Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  Nicholas, who’d been in the shadows, was caught in the beam of a flashlight. When Nick got a good look at his clean-shaven face, he nearly dropped the bulb and prism along with his jaw.

  Nick Slate had had to endure many unusual and unsettling things in his fourteen years—most of them over the last few months. If, a year ago, someone had told him that he’d be standing at the entrance to a secret tunnel, behind Toys “R” U, gaping at a thirty-something version of himself who happened to look exactly like Nikola Tesla, not only would he not have believed it, but he would have called the police.

  “It’s not what you think,” said Nicholas.

  “I don’t know what I think,” said Nick.

  “Oh,” said Nicholas. “Neither do I, so I guess it’s exactly what you think.”

  Mitch turned to Petula. “You mean you didn’t tell him?”

  Petula ignored him. She was not speaking to Mitch. She was furious at the fact that he had given Nick a hug but not her. She was, after all, Mitch’s girlfriend. Or at least she had been before she’d betrayed them all to the Accelerati. But now she’d betrayed the Accelerati, and that should count for something. It made her so furious she realized that not speaking to Mitch was not enough. So she slapped him.

  “Ow! What was that for?”

  The fact that he didn’t know earned him a second slap.

  “Ow!”

  She wound up for a third, but this time he caught her wrist as she swung. “One more time and I will cut off your braids and use them to play Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Petula.”

  She found the image somehow both disturbing and enticing.

  “I’d like to see you try,” she said. “No, really, I’d like to.”

  “Okay,” said Mitch. “Another time, maybe.”

  Thus their stormy relationship entered a reluctant truce.

  But Nick didn’t allow himself to get distracted by them. “Why do I look like Nikola Tesla?” he asked, to anyone who might be able to shed light on the situation.

  “Really?” said Petula. “You want to have this conversation now? Is it just you, or are all seven of you this stupid?”

  That sent Old St. Nick into a laughing fit, which might have been contagious, if everyone else hadn’t been so positively dour.

  A headlight came swinging around the building, and at first they thought they’d been caught by the Accelerati—but it wasn’t a pearlescent SUV, it was Wayne Slate’s drab Subaru.

  “My father and brother are a part of this?” Nick said.

  Zak turned to Caitlin. “You mean you didn’t tell him?”

  “Well, I wasn’t sure Nickelback would convince them to come.”

  But apparently he had—which meant Nick’s father and brother must finally remember who he is! Whatever technological spell the Accelerati placed them under must have been broken!

  Nickelback—the seventh and final fraction of Nick to arrive—was the first to step out of the car. “Did I miss anything?” he asked.

  Zak shined his flashlight at Nicholas’s clean-shaven face in response.

  “Oh,” said Nickelback. “Wasn’t expecting that.”

  When Wayne Slate stepped out of the car, Nick handed Caitlin the bulb and the prism and ran to him. It would have been a wonderful, tender reunion, but Little Nicky stuck out his foot, tripped Nick, and then proceeded to hurl himself into his father’s arms instead, nearly tackling him.

  “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” Little Nicky wailed joyfully, and all the other Nicks converged on the man as well.

  To say Mr. Slate was confused would be putting it mildly. “Nick?” he said, looking at the little boy in his arms, then turning to the fourteen-year-old version. “Nick?” he said again. Then he turned to the baby, who had just begun to coo in Nicholas’s arms at the sight of him. “Nick?”

  “You mean you didn’t tell him?” Zak said to Nickelback.

  “What, that I was one-seventh of his son?” said Nickelback. “How do you think that would have gone over?”

  Danny, meanwhile, stayed by the car, watching the scene unfold in the headlights. He wisely decided that distance was his best option. Although he kind of liked the idea of having a larger family—particularly a younger brother, who might be even worse at baseball than him—it was tempered by the knowledge that this younger brother was actually his older brother, who was actually some old guy, who was actually an even older guy who, for some reason, couldn’t stop laughing at Nikola Tesla, who was holding a baby.

  In the future, whenever Danny would hear someone say, “I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole,” this was the moment that would always come to mind.

  And he wasn’t the only one.

  With all the sudden revelations, it was, to say the least, a WTH moment of the highest possible order—and it might have continued as such a little longer, but a few hundred yards away, alarms began to blare at Wardenclyffe Tower as if it were the scene of a prison break. Suddenly the questions Nick still had seemed less important than the reason they had all gathered.

  “Edison must know we’re gone!” said Caitlin.

  “And,” added Nick, “that the F.R.E.E. is missing a few more pieces.”

  “We’d better get going,” said Petula.

  They stepped into the small stone utility structure and pulled open the poorly welded gate to reveal tunnel number seven, which led to the secret chamber directly beneath the tower.

  “When we got divided,” Nick said, “we each found ourselves at the end of the seven tunnels, so that’s where we have to go.

  “I’ll stay here at the end of this tunnel,” said Nicholas.

  “And I’ll guard the entrance,” said Mr. Slate, “in case that Jorgenson guy shows up. I have a bone to pick with him.”

  Nicholas handed SputNick to Old St. Nick, and the baby was content to play with his bushy white beard.

  “I’m scared,” said Little Nicky, facing the tunnel.

  “Don’t be,” said Danny, finally joining the throng. “If you’ve gotta wait at the end of a tunnel, I’ll wait with you.” Then he put up his fist for a knuckle bump, and Little Nicky obliged, visibly relieved.

  “Thanks, Danny,” Little Nicky said.

  “No worries, bro,” said Danny, thrilled to be, if only this once, the cool older brother.

  Leaving Mr. Slate and Nicholas at the mouth of tunnel seven, the others hurried down the long passage.

  At last they found themselves in the central chamber.

  “This looks awfully familiar….” said Zak.

  He was right—it was just like the one beneath Nick’s house, carved out of the bedrock, but here there were no cobwebs and the tunnel entrances had been reinforced with concrete and were clearly numbered one through seven. The shaft in the center that went up to the tower was narrower than the one beneath Nick’s house—only about six inches wide. No light came through the shaft now, but it did bring down the sound of the alarms, which echoed in the chamber.

  The room was lit with work lights in the ceiling, evenly spaced. Nick pointed to the fixture closest to the very center. “Mitch, I need you to unscrew that bulb.”

  Mitch climbed onto a four-foot-high metal cone to reach the light. Nick remembered there had been a metal cone in the chamber beneath his house too—but that one had rusted away to nothing, while this one was in perfect condition. Mitch considered the bright light bulb. “It’ll be hot!”

  So Nick pulled off his spider-silk hoodie—a special gift from Edison—and tossed it to him. “Use this.”

  Nick looked closer at the metal cone on which Mitch was precariously balancing. It was actually a pyramid with seven sides, each coated with a smooth reflective metal. Figuring out its purpose was as instinctive to him as putting together the device in the tower had been.

  “Of course!” he said. “This chamber and the tunnels are for the energy overflow. When the prism is in the machine up above, it divides the energy surplus and directs it downward into this chamber, so it can shoot through the tunn
els.”

  “I get it,” said Zak. “Like the exhaust deflector trenches beneath a rocket launchpad.”

  “Wow—that’s so cool!” said Little Nicky.

  “Will you all stop geeking out?” Caitlin said. “We don’t have time!”

  But Nick’s mind was already reeling out of control. “I see what Tesla was getting at!” he said, excitedly. “How it connects, how it all works—but there’s still something wrong, something missing….”

  “I know,” Caitlin said gently, doing her best to bring him back into the moment. “The battery. We’ll deal with that after you’ve pulled yourself together.”

  “No,” said Nick, “it’s not that, it’s something else. Something I have to do to complete the circuit.”

  Petula looked up when she heard that and furrowed her eyebrows as if insulted, but she said nothing.

  With Nick distracted by Tesla’s great mechanism, Caitlin took charge.

  “Nickelback, tunnel one,” she ordered. “BeatNick, tunnel two; Little Nicky, tunnel three…”

  No one argued with her. They all knew what they had to do.

  “Good-bye, everyone,” BeatNick said wistfully.

  “You’ll be back,” Nickelback pointed out. “And a lot sooner than I will, might I add.”

  Danny put his arm around Little Nicky and led him down tunnel three. “It’ll be okay,” Danny told him. “It’ll probably be like going on a roller coaster. Or a particle accelerator.”

  Petula stepped forward. “I’ll go down tunnel four with the baby.”

  “Actually, I was going to do that,” said Caitlin.

  Petula glared at her. “Selfish to the end!” she said. “Holding that baby is the only chance I’ll ever get to hold Nick, because all the older versions of him hate me. And you want to rob me of that?” She turned to Old St. Nick. “Hand him over!”

  The eldest Nick hesitated, but in the end gave the baby to Petula.

  To everyone’s surprise, SputNick did not cry in Petula’s arms. Instead he just went from playing with St. Nick’s beard to playing with Petula’s braids.

  “See?” said Petula, with surprising warmth. “This Nick actually likes me.”

  “Only because he doesn’t know any better,” said Caitlin.

  Petula gave her a halfhearted sneer, then turned to Old St. Nick. “Out of my way; tunnel four is mine.”

  “Fine with me,” said Old St. Nick with a shrug, and he ambled off down tunnel five. “Ah, to be fourteen again,” he said with a laugh. “Can’t wait to be rid of this arthritis.”

  “Just live long enough to make it to the end of that tunnel, old man,” Zak said. Then he sighed. “Ah heck, I’d better make sure the geezer gets there,” and he trotted after him.

  With Nicholas already at the end of tunnel seven, only one version of himself remained.

  “Nick, it’s time,” said Caitlin.

  Finally Nick brought his thoughts back to the here and now. He handed Mitch the bulb from the old ghost light. “Screw this in,” he told Mitch. “Carefully.”

  Mitch did, and the light in the chamber changed. It was as if all the other bulbs had been enveloped in a glowing embrace.

  They all sensed it. The other six Nicks at the end of their respective tunnels felt themselves being called toward the center.

  Caitlin was reminded of the moment she’d seen the reel-to-reel tape recorder at Nick’s garage sale. She’d been inexplicably drawn to it…and was almost run over by a speeding car. Nick had saved her life that day. Now she found herself involuntarily reaching for the light.

  Mitch, the closest to it, just stared right into it, still standing on the pyramid. “Oooh!” he said, like he was watching a particularly impressive fireworks display.

  “Mitch, snap out of it,” Nick said. “I still need your help.”

  Mitch shuddered and reluctantly came down from the pyramid. “What is it?”

  “This,” Nick said, opening the velvet pouch just enough to show Mitch the top of the prism, encased in its protective vacuum tube. “When the time comes, take this out of the bag and hold it up to the light.”

  Nick handed the bag to Mitch, who looked at it like he’d been handed a stick of dynamite.

  “M-me? You want me to do it?”

  Nick smiled. “Who else can I trust to do it right?”

  Then Nick turned to Caitlin and took her hand. “Wanna take a walk with me down a cold, dark tunnel?”

  “Any day of the week,” Caitlin answered.

  Nick calculated it would take about a minute and a half for them to make it to the end, so he told Mitch to count to one hundred. That would give them enough time.

  Hand in hand, Caitlin and Nick’s fourteen-year-old fragment hurried down tunnel number six, and Mitch began to count.

  “One Mississippi…two Mississippi…three Mississippi…”

  Edison arrived behind the old Toys “R” Us with an entourage of armed Accelerati at right about the time Mitch reached fifty-five Mississippi. Edison immediately recognized Wayne Slate, who was standing in front of the stone utility building. “Take care of him,” he ordered his men. “I want him out of the way.”

  Wayne saw them approaching and gestured to Nicholas to stay out of sight inside the tunnel entrance. Wayne had had the forethought to prepare his own personal arsenal. Nothing as technologically advanced as Accelerati weaponry, of course, but it would do the job.

  He picked up a stone, wound up, and threw it with the precision of a former major league baseball pitcher.

  After he took the first Accelerati down, the others scattered and cowered behind a Dumpster. The old man, laboring out of an odd-looking vehicle in an oversize wheelchair, bellowed at them furiously for not standing their ground.

  The Accelerati tried to fire on Wayne from their hiding places, but his aim was much better than theirs. He even disarmed one of them with a well-placed chunk of concrete.

  Now the old man rolled across the parking lot toward him. Unlike the others, he had no fear of getting beaned by a rock.

  And sure enough, Wayne found that he just couldn’t throw stones at a decrepit old man in a wheelchair.

  “Mr. Slate,” said the old man angrily, “you’re in my way.” Then he pulled a device out from under his lap blanket and fired, hitting Wayne squarely in the chest.

  Wayne Slate vanished. Only his clothes remained, falling to the ground in a heap.

  “Must I do everything myself?” Edison chided.

  His henchmen seemed reluctant to come out of hiding.

  “He’s gone, you cowards!” Edison yelled. “He won’t be back for twenty minutes.”

  Edison rolled his way over weeds and maneuvered himself into the stone utility structure that marked the entrance to tunnel seven.

  At the center of everything, Mitch nervously fidgeted with the velvet-covered prism, afraid that he’d forget how to count.

  “…eighty-eight Mississippi…eighty-nine Mississippi…”

  At the end of tunnel one, Nickelback looked at his Rolex impatiently, then realized he didn’t have a Rolex—but he was content in the knowledge that someday he would.

  At the end of tunnel two, BeatNick pulled a Snickers bar out of his pocket and, unsure whether it would survive the rejoining with his six other selves, unwrapped it and stuffed it into his mouth.

  At the end of tunnel three, Little Nicky and Danny perfected a secret handshake as they waited for Nicky to ride the roller coaster and/or particle accelerator.

  At the end of tunnel four, things were so blissfully quiet one might think that Petula and SputNick weren’t even there.

  At the end of tunnel five, Old St. Nick gripped his chest and grimaced. “Whoa, Nellie!” he cried. “My ticker! I think this is the big one.”

  “No!” said Zak. “Don’t you dare die on me, old man!”

  Old St. Nick pointed and grinned. “Gotcha!”

  At the end of tunnel six, Nick took a deep breath and realized he had to let go of Caitlin’s hand. S
he had been stronger than him through all of this—and not just because he was one-seventh of himself. He would have to find a way to thank her when all this was over.

  But for now, he just turned to her and said warmly, “See you in a minute.”

  “…ninety-four Mississippi…ninety-five Mississippi…”

  And at the end of tunnel seven, Thomas Edison peered into the darkness—and found himself looking into a face he thought he’d never see again.

  “Nikola?” he said incredulously. “It can’t be!”

  Nicholas had the presence of mind to see this moment for exactly what it was: a golden opportunity. And so he used it, milking it for all it was worth.

  “Tom…” he said in a ghostly voice that echoed satisfyingly in the tunnel. “Tom…what have you done?”

  And Edison did something he hadn’t managed to do in years. He rose from his chair, on shaky legs. “Nikola,” he said, “I—I…I never meant to…I—I never wanted it to be like this….”

  “You can still make it right, my friend….” Nicholas said in a fake accent. “You can still make it right….”

  Then, in the center of the chamber, Mitch reached one hundred Mississippi, tore the prism from the velvet bag, held it up into the light—and the ghostly vision of Nikola Tesla wailed, “Make it right….” as he was drawn down the tunnel away from Edison, like a spirit pulled into the spectral nexus of eternity.

  It wasn’t exactly the spectral nexus of eternity. It wasn’t like a roller coaster or particle accelerator either. It felt more like bouncing off a diving board and spinning in an uncontrolled flip that ends in a monumental belly flop.

  Only with a whole bunch of other bodies hitting the water in the exact same spot at the exact same moment.

  For an instant, Nick felt like he was in a shrinking box with multiple versions of himself, all jockeying for position. Then he couldn’t tell which version of himself he was, and then he was all of them, and then he was just him, and the box was gone, and he was standing in front of Mitch, who was holding the prism in the air, grimacing and covering his eyes.

  “Good job, Mitch!” Nick said. “You can put it away now.”