Edison's Alley

by Neal Shusterman

  “What did you do to me?” the boy demanded with delicious desperation. “Why does the power keep dying all around me?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,” lied Jorgenson. “Perhaps it’s the effect of one of the inventions that you and your little playground friends have so blatantly abused.”

  “You did it!” Nick shouted. “I know it was you! It had to be you! Make it stop!”

  Jorgenson forced a false sigh, and got down to business. “Very well. I promise that your life will return to normal, and you will continue your lackluster existence without any further interference from me…on the condition that you surrender all of Tesla’s devices.”

  He watched as Nick bit his lip, considered the proposal, and then, instead of speaking, put out his hand for Jorgenson to shake.

  Instinctively, Jorgenson raised his own hand, but then he hesitated. He had lost the pinkie of his right hand and it was still painful. The memory made him hate Nick Slate even more.

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t shake your hand,” he said, displaying his bandages. “You and your father shall give us unrestricted permission to retrieve the objects in your attic, and shall cease and desist in all efforts at recovering the others. Finding those objects will be our task now, as it should have been from the beginning.”

  He turned and reached behind him for an expandable file folder that was growing far too fat for anyone’s good. He called it his “nuisance folder.” Mostly it held things relating to Nick Slate. After briefly leafing through it, he pulled out a simple yet comprehensive agreement.

  “I took the liberty of preparing this document a few weeks ago, back when I believed you’d be sensible and would agree to it without causing unnecessary strife.”

  When he turned back, Nick had the slightest smile on his face. Clearly the boy was relieved to have this over with.

  “Here is the document,” Jorgenson continued, laying it on his desk. “As you are a minor, your surviving parent must sign it also. I expect it to be delivered by hand back to this office within the hour. You shall remain…‘powerless’…until it is done.”

  “Of course,” Nick said, and he held out his hand. “Shake my hand, Dr. Jorgenson, and I promise to do what needs to be done with that piece of paper.”

  Jorgenson kept his hand at his side. No doubt the boy wanted to give his injured hand a sadistic squeeze. “Just the signatures will be fine.”

  “I’d feel a lot better,” the boy said, “with a handshake…”

  Now Jorgenson was getting irritated. The twilight was fading, and the room was growing dark. The sooner Nick left, the sooner the lights would return. “A handshake implies respect,” Jorgenson said, keeping his hands by his side. “Need I say more?”

  Nick held out his hand a moment longer, then his eyes narrowed. “Fine.” He picked up the paper. “Like I said, I’ll take this and do what needs to be done with it.” Then he left, closing the door behind him.

  Jorgenson sat back down and popped the last piece of raw fish into his mouth as the diminishing sunlight sliced through the blinds. The boy was bitter. Not a surprise—abject defeat will do that to a person.

  What was surprising, however, was the fact that the lights in the room did not return after the boy left. Was he lingering? Jorgenson walked into his outer office, where the lights were also off, and stopped at his secretary’s desk.

  “Where’s the boy?” he barked.

  “He left five minutes ago,” said the woman.

  “No…that isn’t possible…” He stormed past her and into the hall.

  Farther down the hallway, Jorgenson could see that the ceiling lights were still on. But as he walked closer, the fluorescents flickered out above him, matching his strides. He came to a sudden, slightly nauseated stop and he patted himself down, searching for the tiny chip. The little cretin must have found it before he arrived, and pretended not to know! Somehow he had placed it on Jorgenson—but how? The boy hadn’t even touched him.

  And then Jorgenson remembered turning his back on Nick to pull the document from the file…and the smile—no, it was a grin—on Nick’s face…and the single piece of sushi sitting on the table between them.

  That’s when Jorgenson understood the chip wasn’t on him. It was in him.

  Jorgenson’s wail would have registered a ten on the fury scale, had such a measuring device worked within a twenty-foot radius.

  There was nothing more satisfying than outsmarting a genius. Nick had embedded the tiny chip between the limp slab of fish and rice while Jorgenson’s back was turned. It was small enough, Nick hoped, to be swallowed whole. He was already on his bike, pedaling away across the lawn of the physics building when he heard Jorgenson yell from somewhere inside—indicating that the man had effectively swallowed his pride.

  Now the chip was Jorgenson’s problem, and Nick hoped that his digestion was nice and slow. He had heard that the large intestine could, on occasion, trap things for years. It would serve Jorgenson right!

  But Nick’s mission had only been a partial success. Mitch’s little prophesy-belch had said that their lives could be saved by shaking Jorgenson’s hand—but Nick knew how those little truth-burps worked: they implied no more than what they said. Nick didn’t necessarily have to surrender to the Accelerati—all he had to do was shake the man’s hand.

  Unfortunately, that was going to be much more difficult than Nick had expected.

  A few minutes later, when Nick felt he had put enough distance between himself and the Grand Acceleratus, he took a moment to stop at a street corner and throw the surrender document in a trash can, thereby fulfilling his promise to Jorgenson, by doing exactly what needed to be done with it.

  When Nick arrived home, Beverly Webb was there with his father.

  His life was filled with interlopers. Like last time, Beverly had come over under the pretense of bringing her son to play ball with Danny. Clearly, though, her interest was in their father.

  Was it wrong for Nick to want him to stay in mourning? It had been less than four months since the fire. Sure, the woman’s presence here didn’t constitute a “date,” but her intentions were obvious.

  “I brought that stain remover, Nicky,” she said.

  “It’s Nick,” he said. “Thanks.” No one called him Nicky but his mother.

  He took the thing from her. It looked like an old-fashioned washboard. Of course, thought Nick. He remembered it and its buyer, thanks to the memory-enhancing Oolongevity tea he had drunk a few weeks ago. But the washboard had been purchased by some guy in a Hawaiian shirt.

  “Be careful with it,” Beverly said. “It was a birthday present from Seth—it has sentimental value.”

  “Uh…okay.” Nick should have left right then—taken the thing up to the attic and made himself scarce, but he lingered a moment too long. “How does it work?” he asked.

  “I don’t know how it does what it does,” she said, “but rub anything against it, and it removes the stain without damaging the fabric.”

  That’s when Seth came bounding out of the downstairs bathroom, passing Nick on the way to the stairs. Nick whipped the washboard up to hide his face, and for an instant he thought Seth hadn’t seen him. But before he reached the stairs, Seth spun on his heels.

  “It’s you!” he said, pointing an accusing finger. “Mom, it’s him!”

  “Him who?” Beverly asked.

  Nick had to think fast. “Him who’s about to make you and Danny hot fudge sundaes!”

  There wasn’t an ounce of ice cream in the house, but it distracted Seth just long enough for him to say, “Sundaes?”

  “Yeah!” said Nick, which gave him the time he needed to herd Seth into the kitchen and out the back door, pushing it closed behind them so no one else could hear.

  “You were in our house!” Seth said. “You and your friend! I saw you both! You’re burglars!”

  Nick could have denied it—after all, it would be Seth’s word against his—but
he suddenly realized he had an ace to play.

  “Fine,” Nick said. “You know my secret, and I know yours.”

  That gave Seth pause. “Huh?”

  “You forgot to get your own mother a birthday gift. She said you got the stain remover for her at a garage sale—but you never went to that garage sale. If you did, you would have remembered this house. Your father bought it, not you!”

  Now Seth looked like a kid who’d been caught copying answers from his classmate. “You don’t even know my father!”

  “Goofy glasses? Drives a green Saturn? Likes Hawaiian shirts?”

  Seth gasped. “How do you know that?”

  “Oh, I know lots of things. Not just me, but my burglar friend, too. All my friends. We all know what you did!”

  “But…but…”

  “Here’s what I think happened: your dad brought you back to your mom’s, and at the last second you realized you didn’t have a gift for her, so you grabbed the only thing you could find in his car. You didn’t even know what it was, and your dad probably doesn’t even know that you’re the one who stole it from him.”

  “And I would have gotten away with it, too,” moaned Seth, “if it wasn’t for you rotten kids.”

  “So,” said Nick, putting his arm around Seth’s shoulder, “here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to keep quiet. About everything. No one needs to know about how you totally forgot your mother’s birthday and stole your father’s stain remover, and no one needs to know about me and my friend visiting your house the other night.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure,” said Seth, nodding so furiously Nick thought he might give himself a concussion. “One thing, though—why were you there?”

  “Why do you think?” said Nick, holding up the washboard. “To get this back.”

  “Is that all?”

  Nick shrugged. “That’s it.”

  “But if you wanted to keep it, why did you sell it in the first place?” asked Seth. “That was dumb.”

  “Tell me about it,” Nick said simply. “So are we good?”

  “Yeah,” said Seth. “We’re good.”

  Then Danny came barging out the back door. “Dad says you’re making us sundaes!”

  “Tell you what—what if I take you both to DQ?”

  “That seals the deal,” Seth said, putting his hand up for Danny to high-five. Danny obliged, because any deal that involved ice cream was fine with him.

  They all ended up going out for ice cream, as if they were a family, which made Nick miserable. At least they took two cars, so Beverly and Seth could leave from there—but Nick noticed how, before she shook his dad’s hand good-bye, she glanced at Nick—as if she would have given him a hug if Nick weren’t there.

  Once Nick got back, he grabbed the washboard and took it upstairs to the attic. Before fitting it into the machine, he couldn’t resist rubbing his pomegranate-juice-stained shirt against it. It did remove the stain, just as advertised. But it did even more: the fabric wasn’t just cleaner, it looked newer. Nick examined the washboard more closely. When he tilted it toward the light, it seemed to have an artificial depth, like one of those three-dimensional postcards. On a whim, he rubbed the torn knee of a pair of jeans back and forth across the washboard’s surface. After five strokes, the tear was repaired.

  So the thing didn’t just purge stains, it undid all damage. It made things new. He tried to figure out how he might use it against the Accelerati, then he caught himself. He was thinking like them, and that wasn’t good. Maybe he should stop messing with it and just let it take its place in Tesla’s grand device.

  He quickly found exactly where it went. Caitlin was right—he was getting better and better at completing the puzzle. He could intuitively see the way it all fit together—sensing not just the parts, but the whole.

  He noticed something about the washboard, though, that gave him pause. Two posts extended from it; one was engraved with a dash, the other with a plus sign. Positive and negative. He knew what was supposed to be connected to those two posts.

  Vince’s battery.

  For Tesla’s machine to live, Vince would have to die.

  Nick had told Vince they’d cross that bridge when they came to it, but with each object he added, the bridge came closer and closer.

  Downstairs, his father was on the phone, and he could tell it was with Beverly. Hadn’t they had enough of each other for today? When his father guffawed in response to something, it set Nick on edge. Did she think she could be a part of their whole?

  He idly wondered if he could remove her like a stain, and then he laughed off the idea. But the darkness of the thought lingered.

  Meanwhile, in Kiruna, Sweden, there were undocumented reports of a man’s head exploding for no apparent reason.

  All the police were able to piece together, besides skull fragments, was that he had been chewing on Life Savers at the time. This detail may not seem important, unless you consider the effects of triboluminescence, which is the phenomenon that makes Wint-O-Green Life Savers spark when you chew them…and the fact that Kiruna sits atop the world’s largest deposit of iron ore.

  For some, the failure of the University of Colorado’s sewage treatment plant marked the beginning of the Colorado Springs Dark Time, as history would eventually come to call it.

  In truth, however, the darkness was being distilled long before then, beneath an unremarkable downtown bowling alley. Ironically, the team of cutting-edge scientists cultivating that darkness saw themselves as luminaries—great bringers of light. Of course, the light they offered always came with hefty price tags. If the Accelerati had their way, they would control every source of energy in the world except sunlight—and if they could somehow claim ownership of the sun, they would do that, too.

  As for the university’s waste-processing woes, all the troubleshooters knew was that an unexplained, traveling power outage had begun in the physics building, been tracked for a day and a half around campus, and finally settled permanently at the sewage treatment plant, where the power remained out despite the attempts of a dozen different electricians to get it back on.

  The Army Corps of Engineers was called in, but by then the sewage plant had been out of commission for several days and the university was virtually uninhabitable. Classes were canceled, dormitories evacuated, and people in neighborhoods downwind were advised to stay indoors with their windows closed. There was, of course, a contingent of the population who believed that all of the things occurring in town, from the vanishing house to the near-satanic stench, were in some way supernatural. These were the same type of folk who saw the aurora and other electrical phenomena caused by the orbiting asteroid as mystical signs.

  Typical, thought Alan Jorgenson, that the masses would treat simple science as so much hoodoo. He blamed the sewer stoppage entirely on Nick Slate, of course, in spite of the fact that he was the one who had put the power-draining chip in play in the first place.

  Jorgenson’s superior was heartily amused by the whole thing and just about laughed in his face during Jorgenson’s next visit.

  “The boy has something you don’t, Al,” the old man said, waving his nostril-offending cigar in the air. “He has innate cleverness, and the ability to think on his feet in a most inspired way.

  It was difficult for Jorgenson to hide his indignation—especially from a man as observant as the Grand Acceleratus’s wizened boss.

  “You may be a genius,” the old man said, “but intelligence is only one-third of the formula for true greatness. Perspiration and inspiration are the other two-thirds.”

  “Well, sir,” Jorgenson said though gritted teeth, “you certainly are making me sweat, so I have two parts to his one.”

  The old man chuckled. “Well said—although I suspect the boy is making you sweat far more than I am.” Then he rang a little bell, calling for the housekeeper. “I look forward to meeting this scrappy boy wonder.” Jorgenson was sure he said that only to get further under his skin.


  “That may prove impossible,” Jorgenson told him.

  The old man snuffed the stub of his stogie in an overfilled ashtray.

  “Need I remind you that he still hasn’t given us the list of missing items? And until he does—”

  “I feel confident we can find the remaining items without Nick Slate.”

  The old man sighed. “I know your feelings on the matter, Al—but if the boy’s life becomes forfeit to serve the greater good, you had better assure me that the greater good will be served.”

  “It will, sir. I have no doubt.”

  “Well, I have my doubts,” the old man said. Then Mrs. Higginbotham arrived with a single tray holding his dinner, which put an end to their conversation.

  But that was fine. In fact it was more than fine—because finally Dr. Alan Jorgenson had what he needed from the old man: grudging permission to erase Nick Slate from the equation. Permanently.

  It is an accepted anthropological fact that people live in bubbles. Even in a modern, interconnected world, people’s lives consist of the familiar, the mundane, the routine. The same circle of people, the same meals, the same TV shows, the same Web sites. To most people the “outside world” becomes a place seen only through layers of shaded glass, until it can barely be seen at all.

  Although Caitlin Westfield prided herself on her worldliness, and on being above the mundane, she was a bubble dweller as well. Her life was all about the trials of middle school, her artistic endeavors, and more recently, irritating matters of the heart.

  After the asteroid didn’t end life as we know it, most people reacted by retreating deeper into their comfort zones than ever before. The objects Tesla had left behind, and Nick’s obsession with them, made it very hard for Caitlin to do the same.

  While Nick put together his puzzle, Caitlin was beginning to piece together her own. And she couldn’t help but notice the various effects of the earth’s new satellite.