The Wells Bequest Read online

  “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!”

  “Well, that part clearly is fiction,” said Ms. Minnian, “since the Nautilus is right here.”

  “No way! Then how do you know what’s fiction and what isn’t?”

  “Come on,” said Jaya impatiently. “We’re not going to get to the bottom of all the philosophical stuff today. Let’s just find the time machine, okay? It should be right around this corner.”

  We passed a few more looming hulks and suddenly there it was: the time machine.

  I stopped short and stared.

  “Well?” asked Jaya. “Is that the one you saw us riding?”

  “I—I don’t know. It looks a lot like it. But this one’s so . . . big.”

  “Bigger than the one you saw before?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, how big was that one?”

  I held out my hands a few inches apart.

  Jaya made a skeptical face. “What? How could the two of us ride on a machine that small?”

  “We were only this big ourselves,” I said, showing her with my hands.

  “You’re kidding! Six inches tall? And you only just thought to mention that?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “How was I supposed to know I should ask something like that? ‘Oh, by the way, we didn’t happen to be six inches tall, did we?’” She imitated herself questioning me earnestly. “‘And did we by any chance happen to be kangaroos? No? What about Popsicle sticks? Balls of pure energy?’” Her sarcasm prickled like tiny claws.

  “Fine,” I said. “I guess I didn’t think it through. I guess I forgot you weren
’t there yet—I mean Present You wasn’t there, so you wouldn’t know the things Future You is going to know.”

  “Did Future Us happen to tell you how we happened to end up six inches tall?” asked Jaya.

  “Well, you said something about a shrink ray.”

  “Of course,” said Dr. Rust without a trace of Jaya’s sarcasm. “That makes perfect sense. And did Future Either of You say anything about how you got the time machine to work?”

  “No,” I said. “But . . . there’s something wrong.” I went up to the time machine for a closer look. “Can I touch it?” I asked.

  Ms. Minnian nodded, her lips pursed. “Carefully.”

  “It looks . . . different,” I said, touching a gear.

  “Different how?” asked Jaya.

  I stared at it, imagining the machine that had appeared in my bedroom. As I concentrated, my memory sharpened into one of those visions I get.

  I pointed to the big machine. “Well, this part looks like it’s made of brass. Some of those gears were silver-colored when I saw it before. So was this rod. And this seat is much fancier. The other one looked more like a plain bicycle saddle. It was leather, at least the part I could see. Of course, we were sitting on it . . .”

  “What else?” asked Dr. Rust.

  “There’s something missing. There was a clear rod on the little machine. It looked like glass, maybe.”

  “The ‘crystalline substance,’” Dr. Rust said to Ms. Minnian. “Quartz, probably.”

  “And there was a bar that was kind of . . . sparkling. I think it was this one”—I touched it—“but here it just looks normal.”

  “The ‘twinkling’ bar,” Ms. Minnian said to Dr. Rust.

  “And these levers were white, like they were made out of plastic or china instead of wood,” I went on. “Ivory, maybe, like piano keys. And the whole thing looked kind of—” I squinted at my vision. “I don’t know how to describe it. Kind of geometrically off. Of course, it was tiny and this one is life-size, so I could be wrong, but I don’t know. . . .” I trailed off. “It just seems different,” I said.

  Dr. Rust, Mr. Reyes, and Ms. Minnian looked at each other, then at the machine, then at each other again. “Well,” said Dr. Rust at last, “there are two possibilities. Either somebody will make a great many very specific alterations to this machine before you use it or it’s not the same machine.”

  “I’m going to try it anyway,” said Jaya. She jumped up onto the seat.

  “Jaya, don’t!” said Ms. Minnian.

  “Which lever is future?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she reached out and pressed one.

  “Jaya! NO!” shouted all three librarians.

  But nothing happened. She sat there on the fancy velvet saddle going nowhere. “Nope. Still broken,” said Jaya cheerfully, hopping off.

  Ms. Minnian’s nostrils flared. Her lips stood out red against her pale skin. “Jaya! You know better than to do things like that,” she hissed. “What if it had worked?”

  “What if it had? Then I would have pressed the other lever and come right back—after looking around a little first, of course. Anyway, we all knew it wouldn’t. We’ve tried it a zillion times.”

  “She’s right,” said Mr. Reyes.

  Ms. Minnian was still pale. “Someday, young lady, you’ll go too far,” she said.

  “Well, I think that’s all we can do here today,” said Dr. Rust. “Lucy, will you bring us back?”

  “Oh!” Jaya practically squealed. “Let me! Let me!”

  “Haven’t you done enough, Jaya?” said Ms. Minnian.

  “No, I haven’t. I haven’t done anything. Please, Doc? You promised!”

  Dr. Rust shrugged.

  Taking that as permission, Jaya stooped down and felt the floor the way Ms. Minnian had done with the wall. She dipped her fingers into it, grabbed something, and made that flipping motion.

  This time I managed to keep my eyes open, but I still couldn’t catch the transformation. It happened too quickly. Suddenly we were standing back in the original Wells Bequest space, the fluorescent lights buzzing, facing the blank back wall.

  “Well done, Jaya.” Dr. Rust was smiling.

  Ms. Minnian led us back to the front of the room, took her remote out of her purse, and pointed it at the door. She ushered us upstairs into the suddenly ordinary light of the fading day.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Simon’s Sabotage

  Going back to plain old normal life after spending an hour in a projectivized tangent space full of starships and time machines was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

  I wanted to run back to the basement and look at every single one of the objects. I wanted to sit down with the time machine and figure out how to fix it. But Ms. Minnian had said, “Go home now. That’s quite enough for today.” And I couldn’t get into the Wells Bequest Oversize Annex on my own anyway.

  So here I was, losing badly to Jake at Gravity Force III.

  “What’s wrong with you today?” he asked. I’d just crashed my ship three times before getting wiped by a space raider.

  I threw down my game controller. “Sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m preoccupied.”

  “Obviously. What are you thinking about?”

  I shrugged. “My science project.”

  “Are you still doing robots?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “How’s it going?”

  I shrugged again. “Okay . . . Hey, Jake. What would you do if you found out . . .” I stopped. I shouldn’t talk about this. They would kick me out of the repository.

  “If I found out what? That my best friend suddenly sucked at Gravity Force III?”

  It’s okay, I told myself. He would just think I was speculating about silly stuff, the way I always do. “If you found out the things in science-fiction books really existed,” I said.

  It was his turn to shrug. “They do,” he said.

  My stomach clenched. Did he know? “What do you mean?”

  “We have rockets. We sent men to the moon. We sent rovers to Mars. We have submarines and videophones and artificial eyes.”

  “Oh, that. That’s not science fiction. It’s just science,” I said.

  “Well, before it was science, it was science fiction.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “What are you talking about, then? You mean things like aliens and artificial intelligence and pork chops that grow on trees?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said. “What if you found out they really existed?”

  “They probably do. It’s a big universe. A few zillion light-years past Pluto there are probably aliens planting pork-chop trees with their pet artificial intelligences, talking about whether we exist. And you know what? Every single one of them could beat you at Gravity Force III. Come on, pick up your controller. And this time, concentrate.”

  • • •

  For my next shift at the repository, Ms. Callender put me on Stack 5 again. Abigail and Simon were there when I arrived.

  The door opened and Jaya came in. Her hair looked a storm cloud—dark and wild, with strands shooting out like lightning. My heart did its usual thumpy thing.

  Simon jumped up. “Jaya,” he said. “Have you heard from the Burton yet? Aren’t you supposed to find out this week?”

  “I haven’t heard anything yet. Has it been busy down here today?”

  “Totally dead,” said Abigail. “We only got two slips for the whole shift. Do you know where I’m supposed to go next?”

  “Ms. Callender wants both of you up in Preservation,” said Jaya.

  Simon put away his notebook. “Right,” he said. “Do let me know if you hear from London.”

  “Of course,” said Jaya.

  “What’s the Burton?” I asked after they left.

  “The Burton Memorial Material Repository, in London,” said Jaya. “I’m applying for their summer guest page program.”

  I remembered the conversation she
’d had with Simon back when I first met her. “Would you be gone all summer? I would really miss you!”

  “Thanks. I’d miss you too. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I mean, Simon really wanted me to apply, and it would be fun to work at another repository. I’d love staying with my aunt in London. But Francis is applying too and he really wants it.”

  I wanted to say I hoped she wouldn’t get the job, but that seemed mean. Besides, it wasn’t really true. I did want her to get it, if it would make her happy. But I’d much rather have her being happy on the same continent as me.

  After a pause, I cleared my throat. “So,” I said. “About last week. Did that . . . did all that really happen?”

  “What, you mean the Wells Bequest?” said Jaya. “Yes. It did.”

  “There really are spaceships and time machines in a crazy room down in the basement?”

  “Yes. There really are.”

  “Who else knows about it?”

  “The librarians and most of the pages. And some of the patrons too.”

  “Simon? Abigail?”

  “Yes, and Francis and Alan and Mariela. Most people don’t find out as quickly as you did. You’re pretty special.”

  I blushed. “When did you find out?”

  “Oh, I’ve known for years and years. But that’s different. I kind of grew up in the repository. There was some trouble with the Grimm Collection back when I was ten—my sister, Anjali, got turned into a doll, and I had to rescue her.”

  “What?!”

  Jaya laughed. “Yeah, I know, crazy, right? I was a pretty resourceful ten-year-old. I’ll tell you all about it someday.”

  “Tell me now!”

  “I can’t. It’s way too long a story, and Dr. Rust doesn’t like me talking about it.”

  “All right, but what’s the Grimm Collection? At least tell me that.”

  “The *GCs. It’s another Special Collection down in the basement—objects from fairy tales.”

  “From fairy tales?” I couldn’t believe it.

  She nodded. “Magic mirrors, seven-league boots, flying carpets, things like that.”

  “No way! That’s impossible!”

  “Why? You saw the science-fiction objects in the Wells Bequest. How’s the Grimm Collection any more impossible?”