Six

After school the next day, Edgar was back at the hole, this time with a small box in his hands, as well as a notebook filled with calculations. He placed the box at the edge of the hole and popped it open. Inside was a small turtle he’d caught down by the brook. He lifted it into the air and inspected it.

“If I’m wrong about this,” he muttered, “it will suck to be you.”

He hoisted the turtle over the hole and, with a bit of hesitation, dropped it into the vastness. The turtle’s head seemed to retreat as it fell from view. Poor little guy. Please let me be right.

“It’ll be OK,” he said, more to himself as he started the stopwatch on his Pathfinder.

Then he ducked outside and chose a large boulder to sit on. He yanked out his notebook and, on a clean sheet of paper, wrote the number “8000.”

This was the diameter of the Earth in miles, as Dr. Van Rossum had told him earlier when Edgar lingered around after class.

“Why don’t you just Google this stuff, Edgar?” the teacher had asked. “I know a lot, but I’m not the physics teacher.”

“Because it’s complicated,” Edgar explained. “Yeah, they have formulas online, but you can teach it in a way I can sort of understand. Also, Mr. Norman is totally weird and not as cool as you.”

Van Rossum reclined in his chair and folded his hands behind his half-shiny, balding head. He smiled slyly at Edgar and rocked a bit. “Alright, alright. You don’t have to suck up. What’s this all about, boy?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh come on, Edgar. What’s with all these formulas and calculations and the constant preoccupation with gravity and falling?”

The professor’s big, white bushy eyebrows rose in expectation.

Edgar shrugged, then exhaled in surrender.

“It’s for extra credit. It’s for the Science Fair.”

Van Rossum rolled his eyes and howled.

“Science Fair?” he said, finally composing himself. “Man, Christopher Weedy is right. You are a big liar.” He shook his head. “Just know,” added the teacher with sincerity, “if you’re building a time machine, I’d like a lift back to the seventies.”

__________

Out on the boulder, in the hot baking sun, just below the number eight thousand, Edgar scribbled his first formula:

F=Gm₁m₂/r²

Using a conversion scale in the back of textbook he found in the library, along with his cell phone calculator for calculating, Edgar discovered that 8000 miles is actually 12,755,660 meters.

He wrote it all down.

From there, he tapped four other formulas into the phone: Newton’s Gravitational Law, the Density and Volume of a Sphere, Knowledge of Gravity Inside a Spherical Mass, and the Simple Harmonic Oscillator Equation.

The Harmonic Oscillator he’d taken to his father the night before, since it involved square roots. Edgar wasn’t very good with them, but his dad was pretty much a math genius.

“Physics?” his father had asked, sliding on his glasses.

“Yeah. It’s for extra credit.”

“Yes, sir,” corrected his dad.

Mr. Dewitt withdrew his glasses and wiped them on his sleeve, then slid them back onto his face before squinting at the complicated equations before him. “Isn’t this stuff a little advanced for a freshman?”

“Dad,” sighed Edgar, “this is Washington, remember? It’s like mom’s been saying. It’s two and a half times more advanced than Alabama.”

“More than two and a half,” his father corrected him with a smile, submerging himself in the numbers.

“So what is the Simple Harmonic Oscillator?” Edgar prodded.

“Well, if you take a spring and compress it, the harder you push the spring together, the more it pushes against your fingers. It always wants to return to its original state. I guess you can think of it as a clock, or a pendulum. It’s the principle that explains how a pendulum swings back and forth, see?”

__________

Out on the hot hillside, with the red-tailed hawks spinning above in tight circles, Edgar tapped furiously into his calculator. One by one, he entered the calculations. Then, suddenly, when all the numbers had been crunched, Edgar hit the equals button. The number “42” stared back at him.

He recalculated everything one more time, very carefully, since his life might depend on it, just to be sure.

“42.”

Edgar walked back into the cabin and sat next to the hole, waiting nervously as he munched on broken pretzel sticks that he’d stowed away in his backpack.

“Where’s your lunchbox?” his mom had asked earlier that day.

“I’ve outgrown lunchboxes, Mom,” he’d told her. “I’m in high school now. I’m making my own lunch from now on, too. No more peanut butter and chocolate chip sandwiches.”

“But you love peanut butter and chocolate chip!” she cried.

“Not anymore I don’t.”

He waited by the hole for what seemed an eternity, but suddenly, exactly eighty-four minutes after he dropped the turtle to its death, it suddenly shot back up, rising high over the hole and then dropping rapidly. Edgar reached out and grabbed the frightened creature just in time.

Holy crap. It actually worked?! He clutched the turtle in his hands, cackling like a mad scientist. “Buddy, you’re alive!” He danced around the dusty room, careful not to get too close to the hole.

“You’ve been to China, haven’t you?” Edgar asked as the turtle peered out through its shell with two shiny, fearful, black eyes.

“And you’re still alive,” Edgar mused. “You’re still alive.” He inspected the turtle’s shell, looking for signs of injury, but found none. The little guy was scared but otherwise unharmed. Edgar took him outside and placed him near the brook once again.

After walking back into the cabin, Edgar stared down the hole, thoughtfully. Well, I’ve got eighty-four minutes to spare. Here goes nothing.

And with that, he jumped.