The Mystery of Silas Finklebean by David Baldacci, Rudy Baldacci

screen changed and they were staring at a picture of Silas Finklebean with all the information from the computer’s database, including his current address in Pookesville.
    “My gosh,” said Freddy after they’d finished reading. “Silas Finklebean is right here.” He jumped up. “Come on, guys!”

CHAPTER 22
    BUSTING OUT THE BEAN
    Freddy knocked on the apartment door on the top floor of the tallest building in Pookesville. As he listened to the footsteps coming toward the door, his heart started to pound faster and faster: He would finally be meeting Silas Finklebean, the only person who’d ever figured out how to travel through time.
    When Silas Finklebean opened the door, Freddy and the others realized that they’d all been holding their breaths. Now they let it all out with a collective
whoosh
. As Freddy stared up at the very tall man, he noticed that Finklebean appeared to be wearing the same clothes he had on from the picture in the book.
    Finklebean’s first words were very surprising. “Come in, come in, I was expecting you.” He shook all of their hands as he led them inside and motioned them into chairs. The apartment, Freddy noticed, didn’t look modern at all. In one corner stood an old-fashioned radio. On the wall across from Freddy was an antique clock with a long brass pendulum. Hanging on another wall was an old mercury barometer.
    “I like to keep things from my own time around,” explained Finklebean.
    “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Finklebean,” said Freddy.
    “Well, it’s an honor to meet you, Freddy,” replied Finklebean.
    Howie’s eyes nearly fell out of his face. “How’d you know his name?”
    “Your present is my history, so of course I know all about you.”
    “So you came into the future and stayed because you wanted to?” said Freddy.
    Finklebean smiled sadly. “Well, that’s not exactly what happened.”
    “Indeed, if you had liked the future so much you wouldn’t have surrounded yourself with the past in your apartment,” deduced Theodore.
    Finklebean sighed and sat back. “The future has its good points, but being out of your own time isn’t exactly all it’s cracked up to be.” He suddenly sat forward and said very earnestly. “That’s why I wanted you to come and help me.”
    “
You
wanted
us
to come?” exclaimed Freddy.
    Finklebean nodded. “I didn’t know what else to do. I was desperate to get out of the future. I just don’t fit in here.”
    “So why couldn’t you just go back in your own time machine?” asked Howie.

    “It’s not that simple,” replied Finklebean. “I need your help to do that.”
    “Before we can help you, we want to know everything,” said Freddy very firmly.
    “You’re certainly entitled to an explanation,” Finklebean acknowledged. “Well, my story is quite simple. None of my inventions made any money. And then I invented the time travel machine and started traveling through time. It was a lot of fun at first. I had all these ideas of the good I could do for people. To go into the future and get the cures for diseases and bring them back. And to build inventions to help people, like for solar power and growing crops more efficiently, things like that. But the only person I really ended up helping was myself.”
    Theodore and Freddy exchanged glances. Freddy looked a little ashamed.
    Theodore said to Finklebean, “What you
did
was make money by betting on things, because you already knew the winners.”
    “It’s true,” admitted Finklebean. “I got greedy. The thing is, the more money I made the more I wanted.”
    “What happened after that?” asked Theodore.
    “I came into the future once too often. The Pookesville Robotic Police discovered what I was doing and they took my time machine away. You see, lots of people have time machines nowadays. And so they made it a law that prohibits using information from the future to profit in the past. I broke that law and I’ve been stuck here ever