Edison’s Alley (6 page)

“In that case, we have a deal,” she said. “The strike has been averted.”

She would enchant the visionaries of the Accelerati. And God help them if they weren’t enchanted.

D
r. Alan Jorgenson sat in his office at the University of Colorado, simmering slowly like a roast in a Crock-Pot. He had the resources of the
world’s most technologically advanced secret society at his fingertips. He could control the weather with the flick of a switch; he could stop time and move between the seconds; he could end
the lives of his enemies as effortlessly as changing channels on a television.

So why was he letting a group of mediocre-minded middle schoolers get to him?

There was a timid knock, and in a moment the office door opened just wide enough for the person on the other side to poke his head in. “Excuse me, Dr. Jorgenson?” an impertinent
doctoral student said. “I’ve been waiting for nearly an hour…”

“And you’ll wait an hour more if that’s what I require,” Jorgenson told him.

“Yes, sir.” He unpoked his head and closed the door quietly.

Even as a distinguished full professor at a major university, Jorgenson could not escape the academic blight of doctoral students. He had to maintain his cover, at least for now, and the
academic cred could one day prove useful, so he made his students research assistants and rarely had any use for them unless they had results to show him.

The young bespectacled man outside claimed to have results, but Jorgenson’s university research, no matter how important, paled next to the potential of Tesla’s “lost”
inventions. Retrieving at least some of those inventions would be simple: just kill Nick Slate, take the objects from his attic, and be done with it. But the Man in Charge would not allow it.
Jorgenson’s orders were clear. Let the boy be. At least for now.

“He will be dispensed with soon enough,” the old man had told Jorgenson. “The more he spins his wheels to gather the lost items, the less we’ll have to.”

But “soon enough” wasn’t soon enough for Jorgenson, who knew something the old man didn’t: the boy was crafty. And clever. He had, more than once, outsmarted
Jorgenson’s superior intellect, which meant he was not to be underestimated. If he were allowed to gather too many of Tesla’s inventions—and figured out how to use them—he
and his friends would become formidable opponents. Such objects should not be left in the hands of children.

And to make sure that they weren’t, it was best if those children were killed. Why couldn’t the old man see that?

Once more came the timid knocking and the bespectacled student. “Dr. Jorgenson, I know you said to wait, but I need to teach an undergrad physics class in ten minutes…”

Jorgenson sighed. “Very well.” He gestured for the young man to enter.

The student held a shoe box. “I’ve been in charge of the TTT project. You know—the Titanium Testudine Trials.”

“Ah! The tortoises.”

The young man sat down across from Jorgenson, pulled from the shoe box three tortoise shells the size of coconut halves, and placed them on Jorgenson’s desk. All of the shells had a pale
metallic sheen about them.

Jorgenson was curious to hear the results of the study, but he feigned absolute disinterest. “Just get this over with,” he said. “My time is more valuable than yours.
Don’t waste it!” He paused to gauge the effect of his tone on the student’s psyche and was pleased to detect a tremor in the region of the young man’s knees.

“W-we induced rapid growth using your biotemporal field emitter, and infused the developing cells with titanium, using three different protocols.” He pointed to two of the shells.
“The first two specimens didn’t prove any stronger, but the third was the charm.” He tapped the last shell proudly.

Jorgenson lifted one of the shells. The plastron—or underside—had been removed, leaving only the dome-shaped carapace. “And what happened to the creatures they held?”

The student lowered his head as if in respect for the dead. “They gave their lives for science.”

“Indeed,” Jorgenson said. “As must we all.”

Then Jorgenson started sliding the three shells around on his desk, shuffling their positions again and again. “Are you watching closely? Keep your eye on the strongest one, the
‘charm,’ as you called it.” Jorgenson spoke rapidly, his voice taking on the cadence of a carnival barker. “That’s right, never take your eye off the shell, if you
don’t want to get shucked.”

He stopped and leaned forward, smiling broadly at the younger man, who stared at the row of three shells, somewhat bewildered.

“Now, put your hand beneath the one you think is the strongest,” Jorgenson said.

“My hand? Why?”

“Come, come. He who hesitates is lost.”

After a moment, the student chose the shell in the middle, sliding his hand through the neural arch that had originally made room for the reptile’s neck.

Jorgenson looked into the man’s eyes. “Are you sure that’s the one?”

“I—I think so,” the student said.

“Good, good.”

Without warning, Jorgenson pulled from his desk drawer a large hammer—a weapon he kept as a defense against the potential attacks of disgruntled students and irate colleagues. He held it
up just long enough to register the terror in the young man’s eyes, then he slammed the hammer down on the empty shell on the left. Pieces of shell flew in every direction; Jorgenson felt
some flakes bounce off his chin. The student flinched and grimaced, but, to his credit, did not remove his hand from the center shell.

“Hmm. My test confirms that it wasn’t the shell on the left. Now, would you like to stay with your original choice? Or would you prefer to switch?”

The student just stared at him, his eyes seeming as wide as the lenses of his glasses.

“I’m giving you the chance to change your mind, you see. The mathematical odds are much more favorable if you do—there’s a fifty-fifty chance, as opposed to one in
three.”

“B-but—”

“I know it seems counterintuitive, but it’s true.”

The student was so petrified, he couldn’t move even if he’d wanted to.

“Sticking with your first choice, are you? Risky.” And Jorgenson reached over and removed the unchosen shell from the desk.

“Wait—you’re not going to smash that one?”

Jorgenson smiled once more. “Where would be the fun in that?” Then, without warning, he brought the hammer down with full force on the shell covering the student’s hand.

The young man screamed, but the hammer bounced off the shell, leaving it intact and the hand beneath it unharmed.

“Interesting result,” Jorgenson murmured, and, just to be sure, he slammed the hammer down on the shell a second time, even harder. Again the hammer did no damage. “Well
done!”

The doctoral student, suddenly jolted from his petrifaction, jerked his hand back and gave it a few shakes as if to make sure all of the bones and tendons were still in working order.

“So what have we learned from our little experiment?” Jorgenson asked. “What lesson do we extract?”

“You—you could have mangled me!”

“Wrong!” Jorgenson shouted. “The lesson is:
From now on, you NEVER bring me anything but your best specimen. Is that understood?
” He dropped the hammer onto the
desk and picked up the pristine shell. “Now go and teach your pathetic class.”

As the young man fled the office, Jorgenson examined the metalized shell more closely. His mind flooded with potential uses—indestructible tanks and personnel carriers, undentable
automobiles. And that was only scratching the surface. With the 725 million dollars that had come into the Accelerati’s possession, implementing those uses would be easy.

And yet, any sense of triumph was overshadowed by his recent failure. He longed for the day he could give his research assistants the task of reverse-engineering the objects that Nick Slate had
in his possession. The applications and monetary rewards of those inventions, whatever they were, would be staggering in the hands of someone who knew how to exploit them.

Someone other than Nick Slate.

The old man wanted Jorgenson to wait, but he had waited long enough. Jorgenson had to take matters into his own hands.

He slipped the fortified shell into the pocket of his coat. Then, almost as an afterthought, he placed the other intact tortoise shell back on his desk.

The boy was nothing. He was as empty, and ultimately as fragile, as this shell, which, clearly, had not protected its reptilian owner from an untimely demise.

Jorgenson brought the hammer up once more, and with all his might, he slammed it down on the third shell. It disintegrated in a satisfying burst of silver-green shards. He took a deep breath and
smiled.

It was time to do the same to Nick.

N
ick was not looking forward to his brother’s baseball game after school.

This should have been a sign that something was off—not only because he loved baseball, but also because he prided himself on being a good big brother, and these days Danny really needed
him. The house fire back in Florida may not have been as momentous as an asteroid strike, but it had been just as devastating to Nick and Danny and their father. Four months was not enough time to
heal from something like that. Nick’s family had changed forever, and it could be years before they truly came to terms with it.

Perspective. It was a luxury Nick, his brother, and his father simply didn’t have right now.

Danny’s previous game had ended abruptly when a meteorite the size of a grapefruit was pulled from the sky and into his mitt. He took to the field alone a few nights after that, pulling
dozens more from the sky with the Tesla-modified glove, hoping beyond hope that wishing on the falling stars would bring his mother back. The last space rock he had turned in Earth’s
direction was the heavy hitter.

Now Danny would be in the field again. A different field, to be sure, since the Sports McComplex they had played in was now cratered from meteor strikes. Instead they would be playing in
Memorial Park on Wednesday afternoons, when the diamond was available.

The park was in an older part of town, fairly close to where Tesla’s laboratory had once stood. With mixed feelings, Nick rode his bike through the neighborhood of old homes and came to a
stop across the street from the site. The lab was long gone, of course; the ordinary tract house occupying the space had an iron fence and two guard dogs to keep away the lunatics who saw it as
hallowed ground.

That was the problem—it was mostly lunatics. The greatest inventor of all time deserved more than the babbling fringe.

Such was the brine of Nick’s thoughts as he joined his father in the bleachers while Danny took to the field.

“He’ll do fine,” Mr. Slate said, clearly trying to convince himself. “Baseball is in his blood. He’ll do fine.”

Watching Danny play baseball was a rare moment of escape for Nick’s dad. Wayne Slate worked as a copy-machine repairman at NORAD—which would have been fine, if it weren’t for
the fact that Jorgenson, the veritable eye of the Accelerati, had gotten him the job. It was his way of keeping their whole family under his thumb.

Nick’s dad didn’t know about the Accelerati, of course, or about Tesla’s inventions. Nick wondered, though, if his father knew that it was his very own swing of the
bat—even though it missed the ball that Nick had pitched to him—that had saved the world. Surely he must have suspected, but they had never spoken of it, and Nick doubted they ever
would.

After that day, Wayne Slate had slipped into a bizarre form of post-traumatic stress. He became busy. Busier than ever before. It was as if keeping the blood flowing to other parts of his body
prevented it from reaching his brain, where he would have to process everything that had happened. And whenever he slowed down, he began to sink like a stone into himself.

“I’m fine,” he had told Nick and Danny. “Better than fine. The world is saved—we all have a new lease on life, right? I intend to make the very best of
it.”

They all rose for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” performed by a paunchy middle-aged guy who had once been in a boy band, and then Danny’s team took the field. The woman sitting
next to them on the bleacher kept looking at Nick’s dad out of the corner of her eye. Finally she turned to him and said, “Your son’s the one who caught that meteorite,
isn’t he?”