The Wells Bequest (14 page)

I put my book upside down in my lap. “I still don't understand how science-fiction objects get out of their fictional universes and into the real world.”

“You mean
this
world? What makes you so sure this is the real world?”

“Come on, Jaya. Be serious.”

“I am being serious.”

“All right. How do they get out of their fictional worlds and into
this
world, then?”

She shut her book on her finger to keep her place. “There isn't one single answer. Lots of the objects come through the authors—that's how Mr. Steel got most of the things in the Wells Bequest. Or sometimes we can capture them ourselves.”

“Like we just did with the model time machine,” I said.

“Exactly.” She paused, smiling. Could she be thinking of the kiss? “But there are lots of objects that nobody's captured yet, and maybe they never will. Maybe those stories aren't good enough to have real objects in them. Or maybe I'm wrong, and there is no fictional universe with Kansan mountains in it. Maybe when Verne wrote the story, he put in some true stuff—like the
Terror
—and some stuff he just made up, like the mountains in Kansas.”

“That answer stinks,” I said. “It's totally unsatisfying.”

“Then maybe you should do some literary-philosophy experiments and try to find a better one,” said Jaya. “Ms. Minnian would like that.”

“I wish the judges would let me do that for my science fair project!”

Auntie Shanti put her head in the doorway. “Are you done solving the mysteries of the universe yet?” she asked. “You'd better finish fast—it's time to take the vessel down.”

The Death Ray

A
untie Shanti folded our wings and dove into the Atlantic. We surfaced so we wouldn't scrape the bottom, engaged the cloaking, and docked at the yacht club marina by Battery Park.

I followed Jaya and Shanti up the swaying pier toward the tall buildings of the Wall Street district. The sailboats poked their masts at the setting sun.

“Here, I'll take the time machine,” said Jaya.

“No, you'd better let Leo keep it for now, until Doc speaks with the attorneys,” said Auntie Shanti. “Your apartment might count as an official repository location. After all, your father's the board president.”

“Oh, good point. Do you have someplace safe to put it, Leo?”

I nodded. “My closet, under my laundry. My whole family's terrified of my dirty socks.”

“Schist! Socks!” said Jaya. “Come meet us at the repository after you've dropped it off—Doc's going to want to hear all about it.”

It felt odd carrying a time machine on the subway. The three blond tourists chattering away in German, the African American man in a suit reading a neatly folded newspaper, the tired Chinese woman carrying four red shopping bags full of vegetables, the two little boys elbowing each other for a better view out the window—what would they say if they knew?

• • •

I met Jaya and her aunt again in the repository. We headed upstairs with Ms. Minnian.

“Guess what?” cried Jaya, bursting through the doors into Dr. Rust's office. “My plan worked, and Leo—”

“Stop, Jaya. We're not alone,” said Dr. Rust, pointing at the wall.

“What?” said Jaya. We both spun around to look.

A large tinted sepia photograph in a fancy frame was hanging on the wall. Wires attached the picture to a complicated brass device that looked like an old-fashioned telephone. The photo showed Simon standing in front of a big machine that looked a little like a World War I anti-aircraft gun. It was almost twice as tall as he was. It had five mean-looking barrels, five big, brassy boxes, and a cube with scary-looking swirly things sticking out of it. Somehow those swirly things were the focus of the photo. They seemed to glow.

But it couldn't be a photo. Simon was moving. He was talking, too.

“There you are, Jaya,” he said.

“That's not the shifting picture from the Grimm Collection, is it?” Jaya asked Dr. Rust. “The frame looks different.”

“No, it's the telelectroscope from the Wells Bequest.”

“The what?” said Jaya.

“What's a telelectroscope?” I asked.

“It's a sort of networked videophone—an early version of the Internet. From an 1898 short story by Mark Twain.”

“Mark Twain, the guy who wrote
Huckleberry Finn
? I didn't know he even wrote science fiction.”

“Oh, he wrote pretty much everything,” said Dr. Rust. “He had a wide-ranging imagination.”

The image of Simon cleared his throat sarcastically. “If you're quite done with the literary critique, I have a small matter to discuss,” he said.

We all turned back to Simon.

“As you know, I made a mistake. I would like a chance to rectify that. To do that, I need the time machine. Please send it today by pneumo-courier.” His voice came out hollow and crackly.

“Simon,” said Dr. Rust, “you know perfectly well that the time machine in the Wells Bequest doesn't work. And you also know perfectly well that you've lost all borrowing privileges at the New-York Circulating Material Repository.”

“I also know perfectly well that Jaya and Leo were just in Richmond trying to recapture the time machine from the Time Traveller's house, and I just heard Jaya admit that her plan worked.”

“Don't be an idiot, Simon. You saw us. Did we look like we were carrying the time machine? It's huge.”

“You might have taken it home already when I saw you. Or shrunk it, or made it invisible. I know you have it. Doc, you would be well advised to restore my borrowing privileges and send it to me by the next pneumo-courier.”

“Why would we do that—even if we did have it?” asked Ms. Minnian.

Simon waved his hand at the machine behind him. “Because I have Nikola Tesla's death ray, and I won't hesitate to use it if you don't. I'll destroy New York.”

• • •

For a moment nobody could speak. Then Jaya said, “This is supposed to convince me that you're not evil, Simon? Fail!”

Simon said, “I know you think that now. But you'll see. It will all work out. Once I've used the time machine to correct my mistake, you'll never know about any of this because it will never have happened.”

“And what if we don't have the working time machine—which we don't? Or if we choose not to negotiate with a terrorist?”

“I would be very sad to have to use the death ray, but believe me, I will if I have to,” said Simon. “Don't look at me like that. I'm not a monster. Be sensible! Once I have the time machine, I can change the past and undestroy New York.”

“Not if it's in New York and you destroy it!” said Jaya.

“That's why you'll give it to me,” said Simon.

“But we don't have it!” I said.

“That's crazy, Simon! You're not thinking clearly,” said Jaya.

“All right. I'll destroy San Francisco first. You have cousins there, don't you?”

“Why should we believe that the machine behind you is Tesla's death ray, Simon?” asked Ms. Minnian in a reasonable voice. “There's no record that he ever actually built one. The models and plans are thought to have been destroyed in the South Fifth Avenue lab fire of 1895. The Burton certainly doesn't own such a thing.”

“It's not the Burton's. It's mine,” said Simon.

“What are you doing with Tesla's death ray?”

“My grandmother's grandfather worked in Tesla's lab. He sailed to England the night the lab burned down. He took a lot of models and plans with him. He met my great-great-grandmother on the ship crossing the Atlantic, and they built the death ray together from the plans.”

“Oh, come on.
That
thing?” said Jaya. But she sounded worried.

I was worried too. Even in the sepia motion photo, that big gun looked way too real.

“You have twenty-four hours to hand over the time machine,” said Simon. “Then I'll do a little demonstration to show you what the death ray is capable of. Dallas, shall we say? Or Paris?”

“I don't believe you. You wouldn't do that,” said Jaya. “You're not really that evil.”

“Twenty-four hours,” said Simon, and reached behind him. The photo image went uniformly brown.

• • •

Dr. Rust unplugged the telelectroscope, took it down from the wall, put it outside the office, and shut the door. “We can talk freely—he can't hear us now. What do we do?”

“I know one ought never to negotiate with terrorists,” said Auntie Shanti. “But mightn't it be safer simply to give him the time machine?”

“That's crazy! Why would we do that?” I said.

Auntie Shanti said, “The death ray—if that's what it really is—could destroy a city. And all Simon wants with the time machine is to undo a mistake he made. That seems harmless.”

“No,” said Dr. Rust. “The Wells machine has no restrictions. Simon could use it to alter the past and the future any way he liked. We can't put an object so powerful in the hands of someone so unstable and untrustworthy. And anyway, we don't even know for sure whether that thing
is
the death ray. I'm inclined to think he's bluffing.”

“But what if he isn't?” asked Jaya.

“It looked pretty convincing to me,” I said.

“How could he possibly aim a beam at New York from London unless he was in orbit? Which he's not,” said Dr. Rust.

“Well, we don't have an answer to that,” said Ms. Minnian. “There are no records of what the Tesla death ray was or how it worked.”

I'd just read a whole book about Tesla and his inventions. “Wasn't he trying to use tiny particles of mercury, accelerated in a vacuum?” I said.

“Yes, that was one idea he was playing with. But we don't know for sure what his final concept was, if he ever finished it. The ray could arc along the lines of force of Earth's magnetic field, for all we know. Or it could obey parabolic or ballistic laws, like a missile. We have no idea what that thing behind Simon is.”

“It looks like a really pretentious boson's idea of what a death ray would look like,” I said. “Boy, is that guy full of himself! He's got to use a telelectroscope—he can't even use a cell phone like a normal person.”

“That's not just pretentiousness,” said Ms. Minnian. “He's threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction. The telelectroscope can't be detected with the methods used by national security agencies like the NSA or MI5. Cell phones can. If they heard him and took him seriously, he would be the subject of one of the most massive manhunts in history. And they would find him.”

“Shouldn't we call in the FBI or the NSA or something?” I asked.

“No,” said Dr. Rust. “They would declare us a national threat and confiscate half our collection. We're on our own.”

“Well, couldn't we threaten him back? Are there any deadly weapons in the Wells Bequest?” I asked. As soon as I said it, I realized what a bad idea that was.

“I
have
always wanted to try out Washington Irving's moonstones and concentrated sunbeams,” said Jaya. “But I don't think Simon would react well to threats.”

“Let's not go there,” said Ms. Minnian.

“To be safe, we have to assume the death ray is real,” said Dr. Rust. “I'll reach out to Dr. Pemberley-Potts, and we'll pull together a team to send to London.”

“Can I go?” asked Jaya eagerly. “It's my fault this whole thing started. At least, he said he's doing it for me. I should be the one stopping him.”

“No,” said Dr. Rust. “It's too dangerous.”

Jaya got a stubborn look on her face, but she just said, “All right. I guess you don't need me here, then,” and ran out of the room.

“You'd better go calm her down,” Auntie Shanti told me.

“I'll try. I hope you catch Simon fast.”

The Shrink Ray

I
found Jaya in the Catalog Room. I hurried over to her. “Don't worry, Jaya. It'll be okay. That death ray thing's probably just a big cardboard fake,” I said, with way more confidence than I felt.

Jaya looked up. “Oh, there you are, Leo.” She didn't sound nearly as upset as I expected. “Help me find a good map of the city. Or, no—maybe you should get the money while I find the maps. Get plenty of nickels.”

“What are you talking about? What do you need nickels for?” I checked my pockets. I had a five-dollar bill and sixty-two cents in change, none of it in nickels.

“For the buses and trams and things. Put that away—modern money won't work in 1895, silly!”

“1895? Schist, Jaya! What are you planning?”

“Not so loud. We can't let the librarians know or they'll try to stop us.”

“Try to stop us from doing
what
?”

“From using the time machine, of course. We're going back in time to 1895, before Tesla's lab burned down, and we're stopping Simon's great-great-grandfather from taking the death ray with him when he left for England. Leaves for England? Left for England? Which is it?”

“Jaya! We can't do that!”

“Or we're stopping him from taking the plans for the death ray—Simon's ancestor, I mean. Or maybe we're stopping Tesla from inventing it in the first place. I'm not sure. But we're stopping the death ray at the source so Simon can't get his hands on it.”

“No way!” I said. “That's crazy! The Wells time machine is far too powerful. You know how I worry about changing the past in some horrible way. . . .”

“We won't. We're just going back for a few hours and making one little stop. That won't change much, if anything.”

“Yes, it will! We'll be messing with the lab of one of the most important scientists who ever lived! We could change
everything
!”

“Don't be such a worrywart,” said Jaya. “We'll be careful. This isn't the first time I've operated dangerous equipment, you know.”

“That's the opposite of reassuring,” I said.

“Look,” said Jaya. “I don't actually need you to come with me. I could take the time machine and go back to 1895 by myself. But it'll be much, much better if you help. And I know you're going to agree because you
did.
I mean, you
will.
I mean, you saw your future self already doing it. So can we please just skip this argument and get on with it?”

She was right—I was going to time travel with her, no matter what I said. And Simon hadn't left us a lot of options. “Fine,” I said. “I'll go with you. Not to help, though. To stop you from doing anything too rash.”

“Whatever you say, boss,” said Jaya. She didn't sound like she meant it.

I suppressed the urge to strangle her. “So what are we going to need?” I asked. “Money from 1895 and an old subway map—did they even have subways back then?—and old-fashioned clothes.” So that's why Future Me and Future Jaya were dressed funny! “And the time machine, obviously. What else?”

“The shrink ray from the Wells Bequest. We'll never fit on the model time machine at this size.”

I remembered her mentioning a shrink ray. “Wait—do you have to plug it in? Was this place wired for electricity back in 1895?”

“Oh, we're not leaving from
here
! We can't bring the time machine to the repository, remember? And you saw us in your bedroom. We're leaving from your place.”

“We are? Oh. You're right, we must be.”

“Your building was built already back then, right? It must have been, or we wouldn't have gone there,” said Jaya.

“Yeah, the cornerstone says 1894,” I said. “We'd better bring batteries just in case there wasn't electricity there yet.”

“All right. You take care of the electric stuff and the maps, okay? I'll get the shrink ray and the clothes and the money. What's your shoe size?”

“Nine and a half,” I said.

“Really? Your feet look bigger than that.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I have to stop at home first to pick something up,” said Jaya. “Meet me at your place. What's your address? Here, write it down.”

• • •

Mom and Dad had gone upstate for the weekend and Sofia was staying with Sara, her best friend, so the apartment was empty when I got home. If Simon really acted on his threat, I wouldn't even get a chance to say good-bye to my family.

He wouldn't really do it, would he? He couldn't be
that
evil—could he? But when I remembered the look on his face when Francis teased him about his family, I wasn't so sure.

I got to work at my computer hunting up maps and reading about how people used to get around New York before the subways opened in 1904. I packed up batteries and an adapter. What could I put them in? My backpack would look really out of place in 1895, and they wouldn't invent plastic bags for another few decades.

Maybe my laundry bag?

Emptying it made me realize what a gigantic mess my room was. Dad says a messy desk is a sign of a fertile mind, and Mom doesn't care what I do to my room as long as she doesn't have to look at it.

I kicked things under the bed, shoveled things into the closet, bundled the trash out of the room, threw a sweater over the more delicate projects on my workbench, and straightened the blankets on the bed.

I was engineering a tower of books when the buzzer rang.

“Come on up. It's the sixth floor,” I told Jaya through the intercom.

I stood in the hallway waiting for her elevator and trying to look calm. No big deal, right? Just a coworker I was goopy about, coming over to travel back in time a century or so and stop a supervillain from destroying the city. Not a supervillain, exactly. A dweebervillain. Just the most amazing girl in the city, coming to my own apartment to bend the laws of physics with me and defeat a boy without a conscience. Just the girl—

“Hi, Leo!” called Jaya, stepping off the elevator. She was carrying an old-fashioned leather traveling bag. I led the way to my room.

“I plotted our route downtown,” I said. “Let me show you. We'd better take the Sixth Avenue elevated train, which actually runs on the same track as the Eighth Avenue line up here, and we can catch it at—”

Jaya cut me off. “That's fine. Do you think we could move those books? I need at least five square feet of floor space to work in and a wall outlet.” She took a little gadget out of her traveling bag. It looked like a cross between a pencil sharpener and a vacuum cleaner.

“What's that?” I asked.

“The shrink ray from the Wells Bequest.”

“That's a shrink ray? But it's so . . . small,” I said.

“That's because I shrank it. It's way too big to carry. Come on, help me move these books.”

We pushed the books under my desk. Jaya plugged in the gadget.

“I need to turn it on, but now the switch is too small for my finger. You don't have a needle or a pin, do you?” asked Jaya.

“I have a microprobe. Will that do?”

“What's a microprobe?”

I rifled through the mess on my workbench, found the probe, and handed it to her.

“This is just a needle stuck through a cork,” Jaya pointed out.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “A needle makes a pretty good microprobe, and the cork makes a good handle.”

“Whatever,” said Jaya. She set the shrink ray down in the middle of the cleared space, kneeled beside it, and poked at it with the microprobe.

I peered down at it.

“Get out of the way, Leo! Move back from the shrink ray,” said Jaya impatiently.

“I'm nowhere near it,” I said.

“You will be soon. Get back!”

I retreated to the wall. The little machine suddenly began to swell, pushing a stray book along the floor beside it. It blew up so fast I was afraid it would burst. I leapt out of the way as the machine's side zoomed toward me.

Just when I was sure it was going to hit the wall and bring it crashing down, Jaya threw herself on it and hit a switch.

The thing stopped growing. It was about the size of a motorcycle. It took up all the spare space in my room.

“Wow,” I said. “I wasn't sure you'd stop it before it knocked over the building.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” said Jaya. “I guess I went a little too fast. I had to leave my patience as a deposit when I borrowed the shrink ray.”

“Your
patience
?”

“Yes, remember? Dr. Rust collects functional deposits when we borrow objects from the Special Collections. I generally leave my patience—I don't have all that much of it anyway, so I don't really miss it. Now, what did you do with that time machine?”

“What a thing to leave! Couldn't you leave—I don't know, your
im
patience?” I went to open the closet door. “Close your eyes—it's a mess in here.”

“I'm not afraid of a few dirty socks!”

I dug the Fortnum's bag out from under my laundry, then took out the time machine and handed it to her. “We should use the shrink ray to expand it,” I said. That would be way more practical than shrinking
us.
But I knew I was going to lose this argument—after all, I'd seen us riding the tiny machine.

Jaya shook her head and put the time machine on my desk. “Too risky,” she said. “We don't really understand how the time machine works. The time-travel engineering might depend on fixed distances or surface-volume proportions. Remember what Auntie Shanti said about not using Special Collection objects on each other without testing them thoroughly first? You can seriously disturb their functionality.”

“But you just used the shrink ray to expand itself,” I said. “Why doesn't that ‘seriously disturb its functionality'?”

“That's different. I used the autoexpand setting—it's designed to do this. I've done it a zillion times. It's perfectly safe as long as you manage to hit ‘off' in time.”

“And what if you
don't
manage to hit ‘off' in time?”

“Oh, the shrink ray could go on growing out of control until you couldn't reach the off switch, and then the increased mass could throw the earth out of its orbit and plummet us into the sun. Or if you were autoshrinking instead of autoexpanding, the off switch could get too small for your fingers, and then the shrink ray would shrink out of existence. But none of that's ever happened. I'm always careful.”

I thought about how close she'd come to knocking down my bedroom walls. “I don't think leaving your patience as a deposit is such a great idea,” I said. “It makes you take even more risks than usual.”

“The problem with you, Leo, is you worry too much.”

“You sound just like my sister.”

“Whatever. We can argue after we stop Simon,” said Jaya. “Let's get going now. Stand over here, and I'll shrink you.”

“Wait a sec,” I said. “Can we talk about this some more first? Like, for one thing, are you sure we can control the time machine precisely enough? We're on the sixth floor. The cornerstone was laid in 1894, and Tesla's lab burned down on March 13, 1895. What if they weren't done building this place by then? If you send us back in time to before this building was finished, we'll go crashing through the floor because the floor won't be there yet. We'll die,” I said.

While I was talking, Jaya was pushing me into position opposite the shrink ray's pointy nozzle. “It'll be fine,” she said. She fiddled with some knobs on the shrink ray.

“You can't know that. It's too dangerous! We have to at least look up exactly when the building was finished,” I said.

“Nah, that would take too long. If we see the walls coming unbuilt, we'll stop and reverse the time machine. Are you doing okay there?”

She asked that because I was screaming. I had started screaming because she turned the shrink ray on me. A green light shot out of its nozzle, and everything suddenly went really weird. The walls scampered away sideways, the ceiling shot upward, and Jaya expanded like a shapely, bright-eyed balloon. Everything I'd kicked under the bed loomed up at me like a reproachful army. My whole body itched and tickled, inside and out. It felt like someone was crumpling aluminum foil inside my bones.

“Jaya! Jaya, stop!” I screamed.

“What's wrong?” She hit the off switch. The green light went out and my bones stopped squeaking. “Are you feeling okay? That's probably enough anyway. You look around the right size.”

“Jaya!” I sputtered. “You didn't warn me! I wasn't ready!”

She bent down, bringing her gigantic face close to me, and giggled. She actually
giggled.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “But you sound so funny! And the look on your face! It's so—so cute.”

“I am not
cute,
” I spat.