Hawking's Hallway

  Through all of this, Mrs. Higgenbotham kept circling the room, slamming a swatter down on the table to catch a pesky fly. Unfortunately, she was not a mechanism of great speed, and so the insect evaded each and every swat.

  “Let it be,” Edison told her. “Just bring the meal.”

  As for the fly, it was more than happy to buzz in the dinner guests’ ears, and partake of the meal as best as it could. It was resting on the lip of Edison’s soup bowl, enjoying some cream of asparagus, when Edison said, “Nick has expressed a concern about one of the objects in the lab.”

  “The blender,” Planck guessed, waving her spoon as she spoke, which was more than enough to attract the fly to it. “We’ve determined that it serves as a voltage regulator, and as such doesn’t require a lid.”

  “And what if it does?” asked Nick.

  “This could be a question worth pondering,” Z admitted.

  At that point, the fly narrowly escaped being sucked up Jorgenson’s left nostril as he drew in an exasperated breath of air. “Why do any of you care what he thinks?” he said. “The boy knows nothing about the objects; he just sold them out of his garage.”

  “He knows a lot more than you,” Caitlin said in his defense.

  The fly became a joyful one-insect swarm when the main course arrived. Scandinavian squab cooked in its own juices. It took no interest in the verbal snipes delivered around the table—mostly by Jorgenson and Planck, who lived to antagonize one another.

  “How’s headquarters, Evangeline?” Jorgenson asked. “I hope you haven’t replaced the Renoirs and Monets with sad clowns and dogs playing poker.”

  “I’d send some art to your workplace,” Planck replied, “but I don’t think they allow oil paintings in cafeteria kitchens.”

  “I’m no longer there—or haven’t you heard? It took me less than a month to be promoted out of that position. How many years did it take you to get out of food service, Evangeline?”

  And so it went until dessert: cherries jubilee and a dessert wine served in chilled glasses that fogged and smoked like dry ice when they were set on the table.

  As for the fly, it had taken an interest in the dessert wine, because it had landed on the lip of the bottle and discovered that it was sweet—although now it was buzzing about a bit haphazardly.

  For this reason, Mrs. Higgenbotham picked up her flyswatter again after the wine had been poured to everyone but Nick and Caitlin.

  “Really?” said Caitlin. “Not even a little?”

  “I’m not programmed to serve wine to minors, dearie,” Mrs. Higgenbotham said as she pursued the drunken fly. “Except in religious ceremonies, of course. You’ll have to get someone else to pour.” But of course nobody did.

  “Blandy’s Madeira, and a 1995 vintage too!” said Jorgenson with uncharacteristic cheerfulness. “You must try our host’s aged Madeira, Evangeline. Edison and I have shared many a glass.”

  “Not so many,” grumbled Edison.

  But before Ms. Planck could pick up her glass, Mrs. Higgenbotham, hell-bent on victory, slammed the swatter down, missing the fly, but knocking over and shattering Planck’s goblet.

  “Mrs. Higgenbotham, please!” complained Edison.

  “Dear oh dear oh dear,” Mrs. Higgenbotham lamented. “I’m all thumbs and axle grease. No matter—I’ll fetch you a fresh glass.”

  The incident turned Jorgenson back into his unpleasant self. “That woman should be dismantled and sold for spare parts.”

  “Watch what you say, Al,” said Edison. “You know I have a penchant for old machines.”

  Dinner concluded without further incident. Even the fly no longer troubled them, because it had taken a sip of the spilled wine and promptly died on the table from cyanide poisoning.

  Jorgenson was absolutely infuriated. Not so much by the disrespect, but by the fact that Evangeline Planck was still alive. He had gone to great lengths to coat the inside of her glass with a poison that could mimic a massive heart attack.

  The one variable in the plan he’d not foreseen was Mrs. Higgenbotham and her blasted flyswatter.

  But Alan Jorgenson never had just one plan. There was always a backup.

  Though he no longer had the same level of security access he’d had when he was Grand Acceleratus, he was, through some sleight of hand, able to nab a newly constructed pocket-size device, reverse-engineered from the antigravity machine. It shifted the center of gravity of any object it was aimed at, making said object unstable. When aimed at an individual, it could cause them to stumble—which might not be a big deal, unless, of course, that person was at the top of a staircase.

  And so that evening, when most everyone had gone to their rooms, Jorgenson positioned himself in his carriage-house bedroom, which had a clear view of the upstairs hallway window in the main house.

  The device, not unlike a radar gun, could project a gravitational beam, which the nerdier Accelerati were already calling a “tractor beam.” While the aerospace applications of the device could be highly profitable, the only thing Jorgenson was currently interested in was tugging Evangeline Planck off the top step, so she might plunge ungracefully to the first floor and break her stinking, pathetic, power-usurping neck.

  He waited in his room until he finally saw a female figure pass by the window, and he hit the button. Even from nearly thirty yards away, he could hear the scream and the satisfying cascade of thuds down the steep steps.

  “Sic semper tyrannis,” Jorgenson said. “So perish all tyrants.”

  Then he went to the main house to view his handiwork. When he entered, there were already servants fretting around the bottom of the stairs.

  “What happened?” he asked with feigned innocence. “I heard a scream.”

  And when he looked, he could see that there was indeed a body lying sprawled at the foot of the staircase.

  But it was not the body of Evangeline Planck.

  “Oh my,” said Mrs. Higgenbotham’s head, several feet away from the rest of her body. “Isn’t this embarassing?” Her neck was sparking, revealing torn wires and circuitry. One eyelid was blinking repeatedly, as if she was winking at Jorgenson. “Stairs can be such a nuisance.”

  Edison wheeled out of his downstairs suite, took one look at Mrs. Higgenbotham, and sighed. “Call the robotic engineers,” he declared, and the servants went running.

  Then he rolled back into his suite and closed the door.

  Jorgenson trudged over to the carriage house and spent the evening stewing in his own juices.

  At the same time Mrs. Higgenbotham suffered her unfortunate decapitation, Nick was taking Caitlin on a moonlit stroll of the grounds. Which might have been romantic, if they weren’t so aggravated with each other.

  “Why did you even come here?” Nick asked, breaking the tense silence. “You could have messed everything up!”

  “Me? You’re the one who stopped me from pulling his plug!” Caitlin angrily whispered. “Ending Edison would have ended all of our problems.”

  “No,” Nick growled. “He’s rebuilding Tesla’s machine. It’s the only thing that can keep the world from frying. Do you really think the Accelerati could pull it off without him? With Jorgenson and Ms. Planck fighting it out?” He stared at her another angry moment, then his face softened. “Besides, those wires you were going to pull were just the visible ones. He has backup wires hidden beneath the chair.”

  Caitlin opened her mouth to speak, but found she had nothing to say.

  “Why do you think he was in there alone? Because he trusted you? No, it was because he didn’t trust you. He did it to see if you would try to pull out his wires.”

  Caitlin crossed her arms. “Well, what do you want me to say?” she huffed.

  “Maybe ‘Thank you Nick, for saving my life’?”

  But of course she didn’t say anything. Nick kept walking. “Anyway,” he said, “you’re here now. Maybe you shouldn’t be, but I’m happy to see you.”

  This gave Caitlin pause, and she realiz
ed that rebuilding trust would require effort on both of their parts. So she told him everything that had happened since he’d left Vince’s house: that Vince had returned soaking wet with the globe, that Wardenclyffe Tower was being rebuilt, and that she had been grounded for life.

  “Your other selves are all keeping busy,” she told him.

  “Doing what?” Nick asked her.

  Caitlin shrugged. “Doing what you’re trying to do: save the world. Of course, they can’t settle on how to do it.”

  Nick shook his head. “Typical of me.”

  At last, something they could both agree on.

  “But I don’t get Ms. Planck’s ring,” Nick said.

  Caitlin nodded. “I know, me neither, but it looks familiar.”

  “If we could get it away from her,” Nick suggested, “we could find out just how important it is.”

  Caitlin grinned. “Being with the Accelerati has turned you evil, Nick Slate.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said with a smile. “But in a good way.”

  And then he took her hand. Caitlin tried not to show how glad she was that he had. It meant that trust had been restored, and maybe a whole lot more.

  When they returned to the house, Mrs. Higgenbotham was sitting in an upholstered chair with her head in a crystal punch bowl on the end table.

  It came close to making Caitlin scream, but she managed to swallow it.

  “Don’t mind me,” Mrs. Higgenbotham said. “I am quite indisposed at the moment. I ’ope you will understand if I don’t bring the evening milk and cookies.”

  “Will it be hard to fix?” Nick asked.

  “Not at all, dear,” she told him. “Mr. Edison ’as ’is own private genius bar for this sort of thing. I’m just going to pretend this didn’t ’appen.”

  “Good idea,” Nick agreed.

  The servants had all retired for the evening, and as Nick and Caitlin made their way through the quiet house, they found that they could hear, through the heating grate in the hallway floor, muffled voices coming from Edison’s suite, so they both knelt to listen.

  “We got it to work, Al,” they heard Ms. Planck say.

  “You sent a chimp,” Edison replied. “That’s not proof—”

  “A one-way journey is better than no journey at all. And for the trip I need to make, I only have to go in one direction. As for the return, I have no problem taking the long way home.”

  Caitlin detected discontent in Edison’s voice. He grumbled something, then said, “I still don’t believe this…extreme measure…is necessary.”

  “The evidence speaks for itself,” Planck told him.

  Caitlin looked to Nick. “What are they talking about?” she whispered, but he shushed her.

  “I do not approve,” Edison said. “We need you here. Do I have to remind you that our entire cash reserve has been stolen, and without those funds our situation is dire?”

  “Here’s the beauty of it,” Planck told him. “Once I do what I must have done, I’ll find that money before it’s even stolen. And when I get back, I can tell you exactly where it is.”

  Edison heaved a big sigh. “It’s far too late, and I am far too annoyed, to deal with a time paradox, Evangeline.”

  Caitlin gasped. “The time machine!” she whispered. “They must have built it!”

  Nick looked at her like she was crazy. “Time machine?”

  “Zak and Vince were trying to make one out of the phone and the globe.”

  Nick gaped at her. “That sounds like a really, really bad idea.”

  “Wait….If the Accelerati have the globe and the phone, then that must mean…” She couldn’t even say it out loud. Had the others been captured by Planck at Vince’s house? Had they ripped the battery away from Vince?

  As if reading her mind, Nick shook his head. “If they had the battery, I would know—Edison wouldn’t be able to shut up about it.”

  “But would Edison tell you if it also meant telling you that Vince was dead?”

  Nick hesitated, considering it. In the end he said, “The battery is the last piece they need to complete the machine. Everyone would be buzzing about it, even if Edison clammed up. I don’t believe they have it. Which means Vince and the others must have gotten away, somehow.”

  Caitlin wasn’t convinced, but she chose to trust Nick’s instincts.

  The voices continued to waft through the grate as Planck and Edison bickered about the perils of using the time machine before it had been properly tested with lives that were more expendable, and Edison kept pointing out the flaws in Planck’s plan, whatever that plan was. They heard Edison’s wheelchair creak as if he had shifted back in it, then he heaved another world-weary sigh.

  “If going into the past helps you find the stolen millions, you have my permission. But as for the other bit of nasty business, should you choose to do it, that’s entirely on your head.” Then he added, “Since it’s already happened, I don’t imagine I can stop you anyway.”

  Caitlin turned to Nick. “If Planck goes into the past, she can do anything….”

  Nick shook his head. “It’s not like that—she can’t do anything new. She can only become a part of what’s already happened.”

  Now Caitlin was catching on. “And if it’s already happened, then, like Edison said, we can’t stop her anyway.”

  As far as Caitlin and Nick were concerned, Ms. Planck’s taking a giant step backward in time would do nothing but get her out of their hair for a while. And that could only be a good thing. Right?

  Time paradoxes are a pain where the sun don’t shine—such as black holes and neutron stars, where the laws of physics break down entirely. They’re troublesome on Earth as well. Take, for instance, the vexing paradox that the Accelerati researchers had in building and testing the time machine.

  They had yet to turn it on when a vortex appeared in the lab and a chimpanzee ambled out of it, then looked at them as if to say, You got a problem with that?

  The researchers were deeply troubled and perplexed, until they realized this was the exact same chimpanzee they had been planning to use once the machine was ready for testing tomorrow. Now there were two of them.

  This proved that they would be successful in sending the chimpanzee back a day in time. All that remained was to actually get the machine to function…which posed yet another question:

  Now that they knew the chimpanzee had come back in time, what would happen if they decided not to send it through the time machine after all? Could they challenge reality and create their own time paradox?

  They found this question much more exciting than actual time travel. So, once they got the machine working, they refused to send the chimp, and then they waited to see if such a decision would bring about the end of the universe.

  While the researchers slept that night, the chimpanzee, extremely agitated by having to stare at himself in an adjacent cage, managed to undo his latch. He got out, banged randomly on the controls of the connected phone and globe, then stumbled into the vortex—thereby sending himself back a day in time, where he was forced to stare at himself again, but from the other cage.

  The next morning, when the scientists discovered evidence that the chimp had used the machine, this proved to their satisfaction that it is impossible to prevent something we already know must have happened in the future.

  This fact was not lost on Evangeline Planck. She understood the way these things worked—which is why she had held up an enlarged image of the end of the world for the future-predicting box camera two months earlier. In doing so she had prevented the world from actually having to come to an end in order for the camera to produce the photo.

  There was now something she had to do in the past. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she would go back in time and do it, because there was evidence of Accelerati involvement: specifically, one of their member pins had mysteriously turned up where none should have been. Ms. Planck understood that no matter how careful she was in carrying out this errand, she
would lose her pin at the scene.

  At the end of their conversation in Edison’s suite—which Ms. Planck never would have guessed could have been overheard—the Old Man had finally relented.

  “Since it’s already happened, I don’t imagine I can stop you anyway,” he said. Then he held out his hand and waited. He didn’t have to tell her what he was waiting for, because it was obvious to both of them. She pulled the ring off her finger and placed it in Edison’s wrinkled palm.

  “Hmm,” Edison said. “Not as heavy as I thought it would be.” Then he slipped it onto his own finger, barely able to get it over his knobby knuckle.

  She was expecting him to accompany her to the lab, but he didn’t budge from his spot. “If you do this, Evangeline,” he warned her, “you do it alone. I will have no part of it.”

  “Agreed.”

  But as she turned to go, he stopped her, wringing his fingers, apparently trying to wrap his aging brain around the principles of the fourth dimension.

  “If you were successful,” he pointed out, “wouldn’t you be back by now to tell us so? After taking the ‘long way home,’ as you put it, you would have walked in here days ago, like that chimp, to tell us of your success. Weeks ago, even. The fact that you haven’t already come back concerns me.”

  Ms. Planck offered a shrug. “Perhaps I’ll have better things to do in the past, and I’ll make my presence known tomorrow.” Actually, she was convinced that she would, in fact, have better things to do, and she went out the door without looking back.

  The way Edison saw it, her absence meant that her mission in the past had failed. But Evangeline Planck had a completely different view of the matter. Since she knew about the stolen money, and she’d be going back to a time before it was stolen, she reasoned that she must have been the one who stole it. And at this very moment, her future self (after a short jump to the past), would now be living on her own private island somewhere, with $750 million at her fingertips.

  What other possible explanation could there be?