Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  BeatNick returned not long after that, having been refused admittance to any nightclubs, because he had no ID to prove his age and, like the rest of them, had no money even if he could have gotten in.

  “It’s not fair,” he grumbled. With nothing but grease and sporks left of dinner, he found a Slim-N-Fit nastypack in a corner of the mostly empty pantry and nuked it. Clearly the biggest problem of being divided was going to be keeping everyone fed.

  “I’ll come back in the morning with a bunch of food from my house,” Caitlin told them as she prepared to leave. “I’ll tell my parents there’s a food drive at school or something.”

  Nick walked her to the door. There was an awkward moment as she stood at the threshold.

  “I’m glad you’re back and that you’re okay,” she said. “Well, relatively okay.” She leaned forward for an instant, as if she might give Nick a hug, but then looked around and stopped. If she hugged one, she’d have to hug them all, and that would just be weird.

  “See you all tomorrow,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

  That left the Nicks alone—which made Nick’s fourteen-year-old self anxious. All afternoon he had dreaded the thought of being alone with himself. He thought of the man who had bought the prism. He’d been broken and resigned. What must it be like, day after day, to see your life endlessly flashing before your eyes? A lifetime of your own bad choices. A crystal ball of diminished hope, and past regrets.

  “It’s not all bad,” BeatNick pointed out, glancing over at Nicholas, who was burping SputNick. “Nicholas looks like he’s got his act together, and Nickelback has an air of success about him, even if I don’t agree with all his opinions.”

  Nick supposed that was true—but it was akin to the way people never like the way they look in pictures. When you reflect on yourself, sometimes all you can see are the imperfections.

  “This house only has two bedrooms, plus Vince’s room in the basement,” Nickelback said, “which smells like Vince, but not like death. Believe it or not, there’s a difference.”

  They all laughed at that, which was an odd moment, because it sounded fake, like an old-fashioned TV laugh track, starting and ending at the exact same moment. They all had the same sense of humor, after all—who could blame them for finding their own jokes funny?

  Between the bedrooms and the basement and a variety of sofas, everyone found a place for the night. Nick ended up on the couch in the den, which was itchy and rough, but he was exhausted enough to fall asleep quickly.

  Nick snapped awake at sunrise. He didn’t remember dreaming, and wondered if perhaps their dreams had to be shared and his 14.29 percent wasn’t enough to recall.

  He went to check on the others. The baby had slept through the night in the master bedroom beside Nicholas and was still asleep; Nickelback was snoring in the guest room; Little Nicky had tumbled off the living room love seat sometime during the night and now slept in a tangled blanket on the rug; and BeatNick was sprawled on Vince’s bed in the basement, still far from consciousness.

  Soon they would all be awake, the day would become hectic, and the weight of all the decisions and questions before him would fall upon them with a vengeance.

  Did seeing Edison’s side of things make Nick a traitor, or just practical?

  Would rejoining Caitlin in a battle against the Accelerati be noble, or would it be foolhardy, now that the safety of the world—and of his father and brother—relied on his cooperation?

  And if he did go back to Edison to save the world, could he really change the Accelerati from the inside out?

  Each version of him had a different opinion—and he himself was torn between them all.

  There was one thing, however, that he realized he could do. One decisive action he could take. And there was something he needed to find out….

  Nick grabbed the bulky Teslaphone, took it into the bathroom, and locked the door. Perhaps Zak was the master of numbers and codes, but Nick was somewhat of a genius too—at least various tests and Thomas Edison thought he was. He took in the many rings around the dial, trying to decipher them.

  Both times they had reached Tesla, the inventor had been there in his lab, which meant the time of day was set correctly. The next ring had no numbers, just notches. A few hundred of them. Maybe 365? thought Nick. His proof was one notch that appeared as a dotted line. No—366! That dotted line was February 29—leap year! This was the ring Zak had clicked one notch clockwise.

  Nick turned the ring to February 29, then clicked it ten notches forward to the tenth of March. He moved to the outermost ring—which was for years—and clicked it three notches clockwise. He had a pretty good idea that four notches would connect him with Boris the Iceman.

  Then he put his finger in the single hole, and dialed it. As before, it connected him to an old-school operator, who then connected him to Tesla’s lab. This time Tesla didn’t pick up until the fifth ring.

  “Ya, this is Tesla,” he said.

  Nick cleared his throat. “Mr. Tesla,” he said, “in three days, there’s going to be a fire. Your lab will burn down, and all of your work will be lost.”

  “What did you say?” Tesla sounded horrified—and furious. “Is this a threat? Who is this?” he demanded. “Who are you working for?”

  Nick ignored the questions. He knew enough to expect this response. “Your lab will burn down,” he repeated. “I know because I’m calling from the future, just as I told you when I called three years ago.”

  “This is preposterous!” Tesla raged. “I will find you hooligans and have you, and your employer, arrested!”

  “You need to save your inventions, and save your papers. Get them all out now, before the fire,” Nick told him.

  “I will not be intimidated!” Tesla yelled, but Nick kept his cool.

  “Oh—and on November eighth, a guy named Roentgen will prove those weird rays you discovered really exist. He’ll call them X-rays. And maybe then you’ll believe me.”

  With that, Nick hung up.

  There was a computer in the den. When Nick left the bathroom with the Teslaphone, he got online to see if he had changed history. He had read all the articles, knew everything there was to know about Tesla. He’d quickly be able to tell if anything had changed because of the call.

  To his dismay, he found that all the news reports remained exactly the same. Everything was lost in the fire. Nick hadn’t changed a thing. He slammed his fist on the desk and pushed back from it, right into Nicholas, who’d been standing behind him.

  “You called him, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe,” said Nick.

  Nicholas smiled. “No maybe about it. I know you too well. In fact, when I woke up, I was going to warn him about the fire myself, but you beat me to it.”

  Nick shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. It didn’t change a thing.”

  “I guess Petula was right,” Nicholas said. “Can’t change what’s already happened.” Then he went off to fill a bottle for SputNick.

  For a moment Nick was mystified, but then he remembered the box camera. A couple of months ago, Petula had raced into his house in a panic. She had taken a picture of the future and knew that someone would die in Nick’s house at precisely that time, although she didn’t know who it would be. Rather than try to stop it, she had attempted to get Nick out of the house, so that when it happened, it would happen to someone else. That someone had turned out to be Vince.

  Nick had been furious with Petula at the time. As far as he was concerned, she had killed Vince by not stopping it, and now, thanks to her, Vince needed Tesla’s wet-cell battery to stay alive.

  But perhaps Petula’s perspective had been correct after all. As much as Nick blamed her, and as much as he hated to admit it, maybe she had seen the big picture more clearly than he had.

  What happens happens.

  The only changes you can make are the ones that don’t affect the known outcome. Fact: Someone would die in Nick’s house. Fact: Telsa’s lab would bu
rn.

  But on the other hand, what if Petula was wrong? What if you could alter an event in the past? Maybe even prevent it? What if all Nick needed to do was try harder? More than anything he wanted that to be true, because…

  He looked at the Teslaphone, darkly considering it.

  Then, from the doorway, BeatNick said, “Don’t even think about it.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Nick told him, but they both knew it was a lie. Because when it came to certain things, all the Nicks were of a single mind.

  With the city crawling with Accelerati, all of them hunting for Nick, he knew he had to lie low. The other Nicks had more freedom. No one was looking for them, because no one knew they existed.

  Mitch and Zak stopped by on their way to the university’s computer lab, and BeatNick offered to go with them, wanting to experience, if only briefly, the college life he felt he was missing.

  Caitlin arrived with groceries, as she had promised, but left quickly. “Believe it or not, I have to go take my math final,” she told Nick. “I guess life goes on even when we wish we could put it on hold.”

  Then Nickelback got up to leave, determined to find Old St. Nick. “I’m checking all the soup kitchens and hospitals,” he said as he reflexively rubbed the small scar on his forehead that was now visible, thanks to his receding hairline. It was a mark they all had, from that first day in Colorado Springs, when Nick had been hit in the head by Tesla’s toaster. Only the baby and Little Nicky were scar-free.

  Now just four Nicks remained in the house.

  “You all don’t have to stay cooped up here,” Nick said to the others, and suggested that Nicholas take SputNick and Little Nicky to the park—an idea that made Little Nicky jump up and down.

  Nicholas looked at Nick a moment too long. “All right,” he said. “We’ll leave you alone for a good half hour,” he said. “That should be long enough.”

  “Long enough for what?” Nick said, pretending that he had nothing in mind. But Nicholas knew. How could he not?

  “Make it count,” Nicholas said, and he left with SputNick and Little Nicky.

  Nick stood in the middle of the living room for a whole five minutes before he could will himself to move. And when he did move it felt like the weight of the world was set firmly on his shoulders, past, present, and future. But mostly past.

  He went to the Teslaphone that now sat in the den, waiting for him. Waiting for this inevitable moment. It felt like an enemy. It felt like a friend—not one or the other, but both at the same time.

  Slowly, carefully, he set the dials to where they needed to be, this time changing the settings on every ring—including the rings that marked the phone number.

  He took five slow breaths, like he was about to dive deep underwater. Then put his finger in the hole and dialed.

  The call was picked up on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  What motivates the world’s greatest minds? While we’d like to believe it is something lofty, noble—like the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake—more often than not, what those great thinkers truly want, deep down, are things that every human wants. Fame, perhaps, or to prove to schoolyard bullies throughout the ages that intellect is more important than might. Or maybe something as ugly as greed, or as beautiful as love.

  And maybe, for some, it is that ever-unsatisfied desire to find something—or someone—irretrievably lost in the tumultuous waters of time.

  “Hi, Mom,” said Nick into a telephone receiver that had just reached nearly five months into the past.

  “Nicky,” she said, “it says your number is blocked—whose phone are you calling from?”

  “A friend’s,” he said gently, even though he felt that his heart—in fact all of his internal organs—were about to dissolve.

  “What is it? Is practice done early? Do you need me to pick you up?”

  “No,” he said. “No, nothing like that. But there’s something…there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  “Are you all right?” she asked. “You don’t sound like yourself.”

  “I’m fine,” he insisted. “But…but—”

  “I’m making a special dinner tonight!” she said, cutting him off. “It’s a surprise.”

  Nick felt his eyes begin to fill with tears. “Eggplant Parmesan.”

  “How did you guess?”

  Nick remembered this day. He remembered the meal. He remembered how hungry he’d been and how he had burned his mouth because he ate a big forkful when it was still too hot.

  “Mom, listen to me—something’s going to happen this weekend. Something bad.”

  “Honey, you’re breaking up—what about this weekend?”

  “I said, something’s going to—”

  “Hold on a sec.” He heard her call to Danny, telling him to “get down from there,” wherever “there” was, before he fell and broke his neck.

  Then she was back on the phone with Nick. Listening. Ready to hear.

  And Nick was silent.

  “Honey, are you still there?”

  Nick said nothing.

  “Honey?”

  “I’m here,” he finally said.

  “Are you getting a ride home, or do you need me to pick you up?”

  “Pick me up,” he told her. “Usual time.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Let me get back to dinner, so it’s ready on time.”

  “Mom?” Nick said.

  “Yes?”

  “Mom?” Nick said.

  “What is it, honey?”

  Nick could barely get it out. He felt his throat closing like a wormhole through time.

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “Awww, Nicky,” she said. “I love you too.”

  Now his voice was barely a whisper. “Bye,” he said. And hung up.

  He sat there, letting the tears flow, not even trying to wipe them away. He could have warned her about the fire, but just like Tesla, she wouldn’t have believed him. He could have told her he was calling from the future. She would’ve believed that even less. There was nothing he could have said that would change the fact of what happened. He knew that now beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  Because he remembered that day. Everything. He not only remembered coming home and burning his mouth on dinner, but also Mom mentioning his phone call. But, of course, he hadn’t called her that day. She’d insisted that he had, and Nick had just shrugged it off, thinking his mom was just being weird, as moms can sometimes be. But now he knew the truth.

  This was the call she’d been talking about. It had already happened, which meant that Petula, curse her, was right after all. What happens happens. You can’t change it; you can only become a part of what has already been. Nick’s phone call hadn’t prevented the fire. It didn’t save their house. It didn’t save her. No matter what he said, it wouldn’t have mattered. He could have screamed and screamed, and it wouldn’t have changed a thing.

  Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something he wasn’t seeing. Something he had missed.

  There was somebody behind her.

  It was all too much to think about. Too painful to consider. All he could do in the moment was mourn. He held himself tightly and rocked back and forth, his emotions rolling through grief, fury, self-pity, and more fury. Even though he was only one-seventh of himself, he felt the full emotions of all of his other selves, and he cried until finally he was spent. Then he wiped his eyes, stood up, and got on with the day, focusing his attention on the many things that needed to be done.

  Now he knew what he had to do. He had no time for indecisiveness anymore.

  When Nicholas came back with the younger versions of himself, he must have seen the redness in Nick’s eyes.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  Nick nodded.

  “It didn’t work, huh?”

  Nick shook his head.

  Then Little Nicky said he was hungry, and they all had themselves some comfort f
ood, which wasn’t all that comforting, but at least it was something.

  “I’m going back to Edison,” Nick told Caitlin when she returned early that afternoon. “I’m taking him the prism. I’m going to put the machine together.”

  Caitlin folded her arms and stared at him. She didn’t glare; she just stared. Like you might look at someone you thought you knew but realized you didn’t. “There’s nothing I can say that will change your mind?”

  “No,” Nick told her. “Until I go back, I’m putting everyone else in danger. And we have to discharge that asteroid. We can do it without the globe, like we did at my house last time. It’ll be messy, but it will work. And as long as Edison doesn’t have the globe, he can’t make that machine do anything more.”

  “And if they find the globe?”

  Nick took a deep breath. “If they find it, we’ll deal with it then.”

  He thought Caitlin would fight with him. Maybe even grab the prism from him and run. But she didn’t.

  Instead she said, “Wait one hour.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re just going to have to trust me. But I promise I won’t stop you from going.”

  Nick thought about it. Even though they were pulled in opposite directions now, he did trust her. Because if he didn’t have that, he had nothing.

  “Okay,” he said. “One hour.”

  Caitlin left without another word.

  Exactly one hour later, Nick said good-bye to Nicholas with a handshake, hugged Little Nicky, and gave SputNick a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll see you when I see you,” he said to his other selves, then strode out the front door to return to the Loyal Order of the Accelerati.

  Even with only one-seventh of Nick gone, it seemed like a whole lot more was missing, because that was the seventh that Caitlin knew. Though she didn’t want to admit it, the others made her uncomfortable. They all spoke to her as if they knew her, but she didn’t know them. Not really. More than anything, they were like ghosts of Nick’s future, and of his past. She tried to disguise how awkward she felt among them, but she didn’t think she was doing a good job of it. She imagined they must be self-conscious around her too. Realizing that it must be an uneasy situation for everyone made it a little easier. They were all in the same boat. Unfortunately that boat seemed up the river, and Tesla hadn’t left them a paddle.