Mr. Fahrenheit (13 page)

Sometimes Papaw would say a word or two about the gifts.

“That bat is a Louisville Slugger, just like what Babe Ruth used.”

“That biography is about Benjamin Franklin—your namesake, Benjamin, a real self-made man if ever one walked these United States.”

But mostly Papaw let his notes (written on Bedford Falls Police Department stationery) do the talking. “
To Benjamin—This lantern's a
Coleman!
Good American family company. Maybe we'll go camping & have a fine time. Happy birthday—Sheriff Robert Lightman.
” They never did go camping, but the lantern remained Papaw's most memorable gift. Benji had seen the faint impression of ghost letters on that note, and later on,
he gently rubbed the lead of a pencil sideways across the letters. The message materialized:
A lantern for you, because you're the light of my life.
How beautiful those words were. They pierced him like an arrow, and he thought for one fleeting instant that he understood the deeper chambers of his grandfather's heart.

But no. Of course no. The moral of that story wasn't what Papaw had written, but what he had erased.

Now Benji tipped some lighter fluid he'd gotten from the house into the lantern, then lit the wick with the match. A bright vertical flame blossomed, cutting through the gloom.

He lifted the lantern to the radiation-detector card on his apron. “How am I looking?”

Ellie gave him the A-OK sign.

“So, what's step one, pod-wise?” CR asked.

Benji glanced at Ellie. In the lamplight, she looked even prettier (and hotter, honestly) than usual, her face flushed with excitement, her green eyes sparking. “There is no instruction manual for the impossible,” he said.

They shared a private grin.

Benji kneeled down a few inches in front of the pod, motioning for Ellie and CR to do the same. The highest point of the pod was even with their hearts.

He set the duffel bag on the floor. In addition to all the medical equipment Zeeko had supplied, Benji had added some of his own items from the house. Now he pulled out the first one: a square electronic box, roughly the size of a deck of cards. It was a stud finder, a carpenter's tool that you could run along the surface of walls to find “studs” (solid pieces of wood or metal, basically) hidden inside the walls.

He handed the stud finder to CR. “Go ahead,” Benji said.

“Go ahead what?”

“Go ahead and make the joke I know you want to make.”

CR's goofy-huge smile spread over his face. “Banjo, we're like a married couple in a nursing home. It's disgusting. I love it.” He placed the stud finder against his chest and depressed the device's single button. The device beeped, and a small green light on the top lit up. “Found a stud!” CR said.

Maybe it was just the desire to ease the tension between them from the mini confrontation in the theater, but CR's joke still made Benji laugh.

“How did that work?” Ellie asked, confused.

“
Extremely well,
” CR said.

She swatted the air like she was dismissing a gnat. “How come it could turn on? Doesn't the pod interfere with electronics?”

Benji had thought about this already, actually. At the quarry, when the saucer had made its first appearance, the engine and headlights of CR's truck had turned on by themselves. But Ellie's RustRocket station wagon, a much less modern vehicle, hadn't reacted at all.

“I think it only does it sometimes,” Benji said, “and mostly with things that have digital parts, not just basic batteries.”

“Why?”

“No clue.”

Ellie frowned a little, not quite satisfied. “I never thought I'd say this, but I really wish I'd taken more science electives.”

Benji took the stud finder back. Though he had an urge to use his bare hands, he knew CR would object, so he tugged on his gloves, then moved the stud finder toward the pod cautiously. A fun house–mirror version of Benji, reflected on the pod, did the same. He touched the stud finder against the silvery surface; the pod sang a thin, cheery musical note:
diiiing!

He pushed the button. This time, the little light turned red.

He carefully traced the stud finder along the pod, first side to side and then top to bottom.

The indicator light on the stud finder stayed red the whole time.

“So the pod's empty?” Ellie asked.

“I suppose,” Benji said, feeling weirdly disappointed.

“Then why's it kinda heavy?” CR said. There was a note of concern in his voice.

“We're dealing with interstellar technology here,” Ellie said in a terse voice that made CR blush. “The pod could be made of a new element, for all we know.”

“True,” Benji said.
Although, admittedly, I took as little science as legally possible, too.

He put the stud finder back in the duffel bag, and pulled out Item Number Two.

A stethoscope.

CR still looked a little stung by Ellie's reply, and as soon as he saw the stethoscope, he recovered by saying, “Okay, pod, now turn your head and cough.” Benji gave a chuckle, and even Ellie had to smirk.

Benji plugged the eartips of the stethoscope into his ears. For a trial run, he ran a thumbnail across the listening pad of the stethoscope. The noise in his ears was like the rumble of distant thunder.

After placing the listening pad on the pod with the same gentle caution he'd used with the stud finder, Benji's heart gave a series of quick, hard beats: He thought he heard something shift within the pod, and then (his heart seemed to stop) swore he heard a voice within the pod
speak
. He held his breath, straining to hear.

The voice he'd heard became clear: “
Yoooouuuu're the next contestant on
The Price Is Right
!
” The stethoscope was just picking up the sound from ancient Mrs. Bainbridge's TV next door, which (to Papaw's annoyance) she blasted all day, every day.

So that was a little frustrating . . . but
only
a little. Mostly, as the “science project” continued, Benji felt nothing but a mixture of happiness and curiosity. All their radiation detectors stayed green as he used progressively more aggressive equipment from Zeeko's bag and Papaw's toolbox. First, he tapped a wood-carving chisel against the pod. The chisel was sharp steel, but it didn't leave so much as a scratch on the pod, even when CR stabbed it pretty hard.

Next up was Papaw's blowtorch. An inch-long blue flame emanated from its pistol-like tip. Benji held the fire against the surface of the pod, then inspected the spot it had touched. No burn mark, no discoloration at all.

The pod also stood up invincibly to efforts with both a manual bone saw and a handheld device with a spinning blade that Benji was pretty sure was used to cut skulls. The invincibility was amazing, but even better was the feeling Benji had through all the experiments: full
immersion
.

Part of it was that the itchy urge to check his phone (which he'd never really known he'd had) had vanished.

But the best part was the feeling of
mattering
, the certain knowledge that he was living a centrally special moment in his life. The only really important feeling in the world, he realized, was that the things you experience matter, that they
mean
something, like all the pain and inadequacies are only pixels in this beautiful bigger story you can't see yet. Most people refuse not just to see the story, but to acknowledge even the possibility that it might exist. Maybe that was why Spinney and Papaw tried so hard to claw back in time: They couldn't summon the kind of courageous faith required to face all the uncertainty and possibilities of the present, so they clung to the certainties of the past.

And Benji knew now that every last bit of his own pain and
embarrassment and fear had been worth enduring. It had meant something. If he didn't quite know whether he believed in God, he knew he believed in the future, and in fate. No obnoxious voice from stadium speakers or a drunk FIG or his grandfather's defeated sighs could convince him otherwise. He was strapped in the cockpit with stars in the glass. He was outsmarting the known universe.

Or at least that was how he felt until they decided to hit the pod with the magnetic hammer.

When Benji pulled out the hammer, the sound of Mrs. Bainbridge's TV told him they were going to have to leave soon to get back in time for their one-thirty classes: Drew Carey had just wrapped up the Showcase Showdown, and Wayne Brady was happily welcoming the live studio audience to
Let's Make a Deal.

CR had been growing antsy as time went on, at one point actually pacing, hunchbacked, around the small tree house. Now he hopped gracefully out of his sitting position to his feet, lifted the corrugated tin cover from one of the windows, and peeked outside in the direction of Mrs. Bainbridge's living room picture window. “Yeah, Wayne Brady's on. It's one o'clock . . . holy shit!” CR breathed.

“What?” Benji said.

“Look at that dude break-dance. Look at him go! When I grow up, I wanna be Wayne Brady. Banjo, if I got in a fight with Wayne Brady, who would win?”

“I think we've got time to try one more thing,” Benji said, trying to ignore him.

CR looked back at Benji. “Yeah, it was a trick question anyway. I would beat myself up, because I refuse to lay a finger on an American treasure like Mr. Wayne Brady.” He spotted the
small yellow hammer in Benji's hand. “Ah, Banjo. A damn spinning saw doesn't work, and you're breaking out the Playskool tool set.”

“CR, you can leave,” Benji said. “If you want to stay, cool. If you're bored and want to go, also okay.” He wasn't mad, just stating it as a fact.

He couldn't quite see CR's reaction; the sunlight through the window silhouetted him. CR's shoulders maybe seemed to tense, but when he spoke, he was friendly enough.

“I'm just saying, if Bob the Builder finds out you stole his hammer, he's gonna be pissed.” CR let go of the sheet of tin; it swung down and covered the window again.

Benji tightened his grip on the roofing hammer's black rubber handle. CR was right: The hammer did look small. But its tip was magnetic, and that detail seemed to matter; the saucer had apparently come alive last night when the magnetic winch touched it, after all.

Benji lifted the hammer, preparing to give the pod a firm tap. Outside, Wayne Brady was telling a contestant to choose between Door #1, #2, or #3.

Benji hesitated with the hammer in midair. An image popped insistently into his head, of Ellie using the hammer instead.

“Ellie, do you want to do this one?”

She scooted over to his side of the pod, then said, “How about we do it together?”

Benji agreed. He had been wearing gloves this whole time, and now CR suggested that Ellie do the same. (For a moment Benji felt an inexplicable, strange anger, then shook his head to clear it.)

With a voice suggesting the fate of the world would pivot on her decision, the contestant informed Wayne Brady she wanted to go with Door #2.

Benji tried to put his hand lower than Ellie's on the rubber grip, but there wasn't quite room. “Oh, c'mon,” she said, laughing a little, and placed his hand on top of hers, all their fingers intertwining.

She whispered, “One, two, you-know-what-to-do.”

There was already an electric quality in the air, and that sensation—as if all the atoms inside Benji had begun to crackle—only surged as the hammer arced down toward the pod.

Right around the time Door #2 opened, Benji saw the first thin blue thread of electricity leap between the pod and the hammer. The lucky contestant gave a hysterical shriek. The single thread forked in two: a lightning bolt in miniature.

All this happened in milliseconds, quickly enough that Benji didn't have time to find out if the contestant had been shrieking from joy or something else, and quickly enough that they couldn't stop the hammer from striking the pod. An inch away, the hammer jerked out of their hands, the powerful magnet taking hold. As the hammer made contact, the delicate electricity flared brilliantly, multiplied, and spread, enveloping the entire pod in a complex web made of a hundred threads of dazzling light.

There was an electrical
zap
sound, like a great circuit breaker in Dr. Frankenstein's lab sizzling to life. Benji felt a
WHOMPF
, an invisible wave of power rushing outward from the pod. It was like wind but also nothing like wind: The wave traveled
through
him, making his fillings zing. He fell onto his back. As the shock wave left the tree house, the walls shuddered.

For a moment, Benji was totally still, propped up on his elbows and staring at the pod as the web of light crackled out of existence. He looked at Ellie, who had crashed onto her back, too. She stared at him with eyes wide with shock and something like exaltation.

He scrambled up and lifted the cover off a window just in time to watch the effects of the invisible shock wave ripple across his neighborhood. One by one, the streetlamps lit themselves in broad daylight. Lights in the houses switched on and burned bright. Mrs. Bainbridge's TV blared a deafening commercial about reverse mortgages. Car alarms whooped. Radios sang discordant joy.

And then, all at once, it was over. The streetlamps went dark, and the alarms went silent, and Mrs. Bainbridge's TV resumed its normal volume. It was just another afternoon in the neighborhood in Bedford Falls, Indiana.

Except it wasn't.

“Kiss my ass,” CR whispered shakily. He'd fallen against the wall on the other side of the tree house. His face pinched into an expression rarely seen from CR: absolute and honest fear. “What was that?”

Benji looked down at the plastic radiation-detector card on his chest. His card and everyone else's was the safe color, green. The magnetized hammer, which had been stuck to the pod, clanged to the ground. When Benji would test the hammer later on, he'd find that the magnet no longer worked. Next door, Mrs. Bainbridge's TV now gently explained that wearing adult diapers was nothing to be embarrassed about.