Hawking's Hallway

  Before stealing that money, though, she had to take a brief side trip and do that one other thing—the thing Edison wanted no part of but also wasn’t about to stop.

  Alan Jorgenson was no longer in the loop, so he had no knowledge of the time machine in Edison’s laboratory. However, when he observed from the carriage-house window that Planck was on her way toward the lab alone, he knew that if he was going to end her miserable existence, this would probably be his last chance.

  Jorgenson crossed the grounds some distance behind her. Getting into the laboratory building was no problem, as he had borrowed Z’s key card at dinner (he couldn’t stand the fact that his own security clearance couldn’t get him into so much as an Accelerati bathroom). He knew the key card would come in handy; he just hadn’t realized how soon.

  Silently, he followed Planck to a lab on the second floor.

  He had brought with him a water pistol filled with a green hypobaric gel that would create a high-pressure zone around anything it coated, and thus would cause Evangeline Planck’s head to implode. As anyone can tell you, imploding heads are far less messy than exploding ones.

  But as it turned out, he would not need the deadly gel, because she was standing in front of what appeared to be a very convenient vortex of death. It annoyed him that the Accelerati had created a vortex of death in his absence, when he had struggled so hard and so long to create one himself.

  She looked up at him with a start. “Alan, what are you doing here? And why are you holding a water gun? If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were planning to shoot me with hypobaric gel.” Then she smiled. “Luckily for me, I refilled all of Edison’s hypobaric gel containers with mint jelly. So, unless you’re planning to serve me some lamb, I’d lower your weapon.”

  Jorgenson tried to hide his irritation as he obeyed. “I merely thought we had an intruder.” He gestured toward the pulsing vortex. “May I ask what that thing is?”

  “It’s called the Great Nexus of None of Your Business. Now please leave, before I have you forcibly removed. Preferably in pieces.”

  At that moment, Alan Jorgenson knew exactly what he had to do. He raised the water pistol again and squirted mint jelly into Planck’s face.

  She screamed and clawed at her eyes. “Yagh! The mint! It stings! It stings!”

  She stumbled, and Jorgenson wasted no time. He strode toward her, grabbed her shoulders, and shoved her into the vortex. Oddly, she offered no resistance whatsoever.

  The vortex disappeared and, just like that, Planck was gone.

  Jorgenson wiped up the globs of incriminating jelly and left, satisfied that Planck was history…

  …not knowing that, technically, she now was.

  Forty-some-odd miles away, in Princeton, New Jersey, Wayne Slate carried his moaning son into the emergency room.

  “Help us!” he shouted. “My son fell off his bike and hit his head!”

  Although there were no contusions or abrasions visible on the boy, the way his eyes had rolled into his head suggested some kind of brain trauma. And what father would lie about such a thing?

  They lectured Wayne about the importance of helmets, and prepped Danny for a CAT scan of the brain.

  “No!” his father insisted. “He needs an MRI.”

  The attending nurse was used to panicked parents in the emergency room, and she tried, gently, to reason with him. “Sir, a CAT scan is standard procedure, and—”

  “I couldn’t care less about standard procedure!” Mr. Slate insisted. “I don’t want my son exposed to radiation.”

  “I assure you,” said the nurse, keeping her calm, “it’s perfectly safe. The radiation levels of a CAT scan are well within accepted limits.”

  “No! I want him to have an MRI.”

  The nurse took a deep breath. “After the CAT scan, if further tests are indicated, I’m sure the doctor will call for an MRI.”

  Mr. Slate crossed his arms. “I know my rights! You can’t force him to have a CAT scan against my will. My son is having an MRI.”

  The nurse took another deep breath then let it out, realizing this was just not an argument worth having.

  “All right, but if your insurance doesn’t cover it—”

  “That’s my problem,” said Mr. Slate.

  And she left to find a doctor to order the test.

  MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging and is a common medical procedure that gives doctors a peek inside the human body through a combination of powerful magnetic fields and bursts of radio waves.

  The MRI machine is also well known for its loud, irritating, and sometimes frightening thumping noises.

  Less well known is the unit of measurement for the magnetic output of an MRI: magnetic fields are measured in “teslas.”

  The standard MRI’s magnetic field equals 1.5 teslas. So the question was, how many teslas would it take to defeat an Accelerati mind-block?

  Needless to say, Danny Slate had not been in an accident. Danny could never claim to be the world’s best actor, but his father had given him great direction.

  “Just behave like you do when you’re trying to convince me you’re too sick to go to school.”

  Danny’s experience on the beach with the metal detector had been mind opening—but whatever memory the magnetic field had released was once again trapped the moment the metal detector moved away. What they needed was a magnetic field powerful enough not just to open the door of memory, but to rip it off its hinges.

  All they had to go by were the words Danny had scrawled on a napkin: I have a brother and his name is Nick. That napkin would still have been hanging on their refrigerator had they not taken all the kitchen magnets and affixed them to their heads with duct tape a few days earlier, trying to create a large enough magnetic field.

  Realizing that this was neither effective nor a particularly attractive fashion statement, Mr. Slate had come up with another plan.

  “Your son doesn’t have any metal stents or rods in his body, does he?” the MRI technician asked Mr. Slate as they prepped Danny. “Because the magnetic field this baby puts out is unbelievably strong.”

  “No, no, nothing metal,” Mr. Slate assured him.

  “Dad, I’m scared,” Danny said, which was genuine. Being shoved headfirst into a giant steel donut is no one’s idea of fun.

  “Don’t worry,” said the technician cheerfully. “It doesn’t hurt or anything. It’s just a two-ton electromagnet spinning around your head.”

  Danny just whimpered.

  “It is pretty loud, though,” continued the technician, and he gave Danny plastic noise-canceling headphones, which played country music. This, to Danny, a boy raised on classic rock, was much more offensive than the noise of the machine.

  The moment the MRI started, images and memories began to flood Danny’s mind, as if some magnetically sealed door in his brain had flown open. Everything came back to him. Everything.

  Nick’s garage sale. Nick’s room in the attic. Nick saving him on the baseball field from the asteroid Danny had pulled out of the sky. And finally, the memory of the attic rising above the rest of the house and being struck by lightning.

  All the memories were there. They hadn’t been erased, just suppressed—probably by that guy in the vanilla suit. Danny wished he could write it all down, but he was immobilized in the machine.

  When the MRI was over and the conveyer spit him out, it was as if the Accelerati’s spell had been broken. The intense magnetic field had wiped out his mind-block.

  He still remembered.

  As soon as they removed the straps from his forehead, he sat up and called out to his father, who was waiting just outside the room, “Dad, I remember! They have Nick! They took him. We have to save him!”

  The technician looked at him, not quite sure what to make of this. And he was equally confused by the way they ran out, not just leaving the MRI suite, but fleeing from the hospital altogether.

  Ten minutes later, they showed up at another hospital
across town. This time it was Mr. Slate who was suffering from head trauma and desperately in need of an MRI.

  After business tycoon J. P. Morgan pulled the plug on Tesla’s funding in 1903, Wardenclyffe Tower and the surrounding property were foreclosed on by Tesla’s creditors. The tower was torn down, and Tesla’s laboratory building remained vacant for years. Eventually it was sold, and for half a century, it was used for the production of photographic paper, until it was abandoned once again, and the entire property disappeared behind a thicket of brambles, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle (if Sleeping Beauty’s castle had been rat infested and covered with graffiti).

  In 2013, Nikola Tesla’s lab was saved from demolition by a nonprofit organization that planned to turn the property into a science museum dedicated to his memory—but that plan was derailed by the Accelerati, who purchased the land out from under them for their own undisclosed purposes.

  People in the quaint neighborhood around the abandoned property generally ignored it. Few of the nearby residents knew that this was the very location where Tesla had made his greatest stand for a worldwide free-energy system—and failed.

  When construction finally began on the site, it piqued local curiosity—especially as the girders rose higher and higher, quickly making the resurrected Wardenclyffe Tower the tallest structure in town.

  Yet, for some reason, the local newspaper had never mentioned it.

  The Accelerati didn’t completely control the media, but they did manage to manipulate it. Much like acupuncture, they stuck pins in just the right people and in just the right places to either grant them more attention than they deserved or create a diversion when necessary.

  So the new Wardenclyffe Tower became, for the town of Shoreham, New York, one of those things that people pay no attention to, because it doesn’t concern them.

  Within the gates, the activity went on 24/7. A truck arrived with carefully packed crates filled with objects that could have been sold as junk, and actually once were, but had now been gathered, studied, and shipped here to be reintegrated into the grandest machine humankind had ever known.

  The first taste, Edison had decided, would indeed be free, just as Tesla had wanted. And once all the other utility companies had crumbled and the world was completely dependent on his source of power, he would demand high fees from every user, and they would have no choice but to pay them.

  Thus was the way of the world, as Edison saw it. Business is business. “Free” is never really free. It is merely a means to a more lucrative end.

  There were powerful forces converging on Wardenclyffe Tower. Fourteen, to be exact—although seven of them were the various versions of Nick. The first force to arrive was already perched atop the tower, high above Shoreham. BeatNick, who was sent to infiltrate the site and gather intelligence, had a small lead on everyone else. He was working under an assumed name, and now looked out over the Long Island Sound, wondering when the others would arrive.

  In addition to the nearly completed tower on which he stood, there were several other, much smaller, connected structures elsewhere in town. He could only see a couple of them from the tower, but he knew there were seven. They were squat stone buildings, each no larger than a garden shed. They had been here for more than a hundred years, and as such were just part of the landscape. The community assumed they were old utility substations that either still did their jobs and thus could be ignored, or served no modern purpose whatsoever, and thus could be ignored even more. Now, however, the little buildings were being restored as a key part of the Wardenclyffe reconstruction project.

  Their purpose was kept from the construction crews, and the crews didn’t really care; they were just doing a job. BeatNick, however, knew exactly what they were, as he had recently been part of the welding team on building seven. They were the entrances to the seven tunnels that converged beneath Wardenclyffe Tower—just like the ones under his old house in Colorado Springs.

  “Back to work, Farnsworth!” shouted the foreman when he saw BeatNick gazing out at the view. “You’re not being paid to sightsee.”

  BeatNick lowered his protective visor and returned to welding the panels of the platform into place. His forged documents said he was a Certified Welding Engineer. And the Accelerati were, of course, Certified Geniuses…which meant that none of them had the hands-on construction experience to handle or manage the building of the tower. They therefore had to bid out the project as a regular construction job. To the local subcontractors, Nick’s bogus skill set was in high demand.

  On his first day, he’d been lucky just to avoid burning a hole in himself. It wasn’t easy to mask his huge learning curve at a job he’d never been trained for—especially a dangerous one like welding. He quickly got the hang of it, though, and could soon pass for the real thing. He imagined that if he failed to reintegrate with his other selves, and if the world didn’t end before the F.R.E.E. was finished, he could have a future in this trade.

  Once the foreman had gone back down in the gantry elevator, BeatNick looked back toward the little stone structures masking the tunnel entrances. The rusted, moldy interiors of all the structures were being restored with stainless-steel walls and floodgates over the tunnel entrances.

  But the floodgate covering tunnel seven, he secretly knew, had been so poorly welded that it would only take a tug to pull it open at the right moment, allowing him and the six other Nicks to gather beneath Wardenclyffe Tower where the seven tunnels met.

  The second force to arrive at Wardenclyffe was Petula, who watched the final stages of the tower’s construction as a full member of the Accelerati upper tier, in a brand-new shimmering spider-silk suit. A lavender one.

  Before Ms. Planck’s unexplained disappearance, she had promoted Petula as a reward for having located the globe. This had even fulfilled one of Petula’s lifelong ambitions: to have minions.

  “Bring me a cold beverage.”

  “Yes, Miss Grabowski-Jones.”

  “Go to the nearest five-star restaurant, and order me something that’s not on the menu.”

  “Yes, Miss Grabowski-Jones.”

  “I’m bored. Amuse me.”

  “Yes, Miss Grabowski-Jones.”

  Her underlings were tireless in fulfilling her unreasonable requests. And she hated them for it. She missed the fury-inducing rush of not getting what she wanted.

  But mostly she hated the fact that all of this, especially her life, would go away when Edison found out that she had sent Vince to Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America, rather than ripping him free from his battery and presenting the device to the Accelerati. But what else could she have done, now that she had a very fresh and unfortunate perspective on everything?

  Nick Slate was Nikola Tesla.

  Kinda sorta.

  It was heady and dizzying to know something that not even Edison knew. And she still wasn’t sure how she could use the information to her advantage. First she had to ascertain exactly what it meant. There were only four possibilities she could imagine:

  Nick had been cloned from a random bit of Tesla’s DNA.

  Once Nick reintegrated, he would go back in time to become Nikola Tesla.

  Nick was actually an android modeled after the inventor; or

  This was all a dream and she’d wake up in her bedroom and be very, very annoyed.

  Theory number one seemed unlikely, as Tesla had died with virtually no possessions and his remains were cremated, leaving absolutely no DNA from which to clone him. Theory number two was equally unlikely, because plenty of evidence existed, both photographic and written, to prove that Tesla was raised in Serbia. Since Nick didn’t speak Serbian, it would be impossible for him to pass as the inventor, even if he’d wanted to.

  Number three was also unlikely, because if he were a robot, like Mrs. Higgenbotham, he couldn’t have been divided into seven ages of himself.

  Which left number four, the dream, and that was just too depressing to think about.

&nbs
p; It was all so maddening, it just made her want to send her minions on even more unreasonable excursions.

  She looked up at the tower before her. The girders were already in place and the circular platform at its top almost completed. A caged elevator clinging to the central shaft would soon lift every piece of the F.R.E.E. to the platform, where it would be assembled. Every piece, that is, but the battery.

  I complete the circuit, she thought, and she wondered if that meant she would have to go and retrieve Vince to make the thing work, in spite of everything.

  It made her wish that this was a dream after all. But she knew she was not that lucky.

  The next group of not-so-random forces traveled in a subset of six—a journey made possible by the combination of a daring e-mail and a staggering electronic wire transfer.

  Most beloved greetings. I represent His Highness, Prince Zakia Thuku of West Zenobia.

  His Royal Highness and a small collection of friends wish to fly from the Colorado Springs to the Long Island of New York. We therefore request to charter one of your private jets.

  Toward this end, we have already wired sixty-thousand dollars ($60,000), which is twice your advertised price, into your business account. We expect the plane and crew to be ready by fifteen hundred hours today (3:00 PM in your odd American measurement of time) at your hangar facility at the Municipal Airport of the Colorado Springs, along with a variety of refreshments, a moderately sized lunch buffet, and a multitude of beautiful women.

  With great and kindly thankfulness,

  Murmitch Ló,

  Royal Attaché of West Zenobia

  “Hmm,” said Zak. “Maybe take out the beautiful women part.”

  “Do I have to?” asked Mitch.

  “Well, the rest of the stuff they can probably scrounge up by three. But a harem, aside from being degrading to women, would probably take at least until five, and we don’t have that kind of time. Plus, we’d need a bigger plane.”