Hawking's Hallway by Neal Shusterman
THE ACCELERATI TRILOGY
Tesla’s Attic
Edison’s Alley
Hawking’s Hallway
Text copyright © 2016 by Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman
Chapter opening illustrations by Owen Richardson
Cover illustration © 2016 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 978-1-4231-5522-5
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Contents
Title Page
Books in the Accelerati Trilogy
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1. A House Drowns in Scotland
2. The Wicked Stepmother of Invention
3. Chicken or Fish?
4. Recipes for Disaster
5. Oh, the Humanity
6. Your Morbid Preoccupation with Nessie
7. Fries with That?
8. Weirdly Weird in a Weird Kind of Way
9. A Weebee Cloister-Feebee
10. Memory of a Memory
11. Have You Seen This Boy?
12. Haiku Tub Zone
13. A Is Not for Achievement
14. The Supervillain Spectrum
15. Silver Linings
16. A Game of Jersey Hold’em
17. Mental Detector
18. A Singularity of Purpose
19. Honk If You Love Tesla
20. Anything but Wonderland
21. Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick & Nick
22. Petula, Offensive
23. Your Party Is Not Available
24. The Iceman Screameth
25. Don’t Even Think About It….
26. Gravity of a Gaseous Giant
27. The Ends of the Earth
28. You Will Not Always Be Necessary
29. The Dread Finger of Doom
30. Genie of the Coat
31. A Very Close Shave
32. The Idea of Being Permanently Dead
33. How Tasty Is Thy Eel
34. Heads Will Roll
35. That Minty-Fresh Feeling
36. A Two-Ton Electromagnet Spinning Around Your Head.
37. Convergence at Wardenclyffe
38. A Quantum of Accelerati
39. The Space Between Us
40. The New York Nicks
41. Struja
42. Our Unique Condition
43. Have I Caught You at a Bad Time?
44. The Ring of Power
45. A Clockwork Lemon
46. Creating Reality
47. Hawking’s Hallway
48. City of Light
49. The Long Way Home
50. Meanwhile, in 1856
51. A New Shade of Normal
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
In memory of Mari Lou Laso Elders,
a good friend and great writer.
We’ll miss you, Mari Lou.
—N.S.
For all the writers I’ve met and read and worked with and learned from, and for my mom, for Robby, and always for Jan
—E.E.
Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.
—Stephen Hawking
The woman realized she was in trouble the moment she saw the boy at her front door. It was the kid from the garage sale. She screamed and slammed the door in his face.
She had never heard of Nikola Tesla, and had no idea who this boy was. All she knew was that he had sold her something that allowed her to travel in ways she never dreamed possible.
She’d found out quite by accident how the strange globe worked. On the silver arc that held the globe in place, there was a movable arrow. She had rotated the globe and lined up the arrow with Turkey—one of the many exotic places she wished she could visit, but never had. Then she pressed a button on the base that she thought was a light.
She found herself instantly transported to the Istanbul Grand Bazaar. Beside her was the table holding the globe, and beneath her a perfectly circular section of her parquet floor, about four feet in diameter, which had been shorn away by the teleportation field.
A Turkish salesman, unfazed by her sudden appearance, offered to sell her a teapot.
She screamed, hit a second button marked only with an exclamation point, and found herself back home where she’d started…except she, and the table, and the section of floor fell through a perfectly circular hole into her basement.
Rattled but unbroken, she quickly surmised what the globe could do. And her first order of business had been to go back for that teapot.
Since then, she had made jaunts to Spain, Switzerland, China, and even Antarctica, just so she could say she’d been.
She had been contemplating a long-overdue return to her native Scotland when the boy from the garage sale appeared.
Whether he was an angel, a demon, or just some laddie with a magic globe didn’t matter. All that mattered was not letting him take it back.
In her panic, she hit the globe’s button to escape his incessant knocking. She didn’t realize the teleportation field was set to its widest diameter.
For an instant, she didn’t think anything had happened. She was still standing in her house. Then water—very cold water—began to gush in from every window and doorway.
It didn’t take long for her to realize that she had transported her entire house to Scotland, and it had materialized on the surface of one of Scotland’s many infamous lochs.
The lochs of Scotland are known for being unusually deep, unusually murky, and unusual in general. And, as luck would have it, this particular loch was rumored to be home to a monster affectionately known to the locals as “Nessie.”
Unlike ships, which may take hours to sink, a randomly teleported house sinks with remarkable speed and single-minded determination. The house desired nothing more than to be at the bottom of the lake at its earliest possible convenience.
With her transplanted home foundering, the woman forgot anything unrelated to survival. She was not a strong swimmer, but adrenaline can turn even an elderly widow into Wonder Woman.
Fighting the surge of icy water, she climbed upon her floating sofa. There was no way to get out of the first-floor windows, because the lake was pouring in. Not even a salmon could fight that current.
Instead she paddled her way to the staircase, which was leaning at a fun-house angle. Then she made her way to the second floor, and hurled herself out of her bedroom window into the lake.
It was only when she surfaced and looked back that the terror of it all struck her. Her little suburban house, where she had spent the past twenty-some-odd years of her life, was bubbling out its last breath. In a moment, only the roof remained above water, then just the chimney, and finally that was gone in a churning of bubbling white.
And then she remembered. “The globe!”
She could bear the loss of everything else, but not that.
Just then she heard—or more accurately felt—something behind her, moving across the surface of the water. Struggling to stay afloat, she turned, fully expecting to see the dark, inscrutable eyes of a hungry plesiosaurus. Instead, she saw a small fishing boat.
“Hoy! What’s all this, then? You all right there, ma’am?” called an old fisherman.
She tried to answer, but with all her adrenaline spent, she felt herself going down. The fisherman reached out, and
“So what brings ye to Loch Ness?” the fisherman asked. “And in a house?”
Since the tale was a little tall for the moment, she let her chattering teeth be her only answer.
He put his arm around her to stop her shivering. “There, there,” said the aging fisherman. “My cottage is right there on the shore. You’ll be safe and warm in no time.”
And it occurred to her that this was, in fact, her dream. Not the teleporting-in-a-house-and-almost-drowning part, but the being-in-the-arms-of-a-fisherman-in-the-wilds-of-Scotland part.
She was unaware that life on Earth was about to be threatened by an asteroid, followed by a massive electrical disaster.
All she knew was that she was where she wanted to be, and that the globe, whatever it was, now rested at the bottom of one of the world’s deepest lakes, lost forever.
Or not.
Welcome to Loyal Order of the Accelerati,” Thomas Edison told Nick Slate. He extended a 170-year-old hand for Nick to shake.
Nick grimaced as his hand clutched Edison’s. It wasn’t just Nick’s burn wounds that made him wince. Even through Nick’s bandage, shaking hands with the man was like holding moist papier-mâché an hour short of drying.
Edison seemed amused by Nick’s response but said nothing of it. He grabbed a little bell from the antique rosewood end table in his antique Victorian home and rang for his housekeeper. She appeared quickly, as if she’d been waiting just outside the door, always at the old man’s beck and call, which, in fact, she was.
“Mrs. Higgenbotham, show Master Slate to his accommodations.”
“More than ’appy to,” she said in her thick cockney accent. “It’s been a long time since we’ve ’ad anyone in the guest room.”
Nick followed her up the stairs, relieved to be, at least for the moment, out of the ancient inventor’s presence.
The woman led him to a small bedroom filled with furniture that his grandmother’s grandmother might have liked, and wallpaper that seemed straight out of an old ice-cream parlor.
“’Ere we are,” said Mrs. Higgenbotham, and then she just stood there smiling at him, happy to let the moment become awkward.
“So,” said Nick, “how does it feel to be a robot working for an evil genius?”
“First of all,” said Mrs. Higgenbotham, “Mr. Edison isn’t evil, ’e’s morally ambiguous. All the greats in ’istory were. Charlemagne. Queen Elizabeth. Michael Jackson. And second, I don’t fancy being called a robot. It’s an oversimplification. I am an anthropomorphic servo-automaton. Although that is a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? I’d call myself an android, but I don’t want to be confused with a phone. Although I am a phone. But you really don’t want to access that function, dearie. It’s not a pretty sight.”
She clasped her hands and smiled warmly. “Will there be anything else? Some tea, perhaps, or a raspberry scone?”
“No, thank you,” said Nick.
“’Ow about a nice, tall sarsaparilla?”
Since Nick had no idea what that was, he said, “Another time.”
“As you wish, dearie. As you wish. I’ll be back in about an hour to change the dressings on your poor hands.” And she left Nick to ponder his situation.
A secret society of scientists was blackmailing him into reconstructing Tesla’s greatest invention. If he succeeded, it would harness the limitless energy being generated by a copper asteroid that was now a natural satellite, orbiting the earth like the moon. But all that power would be in the hands of the Accelerati, to do with as they pleased.
Nick removed the little pin from his lapel and looked at the golden A crossed by a figure eight. He was Accelerati now. He’d had no choice but to join the organization in order to save his father and brother—Edison had made that clear. But that didn’t mean Nick had to like it. Yet his deepest fear, too deep perhaps for him to even be aware of, was that he would.
It is said that necessity is the mother of invention, but, sadly, she is often a mother who dies in childbirth. Instead, invention is usually raised by its wicked stepmother: greed.
Nick Slate was no more immune to greed than anyone else. He would take the last jelly bean in the jar before his brother could, for instance, and he would scoop out the last spoonful of Ben & Jerry’s while nobody was looking.
On the other hand, he was just as likely to offer half his sandwich to some random kid who’d left his lunch at home that day, or give his skateboard to a kid whose family, he happened to know, was living in a garage.
Human nature is a dance between self-interest and generosity of spirit. Now that Nick was in the bosom of the Accelerati, he was doing that dance on hot coals.
Bright and early the next morning, Nick was summoned to join Edison at the lab.
The fact that Edison was kept alive by a six-foot-tall wet-cell battery of Nikola Tesla’s design by no means meant that he was housebound. He had a travel coach, perhaps built by Henry Ford himself, that accommodated the huge battery and the wheelchair, allowing the “Wizard of Menlo Park” to ride in style.
He didn’t have to ride far, though, because his lab was just a few hundred yards away from his home. And just like his home, his workshop was a perfect replica of his original laboratory.
“Today begins a future brighter than you can possibly imagine,” Edison told Nick as they entered the building. “Hold your head high. You are Accelerati now. There is no pursuit in this world more noble than ours.”
Nick found that harder to swallow than Mrs. Higgenbotham’s raspberry scones, which were dry, crusty, and seemed to contain only virtual raspberries.
“And what pursuit is that?” Nick asked, not even trying to hide his bitterness.
“Excellence for the sake of excellence,” Edison answered. “And innovation for the benefit of all mankind.”
“Did they put that on your tombstone?” Nick asked.
Edison chuckled, not at all put off by Nick’s derision. “They might have. I’ve never visited. Call me superstitious.”
Edison’s wheelchair/wet-cell contraption rolled slowly down the wide hall of the building, with Nick by its side.
“Our outpost beneath the bowling alley in Colorado Springs is only our secondary facility. This is where our most important work is done.”
And as he spoke, Edison gestured his bony hand toward the various labs they passed. “In here, we’re developing glass that’s as strong as steel but will still shatter when we want it to.”
“Why would you want it to?” Nick asked.
“You never know when you’ll need your own technology to fail,” Edison said. He gestured toward another lab. “And here, in this room, we’re working on a membrane that will allow divers to breathe underwater.”
“When you want them to,” Nick added.
Edison looked up at Nick. “The wise inventor knows the importance of controlling his inventions. Even your beloved Mr. Tesla knew that, or he wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to hide his greatest creation.”
Finally, they turned into a large laboratory in which objects from Nick’s attic were spread out. It gave Nick a sudden sense of déjà vu, because it looked eerily like the fateful day of his garage sale, when he had sold the antiques before knowing that they were parts of a bigger machine.
“The device you had constructed fell apart when your attic came crashing down,” Edison said. “We have all of the individual objects here, plus other pieces that you didn’t have.”
Nick walked among the items. It was true: they were all there. The reel-to-reel tape recorder that spoke your feelings. The cosmic-string harp. The brain-expanding hair dryer. The miniaturizing clothes dryer.
But as Edison said, there were also other things that Nick hadn’t seen since the day he had sold them. The rusted bicycle was there, and the object that looked like a chest of drawers but probably wasn’t, and the blender-ish thing.
“The asteroid will build up a dangerous charge again in a few weeks, but between now and then we hope to reverse-engineer many of these individual objects.”
“Right,” said Nick. “Reverse-engineer….” He picked up the blender. It was heavy; the pitcher was made of copper instead of glass. “Where’s the lid?”
“Was there one?” Edison responded.
Clearly there were grooves for screwing on a lid. Had there been one when he sold the blender at the garage sale? He couldn’t quite remember. Either way, its absence troubled him.
“Maybe you should ask whoever found it for you,” Nick suggested.
“Well, in any event, we hope to figure out what each individual object does, and then adapt the technology. It is my wish that you help us.” Edison paused, studying Nick. “And ultimately, when the time comes, you will take these pieces and rebuild the larger machine.”
“It’s still missing some pretty important parts,” Nick said.
Edison rolled closer to him. “But can you put it together? Do you remember how?”
Nick was not a liar by nature, but he knew that if he told the truth, the Accelerati would own him completely. So he said, “There was something about my attic that made it easy. A kind of gravity in the center that made things clear.”
Edison furrowed his brow. “Jorgenson spoke of that. I told him it was his imagination.”
Nick shook his head. “No. It was real. I’m not sure if I can still put it together. You might have most of the pieces, but you left behind its soul.”
Edison waved his frail hand. “Poppycock. A machine is a machine. And we made a deal. I will protect your father and brother in exchange for your efforts here. Are you a man of honor, Master Slate?”
Nick shrugged. “I like to think so.”
“Then do me the honor of keeping your end of the bargain.”
Nick held up his hands, still covered in bandages. “Not much I can do with my hands like this,” he said.