Bringing Down the Mouse by Ben Mezrich

Author:Ben Mezrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

12

AND THEN THERE WAS darkness.

A thick, soupy, pitch-black darkness filling every inch of the voluminous auditorium, like a velvet dome weighing down every molecule of air, so full and heavy Charlie found it hard to even take a breath.

And suddenly, light. Or more accurately, lightning.

A flash so sudden and fierce that it seemed to crack the very air, followed by a bolt of terrifyingly white electricity running in a single, jagged streak across the center of the auditorium, leaping upward in daggers so sharp, it reminded Charlie of the serrated edge of a hunting knife, or the borders of an angry scar. In that instantaneous glow of the lightning bolt, the auditorium became momentarily visible, a scene illuminated so fast, it was like looking at a single movie frame frozen beneath a sheet of glass. Down at the center of the vast room, the two giant Textolite columns, six feet in diameter, rising twenty feet right out of the floor, capped by the massive double spheres of the Van de Graaff generator: perfectly round, shiny aluminum, melded together at the center, each fifteen feet tall, reaching halfway to the curved ceiling. The bolt of lighting had erupted right off the surface of the aluminum, rising up above the crowd—a frozen blur of wide-eyed faces staring straight up in equal parts awe and terror. Most had probably never seen anything like the display in front of them; assuredly, they had no idea how the Van de Graaff generator worked, or even that it was the largest air insulated Van de Graaff in existence. That it had been donated by MIT to the museum more than half a century ago. To most of the audience, it was an object of awe and maybe even magic.

Charlie trembled as he watched the streak of white leaping from the generator to the telescoping grounding beacon attached near the high curved ceiling of the auditorium. To him, there was no magic in this room; he knew exactly how the Van de Graaff worked. He knew that one of those massive columns contained a rubber conveyer belt, moving at about sixty miles per hour, carrying high voltage DC current to the aluminum of the hollow spheres. He knew that when the aluminum reached a high enough voltage, the energy leaped from the sphere to the grounding beacon—homemade lightning, as fierce and real as anything a cloud could produce.

This wasn’t the first Sunday afternoon Charlie had found himself in the Theater of Electricity at the Museum of Science; the place was sort of a ritual for him, his first stop whenever his parents took him to the brick-and-glass, multifloored city landmark that squatted on a particularly pretty curve of the Charles River. Charlie had always loved the Museum of Science. As he’d aged, his interests had traveled from exhibit to exhibit. As a toddler, he’d been obsessed with the Discovery Center, which was filled with things you could touch and throw and build. When he was a little

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