“If you want it, you have to get it back from Caitlin.”
Jorgenson bristled. “Caitlin Westfield has my coat?”
“Yeah,” said Theo, “but I’m sure she’ll give it back. It’s way too big for her.”
Later that evening, Jorgenson rang the Westfields’ front bell, and when Mrs. Westfield came to the door, he smiled as warmly as a man like Alan Jorgenson could.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’ve come for my coat,” he told her as he pulled what appeared to be a gold pen from his shirt pocket. “Oh, look at that,” he said, pointing over her shoulder.
And when she turned, he pressed a button on the pen and projected a spot of light against the far wall.
“Ohh,” she said, “what is it?” Completely forgetting Jorgenson, she ran to try to catch the light on the wall.
Mr. Westfield, entering the room and seeing the glowing spot on the wall as well, dropped the sandwich he was eating and leaped for the light.
“What is that? Have you ever seen anything like it?” he asked.
“Where did it come from?” his wife asked.
For a few moments Jorgenson shined it around the room and watched them follow.
“There it goes!”
“Try to catch it!”
Theo came creeping around the doorjamb and watched the action, not knowing what to make of it. “They’re like cats jumping at a laser pointer,” he said.
“Precisely,” said Jorgenson. “The BSO Projector is set at the exact wavelength to stimulate overwhelming curiosity in the human mind. They’ve already completely forgotten about me. Now take me to Caitlin.”
He turned off the Bright Shiny Object Projector as Theo led him up the stairs.
“Wait, where did it go?” asked Mr. Westfield.
“I think behind the sofa,” answered Mrs. Westfield.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Pull it away from the wall!”
Jorgenson found Caitlin pacing in her room. He grabbed his coat, which had been thrown over a chair.
“Thank goodness you’re here,” Caitlin said.
Jorgenson grinned from ear to ear. “What irony,” he said, “that you need me to rescue you from your own home. Although I can’t see why I would want to.”
“Has Edison let you out of the doghouse yet?”
Reluctantly, Jorgenson admitted that the information she had given him had been useful. “Let’s just say that part of my life is a rapidly fading memory.” He gestured toward Theo, awkwardly attempting to sit in a beanbag chair. “Mr. Blankenship here tells me you have more intel for me. I may be able to spirit you away from your gilded cage, if I like what I hear.”
“I want to surrender,” Caitlin said. “Nick’s one of you now, and I won’t fight him. I want to be on the same side he is.”
“What?” said Theo. He attempted to stride closer to her, but only managed to slide across the floor, which clearly did not have the impact he intended.
But Jorgenson was unimpressed. “What use could we possibly have for you? You’re clearly not Accelerati material.”
“If Edison wants Nick to do his best work, he’ll do it if I’m there.” Still Jorgenson wasn’t convinced that she was worth the trouble. “And,” Caitlin added, “personally bringing me to Edison would be another brownie point for you.”
Jorgenson tapped his chin, considering. She seemed sincere, but she had already proven herself to be duplicitous. So, to be sure, he reached into his pocket, pulled out the woven circle of a dream catcher, and dangled it in front of her.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Testing you,” he said simply. “The Doomcatcher picks up the slightest vibrations of an approaching chaos front and pulsates an alarm when doom is impending.” However, the Doomcatcher was now motionless, which meant that Caitlin Westfield was currently not the Pandora he had suspected her to be.
“Very well,” he said, putting the Doomcatcher back in his inside pocket. “But you will come as my prisoner and be treated as such.”
“Fine,” said Caitlin.
The Doomcatcher gave Caitlin pause. Did its silence mean she would fail in her attempt to pull Edison’s plug? Or would doing so bring more order than chaos to the world?
There was no way to know. All she could do was move forward with her plan.
When she and Jorgenson stepped out of her room, her parents were already on their way up the stairs, the effects of the BSO Projector having worn off.
“Who in blazes are you?” yelled her father.
And so Jorgenson sighed, pulled out the projector again, and aimed it at the wall downstairs.
“Oooh, it’s back!” shouted Caitlin’s mother.
“Quick, catch it this time!” her father said, completely forgetting Jorgenson as they both ran downstairs.
Caitlin turned to Theo. “Theo, stay here. When they snap out of it, let them know that I’m okay, I just have something really important to do.”
“But they’ll freak out when they see me,” Theo pointed out.
“Exactly,” said Caitlin. “And maybe then they’ll believe you.”
Then she left with Jorgenson, got into his pearlescent SUV, and became a prisoner of the Accelerati.
Even in her absence, the gears of Caitlin’s plan continued to turn that night.
Little Nicky, as she had predicted, could be very, very annoying when he wanted to be. Between his poking and mimicking and I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I’s, Mitch was about ready to pound him into the ground.
When Mitch was whipped up into an emotional meringue, all the others took turns posing questions.
“We can stop Thomas Edison by—” BeatNick prompted.
“—applying the brakes on his wheelchair,” Mitch concluded.
“Evangeline Planck—” began Nickelback.
“—had a root canal on February twenty-second.”
“The key to beating the Accelerati—” started Nicholas.
“—doesn’t fit into any standard ignition.”
“Mitch,” said Vince, “you have to do better than that.”
“It’s not my fault,” said Mitch. “What comes out, comes out. You have to start the right sentence.”
“We can reunite—” Nicholas began.
“—with ghostly light,” Mitch blurted.
BeatNick threw up his hands. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Little Nicky, “but I don’t like it.”
All the answers that Mitch gave were either useless or too enigmatic to help them. Eventually, he went home, and had dreams about being poked and prodded and teased.
Zak and Vince, meanwhile, were quick to discover that it’s not easy to take two machines that defy known scientific principles and create a third one that’s even more defiant.
“We can’t take them apart,” said Zak. “What if we can’t put them back together?”
“Well, we can’t join them if we don’t take them apart first,” Vince pointed out.
The furthest they got was to open the casings and peer in at circuits and wiring and tubes like two skittish members of a bomb squad, uncertain of which wires to cut.
They pulled an all-nighter, and by morning had mapped out schematics for both devices. The one promising lead they found was that each had precisely twelve internal wires that went absolutely nowhere, and they wondered whether or not those could be interconnected.
“Do you want to risk it?” Zak asked, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep.
Although Vince was usually up for a death-defying challenge, he had to admit that connecting those wires without a little more information sounded like a really, really bad idea.
“Who needs a time machine, anyway?” Zak said. “In movies, nine times out of ten, time travel doesn’t end well.”
The others had a full night’s sleep. BeatNick was ready to leave for Shoreham, and Nickelback to Princeton, and Vince helped them fix their obvious travel problem.
Vince gave them the address of the guy who the guy knew, which was on the way to the airport, called a cab, and they left.
As for Nicholas, he planned to stay long enough to have breakfast, because Atomic Lanes didn’t open until ten a.m.
Had the bowling establishment opened earlier, things might have turned out very different.
Of all the Accelerati in Colorado Springs, Petula was the only one who noticed signs of activity at Vince LaRue’s house. The other agents were far too absorbed with the Wardenclyffe project, or were sidelined by some hush-hush financial crisis that no one seemed to want to talk about.
It left her in the perfect position to see what was going on under everyone’s noses. There were a bunch of people in Vince’s house. A veritable family reunion, it seemed. And while many of the relatives resembled one another, none of them looked like Vince.
Ms. Planck had not given Petula much Accelerati technology to help her in her endeavors. She had the Temporal Bouncer—the same “birthday-suiting” weapon Nick had used when retrieving the prism. She had a Doomcatcher in her pocket that only seemed to vibrate when she went home—which made perfect sense to her, since her family always seemed like doom incarnate—and she had a temporal dilator to slow down time in case of emergency.
But she had none of the really good stuff.
Plus it was hard to be stealthy with one arm in a cast—but at least it was down to just a wrist cast now.
The voices from inside the house were muffled and muted, but she clearly heard the words time machine, which made her ears perk up.
She ducked down as two of the men, a twenty-something with a goatee and a middle-aged guy with muttonchops, left the house, bickering as they stepped into a taxi. They looked familiar, but she couldn’t place their faces.
As soon as they were gone, she started the temporal dilator.
Now, moving between the seconds, she opened the window and climbed in. She had three minutes to do what she needed to do, while in the outside world only three seconds would pass. When time returned to its normal pace, everyone present was securely attached to chairs and other stationary objects with cable ties—which Petula always carried on her, because you never know when you might have to tie someone up.
The five victims were bewildered by their sudden predicament. Then the little kid zeroed in on her, and moaned. “Petula…why did it have to be Petula?”
Petula looked down at him. “Do I know you?”
He just glared at her. Why did that glare seem so familiar?
“Let us go, Petula!” said a thirty-something guy with a dark beard. He struggled futilely against his bonds. “Let us go, or I swear I’ll—”
“How do you know me?” demanded Petula. She glanced at Vince, who just shrugged uselessly, then looked back at the bearded guy. “I don’t know you—why do you know me?”
She held eye contact with him for a good long moment, and something occurred to her. She looked to the kid, then the man in his thirties, and then the old man, and truth came to her in a flash.
“You’re all Nick!” she announced. “You made a time machine, went back in time, and became your own grandfather,” she said. “Uh…and father.”
“No, dummy,” said the younger Nick. “It was the stupid prism! It broke us into seven parts.”
“Nicky!” chided Nicholas.
Nicky looked down at the floor. “Sorry.”
It all made sense to her now. It explained why Nick had only seemed partially there back at the ruins of his house. In a way, he had been.
The old man offered her a deal. “Don’t do this, Petula,” he said. “I’ll go out with you! I mean, when I’m put back together and fourteen again, I’ll go out with you.” He gave her a smile with very few teeth in it.
“Ew,” said Petula. “Ew, ew, ew, ew, EW!” And then she realized there were simply not enough ew’s in the world.
Somewhere else in the house, a baby began to cry.
“If you’re gonna keep us all tied up,” said the black kid, “then you’re gonna have to change SputNick’s diaper.”
Rather than being annoyed, she was intrigued. She found the baby in a makeshift crib in the master bedroom. Same dark blue eyes. This was also Nick. And he was helpless! It thrilled her to suddenly have Nick so completely at her mercy. She picked the baby up and it promptly gerbed all over her blouse.
“Yeah,” she said, “you definitely are Nick.”
But in the baby’s eyes she saw none of the animosity, none of the baggage that their nonexistent relationship carried. The baby was truly an innocent, unaware of anything beyond eating, sleeping, and filling his diaper. This was the only Nick that didn’t despise her! She changed his diaper, and put him down to sleep with a pacifier to joyfully suck on.
Then she called Ms. Planck.
Ms. Planck, in her office beneath the bowling alley, did not want to take Petula’s call. All morning she had been dealing with issues that were only getting worse. It began with an irate call from the Old Man.
“Can you please explain why my gardener is at my door with a bounced check?” Edison asked. “In all my unnaturally long life, I have never had a check returned for insufficient funds.”
“I’m sure it’s a mistake,” Planck had told him, a bit bewildered.
“Do we not have three-quarters of a billion dollars in an encrypted floating account? Or have you spent it all?”
The fact was, they had barely dipped into that money. The interest alone was enough to fund most of their operations. Of course the excavation of the Slate home and the building of the new Wardenclyffe Tower had put them pretty deep into debt—but they had more than enough money to pay off the loans. So why were they bouncing checks?
“I’ll look into it,” Planck told him. Then, not five minutes later, she received a call from the Accelerati cafeteria—apparently the caterer was withholding delivery due to issues with a payment that should have gone through the evening before. The Accelerati were worse than middle schoolers when it came to lunch. Once, when their cafeteria workers went on strike, some of the more militant members had threatened to roast the laboratory animals. It infuriated her that even now, when she was finally freed from being the world’s most overqualified lunch lady, she still had to deal with food-service issues.
But the third punch was the worst. She had requested a printout of their latest financial figures. The accountant who entered her office was wearing a sherbet-green spider-silk suit, and his face seemed a bit green as well, as if he might pass out at any moment. He held out the piece of paper with a shaky hand.
“You’re not going to like it,” he said. He took a step backward once she had the page, as if it might blow up in her hands.
According to the printout, the full value of the Accelerati’s cash holdings was one cent.
The look on her face must have been truly terrifying, because the accountant said, in the weakest of all possible voices, “Please don’t kill me.”
She narrowed her eyes even further. “Just get out,” she said. The very idea that he would assume she would kill the messenger for bad news infuriated her. She made a mental note to submit him for genetic experimentation, as punishment for thinking her so evil.
Clearly this was just some banking glitch that could be easily corrected, but that didn’t make it any less irritating. And it made Edison doubt her leadership. As powerful as she had become, all the Old Man need do was wave his hand and she’d be replaced just as quickly as Jorgenson had been.
That’s when her secretary told her that Petula Grabowski-Jones was on the line.
“Tell her I’m busy.”
“But she says it’s an emergency.”
Ms. Planck sighed. With Petula everything was an emergency—and the last thing she needed was more bad news
. Had it been it a mistake inviting Petula into the Accelerati? She wondered if perhaps the girl might be another perfect candidate for the genetics lab.
“Petula, dear, how are you?”
“I found the globe!” she said. “I’m holding it in my hands as we speak.”
Ms. Planck found herself standing up in excitement. “Where are you?”
“Vince LaRue’s house. Come as soon as you can!” she said. “Oh, and one more thing. It looks like they were using it to build a time machine.”
And in that one instant Petula went from being a problem to being Evangeline Planck’s savior.
“Don’t touch any of the buttons!” Vince shouted as Petula examined the globe.
“Not even this one?” Petula teased, moving her finger toward the button.
“Especially not that one!”
Petula laughed. She was familiar enough with Tesla’s inventions by now to know that misuse of them could lead to pain or death. That job would be left to the research and development people who would attempt to reverse-engineer it.
She looked over at the odd telephone. “So is that the time machine?”
“Just because we were trying to make one doesn’t mean we succeeded,” said the black kid.
“Don’t answer her, Zak,” said brown-bearded Nick. “The less we give her, the better.”
Funny, but the more Petula looked at the man Nick would become, the more she felt like she knew him. Nick grew up to be handsome, his eyes staying that same deep shade of blue. Of course, the facial hair made it hard to see much of anything.
Since she had nothing to do but wait until Ms. Planck arrived, she decided to entertain her curiosity. She went to the bathroom and found a razor. It was a lady’s razor, but a blade was a blade.
She slathered him up with shaving cream and, ignoring his protests, began to shave him clean.
“What are you doing? I like my beard!”
“Shut up and stop moving or I might nick an artery.”
When she was done, she took a step back to look at him. When the truth hit, it hit like a shock wave. She nearly fell over.
“No. Freaking. Way,” said Vince, also seeing what Petula saw.
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