The Genius Experiment Read online

  “I just always have,” Max answered, meekly.

  “Or maybe you just made it up,” said Murphy.

  The two large men were making Max very nervous, which was something that didn’t happen very often. In fact, Max considered Fear and Worry to be wasted emotions. Max agreed with Dr. Einstein who once said, “I never worry about the future, it comes soon enough.”

  But these two NYC Children’s Services officers were pushing Max’s internal panic buttons.

  If they really were officers.

  Why wouldn’t they show her their badges?

  As they walked up the sidewalk toward an institutional white van (without any kind of official NYC government license plates), Max did some quick mental calculations. Employing the element of surprise while simultaneously factoring in the weight of her two captors, she figured she could definitely make a run for it. Because Newton’s second law of motion said the rate of acceleration would depend on the mass of the objects attempting to move. Heavier objects (such as the two massive thugs gripping her arms) would speed up slower than lighter objects (such as Max).

  Max blasted off, generating enough force to break free from her captors’ grip.

  “Hey, come back here!” shouted Jimenez.

  Max ignored him and accelerated as rapidly as she could.

  Across the street, she could see Washington Square Park. Maybe if she made it back to the chess tables and Mr. Weinstock, an adult, he could ask the questions the two goons clearly didn’t want to hear from a twelve-year-old girl.

  Max was about to bolt across the street.

  When a bicycle going the wrong way cut her off.

  The cyclist was texting while biking. He didn’t swerve, didn’t even see Max trying to dash across the street.

  So she had to slam on her brakes and skid to a stop.

  Which, of course, allowed the two extremely large gentlemen to gain momentum, catch up, and grab her.

  This time, they lifted her feet off the street.

  “That wasn’t very smart, kid,” said Murphy. “And you’re supposed to be an Einstein?”

  They hauled her back to the van.

  “Where are you taking me?” she demanded.

  “Little Angels,” said Officer Jimenez. “It’s a foster care facility in Brooklyn. A safe place where we can keep an eye on you.”

  They loaded her into the back of the vehicle and locked the door.

  “Mr. Kennedy will be worried,” she said when the two men climbed into the van’s front seats.

  “Who’s this Mr. Kennedy?” asked Murphy.

  “A friend of mine. Can someone please tell him I’m okay?”

  Officer Murphy stared at her for a beat in the rearview mirror.

  Then he turned around and cranked the van’s ignition.

  “Nah, kid. We’re not gonna do that. We’re just gonna haul your butt to Brooklyn.”

  10

  Max had been in foster care facilities like Brooklyn’s Little Angels before.

  She knew she could fit in if she had to.

  She also knew that many foster care facilities were notoriously easy to escape from—once you worked out a foolproof plan. You just needed to prop a few pillows under the covers to make your cot look like somebody was sleeping in it when the staff shuffled around after midnight for bed check. It might take Max a few days to figure out the guards’ routine but once she had it, she’d be heading back to Manhattan.

  But not to the stables. She wouldn’t want to get Mr. Kennedy and the others in trouble. No, she had to find someplace new and, somehow, make arrangements to retrieve her suitcase.

  She couldn’t lose it. The suitcase was the only thing in her whole mysterious life that tied her to some sort of history. The men in the suits were correct. She had no family. No birth certificate. The battered piece of luggage was her only link to her past.

  Max and a nervous, blond boy named Quincy (who seemed terrified of everyone and everything) were sent to the Little Angels kitchen for “dinner prep.”

  The facility prided itself on “empowering children” by teaching them “practical kitchen skills and techniques.”

  That meant Max and Quincy had to put on aprons and peel potatoes if they wanted to eat potatoes for dinner. Max grabbed a potato peeler and went to work on the mountain of spuds sitting in the industrial sized sink.

  Max glanced at Quincy. She really didn’t know how to talk to kids. She’d never spent much time being one.

  “I’ve never peeled potatoes before,” said Quincy, who was very fidgety and twitchy. “Have you ever peeled potatoes?”

  Max nodded. “Couple times.”

  A lot of foster care facilities taught “practical kitchen skills and techniques.” It also meant they had to hire fewer cafeteria workers.

  “Is there like a tab you peel back?” asked Quincy, fussing with a potato. “Like on a banana? I can peel a banana. I had a banana for breakfast. I can peel an orange, too…”

  Quincy was a mess. Max wanted to help him. So she summoned up all her courage and said, “Watch me.”

  She showed Quincy how to slide the peeler around the potato and make the curled skins drop into the waste barrel.

  “You want to give it a go?” She held out the potato peeler.

  Quincy eyed the thing as if it were a snake.

  “I guess,” he said. “I’m a little nervous around knives and blades and sharp things, you know? I cut myself once. I was slicing into a chocolate Easter bunny. The knife slipped. I nicked my knuckle. Needed six stitches. My foster family wasn’t too happy. That’s how I ended up here.”

  Max nodded. “I have a better idea. How about I peel the potatoes and you play with slime?”

  “Slime?”

  “Actually, it’s a polymer. Not quite a solid, not quite a liquid, but very fun to play with.”

  “Cool.”

  Max scanned the kitchen cabinets and found a bottle of white glue, a box of borax laundry detergent, and some green food coloring. She mixed about a half of the glue bottle in a bowl with water and squirted in a few drops of green food coloring.

  “That’s just green glue,” said Quincy.

  “Hang on. Time for science.”

  She carefully added a tablespoon of the borax laundry detergent into the bowl and stirred slowly.

  “Whoa!” said Quincy as Max pulled up a string of goopy sludge with her wooden spoon. “That’s awesome.”

  “Knead it until it gets less sticky,” said Max, passing the bowl over to Quincy. “Really work it around with your hands. We want the two compounds to bond.”

  Quincy happily squished the bowl of green slime.

  Max peeled the potatoes and told Quincy stories about her time in the stables and all her friends there, including the horses.

  The act of squeezing and massaging the slime while listening to Max’s stories seemed to soothe Quincy. He stopped fidgeting and concentrated on the gooey task at hand.

  Max finished prepping the pile of potatoes.

  “Quincy? Two more things. Number one: be sure to wash your hands before dinner.”

  “No problem. What’s number two?”

  “Don’t put that bowl of slime anywhere near the dinner table. People might think it’s some kind of mystery vegetable.”

  “Yeah,” said Quincy. “It kind of looks like the spinach they served last night. It was super slimy, too!”

  11

  Max huddled down on a cot in the room she shared with five other girls whose names she didn’t know. There wasn’t much point in making friends. Max didn’t plan on staying at Little Angels for more than a day or so.

  Two of her roommates were snoring like motorcycles with clogged carburetors. Max, on the other hand, couldn’t fall asleep. She missed her books. Her computer. Her Einstein memorabilia.

  She missed her friends at the stable and hoped they weren’t worrying about her too much.

  She was so alone.

  All she had were the thoughts flickering through her mind. And, as always, she had about a billion of those.

  So, she did what she typically did on nights when sleep wouldn’t come: she struck up a conversation with Albert Einstein. It was all in her head, of course. Nothing too kooky. Max didn’t actually see Albert Einstein sitting in a chair in the corner or floating above her bed, puffing on his pipe.

  With Max, it was more or less an old-school Socratic debate with herself. That meant she taught herself the way the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates taught his pupils: by asking and answering questions.

  “So, I have a question about the theory of relativity,” she thought to herself.

  “Excellent,” replied the gentle voice of Albert Einstein in her head. “One of my favorite subjects.”

  “It explains so much.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But if everything is relative, how can you know what’s actually true?”

  “Ah! Easy. It’s all true. It’s just relative to your perspective.”

  “What about this whole ‘time dilation’ thing? How can time expand?”

  “Also easy. Time is simply another form of measurement. If you’re on a rocket ship zooming through space, time won’t feel any different to you inside your space capsule. But the measurement of time would be different if taken on earth, which isn’t moving nearly as rapidly as you and your spaceship. If you traveled at near light speed to a distant planet, by the time you returned to earth, thousands of years might have passed here. Yet only a few years will have ticked away inside your space vessel.”

  “That’s wild.”

  “That’s the universe.”

  The mental discussion was having the desired effect. Max was starting to feel drowsy. She stifled a yawn and asked her inner Einstein one last questi
on.

  “Okay, your most famous equation, E=mc2, means that the energy of something is equal to its mass—the amount of matter it has—times the speed of light squared.”

  “Correct.”

  “But when you square the speed of light—when you multiply one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second times one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second—you end up with a huge number!”

  “Indeed, you do. Approximately thirty-four billion, five-hundred-and-ninety-six million.”

  “So that means that even the tiniest object contains an enormous amount of energy, right?”

  “Bingo. Even the smallest among us have the potential to add a gigantic amount of energy to this world. And if you don’t believe that, first thing tomorrow morning, just look in the mirror.”

  And, with a smile on her face, Max finally fell asleep.

  12

  Early the next morning, after rising at six to cook a huge vat of oatmeal and learn some more valuable kitchen skills (like how to stir twenty pounds of mush with a wooden spoon the size of a boat oar), Max was informed that she would be going to school.

  “NYU?” she asked eagerly.

  “No,” the stern matron replied. “You’re twelve years old, correct?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then you belong in middle school. With all the other twelve-year-old boys and girls.”

  “B-b-but…”

  The matron gave her an icy look. Max took the hint. She quit protesting.

  Of course, it was totally ridiculous for the powers that be at the Little Angels foster care facility to insist that she go to a “regular” school. Max may have been young and somewhat small, but she had all that unlimited potential and mental energy bottled up inside her. (Just ask Dr. Einstein!)

  Besides, she had finished everything the seventh grade had to teach her about math and science when she was seven years old. She had found an old textbook in a thrift shop when she was young. There was a big “7” on the cover. Max had thought it meant you were supposed to learn the material between the covers when you were seven years old.

  So, she did.

  “Shake a leg,” said the driver as Max and all the other foster kids between the ages of eleven and fourteen piled into the van heading for the nearest Brooklyn middle school.

  Max went to the classes she was supposed to go to.

  She didn’t say a word during English, or math, or social studies.

  In science, she focused on a dusty shaft of sunlight that streamed through a window and illuminated her desk like a heavenly spotlight.

  What would it be like, she thought, to ride that beam of light?

  Legend had it that this was how Albert Einstein first started contemplating his theory of relativity. He was riding a bicycle, saw a sunbeam, and let his mind wander. What would it be like to ride beside a sunbeam to the edge of the universe?

  Max knew that daydreams (the kind that Mr. Kennedy teased her about) often led to the most important scientific discoveries. So she drifted off. She chased that dusty sunbeam out the window. She followed it through space and time. This was what Dr. Einstein used to call a thought experiment—ideas that he played with in his mind instead of a laboratory.

  Maybe it was the trancelike nature of the thought experiment.

  Or the fact that Max had had so much difficulty drifting off to sleep the night before.

  Or the warmth of the sunshine on her face.

  But as she chased that beam in her brain, her eyes grew heavy. The shaft of quivering light felt warm and cozy beside her. The universe was lulling her to sleep.

  Suddenly, far off, somewhere in the dark distance, near the edge of the universe, Max heard someone calling her name.

  “Miss Einstein? Miss Einstein?”

  This was followed by the bang of a wooden ruler against a desk.

  The teacher.

  Max had fallen asleep in class.

  A bell rang. It was definitely time for Max to wake up. It was also time for her to move on to her next class.

  But first she apologized to the teacher.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she told him. “I didn’t mean any disrespect. Sometimes my mind wanders off and I need to chase after it.”

  “Not in my classroom you don’t,” said the teacher. “Here we stay focused and memorize the answers to the questions we know will be on the state science test. Do I make myself clear, Miss Einstein?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The teacher looked at her suspiciously. “Einstein. Is that really your name?”

  “Yes,” said Max because, as far as she knew, she was telling the truth.

  “Any relation?”

  “To Dr. Albert Einstein?”

  “No,” said the teacher sarcastically. “The brothers who bake the bagels.”

  “Not to my knowledge, sir.”

  The teacher waved her off. “Memorize the formulae in chapter three by tomorrow. And don’t you dare fall asleep in my classroom again, young lady!”

  “Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir.”

  Max stuck to herself and muddled through the rest of her school day. At dismissal time, the beat-up van from Little Angels was waiting out front to pick up Max and the other middle schoolers.

  Once again, she thought about making a run for it.

  There had to be a subway station close by. Max could race back to the stables, grab her suitcase, and search out a new place to sleep. She could find a new college to attend, too. Columbia University, way uptown, had some excellent courses for her to choose from. She couldn’t stand the idea of being stuck in a seventh-grade classroom, memorizing facts and figures by rote.

  She couldn’t just go along to get along.

  Max took in a deep breath. She was ready to bolt.

  But if the men in the suits ever found out about the stables, they could make life difficult for Mr. Kennedy and Mrs. Rabinowitz.

  She realized she would be better off going with her original plan. Sneaking out after dark. She just needed to observe and chart the late-night routines of the security staff for a few more days. She could handle a few more days. Time was on her side.

  She climbed into the van with the rest of the crowd. Max sat in the back, so she wouldn’t have to chit-chat with any of the kids. Max didn’t chit or chat very well.

  When they arrived back at the foster care facility, Max received some very unexpected news.

  She had visitors.

  13

  “Your visitors are in my office,” said Mrs. Groober, the woman in charge of the Little Angels foster care facility. “Please make this visit brief. I would like my office back.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Max stepped into the room.

  And her jaw dropped.

  “Mr. Weinstock?”

  It was her chess buddy from Washington Square Park.

  “Yes, indeed,” he replied in his plummy English accent.

  Max was confused. What was Mr. Weinstock doing at her foster care facility? And who were the young man and woman waiting with him? They both had dark hair, interesting eyes, and olive complexions. They were also extremely good looking and athletic. They could’ve been fashion models, for sure.

  “Ah, where are my manners?” said Mr. Weinstock. “Allow me to introduce Charl and Isabl.”

  When he said the names, they sounded like “Sharl” and “Is-bull.”

  “Charl and Isabl, this is Max Einstein.”

  The young man and woman stood up to shake Max’s hand.

  Max took a step back. Charl and Isabl weren’t wearing black suits or skinny black ties but, after her run-in with the officers who yanked her out of NYU, she was a little leery around strange characters she’d never met before.

  “We’re the good guys, Miss Einstein,” said the man named Charl, with an accent that Max couldn’t quite place.

  “They are, Max,” said Mr. Weinstock. “In fact, they are the very good guys. The best. Unfortunately, there are others who… well, we don’t have time for all that, now. But, believe me, dear, Charl and Isabl are here to help.”

  Max took the young man’s outstretched hand. “Thank you, Mister…”

  Charl smiled. “No last name. Just Charl.”

  “And I’m just Isabl,” said the lady, who also had an accent. “We find it easier to do our work if we stay on a first-name-only basis. It helps us stay one step ahead of the Corp.”