The Project (25 page)

“It will,” Luke replied.

The hammering on the door continued, and one of the hinges popped.

“We gotta go,” Tommy said.

“Two secs,” Luke said.

He grabbed a reel of wire from a pile of building materials. It was light, no more than twelve or fourteen gauge. He
twisted one end around the release pin on the block and tackle of the crane, then fed it back toward the door.

The blows of a sledgehammer rained constantly on the other side, and the door shook as he twisted the wire around its handle.

“That’s it. Let’s go,” he said.

The moment the door opened, the release pin would pop and the crate of metal bolts would fall right into the Vitruvian chamber.

They had to be long gone before that happened.

Tommy had pushed a couple of empty crates across the floor below the tripod. He stacked one crate on top of another and then put another crate up against it, to make a stair. They had fallen about half a yard, Luke remembered, so that was how high they needed to be now. The center of the Vitruvian chamber, on the other side of time.

“What if the chamber has stopped working?” Tommy asked. “What do we do if someone has altered the settings?”

“Don’t even think about it,” Luke said.

Tommy smiled. “You first,” he said, helping Luke up onto the first step of the makeshift platform.

Luke looked up at the box of bolts hanging above their heads. “See you next century, bro!” he said.

“You bet, dude,” Tommy said.

Luke climbed onto the next level and stood upright.

Instantly, he felt the buzzing and the hair-raising, skin-prickling presence of the chamber. Then the hammering sounds faded into nothingness, as did the bright lights and walls of the cave.

He was back in the chamber, surrounded by the charcoal walls of the rare-earth magnets.

He crawled over to the hatch and looked back to see Tommy right behind him.

“How long have we got?” Luke asked.

“Seconds!” he said. “They’re on the last hinge!”

Luke stumbled down through the hatch, falling to the ground, and looked up to see Ms. Sheck’s horrified face.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“Never mind,” he yelled. “Just run!”

She didn’t run. She stepped toward Luke, bent down, grabbed his arm, and pulled him up over her shoulder in a firefighter’s lift. His ribs screamed
fire
, but he gritted his teeth and made no sound.

She ran, and Tommy ran with her, through the diagonal door of the shield wall, to the high concrete staircase leading back to the upper levels.

Tommy slammed the metal door shut behind them.

There were 217 stairs, but Ms. Sheck never once faltered, bounding up with Luke on her shoulder. A strange, fierce shape filled his sight, jumping and bouncing around before his eyes while his exhausted brain tried to make sense of the vision. It snarled, and its eyes burned into him as they put more and more distance between themselves and the impending disaster. They had reached the top of the stairs before Luke realized that he was staring at the tattoo of the roaring lion on her arm.

Tommy slammed open the top door, and they hurried along the corridor.

“What’s happening?” Ms. Sheck had little breath to ask.

“I’ll tell you soon,” Luke said.

In his mind, he could see it all.

The final sledgehammer blow. The door pulling open. The metal wire tightening, then popping the release pin.

The box of metal bolts beginning to fall. Dropping right into the portal between time.

And as it fell, it slipped out of 1944 and into the future, but in the future there was a chamber, made of the strongest, yet most brittle magnets known to man. The most powerful magnetic force ever concentrated in one place.

And the box of heavy iron bolts was about to appear in the middle of it.

The sheer energy, contained in such a small space, was almost impossible to imagine.

Each bolt would accelerate with explosive force, smashing into the brittle fabric of the rare-earth magnets. The chamber would disintegrate, and even as it did so, the flying shards of magnet would attract and repel each other over and over again. It would all happen in an instant.

Even as he thought that, the ground heaved beneath their feet and they were thrown down.

The metal door behind them was blown off its hinges like a sliver of tinfoil, rock and dust billowing into the tunnels behind them.

Then, almost immediately, came an implosion, the dust and smoke sucked back down into the depths of the tunnels, rushing back to fill the vacuum that had been created.

For a moment, all the air disappeared and they gasped for
breath, before the pressure slowly began to return to normal.

It was over.

The chamber was gone.

The book,
Leonardo’s River
, was destroyed along with it.

Hitler would lose the war, and the world, for good or bad, would be the same as it always had been.

Mueller himself would be trapped. An old man trapped in the wrong time.

He might try to tell people of the future, but they would just think him crazy.

A crazy old man.

Ms. Sheck was first to her feet and extended a hand down to Tommy and then Luke.

Luke took it and stood, brushing dust and rock particles from his clothes.

“Where’s Gerda?” he asked.

“She left,” Ms. Sheck said. “I don’t know where she went.”

There was a long period of silence; then she asked, “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

Despite the shock and the pain, or perhaps because of it, Luke laughed. “Can it be our new project, instead of
The Last of the Mohicans
?”

Ms. Sheck smiled.

T
ommy and I told Ms. Sheck most of what happened, but we also swore each other to secrecy.

The ability to change the past and steal knowledge from the future. Was there anybody on earth who would not abuse that power?

Leonardo was right. If it came to light, then someone, somewhere, would misuse it.

Leonardo’s drawings had been destroyed by Benfer, and Benfer’s book, and the chamber itself, had been lost in the explosion at the bunker.

So that, pretty much, was that.

Almost.

Somehow, even though I knew the risks, I could not bring myself to completely destroy this centuries-old knowledge. The most amazing discovery of Leonardo da Vinci.

I justified it to myself by thinking that maybe one day there would be some terrible catastrophe, like a nuclear war,
and the Vitruvian chamber could be rebuilt to save the world from disaster. That maybe in the future, people would learn to live in harmony and to use the knowledge responsibly.

But I knew that really I was just making excuses.

Like Benfer, I couldn’t bring myself to wipe the knowledge completely from the face of the earth.

And the plans did still exist, of course.

In the strange and fickle memory of a fifteen-year-old boy.

I knew I couldn’t rely on that memory forever. I had to record Leonardo’s calculations somewhere.

But where?

How could I hide this information so thoroughly, so completely, that it could never be found, and yet at the same time, it was not forever lost?

A code.

I needed a code that would be impossible to break, protected by a key that was infinite.

It took me a year. Six months to create the code, and another six months to encode the numbers and the diagrams.

And where to store the code? There was only one place, of course. Woven into words, secreted into sentences, pasted into paragraphs, concealed into chapters, buried in a book.

Hidden in plain sight.

I went to Dad’s computer and laid out the sheets of encoded data beside me on the desk. Then I typed the first words of my novel slowly, knowing that everyone who read
these words would regard it as just a story. Fiction. No one would ever believe that it was true.

“This is not the most boring book in the world,”
I wrote.
“This is a book
about
the most boring book in the world.”
I considered that for a moment, then replaced the period with a comma and added:
“which is a different book altogether.”

The following people won the grand prize in my school competitions and have all had a character named after them in this book:

D
ARCY
B
ENFER
Brisbane Boys’ College, Queensland, Australia

B
RYAN
B
ROWN
Vista Del Valle School, California, United States

G
LENN
D
INNING
Mount Tarampa State School, Queensland, Australia

A
ARON
F
AYERS
Lincoln Heights School, New Zealand

J
ACOB
I
SHERWOOD
Kimberley College, Queensland, Australia

M
R.
K
ERR
Masterton Intermediate School, New Zealand

P
HILIPP
K
HODIER
St. Patrick’s College Strathfield, NSW, Australia

B
EN
P
ICKERING
Point View School, New Zealand

J
ENNIFER
S
EDDON
Tinopai Primary School, New Zealand

C
LAUDIA
S
MITH
St. Joseph’s School, New Zealand

A
LSO
:
Luke McKay, Laetitia Sheck,
Heath Thompson, Tom Wundheiler

C
HRIS
D
OYLE
strength coach, University of Iowa Hawkeyes

K
RISTI
B
ONTRAGER
public relations coordinator, University of Iowa Libraries

C
HRISTOPHER
M
ERRILL
International Writing Program (IWP), University of Iowa, for his firsthand account of the floods

T
HE
IWP
TEAM
:
Hugh Ferrer
Joe Tiefenthaler
Melissa Schiek
Kiki Petrosino
Kelly Bedeian
Nataša Ďurovičová
Peter and Mary Nazareth
Kecia Lynn

BRIAN FALKNER
attended a three-month writing residency at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2008. He arrived in Iowa City not long after devastating floods had ravaged the region. His experience there became the inspiration for
The Project
.

To learn more about Brian and his books, visit
brianfalkner.com
.