The Wells Bequest (8 page)

Parallel dimensions! Shape-shifters! Did those really exist too? If I hadn't seen a time machine with my own eyes, I would have thought they were messing with me.

“But the Wells reference certainly is indicative,” continued Dr. Rust. “What did this purported time machine look like?”

“Kind of like one of those electric wheelchair-scooter things, only really old-fashioned. It was made out of metal, with gears and knobs. We were riding on a leather saddle.” I remembered how Future Me had been hugging Future Jaya and blushed slightly.

“Hm. That does sound like ours. Jaya, would you mind asking Ms. Minnian to join us? She's on Stack 6.”

“Sure thing, Doc,” said Jaya.

When she was gone, Dr. Rust said to me, “Well, what a . . . what a surprising young man you turn out to be.”

“I'm sorry.”

“No, no, don't apologize. We like surprising at the repository. It's one of our favorite qualities.”

Jaya came back with Ms. Minnian, the unsmiling librarian.

“What is it, Lee? Jaya says you wanted to see me?”

“Yes, thank you, Lucy. It seems our newest page has had an experience you'll want to hear about. Leo, tell her about the time machine.”

Ms. Minnian listened silently to my story. When I was done, she said to Dr. Rust, “How do we know this isn't a ploy to get into the Special Collections? Remember that trouble a few years ago with the Grimm Collection? A page was involved—several pages.”

For some reason that made Jaya mad. “Yes, several pages
were
involved!” she said fiercely. “Several pages saved the Grimm Collection! And it almost got them turned into dolls forever—including Anjali! I almost lost my sister!”

“That's exactly why I'm urging caution,” said Ms. Minnian.

That made Jaya even madder. I could see why Ms. Callender had called her a dragon. I could easily imagine her breathing fire.

“It's okay, Jaya—no one's questioning your heroism, or your sister's,” said Dr. Rust. “Lucy, I see your point, but this doesn't seem like a very effective ploy. If Leo wanted to gain access to the Special Collections, all he would have to do is work and wait. This way he draws attention to himself. He puts us on our guard.”

“Leo's our kind of page,” said Mr. Reyes. “He found the Special Collections thesaurus by himself. When was the last time a page did that? The only other one I can think of was Anjali.”

“He did an impressive job with the assembly test too,” added Dr. Rust.

“I'm not trying to gain access to anything,” I said. “Not with a ploy, anyway. I'm just trying to figure out what I'm going to do and how. I mean, if I used a time machine to come back from the future, that means I'm going to use a time machine to come back from the future pretty soon no matter what, so why not get started now?”

Dr. Rust laughed. “You're right. Shall we pay a visit to the Wells Bequest?”

The Wells Bequest

T
he five of us took the elevator to the basement. We walked past several doors with letters stenciled on them and stopped at one marked
*WB.

“Lucy, do you have your key?” asked Dr. Rust.

Ms. Minnian opened her purse and took out what looked like an old remote control. She pointed it at the door and punched a bunch of buttons. I heard a soft click.

“Thanks,” said Dr. Rust, pushing the door open.

The room looked like any other room in the repository stacks, with the same fluorescent lights and rows of shelving, but for some reason my heart started pounding. I took a deep breath. “Is this the Wells Bequest?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Dr. Rust. “May I see your call slip, please, Leo?”

I handed it over.

“530.11 Z8485,” Dr. Rust read. “That'll be with the oversizes.”

Jaya started down the room through the rows of shelving. The librarians and I followed. We walked past cabinets with ancient-looking padlocks on the doors and open shelves with neatly tagged machines lined up on them. Some had exposed brass gears and steel rivets. Some had complicated antennas and coiled electrical cords.

The place gave me an excited, tingly feeling. It felt like the moment just before you solve a math problem or figure out how to fix a machine, the moment when you can feel the solution arriving, before you quite see what it is.

I paused to look at one of the machines close up, but Ms. Minnian said, “Don't touch anything, Leo. It's dangerous.” She hurried me forward by the shoulder.

We caught up to Jaya, Mr. Reyes, and Dr. Rust at the end of the room. They were facing a blank wall.

“Lucy, will you do the honors?” asked Dr. Rust.

“Of course,” said Ms. Minnian.

“Let me!” said Jaya. “Please? I've been practicing.”

“Successfully?” asked Ms. Minnian in her discouraging voice.

“Well, no, I haven't actually gotten in yet. But I'm sure I will soon,” Jaya admitted.

“On the way out, maybe,” said Dr. Rust. “Going in is more complicated. Lucy?”

Ms. Minnian ran her hands over the wall as if looking for cracks. Apparently she found some invisible irregularity. She probed the spot with her fingertips. Her fingers actually
sank
into the wall—at least, that's how it looked.

Then she did something I couldn't quite understand. She sort of shook the wall and flipped it, as if she were turning a shirt inside out. It felt as if the whole room was turning inside out. It felt as if
I
was turning inside out.

I squeezed my eyes shut and swallowed hard, feeling queasy.

When I opened them again, the four of us were standing in a vast, dim room surrounded by shadowy shapes. The repository seemed to have disappeared.

“Where
are
we?” I asked. Something was wrong with my voice. It came out squeaky.

“I'm sorry, Leo. I should have warned you,” said Dr. Rust.

“Warned me about what? What
happened
?” I was still squeaking.

“We're in the Wells Bequest Oversize Annex, that's all,” said Dr. Rust.

All around us were rows of big machines. They ranged in size from a motorcycle all the way up to an ocean liner. There was a huge metal sphere on three spiderlike legs, as tall as a tree. There was a gigantic mechanical elephant—gigantic even for an elephant—harnessed to a house on wheels. There were streamlined machines and boxy machines and machines with knobs and tubes and propellers. And from where I stood, I could see at least five things that looked like rockets.

“But where did the repository
go
? How did we
get
here?” I couldn't quite catch my breath.

“I did a birational transformation,” said Ms. Minnian.

“Nice, isn't it? I know, it takes a little getting used to,” said Mr. Reyes.

“It was Lucy's idea. So elegant,” said Dr. Rust. “It allows us to store large objects in minimal space.”

“You mean we went into another dimension or something?” I asked.

“We're in the projectivized tangent space,” said Ms. Minnian, as if that would mean something to me. I bet Sofia would know what they were talking about.

“But where's the repository?”

Ms. Minnian waved her hands around vaguely.

“We're still in it,” said Dr. Rust. “We're just . . . more
deeply
in it, you could say.”

“Don't worry about it, Leo. This is just sort of a storage area,” said Jaya.

“A storage area for what? What
is
all this stuff?”

“These are the Wells Bequest Oversizes—objects that don't fit in the main *WB room,” said Mr. Reyes.

“Okay, but what's the Wells Bequest? Nobody's actually
told
me.” It's not that I minded being birational transformationed into a projectivized tangent space—I mean, I wasn't
scared
or anything—but I wished somebody would explain.

“The core of the Wells Bequest is a collection of objects assembled by the great industrialist Alfred P. Steel,” said Dr. Rust, not really answering my question. “His collection passed to us in 1931, according to the terms of his will. We've added to it over the years, of course.”

Jaya interrupted. “Hey, why isn't it called the Steel Bequest, then? I've never understood that.”

“Mr. Steel chose the name,” said Dr. Rust. “He acquired a number of objects from H. G. Wells. He was a big Wells fan.”

“H. G. Wells the writer?” I asked. “The author of
The Time Machine
?”

Dr. Rust nodded.

“What did Mr. Steel get from Wells?” I asked.

“Well, the time machine, for one thing,” said Dr. Rust. “Though there's some question about its authenticity—there's no record of it ever having worked. We also have a small sample of cavorite, along with some Herakleophorbia IV, a heat ray, and a black smoke. And a flask of invisibility potion, but no antidote. There's a tripod too, over there.” Dr. Rust waved at the three-legged spider-sphere.

“What's cavorite?” I asked.

“A gravity repellant. Wells describes it in
The First Men in the Moon.
”

“You mean like an anti-gravity machine?!”

“More or less—an anti-gravity substance. They used it to make anti-gravity devices in the novel.”

Time machines! Anti-gravity devices! Invisibility potions! And they all sounded perfectly serious about it! But the objects were all around me—I could see them with my own eyes, rockets and mechanical elephants and so forth. And the whole birational transformation thing had really happened, hadn't it?

“What's Hera—Hera whatever you said?” I asked.

“That's from
The Food of the Gods.
If you eat it, it makes you grow bigger.”

“But don't,” said Jaya hastily. “You're plenty big enough already.”

“I'm not all
that
big,” I said. Even though Sophia said I was growing so fast.

“If you ate Herakleophorbia IV, you'd be four or five stories tall. Come on, the 530s are this way,” said Jaya.

I fell in step beside her; the librarians followed us. We walked past robots and jet cars and big, scary guns the size of buses.

“Hang on,” I said. “What are those robots?” I paused beside them. “Is one of them that Czech one I wasn't allowed to look at?”

“Rossum's Universal Robot? Yes, it's here somewhere,” said Jaya. She checked a tag. “This is it.”

It was life-size and looked just like a man. It was wearing crazy metallic clothes with pointy shoulders and elbows.

“Come on, Leo. You can borrow it later,” said Jaya, taking me by the arm. I gaped around me as she pulled me along.

“That looks like a spaceship! Is it really?” I asked as we passed one.

“Mm-hm,” said Jaya.

“That too?” I asked, pointing to another.

She nodded, then shook her head. “Technically, it's a starship.”

“What about that one?”

She checked a tag. “No, it's an exodriller from the Cyprian system.”

“What's an exodriller? What's the Cyprian system?”

“I'm not sure. I'm not all that into space operas.”

“What's a space opera?” I wished I didn't have to ask all these questions. I sounded so ignorant.

“You know—like a soap opera in space. Those books where advanced alien civilizations battle each other with all their advanced technology until the prince of the Borlechians kidnaps the daughter of the Argoralite emperor, only instead of him killing her, they marry and make an alliance to bring peace to their feuding families. Or whatever.”

“Oh,” I said. I loved books like that, but Jaya clearly thought they were silly, so I didn't say anything.

We passed some very large telescopes and what looked like a helicopter covered with feathers.

“Why is that helicopter covered with feathers?” I asked.

Jaya shrugged. “Aerodynamics, probably. Or maybe because it's a bio-mechano hybrid.” She patted the helicopter's side. It fluffed its feathers, shook itself, spun its rotors a couple of times, and smoothed itself down again, like a pigeon resettling on a branch.

“Jaya,” said Ms. Minnian behind us, disapprovingly.

“Sorry, sorry.” Jaya grinned, flashing her crooked canine at me.

“Is that thing—
alive
?” I gasped.

“Sure, depending on your definition of alive,” said Jaya. “Half alive? Alive enough that we have to feed it, anyway. It likes sunflower seeds soaked in petroleum. This way,” she said, turning left.

After a couple of modest-size submersibles, we came to a huge submarine that looked strangely familiar. It was almost as long as a football field, tapered at both ends. It had a propeller in the back, with four vicious-looking blades, and a wheelhouse in front. The whole thing was covered with overlapping metal scales. It looked like a gigantic, reptilian cigar.

“Hey, Jaya,” I said, catching her by the arm. “Hang on a sec. That looks just like the
Nautilus,
in
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
By Jules Verne, your favorite.” Mine too. I loved that book. I had read it three times so far.

“Of course it does,” said Jaya. “It
is
the
Nautilus.
”

I stopped dead in my tracks, still holding her arm. “
What?
That's the
Nautilus
—the actual
Nautilus
? But what's it
doing
here?”

The librarians caught up to us. “Ah,” said Dr. Rust. “The French keep asking us the same question. My counterpart at Phénoménothèque Centrale Supérieure de la Ville de Paris calls it a
trésor du patrimoine
—a national treasure—and would very much like to get her hands on it. But the international tribunal ruled that our title to it is airtight. Airtight, get it? Like the
Nautilus
herself?” Dr. Rust paused to chuckle. “Jules Verne loved American technological know-how—and American greenbacks. He was happy to sell the gems of his collection to Mr. Steel.”

“He charged a lot, but Mr. Steel could afford it,” said Ms. Minnian.

“We have a hydrogen balloon from Verne's first book,” said Dr. Rust. “And his Columbiad space gun from
De la terre à la lune,
and the
Albatross
—the flying machine from
Robur-le-Conquérant.
What a racket that thing makes. And of course you saw
la maison à vapeur
—the steam house? I've always had a soft spot for the elephant.”

“That's that steam-powered elephant we passed when we first got here,” said Jaya helpfully. “The book it's from is appallingly racist, but you gotta love the steam house. A steam-powered elephant!”

I had been listening with my mouth open. Now I shut it, opened it again, and said, “But that's fiction! The Verne books and the Wells books and the space operas too! All those books are
fiction
—stuff the authors made up! How can the objects actually
exist
?”

“Ah, so you're interested in literary-material philosophy,” said Ms. Minnian. She sounded almost as if she approved.

“That's a rather profound question,” said Dr. Rust. “Scholars have been looking into it for some time. Lucy's our literary-material philosopher around here.”

“The simplest solution is that those books
aren't
all fiction,” said Ms. Minnian. “As evidenced by the existence of these objects.” She waved her hand again. “Though I admit that's not an entirely satisfying solution.”

“So the stories are true?”

“That's one way of looking at it.”

“But if they
are
true, then the
Nautilus
shouldn't be here! It gets scuttled at the end of
The Mysterious Island,
after Captain Nemo dies. Then it gets buried by a volcano!”