Someone other than Nick Slate.
The old man wanted Jorgenson to wait, but he had waited long enough. Jorgenson had to take matters into his own hands.
He slipped the fortified shell into the pocket of his coat. Then, almost as an afterthought, he placed the other intact tortoise shell back on his desk.
The boy was nothing. He was as empty, and ultimately as fragile, as this shell, which, clearly, had not protected its reptilian owner from an untimely demise.
Jorgenson brought the hammer up once more, and with all his might, he slammed it down on the third shell. It disintegrated in a satisfying burst of silver-green shards. He took a deep breath and smiled.
It was time to do the same to Nick.
Nick was not looking forward to his brother’s baseball game after school.
This should have been a sign that something was off—not only because he loved baseball, but also because he prided himself on being a good big brother, and these days Danny really needed him. The house fire back in Florida may not have been as momentous as an asteroid strike, but it had been just as devastating to Nick and Danny and their father. Four months was not enough time to heal from something like that. Nick’s family had changed forever, and it could be years before they truly came to terms with it.
Perspective. It was a luxury Nick, his brother, and his father simply didn’t have right now.
Danny’s previous game had ended abruptly when a meteorite the size of a grapefruit was pulled from the sky and into his mitt. He took to the field alone a few nights after that, pulling dozens more from the sky with the Tesla-modified glove, hoping beyond hope that wishing on the falling stars would bring his mother back. The last space rock he had turned in Earth’s direction was the heavy hitter.
Now Danny would be in the field again. A different field, to be sure, since the Sports McComplex they had played in was now cratered from meteor strikes. Instead they would be playing in Memorial Park on Wednesday afternoons, when the diamond was available.
The park was in an older part of town, fairly close to where Tesla’s laboratory had once stood. With mixed feelings, Nick rode his bike through the neighborhood of old homes and came to a stop across the street from the site. The lab was long gone, of course; the ordinary tract house occupying the space had an iron fence and two guard dogs to keep away the lunatics who saw it as hallowed ground.
That was the problem—it was mostly lunatics. The greatest inventor of all time deserved more than the babbling fringe.
Such was the brine of Nick’s thoughts as he joined his father in the bleachers while Danny took to the field.
“He’ll do fine,” Mr. Slate said, clearly trying to convince himself. “Baseball is in his blood. He’ll do fine.”
Watching Danny play baseball was a rare moment of escape for Nick’s dad. Wayne Slate worked as a copy-machine repairman at NORAD—which would have been fine, if it weren’t for the fact that Jorgenson, the veritable eye of the Accelerati, had gotten him the job. It was his way of keeping their whole family under his thumb.
Nick’s dad didn’t know about the Accelerati, of course, or about Tesla’s inventions. Nick wondered, though, if his father knew that it was his very own swing of the bat—even though it missed the ball that Nick had pitched to him—that had saved the world. Surely he must have suspected, but they had never spoken of it, and Nick doubted they ever would.
After that day, Wayne Slate had slipped into a bizarre form of post-traumatic stress. He became busy. Busier than ever before. It was as if keeping the blood flowing to other parts of his body prevented it from reaching his brain, where he would have to process everything that had happened. And whenever he slowed down, he began to sink like a stone into himself.
“I’m fine,” he had told Nick and Danny. “Better than fine. The world is saved—we all have a new lease on life, right? I intend to make the very best of it.”
They all rose for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” performed by a paunchy middle-aged guy who had once been in a boy band, and then Danny’s team took the field. The woman sitting next to them on the bleacher kept looking at Nick’s dad out of the corner of her eye. Finally she turned to him and said, “Your son’s the one who caught that meteorite, isn’t he?”
Nick could hear the discomfort in his father’s voice as he deftly changed the subject. “Say, didn’t I spill popcorn on you during that game? I hope the butter didn’t leave any stains.”
“No, not at all. Thanks for asking.”
Stains. Nick suddenly remembered the last game. This woman said her son—one of Danny’s teammates—had bought her a miraculous stain remover at a garage sale. Nick’s interest in the woman was piqued. She probably didn’t even know how unique the object was. Perhaps, thought Nick, that’ll make it easier to get it back.
The popcorn woman slid a little closer to Nick’s father on the bench. “The way you raced out there when the meteorite dragged him through the field…it was very moving. I’m glad to see he’s okay.”
“Thanks,” his father said.
The woman smiled and held out her hand. “Hi, I’m Beverly—Seth Hills’s mom.” She pointed to the ten-year-old at third base.
Nick’s father grinned. “So I suppose that makes you Beverly Hills.”
She sighed. “Luckily, no. I mean, that was my married name, but when that ended, I went back to Webb, my maiden name.”
Nick watched this little parental drama with a feeling resembling nausea. In just a few brief moments she had sidled up to his father and smoothly let him know that she was available. Well, his dad most certainly was not.
“So,” Nick found himself blurting out, “did your husband die, like my mom did, three and a half months ago?”
“Nick!” his father said sharply. It was the first time Nick had used his mom’s death as a weapon. Under the circumstances, he thought she’d be okay with that. In a way, he felt she was an ally in saving his father from Beverly, the Popcorn Lady.
“How awful,” she said, backing off a bit. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“It was a fire,” Nick said. “Did I mention it happened only three and a half months ago?”
They were all rescued by a line drive to her son, the third baseman, who fielded it, getting the first out of the game.
Now that Beverly Webb had become quiet and had moved out of Nick’s father’s airspace, Nick realized that he had just missed a golden opportunity. If she and his father got friendly, Nick would be that much closer to retrieving the stain remover.
A storm raged in Nick now. A single word from him could ease the tension he had created. He could bring this woman into his family circle, or he could keep her out of it forever. But could he betray the memory of his mother just to get a stupid stain remover? Although, it was more than a stain remover, wasn’t it? Would he hate himself if he did it? Would he kick himself if he didn’t? And which was worse, hating himself or kicking himself?
Nick looked up when he heard the crack of a bat. The batter had popped a fly ball into right field—where Danny was waiting.
The ball reached its apex as the batter rounded first, and it came down toward Danny. The entire crowd fell silent with anticipation that bordered on dread, and the other fielders actually began to back away.
Everyone remembered what had happened the last time a ball was hit in Danny’s direction. The sky had opened up and hurled a flaming piece of heaven at him.
This time Danny reached out his arm, held his mitt high…
…and the ball hit the ground about five feet to his left.
The fans rose to their feet in thunderous cheers—even his own teammates were cheering. The batter continued to round the bases, but no one much cared—no one even went after the ball. It was as if, by failing to catch it, Danny had just won the World Series. Danny, not knowing what to make of it, just watched the cheering crowd, and then took an exaggerated bow that brought on even more cheers.
“Go, Danny!” yelled Nick’s dad, ev
er the proud father.
Nick also cheered his brother’s magnificent error. And in that moment he got an idea.
Swinging his arm wide, he brushed his elbow against Beverly Webb’s purse, knocking it off their bench and sending it down into the dim framework of the bleachers. As it tumbled, it spilled keys and loose change that clanged and tinkled on dusty struts all the way down.
“Oops,” said Nick.
Beverly Webb gave Nick a gaze that was not so much cold as piercingly honest.
“We both know you did that on purpose,” she said without any of the anger Nick wanted her to have.
Nick’s father opened his mouth, fully prepared to defend him, but Nick didn’t let him.
“Yeah, maybe I did,” said Nick.
“And maybe you’ll go get it,” said Beverly Webb.
“No maybe about it,” said his father. “Nick, apologize and get her purse.”
Nick stood up. “It was a dumb thing to do. I’m sorry.”
As he left the bleachers, he heard his dad say, “He’s really not that kind of kid,” and that bothered Nick, because it made him wonder what kind of kid he was…or was becoming.
The crawl space beneath the bleachers was darker than Nick thought it would be, with only a few slender beams of light piercing the gloom. The ground was littered with soda cans, gum wrappers, and popcorn. Right now the darkness was his friend, because it meant that no one peering through the slats up above could see what he was doing. He found the purse and began gathering the various things that had fallen out. Including the woman’s wallet, which he now opened.
Beverly Webb thought he had knocked the purse over because he didn’t like her. It was true he didn’t like her—but that wasn’t the reason for what he did. As long as she believed it was, though, she’d never suspect the whole truth.
Nick pulled out her driver’s license and held it in a shaft of light just long enough to memorize the address. Then he slid it back into the wallet, slipped the wallet into the purse, and returned to the bench above, where he presented the purse to its owner.
“Thank you,” she said. His father chose not to look at him.
“Like I said, I’m sorry.”
She offered him a forgiving grin. “Apology accepted. And I get it, okay?”
Nick shrugged. “There’s nothing to get,” he said. Well, there was one thing. And now that he knew where she lived, he’d be coming for the stain remover.
According to the science of game theory, individuals tend to make decisions that favor themselves. This might seem ridiculously obvious, but science is full of things that seem ridiculously obvious yet are far more complex than they appear. Take, for instance, Newton’s greatest achievement, the theory of gravity, which boils down to: “All things that fall, fall down.”
And, like the theory of gravity, game theory is not as simple as it seems. First of all, “game” applies to much more than simple pastimes like Little League, or even Major League, baseball. Game theory stretches to encompass politics, economics, biology—even civilization as a whole—and it can sometimes tip the balance in life-or-death decisions.
The game Nick now played held such life-or-death consequences—for both himself and the world. He knew it, and still he played, because when you’re both a game piece and a player, the only way out is through either victory or defeat. Defeat, in Nick’s case, meant a world in which the Accelerati held all of Tesla’s inventions and, most likely, his life in their hands. Neither of those was an acceptable outcome to Nick.
Vince LaRue was also in the game, although somewhat on the fringe. He had a very different perspective on life-or-death decisions. To him, both states were temporary, and both were a nuisance. He often wished there were a third state of being that wasn’t such a royal pain, but electricity was binary in nature, leaving him only two choices: either positive or negative.
Though Vince did not show it, he was actually pleased when Nick called that night. Sure, Nick was indirectly responsible for Vince’s current binary state, but he was also the driving force behind the most interesting chain of events Vince had ever experienced. After all, the world had almost ended. Perhaps it might almost end again! That was definitely worth the ride.
“Vince, I need your help.” It sounded as if his friend on the other end of the phone was pedaling a bicycle uphill, which, in fact, was the case.
“With what?” Vince asked with a yawn—which was solely for dramatic effect, as the battery did not allow him to be tired.
“Breaking and entering,” Nick said.
This surprised Vince, as Nick was not the burglarizing type. But people change. “I’m insulted you assume I know anything about that.”
“Well, do you?”
“Of course, but I’m still insulted.”
Nick quickly summarized the situation. His brother’s team and their parents had gone out for consolation pizza after losing thirty-three to zero. This gave Nick a window of about two hours to retrieve a garage-sale item from one of those family’s homes.
In the end, it didn’t take much to convince Vince to meet him at Beverly Webb’s house, though Vince made it sound like a major imposition. “The sooner we find all this junk,” he said, “the sooner you’ll stop bugging me, and let me get on with my so-called life.” As he hung up, he felt some satisfaction that this was perhaps the only time in history that the expression “so-called life” was entirely accurate.
The sun had already dropped behind Pikes Peak as Vince rode his bike to the address Nick had given him. The shadow of the Rocky Mountains was now reaching out to blanket Colorado Springs in darkness. Vince loved how quickly night came just east of the Rockies. It fell upon the town like a coffin lid, leaving the populace bewildered until their eyes could adjust.
It was already instant night when he arrived at the boxy tract home at the top of a hill. Vince had come prepared for the job, with two pairs of latex gloves, two LED headlamps on rubber straps, and a set of lock-picking tools that he didn’t actually know how to use. He had put them all into the zippered front pocket of the backpack he now always kept slung over his shoulders. The one that held his literal lifeline.
Nick was standing deep in the bushes at the edge of the property, where he wouldn’t be seen by anyone—unless they knew to look for him.
“I thought you might have changed your mind,” he said as Vince coasted to a stop in front of him.
“Should I have?” Vince asked, not the least out of breath from his uphill pedaling—another benefit of battery-operated existence. He walked his bike behind a bush and leaned it against Nick’s before asking the question that had been nagging at him. “So how come we’re breaking in, instead of negotiating for it?”
“It’s complicated,” Nick said, looking away. “Can we just get this over with, please?”
Vince could have pressed, but he didn’t really care why this mission was different. “Did you find a point of entry?”
“Back door, front door, side garage door. They’re all locked.”
“Doors are never truly locked,” Vince said, until he discovered the nasty double-mortise dead bolts in all three doors. “Except for these,” he amended. “Did you ring the bell?”
“Why would I do that?”
Vince rolled his eyes. Was this obvious only to him? “To find out if there’s a canine presence.”
“Wouldn’t a dog already have heard us?”
“You give them too much credit. You can poke around outside a house for an hour, but until you bang on the wall or ring the bell, most dogs won’t care. But once you do, they care way too much.”
The doorbell yielded nothing but silence from inside, which satisfied Vince. He led the way to the kitchen window—the one least likely to be locked.
“I used to break into neighbors’ homes,” Vince admitted. “Not to take anything, but to watch TV. My mom refuses to spring for the good cable stations.”
The window wasn’t wired with an alarm, and it was only barely la
tched. Together, Nick and Vince gingerly removed the screen. Then Vince used one of the picking tools as a lever to unfasten the latch.
“Easy peasy,” said Vince once they were standing in the kitchen. “And I’ll deny it if you ever tell anyone I said ‘easy peasy.’”
He stopped short when he saw a cat-food bowl on the floor near the sink. “Uh-oh.”
“What is it?”
“They have a cat. Cats don’t seem to like me anymore.”
This sentiment was punctuated, and confirmed, by the loudest hiss Vince had ever heard. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a mountain lion in the room with them. But it was just a common house cat sitting on top of the refrigerator.
“Boo!” Vince shouted, and the cat did an amazing feline leap, ricocheting off the hanging lampshade and out of the room. With the cat dispatched, Vince carefully pulled his backpack around so he could unzip the outer pocket. He fished out the small headlamps and handed one to Nick. “Here, put this on.” Once the lamps were strapped to their heads and flicked on, Vince asked, “What is it we’re looking for again?”
“A stain remover,” Nick whispered, as if somehow breaking into an empty house required hushed tones.
“What does it look like?” Vince said, in a defiantly full voice.
“I don’t know,” Nick whispered back. “Nothing at the garage sale looked like a stain remover.”
“Then how are we supposed to find it?”
“I’ll know it when I see it,” said Nick, his volume finally matching Vince’s. “In the meantime, look for something old and…Tesla-like.” Which was actually a helpful suggestion. “Let’s fan out and check the whole house.”
“Technically, I don’t think two people can ‘fan,’” Vince pointed out.
“Fine. You take the ground floor and I’ll go upstairs.”
And although Vince didn’t like being told what to do, he agreed, since that would have been his plan anyway. Nick left, and Vince watched his light bob up the stairs. Vince’s first stop was the laundry room just off the kitchen—which apparently was the cat’s panic room, because it stood on the dryer, back arched and fur on end like a Halloween decoration.