Tesla's Attic (9781423155126) (9 page)

“I did,” said Mitch. “You just failed to read between the lines.”

Nick didn't want to ask the nature of the crime that had landed Mitch's father in a maximum security prison—although the term
serial killer
did cross his mind precisely twenty-three times between the gate and the metal detector.

“My father's a computer genius,” Mitch finally said. “He designed electronic fund-transfer protocols for international banks. Somewhere along the line he discovered that the banking web was even more tightly connected than the Internet, so he created an untraceable program that could go into any random account and take a single penny. He tried it out, and it landed him here. Guess it wasn't quite as untraceable as he thought.”

“He got thrown in prison for stealing a penny?”

“Sort of,” said Mitch. “He stole one penny from every bank account in the world.”

“No way,” said Nick. “That's got to be—

Mitch pulled the string on the Shut Up 'n Listen.
“—$725,452,344,”
said the device.
“And thirty-nine cents.”

Nick was speechless.

“I never liked my dad's business partners,” Mitch said, unloading junk from his pockets into a plastic bin on the security station's conveyer belt. “They were mega-creepy.”

The Shut Up 'n Listen was not the usual sort of personal effect that prison security came across in their routine checks, and Mitch had the hardest time getting it through. Nick was troubled that Mitch had brought it in at all, but with the whole prison experience, he hadn't noticed until they were already inside under armed surveillance. The X-ray machine didn't reveal anything of obvious criminal intent inside the device, but it was too unusual for the officer on duty to let pass.

“It's my shop project,” Mitch told him. “I promised my dad I'd show it to him.”

“Mitch, why don't you just put it back in the car,” his mom said, collecting her cell phone and jewelry from the plastic bin. “And next time make something plastic.”

Obviously, Nick's mother had no clue as to what the thing really was. But Mitch's sister had figured it out, even if Mitch hadn't told her—because she pulled the string just as the guard said, “I'm afraid I can't—”

“—get a date without lying about myself.”

The officer was flabbergasted, but Mitch's little sister laughed in delight.

“That's funny,” she said.

The officer clearly did not know what to make of this. “Is that so?” he said as Madison pulled the string again. “Well, I don't think—”

“—anyone needs to know that I still live with my mother.”

Madison laughed again. “You want to hear what else it says?”

“No!” The guard, his face reddening, handed the thing back to Mitch. “Just move along.”

Nick thought there'd be bulletproof glass between the prisoners and visitors, but there wasn't. It was just a room with tables and a whole lot of guards. The room smelled like old gym equipment—slightly metallic and slightly foul—and the only way you could tell the prisoners from the visitors was by who wore bright orange uniforms.

“We're hoping we don't have to come here much longer,” Mitch said as he scanned the room for his father, who had not yet arrived. “My dad goes before the parole board next month. His lawyers are asking for time off for good behavior, and my dad is really well behaved.”

Nick didn't know if he should sit or stand or run for his life. This was not the kind of white-collar Club Fed where one would expect to find a computer hacker. This place was the real deal. The men here were grizzled by hard time and harder crimes. Most of them had extreme tattoos that seemed to cover more space than they actually had flesh to put them on.

A guard finally escorted Mitch's father in, and Madison jumped up and down excitedly. Mr. Murló was slimmer than Mitch, but he had the same curly hair and gruff voice. He also had a deerish look of bewildered innocence, as if, after all this time, he still couldn't comprehend his circumstances. The man seemed overjoyed to see his family, but with every breath Nick sensed an abiding melancholy—perhaps the only thing he had in common with his fellow inmates.

They sat at one of the few vacant tables in the room, Nick pulling up a chair with the others, feeling more than awkward. Mitch introduced him as “my best friend, Nick,” which seemed to please Mr. Murló a great deal. Madison spoke about her class play and her crucial role as a dental filling.

Mitch's father regarded the Shut Up 'n Listen curiously. “Whatcha got there?”

But since his mom was sitting right there, Mitch put it beneath the table and changed the subject, asking about the quality of food and his father's chances of parole. It was only when his mother left to take Madison to the bathroom that Mitch pulled out the Shut Up 'n Listen.

“Mitch,” said Nick, “I don't think—”

“That I should use it,” Mitch finished. “I know you don't, and I know I swore. But it's still mine as long as we're here, and I have to do this.”

Nick looked to Mitch, then to Mr. Murló. Whatever Mitch was about to do, Nick couldn't stop him.

“I used to have one of these when I was a kid,” Mr. Murló said nostalgically.

Mitch shook his head. “Not like this one.”

“Your mom said you made it in shop class.”

“Not exactly.”

Mitch didn't try to explain. Instead, he looked around to make sure no one else was close enough to hear, then gave his father a crash course in unfinished thoughts. “The Colorado Rockies…” he began.

“
…
will go 83 and 79 this year,”
the machine finished.

“The unemployment rate…”

“
…
will drop by 3.2 percent.”

“Your favorite restaurant…”

“
…
is going out of business next month.”

“Tomorrow's winning Lotto numbers…”

“
…
will all be divisible by three.”

Mitch looked away for a moment, trying to wipe his eyes without being obvious about it. Mitch's father gave him an awkward grin. “That's cute,” he said. “You programmed the responses yourself?”

“You try it,” Mitch told him.

Nick wanted to say something to stop this before it could go any further, but the scene unfolding before him had the momentum of a bullet train with Mitch at the controls. Mitch, who had always been two parts nuisance, one part screwup, was now pure steel intensity. He had full command of the moment. He knew exactly what he was doing.

When Mitch's father didn't reach for the string, Mitch pulled it again and again, a little more forcefully each time.

“Your business partners…”

“
…
used you.”

“You deserve…”

“
…
better than this.”

“You need this machine…”

“
…
to give you a crucial answer.”

And then Mitch pushed the machine closer to his father. “Ask it where they hid the money, Dad. Because once you can prove those creeps have it, and you don't, it will prove that you're innocent, and they were the thieves, not you. Ask it, Dad. Please.”

Mr. Murló, skeptical and yet a little scared, touched the ring, toying with it, but still not ready to pull it.

“There are stranger things in heaven and earth…” he said.

“Let's just stick with earth,” said Mitch.

Mitch's dad took a deep breath and looked around to make sure the other inmates weren't watching. Then, with electric anticipation, he pulled the string and let it go. “My parole…”

And the machine said,
“
…
will be denied for the rest of your
life.”

The last little bit of the string pulled in, and the machine whirred itself silent. Mitch looked down, unable to meet his father's eyes. “That wasn't what you were supposed to ask,” he said very quietly.

His father said nothing. He just seemed to be lost in himself. Then Mitch's mother came back with Madison, in the middle of a one-sided conversation about the proper sanitary use of a public restroom.

Seeing the silence between Mitch and his father, his mother began a nonstop soliloquy that bounced in free association from personal hygiene to personal training to the training wheels on Madison's bike.

Mitch now clutched the Shut Up 'n Listen close to his chest, and Nick realized that, regardless of what it could do, there was one sentence the machine couldn't finish: Mitch's father's.

“You shouldn't have done that,” Mitch said softly. Nick couldn't tell if he was talking to his father or the machine. All of Mitch's confidence had derailed at high speed, leaving behind this wreckage.

“Mitch, I'm sorry,” Nick said.

“Don't!” Mitch snapped. Then, more calmly, “Just don't.”

When they returned to the car, Mitch kept his promise. He handed the Shut Up 'n Listen to Nick. “It's all yours,” he said.

And although Nick knew that it, like every other object, belonged back in his attic, there was something about the way Mitch commanded the thing that made him realize it wasn't so simple.

The security-check X-ray machine had revealed the mechanism inside. What it hadn't revealed was the mechanism on the
outside
. Somehow Mitch was a part of that now.

Nick knew what he had to do.

“No,” he told Mitch, putting it back in his hands. “Keep it for now.”

Mitch looked at Nick with the same expression his father had worn right before pulling the string that had decided his fate.

“Really? No kidding?”

Nick nodded. “No one can use that thing better than you,” he told him. “And besides, I think he wanted you to keep it for a while.”

“Who, my father?” Mitch asked.

“No,” Nick said. “Tesla.”

That night Mitch skipped dinner and went to his room without even the hint of an appetite. He had been so sure that the Shut Up 'n Listen would give him and his father enough direction to tweak everything just enough to reverse his father's sentence. It was all a matter of starting the proper thought. True, the Shut Up 'n Listen didn't always take the thought in the same direction you were going, but even traveling at a tangent was better than being stuck at a brick wall.

But now it was more than a brick wall. It was a tomb. Fact: Mitch's father was never getting out of prison. The machine could not have been clearer.

Hope is a terrible thing to lose. Sometimes that wounded space gets filled with scar tissue, bitter, ugly, and angry. Yet other times, like the gash on Nick's forehead, it is washed clean, stitched with care, and becomes a decisive part of one's character.

And so, alone in his room, Mitch held the Shut Up 'n Listen in his arms, rocking back and forth, weeping silent tears, because he didn't want his mother to hear him. But even in his grief he was making a powerful pact with himself. He would know who his true friends were—and once he knew, he would make that friendship mean something. And he would never let himself be taken advantage of the way his father had been, by rich, shady business partners in pale pearlescent suits.

D
anny's first baseball game was the following morning.

Nick's father was like a little kid with tickets to the World Series. He'd never been quite as excited for Nick's games. It wasn't that he loved Nick any less; he always took it for granted that Nick would play good ball. On the other hand, Danny playing any ball whatsoever was cause for celebration.

Nick truly wanted to support his brother, but after the troubling day with Mitch, he had tossed and turned in bed with all manner of nightmares. Billions of stolen pennies hailing from the sky, lightbulbs that attracted man-eating moths, and Petula's red satin dress—these were the dark specters of his dreams.

That being the case, he had no intention of going anywhere that morning—but at 7:54 a.m. Danny somehow managed to pull down the attic stairs. He climbed up and began bouncing on Nick's bed with his brand-new cleats, somehow forgetting that Nick's shins were directly under the covers. Nick knocked him off of the bed and onto a pile of dirty clothes that was gathered in the center of the room.

“Safe!” Danny said.

“Out!” Nick demanded, pointing to the ladder.

“Not until you come, too.” Then he looked at Nick a little bit oddly. “Why's your bed here?”

“What do you mean?” But when Nick looked around, he saw what Danny meant. His bed was no longer against the wall—neither was his desk. Both had migrated about two feet away from their respective spots, toward the center of the attic. It was too early to think about such irritatingly unexpected things, so he just pushed the furniture back where it was supposed to be, shooed Danny out, and reluctantly got dressed for his brother's game.

Nick tried to make the best of it. Maybe, he thought, a Pee Wee baseball game would be just the thing to distract him from the weirdness that had surrounded him ever since arriving here.

Sadly, this was not to be the case.

The local community athletic park was one of those massive suburban sports McComplexes, boasting four baseball diamonds, six soccer fields, too many tennis and basketball courts to count, and even a hockey rink. Unfortunately, there were only about twelve parking spaces. So, after a half-mile trek from the parking lot of a Taco Bell, Nick and his overenthusiastic father took their seats in the stands.

All around them were strangers—but here and there a face seemed familiar. Nick wondered if maybe some of these people had been at the garage sale, and if there might be a sneaky way of finding out what they had bought, and what the object in question did.

They all rose for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Nick was filled with the classically conditioned anticipation of the first pitch. True, he was feeling some sour grapes over the fact that he wasn't pitching for the team he had tried out for—which was now playing on the next diamond over—but he had to admit he felt excited and also a bit anxious for his brother's debut. Especially when Danny, playing right field, ran out to left field by mistake.

“If the ball goes over my head, do I get a do-over?” Danny had asked that morning.

“Just catch it,” Nick had told him, “and you'll never have to worry.”

The first batter on the opposing team got on base with a line drive that the shortstop bobbled. The second batter was walked. The third batter, however, hit a pop-up into shallow right field.

Danny, with the steely concentration with which he might do a long-division problem, held up his mitt, and—wonder of wonders—the ball dropped straight into it, as if somehow that had been the batter's intent.

Nick's father leaped up so suddenly it sent a neighboring parent's popcorn flying. “Yay, Danny! Woo-hooo!”

Nick looked over at their stunned neighbor, who now had little butter stains dotting her blouse. “Uh…Dad?”

Seeing what he had done, Nick's father sat down, a little embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said, grabbing the empty popcorn tub and handing it to his son. “Nick, do me a favor: go to the snack bar and get this nice woman a refill. My treat.” As incentive, he gave Nick enough money to get something for himself.

But as he left, Nick heard the woman say, “Not to worry—my son got me this electric stain remover at a garage sale. Never saw anything like it!”

Nick was so busy pondering the possible misuses of an electric stain remover designed by a mad genius that he didn't even notice who was coming up beside him in the concession line, until he felt a hand tap his shoulder.

“Okay if I cut in line?” Caitlin asked. “After all, you owe me for standing me up yesterday.”

Anyone else might have looked over the top in a shocking-pink T-shirt and matching sunglasses, but Caitlin made it work.

“I didn't stand you up,” Nick reminded her. “I left you a message. Trust me, Mitch would have been a basket case if I didn't go with him to visit his father.”

“In the pen? You're braver than I thought.” She stepped forward to stand next to him. “So what brings you out here?”

“My little brother's game. How about you?”

Caitlin glanced quickly at the adjacent diamond, then back at Nick. “I'm a soft pretzel addict, what can I say?”

Nick knew better. “You're here to watch Theo, aren't you? Don't tell me you're still together with him?”

“No. Yes. I don't know.” She folded her arms, frustrated by the question, or maybe a little frustrated with herself. “Honestly, it may be force of habit more than anything. I was taught to recycle instead of throw things away.”

“So melt him into a lawn chair and donate it to Goodwill.”

Then she gave Nick an accusing look. “Why do you care? I heard you went on a date with Petula the other night.”

This was wrong on so many levels, Nick didn't know where to begin. “Who told you that?”

Caitlin shrugged. “Nobody. She posted the restaurant's surveillance video on her SpaceBook page.”

“It wasn't a date! I was just getting information.”

“If you say so.” Then she ordered her soft pretzel and was triumphantly smug. Nick got the replacement popcorn and a soda for himself. He was ready to head back to the bleachers alone, when Caitlin rested her hand gently on his arm.

“Lead the way,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I want to be part of your brother's cheering squad. It'll be much better than watching fans of the opposing team throw peanuts at Theo.”

“What?”

“He's allergic to peanuts. Apparently there's no rule against anaphylactic heckling.”

The fact that Caitlin chose to come back to the stands with him rather than go to watch Theo's game made Nick's day. He thought of offering her his hand to help her over the staggered bleacher rows, which are hard enough to navigate even without a hundred people in the way, but he decided that such a move would be a little too forward.

The second inning had started, and Danny's team was in the field again. Still no score—but there was a man on second and no outs. Nick hoped the double wasn't due to an error on Danny's part.

“Line drive right past the third baseman,” his father told him, as if reading his mind. “It was a solid hit—lucky it was just a double.”

“Dad, this is my friend Caitlin,” Nick said.

“Hi,” his father said absently, keeping his eyes on the game.

“I hear you played major league,” Caitlin said.

That was enough to get him to turn toward her. “For a couple of years, once upon a time.”

“That's more than most people can say.”

He accepted the compliment graciously, then looked at Nick and, with an extremely embarrassing wink, said, “Glad to see you're making friends.”

Before it could get any more awkward, they heard the crack of a bat. A ball soared deep between the center fielder and Danny. Both ran toward the fly ball. It was clearly the center fielder's catch to make—in fact, he even called it—but as the ball came down, Danny held up his glove, and it slammed into the sweet spot with a satisfying thud. It was as if the baseball had curved ever so slightly in midair. As a pitcher, Nick knew that spin could make a ball do mystical things, but that usually happened when it was flying
toward
a batter, not away. But why look a gift horse in the mouth? If today was Danny's day, then it was his day!

Nick's dad jumped up again, this time careful not to bump into the woman's popcorn, and he cheered louder than any parent. Nick joined in, although not quite as loudly.

“Your brother's pretty good,” Caitlin said.

Nick swelled with pride. Warming to his brother's success was easing his own disappointment at not making a team.

The next ball that came toward Danny was in the following inning: a missile smacked by a kid who looked way too old to be in this age group. The ball was clearly going out of the park—and through one of the twelve windshields in the parking lot.

Danny backed up as far as he could until he hit the outfield fence. He held up his glove futilely—

—and then, in midflight, the arc of the ball suddenly changed. It plunged downward like a crashing plane, landing right in Danny's glove.

The crowd gasped.

“No way!” someone shouted. “Did you see that?”

“Did it hit a bird?” someone else asked.

“Maybe it was the wind.”

Caitlin looked at Nick with a kind of fear in her eyes, and that's when he knew.

“Dad,” he asked, “that's not your old glove, is it?”

And his father said, “Nope. It's from your garage sale.” He grinned, all puffed with pride at his prodigy in the field. “I put five bucks in your box. Worth every penny.”

Nick stood up.

“How many outs is that?” Nick asked.

“Two,” his father said. “Try to pay attention.”

Nick looked back at Caitlin. They weren't just on the same page; they might as well have been reading each other's mind.

“We can't take it from him in the middle of an inning.…” Caitlin said.

But it was more than that. “We can't take it from him at all.…” Because how could Nick tell his brother that his moment to shine wasn't really his moment? That he was nothing but an accessory to the glove?

There was a grounder to the shortstop, and the batter got on base. Then a short pop that the pitcher dropped. Man on first and second. A line drive past the third-base line and the bases were loaded—but Nick wasn't worried about the guys on base. He was worried about the next batter—a big kid who was clearly planning on a grand slam.

He swung at the first pitch, connected, and the ball sailed high into left field. The crowd was on their feet, screaming with anticipation. The left fielder positioned himself—but the ball began to curve like a boomerang away from left field, over the head of the center fielder, and straight toward Danny.

Danny's jaw dropped practically to his knees. He positioned his mitt as the ball sailed toward it.…But then something roared more loudly than the crowd, and from out of the sky came a ball of fire trailing a plume of black smoke. The plummeting fireball hit the baseball, instantly incinerating it, then slammed into the sweet spot of Danny's glove.

The force of the impact ripped Danny off his feet. He flew backward, dragged through the grass, and actually dug a trench before he finally came to a stop inches from the right-field fence.

For a moment no one moved. The crowd had fallen into silent shock. Then, all at once, the kids in the field screamed and started running in different directions in a panic. Nick, his father, and Caitlin leaped over rows of people and out onto the field, where they sprinted toward Danny, who lay on his back, his mitt still smoking.

Their dad reached him first. “It's okay, it's okay, it's okay,” he said, cradling his son.

Danny looked up at them with dazed eyes. “Did I catch it?”

“Yeah, Danny,” Nick said. “You did.”

He gingerly pulled the glove from Danny's hand. There, smoldering inside it, was a chunk of red-hot stone about the size of a grapefruit. Danny had caught a meteorite.

As there was nothing in the rule book about unexpected cosmic events, the game was called due to “severe weather conditions.” Police were brought in to hold back gawking crowds, who had abandoned all the other sports being played that day. As for the field in question, it was cordoned off as a disaster area—and it looked like one, with abandoned gloves and hats lying on the field, forgotten by panicking players, as well as a single forlorn cleat that appeared to be trying to steal third base.

Paramedics arrived to evaluate Danny, who should have, at the very least, suffered a shoulder dislocated to the next county, but he didn't seem to be injured at all.

“Could you tell us exactly what happened?” the paramedics asked him while his father paced, still unable to wrap his mind around it.

“I held up my glove and caught a shooting star,” Danny said brightly. “Do I get on the news?”

Nick and Caitlin watched all this unfold without any power to control or direct it…but it seemed that someone else was doing the controlling.