Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  “After everything you’ve done, why should we trust you?” Nick asked.

  “After everything I’ve done?” She stood up and glared at Nick. He had to admit she had a good glare. If its power could be harnessed and weaponized, it would melt cities. “I tried to save your life the day that Vince first died. I led you into Accelerati headquarters to steal the harp, so you could keep the world from becoming toast. And now I just saved four-sevenths of your life again—along with putting Vince where no one will ever find him, which was extremely generous of me, because I find Vince entirely worthless, even undead. So don’t you dare treat me as anything other than the wonderful human being that I am, or I will rip your heart out with my bare hands and squish it beneath the heel of my shoe!”

  “Try it! I dare you!” said Caitlin.

  And because it was Nick’s heart they were talking about, he decided it was best not to antagonize Petula any further.

  “Thank you, Petula,” he said, to Caitlin’s utter disbelief. “I appreciate all you’ve done, but—”

  “—but if you really want to make a difference, then you’ll help Nick reintegrate,” Caitlin said.

  Nick shook his head. “There’ll be time for that later.”

  Now it was Caitlin’s turn to get angry at him. “No, there won’t, and you know it! Once that machine is put together, you’ll never get that prism back, and you’ll never be whole! Is that what you want?”

  Of course it wasn’t what Nick wanted, but how could he put himself before saving the world?

  “The prism!” said Petula. “Now I get it—seven colors of light, seven diffracted Nicks!” She turned to Caitlin, as if Nick suddenly wasn’t there. “I’ll help you put our little Humpty-Dumpty back together again, on one condition.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “I complete the circuit,” Petula said.

  Caitlin and Nick just stared at her. “What does that even mean?” Caitlin asked.

  Petula hesitated. “I don’t know yet. But when I do, you’ll be the first to know.” Then she added, “Maybe.”

  “Even if we do put me back together,” Nick pointed out, “we still have a much bigger problem. Edison’s pretty stuck on the idea of living forever. I don’t think he’ll give up his battery willingly.”

  Petula smiled and tilted her head so that her pigtails fell at an awkward angle. “Then I guess you’ll just have to take it by force.”

  As the Accelerati’s Doomsday Clock ticked down to the final twenty-four hours, the rest of the world labored under the popular misconception that another random discharge somewhere in the world would solve the problem. In the meantime, everyone could enjoy the wild auroras and ride out the increasingly nasty carpet shocks and occasional electrocutions.

  That might have been true had the first discharge been a random one. But it hadn’t. In actuality, a world-saving discharge could not occur without the F.R.E.E.

  Which was now nothing more than a pile of antique parts.

  The upper floor of the control center had been converted into a set of Victorian bedrooms for Edison and his guests.

  “If the Accelerati need money, they can always rent this out as a bed-and-breakfast,” Nick commented.

  “It’s the Accelerati,” Caitlin pointed out. “It would be a dread-and-breakfast.”

  This drew a polite laugh from the underling who had been assigned to escort them to their quarters—apparently they were not trusted to be on the grounds alone. That meant they couldn’t track down BeatNick and learn whatever intelligence he’d gathered as a welder.

  They were locked in their rooms for the night, while outside the sounds of construction continued.

  All building work ceased at midnight. Not because the tower was complete, but because word had reached the foreman that the Accelerati had written them a bad check for services rendered. His response was to tell the night shift to stop until they were paid.

  It was Alan Jorgenson who saved the day in his own special way. He simply pulled out an Accelerati devolver, and with a single shot, turned the foreman into a bubbling mess of primordial ooze that would take millions of years to evolve back into intelligent life. The rest of the labor force took the hint and continued work on the tower.

  Due to the delay, the tower was not finished until noon. Nick remained confined in his room all morning, then, around one o’clock, an Accelerati tech came to get him. Finally Nick was put to work doing what only he could do: turning a collection of garage-sale items into the F.R.E.E.

  As Nick entered the largest room of the building, the parts lay spread out as a grid before him. A beady-eyed Acceleratus, holding a clipboard like a shield, told him all the things that he already knew about the objects.

  “Be careful not to touch object number twelve, or depress the red button on object thirty-two,” the man said, indicating the harp and the globe. “Object twenty-nine appears to be missing a lid,” he said, pointing to the blender, as if it wasn’t Nick who first noticed it. “But we believe it won’t be crucial to your assembly process.”

  The Acceleratus was clearly insulted that he had to work for Nick, and not the other way around. “We thought you could assemble it in pieces, down here, and then we’ll bring it up in the gantry elevator partially assembled.”

  Nick shook his head. “No. It has to be assembled all in one place. That’s the only way it will hold together.”

  “Well, our studies show—”

  “Your studies are wrong,” Nick said flatly, and then directed him to organize a team to take the pieces up to the tower. Since the gantry elevator was so painfully slow, it took more than an hour to get everything to the top.

  When they came for the telephone, Nick told them to leave it behind. “It’s not part of the machine,” he told the beady-eyed clipboard tech, who insisted that Nick was mistaken but didn’t have the authority to do anything but sniff in disapproval and stride insultingly away.

  Once the other objects were gone, the telephone sat alone in the center of the room, and seemed forlorn and purposeless—which troubled Nick, because Tesla never created anything without purpose.

  In the grand scheme of things, Nick’s reintegration was a minor issue. Each of the Nicks knew this. Still, the prospect of living separately and turning into a miserable spectrum of incomplete souls was horrifying.

  The man who had purchased the prism at the garage sale had turned into his own personal dysfunctional family. Had disunification done that to his fractured selves? The way that the Nicks bickered when they were all together seemed to point to an unsettled shattering; a life of bitter disagreement, each age of himself resenting the others. But even worse than that was the gnawing sense of incompletion. A hunger in each of them to be more than he currently was. It’s a feeling everyone experiences from time to time, but when you’re only one-seventh of yourself, that feeling becomes unbearable. Although none of the Nicks spoke it aloud—and certainly would not confess it to each other—their longing to be of one mind and one body was overwhelming, and colored everything they did.

  While fourteen-year-old Nick labored to assemble the F.R.E.E., he was distracted. Unfocused.

  Even with the Accelerati lifting the heavier pieces into place, it took him hours. He finally finished around five p.m, drenched with sweat. Then he stepped back to admire his work. The device was now more complete than it had ever been—but the absence of the battery was glaring.

  Nick now stood before it, trying to feel the sense of connectedness that had always been so comforting back home…

  …but he couldn’t. Something else was missing; it was more than just the battery.

  The blender lid?

  Maybe the lid was part of it, but he sensed it was more…much more than that. There was a fatal failure in the gear work—not the mechanical parts, but the human ones.

  Nick had long known that this great device was more than metal and electronics. In order to work, it required an intricate human interaction, like a musica
l instrument—but one that had to be played by a vast number of people. Everyone had a part, every action was the turning of a complex, invisible gear.

  And something was missing.

  Now, as he stood there, instead of feeling a deep connection to each piece of the machine, and the world around him, he felt a screaming disconnect. It was almost like a silent accusation that he had failed to complete something essential. Was it because he himself was disunified, or was it something else—something he wasn’t yet seeing?

  He looked at the grand view of the town below, the landscape that would be singed beyond recognition if he didn’t complete his task. Everyone was relying on him, but he only had one-seventh of his courage, one-seventh of his fortitude—and today, in this moment, it wasn’t enough.

  Near him Accelerati spoke, but he couldn’t hear them anymore. All he heard was the horrible need of the world, and the sense that some crucial act remained undone.

  At last he sat down beside the device, closed his eyes, covered his ears with his hands, and stayed like that, much to the chagrin of the Accelerati around him.

  The other Nicks felt his anguish. It radiated out from the tower like bolts of invisible lightning. BeatNick was the closest, down at the base of the tower, being reprimanded for having “accidentally” set Jorgenson’s pants on fire. When he felt the pain of his fourteen-year-old self, he resisted the urge to run away screaming.

  Nickelback, who still hadn’t revealed his true identity to Mr. Slate and Danny, began hyperventilating in his hotel room as he waited for word from BeatNick about their next move. Nickelback knew this panic attack was not a random thing, although he couldn’t be sure what it meant.

  And, in a limo coming from Long Island MacArthur Airport, Old St. Nick began to sob uncontrollably, as did Sputnik. Nicholas shuddered, and Little Nicky curled into a ball and began to suck his thumb like he was regressing to infancy.

  “What’s going on?” Zak asked the Nicks when he noticed their sudden change in demeanor. Nicholas was the only one able to articulate it.

  “The space between us…” he said. “It hurts….”

  Meanwhile, on the platform atop the new Wardenclyffe Tower, the fraction of Nick that was still fourteen tried to get his overwhelming sense of incompletion under control. Caitlin was right—I can’t go on like this, he thought. I need to be whole.

  If only there was something that had the power to pull them together….

  And suddenly the proverbial light bulb went on over his head. Literally.

  It had all begun with the turning of a light switch. The garage sale on that dark and gloomy day would have been a failure if they hadn’t turned on that antique lamp in Nick’s garage. Once they did, people began to come like moths to a porch light, even in the torrential rain.

  Each of those people had needed something. They found something. They went home.

  Tesla couldn’t have known who those individuals were, or what their specific needs might be—but he was a man of vision. He saw the big picture, and he knew the gear work that was behind it. He didn’t need to see the turning of those gears to know the result; just the knowledge that they would turn was enough. The idea of the electric motor had come to him in a vision—he knew it would work even before he actually built it. So it was with the F.R.E.E. Each component served its own unique function, and when combined, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

  One of those parts was the old stage “ghost light” that had stood like a glowing electronic Q-tip in the center of Nick’s garage that day, drawing people toward it, bonding them in ways they might never understand. Now the lamp stood at the center of the F.R.E.E. atop the platform of the new Wardenclyffe Tower.

  It took a while for any of the Accelerati to notice that its bulb was missing after Nick had left.

  When Nick told Caitlin what he had taken from the machine, she knew it was a dangerous move—but she also knew it was necessary. He had made himself scarce just in case his theft was noticed before he could return what he had taken—hopefully as his whole self once more. He left it to Caitlin to inform the others.

  She finally tracked down BeatNick as he was being escorted off the grounds. Apparently he had just been fired.

  “Did you really have to do it?” Caitlin asked him as they stood on the street.

  “Is it my fault Jorgenson stepped too close to the welding torch?” he asked with a smirk. “And I did hurl a bucket of water at him right away—you’d think they’d give me points for saving him.”

  On the other side of the gate, which had just been shut, Caitlin saw her personal escort searching the grounds for her. She was a pleasant enough woman, for an Acceleratus, but far too trusting. Caitlin had told the woman she was going to the restroom, and then easily slipped away. Now Caitlin ducked out of sight with BeatNick before she could be spotted.

  “If you’re going to reunite,” Caitlin said, glancing at the flaring night sky, “we’re running out of time.”

  BeatNick assured her that he could get them into the underground tunnel system. “I’ve been in touch with the rest of me,” he explained. “Tell the fourteen-year-old me that we’ll rendezvous at the entrance to tunnel seven at seven thirty tonight. Of course, without a plan to get us all back together, I don’t see what good that will do.”

  “Don’t worry—Nick has a plan.”

  BeatNick took some offense. “I’m Nick too, you know.”

  Caitlin looked at him, catching his eyes, which were, of course, Nick’s eyes. It was nice to know what Nick would look like in ten years or so.

  She smiled at him. “I’m sure a twenty-five-year-old me would be very much in love with you.”

  BeatNick left, and Caitlin lingered by a tall hedge until the gate opened for an exiting construction crew, then slipped back in. She found her escort and complained about her faulty directions to the bathroom.

  Several miles away, on another piece of property that also had a foreclosure sign slapped on the gate, Thomas Alva Edison oversaw a crucial phase of the operation.

  He and his wheelchair rested in the center of a circular concrete platform just over one hundred feet in diameter. The platform consisted of a stabilized subgrade of hydraulic cement overlain by eighteen inches of lime cement and surfaced with fourteen inches of steel-reinforced compression-proof concrete. In other words, it was so sturdy, it could serve as the landing pad for an alien spacecraft. But it had a very different purpose.

  Z came up behind Edison. “Are you sure this will work?” she asked.

  He scoffed. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s electricity.” Then he held up his hand and removed the shiny titanium ring from his finger. He gave it to Z and said, “You may do the honors.”

  In the very center of the huge platform was a copper disk that was hardwired directly to the electrical grid. It was no coincidence that the Long Island Power Authority was controlled and operated by Consolidated Edison Energy, Inc., better known as Con Ed.

  Z placed the ring in the very center of the copper disk, on a spot engraved with a small X. Then she wheeled Edison off the concrete platform to a control booth shielded by several layers of Accelerati-designed blast-proof glass. Just in case.

  Waiting for them there was an Accelerati courier with an urgent message. “The package has arrived,” he told Edison.

  Edison clapped once, which sounded like an ancient book full of brittle pages being slammed shut.

  “Splendid,” he said. “But first things first.” He reached over to the control panel. It was very old-school, featuring a heavy switch that had to be thrown. He preferred it this way. Computer screens with virtual buttons and pull-down menus manipulated by pathetic little mouse-clicks stole all the joy from the act of completing a circuit. He put his hand on the switch’s ivory handle.

  “This,” Edison said, “is why they call me the Wizard of Menlo Park.” And he threw the switch. For a few moments all the lights on Long Island dimmed, and then the small ring in the center
of the huge concrete platform began to expand.

  It was dusk, and the aurora was already flaring in the eastern sky when the one-seventh of Nick that was still fourteen, along with Caitlin and Petula, approached the entrance of tunnel seven. It was within a small stone structure at the edge of a parking lot behind an abandoned Toys “R” Us. The s had fallen from the crumbling sign, which now solemnly announced that “Toys ‘R’ U,” because clearly toys were no longer them. At least not in Shoreham.

  Petula was there because, in exchange for successfully sneaking them out of the gated and guarded Wardenclyffe facility, she had insisted on joining them.

  Caitlin still didn’t trust her. “If you’re spying for the Accelerati, Petula, I swear—”

  “If I were spying for the Accelerati, you would have been sent to their experimentation program hours ago.”

  And since that was likely to be true, Caitlin said no more.

  Several of the Nicks were already there when they arrived. BeatNick was filling his face with junk food. “Hey,” he said with a shrug, “this could be my last meal as a twenty-four-year-old for ten years.”

  Old St. Nick was there, jovial as ever, with Nicholas, who held SputNick, and Little Nicky, who clung nervously to the hem of Nicholas’s shirt.

  Mitch was also there, along with Zak, still dressed in his fake royal robe, long after he needed to wear it. While Zak was a bit royally standoffish, Mitch ran up to Nick and threw his arms around him in an awkward, and never-to-be-repeated, show of affection.

  “They didn’t kill you!” he said. “We were all worried.”

  “So what’s the plan?” Zak asked.

  Nick reached into his sack and produced the prism in its protective sleeve, along with the oversize ghost lamp bulb.

  The Nicks all gasped in unison as they made the connection.

  “Of course!” said BeatNick. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “You did,” said Nick. “Kinda.”