Edison’s Alley (16 page)

Case in point: the man in the lane to their left. He bowled alone, with his designer ball, no doubt brushing up on his game for some tournament that would require even more hair gel than he wore
now. In the lane to their right was a family with three children too young to successfully lift a bowling ball, much less throw one. With the bumpers up, however, every ball they dropped managed to
meander its way down the alley, bouncing off the rubber sides like a lethargic pinball, until it hit the pins hard enough to make them wobble and occasionally tip over.

And Ms. Planck said, “Show me what ya got.”

Petula restrained a glare, and grabbed a ball. Then, with all the strength she could muster, she heaved it down the waxed aisle toward the pins, which always looked like grinning skeleton teeth
to her.

Petula was breaking no teeth today. Without the benefit of kiddie-bumpers, her ball dropped into the gutter with a belligerent thud, and rolled off into oblivion. She knew this would happen, and
she was furious. Petula detested any activity that she wasn’t already extremely good at. Her second attempt got a little closer to the pins but still dropped into the gutter.

“There, are you happy?”

Ms. Planck grinned. Petula took it as sadistic.

“Relax. Your problem is that you don’t have the right ball,” Ms. Planck said. She reached into her ball bag and pulled out a polished orb of royal blue that seemed to swim with
galaxies all the way down to its core.

“Arresting, isn’t it?” said Ms. Planck. “But, like so many things, looks aren’t its best feature.” Then she turned it around and showed Petula a small dial
camouflaged against the resin surface. She made a few adjustments to the dial and then, with perfect form, threw her ball down the alley. Kinetic energy was exchanged from ball to pins, and they
flew with the familiar thunder of what should have been a strike. But it wasn’t. The two outermost pins remained standing, making the lane look like the mouth of a six-year-old who’s
been making the tooth fairy work overtime.

“Tough break,” said Petula, feeling a twinge of joy at Ms. Planck’s misfortune.

But Ms. Planck didn’t seem to mind. “Ordinarily, a seven-ten split is a bad thing. But not today.” Then she threw an intentional field goal right up the middle.

The pins reset and Petula went for her ball, but Ms. Planck stopped her. “For now you’re a spectator.” She tweaked the dial on her ball again and rolled. This time three pins
were left: the seven and the ten pins again, with the five pin right between them.

“They call this split ‘the three wise men,’” Miss Planck said. Like the last time, she missed all of them with her second shot.

“Should I be keeping score?” Petula asked.

“Not necessary when you know what the score will be.” In the next frame Ms. Planck’s first ball left a pattern that was extremely improbable, if not entirely impossible. The
entire back row still stood. And so did the head pin. Then she handed Petula the ball to finish out the frame. Petula threw a gutter ball, of course, which is exactly what was required.

“Now,” said Ms. Planck, “for the crowning glory.” This time she didn’t dial anything on the ball. She just went to the line, and she hurled a perfect strike. And
the moment the pins cleared, things began to happen.

As dim as the light around them was, it dimmed even further, and the far end of the lane began to drop, until it became a ramp leading down to a hidden place beneath the bowling alley.

“To gain admittance to the Accelerati Lodge, one must bowl a precise combination of pin patterns, on this lane,” Ms. Planck explained. “The chance of bowling the patterns
naturally is about one in one hundred billion, which is why it is necessary to have a key-ball that can be programmed to hit certain pins and not others.”

Petula noted that one hundred billion was also the number of stars in the galaxy. This, she knew, was not coincidence. Everything the Accelerati did was by design. She loved that about them.

To their left, the lone hair-gel man was still practicing his game, and to their right, the young family was still doing whatever it was that almost, but not quite, looked like bowling. None of
them seemed to notice that the lane between them had become a passage to some secret hideout.

“Aren’t you worried someone will see?” Petula asked.

“The moment I hit that strike,” Ms. Planck explained, “light began to bend around our lane, rendering it invisible. We simply entered everyone’s blind spot.”

Next to them a boy no older than four stared right at Petula. “Mommy,” he said, “those people over there just disappeared.”

“That’s nice, honey,” said the mother absently. “Now finish your milk.”

“You see?” said Ms. Planck. “People don’t miss what they never really noticed in the first place.”

As they headed down the ramp to the Accelerati Lodge, Petula had to ask the obvious question.

“Why don’t you just have a door with a lock?”

Ms. Planck bristled. “If you have to ask that question, then you’re not one of us yet.”

When it came to the Accelerati, form was far more important than function. They were all about style, elegance, and panache. Their evil designs were truly about design.

For instance, if they determined that there was a need to end your life, they wouldn’t just end it. They would first have you end the life of someone else who needed ending, who in turn
had just ended the life of someone else for them, and so on, like a procession of fishes in which the smaller one is always swallowed by the larger one behind it.

Thus, the Accelerati member who designed the bowling-pin combination lock had been applauded and received the organization’s highest honors before he was killed—by someone else who
needed to be killed.

Their lodge predated the bowling alley by several years. When a local businessman decided to build the recreation spot directly above their underground lair, the Accelerati saw it as an
opportunity. For who would ever imagine that humanity’s greatest minds were hiding underneath a bowling alley? And although it was called Atomic Lanes, the Accelerati’s secret
experiments made it only slightly radioactive.

Petula knew none of this. All she knew was that she was required to take a picture every day, showing what the bowling alley would look like one day in the future. Since the Accelerati had no
enemies powerful enough to attack them, the photos weren’t to warn them of outside threats—but rather to let them know if, over the next twenty-four hours, they would accidentally blow
themselves up.

“Welcome to the Great Hall,” Ms. Planck said, throwing open a pair of ornately sculpted bronze doors. The room before them, however, seemed no larger than a closet.

“That’s some Great Hall,” Petula said, with her familiar flatness.

“Have you ever heard of Zeno’s paradoxes?”

Petula did not answer, because admitting that she did not know something was not part of her chosen lifestyle.

“One of them is the concept on which the Great Hall is based.”

Petula stepped forward, only to find that with each step the other end of the room seemed twice as far away as before; it expanded until she found herself standing in a cathedral-like library.
Huge windows seemed to be looking out on seventeenth-century Venice, with gondolas gliding gracefully by outside.

“Ah,” said Ms. Planck, “Italian Renaissance Day. Each day of the month a different holographic theme is projected. We’re in negotiations to sell the technology to
Apple.”

On the walls were artworks by great artists, familiar in style if not in composition.

“Most of the pieces in this room were presumed lost in fires and other natural, and not-so-natural, disasters.”

Petula didn’t want to think about how they came to be in the Accelerati’s possession.

Just beyond the Great Hall they reached a rotunda where a larger-than-life-size statue of Thomas Edison held up a lightbulb, his expression grim.

“Our founder,” Ms. Planck noted as they passed it. “Obviously.”

Several hallways led to other wings of what seemed to be a sprawling underground complex. It didn’t actually appear to be underground, but instead woven into the infrastructure of Venice.
At least for today.

Ms. Planck led Petula through a door that read
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
. “Don’t dawdle, Petula, he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

No one had ever accused Petula of dawdling. But there was so much to see, both within the walls and outside the windows of the Accelerati Lodge, that it was hard not to be distracted.

“He, who?” Petula asked.

“Dr. Alan Jorgenson, the Grand Acceleratus.”

“You’re not serious—he’s not actually called that, is he?”

“Don’t mock him, Petula,” Ms. Planck told her quietly. “He’s not a man who suffers mockery lightly.”

The R&D wing, which overlooked the pigeon-filled holographic expanse of St. Mark’s Square, was bustling with activity. In the middle of it all stood a tall man in a silk suit that
almost seemed to glow with vanilla-toned pearlescence.

“Evangeline!” he said, taking Ms. Planck’s hand and kissing it. “So good to see you!”

Until that moment, Petula had never considered that Ms. Planck had a first name other than “Ms.”

Then the Grand Acceleratus looked down at Petula. His smile was difficult to read. She couldn’t tell if he was pleased to meet her, or if he was considering whether she would taste better
chewed or swallowed whole.

“And you must be the new fledgling I’ve been hearing so much about.”

Petula held out her hand for him to shake. “Petula Grabowski-Jones,” she announced, then added, “future Grand Acceleratus.”

It was a calculated move that paid off just as
she’d hoped. Jorgenson did not hold out his hand—because it was bandaged—but his smile changed from predatory to genuine. “We appreciate ambition here,” he said.
“I suspect you’ll do well.”

“What happened to your hand?” Petula asked.

The Grand Acceleratus sighed. “An accident while out in the field. One of my associates was frozen, along with my arm. I lost my pinkie in the process.”

Although Petula found the very idea funny, she kept herself from laughing.

“Poor Helga,” Ms. Planck said. “How is she doing?”

“Recovering nicely, thanks to our pressure-defroster,” Dr. Jorgenson told her. “And on the bright side, it proves the viability of human hibernation. Once we have the device
that caused it, we can sell the technology to NASA for a fortune.” Then he gestured to a large window that looked in on one of the research rooms. “You’re just in time—I
think you’ll enjoy this.”

In the center of the room was none other than the cosmic string harp that Petula had helped snag for them. Workers placed watermelons on three low platforms around the harp, and then left the
room.

Once they were gone and the room was sealed, a pair of mechanical hands descended from the ceiling and began to play the harp. Petula expected to feel the same soul-searing vibration she had
experienced in the harpist’s house, but she felt nothing.

“That can’t be right,” Petula wondered out loud, and Jorgenson, guessing what she meant, rapped on the window that was between them and the harp.

“High-density leaded glass,” he told her. “We’re perfectly safe out here.”

The mechanical hands played the invisible strings with increasing intensity. All at once the three melons exploded, splattering the room and window with fleshy shrapnel.

“Remarkable!” said Ms. Planck. “Absolutely remarkable!”

“Wait till you see this next test,” Jorgenson said.

Petula found herself raising her hand, as she never actually did in school. Questions, she believed, should never await permission. But in the presence of the Grand Acceleratus, she
couldn’t help herself.

“Uh, excuse me,” she said, “but I don’t think that’s what the harp is for.”

Jorgenson put his unbandaged hand on her shoulder. “Creators never understand the potential of their creations,” he said. “It’s left to us to complete their
vision.”

The workers went back into the room, this time with a single melon, and set it down. Then they carried in what looked like a huge metallic tortoise shell about the size of an overturned bathtub.
They placed it over the melon, and exited.

The mechanical hands played with the same intensity for over a minute. When they stopped, the workers went in and removed the shell, revealing that the melon had not been damaged at all.

“Splendid!” said Jorgenson. “Not only is the tortoiseshell material resistant to impact and radiation, it also deflects cosmic string dissonance. Whenever we create a weapon,
we strive to also create the perfect defense against it—for ourselves.”

Then he took a long look at Petula, as if pondering a major purchase. “What are your views on vengeance, Ms. Grabowski-Jones?”

Petula considered how she might best answer. “Well,” she said, “some people believe vengeance is a dish best served cold. But I believe it shouldn’t be served at
all—it’s better as an all-you-can-eat buffet.”

Jorgenson grinned once more and nodded his satisfaction. Then he presented her with a small glass vial. It had a tiny computer chip inside.

“I would like you to use this to make Nick Slate’s life miserable.”

Petula took the vial and sighed. “According to him, that’s what I do best.”