Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  The idea of having a bankroll of $750 million at his disposal was still a very new idea to Mitch Murló. What does one do with that kind of money? And although he knew it wasn’t really his, it was his to wield. For the time being, at least.

  At first, Zak had suggested they buy a couple of Rolls Royces and the six of them caravan to Shoreham—him, Zak, Nicholas, Old St. Nick, Little Nicky, and SputNick—riding in style.

  “Nicholas could pull off the deal,” Zak had pointed out. “He’ll drive one of them, and I’ll drive the other.”

  But Mitch realized an airplane charter could be done entirely online, and would get them there faster. Even if the people at AirPlay Jet Charters thought the e-mail was spam, once the transfer appeared in their bank account, no matter how questionable the e-mail sounded…well, money talks.

  Mitch sent the e-mail, after removing the request for beautiful women. And by the time they arrived at Colorado Springs Municipal Airport, sure enough, AirPlay Jet Charters had refreshments and a sumptuous buffet waiting for them, along with a Learjet 40XR, complete with crew.

  Zak totally owned the role of the prince. The African robe they had found at a costume shop downtown was a little over-the-top, but Zak was really working it. He carried himself with such royal aloofness that Mitch couldn’t stop calling him “Your Highness” even after he no longer had to.

  “I can’t believe you guys pulled this off,” Nicholas said as they arrived at the hangar.

  Mitch avoided his gaze. It was just too bizarre, talking to a man who looked just like all the pictures of Tesla, and yet knowing he was one-seventh of his best friend.

  Old St. Nick just couldn’t stop giggling as he looked at the plane, and he filled his plate from the elaborate spread of food.

  Little Nicky, however, turned his nose up at the various delicacies and wouldn’t eat. At one point he tugged on Mitch’s arm and pointed at Nicholas. “Does he freak you out as much as he freaks me out?”

  “He’s you,” Mitch reminded him.

  “Don’t say that. It freaks me out even more.”

  Nicholas himself seemed to be in denial of his Tesla-ish appearance.

  Mitch couldn’t stop thinking about it, though. He hadn’t yet figured out what it meant, but he had four theories:

  They were all living in the Matrix, and he’d stumbled upon a glitch in the system.

  Tesla was actually an alien, who’d left versions of himself throughout history.

  Nick was the antimatter version of Tesla, which meant it was a good thing he and Tesla never met, because they would annihilate the universe; or

  This was all a dream and he’d wake up in his bedroom and be very, very relieved.

  Mitch knew that trying to puzzle it out was a path down which madness lay. So he tried to enjoy the buffet: the oysters that were slimy; the caviar that was salty; and the foie gras, which was just plain disgusting.

  Then he, Zak, and the quartet of Nicks boarded the jet—which got as far as Nebraska before being grounded by magnetic issues related to the asteroid and the overwhelmingly powerful aurora.

  “Our navigational system is all pell-mell,” the captain told them. “We’ll have to take short hops, avoiding the worst of the disturbances, or we could slam headfirst into a mountain.”

  None of them—not even the older Nicks—knew what pell-mell was, but they did grasp the concept of slamming into a mountain. It wasn’t something you wanted to hear from your pilot.

  All told, it took a full day to complete the journey. They made six roundabout stops on their way to Long Island. From Omaha they went to Milwaukee, then to Detroit, then Cincinnati, then Richmond, finally landing in New York—a path that, coincidentally, traced the stars in the Big Dipper.

  While the jet was still diverting around the handle of Ursa Major, four more forces headed toward Wardenclyffe from Edison’s mansion. Fourteen-year-old Nick (still blissfully unaware that his thirty-something clean-shaven self was the spitting image of Tesla) joined Edison, Caitlin, and Z in the old man’s luxury jalopy, specially designed to fit his huge battery.

  Just as the driver engaged the engine, Jorgenson appeared at the passenger window. “Good morning, all. I wasn’t informed we were leaving this early,” he said jovially, scanning the faces in the car. “Oh, is Evangeline not joining us?”

  “She’s indisposed,” Edison said without expression. “Z here will be filling in as interim Grand Acceleratus.”

  Jorgenson did not seem pleased by this news. He opened the car door to enter before Edison stopped him.

  “Sorry, Al,” Edison said, “my battery takes up too much room to allow a fifth passenger.” Then, to intentionally add insult to injury, he pulled out his wallet and handed him a few bills. “Here’s bus fare.”

  Then he pulled the door closed on Jorgenson’s astonished expression, and laughed heartily as they drove off.

  “You’re bad,” Z said to Edison, who continued to chuckle.

  “We take our guilty pleasures where we can find them, Z.”

  Nick and Caitlin said very little to each other on the way. Nick was a little terrified, and a little exhilarated, at the prospect of seeing Tesla’s greatest achievement, Wardenclyffe Tower, rebuilt on the same spot where it had once stood.

  According to the Accelerati’s Doomsday Clock, they had about a day and a half until the electrical charge from the asteroid would reach lethal proportions again. Everything was in place—all that remained to be done was for Nick to assemble the machine.

  Clearly the Accelerati had raided Vince’s house after Caitlin had left, because they had the globe. Did they, as Caitlin suggested, have the battery too? And what did that mean for Vince? The Accelerati would have no reason to keep him attached to it. They would just take it and leave him dead in the water—or dead in the family room, as the case may be.

  On the other hand, if they didn’t have the battery, would Edison be willing to give up his own, and sacrifice himself to save the world? Nick sincerely doubted it.

  The only certainty was that in less than two days the world would either be drastically changing, or drastically ending.

  Thomas Alva Edison kept his thoughts to himself as they took the long ride to Shoreham, New York. The car wove down side streets all the way through New Jersey, because Edison, like most of humanity, detested the New Jersey Turnpike. It was, perhaps, the most hated road in creation, second only to the proverbial highway to hell. Edison much preferred roads that absorbed the character of a town to those that plowed over it, so a trip that should have taken just a couple of hours took most of a day, with stops for meals and afternoon tea. In spite of the Doomsday Clock, he was a man who refused to be rushed.

  Besides, all the work that needed to be done was being done in his absence. The tower was being completed, the pieces of the F.R.E.E. were ready to be assembled, and he had teams scouring the globe for Vince LaRue and his blasted battery. They would find him too, because Edison always got what he wanted in the end. He knew no other way to see the world.

  What filled his thoughts now was the absence of Evangeline Planck. If it were her sole intent to take a one-way trip into the not-too-distant past, she should already be back with little more than an extra gray hair or two. So why wasn’t she?

  Bus fare? The nerve!

  Dr. Alan Jorgenson—the eleventh and perhaps the most dangerous force—refused to even entertain the concept of lowering himself to take a bus. Instead, he took a commuter train. Even so, he could barely abide riding with the rabble.

  This turn of events had made it very clear that Edison had no intention of reinstating him as Grand Acceleratus. The honor was obviously going to Professor Zenobia Thuku, that glorified math teacher.

  Jorgenson leaned back in his seat. As unpleasant as this ride was, he knew that he would arrive in Shoreham first, thanks to Edison’s peculiar travel habits. For a man so far ahead of his time, he was still woefully trapped in a nineteenth-century mentality.

  That would work to
Jorgenson’s advantage, as he would have several hours to assess the situation at the tower before Edison arrived. Then, if necessary, he could create a problem for which only he had the solution, thereby reinforcing how important he was to the Accelerati.

  His thoughts returned to Professor Z, with whom he’d never been on a first-name basis, much less a first initial.

  Would he have to do away with her as well?

  The thought made him weary. So many people to crush and so little time.

  Wayne and Danny were not planning to go to Shoreham at all. In fact, they planned to travel in the opposite direction: west from Princeton, not east. They were frantically packing bags for a trip back to Colorado Springs.

  “We’ll find him,” Mr. Slate told Danny. “I promise you, we’ll find him.”

  The plan was to go back to their house in Colorado Springs and start there. Someone must know what happened to Nick, and he vowed to leave no stone unturned in his search for the son they’d tried to make him forget.

  Whoever “they” were.

  But just as the two were about to leave, the doorbell rang.

  Mr. Slate opened the door to reveal a middle-aged man with muttonchops. And although Wayne Slate couldn’t place him, there was something very familiar about his face.

  For a moment the man seemed almost teary-eyed, but he wiped it away. “Uh, Mr. Slate, my name is, well, never mind my name. I’m here to talk to you about your son.”

  Mr. Slate eyed him cautiously. “Which son?” he asked.

  The man’s eyes practically twinkled. “So you remember that you have two?”

  Wayne wanted to grab the man by his muttonchops, but he didn’t know whether he was friend or foe.

  “Where’s Nick?” he demanded.

  “That question is far more complicated than you think. But if you want to help him, you have to come with me to Shoreham, New York.”

  And thus the final three were on their way.

  All told, fourteen not-so-random forces, many with different desires, different objectives, and different manners of achieving them, were converging on an unsuspecting town on Long Island’s north shore.

  There was no question that something momentous would happen there. But whether anyone would be left alive to notice was the greatest unknown of all.

  Meanwhile, at the very southern tip of South America, in Tierra del Fuego, as far as one might get from Shoreham, New York, Vince LaRue was the talk of the town.

  In this case, the town was just a quaint fishing village of about forty people, but Vince did enjoy being a big fish in a small pond.

  They called him El Niño Electrico, the “Electric Boy,” thinking him some sort of robotic NASA experiment that had crash-landed in their icy midst. Vince didn’t bother to correct them.

  He was taken in by a family and given food and shelter. His two years of middle school Spanish had taught him about as much of the language as a dog might learn, but he was able to communicate by simple phrases and gestures. And when he mimed putting a phone to his ear, they were more than happy to give him one.

  He dialed his mother’s phone number, and she burst into tears upon hearing his voice. Apparently she was still in Scotland, scouring the lake for his remains, as he had predicted.

  “I’m fine, Mom,” he told her. “You’re overreacting.”

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “I’m in Chile. Tierra del Fuego, to be exact.”

  “Chile?” she said incredulously. “What on earth are you doing there?”

  And since he didn’t want to go into the whole explanation, he merely said, “Having lunch.”

  He told her not to go home, as there was some trouble there, and that he would be in touch again soon. Then he hung up and went back to his bowl of mutton stew, which would terrorize his undead digestive system, but was too good to pass up.

  This far south, the Aurora Australis was spectacular, and some of the locals had come to believe that the Electric Boy was somehow responsible. Of course others believed it was a sign of the end of the world. Actually, both factions were correct.

  Without his battery to complete Tesla’s machine, the world would end. It blew his mind to think that he, Vince LaRue, could bring about either the destruction or salvation of life on Earth. Not that life had ever done anything for him, but even so, the entire future relied on either his personal thumbs-up or thumbs-down. It was far too much responsibility for a poor undead kid like himself.

  Something, he thought, would have to be done about this.

  For the moment, though, he was content to eat his mutton stew.

  It was nearly dusk when Edison and his entourage arrived. Nick, who had dozed off during the long drive, opened his eyes as the car rolled up to the wrought-iron gate of the Wardenclyffe property and stopped, its engine idling.

  A large sign was plastered on the gate: NOTICE OF DEFAULT AND SALE.

  Apparently the property had been foreclosed upon and was going up for public auction. While Nick didn’t say anything, Caitlin couldn’t restrain herself.

  “I think you’re being evicted,” she announced, and then added brightly, “Oh, I hope the Accelerati aren’t having money problems. That kind of thing could put you completely out of business!”

  Edison bristled. Nick could swear he heard the man’s battery acid boiling with fury beneath its velvet sheath. “Let them try to throw me out,” he said. Then he ordered his driver to rip down the foreclosure sign.

  The car drove through the gate and deposited them in front of the large brick building that was once Tesla’s Wardenclyffe laboratory. It had now been restored to its previous glory, full of gleaming brass and polished mahogany, as well as huge windows that gave it a clear view of the tower. This was the tower’s command center.

  With Z pushing Edison’s chair, they entered and made their way to the control room, where Accelerati scientists and technicians stood around a long, elegantly curved desk. Some looked down at their instruments while others glanced up through the arched windows at the nearly complete tower.

  “Z, why don’t you familiarize yourself with operations,” Edison suggested, waving a hand at the control desk. Then he pressed the button that engaged the wheelchair’s motor. “I’ll take it from here.”

  Already looking over the instruments on the desk, Z nodded.

  Edison wheeled over to the base of the large windows, followed by Nick and Caitlin.

  The tower was impressive, even by modern standards: a delicate latticework of silver-white metal soaring nearly two hundred feet into the air, topped by a copper platform.

  “They’ve informed me that the structure is almost complete,” Edison told them. “In the morning, we will begin loading the pieces of the F.R.E.E. into the elevator cage and bring them up to the platform.” Then he smiled at Nick. “And you, young man, will assemble it, as you’ve promised.”

  “I’ll assemble it,” Nick told him, “but without the battery to prime it, the machine will never start.”

  Mentioning the battery was a calculated move. Nick hoped that Edison might give something away, but the old man’s face was unreadable.

  “Your only concern is assembling the parts that we have,” Edison told him. “The battery is my affair.”

  Then Edison turned his wheelchair around and looked past Nick and Caitlin. “Well, well, look what the cat dragged in.”

  They turned around to see none other than Petula, seeming more Accelerati-ish than ever in her lavender spider-silk suit. It looked more natural on her than any clothing Nick had ever seen her wear.

  “The cat didn’t drag her, Mr. Edison,” Nick said. “It’s more likely that she dragged the cat. And probably by its tail.”

  Petula scowled at him, and the quantum of Accelerati accompanying her looked at one another nervously, as if she might take her anger out on them. They were clearly her entourage. The fact that Petula now had an entourage could not be a good thing for anyone—especially not its members, whose eyes a
ll seemed to be screaming Help me! or Save me! or maybe even Kill me!

  Edison had to go deal with Jorgenson, whose pants had been accidentally set on fire by one of the welders and who was now raising a ruckus.

  “It wasn’t Farnsworth’s fault,” the foreman insisted as they walked away. “That Jorgenson guy shouldn’t have been on the platform in the first place.”

  Petula stayed to entertain Nick and Caitlin, although gloat seemed more like it. She dismissed her entourage and led Nick and Caitlin to a large, well-appointed work space. By now night was beginning to fall, and the tower, as impressive as it was during the day, took on an eerie glow as spotlights came on. Workers were laboring through the night to complete it by morning. And just in case there were any slackers, Doomsday Clocks were posted everywhere. Twenty-five hours and counting.

  “Is this Edison’s office?” Nick asked.

  “No. It’s mine,” Petula said, sinking into a leather office chair. “Being a darling of the Accelerati does have its perks.” She raised an eyebrow. “As you must know.”

  “I’m only here because I have to be,” Nick said.

  “Oh, right, to save the world,” Petula said. “That’s become your specialty, hasn’t it?”

  Caitlin stepped between them. “As much as we don’t like you, Petula, we have to work together, so can we at least pretend to get along?”

  Petula just stared at her for a moment, then said, “But I am working with you, you idiot.” Then she leaned in closer, lowering her voice. “The other Nicks are fine. So is Vince. I hid him—and his battery—where they won’t find him, which means that Edison will have no choice but to surrender his own battery when the time comes.”

  She couldn’t have shocked Nick more if she had zapped him with the F.R.E.E. The very idea of Petula being helpful seemed a concept from some alternate universe. Both Nick and Caitlin were stunned into silence.

  Then Petula looked at Nick strangely—as if seeing something in his face she hadn’t noticed before. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Whatever information she had, she wasn’t telling. That seemed more like the Petula they knew.