The Wells Bequest

by Polly Shulman

  • • •

  We flew west over the ocean on autopilot, stretching out the day into one long afternoon. Auntie Shanti made cauliflower curry for lunch, or maybe it was dinner. We ate in the mess, with sunlight slanting through the portholes. She and Jaya kept hopping up to check the sonar and make sure the avoidance system hadn’t missed anything.

  After lunch, Jaya found two copies of The Master of the World in the main cabin, one in French and one in English. “Have you ever read this?” she asked. “It’s the Jules Verne novel the Terror comes from.”

  “Cool!”

  “French or English?”

  “English, please.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that. It’s better in French,” she said, curling up in an armchair and opening it.

  Show-off, I thought. And the annoying thing was, she had so many impressive things to show off.

  A few chapters in, I said, “This book is hilarious! First they were all trying to climb an unscalable volcano in west North Carolina, and now the Terror is diving in a giant lake high in the mountains of Kansas. The mountains of Kansas!”

  “What’s the matter? You’ve never been to the mountains of Kansas?”

  “There aren’t any.”

  “Maybe not in this universe.”

  “Really? Are there other universes where Kansas has mountains?”

  “Sure! Jules Verne’s fictional universe, for one.”

  “But that’s fictional. By definition, it’s not real.”

  “Depends on what you mean by real. The Terror is fictional, but it feels pretty darn real to me,” said Jaya, thumping the floor with her feet.

  I put my book upside down in my lap. “I still don’t understand how science-fiction objects get out of their fictional universes and into the real world.”

  “You mean this world? What makes you so sure this is the real world?”

  “Come on, Jaya. Be serious.”

  “I am being serious.”

  “All right. How do they get out of their fictional worlds and into this world, then?”

  She shut her book on her finger to keep her place. “There isn’t one single answer. Lots of the objects come through the authors—that’s how Mr. Steel got most of the things in the Wells Bequest. Or sometimes we can capture them ourselves.”

  “Like we just did with the model time machine,” I said.

  “Exactly.” She paused, smiling. Could she be thinking of the kiss? “But there are lots of objects that nobody’s captured yet, and maybe they never will. Maybe those stories aren’t good enough to have real objects in them. Or maybe I’m wrong, and there is no fictional universe with Kansan mountains in it. Maybe when Verne wrote the story, he put in some true stuff—like the Terror—and some stuff he just made up, like the mountains in Kansas.”

  “That answer stinks,” I said. “It’s totally unsatisfying.”

  “Then maybe you should do some literary-philosophy experiments and try to find a better one,” said Jaya. “Ms. Minnian would like that.”

  “I wish the judges would let me do that for my science fair project!”

  Auntie Shanti put her head in the doorway. “Are you done solving the mysteries of the universe yet?” she asked. “You’d better finish fast—it’s time to take the vessel down.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Death Ray

  Auntie Shanti folded our wings and dove into the Atlantic. We surfaced so we wouldn’t scrape the bottom, engaged the cloaking, and docked at the yacht club marina by Battery Park.

  I followed Jaya and Shanti up the swaying pier toward the tall buildings of the Wall Street district. The sailboats poked their masts at the setting sun.

  “Here, I’ll take the time machine,” said Jaya.

  “No, you’d better let Leo keep it for now, until Doc speaks with the attorneys,” said Auntie Shanti. “Your apartment might count as an official repository location. After all, your father’s the board president.”

  “Oh, good point. Do you have someplace safe to put it, Leo?”

  I nodded. “My closet, under my laundry. My whole family’s terrified of my dirty socks.”

  “Schist! Socks!” said Jaya. “Come meet us at the repository after you’ve dropped it off—Doc’s going to want to hear all about it.”

  It felt odd carrying a time machine on the subway. The three blond tourists chattering away in German, the African American man in a suit reading a neatly folded newspaper, the tired Chinese woman carrying four red shopping bags full of vegetables, the two little boys elbowing each other for a better view out the window—what would they say if they knew?

  • • •

  I met Jaya and her aunt again in the repository. We headed upstairs with Ms. Minnian.

  “Guess what?” cried Jaya, bursting through the doors into Dr. Rust’s office. “My plan worked, and Leo—”

  “Stop, Jaya. We’re not alone,” said Dr. Rust, pointing at the wall.

  “What?” said Jaya. We both spun around to look.

  A large tinted sepia photograph in a fancy frame was hanging on the wall. Wires attached the picture to a complicated brass device that looked like an old-fashioned telephone. The photo showed Simon standing in front of a big machine that looked a little like a World War I anti-aircraft gun. It was almost twice as tall as he was. It had five mean-looking barrels, five big, brassy boxes, and a cube with scary-looking swirly things sticking out of it. Somehow those swirly things were the focus of the photo. They seemed to glow.

  But it couldn’t be a photo. Simon was moving. He was talking, too.

  “There you are, Jaya,” he said.

  “That’s not the shifting picture from the Grimm Collection, is it?” Jaya asked Dr. Rust. “The frame looks different.”

  “No, it’s the telelectroscope from the Wells Bequest.”

  “The what?” said Jaya.

  “What’s a telelectroscope?” I asked.

  “It’s a sort of networked videophone—an early version of the Internet. From an 1898 short story by Mark Twain.”

  “Mark Twain, the guy who wrote Huckleberry Finn? I didn’t know he even wrote science fiction.”

  “Oh, he wrote pretty much everything,” said Dr. Rust. “He had a wide-ranging imagination.”

  The image of Simon cleared his throat sarcastically. “If you’re quite done with the literary critique, I have a small matter to discuss,” he said.

  We all turned back to Simon.

  “As you know, I made a mistake. I would like a chance to rectify that. To do that, I need the time machine. Please send it today by pneumo-courier.” His voice came out hollow and crackly.

  “Simon,” said Dr. Rust, “you know perfectly well that the time machine in the Wells Bequest doesn’t work. And you also know perfectly well that you’ve lost all borrowing privileges at the New-York Circulating Material Repository.”

  “I also know perfectly well that Jaya and Leo were just in Richmond trying to recapture the time machine from the Time Traveller’s house, and I just heard Jaya admit that her plan worked.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Simon. You saw us. Did we look like we were carrying the time machine? It’s huge.”

  “You might have taken it home already when I saw you. Or shrunk it, or made it invisible. I know you have it. Doc, you would be well advised to restore my borrowing privileges and send it to me by the next pneumo-courier.”

  “Why would we do that—even if we did have it?” asked Ms. Minnian.

  Simon waved his hand at the machine behind him. “Because I have Nikola Tesla’s death ray, and I won’t hesitate to use it if you don’t. I’ll destroy New York.”

  • • •

  For a moment nobody could speak. Then Jaya said, “This is supposed to convince me that you’re not evil, Simon? Fail!”

  Simon said, “I know you think that now. But you’ll see. It will all work out. Once I’ve used the time machine to correct my mistake, you’ll never know about any of this because it will never
have happened.”

  “And what if we don’t have the working time machine—which we don’t? Or if we choose not to negotiate with a terrorist?”

  “I would be very sad to have to use the death ray, but believe me, I will if I have to,” said Simon. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not a monster. Be sensible! Once I have the time machine, I can change the past and undestroy New York.”

  “Not if it’s in New York and you destroy it!” said Jaya.

  “That’s why you’ll give it to me,” said Simon.

  “But we don’t have it!” I said.

  “That’s crazy, Simon! You’re not thinking clearly,” said Jaya.

  “All right. I’ll destroy San Francisco first. You have cousins there, don’t you?”

  “Why should we believe that the machine behind you is Tesla’s death ray, Simon?” asked Ms. Minnian in a reasonable voice. “There’s no record that he ever actually built one. The models and plans are thought to have been destroyed in the South Fifth Avenue lab fire of 1895. The Burton certainly doesn’t own such a thing.”

  “It’s not the Burton’s. It’s mine,” said Simon.

  “What are you doing with Tesla’s death ray?”

  “My grandmother’s grandfather worked in Tesla’s lab. He sailed to England the night the lab burned down. He took a lot of models and plans with him. He met my great-great-grandmother on the ship crossing the Atlantic, and they built the death ray together from the plans.”

  “Oh, come on. That thing?” said Jaya. But she sounded worried.

  I was worried too. Even in the sepia motion photo, that big gun looked way too real.

  “You have twenty-four hours to hand over the time machine,” said Simon. “Then I’ll do a little demonstration to show you what the death ray is capable of. Dallas, shall we say? Or Paris?”

  “I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t do that,” said Jaya. “You’re not really that evil.”

  “Twenty-four hours,” said Simon, and reached behind him. The photo image went uniformly brown.

  • • •

  Dr. Rust unplugged the telelectroscope, took it down from the wall, put it outside the office, and shut the door. “We can talk freely—he can’t hear us now. What do we do?”

  “I know one ought never to negotiate with terrorists,” said Auntie Shanti. “But mightn’t it be safer simply to give him the time machine?”

  “That’s crazy! Why would we do that?” I said.

  Auntie Shanti said, “The death ray—if that’s what it really is—could destroy a city. And all Simon wants with the time machine is to undo a mistake he made. That seems harmless.”

  “No,” said Dr. Rust. “The Wells machine has no restrictions. Simon could use it to alter the past and the future any way he liked. We can’t put an object so powerful in the hands of someone so unstable and untrustworthy. And anyway, we don’t even know for sure whether that thing is the death ray. I’m inclined to think he’s bluffing.”

  “But what if he isn’t?” asked Jaya.

  “It looked pretty convincing to me,” I said.

  “How could he possibly aim a beam at New York from London unless he was in orbit? Which he’s not,” said Dr. Rust.

  “Well, we don’t have an answer to that,” said Ms. Minnian. “There are no records of what the Tesla death ray was or how it worked.”

  I’d just read a whole book about Tesla and his inventions. “Wasn’t he trying to use tiny particles of mercury, accelerated in a vacuum?” I said.

  “Yes, that was one idea he was playing with. But we don’t know for sure what his final concept was, if he ever finished it. The ray could arc along the lines of force of Earth’s magnetic field, for all we know. Or it could obey parabolic or ballistic laws, like a missile. We have no idea what that thing behind Simon is.”

  “It looks like a really pretentious boson’s idea of what a death ray would look like,” I said. “Boy, is that guy full of himself! He’s got to use a telelectroscope—he can’t even use a cell phone like a normal person.”

  “That’s not just pretentiousness,” said Ms. Minnian. “He’s threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction. The telelectroscope can’t be detected with the methods used by national security agencies like the NSA or MI5. Cell phones can. If they heard him and took him seriously, he would be the subject of one of the most massive manhunts in history. And they would find him.”

  “Shouldn’t we call in the FBI or the NSA or something?” I asked.

  “No,” said Dr. Rust. “They would declare us a national threat and confiscate half our collection. We’re on our own.”

  “Well, couldn’t we threaten him back? Are there any deadly weapons in the Wells Bequest?” I asked. As soon as I said it, I realized what a bad idea that was.

  “I have always wanted to try out Washington Irving’s moonstones and concentrated sunbeams,” said Jaya. “But I don’t think Simon would react well to threats.”

  “Let’s not go there,” said Ms. Minnian.

  “To be safe, we have to assume the death ray is real,” said Dr. Rust. “I’ll reach out to Dr. Pemberley-Potts, and we’ll pull together a team to send to London.”

  “Can I go?” asked Jaya eagerly. “It’s my fault this whole thing started. At least, he said he’s doing it for me. I should be the one stopping him.”

  “No,” said Dr. Rust. “It’s too dangerous.”

  Jaya got a stubborn look on her face, but she just said, “All right. I guess you don’t need me here, then,” and ran out of the room.

  “You’d better go calm her down,” Auntie Shanti told me.

  “I’ll try. I hope you catch Simon fast.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Shrink Ray

  I found Jaya in the Catalog Room. I hurried over to her. “Don’t worry, Jaya. It’ll be okay. That death ray thing’s probably just a big cardboard fake,” I said, with way more confidence than I felt.

  Jaya looked up. “Oh, there you are, Leo.” She didn’t sound nearly as upset as I expected. “Help me find a good map of the city. Or, no—maybe you should get the money while I find the maps. Get plenty of nickels.”

  “What are you talking about? What do you need nickels for?” I checked my pockets. I had a five-dollar bill and sixty-two cents in change, none of it in nickels.

  “For the buses and trams and things. Put that away—modern money won’t work in 1895, silly!”

  “1895? Schist, Jaya! What are you planning?”

  “Not so loud. We can’t let the librarians know or they’ll try to stop us.”

  “Try to stop us from doing what?”

  “From using the time machine, of course. We’re going back in time to 1895, before Tesla’s lab burned down, and we’re stopping Simon’s great-great-grandfather from taking the death ray with him when he left for England. Leaves for England? Left for England? Which is it?”

  “Jaya! We can’t do that!”

  “Or we’re stopping him from taking the plans for the death ray—Simon’s ancestor, I mean. Or maybe we’re stopping Tesla from inventing it in the first place. I’m not sure. But we’re stopping the death ray at the source so Simon can’t get his hands on it.”

  “No way!” I said. “That’s crazy! The Wells time machine is far too powerful. You know how I worry about changing the past in some horrible way. . . .”

  “We won’t. We’re just going back for a few hours and making one little stop. That won’t change much, if anything.”

  “Yes, it will! We’ll be messing with the lab of one of the most important scientists who ever lived! We could change everything!”

  “Don’t be such a worrywart,” said Jaya. “We’ll be careful. This isn’t the first time I’ve operated dangerous equipment, you know.”

  “That’s the opposite of reassuring,” I said.

  “Look,” said Jaya. “I don’t actually need you to come with me. I could take the time machine and go back to 1895 by myself. But it’ll be much, much better if you h
elp. And I know you’re going to agree because you did. I mean, you will. I mean, you saw your future self already doing it. So can we please just skip this argument and get on with it?”

  She was right—I was going to time travel with her, no matter what I said. And Simon hadn’t left us a lot of options. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll go with you. Not to help, though. To stop you from doing anything too rash.”

  “Whatever you say, boss,” said Jaya. She didn’t sound like she meant it.

  I suppressed the urge to strangle her. “So what are we going to need?” I asked. “Money from 1895 and an old subway map—did they even have subways back then?—and old-fashioned clothes.” So that’s why Future Me and Future Jaya were dressed funny! “And the time machine, obviously. What else?”

  “The shrink ray from the Wells Bequest. We’ll never fit on the model time machine at this size.”

  I remembered her mentioning a shrink ray. “Wait—do you have to plug it in? Was this place wired for electricity back in 1895?”

  “Oh, we’re not leaving from here! We can’t bring the time machine to the repository, remember? And you saw us in your bedroom. We’re leaving from your place.”

  “We are? Oh. You’re right, we must be.”

  “Your building was built already back then, right? It must have been, or we wouldn’t have gone there,” said Jaya.

  “Yeah, the cornerstone says 1894,” I said. “We’d better bring batteries just in case there wasn’t electricity there yet.”

  “All right. You take care of the electric stuff and the maps, okay? I’ll get the shrink ray and the clothes and the money. What’s your shoe size?”

  “Nine and a half,” I said.

  “Really? Your feet look bigger than that.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I have to stop at home first to pick something up,” said Jaya. “Meet me at your place. What’s your address? Here, write it down.”

  • • •

  Mom and Dad had gone upstate for the weekend and Sofia was staying with Sara, her best friend, so the apartment was empty when I got home. If Simon really acted on his threat, I wouldn’t even get a chance to say good-bye to my family.