Beware the Ninja Weenies (7 page)

“How are you feeling?”

“Okay, I guess. Was I in an accident?”

“You rode your bicycle right in front of my car. There was no way I could avoid hitting you.”

Keaton wasn't sure whether he should apologize, so he didn't say anything. People could get pretty upset if their cars were scratched or dented. He knew that from experience.

“You're very lucky,” the man said. He swept his hand around. “I have my own medical facility. Let's say it was a fortunate accident that I was the one who hit you, and that you were less than a mile from my estate. I doubt you would have survived a trip all the way to the nearest trauma center.”

His own hospital?
Keaton realized the guy must be rich. Accident victims sometimes got lots of money. He knew that from watching television. Maybe he could get some money for himself—assuming he lived long enough. “Am I going to be okay?” he asked.

“Except for a few scratches and bruises, you're just fine now. We had to work fast to reduce the swelling that was endangering your brain, but everything went smoothly. I have the finest medical team in the state. It's also a good thing you were wearing a helmet.” The man picked up a folder. “I just got the last of the results. Again, it's all quite fortunate. Despite the impact, none of your vital organs was damaged.”

Keaton wanted to find out how rich the guy was. “Why do you have your own hospital?”

“I've been sick for a while,” the man said. “Since birth, actually. You can't tell it from looking at me, but I don't have a lot of time left.”

Keaton figured he should say something sympathetic, but he wasn't good at that sort of stuff.

“Bad heart,” the man said. “An unfortunate accident of birth. You could say I was born to both fortune and misfortune. I have enormous riches, but a very poor heart.”

Maybe he'll leave me some money,
Keaton thought. He moaned to let the man know how much he was hurting. Then he said, “Did you call my parents?”

The man ignored the question. “I expect I'll be dead in a month or two.”

A wild thought hit Keaton. He could hear the heart monitor racing as he spat out the words. “You aren't taking my heart for yourself, are you?”

The man laughed. “Of course not. I'd have to be terribly evil to do something like that. I assure you—I'm not that evil. I've lived a full life. I'm ready for my fate.”

“That's a relief.” Keaton tried to calm down. He realized he'd watched too many late-night movies with evil doctors and heartless villains. “Was my bike wrecked?”

“Totally crushed,” the man said.

“I guess I'll need a new one.” Keaton waited for the man to take the hint.

“It's difficult going through life with a bad heart,” the man said. “I was never allowed to ride a bicycle. I never got to run and play. No sports. No amusement parks.”

Keaton tried again. “That bike was really expensive. I guess I'll have to walk everywhere now. At least, until I can save up enough money for a new one.”

“Don't worry about it,” the man said.

Finally.
“So you'll buy me another bike?” Keaton asked.

The man pulled something small from his pocket. “You won't be needing a bicycle.”

“Why?” The beeps sped up again.

The man smiled at Keaton, but there was nothing friendly in his expression.

I have to get out of here,
Keaton thought. He looked around the room, in search of the best escape route. The man was standing between him and the door. There were several windows to his right, but Keaton had no idea what floor he was on. He looked over to his left. That's when he noticed the second bed.

“Who is that for?” he asked.

“Oh, that's mine.” The man crossed the room.

“Then who is
this
for?” Keaton pointed at the bed he was on. As he braced himself to dive off the side, he wondered how much it would hurt when he ripped free from the tube and wires.

“That's the one my son uses. Unfortunately, he inherited my condition. He's much sicker than I am.” The man reached up to the bag by Keaton's bedside. “But thanks to a fortunate accident, I found a young and healthy donor who has a strong heart and the right rare blood type.”

“Donor?” Keaton asked.

“Yes, a donor. The odds against it were millions to one. Sometimes you get lucky. Well, actually, I guess I got lucky. And my son got lucky. But you seem to have had an unfortunate accident.” The man injected something into the bag.

Keaton tried to sit up, but he was far too sleepy to move. The beeps got slower. Much slower.

“Accidents happen,” the man said. “Thank goodness for that.”

Those were the last words Keaton heard.

 

BIG BANG

I
found Chelsea in
her backyard. Actually, she was in the toolshed at the very back of her yard. Her parents didn't keep much stuff there, so Chelsea had dragged an old chair and table from her basement, and set them up inside. She called it her “think tank.” Chelsea is so smart, it's scary.

When I walked up to the door of the shed, she didn't even seem to notice me. She was staring at some stuff on the table. I waited. She sighed, but still kept her gaze on the table.

There wasn't much to see—an old watch, a rubber band, a couple batteries, a scattering of paper clips, some tiny springs that looked like they came from ballpoint pens, and some other junk I didn't recognize. It reminded me of the random stuff I found each year when I cleaned out my desk on the last day of school.

I cleared my throat.

Chelsea frowned, but still didn't look up.

I coughed.

She lifted her head. “Oh … hi, Amanda.”

“Hi.” I stepped into the shed. The floor was a couple inches above the ground. “What are you doing?”

“I think I figured it out,” she said.

“Figured what out?” I asked.

“It,”
she said, as if that tiny word could contain a huge meaning. “Everything. The secret of the universe.”

I wasn't sure I'd even understand whatever she was going to tell me, but I had a feeling it was important. For the last three months, she'd been talking about bosons, leptons, neutrinos, and other things I'd never heard of before. Last week, she'd said something about being able to scrape radium—whatever that was—from the hands of very old watches. I waited for her to continue.

“If I'm right, everything can be explained in an incredibly simple way. And that's how it should be. The deep truths are simple. So simple that they're easy to overlook. That's where physics has stumbled for so long. The researchers are adding layers of complexity when they should have been seeking simplicity. Do you see?”

She was already starting to lose me, but I nodded. “So, if you've figured everything out, that's great, right?”

She pointed to the objects on the table. “I need to run an experiment to prove my theory,” she said. “But if I'm right, the chain reaction initiated by my experiment will destroy the universe.”

I stopped breathing as I tried to think of some way to convince myself I had misheard her. My mind churned until my lungs ached. Finally, I took a breath. My lungs felt better, but my gut felt worse. “Destroy the universe?”

“Yeah. It's an unfortunate side effect.” She pointed to a button with a couple wires attached to it. The other end of the wires was taped to a battery. Between the button and the battery, the wires snaked through an assortment of electronic parts.

“You call the end of the universe a side effect?” I backed away a step, almost stumbling at the drop-off by the entryway. “Take it apart. Forget about it.”

“But it's the answer to everything,” she said. “Do you know how long physicists have been trying to unify the fields? Do you have any idea what a mess the obsession with string theory has made out of theoretical physics? This will clear up everything. I'll have a couple seconds, maybe even five or ten, to know I'm right before the end comes.”

“Chelsea, you're sounding crazy. You can't do this. Come on. Get out of that shed. Come stand in the sunlight. Feel how wonderful the world is.” I held out my hand and backed away a step, as if trying to coax a puppy out of a box.

Chelsea stared down at the table, and then back at me.

“Sunshine, flowers, kittens,” I said. “Ice cream, new clothes, bubble bath. Think of all the great things you'd miss.”

Chelsea swallowed, nodded, then stood up and walked out of the shed.

“You can't destroy the universe,” I said. I couldn't believe I actually had to explain something that was so obvious.

“I guess not.”

“Maybe there's another way to test your theory,” I said. I figured I could distract her, and cheer her up a bit as I led her away from the shed. “Or maybe someone else will figure all of this out.”

“Someone else!” Chelsea dived back into the shed. “No! Then I'd never know the truth. Not if they ended the universe. I can't let someone beat me to the answer. I have to know if I'm right.”

“Don't do it!” I screamed.

Chelsea pushed the button.

I flinched, expecting some sort of terrible explosion. For an instant, nothing happened. Then I saw a tiny spot of total darkness hovering above the table. It was barely larger than a pinhead. It started to expand.

“Yes!” Chelsea screamed. “I was right. See, it's exactly what I predicted.”

The sphere of blackness was the size of a golf ball now. I grabbed Chelsea's arm and tugged at it.

“You can't outrun it,” she said. “It will expand exponentially until there's nothing left on the outside. That doesn't matter. I understand everything. I know the secret of the universe.”

I turned and ran. Behind me, Chelsea kept talking, spewing a stream of words about subatomic particles. Then, suddenly, the sound of her voice was cut off. I didn't look back. I kept running. I knew it was pointless, but I couldn't help myself. Maybe that was the real secret of the universe. Even as the universe itself was being swallowed by blackness, life tried to find a way out. Life fought. Life never gave up.

A wall of darkness shot past me. I expected everything to go black, but the inside of the sphere wasn't dark. It was shimmery, like a soap bubble. I looked back. Chelsea was there. Everything was there. I looked ahead. The sphere was expanding, revealing more and more as it swelled away from us. In a moment, I could see all the way down the street.

Chelsea came out of the shed and stood next to me as I watched the inside of the sphere fly past the clouds.

“I was wrong,” she said. “We're still here.”

“That's sort of a good thing,” I said.

I expected her to agree. Instead, she turned back toward the shed. “Wait. I know my mistake. I can get this to work.”

I grabbed her arm. “Can you hold off for a little? You don't want to make another mistake.”

“But I really need to see if I'm right.”

“They're having sidewalk sales at the mall,” I said. “We can try on skirts.”

“Skirts?” Her gaze wavered between the shed and me.

“Yeah. Skirts. Lots of skirts. And the Freezie Shack has a new flavor this week—peach ripple. Jillian got a kitten yesterday. We could go see her on the way to the mall.”

“I guess the experiment can wait,” Chelsea said. “I love kittens.”

I grabbed her arm and dragged her away from the shed before she changed her mind. Once I got her into the world, with its warm sunshine and blue sky, its ice cream and kittens, I was pretty sure I could convince her to hold off from doing any more experiments. Sure, it might be nice to know the secret of the universe, but nowhere near as nice as peach ripple ice cream in a waffle cone.

It looked like I'd saved the universe. I just hoped there wasn't anyone else out there like Chelsea, who was willing to destroy the universe in order to briefly understand it. Or if there was, I hoped she had a friend like me.

 

LAPS

“
Two wrongs make a
right,” Joey said as he read the long list of regulations printed in large red letters on a sign next to the pool-room door. The third and fourth rules were the two wrongs he was about to violate.

No swimming alone.

Nobody under 16 allowed in the pool without an adult.

He'd noticed the sign on the way in, as he'd followed his parents past the pool to the elevator. Fortunately, they hadn't bothered to look. He knew that because when he asked if he could go for a swim, they'd both said it was okay. All they wanted to do was relax in the hotel room after their long drive.

Joey didn't care about the regulations. He was a good swimmer. A serious swimmer. He wasn't going to do anything stupid, like dive headfirst into the shallow end. He checked the hallway in both directions to make sure no hotel people were nearby, then slipped through the entrance to the indoor pool.

“Warm.” Joey wiped sweat from his forehead. The air around the pool was hot and humid. The sharp scent of chlorine burned his nostrils. He tested the water with his toe. It was warm, too.

He climbed down the ladder at the side of the pool and waded through the chest-deep water to the shallow end. Then he pulled down his goggles and kicked off, starting with a breaststroke. After ten easy laps, he switched to freestyle and picked up his pace.

As he turned his head to the side for a breath on the fifth lap, he noticed that the room had gotten steamier. In the middle of the sixth lap, he slowed to a drift and raised his head.

The air was so dense, he could barely see the side of the pool.

Bad ventilation,
he thought as he resumed swimming. He didn't like breathing the damp air. But he had only four more laps of freestyle, followed by ten of the butterfly and ten of the backstroke, and then he could get out.