Edison’s Alley (2 page)

Nick knew that each of the items sold in his garage sale had to be retrieved, but he also suspected that they needed to be out in the world as well—at least for a short time—because
the people whose lives these objects touched were also, somehow, part of Tesla’s grand mechanism. Nick found it somewhat irritating to be manipulated by a long-dead genius, but at the same
time he was comforted by the thought that he might be the central cog in a machine that was crafting something truly worthwhile.

He and Caitlin had figured out that the inventions all fit together to form a larger one—the Far Range Energy Emitter, or F.R.E.E., which had been Tesla’s life’s work. They
were the only ones who had figured that out. Exactly what the F.R.E.E. would do when it was complete was anyone’s guess. All Nick knew was that he felt the need to complete it.

As they approached the casaba melon man’s house, Nick began to hear a rhythmic clanking of metal on metal—a sound that anyone who has been to a gym would
recognize.

“He’s in there,” Nick said. “He’s using the weight machine.”

Caitlin grabbed him before he got too close to the door, a shadow of fear crossing her face. “What do you suppose the machine does?”

Nick didn’t want to speculate, because if he did, he might never go in.

“We’ll know soon enough” was all he said.

Instead of going straight to the front door, they decided to do a little reconnaissance. Quietly they made their way through the dense weeds and brush on the side of the house. When they neared
the window, they could feel their hair standing on end. As it would turn out, there was a reason for that.

“Boost me up so I can see,” Caitlin said. Nick lowered his hands, interlacing his fingers to give her a step up, and then hoisted her higher.

He anticipated Caitlin’s weight as he lifted her, but he thought he must have miscalculated, because he found her surprisingly light. It would turn out there was a reason for that,
too.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“I see the machine,” she said. “It’s right there in the middle of the room, but…”

“But what?”

“No one’s there.”

“What do you mean no one’s there? I can hear someone pumping iron.”

“That’s what I mean. The machine is doing it all by itself.”

Suddenly the window flew open, and Caitlin was pulled out of Nick’s hands and into the house by the home’s large occupant.

“Caitlin!” Nick shouted.

A moment later, a hand reached out, grabbed Nick by the hair, and, with what appeared to be superhuman strength, Nick was hauled off his feet and through the window.

First came an intense feeling of disorientation. Caitlin, Nick, and the casaba man tumbled, but they didn’t quite fall. Nick hit a wall and dislodged a framed photograph, but the photo
didn’t fall either. Instead it floated, flipping end over end until it bumped the ceiling and bounced off.

All at once Nick got it. He looked up, which was actually down, and saw the old-fashioned weight machine, its piston pumping, its cables straining. This was a weight machine in a very literal
sense. It was an antigravity device that made everything around it weightless—which explained why Caitlin felt so light just beyond the edge of the antigravity field, and why their hair had
been standing on end. Each clang of metal on metal created a wave of energy—invisible, but Nick could feel it pulsing through his gut, his ears, and his eyes.

“You think I don’t know who you are? You think I don’t know you’ve been spying on me?” The man’s voice boomed with the same irate tone he had used when
arguing with the supermarket manager. He was, indeed, very large—even more so, it seemed, with his mass unfettered by Earth’s gravity. He pushed Nick, and both of them went flying in
opposite directions, although Nick went much faster.

Caitlin tried to grab the man but couldn’t. She just floated past him, frantically moving her arms and legs as if trying to swim in midair.

Nick hit a beam in the vaulted ceiling, and he yelped in pain. Even weightless, he still had enough inertia for it to hurt. That’s when Caitlin, who had reached the far wall, flung herself
into action. She pushed off from the wall, becoming a human projectile aimed right at the man in the middle of the room. He, however, was much more adept at maneuvering in free fall. With a single
flick of his wrist, he shifted his entire body to avoid her, and then he flew to the far corner, where he peered down at them—or up—like a spider from the center of its web.

“You can’t have it! It’s mine!”

He was an intimidating figure floating in the heart of his lair, holding on to a handle that had been bolted to a crossbeam in the ceiling. Nick looked around and saw that similar handles had
been strategically affixed to the walls and ceiling so the man could maneuver weightlessly through the house.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to struggle with weight all your life, and then find yourself free from it entirely? You can’t possibly imagine how liberating that is. And
I won’t let you steal that from me!” He launched himself once more at Nick, grabbed him, and hurled him across the room again.

Nick spun, and his shoulder painfully hit the weight machine. He ricocheted off of it and, mercifully, found himself hitting a sofa that had been secured to the floor. He wanted to stay there,
but the sofa acted like a trampoline and bounced him toward the ceiling.

“Please,” said Caitlin, “just hear us out.”

“Words have no weight here either,” the man said. “Especially yours!”

Nick hit the ceiling again, but this time he was able to grab one of the handles and steady himself.

“We’re not going to lie to you,” Nick said. “We need the machine back.”

“We’re willing to pay,” Caitlin said, which just made the man laugh.

“Do you think I’m an idiot? There isn’t enough money in the world to pay what this thing is worth!”

“We know,” Nick told him, and then he went out on a limb. “But let’s talk about
you
. Ever since you turned that machine on, living without it has become harder and
harder, hasn’t it?”

The man pursed his lips into a thin scowl. “You don’t know anything,” he growled.

Nick continued. “When the machine is off, you weigh even more than you did before. Your arms are weak, your legs are weaker, and you can barely move, which is why you’re so angry in
the outside world. You’re constantly exhausted…so you go out less and less.”

“That has nothing to do with it!” the man shouted. He no longer looked like a spider in his web, but a cornered creature.

It wasn’t too difficult for Nick to figure out what was happening to the man. When you’re weightless, you don’t use your muscles. When you don’t use your muscles, you
don’t burn calories. The guy was building mass at an alarming rate.

“That machine is killing you,” Nick told him. “You might not want to admit it, but you know it’s true.” He swung himself to a handle slightly closer. Caitlin was
now behind the man, out of his line of sight. Nick only hoped she knew what she had to do.

Nick held eye contact with the man, whose face grew red, his eyes spilling tears that floated away.

“Freedom isn’t freedom when you’re addicted to it,” Nick said.

“But I can’t stop. Don’t you understand? I can’t turn off the machine, because if I do…if I do…”

Nick reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “I know. If you do, then everything will come crashing down.” Then he turned to Caitlin and shouted, “Now!”

And Caitlin, who had swung her way over to the machine, reached into the device and pulled out the pin so the weights slammed down, bringing the machine to a sudden halt.

The moment it did, everything—and everyone—that wasn’t nailed down plunged to the floor. Gravity, clearly not pleased by their blatant defiance of the law, was punishing. Nick
and the large man slammed to the ground, with only a thin layer of worn carpet to cushion their fall. Either one of them could have broken his neck or back, or any other part of his anatomy, but
good fortune left them only bruised.

Grimacing, Nick pulled himself up, the sudden return of gravity making him feel weak after only a five-minute lapse.

Caitlin was disoriented but not hurt, because she had been close to the floor. She noticed that their brief battle had dislodged several things in the room, such as the sofa
cushions and a photograph. The glass in the frame had shattered, and shards now lay strewn across the carpet.
What a hazard they’ll be,
Caitlin thought,
if things go weightless
again.

She went over to Nick, fearing the worst when she saw the pain in his face. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I think so,” he said.

And then she looked at the man, who now lay in a heap, his body racked with sobs. But Caitlin knew it wasn’t from the pain of the fall.

As Nick picked himself up, recovering, Caitlin went to examine the man, who was not really the machine’s owner, but more like its victim.

He struggled to push himself to his feet, but he could not. Caitlin recalled how astronauts who have been in space too long can barely walk when they return home, because of how quickly muscles
atrophy in a weightless environment. She marveled that Nick had the foresight to realize this when they were still floating.

Each time that Nick did something wildly insensitive or generally dim, he would redeem himself by doing something brilliant and profoundly insightful. Caitlin knew that if he were
only
brilliant and insightful, she’d dislike him—just as much as if he were only insensitive and dim. It was the fact that he constantly teetered between the two states that made him so
interesting.

“Why did it all have to go so wrong?” the heavy man wailed.

She knelt down to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe it needed to go wrong,” she said softly, “to bring you to this moment.”

He looked up at her, his eyes questioning.

Among the debris in the room was a pen. She found a scrap of paper and wrote down a name and phone number. “My uncle wrestles with obesity and a slow metabolism. He runs a clinic for
people who are sick of fad diets”—she glanced at the machine—“and, uh…other weight-loss gimmicks.”

The man took the slip of paper and stared at it.

“He’ll help you get back on your feet—so to speak,” she told him compassionately. “When you’re ready.”

He offered no resistance as they took the machine from the house, proving that maybe he was ready after all.

E
ven dormant and only semi-assembled, Tesla’s machine radiated energy.

Whenever Nick stood before the invention in his attic bedroom, he had no doubt that he was somehow a part of it, as were his friends, his father and brother, as well as everyone who had received
one of the items.

His dad and Danny had already played their part in the inventor’s master plan. Nick kept the broken bat in the attic as a memento, but it and the lost baseball glove were spent—he
could sense that they were no longer connected to all the other objects. They also didn’t fit into the machine. Neither did the Shut Up ’N Listen—an eerie variation on a See
’n Say toy—which had served its function by granting his friend Mitch the intermittent ability to “know the answer” even before anyone had formed the question.

The glove, the bat, and the toy were just “things” now, their purposes completed. But there was purpose left to spare for Nick and his friends and for all of the items still
scattered through town.

Before the asteroid near miss, they had amassed twelve “Teslanoid Objects,” as they had dubbed them. In the three weeks since, Nick had been able to recover four more. Some people
had turned up at Nick’s door begging him to release them from the burden, while others had to be tracked down through rumors and gossip.

Teslanoid Object No. 13. Just three days after the asteroid fell into orbit, a tired-looking woman had come by Nick’s house to return a toy she had bought at the garage
sale. She didn’t even ask for her money back.

“Worst purchase ever,” she told him.

The toy was a jack-in-the-box with such a mind-jolting finale, it rendered the unsuspecting viewer unconscious for hours, like a powerful narcotic. The woman had been using the
“narc-in-a-box,” as she called it, to put her fairly feral young children to sleep at night.

“But they figured it out,” the woman told him, “and began using it on me so they could stay up all night eating candy and watching TV. You can’t imagine what my house
looks like every morning now,” she moaned. “Just take it! I never want to see it again.”

Teslanoid Object No. 14. When word got around school that someone’s little brother had broken his arm in a windstorm, Nick thought that odd, because there hadn’t been a whole lot of
wind recently.

On a tip, Nick and Mitch visited a vacant lot, where they found a bunch of little kids playing with a hand bellows from the garage sale. The kids were using it to create little “dust
devil” tornadoes, which they would then run into and get tossed ten feet away like rag dolls, laughing all the while. As mothers often say, “It’s all well and good until someone
breaks an arm.”