He looked at the clock. It was 6:12. He couldn’t have gotten that much sleep, but he was wired.
I have hidden what I have stolen, Jon, he had said. It is in your possession. I believe you will know what it is. I hesitate to be more direct; I’m sure you understand.
No, he sure as hell did not understand. How in the hell could he understand some normal old guy down the street, who had always been nice as he could have been, stealing something important and dangerous from the government and then sticking it on Jon? How the hell was he supposed to understand Dr. Bernhard doing this to him without telling him anything? Even now, he hadn’t told Jon where the hell it was supposed to be. Had Dr. Bernhard snuck in his house? Put it somewhere? Or had he somehow stuck it on Jon, or put it in his bookbag, or . . .
Jon sat up. Books. Three months ago, Dr. Bernhard had given him several books, unbidden. Jon was interested in the subjects, and enjoyed reading, and thought they’d make good things to peruse over the summer. Like most of Dr. Bernhard’s eccentricities, Jon had shrugged them off. Jon had just figured that he was old, he was a scientist, he had a vaguely European accent—so, sure, he was going to be a little strange. Otherwise, he had been interesting, had seemed like he knew something about everything, and had been as nice as Jon could have imagined being to another person.
Appearances are deceiving, Dr. Bernhard had often told him when demonstrating a particular experiment or regaling Jon with a story of scientific conquest. Don’t trust them.
Apparently, that was advice Jon should have taken to have a more immediate application.
Except that Bernhard had been speaking in code. The old bastard had been sending him coded messages the whole time Jon had known him.
The clear, unshakable sense of certainty gripped him again. It was in one of the books. It had to be.
Which one, he wasn’t sure. But no time like the present to try and figure it out. Jon rolled out of bed and heard Megan grunt. He peeked over at her. She was still sleeping, wrapped up in the blanket like a burrito and holding Jon’s sock-stuffed sweatshirt on top of her head. She did not sleep pretty.
Jon opened his closet, and reached up on the top shelf to grab the books. He had figured keeping them out of the whirlwind of his room would probably be a good idea, given that Dr. Bernhard had stressed he be careful with them. This strategy had not been altogether successful, as Jon had already thrown several things on top of the books since he had first put them up there three-odd months ago. A pile of dirty clothes fell out and landed at his feet, and a box of old Legos and Star Wars toys followed, upended on Jon’s head. A few paperbacks—horror novels, not really his thing but Stacey had given them to him for Christmas. Under a month-old edition of the Sunday comics—now, why had he put that up there?—he located the books. His neat stack had been knocked over, but all the books appeared to be there. Except one, pushed towards the back, looked bigger. Bigger than any of the books he had brought home with him, at any rate.
Jon kicked away clothes and Star Wars action figures and pulled a blue milk crate–full of his shoes, most them in pretty bad shape, but “waste not, want not” his mom always said–over and tipped it on its side.
Introduction to Electric Engineering and Applied Chemistry were fine. The Age of Alchemy was also unchanged, as were A Philosophical Primer on Ethics and A History of Eugenics. But one book had transformed significantly. He could still make out the title on the side: The Interstitium: Molecular Molding via Chemical Synthesis In Extremely Small Spaces, although the letters now seemed to be deeply embossed and almost luminous in their burnished gold stamp against the worn leather of the book cover.
The book, too, was easily three times thicker, more the thickness of the Knoxville phone directory than the much thinner textbook he had taken home from Dr. Bernhard’s. The dull brown laminated chipboard that had been its cover was gone, replaced with well-aged embossed leather. The changes didn’t stop there, either.
As he pulled the book out from the back of his closet, any doubt that this might have been the object—the terrible, powerful thing Dr. Bernhard had warned him about—evaporated. This was not just a book. The taut, worn leather was warm against his palms—almost hot. There was a low hum emanating from it, barely audible, but still clear from the moment he touched it. Even the worn leather of the book was not quite right. It felt like leather, yes, but it also felt metallic. Like a fine woven mesh of metal, maybe aluminum, somehow coerced into pretending to be leather.
He stepped down off the milk crate, turning the tome over in his hands. It was much larger than any of the books he remember taking home from Dr. Bernhard’s that day, even though the title, The Interstitium was familiar, and Dr. Bernhard had commented on the title more than once. To make it stick in my head, Jon thought. He was planning this since he met me. Maybe before he met me. Bastard.
The book was much heavier than anything he had taken home that day. How could it have increased in mass? The surface, which had been the smooth, laminated paperboard of a textbook when he had put The Interstitium up in his closet was now a worn, embossed, vaguely metallic leather. Ornament on the front, side, and binding included raised sections—rectangles, rounded circles, and trapezoidal shapes—that came up almost half an inch off the cover itself. It reminded him of the oversized pulpit Bible at their old church, before Doreen had gone Unitarian—with its beveled geometry of panel molding and corner blocks raised off the cover with the grandiosity of a piece of Victorian furniture. The round medallions emerging from the corner blocks of the front cover looked like the ornate finial at the end of a grand staircase, squashed vertically to a quarter of its normal size, but no less detailed.
Jon continue to turn the book over, the warmth—and that hum, that barely audible subwoofer buzz—spreading into his hands and up his arms. Yeah, it looked like it could be a piece of Victorian furniture, or, from a distance, the ornate, old pulpit Bible at his church. But something about the designs was different. More exotic.
The border around the covers was vaguely geometric, like the dentils of an old Victorian roof—and yet the size and shapes of the rectangles inside the strips was random and asymmetrical. In some ways, it was like looking at an autoradiograph of genetic material, the image produced when doing genetic typing–Jon was into genetics–abstracted and turned into a weird embossed motif. The ribs following the contours on the medallions on the corner blocks looked at first blush like a knit ribbon pattern, but when he looked closer, the random assortment of ovals and asymmetric triangles was reminiscent of the binary zeros and ones of machine language. The faint characters that decorated the six rectangular molded panels that extended—actually, extruded seemed like a better word—from the cover weren’t characters that Jon had ever seen. They seemed ideographic, like Chinese language characters or pictographic like Egyptian hieroglyphs, but much more mechanical and rigid in their geometry. Some of them looked vaguely like circuit diagrams.
Jon let his finger trace the contours of the medallion in the top right corner—there seemed to be detail within detail, as if the larger designs embossed into the medallion were made up of smaller and more intricate patterns that were, in turn, made up of still smaller patterns or characters. And something about the medallion reminded Jon of some sort of knob. Or maybe a rheostat.
Jon looked at the type: The Interstitium, with Molecular Molding via Chemical Synthesis In Extremely Small Spaces beneath that in much smaller lettering. It was nothing like what he remembered, except for the actual title. What he recalled as being simple black type on a dull brown background was now embossed and stamped into the worn leather. The letters were a thick and blocky san serif, not the sort of gothic calligraphic text he normally associated with big, old looking books with embossed foil lettering. It looked like gold leaf at first, but as he continued to examine it, running his fingers over the type itself, it seemed to shimmer, a spreading spider web of rainbow light refracting out from beneath the surface of the letters. The words weren’t just reflective, either—they glowed, with a dull but unmistakable light.
This was not the book Jon had brought home some six months ago. He ran one hand across the binding, feeling it hum under his fingers. Hell, this thing wasn’t a book, period.
Jon, I’ve stolen something. Something very terrible and very powerful.
He could practically feel the truth of it. He could smell it in the air, metallic and electrical. He could feel the heat of it in his hands. Not just like feeling something that had been left in a hot car—it was a volcanic heat, radiating up through a mile of solid rock. What he was feeling now, just touching it, that was just the dim echoes reaching the surface.
Something very terrible and very powerful. Jon wondered if the thing was radioactive, if it had been sitting in his room, poisoning him for the last six months. That didn’t really make sense, but what the hell about this did? Nothing, was what. Of course, there was that other thing Dr. Bernhard had asked: Jon, if you wanted to build a ‘doomsday device’, how would you do it?
“Disguise it as a book?” Jon asked himself. He shook his head. And who did it? Who would have made such a thing? Who could have? If it was something—he hated to think it seriously, but he couldn’t avoid it—something alien, why was it a book? Why was the type in English? That didn’t make sense.
Unless it was something Dr. Bernhard did, somehow, Jon thought. Obviously, the guy had figured out how to make it do something, or had figured something out with it—the portable holographic projector, disguised as a video cassette, was proof enough of that. Was this Dr. Bernhard’s disguise for it? Whatever it actually was? Or something else?
Despite the heat radiating from the book, Jon felt like he was freezing. Cold sweat beaded on his forehead. He founded himself unable to open the book. He found himself unable to try.
I don’t want to see anymore I don’t want to know any more I just want to send it back take it back to his house throw it in the trash mail it back to the government—
He heard Dr. Bernhard’s voice in his head—quite clearly, this time, almost as if it were a clear and separate voice, distinct from Jon’s own thoughts. I would only mean to do good. I think that is the terrible trick of it . . . they would only mean to do good, as well.
Jon inhaled deeply, and pulled open the cover. He looked at the first page for a moment, and then laughed out loud. Only then, was he aware of how close he had been to losing control of his bladder.
The first page was a diagram—an elaborate, detailed diagram, and the page itself had almost an appearance of depth, as if the diagrams not only stretched across the page but descended down into the page. What had made Jon laugh, however, was the largest portion of the illustration—a stylized human form, with arms and legs that ended it rounded curves rather than hands and feet, and a round, bald head with big black eyes and a black semi-circle of a smile—it looked for all the world to Jon like a smiley face. The absurdity of it struck him once more as he stared at the smiley faced figure, and he laughed again.
Even what the illustration seemed to be made him snicker. He wasn’t an electrical engineer by any stretch of the imagination, and a lot of the stuff in the diagram he had never seen, but some of the stuff—D batteries, speaker wire, toggle switches, rheostats and pan pots and low voltage electrical motors—was easily recognizable. The illustration showed most of the stuff as being included as components on a belt that went around the figure’s midsection, with wires that ran down to each rounded stump at the bottom of the figure’s legs. The figure appeared to be floating under the power of the wires, toggle switches, and D batteries. A caption under the figure read, simply: Anti-Gravity Belt.
“Hoo-hah,” Jon wheezed. “Hoo, hell. That’s just crazy. It’s all just crazy. Nuts. Completely nuts.”
“What’s crazy?” Megan asked drowsily. “That you’re up talking to yourself at the crack of dawn?”
Jon froze. He had almost forgotten. Megan. Slowly, he closed the book. “Uh, nothing,” he started, grasping for words. What should he say? Probably just put the book up, say it was no big deal, or hint that it was something he was . . . what? Researching? Working on? And she would find out more later, he would say. Then get her out of the house. Get her out of this, and out of danger, as soon as possible. He should have stuck with his original instinct and not let her come over at all. Because Jon had a feeling this situation was going to get very sticky very quick.
Jon, I’ve stolen something. Something very terrible and very powerful.
“Hey, cool,” Megan mumbled. “Is that a book? Where the hell didya get that?” Jon turned around to face her as she leaned in to get a closer look, putting the book on the floor, away from her.
Eyes bleary and auburn hair twisted into a knotty rat’s nest of tangles, chunks of it falling over her face, Jon’s eyes widened. My God, he thought. She’s radiant. And, immediately after: I can’t believe I just thought that.
He knew that she looked crappy, and that that’s what his eyes saw and that’s what he should think—that she didn’t wake up pretty. That she needed a shower and a good hair brushing in the morning. Yet she looked more beautiful to him now than she had last night; almost more beautiful than he could have imagined.
Pheromones, Jon thought. I’ve read about this. Certain people give off smells and they just make you go crazy. They stimulate the sex drive. Mess up your brain. No other explanation.
Megan apparently misread the look on Jon’s face. “Aw. jeeze, don’t look at me—“ She half-covered her face with her hands, which only served to enhance the effect. “I know I look like crap.”
“No, no,” Jon said. “You look—“ Beautiful, Jon’s brain suggested. Radiant. Like an angel. “—fine,” he finished.
“Oh no,” Megan said. “You hesitated. I must look like absolute shit. And I don’t have anything with me. I don’t have my makeup. I didn’t even bring my hairbrush. Shit shit shit.”
“You can use my hairbrush,” Jon offered, thankful for the turn of conversation. Megan had been distracted from the book. “I don’t know if that’s hygienic, but, you’re welcome to. But . . . don’t you need to get home?”
Megan let out a little laugh. “Worn out my welcome, huh? Or now you’ve seen my morning face, you’re ready to kick me out—”
Jon shook his head vigorously. “No!” he almost shouted. He stopped himself; he was a little wound up, he thought. He needed to take it down a notch. “You can set up house in my closet and sleep on my floor until you’re old and gray, if you want.”
He paused for a moment. Did he risk saying anything more? Given the circumstances? He decided he would, especially given the circumstances. “I really liked seeing you last night. I like you being around.”
Megan smiled at him through her bed head. “That’s sweet,” she said, and Jon was afraid he was going to get another pinched cheek. Perhaps that had been the beer as much as anything, because she just reached up and touched his hand. “Thanks. Thanks for letting me crash here. I like hanging out with you, too.”
Tell her about the book, came the thought, filling his mind, as she touched his hand. You really want to do this thing alone?
It was tempting. He was going to need help from somewhere. Hell, he was going to need transportation. Megan’s sister had a car, and that would be a start. And he had already probably put Megan in danger. Possibly tremendous, terrible danger. So didn’t she have a right to know?
I would mean to do good, Dr. Bernhard had said on the tape. I would mean to do good.
Who was he going to get to help him, though? Johnny Two? His mom? He didn’t have a lot of other options. Did he want to put them in danger? Or wouldn’t they be in danger, anyway, just because they knew him? If someone was going to come looking for him, wouldn’t they try and get to him through the people he knew?
Jon shook his head. He was in above his head. Way above his head. He thought the best things right now was just to do nothing. He wouldn’t tell Megan, or Johnny Two, and, of course, no way he was going to tell his mom. Better to think about it. Give this issue some consideration before he decided who to drag into it, or what to do. Maybe he should just turn the thing into the government. He hadn’t known Dr. Bernhard all that well. Maybe he had just been some paranoid old kook and had kept it disguised well enough. Maybe he was still alive, and was just—well, he couldn’t just be pulling an elaborate stunt. There was no denying the technology of the video cassette or the hard, inexplicable reality of the book. Still, he could have been paranoid, or even power mad, and was trying to keep whatever it was he had stolen—the book, it had to be the book—for himself. It was possible he wasn’t dead at all, and was just using Jon.
Jon was just fourteen years old. The most complicated things he had been contemplating for his summer had been learning assembly language programming and maybe getting a good look at Megan’s cleavage while she fawned over Johnny Two. This was way beyond anything he was prepared to cope with—had been, from the moment the video cassette had started to click and whir. Maybe turning the book over to the authorities would be the best idea. Just tell them he had no idea what the hell the old man had been thinking. Just get it out of his life, and let them deal with it.
You were one of the few people I had met that I knew I could trust, Dr. Bernhard has said. That I felt for sure that I should trust. Even with great power. Perhaps especially with great power.
Maybe not. Trust no one, Dr. Bernhard had also said. Jon thought that perhaps that was good advice. Starting, right off the bat, with Dr. Bernhard himself, who Jon currently had no reason to trust at all.
“Jon?” Megan was asking. “Are you okay? Earth to Jon, earth to—”
“Yeah, yeah, heard you,” Jon mumbled. Megan’s head, bleary eyes and tangled hair, was not a foot from his—she had sat up on the bed, right next to Jon, and he hadn’t even noticed. He did notice now, and Megan’s morning breath—it smelled a little like beer, cigarettes, and rotting vegetables—was not pleasant. He backed up a little, worried, distractedly, that his breath might be even worse. “Sorry, I was zoning.”
“No kidding. You okay? Do I need to clear out—”
“No, nothing like that,” Jon said. Although we could probably both use a Tic-Tac, he thought. “I mean, my mom will probably be out for another hour or more. She usually makes a slow start on Saturdays. She wouldn’t come back here, even if she was up. I was just thinking. I’ve got to pick something up in Knoxville—and I kind of don’t want my mom to know about it.”
“Say n’more, say n’more.” Megan gave Jon a toothy grin. She was slightly bucktoothed, Jon thought. The smile was bright and warm, and something tugged at his heart. Just tell her. She’s about to get involved, anyway. Just tell her.
“I’ve got—somebody left me a package, and I’m not sure what’s in it,” Jon said. That sounded good. Not exactly the whole story, but true enough. “I wanted to go ahead and get it today, just to make sure it’s nothing—nothing—“ Nothing what? Too dangerous? Incriminating? Toxic? “—perishable,” Jon finished.
“Perishable, huh?” Megan smiled a little wider, a little twinkle in her eye. She thinks I’m talking about beer or dope or something, he thought. Well, he wasn’t saying that, she was just making up her own mind. It might be something perishable. Dr. Bernhard hadn’t exactly been clear. “Carla owes me, like, a dozen major favors since she started dating Bryan. I’ve done so much cover up, and I’ve taken some major shit from Larry for her. It may not be until this afternoon, but I bet I can get her to drive us down there.”
Drive us down there. There it was. She had said it; they’d all be going, both Megan and Carla would be involved, then. He had known that would have to be the way it worked, if he wanted to get what Dr. Bernhard had left him. But, now she said it, and it was real. Even if he just turned it all over to the government or whoever, they might still get in trouble, even though they wouldn’t really know anything. If he ended up doing what Dr. Bernhard had apparently thought he would—try and hide it from the government or destroy it—then they would be directly involved and could be in serious, serious trouble. Jon felt sick to his stomach.
“That’d be great, thanks. Also,” Jon forced a smile, “it’ll get me out of the house for awhile. My mom is home, like, half the day on Saturday.”
Megan nodded wisely. “Yeah.” She looked up, as if trying to look into her own skull, and then stared, cross-eyed, at a tangle of hair that had fallen down across her nose. “I think I need to get cleaned up before I do anything. And eat some food. I think maybe I drank too much beer last night.” Sticking out her lower lip, she made a failed attempt to blow a lock of hair out from in front of her eyes. It went up, then fell right back. She sighed. “I don’t guess I could shower here, huh?”
“Uh, no,” Jon said. The idea certainly had it’s appeal—Megan, naked and wet and soapy in his bathroom, even if he couldn’t figure out some way to peak in, seemed like something most excellent. If his mother had been out of the house, he probably would have told her to go for it. The chances of his mom waking up and going straight for the bathroom, though, were pretty good. No point in risking making things any more complicated than they already were. “My mom—she could get up, it’s happened, and she usually goes straight for the shower—”
“’s cool,” Megan said, waving one hand dismissively. “I need clean clothes, anyway, I’m just not looking forward to going back to the house. You know.”
“Yeah,” Jon nodded.
“But, I can talk to Carla. Talk to you about—“ She smiled that toothy grin again. “—you’re little errand.”
“Thanks,” she smacked him on the thigh, and gave it a hard squeeze. She was a strong girl, too. “Want to walk me home, hoss?”
He didn’t think he really did, but recognized the sort of offer he’d be foolish to pass—besides which, she was going to get her older sister to drive him into Knoxville to get Dr. Bernhard’s “package”; he couldn’t exactly refuse a request to walk her home. “Sure. Probably better get a move on, before mom gets up.”
“Yeah, yeah, and I might be able to get in before Larry gets up. Or at least before he comes and checks my room.” She swung her legs up on the bed and put them down on the other side. She stood up, pressing down on Jon’s shoulder as she got up for support. She wasn’t entirely steady on her feet.
As she let go of his shoulder, Jon quickly swung his own legs over, standing up. As nonchalantly as he could, he positioned himself between the area at the end of his bed, where the book still lay, clear as could be, on the floor, and Megan. As Megan moved towards the door, Jon nudged the book under his bed with his left foot.
Megan got to the door, and looked back at Jon. “You coming?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you, like, make sure the coast is clear or something?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jon agreed, moving to the door—just one quick backward glance, to make sure the book was obscured. Not just from Megan, but possibly from his mom. She probably wouldn’t come in his room, but better safe than sorry.
He got to the door, and turned the knob. He peaked out for effect—he was pretty sure he would have heard Doreen if she was up and about; she was usually pretty noisy. Everything was dark, just a little morning light bleeding in around the shades in the living room. His mom was still fast asleep.
“Coast is clear,” Jon said. “Let’s go.”
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