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

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 thekeyboard which, in turn, bashed into the cup of cold tea.
    The tea spilled out all over the table.
    â€˜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. Andthen,
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 –