Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  His father got a little angry himself. “Don’t you understand?” he said. “Once I became a full-fledged member, you, your mother, and your sister all became hostages. If I didn’t follow Jorgenson’s orders, I wouldn’t be punished—you would. The only way I could keep you safe was to do exactly what they wanted me to do.”

  But then Mitch asked the important question. “Would you have done it anyway?”

  His father considered this, and gave an honest answer. “I don’t know. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have. But back then…the Accelerati can be very seductive.”

  Perhaps Mitch was just being naive, but he felt sure he could never be seduced by them. Petula, sure. Even when he was dating her, Mitch knew she had the moral fiber of a cobweb. Mitch had to believe he was made of something sturdier than her, and his own father.

  “Leave the Accelerati alone,” his father warned in a whisper. “They guaranteed your safety to me. And as long as you steer clear of them, they’ll have no reason to break that promise.”

  It took a few weeks for that discussion to sink in. Mitch understood at least part of his father’s dilemma now. If he fought the Accelerati, they could go after his mother, or his little sister.

  But could he live with himself if he didn’t act on what he knew?

  Grinthon. Brandon Gunther’s alligator.

  The fact was, he wouldn’t know anything until he figured out what those words meant.

  Beef-O-Rama, Rocky Point Middle School’s hangout of choice, was temporarily serving only vegetarian selections, while resolving a lawsuit that accused them of using rodent meat in their burgers.

  In truth, it was just a misunderstanding based on a typo on the menu, which meant to claim that their burgers were full of nutrients but was printed to read: Our burgers are full of nutrias! While nutrias might indeed be nutritious, they are closely related to rats.

  But that was neither here nor there, because Mitch and Caitlin were just having fries.

  “I want to thank you,” Mitch said to Caitlin. “Your willingness to be seen with me has made me a little less uncool.”

  Caitlin grabbed a fry and dipped it in ketchup. “That works both ways,” she said. “Being with you has made me less cool.” She shoved the fry into her mouth.

  “Well, I promise not to sit next to you on Monday’s flight,” he said.

  “I didn’t know you were going on the field trip to Washington.”

  Mitch shrugged. “My mother thought it would broaden my horizons, and be nice for me to go someplace less stressful.”

  “If Washington, D.C., is less stressful than Colorado Springs, something is wrong somewhere. And you know what? I don’t care about ‘cool’ anymore. When we’re older and coolness matters less, I’m sure we’ll still be friends, and you’ll be running the company that people like Theo work for.”

  “I’d never hire Theo,” Mitch told her. “He’s too much of an idiot.” Then he had another thought. “Has anyone seen him since the EMP?”

  “A lot of people just up and left when that happened,” Caitlin suggested. “His family never struck me as the kind who could endure hard times very well.”

  “Funny,” said Mitch. “Last week, I was hurrying through the hall to get to class, and I thought I saw a life-size picture of him on the wall. I figured it was a baseball recruitment poster or something. But when I looked back, it was gone.”

  Caitlin just shrugged. When Mitch had seen the “poster,” he’d convinced himself it was just his imagination, even though he knew, deep down, that there might be more to it.

  “The thing is,” she said, “you and I are the only ones left in town who know what really happened. It’s hard to connect with people who are totally clueless about it, you know?”

  “There’s always Petula,” Mitch joked.

  Caitlin went a little stiff. Mitch had been kidding, but she was suddenly acting serious. “I spoke to her,” she told him. “She knows where Nick is, and she knows that he’s alive.”

  “She told you that?”

  “No, actually, she told me he was dead. But coming from Petula…”

  Mitch nodded, accepting the logic. “You think he’s still here? Maybe underneath the bowling alley, being held prisoner?”

  Caitlin thought about that, and then said, “It’s probably more complicated than that.”

  Before them, the basket of fries began to dwindle. Although Caitlin only ate one at a time, she ate them very quickly.

  Mitch began to feel like it was a competition. He grabbed three fries, dragged them through the ketchup, and shoveled them into his mouth.

  “If we just had some clue about what’s going on,” Caitlin said.

  “Grinthon,” Mitch said, his mouth full of food.

  “Princeton?” Caitlin said. “What about Princeton?”

  Mitch swallowed. “No, I said Grinthon.”

  Caitlin took a moment to do some mental calculation, then leaned forward. “Mitch,” she said slowly, “what exactly was going on when that Acceleratus said that to you?”

  “I was threatening to blow him up like a parade balloon.”

  “With the bellows?”

  “Yeah,” said Mitch. “I put the nozzle in his mouth and threatened to blow him up. That’s when he said ‘Grinthon,’ and ‘Brandon Gunther’s alligator.’”

  Caitlin looked down at the basket before them. “Mitch,” she said, “why don’t you eat some more fries?”

  “I don’t know,” he told her. “I’m kind of full now.”

  “EAT them!” Caitlin said.

  And so he did. He bit down on one fry.

  “More,” Caitlin said.

  So he took another fry. And then, to his shock, she reached into the basket, grabbed half a dozen, and shoved them into his mouth. His cheeks looked like a chipmunk’s.

  “Now talk!”

  “Ah cahn’t! Mry marth if furl offood.”

  “Exactly! Now say the words the Accelerati gave you!”

  He said, “Vrandon Gumberth alligator.”

  She pushed more fries into his mouth. “Again!”

  He said, “Vrandum Gumber allgirater.”

  “Again!” she said, adding more fries.

  “Randum Gumber algeratem.” Then Mitch gagged. He coughed, spewing chewed potato all over Caitlin. But instead of being mad, she smiled with a gleam in her eyes that almost scared him.

  “Random number!” shouted Caitlin. “The first two words are random number! But I couldn’t quite get the third.”

  Mitch gasped. “Algorithm! Before my father was arrested, all he told us was that he was working on financial algorithms.”

  “Princeton,” Caitlin said. “Random number algorithm.”

  “What does that have to do with Nick?” Mitch asked.

  “I don’t know,” Caitlin said, “but it’s the only clue we’ve got. The answer is in Princeton. We have to go to New Jersey.”

  And Mitch gagged again.

  If you looked up the expression just shoot me now in a dictionary of slang, it would not be surprising to find a picture of Dr. Alan Jorgenson in an apron and hairnet, serving food at Rocky Point Middle School. It was clearly the lowest point of his illustrious career.

  After all he had accomplished, this is what he was reduced to.

  “I can’t have that,” said the whiny snot-nosed child in front of him. “I’m allergic to green stuff.”

  “Good,” Jorgenson snarled, giving him a double portion. “Enjoy your anaphylactic shock.”

  While he wanted to blame this entirely on Nick Slate, he knew it had been the Old Man’s decision to demote him. But exactly how he was demoted had been left up to Evangeline Planck.

  Dr. Jorgenson had room in his heart to hate many people, but currently she was at the very top of his list.

  “There’s something wrong with the pizza,” said a zit-faced girl. “I think you left the plastic on it when you cooked it.”

  “A little bit of carbon disulfide never hurt an
yone,” Jorgenson said. Then he added, “Except for causing the occasional cancer, but you won’t have to worry about that for years.”

  How could they have forgotten that he was the one who’d found the advertisement for Nick Slate’s garage sale? That he was the one who’d had the foresight to realize that these were Tesla’s lost inventions? That he was the one who’d turned on the F.R.E.E. at the crucial moment, thereby saving the world? And this was the thanks he got?

  “Excuse me, Mr. Lunch Lady,” said a kid with more hair on his skull than brain matter within, “this chicken tastes funny.”

  “That’s because it’s not chicken, it’s long pork. Made from the last student who complained about the food.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” said the kid, walking off, clearly not believing it was true in the least. Next week, if Jorgenson had anything to do with it, it would be true.

  For obvious reasons, Jorgenson did not get along with the other cafeteria workers. In fact, one of them actually complained about him. The next day she mysteriously lost her voice, and it hadn’t come back since. After that, nobody said a peep about Jorgenson.

  Ralphy Sherman was spreading rumors that the lunch server was some kind of warlock who worshiped wallabies. Jorgenson never denied it, because it made the students somewhat afraid of him. In fact, his ability to instill fear in kids was the only perk of the job.

  When the shift was done, Jorgenson lingered “to clean the trays,” or so he told his coworkers.

  After everyone was gone, he knocked on a steel cabinet. “You can come out now.”

  And from the half-inch gap behind the cabinet slipped Theo Blankenship, to stand very literally flat against the wall. Because he could do nothing else. It’s hard to do anything but stand against the wall when you’re only two-dimensional.

  In the book Flatland, mathematician and author Edwin A. Abbott described his version of a two-dimensional world. It was a place populated by squares, triangles, and other geometrical figures one might draw on a board.

  Few people knew that, in addition to being a brilliant mathematician, Abbott was also a member of the Accelerati. He had conceived of and ultimately designed a weapon that could rob anything or anyone of depth, leaving them nothing more than a living projection on a wall.

  Such was the case with Theo, a fairly shallow boy who had become that much more shallow. He, like Alan Jorgenson, had Ms. Planck to blame for his current predicament, for she was the one who had fired the weapon that flattened him.

  Theo’s family lacked both the open-mindedness and the courage to deal with a dimensionally challenged teen. Whenever they saw him, his sisters would scream, his mother would sob, and his father would visit the liquor cabinet. When Theo told them he was leaving to seek out kinder, more tolerant surfaces, they gave him no argument.

  Dr. Alan Jorgenson was the only one who had shown Theo some kindness.

  “I will make you three-dimensional again,” Jorgenson told him, when he found Theo lurking on a neighborhood billboard, “if you help me take Evangeline Planck down.”

  Theo was more than happy to agree.

  Jorgenson, of course, had no idea how to return a person’s third dimension, but he wasn’t about to tell Theo that.

  “So what have you found out?” Jorgenson asked Theo in the cafeteria kitchen.

  “Besides that being two-dimensional is a pain in the butt?” Theo said.

  “May I remind you that as a two-dimensional being, you no longer have a butt?”

  “Sure I do, when I turn sideways,” Theo said, demonstrating.

  Jorgenson sighed. “I stand corrected. And I ask again: What have you found out?”

  “Okay,” Theo said, “so I was hanging out on a tree near Nick’s house—and by the way, that’s really kind of unpleasant, because of the bark. And don’t get me started on stucco—”

  “Stay on point,” Jorgenson reminded.

  “Yeah, right,” Theo said. “They haven’t done much with the ruins of his house. But they’re digging in a circle around the outside. There’s this giant metal ring they’re trying to get out.”

  “Interesting,” Jorgenson said. He sat down and crossed one leg over the other. “I wonder if it’s somehow important to the device.”

  “Well, they must think it is, because they’re digging like crazy.”

  “Here’s what I want you to do,” Jorgenson told him. “I want you to follow Petula Grabowski-Jones.”

  “Do I have to?” whined Theo. “She’s weirdly weird in a weird kind of way.”

  “Your vocabulary is inspiring,” Jorgenson said, but apparently sarcasm was lost on the two-dimensional. “Hide in some crevice somewhere, and shadow her when she leaves her house. Eventually she’ll go to Accelerati headquarters. You’ll follow her there, crawl down the lane of the bowling alley when it opens, and then spy on Evangeline Planck—until you know exactly what she’s up to.”

  “And then what?” Theo asked.

  “Then we find a way to reclaim my position as Grand Acceleratus,” Jorgenson said, as if it were obvious.

  “Cool,” said Theo. “I can get behind that.” But then, in his current state, Theo could get behind anything.

  Whether or not Stephen Hawking had ever traversed the dim hallway of a Scottish bed-and-breakfast toward the Hawking Suite, he did have a certain interest in corridors. Not the kind of corridors found in country inns, but those that cut through time and space. Corridors more commonly known as “wormholes.”

  According to a bit of quantum sleight of hand called the Casimir effect, space-time has been proven to warp, perhaps enough to allow for a tear in its fabric, through which otherwise impossible travel could be accomplished. Which means that wormholes could account for a great many mysteries in this universe: socks that vanish from dryers, purses that seem to hold more things than can possibly fit inside them, the impossible distance between your bedroom and the bathroom in the middle of the night, and the magic of David Copperfield. Even the Loch Ness monster’s curious appearances and disappearances could be chalked up to wormholes.

  In fact, the wormhole hypothesis was one of the less outlandish theories that attempted to account for the creature. Speculation abounded, little of it based in fact. But what does fact matter when lore is so much more entertaining? It was rumors and lore that kept Once-Upon-a-Loch Underwater Excursions in business.

  Once-Upon-a-Loch Underwater Excursions had a tiny office in a small village on the less populated side of Loch Ness.

  “Aye, the house,” said the bearded, rotund owner of the company. His name was MacHeath, but everyone called him “Mack the Fork,” because he was so fond of eating. “We spotted it down there weeks ago, but no one believes us. They think we Photoshopped the picture.”

  “I believe you,” Vince said. “In fact, I know it’s true.”

  “Hmm. Got a call said you were comin’ by.”

  “Yes,” said Vince. “Your uncle.” And, based on the man’s baffled look, Vince said, “I mean, your aunt.”

  Mack the Fork stood up. “I’m tellin’ ye right now, boy, I’m claiming full salvage rights. Anything I let ye take will be out of the goodness of me heart.”

  “I understand,” Vince said. “The thing I want won’t be worth anything to you anyway. Just an old globe. It goes back in our family for generations.”

  Mack the Fork nodded. “Of course, salvage commissions are expensive. If ye want to go get it, ’twill cost you a pretty penny.”

  Vince suspected that would be the case, but that’s what his mother’s stolen ATM card was for. “I can give you three hundred today, and three hundred tomorrow.”

  “Six hundred U.S.?” said Mack the Fork, stroking his beard. “Ye got ye’self a deal, laddie. When d’ye want to go down?”

  At breakfast the next morning, Vince’s mom tried to convince him to take a couple of days to explore Edinburgh with her.

  “There are supposed to be lots of ghosts and dead things,” said said enticingly.

 
; “Nah,” he told her. “I’m just going to take a boat out on the lake.” Of course, he didn’t tell her what kind of boat.

  Mack the Fork owned two state-of-the-art submersibles: Synchronicity I and Synchronicity II. The first was large enough for a crew of three. The second was much smaller—a remote-controlled robot, able to squeeze into tight places and retrieve objects with its claws.

  Mack the Fork began to shimmy his way through the hatch of Synchronicity I, following his pilot, a sinewy man who spoke with such a strong Scottish brogue that Vince could only pretend to understand him.

  “Ye’ll have to leave that behind,” Mack the Fork said, pointing to Vince’s backpack. “Not enough room.”

  Vince didn’t know what he could say except, “I’m kind of attached to it.”

  Mack the Fork shook his head. “Ye Americans and yer eccentricities.” Then he sighed and handed Vince a bag. “Put my lunch in it, and I’ll let ye bring it.”

  So Vince made room in his pack for a thermos and a sandwich.

  “Ever been on a dive before?” Mack the Fork asked when they were all inside.

  Vince shook his head no, and the two men laughed, as if they were in on a joke that only mariners knew.

  “It’s a weebee cloister-feebee,” said the pilot. “But yeega yeastie.”

  Then the two men were all business. They knew what they were doing, and it made Vince a little less worried.

  As they descended, the water got dark very quickly. The pilot turned on the lights, but they barely pierced the murk. For the most part the two men were quiet, the only sound the ping of sonar as they navigated deep into the lake’s central trench.

  Suddenly Mack the Fork grabbed the steering column and jerked it to the right, making the entire submersible jolt. “Watch out fer that fin!” he shouted.

  Vince might have died of a heart attack if he could have.

  Then the two men looked at his expression and burst into laughter. “Just havin’ a wee joke on ye, laddie,” Mack the Fork said. “All me years doing this, I only seen Nessie once. And even then I might be lying.”