Read Online Lord of All Things by Andreas Eschbach - Free Book Online

waited, not taking her eyes off his arm for an instant. From time to time Hiroshi lifted up the magnet so they could see underneath.
    “Maybe my skin’s too dark,” he said thoughtfully after a while.
    Charlotte didn’t think his skin was dark at all—not like that of her classmates back in Delhi. But hers was lighter, that was true. She put her forearm next to his. “Try mine.”
    It was a funny feeling to have the magnet at the vein on her wrist where the doctor usually took her pulse and imagine the hemoglobin gathering beneath it. There was nothing to show it was happening, though, on her skin either.
    “Could this be dangerous?” Charlotte asked. “Could I faint or something like that?”
    “I’ll catch you if you faint,” Hiroshi declared.
    They waited a bit longer. It was beginning to get boring.
    “Maybe there’s not enough blood there,” Charlotte ventured. She thought. Where was the skin thinner and the blood flow greater?
    She jumped up, flung open her wardrobe, and stood in front of the mirror inside the door. “The neck! There’s a big vein here, do you see?” She cocked her head to be able to see the side of her own neck. “Here. Hold the magnet right there.”
    Hiroshi came up behind her and held the magnet to the thick artery pulsing at her neck. The two of them stood there motionless, waiting to see what would happen. They stood that way for hours—or so it seemed to her.
    “It’s not working,” Charlotte declared at last.
    He nodded and lowered the magnet. “You’re right.” He put it back in his pocket. “You can’t believe everything you read in books.”
    “Come on,” said Charlotte. “Let’s go play on the swings.”

    It was three days before he saw the doll in the window again. Hiroshi put down the radio—still not fixed—and ran out the door.
    When he arrived, Charlotte was holding two big flashlights, one in each hand. She had come up with the idea of exploring the cellar. She wouldn’t have dared to do it on her own, but she was dreadfully curious about what might be down there. So curious that Hiroshi, too, got swept up in the fever of discovery. The two of them crept down the stairs to an iron door that led to the cellar.
    It was cold down there, especially after the baking summer heat outside. The first thing they found was the heating plant. A steel door opened into a room with an enormous oil tank that occupied almost the entire space. In the next few rooms they came upon old typewriters and shredders and bulky calculating machines, and box after box of forms. Then they reached a bigger room, its metal shelves full of files.
    “Ugh!” Charlotte said, shivering. “Old documents. I hate those. Come on, let’s get going.”
    Hiroshi didn’t know what was so awful about old documents, but since he didn’t think they were especially interesting either, he followed her. At last they came across a lumber room with all sorts of treasures: weird lamps; dusty furniture; garden gnomes; hot plates with thick cloth sleeves around the power cords; framed photos of castles, icebergs, and ships; flowerpots full of shriveled bulbs; a rusty saw; a tricycle with a missing wheel…
    “Look at this,” said Charlotte, holding up a sealed flask full of some yellow fluid with a dead snake rolled up inside.
    Hiroshi had found something even better: a big metal tool chest. “Unbelievable,” he breathed as he lifted the lid and studied all the racks and pinions, the axles, cogwheels, and baseplates. One compartment held hundreds of nuts and bolts, another three electric motors with their cables. “I could practically build a robot with all this.”
    He put the chest down on the floor and began to build—something, anything, just to see how the cogwheels fitted together and how the axles turned. Charlotte squatted down next to him, picked up a large cog, and furrowed her brow. She put it back down. She picked up another part, a baseplate dotted with screw holes, and dropped it