Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  She looked around, thought about everything she knew, and began to conceive a new masterpiece. The only objects they had now, aside from Vince’s battery, were the telephone and the globe—and that gave her an idea.

  “Tell me,” she posed to the group, “what do you get when you combine a telephone that talks through time, and a globe that teleports objects through space?”

  Silence all around. Then Mitch raised his hand uncertainly. “A time machine?”

  Caitlin pointed at him. “My thought exactly!”

  Zak started giggling uncontrollably. “Okay, now I know you’re just messing with me.”

  “The scary part,” said Vince, “is that she’s not.”

  “Congratulations,” she told Vince and Zak. “The two of you have a new science project.”

  Zak just continued to giggle like a kid who’d been up too long past his bedtime.

  Caitlin had no idea if it were possible, or how they’d even use it, but it would be a fine mash-up, and mash-ups were her specialty.

  Then she turned to Little Nicky. “You—you’re seven years old, which means you’re really good at annoying people. It’s your job to tick Mitch off so he starts blurting things that can help us.”

  “Cool!” said Little Nicky, and he got right to work.

  Caitlin, hitting her stride, turned to BeatNick. “You’re going to get on a plane to New York—Shoreham, Long Island, to be exact—and you’re going to sweet talk your way onto the construction crew that’s rebuilding Wardenclyffe Tower. You’ll be our inside man. And if Nick’s there, don’t let him see you, just in case he really has been turned by Edison.”

  “Espionage,” said BeatNick. “Awesome! When do I leave?”

  She then assigned Nickelback to go to Princeton, to try to convince Nick’s father that he had another son.

  “The memory’s got to be in there somewhere,” Caitlin said. And Nickelback agreed, trying to hide the fact that he’d gotten a little teary-eyed at the thought of seeing his dad.

  She turned to Nicholas next. “First thing in the morning, you’re going to go to Atomic Lanes to bowl—and to keep an eye on the Accelerati’s comings and goings.”

  “I’ll report on anything I see,” Nicholas told her. “You can count on me.”

  “Don’t I figure into your plan?” asked the eldest of the Nicks.

  Caitlin considered, then took SputNick away from Nicholas and put the baby in the elderly Nick’s arms. “I’m going to need you to take care of SputNick and Little Nicky until it’s time to bring you all together again. Do you think you can do that?”

  “Of course I can,” said Old St. Nick. “Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”

  “And what about you?” Vince asked. “What are you going to do?”

  Caitlin knew her answer. Usually the artist would stand back to gain perspective on her piece—but not this time. She was as much a part of the work as all the others.

  “No one has the right to live forever,” Caitlin said. “I’m going to pull Edison’s plug.”

  The human body wasn’t made to last all that long.

  While every culture has legends of near-immortal beings, the oldest person who could ever present a verifiable birth date was a 122-year-old French woman. She was understandably cranky in those last few years. Even by French standards.

  Currently, the world’s oldest people are only in their hundred-teens, with Japan and the United States dominating the list. That hasn’t stopped people from searching for ways to live forever, though—from microdieters who claim that their teeny-tiny meals add years to their lives (although it may just seem that way) to tech billionaires throwing millions of dollars at pharmaceutical companies, hoping that results in mice can be replicated in people.

  As usual, humanity as a whole was far behind Tesla. Thanks to his battery, Edison had already lived longer than he could have dreamed possible, and would continue to do so.

  Unless, of course, Caitlin succeeded in her plan.

  As far as her current plans were concerned, her mash-ups were shaping up nicely. Until the canvas was torn away.

  Caitlin never should have answered the door, but we all have a kind of Pavlovian response to a doorbell ring. And Nickelback had gone out to get them food, promising a veritable feast now that they had access to the Accelerati’s money.

  “Tonight we dine like kings,” he said before he left. “Not a single spork or chicken wing.”

  Caitlin had assumed it was him when the doorbell rang. So the person standing there couldn’t have shocked her more had he been wearing a Halloween mask.

  “Dad!”

  There was a rare look on his face—a stern sort of fury from which Caitlin had to avert her eyes.

  “Get in the car,” he said. “Now!”

  “But, Dad—”

  “I won’t say it twice.”

  And when Caitlin didn’t move, he stepped inside and looked around.

  “Is this the company you’re keeping?” he asked. “Who are all you people?”

  “We’re Nick!” said Old St. Nick, far too jovial for the moment.

  Then Mr. Westfield zeroed in on Vince. “I know you! You’re the troubled son of that woman who sold us our house.”

  “Guilty,” said Vince.

  “And you!” he said, pointing at Mitch. “Your father’s in prison for life!”

  Mitch only looked down.

  “And these are the kinds of people you’re spending your time with?”

  Now Caitlin’s mother was on the threshold, peeking inside nervously, like she was about to enter a pit of snakes. “Caitlin, what are you doing here?”

  “Uh…homework?” She knew it was weak, but it was all she had.

  “We had an eye-opening conversation with your principal,” her father told her. “He said you’ve been missing school, and you’ve fallen in with a bad crowd. I can see now that it’s true.”

  Nickelback stood up. “Let me explain—” he began.

  But Caitlin’s father cut him off in true lawyer fashion. “Say another word and I will bring you up on charges of harassment and verbal assault! From the moment my daughter met your grandson, or nephew, or whatever he is to you, her life has been nothing but a downward spiral.”

  “That’s not true!” Caitlin said.

  “Principal Watt told us everything, honey,” her mother added. “How Nick threatened you. How he manipulated you. How he had his thugs attack poor Theo, who was only trying to help you.”

  “Those are lies! And what does Theo have to do with it?”

  “This ends now!” her father said. Then he pointed his dread Finger of Doom at the others, who were rendered speechless by his rage. “And if I catch any of you within one hundred yards of my daughter ever again, I will shove so many lawsuits down your collective throats, you’ll all need the Heimlich maneuver.”

  An instant later she was in the backseat of her father’s Audi, being lectured about life choices and guilt by association, and being “grounded, young lady, until the end of time.”

  In one fell swoop all her plans had been torn asunder. And she realized that the Accelerati were nothing compared to parents.

  The journey of Theo Blankenship was a curious thing, like a penny changing hands multiple times until it winds up back in the pocket of the person who originally tossed it into a fountain.

  The vagrant who discovered the pink Madagascan spider-silk coat draped over a park bench found the jacket warm, and the conversation issuing from it—mostly about baseball—diverting.

  His current station in life made his talking to the coat seem par for the course, so no one took notice of it. For a time, the man thought that Theo was a genie and refused to let him out of the lining until he granted the obligatory three wishes. When no wishes were forthcoming, the hobo lost interest and traded the coat for some good shoes at a thrift store.

  Next Theo endured the ordeal of dry cleaning, which wasn’t as unpleasant in two dimensions as it migh
t have been in three, and was hung on a rack, awaiting purchase. By this time he had not just become resigned to his situation, he had come to embrace it. He was one with the coat. Peering out through a hole in the lining, he would heckle customers and spook small children. “Mommy, a haunted jacket!” they would say, and Theo would snicker.

  Then he spied his very own principal perusing the thrift store. Principal Watt, a notorious tightwad, always bought his clothes used, and when he came close to the coat, Theo played the genie card, and to his own amazement, played it convincingly. Principal Watt fell for it, bought the coat, and Theo began a new life, well positioned to affect the power structure of Rocky Point Middle School.

  “Pink is the new beige,” Principal Watt told his staff when he wore the coat to school.

  Theo had no intention of granting his principal any wishes, but he did convince him to call in Caitlin’s parents and royally mess things up between her and Nick Slate—who, for some reason, Watt insisted did not officially exist.

  Theo soon found Watt was not the most interesting company. The man liked to quote Shakespeare, talk back to the news, and complain to his wife about students who filled his life with sound and fury, signifying nothing.

  For Theo, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow would bring more of the same, and he was beginning to wish that the hobo hadn’t given him up.

  As for the principal, he was willing to give his talking coat the benefit of the doubt. Strange things were happening in the world. What might have seemed preposterous to him a few months earlier now fell much more firmly into the realm of possibility. “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” he mused.

  “Darn right,” Theo agreed. “And don’t call me Horatio.”

  However, when the wishes were not granted, Watt began to suspect that perhaps the voice he heard was in his own mind and not within the lining of the coat. Or worse, the garment was a victim of demonic possession. As calling in an exorcist would be far too awkward, he decided his best course of action would be to burn the coat in ritualistic fashion, then find a support group.

  Principal Watt lit a fire in his fireplace while his wife was off playing bridge, then he began to chant from chapter three of Exorcism for Dummies. And although Theo didn’t know what three-dimensional fire would do to a two-dimensional kid, he suspected it would probably hurt. A lot.

  “You don’t want to do this,” Theo begged as Principal Watt prepared to roast him alive.

  To which Watt responded, “‘Is that my soul that calls upon my name?’”

  “No, it’s me! Your genie! And you’re ticking me off!”

  Nevertheless, Principal Watt balled the coat up against Theo’s muffled complaints. Theo waited for the flames to engulf him. But Principal Watt couldn’t go through with it. He hurled the exorcism book into the flames instead, and fell to his knees.

  Theo tried to comfort him with some Shakespeare of his own. “‘Now is the winter of our discotheque,’” he said, but it just made Watt burst into tears.

  And so, genie that he was, he chose to grant Principal Watt his wish.

  “I will leave you alone forever,” Theo told him, “if you bring me to Caitlin Westfield, and drape me around her shoulders.”

  This explains why, on the night that Caitlin was officially grounded until the end of time, Principal Watt showed up at the Westfields’ front door.

  “It is imperative that I give this to your daughter,” he told Mrs. Westfield. Since he was her principal, and it did seem rather important to him, she called Caitlin out of her room, and he put the coat on her.

  “What’s this all about?” Caitlin asked.

  Her mother just shrugged. “I don’t think it’s yours. It’s too big on you.”

  “There now,” Principal Watt said. “All is as it should be.” Then he turned and ran into the night as if chased by a puma.

  “Well, that was weird,” said Caitlin, and she stomped back to her room.

  And within the lining of the coat, the winter of Theo Blankenship’s discontent was made glorious summer.

  Caitlin threw off the coat the moment she got into her room. Only when she held it in her hands did she realize it was like no fabric she had ever touched, and she gasped. Was this the feel of Madagascan spider silk?

  She hung it on her closet door and stared at it, trying to make sense of why Principal Watt would bring it to her.

  Was he Accelerati? No, that couldn’t be right. He was too small-minded to be evil-scientist material.

  Another mystery I’m never going to solve, she thought.

  She knew there was no way she could tell her parents everything that was going on, because there was no way they would ever believe her. She’d tried giving them the tip of the iceberg but had about as much success as the Titanic. “What happened here in Colorado Springs was no accident,” she had told them. “I’m trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  They’d just scoffed. “You’re fourteen, Caitlin,” her father reminded her. “Your only concern should be keeping your grades up, and what clothes to wear.”

  Could they really think she was so shallow? So two-dimensional?

  She lay on her bed, pounding her pillow in frustration, when the voice behind her made her gasp.

  “Caitlin,” the voice said, “it’s me. Don’t be afraid.”

  “Who is it? Who’s there?” She spun around, but the room was empty.

  “It’s me, Theo.”

  As if things weren’t miserable enough, Theo was here? Where was he hiding?

  “I know this is going to sound weird,” Theo’s voice said, “but I’m in the pink jacket.”

  Slowly she approached it. Was this some Accelerati trick? Was there a speaker in the pocket? She looked, but found nothing.

  And then Theo spoke again, much closer this time. “I’m in the lining,” he said. “This guy put me in his coat and then left it on a park bench. A guy named Jorgenson.”

  “Jorgenson?” said Caitlin. “Alan Jorgenson?”

  “That’s him,” said Theo. “He’s the new lunch dude at school, but he’s really part of this secret society. And they’ve got this sweet hideout beneath Atomic Lanes.”

  “Just keep quiet,” Caitlin told him, “and let me figure this out.”

  She turned the coat inside out and found a hidden zipper that ran the length of it. Slowly, reluctantly, she pulled the zipper down, and when she did, out crawled Theo.

  He scooted across the floor and pulled himself up the door.

  To call him “flat” didn’t do it justice. He was thinner than onionskin, flatter than one of her posters. Caitlin might have screamed, might have run, but she had seen so many bizarre things since coming in contact with the Accelerati that her surprise registered only somewhere in the yellow zone.

  “Who did this to you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Theo told her. “One minute I was shooting video of a tornado that was hurling out cats, and the next I was flat against a wall like this.”

  “And Principal Watt knew about this?”

  Theo shook his two-dimensional head. “He just thought I was a possessed coat. But hey, now that I’m here, can I stay with you? I won’t be a bother. I don’t have to eat, and I don’t take up any space at all.”

  But the idea of keeping Theo as a personal poster child just felt weird. And then something occurred to her. She might be locked up like a suburban Rapunzel right now, but Theo was not.

  She was about to say something to him when the door opened. It was her father. He’d never been particularly suspicious of her, but now he eyed her with distrust and a little bit of pain—the pain of suddenly becoming an outsider in her life.

  “I heard voices,” he said. “Who were you talking to?”

  “You took my phone,” she said, “so I have no one to talk to but myself, do I?”

  “You’ll get your phone back,” her father said, “when you start behaving responsi
bly again.”

  He looked around to confirm there was no one else in the room, then closed the door, never noticing that Theo was right there on the wall behind the door, as stealthy as could be.

  “Theo,” Caitlin whispered, “do you think you could find Jorgenson if you needed to?”

  “I don’t want to be within five miles of that guy.”

  “But you’d know how to find him?”

  Theo shrugged. “I guess.”

  Caitlin took a deep breath. Could it be that the only person who might save her from this untimely grounding was Jorgenson? She’d already made a deal with him. She supposed that when you deal with the devil once, you’re doomed to repeat the transaction.

  “Theo, I need you to slip out of here and find him. Tell him…” Caitlin hesitated. What on earth could she say that would bring Jorgenson? “Tell him I have his coat and some more information, but he has to break me out to get it.”

  Theo frowned. “What’s in it for me?” he asked.

  “I’ll find a way to make you three-dimensional again,” Caitlin told him.

  “That’s what Jorgenson said. I don’t believe you any more than I believed him.” Then he sighed. “But I’ll do it, Caitlin, on one condition. When I’m done, you let me stay here.”

  “But, Theo…”

  “Please. I have nowhere else to go. I can hang out in your closet, or live under your bed.”

  “Ew,” said Caitlin.

  “Okay, then, maybe just the closet.”

  Caitlin hesitated, which was apparently close enough to an agreement for Theo, and he slipped out of her barely open window into the night.

  Jorgenson was actually pleased to see Theo slide under his front door.

  “But where’s my coat?” he asked, because a spider-silk garment, regardless of its color, was very expensive and hard to come by.