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.
Just as he had turned the machine on, he had to be the one to turn it off. The question was, when? When would enough energy have been discharged? If he did it too soon, the world would be back in the same state it was just a few minutes ago. If he waited too long, the machine would blow up, killing him, Caitlin, Jorgenson, and everyone else within the blast radius.
Caitlin surmised the situation, and ripped the wires of the wet-cell battery from the washboard posts—but it made no difference. The machine didn’t stop.
“The battery was just to start it,” Nick told her. “To give it ‘life.’ The asteroid’s supplying all of the power now.”
Nick knew that to shut down the machine, he would have to dismantle it from the inside out. He would have to be the monkey wrench jammed into the works. So he stepped toward the machine, and took a deep breath, preparing to get elbow-deep in the overloading mechanism.
“Don’t!” Jorgenson shouted over the electrical wail. “You don’t know what will happen!”
He tried to move toward Nick, but Caitlin held him back. “Nick knows what he’s doing. Even if you don’t.”
Nick would have laughed if their lives weren’t hanging in the balance. I have no clue what I’m doing. But I’ve got to do it anyway.
The electrical whine around them was degrading into a failing warble. There was no time to second-guess himself; not an instant to lose. Gritting his teeth, Nick thrust both hands into the heart of the machine.
The pain was immediate and intense. It jolted his body and mind, enveloping him as if he had shoved his hands into a—
—fire!
His house was on fire!
On hands and knees
A glance back
His mother behind him
Telling him it will be okay
He can barely see her in the swirling smoke, and—
—is someone else there?
Is that someone behind her?
His imagination?
What else could it be?
And then he’s out on the lawn
Coughing, gagging
And she’s not there
She’s not behind him.
And the windows explode
And the porch collapses
And the world Nick knew is gone gone gone.
Screaming in pain, Nick forced away the memory. He grabbed the clarinet and ripped it out of the machine. He knocked the electrified hair curlers to the ground, and he kicked the weight machine away from the harp.
At last the circuit was broken. The machine finally stopped, and its electrified components began to disgorge energy, shooting spidery bolts in all directions. The toaster began to angrily shoot out what looked like miniature spiral galaxies, then it blew off of the F.R.E.E. and hit Nick in the head.
Electricity does not like to be disrupted. Like a storm-swollen river, it doesn’t just have direction, it has intention—and when its intentions are foiled, its wrath is unleashed down new and unexpected paths.
The moment the circuit was cut, an electromagnetic pulse blew out from the heart of the device—an EMP more powerful than any ever recorded.
For a strange and glorious moment, every electrically powered object within a three-mile radius turned on whether it was plugged in or not. Vacuum cleaners and hair dryers and WeedWackers roared to life as if possessed. Every radio blared unrequested music, and every lightbulb—even the ones still boxed at hardware stores—began to glow.
It was, for that one instant, a twisted fulfillment of Tesla’s dream—free wireless energy for all.
And in the next instant, everything died. Appliance motors burned out, cell phones burst into flames in people’s pockets, and computers fried, their hard drives irretrievably erased.
The pulse had only slightly dissipated by the time it reached NORAD, deep in the heart of Cheyenne Mountain. As the EMP blasted past, NORAD’s
data and defense grid was protected by the tons of granite above, and many paranoiac layers of lead shielding, for it was NORAD’s job to plan for things as unlikely as a technology-killing pulse from a quaint, hundred-year-old home.
Farther away, the pulse weakened; its effect was less intense, but still noticeable. A neighborhood in Salt Lake City experienced a mass garage-door opening, and in Las Vegas, three thousand slot machines paid off simultaneous jackpots.
One would expect that anything at the heart of the pulse would have been incinerated, or at least boiled from the inside out like meat in a microwave—but Nikola Tesla was not so cavalier as to think his inventions could never go wrong. For this reason he had built in some rudimentary protections, such as a force-field generator disguised as a flour sifter, which not only deflected attack from the outside, but also protected things within the field as well.
Of course, if someone was foolish enough to shove his hand into the middle of the Far Range Energy Emitter…well, there’s not much the sifter could do about that.
Nick fell to the attic floor, reeling from the pain of the electrical burns, and the strike of the ballistic toaster—and then realized that he was still falling. With the weight machine turned off, the spindly struts that had elevated the attic could no longer bear the weight of the machine. Joints buckled, gears flew, the struts collapsed, and what was left of the attic began to crash back down upon the house.
Caitlin had shielded her eyes when the machine failed, and although the force field protected her from the explosion, it could not protect her from the half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich Nick had left on a plate on his bedroom floor. She slipped on it, the plate went shooting off into oblivion like a discus, and Caitlin fell through the attic trapdoor, much like Petula had. Unlike Petula, however, Caitlin managed to catch herself on the struts supporting the elevated attic—but when the pyrotechnics ended and the attic started to fall, the struts began to collapse. With the framework crumbling around her, she knew there were only three possible outcomes: she would be crushed to death; she would fall to her death; or she would be impaled by jagged steel and bleed to death. As she tried to decide which was the least awful way to die, a fourth possibility presented itself. Without a second to lose, she jumped toward Danny’s room, which, like all the other rooms on the second floor, had no roof.
Her aim was true. She landed on Danny’s bed with enough force to shatter the wooden frame.
An instant later, the attic met the second floor. Wood and steel and plaster came raining down, leaving the fish in Danny’s aquarium to ponder the madness of the nonliquid world.
When Wayne Slate reached the second-floor landing, his heart nearly stopped, until he realized the body lying there wasn’t Nick, it was someone else. When he realized it was the twin brother of the kid who had died in his house a month earlier, his heart nearly stopped again.
But all of that was blown out of his mind as the elevated attic began to collapse.
He dove for cover as the attic came down, buckling the walls of the second floor, destroying what little structural integrity the house still had. And then, like a gift from heaven, the spring-loaded attic stairs popped open, and Nick was ejected into his arms, bloody and bruised, but still very much alive.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” his father said, holding Nick in his strong embrace. Though clearly nothing was okay, his son was alive, which meant that everything was okay.
The first thing people noticed in the aftermath of the discharge was the silence. Every power station and transformer within a three-mile radius of Nick’s house had exploded, and every electrical device was beyond repair.
But the silence was more than just the quiet of stilled machinery. The sky was peaceful, too, all around the world. The strange sizzling lightning had ceased everywhere, and the skies between the Arctic and Antarctic Circles no longer flared with the aurora. The asteroid was once more just a reddish-gray spot in the sky, a fraction the size of the moon.
By the time Mitch arrived at Nick’s house, followed by seven cats convinced he was their savior, the first responders were already there.
The house looked like it had been sat upon by a giant. Fire trucks and ambulances sprayed red light through the smoke and dust, and Mitch knew beyond doubt that Nick had turned on the half-built machine.
Petula was being attended by paramedics and basked in the attention like a dying diva.
In the driveway, Nick was being loaded into an ambulance on a stretcher, with Caitlin on one side and his father on the other. Mitch could see that he was alive by the way he gripped his father’s hand, but the ambulance left before he could ask about Nick’s condition.
And then, out of the ruins of the house, strode Jorgenson. Mitch’s one consolation was that he looked as ruined as the rest of them.
As soon as Jorgenson emerged, medics rushed to help him, but he waved them off with such an imperious air that they let him stride on.
Mitch confronted him. There were a million things that he wanted to say to the man, but one in particular bubbled its way to the surface.
“My father’s one of you, isn’t he? You didn’t frame him—he’s one of you.”
Jorgenson gave him a disgusted look, like Mitch was something nasty he had spotted on the sidewalk. “He was one of us. We disavowed him. Accelerati don’t get caught.” And then he added: “It took you long enough to figure it out.”
“I’m going to figure out ‘Grinthon,’ too. And ‘Brandon Gunther’s alligator.’”
Jorgenson’s disgusted glare took a turn toward bafflement. “I haven’t the foggiest notion what you’re talking about,” he said. “But if I did, I would say the same.”
On the street behind them, a couple of Accelerati SUVs arrived, along with more police and emergency vehicles. Mitch didn’t care.
“I will take you down. Every last one of you,” he said.
“I sincerely doubt it,” said Jorgenson, nice and smug. “I think it’s clear that—”
“—things won’t end well for you,” Mitch blurted. And he smiled, because he knew it would come true.
Jorgenson, only mildly disconcerted, brushed him aside. “If you will excuse me, I have a disaster area to contain.”
Mitch thought about using the bellows, to give him a nice sharp blast and send him off to Oz, but he was distracted by the sight of two paramedics carrying a body bag out of the house.
“It’s weird,” he heard one of them say, “but this looks like the same kid we took out of this same house a few weeks ago.”
So, when no one was watching, Mitch snuck back into the house and made his way up the shattered stairs to the remains of the attic. He left the bellows like a flower on a grave, and then picked up the battery.
A few minutes later, when the dead kid disappeared from the body bag, the paramedic decided it was the perfect cherry to top off this day.
Nick awoke in a comfortable hospital room, if anything about a hospital room can be called comfortable.
“Hey,” said a familiar voice.
He turned to see Caitlin by the door. “They said I couldn’t visit without an adult,” she told him as she walked over to his bed, “but it’s amazing how little they seem to care when you pretend you don’t hear them.” She glanced at his bandages and the swollen fingers protruding from the white layers of cotton gauze. “It looks like you really did a number on your arms.”
“It couldn’t be helped,” Nick told her. “How’s everyone else?”
“We all survived,” she said. “Except for Vince, of course.”
Nick sighed. “Are we going to have to go resurrect him again?”
“Mitch already did.”
“Good,” Nick said, leaning back and closing his eyes.
“I know, right? After the first time, I’ll never look at jelly beans and spandex the same way again.”
Caitlin explained that Mitch was making a special trip to Colorado State Penitentiary to talk to his father, a
nd that the newly re-re-reanimated Vince and his mother were leaving town, because they couldn’t risk the Accelerati finding him and taking away the battery.
“He told me they were going to Scotland,” Caitlin said. “I couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking.”
As for Petula, she had vanished entirely. “And if she ever shows her face around me again, she won’t have a face left to show,” Caitlin vowed.
Nick turned to look out the window. “Clear blue sky today,” he said. He reached up to her as best he could, and touched Caitlin’s arm with a fingertip. “There’s no shock.”
Caitlin smiled. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “I mean, I felt something.”
Nick could feel himself starting to blush, but before the moment got too awkward, he said, “Hey, did you see my dad and Danny around?”
“I know they were here—maybe they’re in the cafeteria getting lunch,” Caitlin suggested. “Hey, there’s a vending machine down the hallway. Why don’t I get us something to drink. We can make a toast to you for saving the world again.”
She left, and Nick looked out the window once more. A moment later, he heard someone enter the room.
“Your ability to foul the waters of everything you touch is truly remarkable.”
Nick turned his head to face a gaunt figure in a brand-new vanilla suit.
“You’re the only foul thing in here, Dr. Jorgenson.”
Jorgenson took a step forward and glanced at the machine that was monitoring Nick’s vital signs.
Nick got worried. “Are you going to kill me?” he asked.
“I have plenty of justification for ending your life and the lives of your friends. It would solve a myriad of problems, too. For that I would feel no remorse. Except for one thing. Quid pro quo.”
“English please,” Nick said.
“You saved my life when you didn’t have to,” Jorgenson told him, “and decency dictates that I spare yours.”
“So you’re letting me go?”
“Let’s just say I’m leaving your destiny in the hands of a higher power.”