Einstein's Underpants--And How They Saved the World

by Anthony McGowan

  No way was he going to put these on under his trousers. That was icky beyond endurance.

  He tried pulling them on over his trousers. There was plenty of room for that. Einstein, Alexander concluded, was a bit of a porker. He looked at himself in the mirror. He’d never felt so stupid in his life. He looked like . . . Well, there was nothing really that he looked like except for a kid wearing a pair of old man’s underpants over his trousers.

  He sat at his desk and, still not quite believing what he was doing, opened his books.

  The first question was:

  10x – 2 = 7x + 4

  Find the value of x.

  He stared at it.

  It stared back at him.

  They were like two animals meeting in the jungle at night, not quite sure what to make of each other.

  Alexander waited for the pants to kick in, to send their signal to his brain.

  Nothing.

  He felt like an idiot for even thinking that the pants might help him with his homework. He pulled them off and threw them in the corner. Tomorrow he’d burn them with the leaves in the garden. Except they would probably give off toxic smoke and gas everyone in the street, and the police would come and arrest him, and at his trial it would be revealed that not only was he rubbish at algebra but he’d also put on a pair of dead man’s underpants. Live that one down at school he certainly wouldn’t.

  Then Alexander had another thought. Probably a mad one. The underpants, when worn in the conventional area – i.e. covering your bum – were a very long way from the area you used for solving algebra problems – i.e. your brain. Perhaps if they were closer . . .

  Worth a shot, now he’d travelled this far on the road to insanity.

  He retrieved the pants and, feeling a torrent of emotions, including shame, excitement, humiliation, shame, shame, embarrassment and shame, he put the pants on his head.

  He looked at himself in the mirror again. He looked like a kid with a pair of old underpants on his head. He started to laugh. He laughed so much that he slumped onto the floor.

  It was while he was on the floor that something else happened to Alexander. His mind started to whirr. It was most peculiar. Something, he thought at the time, to do with the laughter bringing oxygen to his brain.

  He stopped laughing and stood up.

  ‘Why not have another look at that problem?’ he said aloud to himself.

  He stared again at the numbers and letters. Then he picked up his pencil and began to write.

  10x – 2 = 7x + 4

  10x – 2 + 2 = 7x + 4 + 2

  10x = 7x + 6

  10x – 7x = 7x + 6 – 7x

  3x = 6

  x = 2

  It was easy. Why hadn’t he seen it before?

  He raced through the other nine problems in five minutes flat. He felt exultant. He felt . . . extraordinary. He’d cracked algebra. He was . . . he was . . . a genius.

  There was a knock at his door, and his mother said, ‘Alexander?’

  ‘Come—’ he began, and in the nick of time remembered to rip the pants off his head.

  CHAPTER 9

  CONTACT

  HIS MOTHER CAME into the room carrying the cordless phone. She had the sort of neutral expression on her face that Alexander had learned to fear.

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said.

  He hadn’t even heard it ring, he’d been so wrapped up in his algebra.

  ‘Who . . . ?’

  ‘Uncle Kevin.’

  Otto!

  His mother waited for a couple of seconds, and then Alexander closed the door gently in her face. He wasn’t a slamming-the-door kind of kid.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  He was expecting the usual flood of words from Otto. All he got was a subdued, ‘Hi.’

  Then a pause.

  ‘Everything OK, Otto?’

  Another pause. Alexander thought he heard the sound of footsteps echoing down the phone line.

  ‘I’m on the pay phone in the corridor. It’s hard to speak. They listen.’

  ‘You sound funny, Uncle.’

  ‘They’ve been giving me drugs. I fight them, but they are too strong.’

  ‘I’ll come and see you soon.’

  ‘No! You must not. Did you find the . . . you know what.’

  ‘The pants?’

  ‘Shhhh!’

  ‘Er, yes.’

  ‘Have you tried them?’

  ‘Well, actually I just did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I think they, er, that is to say, well, I think they did something. They made me see . . .’

  Otto sighed contentedly. ‘Yes, yes. Now you understand. And once you have understood, then it’s time to act.’

  For a second Alexander thought that Otto was talking about his homework. ‘Yeah, I’ll hand it in tomorrow—’

  ‘What are you jabbering about, boy? Don’t you comprehend the seriousness of this? Now I have been incarcerated, you are the Earth’s only hope.’

  The drugs had definitely dulled Otto’s frenzy, but his intensity still burned like phosphorus. And even though Alexander knew that his uncle had serious mental problems, he found it almost impossible to resist his will.

  ‘But what can I do? I’m only a kid.’

  ‘You read my message?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Then you know your mission. You must form a league of heroes. When the attack comes, you will be the resistance. You will be an underground army. And, guided by the you know whats, you will know where and how to strike.’

  ‘But where will I find superheroes around here? It’s not exactly Gotham City, is it?’

  ‘Seek and you shall find.’

  ‘And what shall I tell them? I’ll need some kind of proof . . . I mean, no one’s going to believe any of this.’

  ‘You have my data?’

  ‘I think so – I took the hard drives out of your—’

  ‘It’s all there. But remember, time is running out. Act now or it’s the end of humanity. I can’t talk any more.’

  ‘Are they listening again?’

  ‘No, my money’s run—’

  And then Otto was cut off.

  It took Alexander a long time to get to sleep that night. His mind churned and toiled. He lay under his duvet, writhing with embarrassment at the very idea of recruiting superheroes to fight some kind of alien invasion. He knew that the sane thing would be to simply ignore Uncle Otto. But two thoughts nagged and chewed at his brain, like dogs at a bone. What if he was right? What if something really terrible was going to happen to the world, and he was the only one who could save it? And then there was the ludicrous fact that the pants, Einstein’s underpants, had really seemed to give him the power to do his algebra homework.

  It was no good. He got up, attached the hard drives to his laptop, and, after he’d put Einstein’s underpants on his head, delved into the data.

  When he finally drifted to sleep some hours later, he dreamed of monsters again.

  And Admiral Thlugg? He too was dreaming, lying upon his soft and swampy bed in his private quarters.

  And when a Borgia dreams, he dreams of killing.

  Killing slowly.

  Killing deliciously.

  Drawing out the juice, that delicious liquid centre that all living things possessed.

  When he woke up ready for duty, he found that he had eaten his pillow.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE BIRTH OF UNLUCKEON

  ‘YOU ARE KIDDING?’ exclaimed Melvyn.

  Before Alexander had the opportunity to stress that no, he wasn’t kidding, and yes, he was deadly serious about the need to form a league of superheroes to defeat the forces that were massing to conquer the Earth and eat all its inhabitants, human, animal, vegetable and quite possibly mineral as well, Melvyn managed to walk into a wall, bounce backwards, trip over a passing black cat and land on his backside in the middle of the only puddle on an otherwise utterly bone-dry pavement.

  Alexander
and Melvyn had been walking to school together, as they did most days.

  Alexander helped Melvyn back to his feet.

  ‘I’m going to have a wet bum all morning,’ Melvyn said in a matter-of-fact way. He’d grown used to this sort of thing and it didn’t bother him much any more. ‘I expect everyone will think I’ve had an accident in my trousers.’

  Alexander nodded. It was what people would think. The best Melvyn could hope for was that everyone would assume he’d simply wet himself rather than having had some sort of titanic diarrhoea episode in his pants. But, knowing Melvyn’s luck, some other kid in the classroom would let fly with a super stinky fart at exactly the moment everyone noticed the huge stain on his trousers, and two plus two would be put together and inexorably equal the fact that Melvyn had poohed himself.

  ‘I know it sounds crazy,’ Alexander said, shaking the thoughts of what might or might not happen to Melvyn from his head, ‘but I think that this time Uncle Otto was on to something.’

  ‘Your uncle Otto is a fruitcake. You told me he believed that he was being followed by specially trained badger assassins.’

  ‘OK, so the badgers were a bit silly. And even Otto admitted in the end that it wasn’t a disguised badger but an old bucket, and it wasn’t following him but just lying there. And I’m not saying he’s the most sane person in the universe, but that doesn’t mean he’s always wrong. Even a broken watch is right twice a day.’

  Melvyn just shook his head.

  ‘Think about it,’ Alexander continued. ‘What if this is one of those times – the times when the broken watch happens to be right? What if the world really is doomed, and we had the chance to do something about it, and we blew it, just because . . . just because . . .’

  ‘Just because it all sounds completely mental?’

  ‘Exactly. But the thing is, it isn’t completely mental.’

  ‘It must be contagious. Or hereditary. Or both.’

  ‘No, listen to me. You know those drives I took out of Otto’s steam-powered computers?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you found something on there, did you? Nothing, you know, creepy . . .’

  ‘No, nothing like that. Numbers.’

  ‘Numbers? Was he playing the lottery or something?’

  ‘Maybe, sort of. It was the stuff he said he’d picked up from his aerials. All in binary. Ones and noughts. Hundreds of millions of ones and noughts. To begin with it looked like white noise, just meaningless numerical static. But he said he’d seen patterns in there, so I ran it through a couple of mathematical programs I downloaded. Let them do the number-crunching for me. First they converted the binary into normal numbers, and then . . .’

  Melvyn looked interested, or at least not completely bored. ‘And then what?’

  ‘And then, well, I don’t know exactly. Even understanding how these programs work is beyond me. But the thing is, they found patterns. They really did. The numbers weren’t meaningless.’

  ‘So what did they mean?’

  ‘Search me. All I can say is that this stuff wasn’t random. It was produced by some kind of intelligence. And it didn’t come from Earth.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Nope. I’m not sure about anything. But that’s what it looks like to me. And that’s why we have to do something.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we tell the authorities? NASA or the government or, I don’t know, someone like that?’

  ‘What, write them an email saying that my insane uncle, who hid Einstein’s underpants in his dummy kettle, thinks we’re about to be invaded by aliens? That’ll go straight to the prime minister with URGENT stamped on the file, won’t it?’

  ‘He did what with Einstein’s underpants?’

  ‘Ah, did I not mention them yet? Well, you see, someone gave Albert Einstein’s pants to Otto, and Einstein’s genius has somehow been imprinted on them—’

  ‘Like a skid mark?’

  ‘Yes, exactly! The skid mark of genius! And that genius gets passed on to whoever wears the pants. Because in a way that’s what genius is – I mean, a thing from within you that leaves its mark, or stain, on the world.’

  ‘Please don’t tell me you believe this.’

  ‘I do believe it. I mean, I don’t believe it. I mean, I sometimes do and sometimes don’t.’

  They walked in meditative silence for a while, during which time Melvyn got pooed on by a pigeon and stumbled over an almost imperceptible irregularity in the pavement. Then he said, ‘Have you actually tried them on?’

  Alexander nodded sheepishly.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Did you turn into a genius?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It’s hard to tell. How would you know?’

  ‘Did you have any super-amazing thoughts? Did you solve Gödel’s last theorem? Did you have a great idea for ending world hunger?’

  ‘Not as such, no. But geniuses don’t have great thoughts all the time, do they? They must have some periods when they’re just idling along, thinking about what’s on the telly that night and having a cup of tea.’

  ‘So, no effect at all then?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ Alexander was reluctant to tell even his best friend that he’d needed Einstein’s help with his algebra.

  ‘Look, I did an experiment. There were some tricky problems, and I couldn’t work them out, but when I put on the underpants . . . well, I sort of could. It was amazing, really.’

  Melvyn sighed. ‘OK then, let’s assume that you’re right, and that the world is about to be invaded, and that Einstein’s underpants have turned you into a genius. What do you want us to do next?’

  ‘Otto said we can’t do it on our own. We have to find the other superheroes.’

  ‘What do you mean the other superheroes?’

  ‘I mean the others as well as us.’

  ‘Us? Since when were we superheroes?’

  ‘You admitted that I’ve got super-intelligence when I wear Einstein’s underpants, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Melvyn sceptically.

  ‘So that’s me sorted. And you – well, you do have a sort of special power.’

  ‘Do I?’

  At that moment a bus (the number thirteen, of course) rumbled past them on the High Street. One of its fat tyres rolled over the corpse of a mouldy, blackened banana. The laws of physics, biology and chemistry should have dictated that the banana was simply squished beneath the tyre, but the laws of the natural universe would often behave erratically around Melvyn, and now they conspired to send the pulpy mass of rank banana matter shooting towards him like a huge gobbet of phlegm fired from a giant footballer’s nose.

  Alexander saw the mushy projectile speeding towards his friend and tried to drag him out of the way, but he only succeeded in making sure the banana impacted juicily on Melvyn’s inner thigh.

  Although the manky banana gunk was travelling at the speed of a peregrine falcon falling on its prey, it was too soft to cause any serious physical damage. That, however, was not the point. The point was to add more textural interest to the wet patch on Melvyn’s trousers. It now looked for all the world as if Melvyn’s little accident in his pants had spread and seeped out from its original site to engulf the entire area from knee to belt. This wasn’t just diarrhoea, this was cholera, this was the bloody flux.

  ‘Boggeration,’ he said, the nearest he ever came to using bad language.

  ‘See what I mean? That sort of bad luck – I mean, bad luck taken to those sorts of cosmic levels – well, that counts as a special power. In its way it’s as impressive as being able to fly or walk through walls or fire laser beams out of your eyes.’

  Melvyn made a grunting sound. It was hard to know if it was a grunt of agreement or a grunt of despair, which is one of the problems with grunting as a means of communication, and the main reason why primitive man invented words.

  ‘So, that’s you and me, the first of the few. I’m the brainiac leader, and you’re, erm, Unluckeon.’
>
  ‘Unluckeon?’

  ‘Yeah, you know, everyone needs a special superhero name.’

  ‘Unluckeon’s a bit rubbish.’

  ‘Well, try to think of something better then. But the thing is, if you and I have these amazing powers . . .’

  Melvyn coughed, although coughing is an even less efficient way of conveying meaning than grunting.

  ‘. . . amazing powers, then there are bound to be other kids in our school who do as well. Because, you know, it would be a bit weird, wouldn’t it, if we were the only ones and just happened to be best friends. So all we have to do is find them.’

  ‘And how do we do that?’

  ‘What we need to do is hold some – what-do-you-call-it? – auditions.’

  ‘Like The X Factor for freaks?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  Melvyn combined a grunt, a cough and a snort. He was still attempting to wipe off the smeared banana mess when they wandered into their form room for morning registration. At just that moment Matthew Norrington released one of his notorious SBDs, its smell as cloying and fatal as mustard gas.

  CHAPTER 11

  ITEMS WANTED

  THE FOLLOWING WORDS appeared the next day in the school magazine, published in both paper and web editions. (The magazine was run entirely by the pupils, with Mr Van theoretically overseeing the whole operation. Mr Van’s view – not shared by all the other teachers – was that the kids had to be allowed to make their own mistakes, and so he only ever interfered to remove outright obscenities and split infinitives.)

  FOR SALE

  Full set of Alex Rider books, unread. 10p. Contact Malcolm Mitchin, Form 7G.

  Valuable antique wooden tennis racket. £1.50. Contact Mary Cunningham, Form 9J.

  Pair of spectacles (unwanted gift). Any reasonable offer accepted. Contact Paul Burke, Form 8M.

  Oboe. Working but badly stained. £25. Contact Francis Meanwood, Form 7L.

  Mobile phone. Can get any make you want.£10. Text me on 07814 568 372.

  Scotch egg. Only just past eat-by date. Probably delicious. 25p. Contact Simon Morley, Form 8G.