Max Einstein Saves the Future Read online

  Provided, of course, that Klaus would let her have a few hours alone with his prized robot.

  16

  “You had her in London and you let her slip away?” demanded the chairwoman.

  She pounded her fists on the table, rattling all the crystal water goblets lined up in front of the scowling billionaires.

  Professor Von Hinkle smirked. This was his first “dressing down” at the hands of the Corp’s board of directors. He was enjoying it. The so-called power brokers ringing the enormous table were imbeciles. They didn’t appreciate his genius.

  Not yet anyway.

  “Dadgumit, son,” snarled the Texan, “you’re worse than that Dr. Zimm feller. That pair of British assassins you hired fell for that old ‘I’m goin’ out to the airport to catch a plane to Rome’ bit? Shoot, son—that one’s as old as Moses. Why didn’t your boys in London use some kind of tracking device or tap into all them security cameras they got over there?”

  Professor Von Hinkle waited patiently as the angry Texan’s ear tips went from red to pink and finally to a fleshy white. “Are you quite finished?” he asked, nonchalantly.

  “I reckon,” said the Texan.

  “Good. Then allow me to bring you ladies and gentlemen up to speed. We didn’t ‘lose’ Max in London. We merely flushed her out of her hiding place. Much as one flushes birds out of the bushes before pelting them with a shotgun blast. Movement puts your target in play. We now know with one hundred percent certainty that Max Einstein and the majority of her CMI compatriots have gathered at Oxford.”

  “That the fancy school in England?” asked the Texan.

  “Yes,” replied Von Hinkle.

  “How did you come across this information?” asked the board chairwoman.

  “The old-fashioned way. No surveillance cameras. No satellite imagery. No tracking devices. Just reliable human intelligence.”

  “You have an asset on the ground?”

  Von Hinkle nodded. “Indeed I do.”

  “Who is it?” demanded the chairwoman.

  Another smirk from Von Hinkle. “Sorry, ma’am. That information is confidential.”

  “What’s the little girl’s security situation?” asked the Texan. “She got much protection?”

  “Hardly,” scoffed Von Hinkle. “There are two commando types guarding Max and the other children. Their names are Charl and Isabl.”

  “Last names?” asked another board member.

  Von Hinkle shook his head. “They prefer not to use those. I suspect Charl and Isabl are pseudonyms.”

  “Huh?” grunted the Texan.

  “They’re fake names. There is another adult with the young do-gooders. A foul-tempered instructor from the Change Makers Institute in Jerusalem, a middle-aged woman named Tari Kaplan. But, she is in no way a threat. She is merely a teacher.”

  “What about our dadgurn robot? Is he over there in Oxford, too?”

  Von Hinkle nodded.

  “Then what are you waiting for? Haul your butt on over to England! Go grab Max Einstein and Lenard.”

  “You may borrow the SST,” said the chairwoman.

  Von Hinkle smirked again. He knew they’d give him the SST.

  SST was short for Supersonic Transport. Jets that could fly faster than the speed of sound. Even though the Concorde (the only commercial SST) was banned from the skies years ago because of its ozone-searing exhaust fumes as well as its window-rattling sonic booms, the Corp still maintained its own secret SST. It flew at 2.2 times the speed of sound and could make the trip from West Virginia to London in a little over three hours.

  “Thank you for the use of your jet,” said Von Hinkle, bowing slightly at the waist. “It will surely speed up my delivery time.”

  “But don’t y’all dare come back without Max Einstein!” screamed the Texan. “Or our dadgum robot.”

  “Rest assured we won’t.”

  The Corp’s supersonic private jet could seat eight. That’s all the professor needed. There would be plenty of room for him and the seven heavily armed mercenaries on his snatch-and-grab team. The ones who were willing to complete missions at any cost.

  Max and Lenard wouldn’t know what hit them.

  17

  Before Max could check into her dorm room and find out what Leo knew, she and the others—along with Charl and Isabl—were escorted into a dining hall for what Ms. Kaplan called a “world hunger banquet.”

  There were three tables set up inside the dining hall. One had very nice plates, crystal stemware, and a fine linen tablecloth with a pretty centerpiece of purple roses. The second table was set for two people with disposable plastic cups, plastic spoons, and paper plates. The third table had no chairs and no actual place settings—just a stack of plastic cups and a pile of paper plates piled up in the middle. There was garbage, flattened cardboard boxes, and empty cans scattered around on the floor near the third table.

  “Looks like a bloomin’ trash heap,” Siobhan whispered to Max.

  “Welcome to the hunger banquet,” said Ms. Kaplan. “Before we eat, let’s take a quick quiz.”

  Max glanced at Tisa. Both of them rolled their eyes. Ms. Kaplan definitely loved giving quizzes and exams.

  “True or false,” Ms. Kaplan continued. “Overpopulation is the main cause of hunger.”

  “True!” blurted Klaus, who always wanted to be the smartest boy in any class.

  “False. The world produces enough grain to feed every single human being on the planet thirty-five hundred calories a day. That’s enough excess calories to make most of us fat.”

  Klaus, who was slightly pudgy, looked down at his shoes.

  “True or false,” said Ms. Kaplan. “Hunger affects the young and old, men and women, boys and girls equally.”

  “False!” said Keeto.

  “Correct,” said Ms. Kaplan. “The vast majority of the people who die because of hunger are boys and girls under the age of five, the elderly, and women.”

  As Ms. Kaplan ran through a few more true/false questions, Max realized what an enormous task this new project would be. Solving world hunger was going to be way more difficult than finding a solution for clean water in India or cheap electricity in a remote African village.

  “Now, then,” said Ms. Kaplan, “let us pretend that the ten of us represent the world’s population. Ten percent of us would live in a rich country.”

  “That means just one of us,” said Annika.

  “Exactly. Annika, please take your seat at the rich table.” Ms. Kaplan gestured to the fancy table with the flowers and fine china. “You will be enjoying a full meal with meat, fresh vegetables, some lovely roasted potatoes, a glass of milk, and cake for dessert.”

  Annika sat down, alone. A waiter came into the dining hall with a domed plate. Whatever was underneath the silver lid smelled delicious.

  “Would you like your milk now,” the waiter asked, “or with dessert?”

  “With the cake,” said Annika, sounding excited.

  “But of course.” The waiter bowed and departed.

  Ms. Kaplan addressed the rest of the group: “Twenty percent of you live in middle-class countries.”

  “That’s just two of us,” said Toma.

  “Correct. Charl and Isabl? Congratulations. You have worked hard and have enough food to meet your needs. Tonight, you will be dining on rice and beans. You will also be drinking clean water.”

  “That’s okay,” said Charl. “We don’t need rice and beans.”

  “Two of the kids should sit at the middle-class table,” added Isabl.

  Ms. Kaplan shook her head. “No. I insist.”

  Charl and Isabl sat down. The waiter came back with a pot of rice, a steaming bowl of cooked black beans, and a pitcher of clear water.

  “That leaves the rest of us.” Ms. Kaplan pointed to the table with the stack of disposable cups and plates for a centerpiece. “We will represent the seventy percent of the world’s population that is poor. We do not have enough food. We do not
have access to clean water. Every day, we must make hard choices about who will eat and how much. Tonight, the seven of us will share a small pot of rice and some water from a well in our village.”

  “Where are our chairs?” asked Keeto.

  “And utensils,” Klaus whined.

  “We cannot afford luxuries such as chairs,” said Ms. Kaplan. “We will sit on the floor and eat with our hands.”

  “Um, there’s garbage all over the floor,” said Tisa.

  “Yes,” said Ms. Kaplan. “There is.”

  Now the waiter walked in with a small pot of rice and a jug of murky brown liquid that looked disgusting. Like the water in Vihaan’s grandfather’s village before we came up with a solution, thought Max.

  “Ah, here comes our rice and water. Unfortunately, it is dirty water.”

  Klaus raised his hand.

  “Yes?”

  “Was the rice cooked in the dirty water?”

  Ms. Kaplan nodded.

  “Great…”

  “Please, poor people,” said Ms. Kaplan. “Join me. Find a seat on the floor. We will divide up the rice. Decide who gets more, who gets less. And remember—seventy percent of the earth’s population must make this same choice every single day of their lives.”

  Max and Siobhan squatted on the floor with the others. Ms. Kaplan served up meager portions of the rice in paper bowls. Nobody was thirsty for the water. Nobody was hungry for the rice, either.

  “Tomorrow,” Siobhan whispered to Max, “you and I are splitting a whole supreme pizza. For breakfast!”

  18

  When the world hunger banquet was over, Ms. Kaplan made a small speech hoping everyone learned something from their dining (or lack of dining) experience.

  “Yeah,” said Keeto. “I learned my stomach really grumbles and gurgles when it’s empty.”

  Everybody laughed. Except Annika. She was busy licking the last bit of frosting off her cake fork. (She’d had different forks for all the different courses of her rich country meal.)

  “You guys are dismissed until tomorrow morning’s lecture,” said Charl.

  When he said that, Klaus bolted out of the room.

  “Crikey,” said Siobhan. “Where’s he going in such a hurry?”

  “I suspect he’s calling in an urgent pizza order,” muttered Keeto.

  “Come on,” Max said to Siobhan. “He needs to let us borrow Leo.”

  The two friends took off running.

  “Max!” shouted Isabl. “Go to your room. No late-night strolls while we’re here in Oxford. Siobhan, take Max to your room immediately.”

  “I will,” said Siobhan. “Just as soon as we have Leo!”

  Siobhan and Max followed Klaus down a corridor. He ducked right and headed down some steps. So Siobhan and Max took a right and headed down the steps, too.

  “Klaus?” they shouted. “Klaus!”

  “What?”

  At the foot of the steps, Klaus was standing in a pool of bright, fluorescent light, digging in his pockets for something. He looked surprised to see them.

  Max slowed down, suddenly cautious.

  What was Klaus up to? Could he be doing something nefarious? Something that involved the Corp?

  Siobhan and Max made it to the bottom and saw the source of the strange light. Max giggled at her own suspicions. The light was beaming out of a vending machine loaded with candy bars and bags of what the English called crisps and Americans called potato chips.

  “Do either of you have fifty pence?” Klaus asked, his hands jammed deep inside his pants pockets.

  “Depends,” said Siobhan. “Are you going to let Max borrow Leo tonight?”

  “Yes. If she has 50p.”

  Max dug into her pocket and found a fifty pence coin.

  Klaus got his Aero candy bar.

  Max got Leo.

  “Good to see you again, Max,” said Leo after he was powered up inside Siobhan and Max’s dorm room.

  “Good to see you, too, Leo,” said Max.

  Suddenly, the glass in the windows rattled.

  “Crikey,” said Siobhan. “What the heck was that?”

  “Sounded and felt like a sonic boom,” said Max.

  “Agreed,” said Leo.

  “There must be a military airbase close by.”

  “I can check that for you,” offered Leo.

  “Not right now,” said Max. “We have more important matters to discuss.”

  “Reckon I’ll give you two some privacy,” said Siobhan, pouring a fistful of coins out of a small change purse. “All of a sudden, I fancy some Tayto cheese-and-onion crisps. Maybe a Kit Kat bar. Saw both in that vending machine downstairs. Ta!”

  She left the room. Leo and Max were alone.

  Max got right to the point. No use beating around the bush with a machine. “So how come you never mentioned what Dr. Zimm told you about me?”

  “I don’t recall you ever requesting that specific information, Maxine.” Leo closed his eyes. Max could hear his hard drive whirring. “Checking. Checking. Confirmed. I have scrolled through the complete catalogue of our mutual dialogues. That question was never posed.”

  Max let out an exasperated breath. Robots. “Okay. I’m asking now. What do you know about who I am or where I came from?”

  “Only what Dr. Zimm downloaded into my memory chips.”

  “Which is?”

  “You were, twelve years ago, a baby.”

  Max rolled her eyes. Sometimes, conversing with the automaton could be extremely frustrating.

  “Of course I was a baby twelve years ago,” she snapped. “That’s when I was born.”

  “We can assume that is correct.”

  “Huh?”

  “Dr. Zimm discovered you when you were not yet speaking. You were, however, crawling across the floor of his basement laboratory. Therefore, he postulates that you were between seven and ten months old.”

  “Wait a second. I was crawling around on the floor of Dr. Zimm’s lab?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Where was this lab?”

  “In a basement.”

  “Where was the basement? And, I promise you, Leo, if you say, ‘underneath a house,’ I’m going to scream.”

  “The basement was situated in a place called Princeton, New Jersey. Not far from the university where Dr. Zimm was doing intellectual espionage work for the Corp.”

  “I’m from New Jersey?” said Max.

  “So it would seem.”

  “Who were my parents?”

  “Unknown.”

  “What did Dr. Zimm tell you about them?”

  “That he never located your birth parents. He did, however, find your suitcase.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Leo gestured toward Max’s propped-open Einstein shrine.

  “Your suitcase. When Dr. Zimm first saw it, twelve years ago, it was not as cluttered as it is currently. Twelve years ago, there was only one photograph of Dr. Einstein taped inside. It was accompanied by the cover sheet to a scholarly paper titled ‘The Maximum Application of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.’”

  “Who wrote the paper?”

  “I’m sorry, I do not have that information.”

  “Were my parents’ names anywhere on the suitcase?”

  “No. But yours was.”

  “There was a name tag?”

  “No. Dr. Zimm gave you your name. He derived it from the title of the scientific paper. Dr. Zimm was the first to call you Max Einstein.”

  Leo went silent.

  “Is that it? Is that everything Dr. Zimm knew?”

  “Yes, Max. It is.”

  It’s not much, Max thought.

  Ah, but it’s a start, said the kindly Einstein in her head. Don’t forget, I spent a good deal of time in Princeton, New Jersey, too!

  Could there be more clues to her past waiting to be discovered there?

  19

  The next morning, still frustrated that Leo didn’t really know that much abou
t her past (and realizing that Dr. Zimm had been lying to her all along when he promised to tell her “everything you ever wanted to know”), Max and the other seven members of the CMI team made their way to Rhodes House to hear Sir Gordon Richards speak about world hunger.

  That’s why Max had only a banana for breakfast.

  After last night’s world hunger banquet—and still thinking about that 70 percent of the world who have to get by every day on a single bowl of rice—she wasn’t all that hungry. She even turned down the extra Kit Kat bar Siobhan had snagged out of the basement vending machine.

  Charl and Isabl went with the CMI team to the lecture hall. They had their sunglasses on and their pigtail earpieces in. They were running security. Ms. Kaplan stayed behind at the dorm to, as she put it, “refine our upcoming leadership exams.” Yep. As long as Ms. Kaplan was around, there were going to be tests. Lots and lots of tests.

  Max didn’t think Professor Einstein would agree with Ms. Kaplan’s techniques. “Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift,” he once said, “and not as hard duty.”

  Ms. Kaplan was all about the hard duty.

  Max thought Sir Gordon Richards’s talk on the same stage where Albert Einstein spoke way back in 1931 was fascinating. She could understand why Ben wanted the Change Makers to hear what he had to say.

  “Last night,” said Sir Richards, “seven hundred and ninety-five million people went to sleep hungry.”

  “Yeah,” muttered Keeto. “I was one of them.”

  “That’s more people than the population of the United States and Europe combined. Not having enough food makes hunger, and, of course, malnutrition, the number one public health risk worldwide—far greater than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.”

  “Ben certainly didn’t choose an easy assignment for us this time,” whispered Annika.

  After painting a grim picture about the problem, Sir Richards went on to outline a few possible solutions. Max took notes.

  “We should produce less biofuel for our internal combustion engines and use food for, well, food. Here’s a hard one for me: we need to stop our first-world meat feast. Forty percent of grain crops are currently going to feed cows, pigs, and fish instead of people. We must endeavor to support small farmers. Particularly, small farms owned and operated by women. And, finally, we must encourage economic growth. More trade and open markets will help the flow of food.”