Tesla's Attic

by Neal Shusterman

  “Do it again!” insisted Nick.

  He pulled the string and the machine said, “The pig goes—”

  “Oink! Oink!” Mitch said. “Hey, stop that!” As if Nick was making him do it. Could it be that Mitch had become so connected to the thing that he was finishing its thoughts? What if that connection went deeper? What if this device had given Mitch some sort of link above and beyond anything they could understand?

  “Again,” said Nick. “Keep on going!”

  Mitch pulled the string over and over, letting it begin the sentences, then blurting out the conclusions himself.

  “The chicken goes—”

  “Cluck!”

  “The dog goes—”

  “Woof!”

  “The farmer sells his corn—”

  “—at five dollars and eighty-four cents per bushel as per today’s commodities market.” Mitch went wide-eyed at the words coming from his mouth. “How did I know that?”

  “Keep going!” said Nick.

  Mitch, feeling the power of the moment, had a sudden surge of adrenaline, pulled the string with all his might…

  …and it broke.

  The dial of the Shut Up ’n Listen spun itself silent.

  “Well,” said Mitch, “that’s that.”

  But Nick wasn’t so sure. “The amount of rainfall in Topeka, Kansas last month was—” he began.

  And Mitch said, “—the highest of any city in Kansas.”

  “The Eiffel Tower—” began Nick.

  “—has exactly three hundred and forty-seven pieces of used gum stuck to its girders,” said Mitch.

  “The end of the world will come—” began Nick.

  “—in sixteen minutes and forty-three seconds, or in four-point-six billion years.”

  “Bingo!” said Nick.

  “N-42,” responded Mitch. “The winning number on the highest bingo jackpot in history. How do I know these things?”

  “You don’t!” Nick told him. “Somehow you’re channeling the universe! The Shut Up ’n Listen made you like one of those radio telescopes that can tune in the Big Bang.”

  Mitch nodded, in a kind of mental shell shock. “Right,” he mumbled.

  “And that whole thing about us being connected—maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s going to take the two of us to fix things.”

  “How?”

  Nick tried to quickly wrap his mind around what he had just learned. There were two options now. Either the world would end in a few minutes, or it would end in a few billion years, like it was supposed to. Which meant the Felicity Bonk fiasco could be still be avoided. It all depended on the thought he started…and Mitch finished.

  And so he said, “The answer to everything—”

  And Mitch responded, “—is right in your hands.”

  “Aha! So there is an answer!” Nick shouted. “But what does it mean?”

  “Well,” asked Mitch, far more timidly than usual, “what’s in your hands?”

  Nick looked down at the baseball bat that he was, indeed, still holding. He had felt so compelled to swing it and smash Tesla’s mad creations. Only now did he notice that it really didn’t quite feel like any baseball bat he’d ever held. Its center of gravity was different, and it seemed to vibrate with some dormant resonance, like the wood of a guitar moments after the sound of the chord has faded.

  Was there a place for this item in the incomplete machine before him? Or was its purpose separate? Still related, but separate. Like the way the glove drew Celestial Object Felicity Bonk toward its rendezvous with earth.

  A glove and a bat. A baseball game would not be complete without both.

  And lots of games are won in the bottom of the ninth.

  “Hey, Dad,” said Nick, coming downstairs with Mitch. “How about a little baseball before we go?”

  Nick’s father had given up on the steaks and was sitting on the sofa with Danny, his arm around the boy. No music, no TV, no video games. The two were appreciating the mere act of living, the sounds of birds from outside, the dusty smell of the old house. In the end, Nick supposed, everyone would truly come to believe that the best things in life are free.

  His father looked at him blank-eyed for a moment, then smiled.

  “Before we go…” he repeated. “Yes, Nick. I think that’s exactly what we should do.”

  And even Danny, who had not been near a baseball since his ill-fated cosmic encounter, agreed.

  They didn’t go to the sports complex. There was no time. Instead they went to the park just a block away. A grassy field with no baselines and a cheap roll-away backstop. They were the only ones there, of course.

  Nick looked up to where the asteroid was coming in from high in the eastern sky. Then he checked his watch. Four minutes to impact, and the thing still appeared smaller than the moon in the sky.

  “You’d think it would look bigger,” Mitch said.

  “It’s only fifty miles wide,” Nick pointed out. He supposed it would grow immense and swallow the sky only in the last seconds before striking.

  In the field, Nick positioned himself on the pitcher’s mound with the looming asteroid behind him. He held the ball signed by every member of the Tampa Bay Rays.

  “Play deep center field,” he told Danny and Mitch.

  “But we don’t have gloves,” Danny said.

  “It doesn’t matter, Danny,” Mitch told him, and the two ran out to center field.

  At home plate, Nick’s father brandished the bat on his shoulder, and then he said, “I love you, Nick.”

  Nick tried to keep his eyes clear, but he found it difficult. “I love you, too, Dad.”

  And with that, Nick wound up and threw the most important pitch of his life.

  Newton’s Third Law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When a baseball is hit by a powerful force, its reaction is to fly out of the ballpark. It’s simple physics that makes any ball game possible.

  “Whiffin’ Wayne” Slate knew this was to be the last at-bat of his life. His one chance to redeem himself. To get a piece of the ball. He eyed the asteroid in the sky, above his son’s head. In defiance of fate, he would swing away and blast that baseball right toward that killer chunk of rock.

  The determination with which he swung at his son’s pitch was unparalleled by any swing of his life. This was his moment. He could feel his entire soul in that swing. And as the bat came around, he waited for the glorious feel of stitched leather against wood—that moment when the bat would connect with the ball.

  Nick, however, had thrown a curveball—and a good one. The ball headed straight toward his father, then veered right, missing the end of the swinging bat by half an inch. The ball hit the backstop with a rattle, and fell to the ground, leaving Whiffin’ Wayne Slate, sadly, unredeemed…

  …but the force of that swing, magnified by the curious nature of that antique bat, had to go somewhere.…

  A shock wave spread out from home plate like a sonic boom, blowing Nick, Danny, and Mitch off their feet. Beyond the park, it shattered windows, but the vast majority of its energy headed skyward.…

  “I thought we might have a little chat, you and me, on this lovely afternoon,” said Ms. Planck as she stood in Petula’s doorway.

  Petula glared at her. “What could there possibly be to talk about”—she glanced at her watch—“with four minutes left to the world?”

  “This!” Ms. Planck held up a three-foot-long cardboard mailing tube.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this,” Petula said, “but I think you missed the FedEx cutoff time.”

  “Maybe not. May I come in?”

  Petula’s parents, at some point during the day, had made up and were now making goo-goo eyes at each other at the kitchen table. Not an image Petula wanted to take with her to oblivion. So she closed the door to the kitchen.

  Ms. Planck sat on the sofa where Mitch had kissed Petula a few days earlier. On the coffee table she rolled out a print of the very picture Petula had t
aken yesterday—only this one was four feet across and three feet high. As with the smaller image, this poster-size one clearly showed the utter destruction that was just a few minutes away.

  “I took the liberty of enlarging your excellent photograph—and look how clear it still is. You can see every texture of flaming rock—every speck of spewing lava. That box camera of yours is quite—shall we say—ahead of its time.”

  Petula crossed his arms. “So you figured it out. A big lot of good that does now.”

  Ms. Planck ignored Petula’s fatalistic attitude. “Tell me, Petula, where did you take this picture?”

  “My backyard.”

  Ms. Planck nodded. “Show me.”

  Petula led her out to the yard, full of crabgrass that would never be pulled and dandelions that would never go to seed.

  “Show me where you were standing,” Ms. Planck said calmly.

  “Why?” Petula demanded.

  “Humor me.”

  Petula moved to the spot where she took the picture the day before, and Ms. Planck stood about six feet in front of her. Then she unrolled the large image of Armageddon, which stretched the full width of her reach.

  “I would bet,” Ms. Planck said, “that at precisely five nineteen, this will reflect the scene that your camera is destined to capture.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Look at your watch, Petula.”

  Petula glanced at her watch to reveal that the time was five nineteen.

  “Wait…but…I don’t understand,” Petula stammered.

  But then she saw Ms. Planck’s smiling eyes above the oversize image, and the truth hit her with the force of a meteor.

  “I didn’t take a picture of the end of the world!” Petula said. “I took a picture of a picture of the end of the world.”

  Petula held up her fingers in a square shape like a viewfinder, to see the image that a camera would see. The old box camera had, indeed, taken a picture of this exact moment in time.

  “When you know the future,” Ms. Planck said, echoing a thought Petula already had, “you can either let that future happen to you, or be the one to create it.”

  And at that moment a shock wave hit them with such power that it knocked them off their feet and tore the large photograph from Ms. Planck’s hands. The photo flew off into the sky like a lost kite.

  At home plate, Nick’s dad looked morosely down at the ball he had missed. He picked it up and sighed. “I guess it’s true, then. Now and forever I’ll always be Whiffin’ Wayne Slate.”

  Nick came running to him from the pitcher’s mound, wearing a huge grin. Mr. Slate marveled at his son’s ability to smile at a time like this.

  Danny ran over a moment later, bewildered, with Mitch close behind. “What was that?” Danny said. “I thought it was the asteroid.”

  “If it was, we wouldn’t be here,” Mitch pointed out.

  “That,” said Nick, “was a grand slam.”

  “In case you didn’t notice, I missed the ball,” his father said.

  But the grin didn’t leave Nick’s face. “Then how come the bat is cracked?”

  Mr. Slate looked down, and sure enough, the bat had split lengthwise down the middle.

  “Son of a gun. You’re right.”

  The truth didn’t quite fall into place until he looked up and saw that the asteroid was no longer growing larger. In fact, it seemed slightly smaller, and to be slipping sideways across the sky. None of them was willing to speak aloud the thought that something had changed—as if saying it would jinx it.

  The four of them watched Celestial Object Felicity Bonk for five minutes, then ten minutes, then twenty—long after it was supposed to have struck Colorado Springs.

  Mr. Slate picked up the cracked bat. Sometimes bats had illegal cork cores to give them greater hitting power. He had no idea what was in the core of this particular bat, and he suspected he would never know—but in the end it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the result. He thought about the events of the past few weeks. The baseball glove that pulled things from the heavens, and now a bat that sent them back. And he marveled.

  When it was clear that the earth was still here, and would remain here indefinitely, people got pissed off. Across the globe, valuable possessions had been given away, and guilty consciences had been purged by shocking confessions, all in the belief that no one would live to regret it.

  But the astronomers were wrong, and Felicity Bonk turned out to be a fickle lover. For although she had brazenly courted the planet, something had knocked her off her intended path, leaving her in a harmless, platonic orbit that barely even affected the tides.

  The following morning a national holiday was declared, and a parade was established, with the real Felicity Bonk herself riding and waving from the lead float, as if she had done anything more than pay ten bucks for a big rock. By noon, people were already arguing about what to call the day, and whether or not it should be shifted to a Monday in future years to create a three-day weekend. Regardless, “Bonk Tuesday,” as it was currently called, was sure to be celebrated in one form or another for years to come.

  Petula, in spite of resolving not to, called Mitch that morning. “I told myself that the world would have to end before I accepted your invitation to the movies,” she said. “Close enough.” Then she gave him the time, place, and movie of her choosing, and suggested that a corsage would not be inappropriate.

  Mitch, however, had other plans. “Actually, I’m going to visit my father today,” he told her. “After what happened yesterday, I’ve really come to appreciate what little time I get with him.”

  “What?!” said Petula, suitably disgusted. “Is your father more important than a date with me?”

  “Well…yes,” he told her reluctantly, “but you’re important, too.”

  “Fine. You will not get another chance. How about Saturday?”

  He agreed, and she hung up on him, feeling frustrated by her own happiness over the matter.

  That afternoon, Petula joined Ms. Planck for a stroll in Acacia Park, where they had first bonded over photography.

  “The thing to keep in mind,” Ms. Planck said, “is that you and I saved the world.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Simple,” Ms. Planck explained. “If we hadn’t intervened, with me holding up the enlargement at the precise time and place for you to catch it with the box camera, then your picture of the end of the world would have been the real thing. Thanks to us, it wasn’t.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Petula confessed. “If the camera took a picture of a picture, where did the original image come from?”

  Ms. Planck smiled. “Ah, I love a good paradox. Don’t you?” They walked on a bit. “Think about it when you go to bed,” she told Petula. “It’s better than counting sheep.”

  That made Petula smile.

  It was late afternoon. The sound of children in the playground became distant as they neared Ms. Planck’s town house. In this quiet part of the park, they were very much alone. That’s when Ms. Planck knelt down in front of Petula. Smiling warmly, she said, “I have a gift for you. Something very special to commemorate your noble actions.”

  She opened a small jewelry box, revealing a shiny gold pin in the shape of the letter A, but with the symbol for infinity through its center.

  “Wear this close to your heart, Petula,” Ms. Planck told her, “but don’t let anyone see it.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a sign that you belong to a very special organization.”

  Petula turned the small pin over in her hands, watching it catch the light. No one had ever given her a gift of jewelry before, unless you count the friendship ring she wore on her pinkie. But she had bought that for herself.

  “This organization…is it secret?”

  “Very much so. A group of people wise beyond words, shrewd beyond measure, and destined to steer the course of all mankind.”

  Petula liked the sound of that, so she f
astened the pin beneath the collar of her blouse, hidden from view.

  “Thank you, Ms. Planck,” Petula said. “But if you’re part of this group, why do you serve us lunch?”

  “We’re in all walks of life, honey,” Ms. Planck told her with the slightest of grins. “That’s how we spot those who belong among us…and how we monitor certain persons of interest.”

  “So,” said Petula, “you’re undercover.”

  Ms. Planck stood up and continued walking beside her. “I prefer to call it hiding in plain sight.”

  Petula could relate. In a sense she felt like she’d been hiding in plain sight all her life, but now it would be with a purpose. She thought about how Nick Slate had humiliated her, when all she had tried to do was save him. An icy vein of anger coursed through her.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Ms. Planck.

  “I was thinking that success is the best revenge.”

  “No, dear,” Ms. Planck corrected. “Revenge is the best revenge. But we’ll have plenty of time to discuss such things.”

  “Will I meet other members of this club,” Petula asked, “and find out more about what you do?”

  “You will,” Ms. Planck said, “you will. And you can’t imagine how thrilling your life is about to become.”

  Only now that the crisis had been averted did Nick’s and Caitlin’s attention turn to their fallen friend. They sat in Nick’s room, Caitlin tearful and Nick nearly so, as they lamented how poor Vince was caught squarely in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although Nick knew that it had been the Accelerati’s doing, he couldn’t get past the fact that it was his hand that had aimed and fired the weapon that killed him.

  “You can’t think that way,” Caitlin said, her voice soothing. “If you do, then they win.” But Nick just shook his head. “It could have been any of us,” Caitlin continued. “Your father. Your brother.”

  “Am I supposed to be happy it was Vince instead of them? Or you? It shouldn’t have been anyone.”

  Caitlin dropped her shoulders and sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to help.”