Edison’s Alley
Neal Shusterman
Text copyright © 2015 by Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman
Cover illustration © 2015 by Cliff Nielsen
Cover design by Maria Elias
All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.
ISBN 978-1-4231-5518-8
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1. Relativistic Cheese
2. Fat Man Floating
3. Teslanoid Objects
4. The Epic Spectacle of the Human Fail
5. Undeaditude
6. Of Lobsters and Lunch Ladies
7. Shell Game
8. “We Both Know You Did That on Purpose”
9. All Things That Fall
10. Black Holes and Gray’s Anatomy
11. The Alternative Is Terrifying
12. Good-Bye Kitty
13. Walking the Planck
14. Hold That Thought
15. String Theory
16. Harp Failure
17. Freeze!
18. Edison’s Alley
19. A Club, a Pole, or a Stick
20. Laptops and Tablets and Phones, Oh My
21. Bagels and Lochs
22. No Idiot
23. Powerless
24. Ruh-Roh
25. Deep Hoodoo
26. Agent of Pane
27. Cowardly New World
28. A Dog That Didn’t Get Hit by a Truck
29. Earwax-Deep
30. The Hiss of a Thousand Snakes
31. The Gods of Power
32. Mysterious Errand
33. Quid Pro Quo
34. Somewhere in New Jersey
About the Authors
To all the teachers and librarians out there making a difference in kids’ lives
—N.S.
For the science teachers who inspired me, and all the teachers who encouraged me, and for Jan, Robby, and Mom
—E.E.
Dr. Alan Jorgenson, undisputed commander and chief of the Accelerati, rang the doorbell of the old house, ready to meet with his superior—because in this world, even the boss has a boss. While one may presume to be the big cheese, there is always a larger, more pungent one to contend with.
And as big cheeses go, few could be more pungent than the one who gave Jorgenson his marching orders.
The housekeeper opened the door and beamed at him as he stepped in. “A right pleasure to see you, Mr. Jorgenson,” she said.
“Doctor Jorgenson,” he corrected.
“Yes, yes, ’ow silly of me.”
Jorgenson looked around. The house hadn’t changed in years. It never did. There was comfort in that for an agent of change like himself. Knowing that some things were forever gave him a bit of grounding.
“’E’s been waiting for you, ’e ’as,” the housekeeper said with a pronounced cockney accent, as if she’d been dragged from the gutters of industrial England.
To the best of Jorgenson’s knowledge, the housekeeper had never been to England, much less come from there. If anything, she should’ve had a Germanic sensibility, as her gearworks had come from a fine watch factory in Düsseldorf. Her owner, even though he was American, preferred a British touch to his domestic life. Even the air in the house smelled of musty Victorian sensibility.
“’E’s in the parlor. Would you like a spot of tea, dear? I ’ave some nice Oolongevity, or English breakfast.”
“Just water will be fine, Mrs. Higgenbotham.”
“Would you prefer your water transdimensionally filtered, or just from the tap?”
“Tap will do, thank you.”
“Quantum-chilled or—”
“Just bring it.”
“As you wish, guv’nor.”
The parlor, as always, was dark. The aged man in the tall red leather chair was surrounded by his perpetual cloud of cigar smoke. “Good evening, Al,” he said.
Jorgenson sat down. “And to you, Al,” he said back.
Such was their standard greeting.
Jorgenson waited for his eyes to adjust to the dimness, but he knew they never would, so low was the light. What irony, thought Jorgenson, that this man, a luminary, would come to despise light. Or perhaps he just couldn’t bear to see luminaries who shone even brighter than he.
“I suppose I should congratulate you,” the old man said, “for the fact that your team’s incompetence did not bring about the end of the world.”
Jorgenson grimaced as he recalled the massive asteroid that had come so close to wiping out all life on Earth only a few weeks earlier. “I take full responsibility for that debacle.”
“Noble of you to accept the blame,” the old man said from within his cloud of smoke, “but there were other forces at play. It was out of your control from the beginning.”
For Jorgenson, the idea of anything being out of his control was like a slap in the face. Yet he had to admit that even with a mass of technology, money, and influence at his fingertips, he could not have affected the Felicity Bonk incident. “This Nick Slate boy and his friends are shrewder than we gave them credit for.”
“Yes, the boy,” the old man said with a sigh. “We will deal with him when the time comes. An honor I shall leave to you.”
Jorgenson smiled. “Believe me, it will be my pleasure.”
“But only when the time comes. In the meantime, there are other things to consider—”
At the creak of a floorboard, Jorgenson turned to see Mrs. Higgenbotham walk in with a glass of water that had hardened into ice the color of a glacier. “We’re ’avin’ trouble with the quantum-coolin’ thingamajig. But you know what they say: ‘When everything is right with the world, even squirrels sing.’ And who wants singin’ squirrels?” She patted him on the shoulder. “It’ll melt eventually.”
“Don’t you find it curious,” the old man asked, once the housekeeper had left, “that the Bonk asteroid has settled into an orbit as stable as the moon’s?”
Jorgenson knew where this was going, but he played along anyway. “Some call it luck. Some say it’s divine intervention—”
The old man waved his hand at the very suggestion. Smoke eddied in a lazy whirlpool. “It is neither, and you know it. Rather it is part of a plan—a very human plan—devised by a great mind. Unfortunately, that mind was not great enough to know what was good for it.” Then the old man smiled. “Which is why we will be reaping the benefits of Tesla’s greatest endeavor.” He pointed his cigar at Jorgenson. “In the short term, it is your efforts that will make all the difference, however.”
Then the old man blew smoke with such force that it bridged the distance between them, filling Jorgenson’s nostrils and stinging his eyes. “I expect you, as the head of the Accelerati, to impress me,” the old man said, with a fair measure of threat in his voice. “I will settle for nothing less.”
Jorgenson gripped his chair as if it might fly out from under him. “And in the long term?” he asked. “I suspect you have a plan of your own, do you not?”
“I do,” said the old man, leaning forward for the first time. “A spectacular one.”
The world had not ended…which was very inconvenient.
Celestial Object Felicity Bonk—the unlikely name of the asteroid that had been on a collision course with Earth—rather than obliterating life as we know it, could now be seen in the night sky. It wa
s nowhere near the size of the moon, of course, but it appeared larger than a planet.
After a brief period of celebration lasting less than a week, the world returned to its pre-Bonk patterns. The horrors of war, oppression, and reality TV, all of which might have been ended by the well-placed meteor strike, were back in force, and Nick Slate was left having to unscrew the massive screwup that had brought everything to the brink of extinction. He was taking that responsibility seriously.
Slowly but surely, Nick and his friends were gathering the strange objects that Nick had sold in his garage sale a few weeks ago and returning them to his attic. Today’s recovery mission was going to be a challenge. It would require Nick and his friend Caitlin’s combined powers of persuasion, iron wills, and most likely, money that they didn’t have.
“How certain are you that this is the same man from your garage sale?” Caitlin asked as she and Nick approached a house overgrown with unpruned hedges and low-limbed trees.
“I could be wrong,” Nick told her, “but I do remember a loud fat guy at the garage sale, and this dude certainly fits the bill.”
Caitlin glared at him. “It’s cruel and insensitive to call a person who is morbidly obese a ‘fat guy.’ I have an uncle who struggles with that, and I can tell you, it’s not an easy cross to bear.”
“Sorry,” Nick said. To look at Caitlin, he couldn’t imagine anyone in her family being anything but beautiful and slender, or at least well groomed and proportional. “I’d call him a ‘large gentleman,’ but there’s nothing gentlemanly about him. He’s a creep, at any poundage.”
Caitlin nodded and sighed. “Creeps do come in all shapes and sizes.”
Nick had run into him at the grocery store, where the man was bitterly arguing with the store manager over the price of a casaba melon. Nick had seen him switch a product code sticker from a less expensive piece of fruit. Although he could have ratted the man out, he let it play through, all the while awed by the guy’s audacity and the fact that any human being would get into a fight over a melon. Something about the way he bickered made Nick remember how one customer had aggressively haggled over the price of an item in his now-notorious garage sale. He realized that this was the same quarrelsome dude.
“Do you remember what he bought?” Caitlin asked. Both of them were hesitant to walk up to the man’s front door.
“I can’t be sure,” Nick said, “but I think it was a weight machine.”
When one holds a garage sale, one never expects to see the junk sold to unsuspecting neighbors ever again. But when the garage-sale items are the lost inventions of the world’s greatest scientist, the word “oops” doesn’t begin to cover it.
Perhaps if Tesla hadn’t disguised them all as normal household objects, Nick might have had a clue that the things in his attic each had a greater purpose. Now Nick understood that the inventor hadn’t wanted them to be discovered by the secret society of scientists known as the Accelerati. But Nick hadn’t known that at the time, and the inventions had been dispersed into the world to wreak their peculiar sort of havoc.
And yet Nick had to wonder, in spite of the clear and present danger the objects posed, if there was also a method to the madness. Perhaps everything that had happened was part of the inventor’s master plan.
For instance, his brother unwittingly pulled an asteroid into a collision course with Earth using a cosmic attractor disguised as a baseball mitt. Could it be coincidence that his father had swung a celestial deflector disguised as a baseball bat?
Nick knew that each of the items sold in his garage sale had to be retrieved, but he also suspected that they needed to be out in the world as well—at least for a short time—because the people whose lives these objects touched were also, somehow, part of Tesla’s grand mechanism. Nick found it somewhat irritating to be manipulated by a long-dead genius, but at the same time he was comforted by the thought that he might be the central cog in a machine that was crafting something truly worthwhile.
He and Caitlin had figured out that the inventions all fit together to form a larger one—the Far Range Energy Emitter, or F.R.E.E., which had been Tesla’s life’s work. They were the only ones who had figured that out. Exactly what the F.R.E.E. would do when it was complete was anyone’s guess. All Nick knew was that he felt the need to complete it.
As they approached the casaba melon man’s house, Nick began to hear a rhythmic clanking of metal on metal—a sound that anyone who has been to a gym would recognize.
“He’s in there,” Nick said. “He’s using the weight machine.”
Caitlin grabbed him before he got too close to the door, a shadow of fear crossing her face. “What do you suppose the machine does?”
Nick didn’t want to speculate, because if he did, he might never go in.
“We’ll know soon enough” was all he said.
Instead of going straight to the front door, they decided to do a little reconnaissance. Quietly they made their way through the dense weeds and brush on the side of the house. When they neared the window, they could feel their hair standing on end. As it would turn out, there was a reason for that.
“Boost me up so I can see,” Caitlin said. Nick lowered his hands, interlacing his fingers to give her a step up, and then hoisted her higher.
He anticipated Caitlin’s weight as he lifted her, but he thought he must have miscalculated, because he found her surprisingly light. It would turn out there was a reason for that, too.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“I see the machine,” she said. “It’s right there in the middle of the room, but…”
“But what?”
“No one’s there.”
“What do you mean no one’s there? I can hear someone pumping iron.”
“That’s what I mean. The machine is doing it all by itself.”
Suddenly the window flew open, and Caitlin was pulled out of Nick’s hands and into the house by the home’s large occupant.
“Caitlin!” Nick shouted.
A moment later, a hand reached out, grabbed Nick by the hair, and, with what appeared to be superhuman strength, Nick was hauled off his feet and through the window.
First came an intense feeling of disorientation. Caitlin, Nick, and the casaba man tumbled, but they didn’t quite fall. Nick hit a wall and dislodged a framed photograph, but the photo didn’t fall either. Instead it floated, flipping end over end until it bumped the ceiling and bounced off.
All at once Nick got it. He looked up, which was actually down, and saw the old-fashioned weight machine, its piston pumping, its cables straining. This was a weight machine in a very literal sense. It was an antigravity device that made everything around it weightless—which explained why Caitlin felt so light just beyond the edge of the antigravity field, and why their hair had been standing on end. Each clang of metal on metal created a wave of energy—invisible, but Nick could feel it pulsing through his gut, his ears, and his eyes.
“You think I don’t know who you are? You think I don’t know you’ve been spying on me?” The man’s voice boomed with the same irate tone he had used when arguing with the supermarket manager. He was, indeed, very large—even more so, it seemed, with his mass unfettered by Earth’s gravity. He pushed Nick, and both of them went flying in opposite directions, although Nick went much faster.
Caitlin tried to grab the man but couldn’t. She just floated past him, frantically moving her arms and legs as if trying to swim in midair.
Nick hit a beam in the vaulted ceiling, and he yelped in pain. Even weightless, he still had enough inertia for it to hurt. That’s when Caitlin, who had reached the far wall, flung herself into action. She pushed off from the wall, becoming a human projectile aimed right at the man in the middle of the room. He, however, was much more adept at maneuvering in free fall. With a single flick of his wrist, he shifted his entire body to avoid her, and then he flew to the far corner, where he peered down at them—or up—like a spider from the center of its web.
He was an intimidating figure floating in the heart of his lair, holding on to a handle that had been bolted to a crossbeam in the ceiling. Nick looked around and saw that similar handles had been strategically affixed to the walls and ceiling so the man could maneuver weightlessly through the house.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to struggle with weight all your life, and then find yourself free from it entirely? You can’t possibly imagine how liberating that is. And I won’t let you steal that from me!” He launched himself once more at Nick, grabbed him, and hurled him across the room again.
Nick spun, and his shoulder painfully hit the weight machine. He ricocheted off of it and, mercifully, found himself hitting a sofa that had been secured to the floor. He wanted to stay there, but the sofa acted like a trampoline and bounced him toward the ceiling.
“Please,” said Caitlin, “just hear us out.”
“Words have no weight here either,” the man said. “Especially yours!”
Nick hit the ceiling again, but this time he was able to grab one of the handles and steady himself.
“We’re not going to lie to you,” Nick said. “We need the machine back.”
“We’re willing to pay,” Caitlin said, which just made the man laugh.
“Do you think I’m an idiot? There isn’t enough money in the world to pay what this thing is worth!”
“We know,” Nick told him, and then he went out on a limb. “But let’s talk about you. Ever since you turned that machine on, living without it has become harder and harder, hasn’t it?”
The man pursed his lips into a thin scowl. “You don’t know anything,” he growled.
Nick continued. “When the machine is off, you weigh even more than you did before. Your arms are weak, your legs are weaker, and you can barely move, which is why you’re so angry in the outside world. You’re constantly exhausted…so you go out less and less.”
“That has nothing to do with it!” the man shouted. He no longer looked like a spider in his web, but a cornered creature.
It wasn’t too difficult for Nick to figure out what was happening to the man. When you’re weightless, you don’t use your muscles. When you don’t use your muscles, you don’t burn calories. The guy was building mass at an alarming rate.
