Edison’s Alley (22 page)

Danny had dragged the asteroid from the heavens, and then Mr. Slate had knocked it into orbit, turning it into a massive electrical generator, which created beautiful lights in the night sky and
annoying static—but what if that static was more than just a nuisance? If the asteroid was a generator, could it be overloading?

“Caitlin, honey, talk to me! Are you all right?”

Caitlin took a deep breath, and got her bearings. “I’m fine, Mom. Just a shock is all.” She carefully grabbed the sheets again. Even in the light of the laundry room, the
sparks within the sheets could be seen as tiny little flashes, discharging with faint, arrhythmic snaps. “See?” Caitlin said, trying to downplay it. “Just static.”

Her mother seemed both upset and a little bit frightened, but her own emotional charge passed. “Well,” she said, “maybe we’ll air-dry from now on.”

Petula was also becoming more and more aware of the strange occurrences brought on by the asteroid in orbit. Most interesting to her was the increasing number of times kamikaze
birds would fly into the glass of her living room window. It was as if the disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field had caused the neighborhood bird population to lose all sense of
direction.

Petula could relate—and she wondered whether she was the bird, or the pane. Surely there was the potential to be either. She could be the victim or the agent of forces unseen.

From the moment Petula became a junior pledge of the Accelerati, she knew that she was playing in a new league, with far higher stakes.

They had killed Vince. True, he was now connected to a device that made death little more than an inconvenience—but they probably hadn’t known the battery existed when they placed the deadly remote in Nick’s house.

They had killed an innocent harpist. True, for some reason, the woman didn’t seem to mind the fact that she was being killed, but that didn’t lessen Ms. Planck’s act of
murder.

Could Petula condone and forgive such acts? And if called on to kill with her own hand, could she do it? Petula knew, with absolute certainty, the answer to that question.

Maybe.

Petula despised the Great Maybe. She had always valued certainty, but she was coming to understand that “maybe” was a comforting answer to life’s most difficult questions. It
allowed one to avoid consulting one’s own moral compass for as long as possible—and with the Earth now so weirdly magnetized, who knew in which direction her moral compass would point?
Best to let it spin unchecked for a while.

The problem was not her indecisiveness, though. Her concern was how coldly decisive the Accelerati were. She suspected—no, she
knew
—that things would not end well for Nick if
Dr. Jorgenson, the Grand Acceleratus, had his way.

“As long as he’s useful to us, he’ll be fine,” Ms. Planck had assured her—as if that was comforting. For all Petula knew, Ms. Planck would end his life herself once
he ceased being “useful,” whatever that meant.

“The Grand Acceleratus already tried to kill him,” Petula reminded Ms. Planck. “Nick told me so.”

“Only because Nick was holding a weapon on him—a weapon that froze his arm, and left him without a right pinkie. Dr. Jorgenson can’t be blamed for trying to defend himself, can
he?”

It all sounded so reasonable. Petula was sure that if Nick were killed, the Accelerati would have a reasonable explanation for that, too.

There was so much for her to weigh. Being part of the Accelerati had already made her special; it could also make her great—not just in her own mind, but in the world outside of it.
Is
this the price of being great?
Petula wondered. Being willing to sacrifice anything and anyone in the pursuit of greatness?

When put that way, the answer became clear:

Maybe.

On Saturday, Petula was called before the Grand Acceleratus again. Ms. Planck bowled their way in, and once more they crossed through the Great Hall overlooking a glorious
vista. Today it wasn’t Venice; it was a rain forest canopy.

“Try not to irritate him,” Ms. Planck warned. “He’s had a rough week.”

As Petula and Ms. Planck strode through headquarters, the few Accelerati present noticed the heavy, gunmetal clarinet in her hands and whispered to one another, clearly knowing what it was, if
not what it did. She fought the urge to show them.

She had brought the clarinet at Ms. Planck’s insistence.

“Jorgenson asked for it, and he’s a man who gets what he wants,” Ms. Planck had told her.

She led Petula past the scowling statue of Edison and the research department, down a flight of stairs to an impressive wooden door with a brass knocker that seemed entirely out of place. But
what was she thinking?
Everything
down there was entirely out of place.

Jorgenson opened the door.

“Miss Grabowski-Jones,” he said. “A pleasure to see you again.”

She reflexively held out her hand to shake, but he displayed his bandaged right hand.

“Sorry,” she said. “I forgot.” She and Ms. Planck stepped inside.

“Welcome to my private residence.”

The well-appointed living room was decorated with minimalistic modern furniture, and it had large windows on three sides. Through the magic of high-definition holographics, the room appeared to
be suspended ten stories above New York’s Times Square.

Ms. Planck smirked. “Not following the rain forest theme? I would have thought you’d go for something more pastoral.”

“That shows how little you know me, Evangeline,” Jorgenson said, and then he quickly returned his attention to Petula. “Some like the tranquillity of nature outside their
window; I prefer to exist at the very crossroads of humanity.” He took out his phone and tapped the screen several times. With each tap the scene beyond the windows changed to another hub of
civilization. The Champs-Élysées in Paris. Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

“I can be in all these places with the touch of my finger.”

Petula would have been impressed by the display if Jorgenson hadn’t been so impressed with himself. Yes, he was the Grand Acceleratus, but his self-importance rubbed her natural
contrariness the wrong way, and she found herself saying, “Yeah, but they’re just pictures.”

Ms. Planck put a firm hand on her shoulder to remind her to watch herself. Jorgenson didn’t seem offended, though. He took her comment in stride.

“Reality is subjective,” he told her. “It can be whatever we choose it to be.”

“Yeah, but they’re still just pictures,” Petula said again. And she reached out and brazenly tapped the
CLEAR
button on his phone interface. They were
left in a room with a lot of windows looking at nothing but huge black plasma screens a foot beyond the glass. “It’s not reality if I can turn it off,” she said.

Ms. Planck squeezed her shoulder until it hurt and said, “Dr. Jorgenson, I’m sorry, she didn’t mean—”

Jorgenson put up his pinkieless hand for silence, then waved to dismiss her. Ms. Planck threw Petula a disciplinary glare before she left the residence, closing the door behind her.

Once Ms. Planck was gone, Jorgenson smiled at Petula—that same moray-eel kind of smile she had seen before. “You pride yourself on being an irritation in the lining of the
world,” he said, his voice soft. “But we irritations eventually become the pearls. I see the pearl you could be, Petula.”

It was the kindest thing that anyone had ever said to her. Was it crazy for her to think that the man might be sincere?

“I’m sorry if I insulted you,” she said. “But I think pictures shouldn’t just show us what we want to see—they should show the truth.”

Jorgenson nodded. “Like the pictures your camera takes.”

“Which are always true.”

Jorgenson finally got to the business at hand. “But I see you’ve brought me a gift.”

Petula had almost forgotten the clarinet she held by her side. “Well, it’s not really a gift, since you asked me to bring it, and especially since I can’t leave it with
you.”

His countenance took a turn toward stormy. “And why can’t you?”

For the first time in this encounter, Petula became uncomfortable. “Nick gave it to me—and he’ll know I don’t have it anymore. He’s…connected to this stuff
somehow.”

Jorgenson waved his hand again. “Nonsense. Why would he know? He doesn’t know you gave us the camera lens, after all.”

“Only because he has the camera it came from,” Petula insisted.

“Come, come,” said Jorgenson. “He’s not any more connected to these objects than your mother is connected to your clothes dryer.”

“Actually,” said Petula, “my father does the laundry, and he always seems to know when the load is done, even before it buzzes.” Jorgenson said nothing, so she pressed
on. “You want Nick to trust me, don’t you? I can’t do anything that will make him suspicious.”

Jorgenson sighed and put out his hand. “At least let me see the instrument.”

Reluctantly, she gave it to him.

He examined the clarinet’s many buttons and valves. “I used to play, you know.”

“Marching band?”

Jorgenson’s cold eyes flicked to hers. “Hardly. The Harvard Symphony Orchestra.”

More self-importance. If it were anyone other than the Grand Acceleratus, she would not have tolerated it.

He positioned his good hand and his wounded one on the instrument, put the mouthpiece to his lips, and blew.

What came out of the other end was not music. It was the most horrific and distressing series of sounds Petula had ever heard. Pain could not adequately describe the experience. It made her want
to rip her ears off and stomp them like cockroaches. She had played the clarinet only once herself, out of curiosity—but there must have been a sonic buffer zone for the player, because what
had sounded to her like nothing more than bad music had left her parents screaming and scrambling to call 911. Now she understood why.

Jorgenson played for the better part of ten seconds, and each second seemed to stretch toward an infinity of anguish. When he was done, Petula found herself on the floor, her ringing ears still
not ready to trust that it was finally over.

Jorgenson took the clarinet from his lips and looked curiously at Petula, who was struggling to recover. “Remarkable,” he said. “Those were supposed to be the opening strains
of
Rhapsody in Blue
, but apparently that’s not what came out.”

“Not even close,” she said, glaring up at him. “I think Gershwin should rise out of his grave just to smack you.”

Jorgenson regarded the clarinet for another moment. “Yes, this will weaponize nicely,” he said, satisfied. Then he held it out toward Petula. “In the meantime, I leave it in
your capable hands.”

Petula stood up and took it, wondering what the catch was. In her experience, gestures of goodwill were just camouflaged favors that would one day need to be repaid. It couldn’t be that he
genuinely trusted her.
Nobody
genuinely trusted her—not even the members of her own family. Not even her Chihuahua, Hemorrhoid, who would always sniff the food she set out for him and
look up at her as if weighing the possibility that she might be poisoning him again.

No—she knew Jorgenson’s gesture came with a price. And she suspected what that price might be.

“Tell me, Dr. Jorgenson…what happens to Nick when you have all the things he sold in his garage sale?”

“Then we’ll be done with him.” He quickly added, “And you will advance heartily up the ladder here.”

“Done with him how?”

He didn’t answer the question. Instead he said, “Miss Grabowski-Jones, there comes a time in each of our lives when we must decide whose side we are on. Whether we are we going to
serve the great cause of humanity, or wallow with the swine. You don’t appear to be the wallowing type.”

“I’m not,” Petula said, indignant at the suggestion, but also torn, because she knew that swine are eventually slaughtered to put bacon on the Accelerati’s plates.

Jorgenson, sensing her pensiveness, changed the subject. “By the way, you’ll be pleased to know what we have in store for the time lens you gave us,” he said. “We plan to
build a telescope that we will train on the windows of world leaders. Imagine if we knew, twenty-four hours in advance, what the most powerful people in the world will be doing tomorrow!”

“It would make
us
the most powerful people in the world,” she said.

“Precisely. But in the meantime, I’ve found another use for it.” He reached up and pulled down what Petula, until now, had thought was just a weird ceiling lamp. It descended
as Jorgenson tugged on it, revealing it to be the lower end of a periscope.

“Really?” Petula couldn’t help but smirk. “What, are we in a submarine?”

Jorgenson grinned and tapped his phone once more, turning the vista beyond the large windows into a seascape full of circling sharks.

“Reality is what we make it,” he said, gesturing to the periscope.

“Still just pictures,” she said, but she moved closer to take a gander.

The periscope must have been able to pass through some undetectable spatial void in the bowling alley, because its head—which contained the time-leaping lens—was mounted on the
building’s roof.

Most periscopes turn, giving a 360-degree view, but this one was fixed and focused on a single magnified spot, some miles away, zeroing in on tomorrow.

Petula gasped, recognizing it right away. “It’s Nick’s house.”

“It behooves us to know what he’ll be up to, before he’s up to it,” Jorgenson said.

And so Petula gazed once more into Nick Slate’s future, just as she had when she developed the picture that had predicted Vince’s untimely death…

…and just like then, what she saw changed absolutely everything.

This time, however, she knew exactly what she had to do.