Tesla's Attic

by Neal Shusterman

  At lunchtime, Caitlin sat with Theo rather than with Nick, trying to lose herself in simpler times, and all times with Theo were simple. He was the white bread to her PB&J, and the fact that he would still sit with her in spite of having suffered public humiliation was somehow admirable. Either he was sure enough about himself not to care, or he simply didn’t know what else to do.

  Or maybe he sat with her because he knew that as long as she was with him, she wasn’t with Nick. Although today, Nick was the last person she wanted to sit with, because rehashing the night before would not exactly be conducive to digestion.

  So Ms. Planck served up her usual slop, and then Theo served up his usual fluff. And for a while Caitlin could pretend that the extent of her problems lived and died within the hallowed halls of Rocky Point Middle School.

  “Meteor showers suck,” Theo proclaimed.

  “Not all of them,” Caitlin pointed out.

  “Well, the ones that shut down the baseball fields do. All our home games are canceled until further notice, and all because of a bunch of rocks.” Theo carved a river of gravy through his mashed potatoes and directed it into a series of rapids using chunks of beef stew. Theo, Caitlin had learned, was the absolute master of playing with his food.

  “So are we still, like, going out?” he asked.

  “Ask me again next week,” Caitlin told him.

  “Fine,” said Theo, “enjoy your lunch.”

  And he up and left, taking his gravy river with him. If nothing else, this had made it clear to Caitlin that there was no going back. Whatever trajectory her life was on, she knew her white-bread days were over.

  When she got home, Caitlin found none other than Mr. Accelerati himself—Jorgenson—sitting in her kitchen as if he belonged there, sipping a cup of tea.

  This was odd enough, but what made it even more disturbing was that her mother, in one of her food-show frenzies, had decided to attempt a fancy meal. Moving at the pace of a contestant in a culinary competition, she was opening and closing drawers, setting pots and bowls everywhere, and leaving ingredients precariously balanced on counter ledges.

  All of this was going on around Jorgenson as if he weren’t even there.

  “Mom, what are you doing?” Caitlin asked.

  “It’s called Brandy Peppercorn Duck, or at least it will be when it’s finished,” her mom said, plopping a silver bowl down right in front of Mr. Jorgenson, who only looked at Caitlin and smiled.

  “What’s he doing here, Mom?”

  “He who?”

  “Don’t you see there’s a man sitting in the middle of our kitchen?”

  “Well, yes, obviously there is,” her mother said, focusing her eyes on Jorgenson for a moment before returning to the multitasks at hand and opening the refrigerator. “Now, let’s see, do we have enough butter?”

  Jorgenson simply grinned at Caitlin.

  “Mom, did you invite him into the house?”

  “No, he was here when I got home,” her mother answered absently. “Now, Caitlin, you’re either going to help me with this dinner, or go do your homework. But please don’t distract me, it’s a complicated recipe.”

  “But, Mom—”

  “I wouldn’t bother,” said Jorgensen softly. “Anything you say will just confuse her and complicate the matter.”

  He held up a small fob on the end of his key chain.

  “It’s quite simple, really,” Jorgenson said jovially. “The chip inside this device projects a signal that affects the logic center of the brain of the person it’s been keyed to, telling her there’s absolutely nothing unusual about her current circumstance. Observe.”

  Jorgenson turned to Caitlin’s mother. “Mrs. Westfield, I’m going to place your cat in the microwave.”

  “Be my guest. Make sure you turn him halfway through.”

  Jorgenson turned to Caitlin with a pleasant smile. “You see?”

  Caitlin found herself fuming. “If you so much as touch Caliban…”

  Jorgenson put up his hands. “Banish the thought. I merely proposed it as an example.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I want to save your friend Nick a world of pain, and I was hoping you might help me.” He glanced at her mom, then back at Caitlin. “It’s a lovely day. Shall we sit out on your patio?”

  And although it was the last thing Caitlin wanted to do, she agreed.

  As Jorgenson stood up, he picked up the small teapot in front of him and poured a cup of tea for her. Caitlin looked at the brew warily.

  “How do I know you’re not poisoning me?”

  “Actually, Miss Westfield, it’s quite the opposite. The leaves of this coenzyme ‘Oolongevity tea’ are from select plants, genetically engineered for the highest medicinal value. An instant herbal cure for whatever ails you, from the common cold to various and sundry malignancies.”

  “What if you’re what ails me?” Caitlin asked.

  “Well, we’re here to discuss the cure for that, aren’t we?”

  He handed her the cup, and they headed outside to the patio.

  She was admittedly curious, so she tasted the tea. It was sweet and flavorful, and she instantly felt more relaxed. Healthier, even. Caitlin suspected it was the first of many bribes Jorgenson would offer. She put the cup down and crossed her arms.

  “Oh, one more thing,” said Jorgenson. “You will find that this tea has a profound effect on memory—and it will make you feel inclined to tell the truth about the things you suddenly remember.”

  “Truth serum?”

  “Please, it’s herbal. At most, it’s truth chai.”

  On an empty stomach, it was hitting her system quickly. She suddenly remembered where she had left her lunch box. In the third grade.

  “So, how is this going to work?” she asked.

  “Very simple,” Jorgenson said. “I ask you a number of simple questions, and you tell me what I need to know. If you cooperate, I can assure the safety of Nick, his family, and all of your friends.”

  “And if I don’t answer at all?”

  “Then no amount of Oolongevity tea can assure anyone’s health.”

  It was a thinly veiled threat. Considering what the Accelerati had done to Svedberg, she knew Jorgenson wasn’t bluffing. In fact, she had begun to wonder if she would get out of this encounter alive.

  On the other hand, Jorgenson didn’t know how much dead Svedberg had told her and Nick about the Accelerati. She realized the only way she stood a chance was to play this like a game, and so she said, “If I answer your questions, it’s only fair that you answer mine. And since you had the same tea that I did, I know you’ll be truthful.”

  Jorgenson bristled, but only slightly. “Fair enough.” And he leaned forward. “Where is the Ballistic-Gravitational Glove?”

  Caitlin considered how she might somehow sidestep the truth, in spite of the sudden urge to tell it. Then it occurred to her that the answer was obvious and would only give Jorgenson information he already knew. He was testing her.

  “Probably still beneath that two-ton meteorite, if it didn’t get incinerated.”

  Jorgenson nodded. “We will know once we’re done excavating it.”

  “My turn,” Caitlin said. “How did you turn Svedberg’s shop into a coffeehouse so quickly?”

  “Selective time dilation,” Jorgenson responded without hesitation. “We can travel between the seconds, doing in five hours what would normally take five days. We actually have a very lucrative contract with Starbucks to put in shops overnight.” Through all of this, he held eye contact with her. “Now,” he said, “tell me the location of the Far Range Energy Emitter.”

  Caitlin was about to say she had no idea what he was talking about, but then realized that his question had just revealed something important. She briefly considered how to respond honestly and said, “If I had the answer to that, this would be a very different conversation, wouldn’t it?”

  Jorgenson clearly wasn’t pleased with the answer, but before
he could say anything, Caitlin asked, “What will you do with it when you find it?”

  “We’ll do what Tesla was never able to do. Make it work.” And then he added quickly, “For the betterment of mankind, of course.”

  “Of course,” Caitlin responded. “As you define it.”

  Jorgenson brought his hand down on the small table with enough force to make her teacup jump. “Now tell me about each of the items you already have, and what each of them actually does.”

  If this were a game, Jorgenson had just flipped the board.

  “Thank you for the tea,” said Caitlin, sounding far calmer than she actually felt. “But there is nothing more I wish to say to you. And that’s the truth.”

  “How…very…unfortunate,” Jorgenson said, drawing out each word to make clear how unfortunate it really was. And then he said calmly, “I could reach out and slit your throat right now, you know, and your mother would happily give me a hand towel to clean up the mess. You realize that, don’t you?”

  Caitlin took a deep slow breath and then said, quite evenly, “Killing me won’t help you any more than killing Svedberg did.”

  Jorgenson’s eyes glinted, but the truth in her voice stopped him. He stood and straightened his pearlescent coat. “When one stands in the way of the greater good, Miss Westfield, one is often ground up by the wheels of progress. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.”

  After he left, Caitlin returned to the kitchen, where her mother was head-and-shoulders deep into the cupboard.

  “What are you looking for?” Caitlin asked.

  “Garlic press,” her mom replied.

  Caitlin followed a string of muffled meows to the microwave oven. Quickly throwing open the door, she found her cat, Caliban, sitting inside, safe and sound, placed there no doubt by Jorgenson, traveling in between the seconds.

  Nick had been terrified of the Accelerati before he heard Svedberg’s tale. And yet, finding out that the Accelerati were even more powerful and dangerous than he had imagined—rather than increase Nick’s terror, it gave him an uncanny sense of relief.

  Knowing they could easily crush him like an insect posed the all-important question: why hadn’t they? After all, if you see a spider in your room, you squash it, plain and simple—unless you have a reason to let that spider live. So it can catch flies, perhaps, or maybe, as in the case of the Madagascan silk spider, so it can weave valuable webs.

  For whatever reason, the Accelerati needed Nick—which put him at a distinct advantage, because he definitely did not need them.

  “They’re looking for something called a Far Range Energy Emitter,” Caitlin said.

  She had come over unexpectedly late that afternoon, racing upstairs and into the attic. It was the first time in the universe’s thirteen-billion-year history that a girl had been in Nick’s bedroom.

  Luckily Caitlin was doing all the talking, or she might have noticed how, for at least the first couple of minutes, Nick found himself incapable of speech. She first told him of her chilling encounter with the Grand Acceleratus himself—or whatever you call the leader of a lethal secret society. Then they began to discuss the mystery of the Far Range Energy Emitter.

  “You think it was something I sold at the garage sale?” Nick asked.

  Caitlin shook her head. “It sounded like something bigger. Not a thing, but a place.”

  “Some place Tesla built, maybe?” Nick suggested. “Like Wardenclyffe Tower?”

  In crunching facts about the mad scientist who now ruled his life, Nick had learned that Tesla began building a tower in New York, nearly two hundred feet tall, with a giant copper sphere at the top. He quickly relayed the facts to Caitlin: how it was supposed to transmit electricity from the United States to Europe through the air, how it would have been the world’s first “wireless” network, and even though he designed it nearly a hundred years ago, it would have blown today’s technology out of the water…if it had worked. Unfortunately, Tesla ran out of money before it was finished.

  “Well, whatever this thing is,” Caitlin said, “they’re desperate to find it.”

  “Which means we need to find it first.”

  “There are a lot of things we need to find first,” Caitlin reminded him.

  “Right. So what else did Jorgenson do?”

  “Well, he gave me some sort of crazy mind-warp tea that made me remember all the places I hid my pacifier when I was, like, two. It also made me tell the truth, but only about the things I felt like talking about, so he didn’t get much out of me. I suppose if he had used a second tea bag, I might have remembered previous lives.”

  Nick heard the sound of a car in the driveway—Nick’s father returning home after his second triumphant day as the copy-machine repair king of NORAD. He looked over at Caitlin sitting right there on the edge of his bed, thought of his father coming into the house, and he felt that knee-jerk reaction of being caught doing something he shouldn’t. Which annoyed him, because he wasn’t doing anything. And it annoyed him further that he wasn’t.

  “Whatever Jorgenson wants from me,” Nick told Caitlin, “I can’t give him—even accidentally. Because once I do, I’m in the drawer next to Svedberg.”

  And then he heard Danny shout from the bottom of the attic ladder.

  “Hey, Dad—Nick’s got a girl up in his room, and they’re whispering secret stuff.”

  To which he heard his father respond, “About time!”

  Nick would have turned beet red, but somewhere deep down, his subconscious mind decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

  Caitlin stood up. “I’d better go before any of my pets end up nuked.”

  “Huh?”

  “Long story.”

  He would have seen her out, but his phone rang. Although caller ID claimed that Eleanor Roosevelt was on the line, it turned out to be Petula.

  “I just want you to know,” she growled at him, “that I’m holding you personally responsible for what is going to happen tomorrow afternoon.”

  Then she hung up loudly in his ear.

  Nick woke at dawn with an idea. It sent such an adrenaline rush through him that he didn’t have his usual morning sluggishness. He was dressed and racing down the stairs in five minutes—only to be stopped by his father, who, thanks to actually having a job, was also up at the crack of dawn.

  “Where are you headed off to?” his father asked, looking far more professional than usual in a coat and tie.

  Outside, Nick heard the rumble of trash trucks, and the loud complaint of garbage cans being raised and unloaded into the hopper. With a sickening groan, he realized that this was trash day, which meant he didn’t have much time to implement his plan.

  “Morning run,” he blurted.

  “Really? Since when?”

  “Since now,” Nick said, and he burst out the door before his father could ask any more questions.

  Trash trucks swarmed everywhere, like some sort of metallic-green invasion. Some of the streets Nick passed had already had their big plastic trash bins emptied, while some still awaited the inevitable.

  A truck was already on Caitlin’s street when he arrived. Without a moment to lose, Nick flipped open the lid of Caitlin’s trash bin and thrust his hands into the unpleasantness. Chopped onion and potato peels, duck skin in a dark red sauce. The mess clung to his arms and squished between his fingers.

  What were the chances he could find it? What were the chances it was even here? Nick dug through another layer of trash. The garbage truck was now at the next house, and the driver was eyeing him with malice, as if he might use his big hydraulic claw to pick up Nick along with the trash and deposit him in the hopper.

  When Nick looked up, Caitlin was standing there in Starry Night pajamas, looking at him like he had lost what little sanity he had left.

  “Mind telling me what you’re doing Dumpster-diving on my doorstep?”

  “It’s not your doorstep, it’s your curb.”

  Finally his fingertips touched a fine mesh
with a familiar consistency attached to a tiny string, and he extricated it from the trash. A tea bag dangled from his fingers, and the little tab had the tiny A symbol of the Accelerati.

  “Teatime!” he said cheerily.

  A minute later, Nick was washing his hands in the kitchen sink, and Caitlin was setting the teakettle to boil. They had quickly concocted a semi-plausible story for her parents as to why Nick was at her house so early. Something about having to document the calls of birds at dawn for science class.

  “Would you like something to eat, Nick?” Caitlin’s mother asked. “I can’t imagine you had breakfast before coming here at this ungodly hour.”

  “No thanks,” Nick told her brightly. “Just some tea would be fine.”

  The brew that Caitlin poured for Nick, however, barely resembled tea. It was pale and weak.

  “I’m not feeling anything,” he whispered to her after the first cup.

  “Well,” she pointed out, “the bag’s already been used.”

  “What am I supposed to feel?”

  “First you’ll feel…healthy. Then you start remembering weird stuff and have an urge to tell the truth about it.”

  After the fourth cup, with the weak tea sloshing around in his stomach, Nick finally began to feel a mild but undeniable sense of well-being. And then, a minute later—

  “I was eating chocolate the first time I actually tied my own shoelaces! My favorite kind of baby food was string beans! I used to pick my nose and hide it under the kitchen table when I was five!”

  “Ew!”

  Nick really didn’t want to be telling Caitlin these things, but once he started, he found it hard to stop. And then something that was both joyful and sorrowful came to mind. “My mom smelled like magnolia blossoms at my sixth birthday party.”

  Caitlin looked excited. Nick just felt weird. Like he had opened a trunk of things he never realized he had lost. He closed his eyes and got to the task at hand—the reason he had come over before the trash was collected. He thought back to the day of the garage sale.

  “We sold thirty-two items from the attic.…” And then he started to remember to whom they had gone.