Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  She did deserve an explanation. “I know where the missing blender lid is,” he told her. “It’s more important than I thought, and I have to get it!”

  “It’s at the tower?”

  “Not exactly….”

  “So why are we running toward the tower?”

  Nick didn’t slow his pace. How could he explain to her that it wasn’t just knowing where the piece was, but why it was there? The why was far more important than the where.

  It was then that Caitlin began to connect some of the critical dots.

  “You’re going after the globe!” she said. “Are you telling me the blender lid is hidden in the past?”

  “It’s not hidden,” Nick told her. “It’s exactly where it’s supposed to be: in my attic!”

  Nick pulled slightly ahead, and Caitlin put on speed to keep up with him. The others were too far behind to hear, which was fine with Nick.

  “No, it was never there!” insisted Caitlin. “You said it yourself: you sold that blender without a lid!”

  “Which means that someone took it before I moved into that house!”

  “But why?”

  To that, Nick could only smile. “Exactly!”

  The tower was only a few blocks away now. Nick knew timing was crucial, and that any number of monkey wrenches could be hurled into the works. The first monkey wrench was his father, who would go to the ends of the earth to keep Nick safe, and thus prevent him from doing the highly dangerous thing he needed to do.

  Nick had Nicholas’s memory of Edison birthday-suiting his father—so he knew Wayne would show up in just a few minutes.

  Nick slowed down enough to allow his brother to catch up. “Danny, I need your help,” he said as they continued to run.

  Danny had been waiting for this—hoping for it even. Although he didn’t understand the big picture the way Nick did, he did sense that there was a big picture to see. And it was a thrill to be a part of it.

  “There’s something I need you to do,” Nick told him, “but you can’t ask any questions. You just have to do it.”

  “Okay,” Danny said.

  “In about five minutes, Dad is going to reappear in the parking lot behind the old Toys “R” Us.”

  “Uh…okay.”

  “When he shows up, give him back his clothes, which are there waiting for him.”

  Danny had to run that through his head twice. “He…won’t have any clothes?”

  “Long story,” said Nick. “Once he’s dressed, you can’t let him go anywhere. Pretend you sprained your ankle. Fall to the ground, scream a lot—and scream even louder if he tries to pick you up. Don’t let him move you, and don’t let him leave you.”

  “I can do that,” Danny said, then frowned. “Why am I doing that?”

  And his brother said, “No questions, remember?” Which is exactly what Danny had suspected Nick would say.

  “How long do I have to keep Dad there?”

  “Until either the sky stops sparking,” Nick told him, “or the world ends.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Danny decided that his brother was right. Best not to ask questions about these sorts of things. Not even to himself. So he hurried off, trusting Nick’s judgment.

  Meanwhile, Z, who had made the mistake of wearing heels today, was struggling to keep pace with Nick and the others.

  She did not regret throwing away everything to save her son and his friends—but why in the name of all things reasonable would the Slate boy head back to the tower? Stumbling on her Prada stilettos, she finally pulled alongside him and grabbed his arm hard enough to almost make him drop the phone.

  “You must stop!” she insisted. “Jorgenson will vaporize you on sight. I will not let you go back there!”

  To Nick, Dr. Zenobia Thuku was monkey wrench number two. She had a whole host of weapons in that bottomless purse of hers. He knew she wouldn’t hurt him, but she could certainly find a way to remove him from the situation. She could mesmerize him with the Accelerati laser pointer, for instance, and make him abandon everything to chase its seductive beam.

  Nick pulled himself out of her grasp. “You have to trust me.”

  “Trust you?” Z said. “I hardly even know you.”

  Which is why, thought Nick, you won’t be expecting what I’m about to do. He plucked the purse out of her arms and tossed it to Caitlin. “Run!” he shouted to her.

  She obeyed, holding the handbag that seemed far too small for all the objects inside. She didn’t have to be asked to trust Nick. Even when he made a horrendous mistake, it always seemed to take them to where they needed to go—even if they hadn’t realized it at the time. Which meant that his mistakes were not mistakes at all—even when it seemed like he was racing them toward certain doom.

  But Caitlin also knew that without her clearheaded thinking, it might actually become certain doom. Their gears were now forever meshed, their fates intertwined.

  “Use Z’s key card to open the gate!” Nick called after her, so she began to fish through the seemingly bottomless purse as she ran.

  Dr. Thuku chased Caitlin, yelling, “Stay out of my purse!” along with a warning that Caitlin could inadvertently blow her head off, or worse. Z broke a heel in the pursuit but still managed to keep going in a rapid limp.

  “You realize that if my mom catches her, she’s toast,” Zak yelled to Nick from several paces behind. “There is no force in nature worse than my mother when she’s mad.”

  But the sparks flying from the asteroid hundreds of miles above their heads proved Zak wrong. There were far more dangerous forces in nature.

  “Nick!” called Mitch, between his huffing and puffing. “Will you at least tell us your plan?”

  “No time!” he shouted as they rounded a corner. He could see the tower up ahead, lit by spotlights, drawing the attention of the entire neighborhood. Four helicopters hung above the tower, suspending the giant ring. He picked up his pace, pushing past the crowd, who were not sure whether to feel awed or horrified by the sky and the tower.

  Up ahead, Caitlin, still fumbling through Z’s purse, reached the gate and simultaneously found the key card. As all Accelerati eyes were on the tower—and on Edison slowly rising in the elevator, nearing the top—no one saw her swipe the card and open the gate.

  Z arrived an instant later and grabbed her purse from Caitlin. It turned over, and seemed to vomit its contents of weapons, cosmetics, and breath mints onto the ground in a pile that was much larger than the bag.

  Z groaned and knelt down to gather it all up—giving Nick and the others time to push through the gate and onto the tower grounds.

  They hadn’t been seen yet, but there were scores of Accelerati between them and the tower.

  “Zak,” Nick said, “I need a distraction.”

  Zak had never seen the machine in action, and had no real reason to trust Nick—but he was riding a thrilling wave of adrenaline that had begun the moment Caitlin, Mitch, and Nick had come into his life. He knew something had changed in him, because he didn’t feel the urge to shuffle his deck of cards anymore. Up until now, he had lived his life with mathematical precision. This free fall of randomness was like skydiving, and as long as the ground remained out of sight, he had no intention of deploying his parachute.

  “I’m on it!” Zak said, pulling out his laptop.

  Dr. Alan Jorgenson was pleased with the current state of affairs. He was in charge again! In spite of his pink suit, and the fact that part of the left pant leg had been burned away, he took the reins of the operation as if he’d never been forced to surrender them.

  “Clear the area around the tower!” he commanded from his position behind the booming microphone of the control center. “Make sure the helicopters hold their positions, and await my orders.”

  It was finally Dr. Alan Jorgenson’s chance to shine, and he was determined to outshine Edison himself. Henceforth, he would be known as the man who tamed the raging beast that was Celestial Object Felicity Bonk.

  H
e was poised for long-overdue greatness when he, and every single Accelerati in the control center, received an urgent text message.

  In unison, they all looked at their phones.

  The message had no sender’s name or number attached, and it consisted of just a single word:

  DISTRACTION

  And by the time Jorgenson turned back to the window, a gaggle of kids was halfway to the tower…led by none other than Nick Slate.

  How was this possible? Jorgenson immediately regretted not having disposed of the miserable boy when he’d had the chance. The thought of leaving him sealed in a mausoleum to ponder the torturous depths of his failure had been much more appealing at the time, but here was the consequence. The boy was as slippery as a graphite-lubricated swine.

  “Draw your weapons!” Jorgenson ordered. “Shoot to vaporize.”

  “Just Slate?” one of his underlings asked.

  “No, all of them.”

  The Accelerati around him poured out the door toward the tower, and various blasts, beams, and pulses began to fly from a whole variety of Accelerati weapons. The agents, however, were not very accurate in their aim. This was due to several factors.

  The strobing of strange lightning in the sky was even more distracting than Zak’s text.

  They were scientists, not soldiers, and were not well trained in the use of their own weapons.

  Many of them didn’t really want to kill a bunch of kids.

  It was now widely known that the Accelerati were broke, so faith in their reappointed leader was at an all-time low; and

  None of them much liked Jorgenson anyway.

  The result was a Star Wars sort of weapons battle. In other words, lots of intimidating guns were fired, yet, somehow, no one actually got hit.

  Only Dr. Zenobia Thuku’s aim was true—but the kids were not her targets. Having gathered the contents of her dimensionally elastic purse, she pulled out her temporal bouncer and fired at her colleagues, birthday-suiting at least a dozen Accelerati.

  Soon she had drawn the fire of most of her remaining coworkers.

  Zak, seeing that his mother’s life was in danger, joined her in the battle. He reached into her purse and pulled out the first weapon he could get his hand on—which turned out to be the force-field generator. Soon there were hordes of Accelerati rolling around in human hamster balls, which their own weapons could not penetrate.

  “We make a good team,” Zak told his Mom.

  “We will have a long talk about all of this later, Zakia,” she replied. Zak suspected he might need to put himself in his own protective hamster ball for that conversation.

  When Jorgenson saw that the Accelerati were failing to vaporize Nick and his cohorts, he left the control center to do it himself.

  Three kids were heading to the tower, and Jorgenson realized that if he ran, he might be able to cut them off before they got there. But as Jorgenson neared the tower, he slipped on Vince’s last will and testament, which was still blowing around the property, and he fell just before catching up with Nick, Caitlin, and Mitch.

  Jorgenson picked himself up, muddied but unhurt, and resumed the chase—but now the kids had the advantage.

  He increased his pace until he was just a few strides behind Mitch, the slowest of the bunch….

  Nick kept his eye on the prize: the tower.

  Edison had just reached the platform at the top. “Hurry,” he shouted to Caitlin and Mitch behind him, who didn’t need to be told.

  Meanwhile, high above their heads, a drama was unfolding as the quartet of hovering helicopters burned through their final cc’s of fuel. With little choice, the first pilot to reach the danger level announced he was releasing his cable.

  If only one cable were released, the ring would begin to swing, taking out the tower and dragging the three other helicopters down with it, so they had no choice but to release all the cables at the same time.

  Mitch Murló had just hit his stride, nearly catching up with Caitlin and Nick, when the cables were released, and he was caught entirely by surprise when a wall of shiny metal appeared directly in front of him with a deep clang that shook the ground enough to wake the dead back in the graveyard.

  Mitch slammed into the metallic wall at full speed and bounced back. He would have been knocked to the ground, but instead he bumped into Jorgenson, a few steps behind, who broke his fall.

  As Mitch rubbed his bruised nose, he realized what had happened. Nick and Caitlin, along with Edison, were now within the circumference of the ring. Everyone else was outside.

  Jorgenson realized this as well. In the heat of the moment, he had been thinking very two-dimensionally. Not Theo Blankenship two-dimensionally, but 2-D enough to have forgotten all about the forty-ton ring above their heads. He was now beyond fury. “Who,” he demanded, “ordered the release of the ring?”

  He looked up to see the four helicopters hurrying away in the dangerously sparking sky. The ring’s polished metal walls were too high to climb. Whatever Slate was planning to do, Jorgenson could no longer stop him.

  He turned to Mitch, grabbed him, and pushed him up against the metal, unable to restrain his anger. “When this is over, you will suffer,” Jorgenson snarled. “I will make you and your friends feel the full force of my wrath.”

  Mitch saw the fury in his eyes, and knew Jorgenson might well strangle him on the spot. But in this moment, Mitch suddenly saw an opportunity. Still in Jorgenson’s grip, he ignored the man and appealed to the other Accelerati around them, many of whom were still hamster-balled.

  “Is this the kind of leader you want?” he said to them. “Someone who would make children suffer?”

  Jorgenson got even angrier. “Shut up or—”

  “Or you’ll what?” Mitch said. “Go on, tell them exactly what you’ll do. I’m sure everyone wants to hear.”

  Mitch was calm. He wasn’t blurting. Perhaps he didn’t have to finish anyone else’s sentences anymore, only his own.

  It was Jorgenson who was now caught in a mental stutter, knowing that whatever he said would make things worse.

  “What has he done for any of you but make your lives miserable?” Mitch continued. “You’re geniuses—the best in your fields, just like my father—and you’re going to let him order you around like slaves? How long until each of you takes the fall, like my dad did?”

  Jorgenson pushed Mitch away. He didn’t have time for this. He looked at his watch, which was synchronized to the Doomsday Clock. The asteroid was about to move into range. Once it did, they’d have ten minutes to start the machine.

  “Get a ladder!” he ordered his underlings as their hamster bubbles popped. But apparently they didn’t see themselves as underlings anymore, because no one moved.

  “Did you hear me?” he demanded. “I said, get a ladder.”

  They didn’t even dignify him with an answer.

  “Oh, and by the way,” Mitch said quietly to Jorgenson. “I’m the one who stole all your money.”

  That’s what made Jorgenson snap. He pulled out his devolver and aimed it at Mitch. He was fully prepared and willing to turn the boy into a puddle of bubbling goo, but one of the other Accelerati grabbed his arm, bent it painfully backward, forced Jorgenson to his knees, and then ripped the weapon out of his hands.

  By now most of the force-field bubbles had popped, but no one was firing at Z or Zak anymore, so those two lowered their weapons as well.

  “We’re falling back to the command center so we don’t get electrocuted,” the man said coolly as the rest of the Accelerati hurried away. “But by all means, Jorgenson, stay right here. In fact, we’d all prefer it.” And the Acceleratus, now loyal to Z once more, hurried off with her, Zak, and Mitch, leaving Jorgenson there alone.

  Inside the ring, Caitlin was the first to realize that Mitch was no longer behind them, and that they had been cut off from the rest of the world.

  “Nick, we lost Mitch….”

  But Nick’s attention was caught by something else
. A figure lying limp just beside the elevator. Vince. Without his battery. As dead as dead can be.

  “Oh no….” said Caitlin.

  Nick took a deep breath. “We can’t think about it now. We’ve got to get to the top of the tower,” he said, pushing the button to call the elevator.

  “But we can’t just leave him here.”

  “We won’t,” said Nick. “We’ll come back and do…whatever we have to do, but right now we have to get up there. Vince would understand.”

  Around them an air-raid siren began to blare. “The asteroid is in range!” came the announcement from the control center, “The asteroid is in range!” And a ten-minute countdown began.

  Nick shifted the telephone that was clearly weighing him down and looked up at the caged elevator gradually rattling down toward them. “It’s too slow! Come on.”

  He led Caitlin to a ladder that ran up the back of the elevator scaffold, then he took a deep breath and began to climb with one hand, while precariously carrying the telephone in the other.

  Caitlin had pieced together a good portion of Nick’s plan, but she was still baffled by some key elements.

  “How do you know someone took the blender lid from the attic?” she asked as she climbed behind him. “How can you be sure?”

  And Nick said, “Because I must have been the one who took it!”

  That left Caitlin reeling in a vertigo that had nothing to do with the height of the climb.

  “It could be missing for a hundred reasons,” Nick said. “But if I go back, I can lock in a single reason. I can create the reality in which I’m the one who took it!”

  “You can’t create a reality!” Caitlin reminded him. “You can only become a part of what already happened!”

  “Precisely,” said Nick. “And I’m going to make sure this is what happened!”

  The logic was as circular as a Tilt-A-Whirl, but Caitlin had to admit that despite her reservations, it made sense. Still the big question remained.