Everyone gathered around a table stacked high with boxes wrapped in pretty bows, and Gerdie’s mom handed them out one by one. It took nearly a half hour of unwrapping before she uncovered a present for Gerdie.
Gerdie opened it. It was a dog collar. Linda and Luanne laughed the loudest in a chorus of giggles. Gerdie wanted to throw the collar into the crowd, along with a few well-aimed punches. But her mom quickly handed her another present. “Don’t be mad. The girls are just teasing.”
Gerdie opened the small box and suddenly her scowl was replaced by a toothy smile “It’s an Inimation 410A!”
“A what?” her mother asked.
“It’s a state-of-the-art scientific calculator with over four hundred mathematical functions. It has a two-line display with thirty-two levels of parenthesis! It does formula notation; variable statistics; fraction and decimal conversions; Boolean operations; probability searches; degree, radian, and grad conversions; sine, cosine, and tangent calculations; as well as exponent and trigonometric functions. It also has a hundred and fifty megabytes of memory storage, plus it runs off a solar cell.”
Gerdie stopped talking. She knew everyone was staring at her—even the party clown.
“It’s very advanced,” she finished quietly.
“What a nerd,” Luanne said as she, Linda, and her mother left Gerdie to go to the patio, which they were using as a dance floor. Their mom was entirely too old to dance with the girls and their friends, but it didn’t stop her from teaching them a goofy dance she called the “Electric Slide.” She was giggling like a twelve-year-old.
Gerdie looked around. Who would have bought her such an amazing present? She shook her head. Oh, who cared! She couldn’t wait to test it!
She turned to run back to her room, but standing behind her was a man built like a tree with thick arms and legs. He had jet-black hair with a white stripe down the middle—just like a skunk—and it hung down in his eyes. He had a long, shaggy beard, and an eye as white as snow. At the end of one of his arms was a silver hook where his hand should have been.
“Here’s one more,” the strange man said, handing Gerdie a thin envelope with his good hand. Just like the envelope upstairs, it was addressed to her. “My employer hopes you have a happy birthday.”
“Huh? Who is your employer?” Gerdie asked, but the man turned and hurried away. “Are you with the caterers?”
But he was gone. Gerdie shrugged off the odd encounter and opened the envelope. Inside was a piece of plain white paper that read:
X = 41.6443/3
“What is it, Gerdie? You look like you don’t feel well,” her mother said, stepping off the dance floor for a breath of fresh air.
Gerdie didn’t answer. Instead, she darted into the house, up the stairs, and back into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. She snatched her notebook off the bed, then fumbled to open her new calculator with nervous hands. Once it was powered on, she typed in her equation. Then she punched in the mystery number for the value of x and pressed the Equals button. Suddenly, the calculator buzzed and blinked and bounced around in her hand. Its plastic case got so hot that Gerdie dropped it on the floor. There was a POP! and a CRACKLE! And then the screen went black.
“No!!!” she cried, scooping it back up, ignoring the burns to her hands. She punched the buttons, but there was no life left in it. She tossed it aside and buried her face in her pillow. Tears streamed out of her eyes, soaking her cheeks and lips. She needed the answer to her equation! It would change everything.
And then she heard the Inimation 410A hum to life once more. She sat up, wiped her eyes, and looked down at the calculator lying on the floor. On the screen was flashing a number:
17
17
17
Gerdie couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The math problem she had labored over for more than a year and a half was solved. The dark ocean had calmed and the numbers had found dry land in the form of the beautiful number 17!
Gerdie raced to her closet and threw open the door. Inside was a tube of blue-and-gray drafting paper. She unrolled it on her desk and smoothed it out to reveal the plans for a bizarre-looking machine. It had buttons and knobs and two glass tubes rising out of the top. She studied it like it was a masterpiece hanging in an art museum. Then she glanced down at the mysterious letter still crumpled in her hand. Attached to the paper with the equation was another letter, this one on stationery from a place called the Arlington Hospital for the Criminally Insane. It was signed, Happy birthday from your pal Heathcliff. Gerdie smiled.
“Thank you, Heathcliff. This is the best birthday present ever.”
THREE DAYS LATER
Gerdie tightened the final screws on her creation. She stepped back to admire her beautiful invention. Two glass tubes rose from the top like bunny ears, straps hung down like limp arms, and its faceplate had a dozen different dials and parts from old video game consoles. In truth, it was an ungainly misfit, but then again, so was its creator. No matter: The government would pay her a fortune for the machine once they saw what it could do.
She tapped the power button and heard the motors turning. A fuzzy map formed on one of the tiny monitors, and after peering at it for a long moment, she punched some coordinates into the keyboard on its side. It weighed a ton, but she hefted the device onto her back and reached over to push the record button on a mounted video camera. A good scientist always documented her successes and her failures.
“Well, this is the maiden voyage of my machine. I still don’t have a name for it, but I’ll worry about that if it works. If all goes according to plan, I will vanish from my bedroom and reappear half a block away in the church parking lot,” she said. “If not—I don’t know. I’ve never built a teleportation device before, using my allowance as the budget. I know it’s probably dangerous to test this in the house, but I just can’t resist!”
She awkwardly turned to look at the movie star photos she had taped to her bedroom walls. “If this thing works, I’m going to use every penny to make myself look like you—hair, makeup, dental work—everything. I’ll be an all-new me, and Gruesome Gerdie will be a thing of the past.”
She flipped the activation switch. Above her head she could hear the glass cathode tubes warming. She gazed upward just in time to see a powerful charge passing back and forth between them, creating a tiny lightning storm of crackling energy. The electricity formed into a spinning ball of perfect light that grew and grew. Its surface was clear and white, but when Gerdie ran her hand through it, she left streaks where her fingers had glided—like smearing icing on a birthday cake. The circle grew bigger than her whole body, and then it floated down from above until it was directly in front of her face. There was an odd tearing sound, like someone was ripping a huge piece of paper in two, and with shocking force Gerdie was dragged into the energy circle.
A split second later she was freezing and blind. She rubbed her eyes into focus. To her surprise, she was not in her bedroom or in the church parking lot. Instead, she was alone in a frozen wasteland that stretched as far as the horizon. Ice covered everything and snow was coming down in blankets, each tiny crystal like a razor cutting at her exposed skin.
“Where am I?” she said, teeth chattering, to no one in particular. There didn’t seem to be a living soul for miles. Had she plugged in the wrong latitude and longitude? Had she assembled the machine incorrectly? Had her equations been incorrect?
No! That wasn’t possible. Gerdie took great pride in how thorough she was. No matter how simple the problem, she accounted for every possible solution. Her teachers often complained that she made things intentionally difficult. She had once used a whole ream of paper to prove the answer to 2 + 2! Still, here she was, in a place too cold even for Santa Claus. No, something else was wrong. Heathcliff’s number must have altered the machine’s basic function.