Edison’s Alley (28 page)

Petula pulled the battery from Vince’s backpack. “It can’t be you,” she told him, “You don’t understand—it has to be me!
I complete the
circuit!
”

She tried to hold the battery out of his reach, but he grabbed it from her, pushing her backward. She stumbled over Nick, who was beginning to stir, moaning his way back to consciousness.

“Now we will know what Tesla knew!” Jorgenson took the battery’s leads in his hands. “Now
we
shall be the deity electric! The gods of power!”

But Petula kicked him behind the knee, causing his leg to buckle, and he dropped the battery.

“I complete the circuit!” Petula insisted. “The harp told me!”

Jorgenson turned to Petula, ready to tear her apart for her insolence, but she was more than ready for the fight. After all, she had taken an online course; she was a black belt in theoretical
jujitsu.

Nick’s head pounded. His ears rang. He was dazed, but he understood the gist of what was going on. Somehow Jorgenson was here. He had knocked Nick out and Petula was
valiantly trying to fend him off.

Before him was the battery. Vince’s battery. And beyond that, the machine.

The hissing, snapping sizzling sounds from the heavens had grown deafening—and that’s when Nick knew what he had to do. The machine was not finished, but even so, he had to turn it
on. Even if it failed, even if it blew up, he had to do it. Because if he didn’t, everyone would be toast. Literally.

While Petula battled Jorgenson, getting in some theoretically accurate martial-arts moves, Nick crawled to the machine. Through the pyramidal skylight, he could see the asteroid, its orbit
having brought it directly overhead.

Nick grabbed the negative and positive wires of the battery. Jorgenson, on his back, saw what he was about to do.

“No!” Jorgenson yelled like a spoiled child. “Mine!”

But the machine was not his. It would never be.

Nick held his breath and hooked the electrified wires on the posts of the shimmering washboard.

T
here are some who believe that the great Tunguska “comet” blast that leveled two thousand square kilometers of Siberia in 1908 was
actually caused by one of Tesla’s experiments gone awry. According to this theory, he was attempting to transmit energy wirelessly via a massive Tesla coil—very much like the device
that now filled Nick’s attic.

While the inventor’s connection to the Tunguska incident remains speculative, it is verifiably true that he constructed a giant Tesla coil atop a tower 190 feet high in Shoreham, New York.
He believed that Wardenclyffe Tower, as it was called, would create a resonant electrical pulse through the earth, thus providing free electricity to everyone on the planet. None of the rich
businessmen who funded Tesla, however, were interested in anything that was free, so they killed the project before the world could see its potential.

Tesla went broke, and what was arguably the greatest invention in the history of the human race was torn down and sold for scrap to pay off his debts.

Legend has it, however, that in 1903, before the wrecking ball came a-calling, Tesla fired it up once, and only once. The glow from the great coil could be seen hundreds of miles away in
Connecticut, across Long Island Sound, and some say they could feel the electrical charge as far as Paris. The
New York Sun
reported that bolts of electricity shot out in all directions, as
if on some “mysterious errand.”

The day Nick Slate turned on the unfinished machine, a new mysterious errand began.

Danny, who had spent the day out with his teammate Seth, was riding home with Beverly Webb at the same moment Nick fired up the machine in the attic.

The car had just turned on to Danny’s street, and he immediately knew something was wrong at home, perhaps because his house seemed taller than it was when he left it that morning.

The attic was, in fact, rising.

The levitating triangular shape looked something like the image on the back of a dollar bill: the pyramid with the glowing eye at its top. The attic didn’t have an eye, but it sure was
glowing.

Beverly saw it a moment later. “What on earth?”

The sight must have absorbed all of her attention, because she began to veer into an oncoming car. She jerked the steering wheel and successfully avoided a collision, but she jumped the curb and
killed a poor defenseless mailbox.

Danny climbed out of the car, ignoring Beverly’s colorful language, and hurried toward his family’s supremely weird home. People who had already been outside to eye the troublesome
sky were converging on his house to gawk.

Now that he was closer, he could see that the attic wasn’t levitating at all. It was being lifted skyward by a series of gears, cranks, and support struts…?

“That’s cool,” said Seth, coming up behind him. “I wish my house could do that.”

Mr. Slate saw the attic rising, too. And he saw the steel band that he had unearthed in his yard begin to shimmer with static flashes.

But, with the logic centers of his brain currently blocked by Accelerati technology, he found nothing unusual about this. An attic rising 190 feet above the rest of the house? Such things
happened every day. Didn’t they?

He wanted to return to his digging, but deep inside him, in a place he couldn’t quite reach, he had a nagging suspicion that he was missing something important.

Then, when a massive and continuous bolt of lightning shot down from the distant asteroid and right through the glass skylight of his attic, it occurred to him what was wrong.

He had been so busy digging, he had forgotten to eat lunch.

Petula Grabowski-Jones was a great believer in self-preservation. Sacrificing herself—either for the benefit of others or the benefit of science—was not part of her
psychological makeup. She firmly believed that others didn’t deserve it, and as for science—well, Jorgenson would be a far better sacrifice, him being a professor and all.

And so, the moment Nick connected the battery and everything in the room began to shake, Petula decided it was time to make a quick exit. She unwedged the broken baseball bat and pushed open the
attic stairs.

To her surprise, she found that the attic stairs no longer reached the second-floor landing. The attic had begun to rise, and if she didn’t get out soon, it would be too far to jump.

“Where’s Nick?” Caitlin yelled at her from below. “Petula! Where’s Nick?”

Petula turned to see Nick standing by the machine. She might have grabbed him then and pulled him out with her, but the weight machine made gravity shift just enough for her to lose her
balance.

She fell down the ladderlike steps, until they ejected her like a playground slide ten feet above the rest of the house. Caitlin moved out of the way as she fell. Vince, still dead as a
doornail, would have broken Petula’s fall, but she missed him and hit bare wooden floor, breaking her arm in three places.

Jorgenson knew that turning on Tesla’s machine was a calculated risk—but it was his risk to take. Then Petula had attacked him, and now the Slate boy had wrested
control. As the machine began to grind into action, Jorgenson pushed his way to his feet.

This was, and had always been, his destiny. His life had been spent searching for the machine before him. He would not let the boy steal his glory. The Jorgenson Power Transducer, as he would
name it, would secure his place in history.

As Jorgenson stumbled across the shaking attic, he didn’t notice the room rising. Or Petula falling. All he could see was the boy at the controls. As he gripped the boy’s shoulders,
the electrical charge that had built up in the trillion-ton copper asteroid suddenly found a place to go, and it blew Jorgenson across the room.

Down below, the gawkers took off in all directions when the powerful blast of lightning struck and the attic walls exploded. Beverly dragged Seth away, but Danny took off
toward the house.

He ran to his father in the backyard, who was now staring at the attic, slightly bemused, as bits and pieces of smoking lumber settled all around them.

“Oh, hi, Danny,” he said.

“Dad, what’s going on?”

“Our attic just exploded,” Mr. Slate said cheerfully. “Hey, how about we go to Hometown Buffet? I feel like I could eat a horse.”

Danny couldn’t quite believe what he’d heard, so he pretended he didn’t.

“Where’s Nick? He’s not up there, is he?” Danny turned to see Petula running out of the house, grimacing as she gripped her weirdly dangling right arm—but Nick
didn’t come out with her. “Dad!” Danny said, shaking his father. “Where’s Nick?”

And at that moment, high above them, a key chain was blasted out of Alan Jorgenson’s pocket. It fell nearly two hundred feet into Danny’s now-roofless room and into his fish tank,
where it immediately shorted out.

Mr. Slate snapped out of his haze in an instant. His eyes filled with the dark dread of understanding as he looked at the scene before him.

“Oh my God!” Then he raced into the house to save his son.

Nick had no idea what had happened. All he knew was that a steady stream of electricity was shooting down from the sky into Tesla’s machine—and the machine was
alive!

The curlers pumped like pistons and the hair dryer glowed like a reactor while the toaster produced blue spiral pulses that the camera lens focused into a stream of pure power down the bell of
the clarinet. The weight machine was pumping, directing its antigravity field downward and causing the entire attic to rise.

Nick could feel his own mass decrease to what he might weigh on the moon. Or on the asteroid.

The walls of his attic were gone. They had been blown away completely, leaving only the floor, and the machine.

Nick could sense that the machine wasn’t working properly. It was missing too many parts. It was taking in the electricity, but it didn’t have any way to disperse it.

Then he heard someone yelling. He followed the sound to the jagged edge of what had once been his bedroom. There, hanging by one hand, was Alan Jorgenson. He was just outside the machine’s
gravity field—far enough that it wouldn’t save him from falling to his death if he lost his grip. The man’s Madagascan spider-silk suit no longer shimmered with pearlescence. It
was shredded and singed. Nick saw no regret or pleading in his eyes, just coldness, as if his soul had been frozen by his own remote control. Maybe it was the persistent vibrations from the cosmic
string harp, but Nick felt like he could almost read the man’s mind.

I am now going to die,
Jorgenson’s expression said.
This miserable boy who has ruined everything will now ruin me.

Nick could have just stood there and watched Jorgenson fall. The man certainly deserved it. No one would blame Nick.

But as awful as Jorgenson was, Nick simply couldn’t do it. Letting a man fall to his death was not the kind of victory he wanted. So he reached out his hand.

Nick read Jorgenson again.
I don’t trust him! He’ll take my hand and cast it off, sending me to my death.

Nick didn’t say a word. It didn’t matter what Jorgenson believed about him. Nick just kept his hand extended. Jorgenson would either take it, or he wouldn’t. That would have to
be his choice.

In the end Jorgenson reached up with his free hand—the hand with the painfully chipped-off pinkie—and grabbed Nick’s.

Nick leaned back and, using a buckled floorboard to brace himself, pulled Jorgenson up and out of danger. And in that moment Nick realized something.

He had just shaken hands with Dr. Jorgenson.

From the second floor of Nick’s house, Caitlin had watched the attic rise toward the heavens.

She felt the jolt as the asteroid discharged, and took cover as the attic exploded. At first she figured there was no way Nick could have survived. Then, when she saw Jorgenson hanging from the
edge of the attic, she nurtured a sliver of hope that Nick was still alive.

The only way up there was to scale the accordion-like scaffolding that still connected the attic to the house. So she began to climb.

Nick knew that the machine was overloading and the next explosion wouldn’t take out just his attic. It would leave a crater miles wide.

“It’s no use!” Jorgenson said. “We have to get out of here!”

“And how are we going to do that, Einstein?”

Jorgenson, genius that he was, had no answer.

The machine shook violently. The spatial distortion coming from the cosmic strings of the harp seemed about to shred the very fabric of space, and still power shot down from the supercharged
asteroid.

That’s when Caitlin arrived, out of breath, but looking ready to rip out one or more of Jorgenson’s internal organs.

“You!” she growled. “I should have known you were behind this!”

“Forget him!” said Nick, realizing how truly unimportant Jorgenson was, in spite of all of his superior airs. “We’ve got to shut this thing down!”

“There’s some sort of metal ring around your house,” Caitlin told him. “Maybe it’s a part of the solution.”

As soon as she said it, Nick instinctively knew it wasn’t the solution, but part of the problem. The machine was designed to discharge somehow. The ring his father had found must have been
some sort of power storage cell—but since the device wasn’t complete, it couldn’t connect with the ring.