Rebels With a Cause Page 2

  “You and your team did amazing things with your solar power solutions in the Congo, Maxine,” Mr. Weinstock continued. “Amazing things, indeed.”

  “True, I guess. But the key word in your first sentence was ‘did.’ It’s already been done. What do we do next? What do we do now?”

  “Simple. Be patient.”

  “I’m not the only one eager to get going again,” said Max. “I’ve been texting and e-mailing with everybody else on the team. They’re all itching for more action. Even Klaus.”

  Mr. Weinstock put a finger to his lips. “Be careful, Max,” he whispered. “The Corp has eyes and ears everywhere.”

  That startled Max. Just slightly.

  “Do they know where I am?” she whispered back, her eyes darting around, scanning all the strangers in the park, looking for a familiar egg-shaped sinister face. One with sharp teeth too large for his smile. Dr. Zimm.

  “No, Maxine,” said Mr. Weinstock. “They do not know your current residence. However, they do know where you used to live.”

  With that, he pulled out his phone.

  “I think you should watch this video clip, dear.”

  5

  Max looked at the screen on the phone, recognized the image.

  It was her old apartment, the one above the horse stables.

  “I figured you guys had security cameras watching me,” she said.

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Weinstock, tapping the Play icon. “Several of them.”

  “So, why aren’t I in the picture?”

  “This particular footage was recorded just yesterday. Long after you’d checked out.”

  “No one’s in my old room? I left months ago.…”

  “There have been several formerly homeless tenants since,” said Mr. Weinstock. “But, fortunately, thanks to our training initiatives and contacts in the business world, all of them have moved on to new jobs and homes of their own. Your old room was vacant when these unannounced visitors dropped by. Ah. Here they come. Through the bathroom window.”

  Max studied the high-definition footage, shot from multiple camera angles. It jumped around like an action movie—from the entrance to the living room to the kitchen and back again. Two men dressed in black cargo pants, black turtlenecks, and black beanies could be seen outside the window, jimmying it open with a pry bar.

  “Seriously?” said Max. “The Corp’s thugs dress like cat burglars in a heist movie? Did they forget their burglar masks?”

  “No, we suspect they wanted us to see their faces.”

  “Why?”

  “So we could run them through our facial recognition software and realize that the first man into your room, the one with the tiger tattoo crawling up the back of his neck, is Friedrich Hoffman. Very ruthless. Very efficient. He also enjoys opera.”

  Max looked at Mr. Weinstock. He shrugged.

  “We all have our hobbies, Max.”

  Max watched as the two men in black trashed her old room. They pulled drawers out of dressers. Flipped over the mattress. Ransacked the kitchen cupboards.

  “Ah,” said Mr. Weinstock, “the second gentleman, the one so mercilessly tearing apart the cabinetry, is Mr. Pinky Mulligan.”

  “And what does Pinky like?” asked Max. “Irish step dancing?”

  “Not particularly. However, Pinky is so named because, as you might notice if we were to zoom in a little closer on his left hand, he lost his pinky finger in a barroom brawl when he was sixteen. Both of these gentlemen have extensive arrest records. They are also known foot soldiers for the Corp and, according to our best intel, report directly to Dr. Zacchaeus Zimm.”

  Suddenly, the surveillance video ended.

  Ben was on the screen.

  “And this, Max,” he said, “is why you need to stick to our plan.”

  Max couldn’t help but grin. She did every time she saw Ben. He was kind of quirky. Kind of geeky. Kind of cute. He was also super intelligent and had a great heart, the kind that really wanted to save the world, even though, when it came to actually being in the world, Ben was super awkward. His social skills weren’t the best. Sort of like Max’s. Maybe because they both lived in their heads too much. Maybe because they’d both lost their parents at a very young age.

  Actually, Max had never really known her parents.

  Loss. Loneliness. They had that in common. Maybe that’s why she and Ben got along so well.

  “So, Max—I mean Adjunct Professor Paula Ehrenfest…”

  Now Ben made Max laugh. The alias they’d created for Max’s position at Columbia University (a position paid for by Ben through his Benjamin Franklin Abercrombie Foundation) was a tribute to one of Albert Einstein’s physicist friends, Paul Ehrenfest.

  “… you see what the Corp is capable of. Now will you please listen to me? Your next project is coming. Soon. I promise. We’re fielding several requests, looking for the perfect opportunity. Right now, the most important thing you can do is to stay safe! You’re my team leader.”

  Okay, thought Max. If the warning comes directly from Ben, I should probably listen.

  “Fine,” Max said when Ben’s video clip ended. “You and Ben made your point, Mr. Weinstock. I’ll head back up to Columbia on the subway.”

  “No need,” said Mr. Weinstock, pocketing his phone. “I believe your ride just arrived.”

  He nudged his head to the left.

  To where the sunglasses-wearing Jamal and Danny stood with their arms crossed over their chests.

  And, yes, they were both wearing suits. Even though it was 95 degrees in the shade.

  6

  “Please don’t do that again, Max,” said Jamal as he piloted the black Lincoln MKZ uptown.

  “You made me go into the bathroom,” said Danny. “Women yelled at me, Max. My ears are still ringing.”

  “Your face is still kind of red, too,” said Max.

  “Yeah, Danny,” said Jamal, and laughed. “It is. What’d they call you?”

  Danny slumped down in his seat. “A pawn of the patriarchy.”

  “Nice,” said Max.

  “Look, Max,” said Jamal, “this little cat-and-mouse game has been fun, but word is the Corp is on your trail.”

  “Yeah,” said Max, gazing out the window as the car rolled north through the canyons of Manhattan. “Ben told me.”

  “So, you’ll play nice?” said Jamal, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. My daughter’s dance recital is next weekend. Don’t want to miss it because I’m chasing after you.”

  “But that thing with the mirror tucked into the shower tote so you could see behind you?” said Danny. “That was smart, Max. Very impressive.”

  “Thanks.”

  On Monday morning, Max (a.k.a. Adjunct Professor Paula Ehrenfest) was walking down the seventh-floor corridor of John Jay Hall, flanked by Jamal and Danny. She was off to teach her first class of the day.

  “Excuse me, Paula?”

  It was Nancy Hanker. The resident adviser for the seventh floor. RAs were supposed to plan community-building activities for the floor and help residents if they had any problems or issues.

  They were not supposed to give residents the stink-eye, which was, basically, all Nancy Hanker ever did when she saw Max, Jamal, or Danny.

  Nancy Hanker did not like the twelve-year-old physics prodigy residing on her floor. She also didn’t like her bodyguards.

  “Hey, Nancy,” said Max. “We’re kind of in a hurry. I’m lecturing about special relativity and relativistic kinematics this morning.”

  Nancy didn’t blink. “It’s about your… security team.”

  “Ma’am?” said Jamal, stepping forward. “Is there a problem?”

  “Yes. This is a dormitory. None of the other residents have private bodyguards.”

  “I’m sure if the president’s daughter were going to school here, she’d have Secret Service protection.”

  “I’ll let you know if it ever happens,” said N
ancy. “I talked to campus security. You two gentlemen can’t stay on the floor anymore.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” said Danny. “We are here on—”

  Nancy showed him the palm of her hand.

  “I know. Some wealthy benefactor endowed the adjunct professor princess here and paid for you guys to be her private security detail. But we have a housing shortage at Columbia. We need your room. For a student! Rent a van. Sleep in it. Have a nice day.”

  Nancy Hanker returned to her room and slammed the door.

  “This presents a problem,” muttered Jamal.

  “There are no problems, only solutions,” Max muttered back.

  “John Lennon wrote that,” said Danny. “For a song.”

  “Yes, he did,” said Max. “Come on, you guys. We can’t be late for class. We’ll deal with this other stuff later. That’s why time was invented.”

  “Huh?” said Danny.

  “Just something Albert Einstein said: ‘The only reason there is time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.’”

  7

  Physics 1601 met in a lecture hall on the third floor of Pupin Hall on the Columbia campus.

  All 272 seats were full of eager students peering down at Max, who looked even tinier in the well of the amphitheater. Her bodyguards, Jamal and Danny, were in the first row. They did not have notebooks or pens.

  “Today,” Max told her audience, “I’d like to look at one of Albert Einstein’s most famous thought experiments—what he called Gedankenexperiment—”

  “Because it’s German!” said a student in the front row named Johnathan Phillips (the same student who thought he should be leading the lecture instead of “some twelve-year-old nerd with frizzy hair”).

  Max ignored Johnathan Phillips. She often had to.

  “In this thought experiment,” Max continued, “Dr. Einstein was exploring the relativity of simultaneity. Whether two events occur at exactly the same time is never one hundred percent definite. It all depends on how and where you look at those two events. What’s really cool about thought experiments is that you don’t need a lab or equipment or even a calculator. You just need your brain and your imagination.”

  “Like me imagining that a twelve-year-old girl can teach me anything,” Johnathan Phillips muttered snidely to the student sitting to his left.

  Max ignored him. Again.

  “Here’s one of Einstein’s most famous thought experiments.” Max went to the chalkboard and started drawing a train with several cars, two cartoon Einsteins—one on the train, one on a train platform—and two lightning bolts striking either end of the platform. “Okay. We have one observer standing here, in the middle of a railroad station platform. Another observer is on a train pulling into the station. The train’s traveling at nearly the speed of light. Guess it was an early bullet train.”

  The students in the lecture hall laughed.

  “Lightning strikes either side of the train platform at the exact same second. The observer on the platform is right in the middle—the same distance from each lightning bolt.”

  “What does the person on the platform see?” Max asked her audience.

  “Simultaneous lighting strikes,” said a student in the third row.

  “Okay. How about the passenger? The observer on the moving train?”

  No one answered, but everyone (except maybe Johnathan Phillips) was thinking about it.

  “Dr. Einstein tells us,” Max continued, “that, to the observer on the moving train, events that happen in the direction the train is traveling will appear to happen before events behind it. Therefore, for our passenger, the lightning will hit one end of the platform, the one the train is moving toward, before it hits the end of the platform behind the train—even though the observer on the platform will swear up and down that both lightning bolts struck at exactly the same time. The whole idea of something happening simultaneously is thrown out the window when we add movement.”

  “I say the lightning is there and not there!” said Phillips. “Because of quantum theory!”

  “Not if it has been observed, Mr. Phillips,” said Max. “Which, in this thought experiment, it has been. Twice.”

  Phillips stood up.

  “Oh, I see you’ve read a book or two about quantum physics,” he said, moving forward, as if to challenge Max. Jamal and Danny, her bodyguards, were, suddenly, paying very close attention to Max’s lecture.

  “Yes,” said Max. “I am familiar with the uncertainty principle. Is the moon out tonight? The answer is yes and no. It is both there and not there—until I look up and see it in the night sky.”

  “Then why couldn’t your hero, Dr. Einstein, accept that reality was this weird? Why didn’t he buy into the bizarreness of quantum physics?”

  “Because he was wrong. Something, I am assuming, Mr. Phillips, that you have never been.…”

  “Ooooh,” said the other 271 students. Some started pulling out their smartphones to record the confrontation gathering steam like the thunderheads creating those lightning bolts in the thought experiment.

  “However,” Max continued, “by trying to disprove the ‘uncertainty principle’ Einstein did discover ‘quantum entanglement.’”

  Phillips stepped forward. “Quantum entanglement? Is that what you call it when something gets stuck in your hair? And, by the way, who do I talk to about getting a refund? I’m not paying an Ivy League tuition to be lectured to by a twelve-year-old girl.”

  He took another step forward.

  It was one too many.

  Jamal and Danny were on him in a nanosecond.

  And every phone in the lecture hall captured the moment Johnathan Phillips was wrestled to the floor.

  8

  The next morning, Max’s confrontation with Johnathan Phillips was on the front page of the Columbia Daily Spectator, the university newspaper, with a screaming headline:

  “Who Is Adjunct Professor Paula Ehrenfest and Why Does the 12-Year-Old Physics Prodigy Need Professional Bodyguards?”

  Under it was a photograph of Johnathan Phillips being thrown to the lecture hall floor by Jamal and Danny.

  Phillips was clutching the rolled-up homework assignment Max had handed out when the class started. Phillips had earned an A. But since he was such a jerk, Max had spitefully switched it to an A–. But then, after speaking to Albert Einstein, she realized that was wrong.

  Max didn’t actually speak to the most famous physicist in history. After all, Dr. Einstein passed away in 1955. But she did have imaginary conversations with him in her head. His voice was gentle, the way a kindly grandfather might sound (not that Max had ever had one of those, either).

  “Treat Mr. Phillips the way you wish to be treated, Max,” her Einstein voice had told her.

  “But he never shows me any respect.”

  “And so you wish to sink to his level?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Good. Example isn’t just another way to teach. It is the only way to teach.”

  Phillips had done the work. He deserved the proper credit. So, Max had done the only thing she could do (especially after checking in with her internal mentor). With a vertical flick of her red pen, she’d turned the spiteful A−into a glowing A+.

  Ben must’ve seen the front-page article and picture. He sent Max an urgent text at 7:32 a.m.:

  No more classes this week.

  Lie low. Stay safe. I’ll be in touch.

  Great. She was already lying low! Now Ben wanted her to lie even lower?

  Max hurried downstairs to check in with her security detail. (Thanks to Nancy Hanker, they were camping out in an RV parked on the street outside her dormitory.)

  “This could blow your cover, Max,” said Jamal, tapping a copy of the student paper. “You should stay indoors today.”

  “We may need to initiate a rapid extraction,” added Danny.

  “If the Corp sees that newspaper article…” said Jamal, letting that thought hang in the air.
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br />   “Yeah,” said Max, understanding completely. “We may have to move again. Sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” said Danny. “That Phillips kid was out of line. And hey, if Albert Einstein can make a mistake or two, so can anyone.”

  Max went back to her room and reread some of the postcards and letters she’d received from the other members of the CMI team, all of whom were back home with their families.

  Home.

  Family.

  Max really didn’t really have either one of those. She’d only been at Columbia for two months and now, thanks to the photo in the school newspaper, she might need to move again.

  She looked at the postcard Klaus had sent her from Poland. It had been mailed to her old address, the apartment over the horse stables. Klaus was a bit of a blowhard and extremely self-centered. But he was wicked smart. Especially when it came to robotics and AI—artificial intelligence.

  He also thought he should be the CMI team leader instead of Max.

  “Should the pressure of being the ‘Chosen One’ prove too much for you,” Klaus had written, “please know that I am ready, willing, and able to assume that heavy burden and all its responsibilities at your earliest convenience.”

  Did Max think Klaus was a pompous buffoon who ate way too much sausage? Or was he just a smart kid who had such an inferiority complex that he had to constantly boast to inflate his ego? That, too, was relative. It all depended on what day you asked and what Klaus had just done—something brilliant or something bizarre.

  Since Max had more or less been confined to her quarters for the rest of the day, she did what she often did when she was restless or confused or couldn’t sleep: She struck up another conversation with Albert Einstein.

  9

  The Einstein conversation was, once again, all in Max’s head.

  She didn’t actually see Albert Einstein sitting on a beanbag chair in her dorm room, puffing on his pipe (one of the not-so-brilliant things the great genius did during his lifetime) or scribbling physics formulae on the walls. It was, basically, an internal dialogue with herself.