The world had not ended…which was very inconvenient.

Celestial Object Felicity Bonk—the unlikely name of the asteroid that had been on a collision course with Earth—rather than obliterating life as we know it, could now be seen in the night sky. It was nowhere near the size of the moon, of course, but it appeared larger than a planet.

After a brief period of celebration lasting less than a week, the world returned to its pre-Bonk patterns. The horrors of war, oppression, and reality TV, all of which might have been ended by the well-placed meteor strike, were back in force, and Nick Slate was left having to unscrew the massive screwup that had brought everything to the brink of extinction. He was taking that responsibility seriously.

Slowly but surely, Nick and his friends were gathering the strange objects that Nick had sold in his garage sale a few weeks ago and returning them to his attic. Today’s recovery mission was going to be a challenge. It would require Nick and his friend Caitlin’s combined powers of persuasion, iron wills, and most likely, money that they didn’t have.

“How certain are you that this is the same man from your garage sale?” Caitlin asked as she and Nick approached a house overgrown with unpruned hedges and low-limbed trees.

“I could be wrong,” Nick told her, “but I do remember a loud fat guy at the garage sale, and this dude certainly fits the bill.”

Caitlin glared at him. “It’s cruel and insensitive to call a person who is morbidly obese a ‘fat guy.’ I have an uncle who struggles with that, and I can tell you, it’s not an easy cross to bear.”

“Sorry,” Nick said. To look at Caitlin, he couldn’t imagine anyone in her family being anything but beautiful and slender, or at least well groomed and proportional. “I’d call him a ‘large gentleman,’ but there’s nothing gentlemanly about him. He’s a creep, at any poundage.”

Caitlin nodded and sighed. “Creeps do come in all shapes and sizes.”

Nick had run into him at the grocery store, where the man was bitterly arguing with the store manager over the price of a casaba melon. Nick had seen him switch a product code sticker from a less expensive piece of fruit. Although he could have ratted the man out, he let it play through, all the while awed by the guy’s audacity and the fact that any human being would get into a fight over a melon. Something about the way he bickered made Nick remember how one customer had aggressively haggled over the price of an item in his now-notorious garage sale. He realized that this was the same quarrelsome dude.

“Do you remember what he bought?” Caitlin asked. Both of them were hesitant to walk up to the man’s front door.

“I can’t be sure,” Nick said, “but I think it was a weight machine.”

When one holds a garage sale, one never expects to see the junk sold to unsuspecting neighbors ever again. But when the garage-sale items are the lost inventions of the world’s greatest scientist, the word “oops” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Perhaps if Tesla hadn’t disguised them all as normal household objects, Nick might have had a clue that the things in his attic each had a greater purpose. Now Nick understood that the inventor hadn’t wanted them to be discovered by the secret society of scientists known as the Accelerati. But Nick hadn’t known that at the time, and the inventions had been dispersed into the world to wreak their peculiar sort of havoc.

And yet Nick had to wonder, in spite of the clear and present danger the objects posed, if there was also a method to the madness. Perhaps everything that had happened was part of the inventor’s master plan.

For instance, his brother unwittingly pulled an asteroid into a collision course with Earth using a cosmic attractor disguised as a baseball mitt. Could it be coincidence that his father had swung a celestial deflector disguised as a baseball bat?

Nick knew that each of the items sold in his garage sale had to be retrieved, but he also suspected that they needed to be out in the world as well—at least for a short time—because the people whose lives these objects touched were also, somehow, part of Tesla’s grand mechanism. Nick found it somewhat irritating to be manipulated by a long-dead genius, but at the same time he was comforted by the thought that he might be the central cog in a machine that was crafting something truly worthwhile.

He and Caitlin had figured out that the inventions all fit together to form a larger one—the Far Range Energy Emitter, or F.R.E.E., which had been Tesla’s life’s work. They were the only ones who had figured that out. Exactly what the F.R.E.E. would do when it was complete was anyone’s guess. All Nick knew was that he felt the need to complete it.

As they approached the casaba melon man’s house, Nick began to hear a rhythmic clanking of metal on metal—a sound that anyone who has been to a gym would recognize.

“He’s in there,” Nick said. “He’s using the weight machine.”

Caitlin grabbed him before he got too close to the door, a shadow of fear crossing her face. “What do you suppose the machine does?”

Nick didn’t want to speculate, because if he did, he might never go in.

“We’ll know soon enough” was all he said.

Instead of going straight to the front door, they decided to do a little reconnaissance. Quietly they made their way through the dense weeds and brush on the side of the house. When they neared the window, they could feel their hair standing on end. As it would turn out, there was a reason for that.

“Boost me up so I can see,” Caitlin said. Nick lowered his hands, interlacing his fingers to give her a step up, and then hoisted her higher.

He anticipated Caitlin’s weight as he lifted her, but he thought he must have miscalculated, because he found her surprisingly light. It would turn out there was a reason for that, too.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“I see the machine,” she said. “It’s right there in the middle of the room, but…”

“But what?”

“No one’s there.”

“What do you mean no one’s there? I can hear someone pumping iron.”

“That’s what I mean. The machine is doing it all by itself.”

Suddenly the window flew open, and Caitlin was pulled out of Nick’s hands and into the house by the home’s large occupant.

“Caitlin!” Nick shouted.

A moment later, a hand reached out, grabbed Nick by the hair, and, with what appeared to be superhuman strength, Nick was hauled off his feet and through the window.

First came an intense feeling of disorientation. Caitlin, Nick, and the casaba man tumbled, but they didn’t quite fall. Nick hit a wall and dislodged a framed photograph, but the photo didn’t fall either. Instead it floated, flipping end over end until it bumped the ceiling and bounced off.

All at once Nick got it. He looked up, which was actually down, and saw the old-fashioned weight machine, its piston pumping, its cables straining. This was a weight machine in a very literal sense. It was an antigravity device that made everything around it weightless—which explained why Caitlin felt so light just beyond the edge of the antigravity field, and why their hair had been standing on end. Each clang of metal on metal created a wave of energy—invisible, but Nick could feel it pulsing through his gut, his ears, and his eyes.

“You think I don’t know who you are? You think I don’t know you’ve been spying on me?” The man’s voice boomed with the same irate tone he had used when arguing with the supermarket manager. He was, indeed, very large—even more so, it seemed, with his mass unfettered by Earth’s gravity. He pushed Nick, and both of them went flying in opposite directions, although Nick went much faster.

Caitlin tried to grab the man but couldn’t. She just floated past him, frantically moving her arms and legs as if trying to swim in midair.

Nick hit a beam in the vaulted ceiling, and he yelped in pain. Even weightless, he still had enough inertia for it to hurt. That’s when Caitlin, who had reached the far wall, flung herself into action. She pushed off from the wall, becoming a human projectile aimed right at the man in the middle of the room. He, however, was much more adept at maneuvering in free fall. With a single flick of his wrist, he shifted his entire body to avoid her, and then he flew to the far corner, where he peered down at them—or up—like a spider from the center of its web.

“You can’t have it! It’s mine!”

He was an intimidating figure floating in the heart of his lair, holding on to a handle that had been bolted to a crossbeam in the ceiling. Nick looked around and saw that similar handles had been strategically affixed to the walls and ceiling so the man could maneuver weightlessly through the house.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to struggle with weight all your life, and then find yourself free from it entirely? You can’t possibly imagine how liberating that is. And I won’t let you steal that from me!” He launched himself once more at Nick, grabbed him, and hurled him across the room again.

Nick spun, and his shoulder painfully hit the weight machine. He ricocheted off of it and, mercifully, found himself hitting a sofa that had been secured to the floor. He wanted to stay there, but the sofa acted like a trampoline and bounced him toward the ceiling.

“Please,” said Caitlin, “just hear us out.”

“Words have no weight here either,” the man said. “Especially yours!”

Nick hit the ceiling again, but this time he was able to grab one of the handles and steady himself.

“We’re not going to lie to you,” Nick said. “We need the machine back.”

“We’re willing to pay,” Caitlin said, which just made the man laugh.

“Do you think I’m an idiot? There isn’t enough money in the world to pay what this thing is worth!”

“We know,” Nick told him, and then he went out on a limb. “But let’s talk about you. Ever since you turned that machine on, living without it has become harder and harder, hasn’t it?”

The man pursed his lips into a thin scowl. “You don’t know anything,” he growled.

Nick continued. “When the machine is off, you weigh even more than you did before. Your arms are weak, your legs are weaker, and you can barely move, which is why you’re so angry in the outside world. You’re constantly exhausted…so you go out less and less.”

“That has nothing to do with it!” the man shouted. He no longer looked like a spider in his web, but a cornered creature.

It wasn’t too difficult for Nick to figure out what was happening to the man. When you’re weightless, you don’t use your muscles. When you don’t use your muscles, you don’t burn calories. The guy was building mass at an alarming rate.

“That machine is killing you,” Nick told him. “You might not want to admit it, but you know it’s true.” He swung himself to a handle slightly closer. Caitlin was now behind the man, out of his line of sight. Nick only hoped she knew what she had to do.

Nick held eye contact with the man, whose face grew red, his eyes spilling tears that floated away.

“Freedom isn’t freedom when you’re addicted to it,” Nick said.

“But I can’t stop. Don’t you understand? I can’t turn off the machine, because if I do…if I do…”

Nick reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “I know. If you do, then everything will come crashing down.” Then he turned to Caitlin and shouted, “Now!”

And Caitlin, who had swung her way over to the machine, reached into the device and pulled out the pin so the weights slammed down, bringing the machine to a sudden halt.

The moment it did, everything—and everyone—that wasn’t nailed down plunged to the floor. Gravity, clearly not pleased by their blatant defiance of the law, was punishing. Nick and the large man slammed to the ground, with only a thin layer of worn carpet to cushion their fall. Either one of them could have broken his neck or back, or any other part of his anatomy, but good fortune left them only bruised.

Grimacing, Nick pulled himself up, the sudden return of gravity making him feel weak after only a five-minute lapse.

Caitlin was disoriented but not hurt, because she had been close to the floor. She noticed that their brief battle had dislodged several things in the room, such as the sofa cushions and a photograph. The glass in the frame had shattered, and shards now lay strewn across the carpet. What a hazard they’ll be, Caitlin thought, if things go weightless again.

She went over to Nick, fearing the worst when she saw the pain in his face. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I think so,” he said.

And then she looked at the man, who now lay in a heap, his body racked with sobs. But Caitlin knew it wasn’t from the pain of the fall.

As Nick picked himself up, recovering, Caitlin went to examine the man, who was not really the machine’s owner, but more like its victim.

He struggled to push himself to his feet, but he could not. Caitlin recalled how astronauts who have been in space too long can barely walk when they return home, because of how quickly muscles atrophy in a weightless environment. She marveled that Nick had the foresight to realize this when they were still floating.

Each time that Nick did something wildly insensitive or generally dim, he would redeem himself by doing something brilliant and profoundly insightful. Caitlin knew that if he were only brilliant and insightful, she’d dislike him—just as much as if he were only insensitive and dim. It was the fact that he constantly teetered between the two states that made him so interesting.

“Why did it all have to go so wrong?” the heavy man wailed.

She knelt down to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe it needed to go wrong,” she said softly, “to bring you to this moment.”

He looked up at her, his eyes questioning.

Among the debris in the room was a pen. She found a scrap of paper and wrote down a name and phone number. “My uncle wrestles with obesity and a slow metabolism. He runs a clinic for people who are sick of fad diets”—she glanced at the machine—“and, uh…other weight-loss gimmicks.”

The man took the slip of paper and stared at it.

“He’ll help you get back on your feet—so to speak,” she told him compassionately. “When you’re ready.”

He offered no resistance as they took the machine from the house, proving that maybe he was ready after all.