The Seventh Mountain (32 page)

“You invented this?”

“Kind of. Nikola Tesla came up with the
idea. He was a pretty famous scientist.”

Jamal said, “Yeah, I’ve heard of him. Wasn’t
he the one that invented all that lightning stuff?”

“Yeah, that and a lot more. He did all kinds
of things. He made an earthquake once and a death-ray gun that
destroyed part of Siberia… Tunguska, I think.”

“So, Nikola Tesla invented it.”

“Well, not really. He did all kinds of
experiments with frequency and resonance and stuff. He speculated
about this kind of thing in his notes. My dad helped me with the
calculations and I did the rest. The only problem is that it’s so
big. I had to use surplus military parts from a submarine sonar
system.”

“So, what do we do?”

“We need to catch them out in the open, away
from everybody else, and we need to stay pretty far away, too.”

Chenoa said, “They practice swords out by
The Island, every Saturday afternoon while we’re riding with Mrs.
Shadowitz.”

Jamal said, “We finished that just before
Christmas vacation.”

Nick added, “If we’re in the bleachers, that
should work.”

Mark said, “Sounds like a plan.”

Nick said, “This Saturday is a flags match.
It’ll have to wait ‘til next Saturday.”

Two weeks passed and the slated Saturday
came. They were hauling the two suitcases to the eighth level
bleachers by way of the stairs when Mr. Thorpe caught them. Mark’s
being watched all the time definitely had its drawbacks.

“That’s rather interesting. What do you have
there?”

The group stopped on the landing and turned
to face Mr. Thorpe, who was coming up the stairs, smiling like a
cat that had just cornered its prey. He pointed to the
suitcases.

“Open them up; let me see.”

Mark said, “This is personal property,
sir.”

“I’ll be the judge of that, now, let’s see
it!” His voice vibrated them, inside, like he was an infrasonic
weapon himself.

Nick unzipped the suitcase that he was
carrying, revealing four soup-can-sized long tubes that had been
painted black and some electrical cables. Mark unzipped his,
revealing a battery bank and more electrical cables.

“So, you think that I can be fooled that
easily, do you? We’ll see about that. March yourselves up to the
next level and out onto the balcony. We’ll see what the engineering
section has to say about this
personal property.”

Mark and Nick zipped up the suitcases and
lugged them up and out onto the fifth level balcony, as instructed.
Jamal and Chenoa followed.

Mr. Thorpe held his elbows out. “You’re
going to remanifest to the engineering section with me. Now! You
two, I’ll deal with later.” He pointed at Chenoa and Jamal.

Mark and Nick touched his elbows and
instantly they were standing in front of the door to the power
generating facility.

“Follow me.”

Mr. Thorpe opened the door and strutted into
the room with Mark and Nick following, carrying the suitcases,
which were heavy before, but seemed much heavier now.

The figure behind the counter was examining
some papers on a clipboard. He had short, curly brown hair and a
handlebar moustache curling in a neat little spiral at the tips. He
was tall and lanky and, without a doubt, surprised to see Mr.
Thorpe.

“Mr. Thorpe, what brings you here?”

“These boys have something that I want you
to take a look at.”

The man looked at Mark and Nick. “Hi, Nick.
How’s your dad doing?”

The man was Johan Müeller, a frequent
visitor to Nick’s dad’s underground laboratory and someone whom
Nick had met on several occasions. Magi science labs outside of the
mountains were typically hidden from public scrutiny by being built
underground.

“Hello, Mr. Müeller. He’s doing all
right.”

Mr. Thorpe threw his hands into the air.
“Great, just what I need.”

“What you got there?”

“It’s my infra-sonic prototype.”

“So, you finally got it to work, did
you?”

“Yes sir, only the power supply is too big
and heavy.”

“Yeah, what are you using?”

“Ni-cad batteries.”

“You’d have to use enough of those to fill a
suitcase.”

Nick pointed to the one that Mark was
carrying. “That’s this one.”

“What are you using for emitters?”

“Towed-array sonar transducers, military
surplus, not very good ones, but they work.”

“I see, you’re using them as a beat
frequency oscillator, mixing the signals at a distance.”

“Yes sir, that’s it.”

Mr. Thorpe spun and huffed toward the door.
“I’ll just leave you two chums to chitchat.” He continued out,
leaving Mark and Nick stranded and officially in violation of the
rule prohibiting students from being beyond the wall
unsupervised.

Mark and Nick looked at each other, paused
and then shrugged.

Mr. Müeller said, “What was he so annoyed
about?”

Mark said, “He thought that he had caught us
doing something against the rules or something.”

“Having that isn’t against the rules. In
fact, you should get extra-credit for it. I’ll even suggest that to
Mrs. Allen, your science teacher.”

Nick said, “Thanks. How do we get back?
These cases are heavy.”

“Oh, just take an auto-car to Magi City and
then hop on the subway. It’ll take you right back to the school’s
underground platform.”

Mr. Müeller raised the counter to let them
through to the auto-car station. Mark and Nick walked through the
counter and started down the hall.

“Hold up a second. I’ve got some stuff that
you can use to make that thing smaller and lighter.” Mr. Müeller
disappeared into a room off the hall and returned a few minutes
later with a canvas bag.

“There’s two, high efficiency, ultrasonic
transducers in there along with a micro-fusion supply, a beat
frequency oscillator chip and a few other things. You should be
able to shrink the size and weight of that thing,
considerably.”

The bag couldn’t have weighed more than a
pound or two. The wires alone in Nick’s prototype weighed much more
than that. If what Mr. Müeller had said was true, then he could
build a hand held model. Nick looked in the bag. It looked like
everything that he would need.

“Thank you, Mr. Müeller.”

“You just show me what you come up with and
that’ll be thanks enough.”

The ride to the subway station was much
slower than they had experienced before. Its leisurely pace let
them see part of Magi City. Two story frame houses lined the single
street where they came in. Each house had a small sign out front
that named the house’s occupants. Tree lined sidewalks paralleled
the street on either side.

Several miles down, the street came to what
must have been the business section. Small shops lined the street
with a few people walking to and fro, not much activity at all.

The auto-car pulled into an open area and
the car’s electronic voice said, “Destination reached, Magi City
subway platform.”

This area had a crowd by Magi City
standards, maybe as many as thirty people, all apparently waiting
for the subway. It seemed odd that no one was dressed in tribe
colors except for Mark and Nick. They lugged the suitcases out of
the car and up to the area where everyone seemed to be waiting.

It was cold there, being January and all,
quite a change from the climate at the school.
Maybe all the
different sections have their own climates.
It was a strange
idea, but it seemed to fit. How could the school have a year-round,
at least so far, desert climate and less than thirty miles away be
freezing cold? It didn’t make any sense according to normal
thinking, but this place was anything but normal. The cold hadn’t
settled into them yet, but it was on them, gnawing away at their
thin tunics. Wearing just sandals on their feet didn’t help much
either.

“You fellows lost?”

Mark and Nick turned to see who had spoken
to them. It was an older man, bundled up in a parka, gloves, and a
fur-lined hood.

“No sir. We just kind of got stranded in the
engineering section and came here to catch the subway back to
school.”

“Yep, figured it might be something like
that. Most folks know that we elected to have season changes here
and it gets a mite chilly this time of year. Train should be along
any minute now. Don’t miss it or you’ll catch cold.”

Mark said, “Thanks, we won’t.”
I have got
to remember to put some warm clothes into Aaron’s Grasp.

The subway came and what looked like a
hundred people got off. The thirty or so people waiting got on,
including Mark and Nick. It was warm and comfortable inside for the
fifteen minutes that it took to traverse the underground
passage.

The subway station that was under the school
was a place that none of Mark’s group had ever seen or heard of. It
wasn’t listed on the mall maps, and certainly no one had ever
mentioned it to them or given the slightest hint that something
like that might even exist. And there were two sets of tracks.

The signs on the wall said that the subway
to Magi City departed every twenty minutes on track A. Track B
listed destinations, every hour, to the other six mountains
starting at noon and ending at 5 p.m. The noon train went to The
First Mountain; the 1 p.m. train went to The Second Mountain and so
forth.
Why are there trains to all the other mountains? Magi can
just remanifest. That’s right, not everybody at the mountains are
Magi.

The only exit from the platform was a set of
stairs that led to the first level as well as farther up to the
other levels. Mark hadn’t noticed the downward leading stairs in
the past because his destination had never been any lower than
level one. He thought,
It’s funny how the mind works
.

Nick said, “After we put the suitcases up, I
need to come back down and buy some tools.”

“It’s too late to get Slone today. Do you
think you can have it ready by next Saturday?”

“I’ll have it ready, no sweat.”

Nick used every minute of his spare time to
work on the new device. Not a day went by that he didn’t skimp on
homework and studies or skip lunch in order to make more time to
work on it and test it. It took four days to complete it. The
scopes and meters indicated that it was working just fine, only it
hadn’t been field tested, yet.

It was a fine-looking weapon like it was
straight out of some low budget, old science fiction movie where
the evil aliens always had some sort of ray pistol that flashed a
beam of light and whistled. This gun did no such thing; it was
silent and had nothing to indicate that it was firing at all,
except of course the intended effects, theoretically.

Saturday came and brought with it the usual
things; breakfast in The Oasis, homework, practice, lunch, more
homework and practice, and later, a chance to even the score. The
group, especially Nick, was ready.

Chenoa and Jamal had watched Slone’s group
from the fifth floor balcony last week while Mark and Nick were
being taken away by Mr. Thorpe. Slone’s group had practiced until
it was just starting to get dark. They expected them to do the same
thing today. They planned to wait until Slone’s group was hot,
tired and looking forward to returning to the school. Oh, they’d be
returning all right, but not very much looking forward to it.

Slone and his crew were right where they
usually were, practicing single and team combat. He had twenty-one
followers now. Mark, Nick, Jamal and Chenoa sat in the bleachers
and watched, waiting for the indication that they were ready to
head in.

Shadows were growing long and a huge flock
of starlings, a hundred yards wide and about a mile long, began
passing overhead in their nightly journey from the farm fields to
their nesting homes in the crags and crevasses in the waste lands
on the other side of the school. Slone’s group sat on the ground,
relaxing after a long, hard work out. Now was the time.

Nick aimed the weapon. A lone figure
appeared on the field next to Slone. Nick began squeezing the
trigger, slowly; he wanted to savor every moment of this event.

Mark pulled out his binoculars to see who
the new figure was. “It’s Mr. Thorpe.”

Jamal reached out and pushed Nick’s arm up.
“That’s Mr. Thorpe down there.”

Nicks finger pressure brought the trigger to
the critical point when Jamal moved his arm. The weapon, pointed
into the air, began firing, unnoticed. The starlings, tens of
thousands of them, were passing through the beam, directly over
Slone’s crew.

“So what. He deserves it.”

“Yeah, but Mrs. Shadowitz said no practical
jokes on teachers.”

Nick continued unknowingly firing the gun.
“I don’t care. It would be worth it even if I got expelled.”

“You don’t need to get expelled. We can
wait.”

Mark said, “Bull’s-eye, we don’t have to
wait.”

Chenoa said, “What do you mean,
bull’s-eye?”

Mark said, “Use your binoculars.”

She looked through her binoculars and saw
that it was raining great, gray globs on Slone’s crew. She followed
the rain up to its source. A cloud of starlings was passing through
the beam and jettisoning their foul, fowl cargo as they did so. Mr.
Thorpe wasn’t getting hit; he had some kind of invisible shield
around him.

Chenoa sucked in a hard breath, preparing
for a belly laugh. “I don’t believe it.” A hysterical laugh gushed
from her.

She was laughing so hard that Mark grabbed
her binoculars before she dropped them.

Jamal and Nick both looked at them. “What’s
so funny?”

Mark pointed at the field. Jamal took out
his binoculars and looked, only to burst out laughing, too.

Nick didn’t realize that he was still
holding the weapon, pointed and firing at the birds. He looked,
realized what he was doing, released the trigger and looked at the
flock of birds flying in the distance. He looked at the field and
his eyes got big and his mouth dropped open. “It works!” He pulled
out his binoculars for a closer look.