Einstein's Underpants--And How They Saved the World Read online

  Alexander had invented his own scale for working out what sort of mood Uncle Otto was going to be in. The mildest, least insane Otto was just ‘batty’. From there the scale went through ‘fruitcake’ to ‘bananas’, ‘loop-the-loop’, ‘mad as a monkey on a trike’, all the way up to ‘screaming loony’.

  Now, Alexander reckoned that Uncle Otto was about halfway between loop-the-loop and monkey on a trike.

  ‘Who’s coming for you?’ he asked sleepily.

  ‘Can’t explain now. Come round right away.’

  ‘But, Uncle Kevin – I mean, Otto, it’s the middle of the night . . .’

  ‘Who cares about the time? Don’t you realize the future of the planet is at stake?’

  ‘How? What do you mean?’

  ‘I can’t explain over the phone. They monitor all communications. I can’t block them.’

  ‘I can’t come round now. My mum . . . she’ll go crazy.’

  Uncle Otto started screaming at the top of his voice: ‘BUT THEY’RE COMING. THEY’RE COMING NOW! THEY’RE COMING TO EAT US. IT’S ALL DOWN TO YOU AND ME. WE’RE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN SAVE HUMANITY!’

  ‘OK, OK. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

  That calmed Uncle Otto down, and he stopped screaming.

  Alexander got up and pulled on his jeans and jumper over his pyjamas. He looked out of his window. The first glimmerings of dawn were lighting the edges of the world. A massive yawn bubbled up from somewhere around his knees and burst out of his mouth. Five minutes, he thought, won’t make any difference. He lay back down on his bed and closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again, it was half past eight. Nobody had woken him yet because it was Saturday, but he could hear sounds from downstairs – his little brother watching cartoons, his dad burning the toast in the kitchen (‘Aaarghhh! Blast stupid toaster’), etc. etc. Alexander really wanted to go and watch the cartoons with his brother and eat some toast washed down by a cup of tea with four spoons of sugar in it. But his conscience wouldn’t let him. He put on his socks and trainers and slipped quietly out of the back door.

  CHAPTER 4

  THEY TAKE POOR OTTO AWAY

  DRIVEN BY GUILT, his legs a spinning blur, Alexander cycled the two kilometres to his uncle’s flat in five minutes.

  He was fast, but he wasn’t fast enough.

  By the time Alexander reached Uncle Otto’s flat above the butcher’s shop in the High Street, the crowd had already assembled. Old ladies in vast coats, bald-headed men with sticks, fat mums clutching snotty-nosed toddlers all gathered to watch Uncle Otto being carried out by some burly ambulance men, helped by six police officers. Otto was strapped to a stretcher so he couldn’t even move his arms. But they couldn’t stop him from screaming.

  ‘You’re all doomed!’ he yelled. ‘They’re coming to get you. They’ll eat every last one of you. Then you’ll be sorry.’

  The crowd didn’t look very surprised to hear all this from Otto. Most of them had heard him yelling something similar from the window over the butcher’s shop for the last couple of years.

  Alexander pushed his way to the front of the crowd. Uncle Otto’s wild eye swivelled and caught him.

  ‘Alexander, Alex, Lexie Lex, Ex,’ he hissed. ‘Come here, boy.’

  As Alexander approached, one of the policemen put his hand on his chest. ‘Close enough, lad,’ he said. ‘This chap’s dangerous. He’s been ranting and raving. There’ve been complaints.’

  ‘He’s not dangerous,’ said Alexander. ‘He’s my uncle.’

  He jinked past the policeman, wormed his way between two of the astonished medics and reached the stretcher. He clutched Otto’s tethered hand.

  ‘Are you OK, Uncle?’ he asked with tears in his eyes.

  He felt terrible. If only he’d come round when Otto had telephoned. He could have calmed him down, soothed him, got him talking about the planets and space and not this other crazy stuff.

  ‘These madmen don’t know what they’re doing,’ replied Otto, spraying spittle like a garden sprinkler. ‘I’ve got the co-ordinates. I know which way they’re coming. I’ve picked up their transmissions.’

  ‘Please just shush, Uncle,’ Alexander said soothingly. ‘If you just keep quiet for a while they’ll let you go.’

  ‘Not if they’re secretly working with the others. Yes, that’s it. They’ve been infiltrated. THEY’RE HERE ALREADY. THEY’RE EVERYWHERE.’

  ‘That’s enough, son, I said.’ The policeman grabbed Alexander and tried to pull him away. ‘You’re only getting him worked up.’

  But Uncle Otto’s claw-like hand gripped Alexander’s. ‘Alexander, listen. My observatory. My notes. I’ve left them for you. And instructions. It’s down to you now. Trust no one.’

  And then he hissed, ‘Here, here!’

  Alexander bowed his head, and his uncle whispered something in his ear.

  And then the stretcher was away, strong arms barging past.

  CHAPTER 5

  EAT NO YOGURT

  ALEXANDER WATCHED AS the doors of the ambulance slammed shut. The crowd drifted away, and he was left alone on the street. It was only then that he realized there was something in his hand.

  It was a set of keys. The keys to Otto’s flat.

  There were two keys for two doors. The first was outside, next to the butcher’s. As ever, Alexander was captivated for a moment by the grisly pink specimens in the window. Poor Otto was a vegetarian, and it grieved him to have to live over such a place, but the council had put him there.

  The next door was at the top of a flight of dingy stairs smelling faintly of meat and blood. Not knowing what he was going to find, his heart racing, Alexander opened the door.

  Otto’s place was always a bit of a mess, but he’d never seen it like this. There was junk everywhere. Empty bottles, sweet wrappers, scrunched-up tissues. There were half-eaten pizzas crawling like mutant monsters out of boxes. Fat bluebottles buzzed lazily. The place smelled like a vulture’s burp. The TV was turned to face the wall, as if Otto was concerned that its screen concealed an ever-watching eye. On a shelf sat at least thirty naked Barbie dolls, their hair in disarray, looking like they’d witnessed some terrible act of barbarity. What were they there for? A warning? A threat? Or were they just Otto’s friends, like the panda that Alexander still kept in his bedroom and had to hide whenever his mates came round to play?

  But this wasn’t what Alexander had come to see. To reach the laboratory and observatory Uncle Otto had constructed in his loft you had to pull down a complicated folding ladder contraption. It had always seemed like an adventure to Alexander, but now his heart was filled with dread. As he climbed, his imagination filled the loft with bizarre monsters, yellow-eyed lizard men, beetles the size of dogs, human kebabs.

  He pushed back the trapdoor, stuck his head through the square opening, and felt around for the light switch. Just as he flicked it on, his hand landed on something furry, and he screamed like an eight-year-old girl finding a spider in her curds and whey.

  Dead rat?

  Severed head?

  Coughed-up hairball?

  Alexander blinked in the light.

  No.

  It was just his uncle’s purple bobble hat.

  He pulled himself up and looked around. The floor was covered with newspapers, most of them elaborately annotated in green marker pen. Sections had been cut out and rearranged. Some pages had been violently slashed, as if with a machete.

  Almost every square inch of the walls was covered in scribbles in the same green marker pen. There were numbers and equations and diagrams and, amid much that was utterly incomprehensible, the occasional blunt statement.

  THEY ARE COMING

  THEY WILL EAT YOU

  WE ARE DOOMED

  YOGURT WILL MAKE YOU BLIND

  The plastic telescope was in its usual place, aiming up through the skylight, and nearby three ancient rubbishy computers stood shoulder to shoulder on a desk made out of an old door propped up on legs made
of piles of books. Otto had told Alexander that the computers were networked together, forming the most intelligent supercomputer in the world outside of NASA. He said they were more powerful than the Death Star. Alexander actually reckoned that the real computing power from the three beige boxes was about equal to his digital watch.

  He sat in front of one of the computers, moved the cup of cold tea that stood in the way, and hit the keyboard, waking the machine from sleep.

  A box appeared, asking for a password. Alexander typed: EATNOYOGURT. It was what Otto had whispered in his ear.

  The screen blinked a couple of times, and then Alexander found himself in the middle of an operating system he’d never even seen before. There were no desktop pictures, no icons, nothing but green letters and numbers on a black background, and a blipping cursor.

  Eventually he figured out how to do a system-wide search. Not long after he found a file named: FORALEXTOPSECRET.doc.

  His heart thumping, his mouth dry, he hit the return key, and the document appeared on the screen.

  CHAPTER 6

  UNCLE OTTO’S MESSAGE

  My dear Nephew Alexander,

  If you are reading this note it means that something tragic has happened. I have probably been captured by the enemies of humankind. They may well be eating me now, taking great big bites out of my legs, buttocks, nose, etc. etc. If they are not eating me, then they will no doubt be performing hideous experiments on me, the nature of which I cannot even begin to describe as you are only a kid and they will give you nightmares, although they probably involve sticking things into me using all available orifices. By the way, if someone else apart from my nephew Alex is reading this, then GO BOIL YOUR HEAD, YOU EVIL SPY. YOU STINK. AND YOUR MUM STINKS. AND YOUR DAD IS A TOILET CLEANER.

  As you (I mean Alexander, not the evil spy whose dad is a TOILET CLEANER) know, for several years I have been monitoring intergalactic radio communications. Most of the millions of messages I have picked up were in code, which delayed me for some time. However, I have now cracked the code, using a decoding device of my own devising. The message is clear.

  The invasion has begun.

  DO NOT DOUBT THIS.

  I have confirmed it with astronomical observations, using my own nuclear telescope, and by studying the behaviour of bats, owls, foxes, wolves and other nocturnal species.

  The governments of Earth are too dumb to understand the threat they face, and even if they did understand it, they are too stupid to act decisively. Too stupid or, AS I SUSPECT, already INFILTRATED AND PREPARED FOR BETRAYAL. I, and I alone, have foreseen all this. How? you ask. Me, an ordinary scientist? I’ll tell you. Many years ago I was given a precious gift at an international conference for cosmologists, which for security reasons took place at an institution for the care of the insane. A renowned German physicist called BARON LUDWIG SZCHITOFF gave me a wondrous garment that had once belonged to the greatest of all scientists, ALBERT EINSTEIN. This garment had MAGICAL PROPERTIES. The very soul of Einstein had been INFUSED INTO THE FABRIC. As a consequence, anyone who wears the garment gains a portion of the great man’s intelligence. This will turn them into a GENIUS.

  Like many things, this item of clothing could be used either for GOOD or EVIL. In the wrong hands (or legs) it has the destructive potential of a thousand thermonuclear weapons. In the right hands (or legs) it will save the world. Probably. Therefore I have concealed this item in a cunning hiding place that you, and you alone (that’s Alexander, not the STINKY SPY – didn’t I tell you to get lost?) – where was I? Oh, yes – that you and only you will know about.

  When you have found the sacred garment, you must begin the battle. You can fight alone but, as I have discovered, alone you cannot win. To win you must gather about you a confederation of allies, a league of heroes, a round table of valiant knights.

  This is all I have to say. I hear the approach of the ENEMIES OF MANKIND.

  Goodbye and good luck.

  OttoAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGG HHHHHHHHHH . . .

  CHAPTER 7

  HOT WATER

  ALEXANDER WAS STUNNED. What could he do? There was no clue as to the whereabouts of the mysterious garment. And just what was it, anyway? A cardigan? A vest? A hat? On a whim Alexander went and picked up the purple bobble hat and brought it back to the desk. It didn’t look like the kind of thing Einstein would have worn.

  This is all just stupid, he thought, and sent the hat gyrating away like a woolly flying saucer. Uncle Otto was a certified nutcase. The world wasn’t in peril, or at least not in the way he thought it was.

  He spun round on the swivel chair, ready to leave the smelly flat for the last time. As he twisted, his elbow caught the edge of the keyboard which, in turn, bashed into the cup of cold tea.

  The tea spilled out all over the table.

  ‘Drat,’ said Alexander, thinking what a pain it was going to be to clean it up.

  Tea.

  The thought triggered something. Something about tea. About Uncle Otto and tea.

  Or rather, Uncle Otto and his kettle.

  Otto was convinced that people were trying to poison the water in his kettle. To thwart them, he had two kettles – the dummy kettle he always left on display when he went out, and the real one he actually used to boil his water, which he kept hidden.

  And Alexander knew where.

  He rushed down the ladder and went into the bathroom. He opened the lid of the toilet bowl, and there was the kettle. Feverishly, he opened the kettle. Then his heart sank. Nothing. The kettle was empty, except for the scummy toilet water.

  He sat on the loo, disheartened. And then, ping! It came to him. Otto was convinced that They were spying on him. He’d guess that They knew about his ruse with the kettle. So what would he do? He’d only pretend to use the dummy kettle, while secretly using the real kettle. The real one was the dummy, and the dummy one was real.

  Alexander rushed back to the kitchen, lifted the kettle lid, and there, nestling in the dark heart of it, he found what he was looking for. He picked the thing out. It was a sort of pale grey colour, smudged with darker hues. Alexander guessed it had once been white. He unfolded it gingerly.

  Pants.

  Underpants.

  Y-fronts.

  Big.

  Alexander dropped them with a squeal. ‘Yuck.’

  Was this really the wondrous garment Uncle Otto had told him about? Einstein’s underpants?

  What a nutter.

  Alexander thought about simply throwing them away. Or just leaving them where they were on the dirty lino of the kitchen floor. They looked like they’d be able to crawl off on their own to die in the corner. Or perhaps they’d mate with a cockroach and have lots of mutant underpant babies, scuttling about like floppy tortoises.

  But he couldn’t just walk away from the underpants. What if Otto was right? What if it really was down to him to save the world? And what if the only way he could do that was with the help of the grundies?

  Alexander found a plastic bag and scooped up the pants, trying hard not to let them touch his skin. Then he returned to Otto’s lab, looked around for a screwdriver, opened the cases of the three old computers and removed the hard drives. And then, with his plastic bag of unwashed pants and crazy data slung over his handlebars, he cycled home.

  CHAPTER 8

  ALGEBRA

  ALEXANDER HAD BEEN sweating blood over algebra. The thing was, he just didn’t get it. He was good at maths. He was very good at maths. Give him numbers and he was happy. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, percentages – with those he was like a porpoise gambolling in the sea. He loved geometry and trigonometry. He never bothered with a calculator, even when one was allowed – he just found it easier to do it in his head or on paper.

  But that all changed when, instead of numbers, letters appeared. He knew his times tables up to 20 x 20, but when he saw even an easy algebra problem – say, if x = 4, y = 6 and z = 9, then solve (x + y) (y + z) – his brain turned to porrid
ge. Algebra was his kryptonite. He reckoned he must have had some kind of nasty algebra experience when he was a kid. Maybe he’d fallen into a big pot of alphabetti spaghetti or something.

  This was bad for Alexander’s morale. Being good at maths was important to him, central to the person he was. If he’d been good at loads of other things as well – the shot put, country dancing, basket weaving, whatever – it wouldn’t have mattered so much. But being good at maths was pretty well it, for Alexander. And that was partly why he’d disguised his algebraphobia. Hidden it. Lived a lie. If anyone found out that he couldn’t do simple algebra, then a big part of his personality would be exposed as a sham. He’d lose the respect of his fellow nerds, and that would be the end of him.

  Up till now it had worked fine. They hadn’t really done any algebra in Year Seven. But now it had arrived. In class he’d hit on a brilliant ruse. When Mr McHale asked for the answer to the problem he’d written on the board, Alexander shot his hand up, knowing that the teacher would say, ‘OK, Alexander, let’s give someone else a chance for a change.’

  But there was no escaping this first algebra homework assignment. Asking his mum and dad for help was pointless. May as well ask Umberto, their goldfish. Mum would say, ‘Ask your father,’ and his dad would say of course he’d help, then sit next to him huffing and puffing and becoming increasingly frustrated, and then getting in a wild temper with the book – throwing it in the corner and saying it must have been printed wrong or something – and then going back to reading the newspaper.

  It was then that Alexander thought of the underpants. They were still in the plastic bag under his bed. He’d hidden them there because he wasn’t quite sure how he could explain having an old man’s underpants without making him and Otto sound like total psychos.

  But now he was desperate.

  He reached under the bed and got out the pants. He held them up to the light. They had obviously been laundered. But that didn’t mean they were nice and clean. There was a mottled pattern of stains and blotches so ingrained that they were now just part of the pants, the way the brown liver-spots on his granny’s hands were part of her.