Max Einstein Saves the Future Read online

  “We told you not to leave the dorm,” said Isabl, who’d made the trip with her partner.

  So had about half a dozen campus security officers and a pair of officers from the Princeton Police Department.

  “Darryl McMasters,” said one of the police officers, shaking his head. “I thought we told you to leave this house alone.”

  “I was just walking down the street, man,” Darryl lied. “There’s no law against that, is there?”

  The police officer’s partner rolled her eyes. “I will be so glad when they tear this place down next week.”

  “What?” said Darryl. “They’re tearing it down? The Tardis House?”

  “Who are the Tardises?” asked the cop.

  “Never mind,” said Darryl. “But you can’t tear the house down. Albert Einstein visited here once.”

  “You want us to arrest you so you can tell it to the judge?”

  “No,” said Darryl. “Hey, Toma.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Lose my number.” Darryl stuffed his hands into his pockets and shuffled up the sidewalk.

  “Thank you for your assistance, officers,” Charl said to the campus and Princeton police. “We’ll take it from here.”

  “These two,” asked one of the campus police, “are they part of the genius squad? The kids who are supposed to save the world?”

  “That’s right,” said Isabl.

  The officer shook her head. “Poor world. We don’t stand a chance.”

  Max and Toma climbed into the CMI van.

  “I’m sorry,” Max said.

  “Me, too,” added Toma. “But the house really is historically significant.”

  Especially to me, thought Max. Maybe.

  “Why’s it so special?” asked Charl as Isabl piloted the van back toward the Princeton campus.

  “Back in 1921, they did Einsteinian time-travel experiments there,” said Toma, excitedly. “They took the theory of general relativity and pushed it to the max.”

  “It’s dangerous for you two to be roaming the streets by yourselves,” said Isabl, looking at them through the rearview mirror. “You know that.”

  “We had Darryl,” said Toma. “And he’s a grad student.”

  Max stared out the window and watched the campus buildings roll by. Most looked like they’d been there since forever. She was seeing the same Princeton that Albert Einstein probably saw all those years ago.

  What she couldn’t see, however, was the miniature drone following the van.

  29

  Almost.

  Professor Von Hinkle sat in his cozy room at Princeton’s Peacock Inn, monitoring the drone video feed on his laptop computer.

  He’d almost had her.

  His advanced facial recognition software had picked up Max Einstein’s image on the streetlamp surveillance camera. She was far enough away from her security detail for an efficient strike. Three drones from his squadron of twelve was all it would’ve taken. Two to lethally inject the Chinese boy Toma and the bumbling grad student Darryl. One to administer a sedative to Max.

  But the CMI security team had swooped in before the remotely controlled drones could attack. And, to make matters worse, they were accompanied by campus and township police. Apparently, they had facial recognition software, too.

  If Professor Von Hinkle had gone ahead with the hit, it would have been a wasted shot.

  No, Von Hinkle would wait for his next opportunity, which hopefully would come at a location without so many antagonistic law enforcement agencies close at hand.

  His undercover asset would make certain of it.

  If they didn’t (and soon), Von Hinkle might send a lethal injection drone after them, too.

  After all, he had a dozen of them.

  30

  The next morning, Max joined the rest of the CMI team for breakfast.

  “Where’d you sneak off to last night?” Siobhan asked.

  “Just another stop on my tour of old Einstein haunts,” said Max. “A place where they did some interesting work related to his theory of general relativity.”

  That was all Siobhan got. No honest confession that Max might’ve visited the house where she used to live, way back in 1921, until, in a freak accident, she time-traveled forward into the future, which turned out to be everybody else’s present.

  It sounded so ridiculous, Max didn’t even believe it herself.

  Yes, it probably would’ve been good to talk about her thoughts and feelings with a friend like Siobhan. But Max Einstein still didn’t know how to confide her deepest feelings with anybody, even her best friends, without making herself vulnerable. She’d lived by herself for too long, she figured. She was too street smart and cautious from her years as a homeless orphan. The first twelve years of her life had taught Max that she really couldn’t trust anyone—except, maybe, the imaginary Einstein in her head.

  After breakfast, the team members were told to report to a study room in Mathey College.

  The desks had been outfitted with cardboard privacy screens.

  “What are those for?” asked Klaus.

  “So you won’t be tempted to copy answers from your neighbor’s answer sheet,” replied Ms. Kaplan. “Kindly find your seats. The initial examination will commence in three minutes.”

  “What?” said Keeto. “Is a doctor coming to check us out? Make sure we’re up to date on our shots?”

  The kids laughed. Ms. Kaplan did not.

  “This will be a test of your knowledge about world hunger. Its root causes and current statistics. It will cover all the material I asked you to familiarize yourself with.”

  Max looked to Tisa.

  Neither one of them loved taking tests.

  Neither one of them had studied for this one.

  Max took her place behind one of the cardboard privacy screens. She stared at the exam booklet and the answer sheet filled with rows and columns of circles for her to fill in with a number-two soft lead pencil.

  “You may now break the seal on your exam booklet,” Ms. Kaplan announced.

  Max used the sharply pointed pencil tip to slice open the circular sticker keeping it shut.

  The booklet was filled with questions about world hunger facts with multiple-choice answers.

  Max glanced at the first one.

  1. What percentage of food is wasted and never consumed after being grown, processed, and transported in the United States?

  ○ 10%

  ○ 20%

  ○ 30%

  ○ 40%

  Max assumed the answer was 40 percent. She’d seen how wasteful Americans could be with their food during her years as something of a dumpster diver. There were always big bags of doughnuts or bagels being tossed out behind New York City’s bakeries every night. She used to gather up the bags and take them back to the stables where she lived to give her other homeless friends a feast.

  But, instead of answering the question (or any of the ninety-nine others), she started looking for patterns in the answer sheet filled with circles. She ended up connecting the dots to draw the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and several other constellations.

  Her mind was floating through space, visualizing one of the basic concepts of general relativity: that stars and planets warp the fabric of space-time, making time travel possible. Making her journey forward from 1921 possible?

  An hour later, when Ms. Kaplan called time, Max turned in her decorated answer sheet and received another circle.

  A big, round zero.

  She’d flunked the exam.

  Her days as the CMI’s “Chosen One” might be dwindling down to a big round “zero,” too.

  31

  After the exam, each member of the team was expected to present their best idea for eliminating world hunger.

  Ms. Kaplan and a panel of judges from Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where Albert Einstein had been one of the first professors, would listen to the ideas and help determine the best of the best.

&nbs
p; Max knew that the founding director of Princeton’s IAS had believed that if it steered clear of “the chase for the useful,” then “the minds of its scholars will be liberated.” In other words, the Institute wanted to set thinkers free and not focus on results. They let scholars take advantage of surprises, hoping that “someday an unexpected discovery” might open up new worlds and new solutions.

  The IAS was big on blue-sky thinking. Brainstorming with no limits and no expectation of practical applications for their discoveries. This was pure Einstein. So much of Max’s hero’s genius came from these thought experiments. He loved thinking for the sake of thinking. Max did, too.

  It’s probably why she wasn’t great at regurgitating facts for a fill-in-the-circles exam.

  Tisa, the biochemist from Kenya, went first. She stood before the panel of judges, seated in the front row of a large lecture hall, and advocated supporting small farmers. Especially in third-world countries.

  “A combination of money and education in low-tech concepts such as better rice planting and irrigation, coupled with better seeds and fertilizer, could spark a green revolution back home in Africa!” she told the judges.

  “We need to roll out more biotech, big time,” said Klaus when it was his turn. “I’m talking genetic modification, people. Yes, I know it gets a bad rap in the developed world, but think about it in real-world applications: we could gene-splice plants so they could withstand droughts and floods. We could play with the genetic code of pigs and chickens to engineer their stomachs and intestines so they’d eat food humans don’t need and maybe make them poop less, too, which, hello, would help us with clean water problems!”

  The judges didn’t look too happy with Klaus’s idea. In fact, several looked like they might lose their lunches.

  Siobhan talked about easier access to credit. “The big banks need to help the little farmers.” Annika discussed the logic of urban farming, since nearly 25 percent of undernourished people live in cities. Toma had some wild, bluer-than-blue-sky ideas about colonizing Mars and setting up “remote agricultural stations” on Jupiter’s moons. Keeto suggested creating an app directly linking farmers with consumers.

  Hana, the vegan botanist from Japan, went second to last and talked about her vision for sustainable food. “We must farm and grow food in a way that can be done forever,” she said. “No more dependence on cheap energy powering huge farm machinery. No more petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides. Food should be sold locally through farmers’ markets and local shops. We need to go organic. It’s kinder and gentler to the land and animals we all need to survive.” Then she started sounding like she was running for office. “The answer to world hunger, my friends, lies not in handouts of free food but in building local systems of production and distribution that can withstand shocks such as war, drought, and disease—ensuring that nutritious, sustainable produce is always available.”

  Several judges’ heads were nodding when Hana finished. A couple even clapped.

  Then it was Max’s turn.

  “Whatever we do,” she said, “we should start small. Prove that it works. And only then ask others to scale it up for us. There’s no way a group as tiny as ours can solve a global problem as huge as world hunger without the help of many, many others.”

  “What?” scoffed Klaus. “Start small? Come on, Max. Go big or stay home. We’re the Change Makers! We don’t do anything in a small way.”

  The young geniuses were asked to leave the lecture hall while the judges and Ms. Kaplan deliberated.

  The CMI team didn’t have to wait long for the decision.

  Hana’s sustainable food idea was quickly deemed the best. Ms. Kaplan declared her the new Chosen One.

  “And Ben concurs with my decision,” she added. “Max? We look forward to your help in implementing our new leader’s vision.”

  In other words, Max Einstein had just been officially demoted.

  32

  “We should field-test Hana’s sustainable farming idea ASAP,” said Ben over a speakerphone set up in one of Mathey College’s common rooms.

  The entire CMI team, including Leo, was huddled around the device.

  “The sooner the better, sir,” said Hana, sounding super confident in her new role as the team leader.

  “Um, you can call me, Ben, Hana. ‘Sir’ is what people used to call my father. I’m just Ben. And since we’ll be working more closely together now… first names are fine with me… if, you know, they’re fine with you.”

  Max was wondering if Ben and Hana would start going out for private Chosen One lunches, the way Max and Ben used to.

  Was Max jealous? No. Of course not. Okay, maybe a little.

  “We should move our base of operations to West Virginia,” suggested Ms. Kaplan. “It ranks as one of the hungriest states in America. Fourteen-point-nine percent of households in West Virginia suffer from food insecurity.”

  “Why not New Mexico?” asked Max. “It’s the numberone state for hunger issues. Seventeen-point-nine percent of the population is dealing with not having enough food.”

  Sometimes, Max remembered random facts like that. Usually when she didn’t have to do it for a test.

  “Then there’s Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama,” she continued. “All of them are worse off than West Virginia.”

  “This is not your call, Ms. Einstein,” said Ms. Kaplan dismissively. “Hana is in charge and she asked that I pick the location for our first field test.”

  Max looked down at the speakerphone. Ben didn’t say a word. Yep. Her days as the Chosen One were definitely over.

  “Besides, West Virginia is much closer to Princeton than any of the states mentioned by Ms. Einstein,” Ms. Kaplan continued. “We can start implementing Hana’s ideas almost immediately.”

  “I, uh, agree,” said Ben. “West Virginia it is. I’ll, you know, make some phone calls.”

  “I’m one step ahead of you, Benjamin,” said Ms. Kaplan. She pulled a stack of papers and folders out of her briefcase. “I’ve done some preliminary research. There are some local organizations already doing sustainable agriculture work in Central Appalachia. They’ve set up shop not far from Shepherdstown, West Virginia. A green business lender in the area received a major grant from the Department of Agriculture to enhance farm-to-fork delivery. In other words, there are existing groups and infrastructure we can work with.”

  “Cool,” said Ben. “You’re in charge, Ms. Kaplan. Well, you and Hana. I’ve got to run. Some kind of meeting. Keep me posted. Send me a text or something. Thanks. Bye.”

  Ben clicked off.

  “West Virginia?” moaned Klaus. “Farming? I’m not sure I want to be a farmer. And Leo here isn’t built for heavy labor outdoors.”

  “What Klaus says is true,” said the automaton. “Mud and manure might seriously impair my delicate circuitry.”

  “Mine, too,” cracked Keeto.

  “We will keep Leo out of the fields,” said Ms. Kaplan. “He can assist with logistics.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Kaplan,” chirped the robot.

  “Great,” said Klaus. “I’ll assist Leo with his assisting.”

  “No, Klaus,” said Hana. “I want you in the field with the rest of us.”

  “And by ‘field,’ you literally mean like a cornfield, right?”

  “Actually,” said Hana, “until I can convince the locals to go vegan with me, we’ll probably be working in fields where they grow hay to feed livestock.”

  Annika nodded. “Hay is currently West Virginia’s number one crop. Interestingly, ninety-five percent of the farms in the state are family owned. That’s the highest percentage in the US.”

  “Let’s hope these families won’t mind working with us,” said Tisa.

  “Are you kidding?” said Keeto. “They’re gonna love us. They might even want to adopt us all! Even Leo!”

  “That would be sweet,” said Leo. “However, I have already found my forever home. With the CMI.” />
  “Awwww,” said Klaus. “Isn’t he cute? I programmed him to say that.” He rubbed the robot’s shiny plastic hair.

  Everyone cracked up, except Max.

  “We will ship out first thing tomorrow morning,” announced Ms. Kaplan. “Seven a.m. sharp.”

  As the others shuffled out of the room, Max remained behind.

  She was doing another thought experiment.

  This one was thinking about how she couldn’t leave Princeton until she visited the Tardis House at least one more time.

  33

  Max needed to be prepared before she set out for 244 Battle Road again.

  First stop was Tisa’s room.

  “So,” Max asked her friend, “have you been able to put your portable chem lab back together after our luggage incident in Oxford?”

  “A little bit,” said Tisa. “One of the chemistry professors on loan to the Institute for Advanced Study helped me out. She even gave me a handy metal carrying case for my brand new chemistry set.” Tisa placed the box filled with rattling jars and bottles on a table. “How are you doing putting your Einstein memorabilia collection back together?”

  “Not as good as you. But that’s okay. All that stuff was sacrificed for a good cause: us staying alive.”

  “Totally. So, what do you need, Max?”

  “Have you got any acetic acid?”

  Tisa popped open the clasps on her chemistry kit. “Yeah. Here it is. Also known as methane carboxylic acid.” She pulled out a small jar filled with liquid. “What do you need it for?” She looked around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “Are you having an ear fungus issue?” she whispered.

  “Maybe,” said Max.

  “Well, be careful with it. The stuff stinks. Acetic acid is what gives vinegar its nasty odor.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So, you excited about heading to West Virginia tomorrow?”

  Max nodded. “Definitely. I’m sure Hana will do a great job setting up the project.”