The Wells Bequest (9 page)

“Well, that part clearly
is
fiction,” said Ms. Minnian, “since the
Nautilus
is right here.”

“No way! Then how do you know what's fiction and what isn't?”

“Come on,” said Jaya impatiently. “We're not going to get to the bottom of all the philosophical stuff today. Let's just find the time machine, okay? It should be right around this corner.”

We passed a few more looming hulks and suddenly there it was: the time machine.

I stopped short and stared.

“Well?” asked Jaya. “Is that the one you saw us riding?”

“I—I don't know. It looks a lot like it. But this one's so . . . big.”

“Bigger than the one you saw before?”

I nodded.

“Well, how big was that one?”

I held out my hands a few inches apart.

Jaya made a skeptical face. “What? How could the two of us ride on a machine that small?”

“We were only this big ourselves,” I said, showing her with my hands.

“You're kidding! Six inches tall? And you only just thought to mention that?”

“You didn't ask.”

“How was I supposed to know I should ask something like that? ‘Oh, by the way, we didn't happen to be six inches tall, did we?'” She imitated herself questioning me earnestly. “‘And did we by any chance happen to be kangaroos? No? What about Popsicle sticks? Balls of pure energy?'” Her sarcasm prickled like tiny claws.

“Fine,” I said. “I guess I didn't think it through. I guess I forgot you weren't there yet—I mean Present You wasn't there, so you wouldn't know the things Future You is going to know.”

“Did Future Us happen to tell you how we happened to end up six inches tall?” asked Jaya.

“Well, you said something about a shrink ray.”

“Of course,” said Dr. Rust without a trace of Jaya's sarcasm. “That makes perfect sense. And did Future Either of You say anything about how you got the time machine to work?”

“No,” I said. “But . . . there's something wrong.” I went up to the time machine for a closer look. “Can I touch it?” I asked.

Ms. Minnian nodded, her lips pursed. “Carefully.”

“It looks . . . different,” I said, touching a gear.

“Different how?” asked Jaya.

I stared at it, imagining the machine that had appeared in my bedroom. As I concentrated, my memory sharpened into one of those visions I get.

I pointed to the big machine. “Well, this part looks like it's made of brass. Some of those gears were silver-colored when I saw it before. So was this rod. And this seat is much fancier. The other one looked more like a plain bicycle saddle. It was leather, at least the part I could see. Of course, we were sitting on it . . .”

“What else?” asked Dr. Rust.

“There's something missing. There was a clear rod on the little machine. It looked like glass, maybe.”

“The ‘crystalline substance,'” Dr. Rust said to Ms. Minnian. “Quartz, probably.”

“And there was a bar that was kind of . . . sparkling. I think it was this one”—I touched it—“but here it just looks normal.”

“The ‘twinkling' bar,” Ms. Minnian said to Dr. Rust.

“And these levers were white, like they were made out of plastic or china instead of wood,” I went on. “Ivory, maybe, like piano keys. And the whole thing looked kind of—” I squinted at my vision. “I don't know how to describe it. Kind of geometrically
off.
Of course, it was tiny and this one is life-size, so I could be wrong, but I don't know. . . .” I trailed off. “It just seems
different,
” I said.

Dr. Rust, Mr. Reyes, and Ms. Minnian looked at each other, then at the machine, then at each other again. “Well,” said Dr. Rust at last, “there are two possibilities. Either somebody will make a great many very specific alterations to this machine before you use it or it's not the same machine.”

“I'm going to try it anyway,” said Jaya. She jumped up onto the seat.

“Jaya, don't!” said Ms. Minnian.

“Which lever is future?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she reached out and pressed one.

“Jaya! NO!” shouted all three librarians.

But nothing happened. She sat there on the fancy velvet saddle going nowhere. “Nope. Still broken,” said Jaya cheerfully, hopping off.

Ms. Minnian's nostrils flared. Her lips stood out red against her pale skin. “Jaya! You know better than to do things like that,” she hissed. “What if it had worked?”

“What if it had? Then I would have pressed the other lever and come right back—after looking around a little first, of course. Anyway, we all knew it wouldn't. We've tried it a zillion times.”

“She's right,” said Mr. Reyes.

Ms. Minnian was still pale. “Someday, young lady, you'll go too far,” she said.

“Well, I think that's all we can do here today,” said Dr. Rust. “Lucy, will you bring us back?”

“Oh!” Jaya practically squealed. “Let me! Let me!”

“Haven't you done enough, Jaya?” said Ms. Minnian.

“No, I haven't. I haven't done
anything.
Please, Doc? You promised!”

Dr. Rust shrugged.

Taking that as permission, Jaya stooped down and felt the floor the way Ms. Minnian had done with the wall. She dipped her fingers into it, grabbed something, and made that flipping motion.

This time I managed to keep my eyes open, but I still couldn't catch the transformation. It happened too quickly. Suddenly we were standing back in the original Wells Bequest space, the fluorescent lights buzzing, facing the blank back wall.

“Well done, Jaya.” Dr. Rust was smiling.

Ms. Minnian led us back to the front of the room, took her remote out of her purse, and pointed it at the door. She ushered us upstairs into the suddenly ordinary light of the fading day.

Simon's Sabotage

G
oing back to plain old normal life after spending an hour in a projectivized tangent space full of starships and time machines was the hardest thing I'd ever done.

I wanted to run back to the basement and look at every single one of the objects. I wanted to sit down with the time machine and figure out how to fix it. But Ms. Minnian had said, “Go home now. That's quite enough for today.” And I couldn't get into the Wells Bequest Oversize Annex on my own anyway.

So here I was, losing badly to Jake at Gravity Force III.

“What's wrong with you today?” he asked. I'd just crashed my ship three times before getting wiped by a space raider.

I threw down my game controller. “Sorry,” I said. “I guess I'm preoccupied.”

“Obviously. What are you thinking about?”

I shrugged. “My science project.”

“Are you still doing robots?”

“I guess,” I said.

“How's it going?”

I shrugged again. “Okay . . . Hey, Jake. What would you do if you found out . . .” I stopped. I shouldn't talk about this. They would kick me out of the repository.

“If I found out what? That my best friend suddenly sucked at Gravity Force III?”

It's okay, I told myself. He would just think I was speculating about silly stuff, the way I always do. “If you found out the things in science-fiction books really existed,” I said.

It was his turn to shrug. “They do,” he said.

My stomach clenched. Did he
know
? “What do you mean?”

“We have rockets. We sent men to the moon. We sent rovers to Mars. We have submarines and videophones and artificial eyes.”

“Oh,
that.
That's not science fiction. It's just science,” I said.

“Well, before it was science, it was science fiction.”

“Yeah, but that's not what I'm talking about.”

“What
are
you talking about, then? You mean things like aliens and artificial intelligence and pork chops that grow on trees?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “What if you found out they really existed?”

“They probably do. It's a big universe. A few zillion light-years past Pluto there are probably aliens planting pork-chop trees with their pet artificial intelligences, talking about whether
we
exist. And you know what? Every single one of them could beat you at Gravity Force III. Come on, pick up your controller. And this time, concentrate.”

• • •

For my next shift at the repository, Ms. Callender put me on Stack 5 again. Abigail and Simon were there when I arrived.

The door opened and Jaya came in. Her hair looked a storm cloud—dark and wild, with strands shooting out like lightning. My heart did its usual thumpy thing.

Simon jumped up. “Jaya,” he said. “Have you heard from the Burton yet? Aren't you supposed to find out this week?”

“I haven't heard anything yet. Has it been busy down here today?”

“Totally dead,” said Abigail. “We only got two slips for the whole shift. Do you know where I'm supposed to go next?”

“Ms. Callender wants both of you up in Preservation,” said Jaya.

Simon put away his notebook. “Right,” he said. “Do let me know if you hear from London.”

“Of course,” said Jaya.

“What's the Burton?” I asked after they left.

“The Burton Memorial Material Repository, in London,” said Jaya. “I'm applying for their summer guest page program.”

I remembered the conversation she'd had with Simon back when I first met her. “Would you be gone all summer? I would really miss you!”

“Thanks. I'd miss you too. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I mean, Simon really wanted me to apply, and it would be fun to work at another repository. I'd love staying with my aunt in London. But Francis is applying too and he really wants it.”

I wanted to say I hoped she wouldn't get the job, but that seemed mean. Besides, it wasn't really true. I did want her to get it, if it would make her happy. But I'd much rather have her being happy on the same continent as me.

After a pause, I cleared my throat. “So,” I said. “About last week. Did that . . . did all that really happen?”

“What, you mean the Wells Bequest?” said Jaya. “Yes. It did.”

“There really are spaceships and time machines in a crazy room down in the basement?”

“Yes. There really are.”

“Who else knows about it?”

“The librarians and most of the pages. And some of the patrons too.”

“Simon? Abigail?”

“Yes, and Francis and Alan and Mariela. Most people don't find out as quickly as you did. You're pretty special.”

I blushed. “When did
you
find out?”

“Oh, I've known for years and years. But that's different. I kind of grew up in the repository. There was some trouble with the Grimm Collection back when I was ten—my sister, Anjali, got turned into a doll, and I had to rescue her.”

“What?!”

Jaya laughed. “Yeah, I know, crazy, right? I was a pretty resourceful ten-year-old. I'll tell you all about it someday.”

“Tell me now!”

“I can't. It's way too long a story, and Dr. Rust doesn't like me talking about it.”

“All right, but what's the Grimm Collection? At least tell me that.”

“The *GCs. It's another Special Collection down in the basement—objects from fairy tales.”

“From
fairy tales
?” I couldn't believe it.

She nodded. “Magic mirrors, seven-league boots, flying carpets, things like that.”

“No way! That's impossible!”

“Why? You saw the science-fiction objects in the Wells Bequest. How's the Grimm Collection any more impossible?”

“But science fiction is based on
science
! Science is
real.
Like my friend Jake says, a lot of those things ended up getting invented later on, and the ones that didn't, they might soon. But magic—that's just nonsense! There's no such thing. There can't be. By definition—otherwise it wouldn't be magic.”

“Well, what can I say? There
is,
” said Jaya. “Right down there in the basement.”

I hated the idea. Not as much Sofia and Dmitri would hate it, but a lot. “That's just wrong,” I said. I guess I was a real Novikov after all.

“Not nearly as wrong as the Lovecraft Corpus,” said Jaya. She was clearly enjoying watching me get so upset.

“What's the Lovecraft Corpus?”

“Stuff from gothic stories and horror,” said Jaya.

“Like what? Ghosts? Vampires? Severed heads?” What a horrible thought!

“You don't want to know. I went in there once—it was really, really creepy. That's the one Special Collection I'd rather not explore.”

I shuddered. “What else do they have here?”

“What other Special Collections, you mean?” She counted them off on her fingers. “There's the Grimm Collection, the Wells Bequest, the Lovecraft Corpus, and the Gibson Chrestomathy.”

“The Gibson what?”

“The Chresto, for short. It's is a collection of cyber stuff—artificial intelligences, computer viruses, bionic body parts, that kind of thing.”

“Oh, okay.” That didn't sound so bad. More like the science-fiction collection—stuff that theoretically
could
exist. I thought of something else. “Are all the Special Collections all objects from fiction?” I asked.

“That's one of those philosophical questions Ms. Minnian was talking about,” said Jaya. “What is fiction? If the objects exist, don't the stories have to be true, not fiction?”

“Unless somehow the fiction comes true and produces the objects,” I said.

“That's one theory,” said Jaya.

“It's easy enough to test,” I said. I took a handful of scrap paper and a stumpy little pencil from the cabinet next to the card file and started scribbling. I covered four little squares of paper. “There,” I said, handing them to Jaya.

She read out loud. “‘Once upon a time there was an . . .' Wow, you have messy handwriting. What's this word?”

“‘Awesome.'”

“‘ . . . awesome boy named Leo Novikov. One day he wrote a story on some pieces of paper about an awesome boy named Leo Novikov. The awesome boy in the story invented an awesome machine. When you pressed a button, the awesome machine would fix everything that was broken that you put on the platform.' What platform?” asked Jaya.

“The platform on the machine, of course.”

“You didn't say there was a platform on the machine.”

“Obviously there is, or where would you put whatever you wanted fixed?”

Jaya rolled her eyes and went on reading: “‘It would also make your teeth straight and make you get A's in all your classes. When the awesome boy Leo Novikov NOT in the story finished writing about the awesome boy Leo Novikov IN the story, he looked around and what did he see? He saw the machine that the awesome boy Leo Novikov in the story had invented! It was right there in front of him! And it worked perfectly! The end, by Leo Novikov.'” Jaya handed me back the slips of paper. “Well? What did that prove?”

“Well?” I said. “Where's the awesome machine? If writing a story makes science-fiction objects exist, it should be right here in front of me.”

“Not necessarily,” said Jaya. “Maybe it only works with
good
stories.”

“Hey! You're talking to the next Jules Verne here,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “Or maybe it doesn't work until after seventeen years have passed.”

“Why seventeen?”

“Why
not
seventeen? Or maybe the story needs to be published for it to work. Or maybe it needs to be popular. Who knows how it might work? All you've proved is that
you
writing
that particular
story didn't do anything. Except make me laugh my head off, deep down inside.” She grinned. Her one crooked tooth looked like it was laughing at me too.

I crumpled up the pieces of paper and threw them at her. One of them stuck in her hair. “So if this is a circulating library, do all those objects in the Special Collections—you know—
circulate
? Can people borrow them?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Jaya. “But you need to leave a serious deposit. And some objects are so dangerous they don't really let you take them out. Technically you can do it, but you would have to leave your life behind as a deposit, and there's not much you can do without your life.” She picked up the pieces of paper, including the one in her hair. She uncrumpled them and handed them back to me. “Here's your masterpiece,” she said.

“Thanks.” I put it in the recycling basket. I thought about how cool it would be to borrow a spaceship or a very powerful telescope. I wondered if I could afford the deposit.

• • •

When our shift was over, Jaya and I clocked out and walked downstairs with Francis. The three of us paused on the steps outside the repository to say good-bye.

Simon burst through the doors. “Jaya? Jaya! There you are! This came for you,” he said. He handed her a blue envelope with a foreign stamp.

“What is this? Where did you get it?”

“Ms. Callender had it on her desk. It's from the Burton—it must be,” said Simon. “Open it!”

Jaya slid her finger under the flap and tore the envelope open.

“Well? What does it say?”

“Hang on. I can't tell you till I read it.” She pulled a letter out of the envelope and unfolded it. Then she gasped. “I can't believe it! I got it! I got the guest page position!”

“Yes! I knew you would!” said Simon. He threw his arms around her. She looked a little uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as I wished she looked.

“Congratulations, Jaya. I'm very happy for you,” said Francis. He smiled, but his voice sounded flat.

Jaya wiggled out of Simon's embrace. “I'm so sorry,” she said, hugging Francis's arm.

He shrugged slightly. “They made an excellent choice. You deserve it—you'll be a great guest page,” he said. “Well, I'd better go. I'll see you guys next week.” He freed himself from Jaya and walked quickly down the stairs. Jaya frowned after him.

“Aren't you happy, Jaya?” said Simon. “This means we'll be together all summer. It's very good news.”

“Sure, I guess,” said Jaya. “But I feel bad for Francis. He really wanted the job. And it involves the music collection, so he's more qualified than me.”

“Well, they must have liked your application,” I said. “They chose you, didn't they?” I didn't want her to go away. But I couldn't imagine anyone not choosing her for anything, no matter who else applied.

“I guess so. And I love London. It's just—I hope they didn't think they had to take me because Auntie Shanti's on the board of directors! I would feel terrible about that.”