Einstein's Chalkboard

by Mark Stout

Blaise Kepler is an otherwise ordinary ninth grader with a tragic burden to he's got a full-blown classic rock obsessive-compulsive disorder, instilled as a result of viewing the Beatles' Yellow Submarine when he was but a small boy. But when Blaise's dad loses his physics gig at the idyllic University of Florida, the bills still have to be paid and that drives dad to take a similar position in far-away Princeton, New Jersey, his father's hometown. Blaise has to change schools mid-year but bureaucratic snafus place him in the wrong classes at his new and super-competitive magnet school. While Blaise fails to rise to the challenges of his new settings, his now-nearby Grandmother, in a desperate attempt to help him become the kind of student she thinks he's can be, reveals a profound she harbors a secret stash of the writings of Albert Einstein and it isn't just a letter or two, it's a large library. But after the writings have been revealed to Blaise, he's in an accident that knocks him out cold. While unconscious, Blaise has a vision—a visitation—and it's from Einstein who calls on him to help fulfill a task of scientific discovery for someone called "The Architect.” After the accident, Blaise’s mind—and several other things—start working on an entirely different level, helping with the schoolwork but failing to fully satisfy the requirements of Einstein's mission. Instead, Blaise needs his quasi-misfit and semi-savant friends from the school’s robot-building Science Club to help execute a high-tech heist and procure the Einstein writings for further study. When an unscrupulous scientist, the Chair of the University's Physics Department, sniffs out the long-hidden Einstein writings, things start spinning faster for Blaise. Despite the knowledge Blaise has acquired and his new and beautiful mind, he still can't satisfy Einstein’s perplexing tasking. This calls for Blaise and his friends, in disguise and enabled by their ever growing intellectual prowess, to enter the scientist’s academic lair to view his secret copy of an ancient Einstein lecture filmed in the 1930s.Blaise and his friends come understand and later, improve on Einstein’s theories, which they use to build a machine of enormous power, the implications of which they've failed to grasp. When the unscrupulous nemesis intrudes to claim this achievement as his own, he's inadvertently sent away via a rogue wormhole where his unintentional time travel places the universe dangerously out of balance. This means Blaise and his allies must travel through time, bring the nemesis home, and secure the knowledge of Einstein’s Chalkboard.

258 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 23, 2012