Tesla's Attic (9781423155126) (8 page)

He wound up for the second pitch, and for an instant, only an instant, he wondered if anyone here had bought something from his attic. And that momentary mental hiccup flew off the tips of his fingers along with his pitch.

“Hey batter-batter-batter—swing!”

The second pitch wasn't quite as wild as the first, but was way too high for the catcher to reach. It hit the backstop and bounced off with a rattle.

This time the coach said nothing. He just motioned for the catcher to give Nick one more chance.

Nick tried to pull in all his concentration, winding it down into the perfect pitch he always delivered when it was most needed. His mother had been in the stands at his last game. He had pitched a no-hitter. When he threw that final strike, and the team raised him over their heads, he remembered the way she stood in the stands cheering for him.

Now, as he wound up to throw the third pitch, all he could think was that she would never see him play again…and even though Mitch said nothing this time, it didn't matter. With thoughts of his mother clouding his mind, his pitch hit the batter.

“Ow! What's wrong with you?” yelled the batter, rubbing his bruised arm.

“Sorry!” Nick shouted. “I didn't mean to, it just…”

The coach took a few seconds to inspect the damage to the batter, then reluctantly came out to the pitcher's mound.

“Son,” he said, taking off his hat like he was about to tell him his dog had died, “I hate to say this, but maybe pitching isn't your forte.”

“But it
is
,” stammered Nick. “It's what I do best.”

The coach glanced at the batter, who was still rubbing his arm, then back at Nick. “I'm sorry, son, but I think you need to work on your game some. Maybe next year.” Then he walked away.

Nick wanted to hurl the glove at his retreating head. But he wouldn't give Theo and the rest of the team the satisfaction of seeing his anger. Instead, he took off his mitt and tossed it to the first baseman, who bobbled it and dropped it at his feet.

“Keep it,” Nick said. “Maybe you'll actually catch a ball with it someday.”

“Guess what happened today!” Danny was bouncing with excitement as Nick came in the door.

“You got bit by a radioactive spider, and now you can catch thieves just like flies.”

“No,” said Danny. “I made the nine-and-under baseball team!”

Nick just stared at him.

“The coach says I'm a natural outfielder!”

There were many foul balls flying through Nick's head at the moment, but instead of saying something he'd regret, he dug down and forced a smile. “That's great, Danny. Mom would have been proud of you.”

Then Nick went to his room, pulled the ladder up behind him, and didn't come out for the rest of the night.

A
rchimedes, the great mathematician, once said, “Give me a lever long enough, and I shall move the world.” Of course, another time he ran naked through the streets shouting “Eureka!”—which only goes to show that even history's greatest minds have issues.

Take Euclid, who, even after proving that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, was habitually late to everything. And let's not even mention Pythagoras.

We rarely consider that the great minds that have changed the world at one time or another suffered heartbreak, loss, and exclusion from their chosen sport. We forget that they were human.

Nick Slate had no clue how important a part he was soon to play in the grand scheme of things. But one thing is certain: none of it would have been possible had he not suffered the course of his own human events.

Events like Petula Grabowski-Jones.

Eight o'clock sharp, Petula had said. Although Nick didn't want to appear eager to have anything to do with her, she did claim to have information he desperately needed. So he showed up five minutes early.

Petula, of course, had shown up ten minutes early.

Before he saw her, Nick thought he must have gotten the address wrong. The place was a restaurant. Not the sit-down-and-pig-out kind, but the kind where the food was ridiculously expensive, the portions were ridiculously small, the menu was in another language, and the waiters were dressed better than you.

Petula sat alone at a table with her hair up, wearing a stylish dress designed with curves in all the right places on a body that, unfortunately, had no discernible curves at all, so it hung like a red satin toga.

She looked up at Nick as he entered. “What do you think you're doing?” she asked sharply. “They don't allow jeans in here. Sit down before anyone sees you.”

Nick looked around. No one was watching them but an elderly couple, who grinned at them with an “Ah, young love” look in their eyes.

“What's the deal?” Nick demanded.

Petula grinned. “You want information, you're going to have to romance it out of me. But I'll tell you right now, I don't kiss on the first date. Unless you actually want to.”

A waiter arrived and smoothly placed before Nick a plate of some kind of food he had never seen before. They looked like miniature onion rings, but Nick doubted they were.

“Your date took the liberty of ordering the calamari appetizer,” the waiter informed Nick.

“She's not my date,” Nick said, then turned to Petula. “You're not my date.”

“Let's not argue semantics,” she said. “Now sit down and eat some squid.”

Nick thought of a million reasons why not to sit, but they paled in comparison to the one reason he needed to, so he plopped himself down in the chair and, as he angrily gnawed on a calamari ring, said, “Whatever you've got to tell me had better be worth it. And by the way, I can't pay for this place.”

“Calm down; I have a gift certificate.” She waved it in his face. “Of course it's expired, but we can feign ignorance.”

“Fine.” Nick grabbed another few fried rings. “But your information had better be as good as this calamari.”

Petula smiled victoriously. “Patience,” she said. “It's only the first course.”

And so Nick had to endure not just the calamari, but a salad and small talk that was almost as microscopic as the portions, before Petula would divulge anything.

Nick, on the other hand, was anxious to share what he had learned in his own research: that Tesla and Thomas Edison hated each other; that Tesla had accomplished things that to this day haven't been duplicated; and that he made his first million by the age of forty, but gave it all away.

To all of these things, Petula merely said, “Tell me something I don't know.”

It was as they awaited their entrées that Petula served up the stuff that wasn't common knowledge. “Tesla was a very private man,” she told him. “Rumor was he had a secret love shack, because he was carrying on with some Colorado Springs socialite, but no one in the old social columns I read knew who it was.”

Nick considered this. It didn't take Euclid to connect the dots. “My great-aunt Greta?” he asked. The thought of his great-aunt having a romantic anything with anyone made him shudder.

“Apparently so,” Petula said. “She was what you would call a floozy.”

“So that explains why his stuff was in my attic.”

“Yes and no,” Petula said, enigmatically.

Their entrées arrived: Petula's blackened ahi with a lavender-infused beet rémoulade, and Nick's grilled cheese sandwich. That's where the conversation ended, as Petula had a strict rule about not talking while chewing.

Between her seventh and eighth forkful, however, she said, “The question you need to ask yourself is…why did he put it in
her
attic, and not his own?”

As Petula had predicted, acting clueless about the expired gift certificate got them a free meal, and although Petula requested a walk home, Nick only went as far as the corner of her street, as any farther would definitely make this feel too datelike for comfort.

The information Petula gave him was worth enduring the meal, but there was still something she was holding back. “You still haven't told me what the old camera does,” Nick pointed out, before they parted. “Besides taking pictures, I mean.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she told him. “It's a camera—it's not like it's going to grow legs and do the hokey-pokey.”

And although Nick wasn't so sure about that, he didn't want to inflame Petula's curiosity any further. “Never mind. It's just that it belonged to Tesla, and like you said, he was a genius.”

“Sometimes,” said Petula, “a camera is just a camera.”

She held out her arms, expecting a good-night hug, but Nick kept his hands in his pockets and said, “Well, see ya,” then made a successful escape.

Although he knew there must be more to the camera than met the eye, if Petula hadn't discovered it yet, that could only be a good thing.

When he got home, Vince was lurking on the porch. The kid was very good at lurking, Nick decided.

“Here,” he said as Nick approached, and held out an object that Nick recognized from the garage sale: an electric fan with odd hexagonal blades. “I was trolling the police net, and I heard about an apartment complex where the air-conditioning went haywire. Froze the place out. Snow in the hallways and stuff. This thing was running in apartment Four-G. People had no idea it was the cause of their freeze-out.”

“Good going, Vince.”

“Wanna see if we can cryonically freeze your neighbor's dog?”

“Tempting, but no.”

“You're no fun.” And with that, Vince slouched his merry way home.

Nick brought the fan up to his room, where he found that his dirty laundry had been collected in the center of the attic floor. Weird. He hadn't left it that way. When his mom was alive, she would occasionally gather his soiled clothes and shove them underneath his covers, as a not-so-subtle reminder to put them in the hamper. But now that she was gone, his dirty laundry carpeted much of the floor until he got so sick of it he finally washed it.

Was Danny playing some sort of game? Regardless, since the clothes were all in one convenient pile, he brought them down to the old washing machine that was certainly not designed by Tesla, because it did nothing abnormal—if you didn't count the way it jumped during spin cycles. Once out of sight, the laundry was out of mind—and when he returned to his room Nick didn't notice that his bed and desk had moved three inches from the wall, toward the center of the room.

M
itch Murló, despite popular opinion, had a life.

It wasn't an enviable one, though. At least not for the past year. His mother, who had always been there for him, was rarely around now, because of the two jobs she had to hold down to keep food on the table for Mitch and his younger sister. His father, who had also always been there for him, was now elsewhere.

When Nick showed up in town, it was Mitch's chance to have a friend who knew nothing of his family's considerable baggage, so of course he tried a little too hard. Who could fault him? Mitch knew it wouldn't last forever—after all, people talked—but for now he and Nick had something in common: a sudden interest in the lost inventions of the original mad scientist.

And maybe, thought Mitch, it might even withstand a Murló “family day.”

At eight o'clock on Saturday morning, Mitch sat at the kitchen table, staring at the Shut Up 'n Listen before him. He loosened his tie, as it was already beginning to choke.

The device waited with patient, intimidating silence for the opportunity to finish his thoughts. The little ivory ring on the end of the string was practically taunting him to pull it.

“Can I play with it?” asked Madison, his five-year-old sister.

“No,” he told her. “It's not a toy.”

“It looks like a toy.”

“Well, it's not.”

“Then you can't play with Mr. McGrizzly.” She wiggled her stuffed bear tauntingly in his face, then strutted out of the room, leaving Mitch alone with the device that was anything but a toy.

He took a deep breath, pulled the string, and held it taut. “My father…” he said, then let the string go.

And the machine said,
“
…
can't wait to see you.”

Mitch sighed. Not what he wanted to hear. Again his tie seemed to be turning into a noose, and he tugged it looser. He pulled the string and tried again. “My father only needs…”

“
…
to see you and your sister.”

Mitch pounded his fist on the table in frustration. One more time he grabbed the ring and pulled.

“I can't visit my father today…”

“
…
without wearing a smile.”

Mitch put his head in his hands. There was no getting out of this, and the damn machine only rubbed it in.

It wasn't that Mitch didn't love his father—he did—but the weekend visits had been getting progressively more difficult, more awkward. Mitch knew it was petty of him. But the things happening around him now were bigger than his personal problems. The connection between Mitch and this device was growing stronger. It was almost as if he had become a part of the mechanism. A crucial part of it.

He didn't understand it any more than he understood how the machine could do what it did. All he knew was that he, Nick, Caitlin, Vince, and everyone else who had been affected by the weird crap from Nick's attic were part of some invisible clockwork that was activated by the garage sale and was churning its gears toward some dark, mysterious end.

“Or maybe I'm just nuts,” he said out loud. Hearing himself say it made him feel a whole lot better.
How weird
, he thought,
that I'd rather be nuts than right.

Mitch's mother walked into the kitchen, her ear glued to her phone, as usual. “Honestly, Maria, the weather's been so unpredictable like the sudden downpour last week and my tires are bald and I don't have the money to replace them so one of these days we'll just fly off the road and land dead in a ditch and no one will find us for months and you know what else…?”

Mitch found it amazing that she could talk without stopping for breath. The only way to get a word in edgewise was to talk on top of her at an increasingly louder volume. It was like merging onto a non-yielding freeway.

“Mom, I got too much homework and a major project due on Monday and I can't work in the car you know I get carsick so if I go today I'll fail and—”

“—the ‘check engine' light keeps coming on what does that mean anyway ‘check engine' why doesn't it just tell me what's wrong because if it did—”

“—and you and Dad will have no one to blame but yourselves for keeping me from doing my work which is due on Monday AND I'LL END UP GETTING SENT TO THE ALTERNATIVE SCHOOL ALL BECAUSE OF YOU!”

“Hold on, Maria.” And finally she took the phone away from her face. “What are you going on about?”

“My homework, which is—”

“Very easy if you don't wait until the last minute,” his mother said, subverting his thought. Then she returned to the phone, still without taking a breath.

The alternative school
, thought Mitch, which was named after none other than Nikola Tesla, the man behind the machine that lately seemed to be controlling his life.

He picked up the Shut Up 'n Listen and headed for the door, pulling the string as he did.

“I'll be back,” he called to his mom. “I'm going…”

“
…
to see Nick,”
finished the machine.

For once, the machine said exactly what he was going to say.

At that very moment, however, Nick was considering an unexpected proposition.

“So, you wanna come over?” Caitlin asked him over the phone, after about nine seconds of small talk. He didn't even know how she'd gotten his number.

“Huh?” he said like an imbecile. Then he fumbled the phone but caught it before it hit the floor.

“I need some help with my new art project,” Caitlin said. “It involves blowing up paint cans with M-80s, and none of my other friends are willing to take any more shrapnel for the cause.”

At that moment he would have dived on a paint grenade for Caitlin, but he wasn't about to admit it out loud. “Sure, I guess,” he said.

“Do you have insurance?” Caitlin asked.

“Uh, yeah?” Nick said, which was better than saying, “Let me consult my portfolio of things I am clueless about.”

“Good,” Caitlin said brightly. “See you in half an hour?”

“Okay. And if you don't like my contribution to your project, you can always blow me up.” But unfortunately the call dropped somewhere before he finished his sentence, leaving Nick to agonize for many years over exactly which words Caitlin had missed.

After dressing himself in clothes that were nice, but not too nice, and putting on cologne and then washing it off, Nick left the house for his explosionist-art encounter with Caitlin.

Nick was so caught up in his own thoughts that by the time he saw Mitch riding up on his bicycle, it was too late to hide.

“Hey,” said Mitch, “goin' somewhere?”

“Yeah,” said Nick, determined not to go into the details, because then he'd never be able to get rid of Mitch. “What's with the shirt and tie? Is it a religious thing? Are you going to knock on my door and leave a pamphlet?”

He'd meant it as a joke, but there was a certain sadness in Mitch when he answered, “Nah. Nothin' like that.”

Mitch seemed awkward. It wasn't like him. Usually he would just barrel into conversation, oblivious to whether the other person wanted him to or not.

“Listen, Mitch, I'm kind of busy right now, so…”

“I'm gonna go see my dad today. I was hoping you might come with. I bet he'd really like to meet you.”

Let's see
, thought Nick.
Quality artistic time with Caitlin, or
hanging out with Mitch and his father?
It was like comparing apples and no freaking way.

“Maybe some other time,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah, I understand.” Again that uncharacteristic look on Mitch's face. Something between nausea and puppy-dog eyes. “It's just that my dad thinks I have no friends. I want to show him he's wrong, y'know?”

Nick took a deep breath to steel himself against Mitch's desperation.
Let's see
, he thought.
Quality artistic time with Caitlin,
or my conscience?
The decision was a little bit harder this time, but Nick's mental scale still tipped toward Caitlin. “Another time,” he said again, and added, “I promise.” And the fact that he really meant it was enough to satisfy his conscience.

To Nick's absolute surprise, Mitch didn't put up a fight. He just caved.

“Right,” he said. “Okay, then, see ya.”

He turned around and began to pedal away. It was as if knew he was defeated even before he began.

It was clear that Mitch needed this, and needed it now, not “some other time.” So the question was, how on earth could Nick shift the balance to Mitch, when Caitlin sat so firmly on the other side?

To Nick's surprise, the answer came easily.

“Mitch, wait up!” He trotted out to Mitch in the middle of the street. “Tell you what. I'll go with you today on one condition.”

“Yeah?”

“When we get home, you give me back the Shut Up 'n Listen.”

For a moment Mitch looked like he had been stabbed through the heart. But then he looked Nick in the eye, held out his hand, and said, “Deal.”

It is well known that the microwave oven was invented by accident, when a scientist walking near a huge microwave array discovered that a candy bar in his pocket had melted.

The first artificial sweetener was discovered when a researcher sat down for dinner and found his bread so unexpectedly sweet he was compelled to retrace his steps, touching every chemical his hands had come in contact with that day, until he found the ones that combined into something that tasted like sugar.

And the Slinky? It was invented when a naval engineer knocked a spring off a counter and watched it climb its way down to the floor.

Of course these all could just as easily have gone awry. The microwave guy could have fried his heart instead of the chocolate in his shirt pocket. The sweet genius could have had the good sense to wash his hands before eating, never discovering anything. And the Slinky sailor could have abandoned his wife and kids to join a Bolivian religious cult, never to be heard from again. (Well, actually, he did—but not until after inventing that which walks down stairs, alone or in pairs, thus changing childhood forever.)

Happy accidents and unexpected revelations are the rule rather than the exception in the world of science. For example, Petula Grabowski-Jones made a shocking discovery when she developed a photo she had snapped of her Chihuahua, Hemorrhoid, sitting on the corner table in the living room in broad daylight. Instead of getting an image of her dog, she got an image of her mother—taking money from her father's wallet in that very same location, in the middle of the night. This accidental find provided Petula with much-needed insight into her “malfunctioning” box camera—and a great income opportunity through blackmail.

The last thing Caitlin Westfield expected to discover was that blowing up paint cans was really no fun at all without Nick's help, which in turn gave her the unexpected revelation of her own secret motivation. She suddenly realized that she had concocted the whole art project as a means of spending the afternoon with Nick.

And as for Nick, the last thing that he expected to discover was that, much like the asteroid that had killed off the dinosaurs, thereby clearing the way for the evolution of mammals, there was more to Mitch than his overbearing, tactless surface might suggest.

“My dad lives in a gated community,” Mitch told Nick as they made the long drive to wherever they were going.

They were in the backseat of Mitch's family car, his mom driving with her cell phone pressed quite illegally to her ear as she talked nonstop. Mitch's little sister was in the passenger seat next to her mom, kicking her feet against the plastic dash like she wanted to kill the glove compartment.

“What does your dad do?” Nick asked.

“Well, he was into computers,” Mitch answered, “but now he works for the state.”

Nick nodded, but that was already more information than he needed when he was still cursing himself for choosing the Murló family's Pontiac of Pain over a day with Caitlin.

Mitch fidgeted with the Shut Up 'n Listen but didn't pull the string. Nick wondered if his restraint was due to having sworn on Vince's Damnation Bible, or if there was a thought he didn't want finished.

“You know it's best if it goes back into my attic, right?” Nick said.

Mitch didn't look at him. “It doesn't matter what I think. I made a deal, didn't I?” Still, he ran his hand along its cold metallic shell. “Lately I've been feeling like it knows what I'm going to say before I even say it. That's crazy, right?”

“Yeah, crazy,” Nick said. But he knew better.

Mitch's father's exclusive gated community had an extensive guard gate. In fact, it had two. It also had an electrified fence. And towers with armed guards. All things considered, few gated communities could be more exclusive than the Colorado State Penitentiary.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Nick asked Mitch as they waited in line to pass through the metal detector.