Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  Mitch slipped it back into the velvet sleeve and handed it to Nick. “It worked?”

  “Looks like it,” said Nick, and yet he still felt an empty space inside of him. It wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been before, but it was still there.

  Caitlin came running out of their tunnel, then Danny and Zak from theirs. Nick remembered being at the end of each tunnel with them. He remembered impatiently looking at a Rolex that didn’t exist yet. And he remembered the look on Edison’s face as he faced the ghost of Nikola Tesla.

  “You’re whole!” Caitlin said, and gave him a crushing hug. It made him remember what she’d said to BeatNick earlier that day. He had always been awkward with his affection when it came to Caitlin, but he drew a bit of confidence from his older self.

  “This is from BeatNick,” he said. “Something he would have saved for the twenty-four-year-old Caitlin, if he could.”

  And then he kissed her. This wasn’t an ordinary kiss. It was the kind of kiss that changed lives, saved worlds, and became emblazoned in one’s memory, becoming the yardstick by which every future kiss would be measured.

  For a brief moment, Caitlin thought she must have been struck by some Accelerati weapon herself, because she could swear she was melting into a puddle of protoplasm on the floor. And when it was over she had no idea what to say, except “Did you just eat a Snickers?”

  It was Zak who suddenly realized what should have been obvious to all of them. “Where’s that annoying girl with the braids?”

  They looked toward tunnel four, and that’s when Nick knew. He had memories from every other Nick, but he had no memory of being held in Old St. Nick’s arms, or playing with Petula’s pigtails. He began reflexively patting himself down, as if he’d misplaced his wallet—but the answer wasn’t in any of his pockets. It was at the end of tunnel four. SputNick was missing.

  “PETULA!” he wailed, and took off down the tunnel.

  Meanwhile, at the far end of tunnel seven, Edison, looking paler than usual, if that were even possible, wheeled out of the small stone structure, where his fairly useless entourage waited for instructions.

  “Sir?” one of them asked. “Are you all right?”

  Instead of answering, Edison considered the pile of clothes on the ground. “Return to the command center,” he said. “Now.”

  “But what about—”

  “Mr. Slate is the least of our concerns. Leave his clothes. Leave him be.”

  The others looked to one another in confusion and disbelief.

  “But, sir—”

  “You heard me.”

  Then he rolled back to his car, they loaded him in, and he ordered his driver to return him to the tower.

  Tunnel four ended in a stone mausoleum. The name carved on the outside of the small moss-covered structure was STRUJA, which was a dead giveaway to anyone who spoke Serbian, because it was the Serbian word for “electric current.”

  The crypt was located in an old graveyard with dozens of similar marble structures. Twilight was fading, and the cemetery was filled with shadows as dark as open graves. Nick thought to call out to Petula, but he realized that if she was trying to evade him, this would only give away his position. So he stood quietly and listened…until he heard to his left the scraping of iron against stone, and the cooing of a baby. He ran down an aisle just in time to see Petula pulling the gate closed on another tomb.

  The idea of Petula with a baby in a graveyard did not sit well with him. She could be up to any number of unpleasant things, none of which he cared to think about. Nick didn’t know who he was more furious at—Petula, for yet another betrayal, or himself, for being stupid enough to trust her.

  He reached the mausoleum he had seen Petula enter and he rattled the gate, but couldn’t get it open. She had padlocked herself and SputNick inside.

  “Petula—what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Completing the circuit,” she told him, which made absolutely no sense, and sounded like any other obtuse, irritating thing that Petula might say.

  SputNick saw Nick through the gate and began to cry, reaching out for him. Though the baby didn’t understand what was happening, he wanted completion as much as Nick did.

  That’s when Nick saw what she had with her. The telephone and the globe. They were intricately wired together. Petula, holding the baby with one arm, made final adjustments on the jury-rigged device.

  This was the time machine he and Caitlin had heard Edison and Ms. Planck talking about. Petula had reassembled it or, more likely, had blackmailed Accelerati scientists into reassembling it for her.

  She finished her tinkering, stuck her index finger into the rotary dial of the phone, and turned it.

  As it spun back into place, Nick saw something that a less intelligent person might call a swirling vortex of death. But he knew what it was. It was a passageway to another time.

  “Petula! Stop!”

  He began to kick at the gate with all his might. At last it gave, and he charged through.

  That’s when Petula finally put her black belt in theoretical jujitsu to good use. She thrust the heel of her palm into Nick’s sternum, knocking the wind out of him. He fell to the floor of the mausoleum.

  “It has to be done, Nick!”

  Nick gasped for air, still unable to lift himself up. “Have you…lost…your mind?”

  Petula cradled the baby and spoke with calm acceptance and resolve. “I complete the circuit. Not you, not anyone else. Me.” She turned to the undulating tunnel of light before her. “When you think of me—and you’d better—remember how I hurled myself into the abyss for you. Maybe you’ll hate me a little less.”

  Then, holding SputNick tight, she leaped into the portal.

  It closed the moment she was gone, leaving Nick alone with the globe, the phone, and six-sevenths of himself.

  The reality of what Petula had done was only beginning to infiltrate Nick’s mind when half a dozen Accelerati appeared at the crypt’s gate, weapons drawn.

  “Don’t move! Hands in the air.”

  “How can I put my hands in the air if I’m not allowed to move?”

  While the Accelerati thugs pondered which of the two requests was the more urgent, one more member of the Accelerati stepped forward. The one person in the world Nick least wanted to see in any time period.

  When Dr. Alan Jorgenson stepped into the mausoleum, the situation was crystal clear to him: Nick Slate, the sniveling traitor, had stolen the light bulb, the prism, and the globe in order to sabotage the F.R.E.E.

  It looked like the boy was attempting to use the globe and the antiquated telephone to create that vortex of death into which Jorgenson had thrown Evangeline Planck. And while hurling Nick State into the same vortex was a cheery thought, there were more important things to do right now.

  “Your abject selfishness and stupidity boggle the mind,” Jorgenson seethed. “Rather than see the Accelerati triumph, you would allow the world to be destroyed. Who is the villain in this equation, Master Slate, you or me?”

  “Let me explain,” said Nick. “It’s not what it looks like.”

  Jorgenson laughed at the boy’s audacity. He’d been caught red-handed and still he was telling lies. “I suppose now you’re going to tell me you were going to bring it all back.”

  “I was!” Nick said.

  Jorgenson had had enough. He instructed the Accelerati to disconnect the globe from the phone and return it to the platform, along with the prism, which they pulled from Nick’s pocket.

  “You need me to put them back in!” Nick insisted.

  “Actually, we don’t,” Jorgenson said, with a gloat he could not contain. “The scientists in attendance took photos and notes when you assembled the machine. They know exactly where to place these parts. The truth is, Nick, neither I nor Mr. Edison has any further use for you.”

  “Dr. Jorgenson, what about the telephone?” one of the others asked.

  “Leave it,” Jorgenson said. “It’s not a
part of the machine.”

  Then Jorgenson ordered the broken gate sealed with a molecular fuser with Nick still inside, where he’d have plenty of time to think about the consequences of his insolence.

  “Wait!” Nick called, his hands gripping the iron gate with the gratifying semblance of a criminal behind bars. “You’ll need Edison’s battery to start the F.R.E.E. You’ll have to make him give it up!”

  “Actually, we won’t be needing Edison’s battery at all,” Jorgenson said, immensely pleased with himself. “We’ve resolved that issue.”

  That made the boy’s face blanch in a most satisfying way. “Resolved it? How?”

  Jorgenson chose to say nothing more. Let him wonder.

  “Resolved it HOW?”

  But Jorgenson left Nick trapped and alone, except for the silent dead entombed around him.

  Vince stood in Edison’s office looking through a large window at Wardenclyffe Tower. Night had fallen quite a while ago and the aurora was bright, but not as bright as it had been in Tierra del Fuego.

  Sparks were beginning to arc across the sky now. Lightning without the benefit of clouds. A sign that things were coming to a head. It wouldn’t be long before the charge reached the critical stage.

  Vince hadn’t expected to be alive to see this. He thought the Accelerati would have ripped him from his battery by now.

  He was resigned to death. Actually, he had been resigned to it for years, long before the first time he had actually died. It was a lifestyle, after all.

  Vince LaRue had not been captured. He had turned himself in.

  His choice to surrender really wasn’t difficult at all. The math alone was a compelling argument:

  Give myself up, I die.

  Stay hidden, I still die, and so does everyone else.

  While Vince had no recollection of what it was like “on the other side,” he did suspect there’d be a very special punishment awaiting someone selfish enough to kick everyone else’s bucket along with his own.

  The decision, therefore, was easy. The hard part had been making his surrender stick. He simply couldn’t find the Accelerati.

  True, they were searching the globe for him, but they were, after all, a secret organization that did not wish to be found, making surrender very inconvenient.

  First he posted pictures of himself and details about the Chilean town that was harboring him on every social media site he belonged to. But since he had very few followers, nobody noticed or cared—except for his Spanish teacher, who told him to try the ceviche.

  He called the Shoreham Police Department and attempted to get them to take a message to Wardenclyffe Tower concerning his whereabouts. But since it was not official police business, they felt no particular sense of urgency. They took his number and promised to get back to him, and then reconsidered when they realized it was an international number. In the end, he posted an ad on eBay for a battery that brings back the dead.

  He got several lowball offers. Then the Accelerati finally noticed the ad, traced it back to the computer he had used, and stormed the sheep farm where he was staying with enough manpower to overthrow the Chilean government.

  That was yesterday. Now, after eating a dinner fit for a vegan king in Edison’s office, he awaited his first audience with the man himself.

  When Edison rolled in, Vince was taken aback by his decrepit appearance, as well as the large, shrouded object on the back of his motorized wheelchair. The old man seemed humorless, distracted—as if he’d just seen a ghost.

  “Vincent Bartholomew LaRue, I presume?”

  “Just Vince,” he told Edison. “Bartholomew was a parental brain fart for which they will never be forgiven.”

  Edison extended his hand for Vince to shake. Both of their hands felt cold, clammy, and not entirely alive.

  “Thanks for the grub,” Vince said, pointing to the spread set out before him. “It’s pretty good for zombie food.”

  “Yes,” said Edison. “My chef is well versed in preparing dishes for our unique dietary needs.”

  Edison took a plate for himself, but his hand shook so much that he dropped it and it shattered. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “I just had a very disturbing experience and I’m still a bit shaken.”

  Vince got him a new plate and filled it for him, wondering if it was appropriate to serve dinner to your own executioner.

  “You and I are unique in the world, Mr. LaRue,” Edison said. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet someone who shares the same condition.”

  “Undeath?”

  Edison sighed. “I prefer to think of it as being ‘electrically maintained.’”

  Vince looked at the object on the back of Edison’s wheelchair, wrapped in what looked like a homemade cozy for something that wasn’t very cozy at all. And Edison caught him looking at it.

  “If you wish to see it, be my guest,” Edison said. “Indulge your curiosity.”

  Vince removed the cozy to reveal a cylinder that looked similar to his, except much taller and made of glass. The liquid inside had gone cloudy and brown, so dark that for the most part it hid the metallic cells within.

  “It was, of course, an invention of Tesla’s,” Edison told him. “I acquired it in a wager. You see, Nikola created it as a tool for law enforcement. He believed that violent crime would become a thing of the past if a murder victim could be reanimated long enough to identify his killer. I bet Tesla that not only would the police refuse it, but also they would actively deny its existence. I won the bet.”

  Edison ate a spoonful of pureed carrots and ginger that looked like baby food but tasted much better. “Tesla’s greatest flaw was an inability to understand human nature,” the old man continued. “You see, the battery would have put homicide detectives out of work. In the end, solving crimes is less important to the world’s criminal justice system than being paid to solve crimes.”

  Then Edison put down his plate and leaned toward Vince. “May I see yours?”

  Vince stepped back protectively. Then he nodded. He carefully removed his backpack, making sure not to dislodge the electrodes from his neck. Then he pulled out the battery.

  “Extraordinary,” Edison said. “So mine was the prototype. I always suspected Nikola had built a more compact version.”

  Edison looked out at the tower, standing silhouetted against the sparking sky. “I assume that its inclusion in the F.R.E.E. is to give the machine a sort of spark of life.” Then he turned back to Vince. “The world will never be ready for free energy,” he insisted adamantly. “To be valued, it must have a price. That is the way of the world. Nikola labored under the false assumption that everyone was as altruistic as he. That everyone’s goal was the enrichment of the world, rather than the enrichment of their own pockets. I, on the other hand, understand that those two things must go hand in hand.”

  Then he took on that unsettled gaze again. “He never forgave me for succeeding at his expense. So much water has passed under the bridge that I don’t know how, after all these years, he can expect me to make things right.”

  A particularly large lightning bolt sizzled across the sky. Vince grimaced. “So…what happens now?”

  Edison explained with neither remorse nor glee. He merely stated the facts. “The asteroid will soon pass overhead. As it does, we will have a ten-minute window in which to turn on the machine. The first discharge will be massive. A spectacle to behold, certainly. Then, once the machine is engaged and functioning, the asteroid will discharge on every orbit, several times a day.”

  “And my battery?”

  “I’m afraid it must be there to start the process every time. Once you’re disconnected, it will be, unfortunately, for good. And for the good of mankind.”

  Vince took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “How much time do I have?” he asked.

  But Edison didn’t have to answer, because the Doomsday Clock on the wall was at thirty-eight minutes and counting.

  Nick stewed with anguish in the mauso
leum as the heat of day gave way to the damp chill of night.

  It was all going to happen without him.

  After everything he’d done—after all he’d put his friends and family through—Jorgenson had booted him beyond the sidelines. He wasn’t even a spectator anymore, he was entirely out of the picture with no way back in. How cruel the universe was to instill in him a burning need—and an absolute certainty that he was at the core of the equation, the central human gear of Tesla’s machine—only to be ripped out at the last moment and tossed aside. Or maybe it wasn’t the universe at all. Maybe he had been deluding himself from the beginning. Perhaps Jorgenson was right, and Nick was just a sad, sorry kid with confidence issues who needed to be a part of something larger than himself.

  Self-pity was not Nick’s style, but sitting powerless in a mausoleum, a few hundred yards away from what was about to be the world’s greatest source of power, made a person feel inadequate on every level. His friends had probably been captured. And what about Vince? Did they have his battery, as Jorgenson had seemed to suggest?

  Nick got up and kicked the gate again and again, to vent his frustration as much as to break the gate down, but neither goal was achieved. He still felt miserable, and the fused iron held firm. He was truly trapped there until someone came to free him, or fry him.

  He slid back down to the ground and put his head in his hands. Now it was just him, the deceased, and the blasted telephone.

  Which began to ring.

  The harsh sound filled the cold stone chamber and made him jump. In the silence before it rang again, he could still feel it shrieking in his ears like a fire alarm.

  After the third ring he reached out, lifted the receiver from the cradle, and brought it to his ear.

  “Hello?” he said.

  Then he heard a familiar accented voice.

  “Hello. This is Nikola Tesla. Have I caught you at a bad time?”

  Typically, dead people don’t make phone calls. Lines may go dead, and in a particularly awkward phone conversation there might be dead air, but dead people are not inclined to pick up the phone to chat with the living.