad and steamed vegetables (both of which Nick hated) untouched.

  “You’re all such children,” Caitlin said, even as she also reached for the more preferred items.

  Since SputNick seemed a little old for just formula, and since the blender had been spared by the EMP, Nick had the bright idea of making baby food out of the steamed veggies. Caitlin took it upon herself to supervise.

  “I’ve done this for my cousin,” she told him. “You have to add a little
water and put it on puree.”

  “I know how to use a blender,” he told her—but secretly added a little bit of water when she turned away.

  “And don’t overblend it—it should have a little bit of texture.”

  Whether it was due to Caitlin looking over his shoulder or his own carelessness, Nick turned on the blender prematurely and spewed partially processed vegetables all over the kitchen.

  “You might want to put on the lid next time,” said Caitlin, in a sarcastic tone that would have frustrated Nick had his mind not suddenly ricocheted elsewhere.

  “There was no lid,” he said.

  Caitlin reached right beside him and held it up. “Hello? It’s right here?”

  “No,” said Nick. “Not this blender….”

  He thought back to the blender sitting in Edison’s lab—the copper one that was a part of Tesla’s machine. When he’d taken inventory with Edison, he couldn’t remember—but now he was certain that he had sold it without a lid. In fact, he recalled wondering what the buyer could possibly do with a lidless blender.

  He told Caitlin about it as they cleaned up and made a new batch of vegetable mush for the baby. She couldn’t remember the blender at all, since it had sold before she’d even arrived at the garage sale.

  “Well, if the lid wasn’t in the attic, then maybe the machine doesn’t need it,” she reasoned.

  Still, Nick felt that it was important somehow, though he couldn’t put his finger on why.

  By the time Nickelback returned from his search for the eldest Nick, all that remained of the meal were some picked-over wings and the unwanted macaroni salad, which he ate under protest, griping that the younger Nicks could have been a little more considerate.

  “What happened to BeatNick?” Caitlin asked.

  “The city’s nightlife called to him,” Nickelback said with a shrug. “He’s over twenty-one, he can do what he wants.”

  “Any leads on Old St. Nick?” Nick asked.

  Nickelback shook his head. “Not a one. And I didn’t want to stay out there long—downtown gets sketchy after dark. All nature of things are for sale in dark corners. There was even a hobo who offered to sell me a talking coat.”