“Don’t worry about me,” DeMarco said with a smile. “How much trouble could I get into in a museum?”
Tesla smiled back.
Nick grimaced.
“How much trouble could I get into in a museum?” was what DeMarco had said to his mother that morning when he was trying to talk her into letting him spend the day at the Learnasium.
DeMarco’s mom thought it was dangerous for her son to be hanging around with Nick and Tesla Holt. And Nick was starting to worry that she was right.
“If you hear me, come out of there right away,” said DeMarco. “There should be time for us to duck around that corner down the hall before Ms. Wheelton-Warner—”
“Wharton-Wheeler,” Tesla corrected him.
“—before she gets to the top of the steps.”
“Yeah,” said Nick. “Except, around that corner is a dead end. If Ms. Wharton-Wheeler decides to go down the hall instead of into the exhibit, we’re trapped.”
“Maybe there’s another exit,” Tesla said to her brother. “Come on.”
One at a time, they tiptoed through the doorway and into the darkness.
Silas, meanwhile, was feeling a little creeped out.
His friends were gone and he was alone in a big, murky, nearly deserted building. Plus he was standing beside a giant brain. A foam-rubber brain, sure, but a giant brain nonetheless. An evil brain, if Silas were to guess.
Silas would eat this stuff up if it was in a movie or a comic book or a game or a story his dad was telling. But in real life? Somehow it wasn’t as much fun.
He squinted up at the balcony on the other side of the lobby. DeMarco was supposed to be up there watching, waiting for his signal. But if DeMarco was there, he was doing a great job of being sneaky because Silas couldn’t see him at all.
Silas wanted desperately to activate the LED on the gadget glove. It would be the perfect distraction for a twelve-year-old boy waiting by himself in the dark. But he didn’t—he knew what Tesla would do to him if he turned on the light at the wrong time. Or at least he could guess what she’d do, and his guesses were pretty disturbing. Besides, his friends were counting on him to signal properly so that they could escape. So he had to come up with something else to keep his mind occupied while he kept watch.
Silas looked at the glove. He made a dramatic gesture, pointing into the atrium’s darkness and thinking, Beware, criminals. You face the power of Laserhand!
Then he decided that Laserhand needed a theme song.
“Laserhand. Laserhand. Does the cool stuff a laser can,” Silas sang softly. “He melts steel. Blows up … uhh … wheels. Cuts through walls. Zaps … umm … malls. Ugh.” He realized that theme songs were harder to write than he thought.
He started over.
“Laserhand. Laserhand. Does the cool stuff a laser can. He blasts crooks. Something ooks. Really cooks? Makes stuff fry. Bad guys cry. Look out! Here comes Laser-eep!”
Silas spun around.
Something was moving. He’d glimpsed it behind him, on the other side of the big brain.
He stopped and listened. There it was again.
Shuffling feet. Heavy breathing.
Getting louder. Coming closer.
Suddenly Silas wished he’d paid attention when Nick started babbling about Morse code. What was the signal for “HELP!!!”?
And then a shape lurched out from behind the brain.
For a sliver of a second, Silas thought, Please be Berg. Please say “All right, punk!” Please be Berg. Please.
But the shape didn’t say “All right, punk.” It definitely was not Berg. It was taller and broader than Berg. And of course, Berg didn’t have a beak and clawed feet and dark wings that spread wide when he swooped down on his prey.
But this thing did.
DeMarco was in position on the terrace, watching for the distant pinprick of light from below that would mean “Get out of there!” He could tell where the giant brain was, but he couldn’t quite see Silas. It was too dark. Yet from time to time, DeMarco would catch a dim flutter of movement that he assumed was his friend.
And then, something strange—was that two flutters, close together? And did he hear something echoing from across the vast hall? A gasp? A cry of surprise? The sound was too faint to be sure.
DeMarco squinted, leaning over the railing and trying to get a better view. He watched and watched for the flash of light that would tell him trouble was coming, that something was wrong and he had to warn the others. But all he saw were shadows.
“Did you hear something?” said Nick.
Tesla stopped and cocked her head. She seemed to be listening.
“Yeah,” she said after a moment of complete silence. “The tick-tick-tick of wasted time.”
She headed deeper into the dimly lit exhibit.
Nick frowned. He lingered where he was, still listening for noises from outside. He could’ve sworn he’d heard a faint, distant yelp. But he didn’t hear anything now. Maybe it had just been his common sense saying “What are you doing? You don’t know this Wharton-Wheeler lady is up to anything. And this is, like, trespassing!”
“Come on!” Tesla called to him.
Sometimes it seemed to Nick that Tesla spoke a lot louder than common sense.
And so Nick followed.
The first part of the exhibit was a corridor lined with signs and pictures, but it was almost too dark to see them. From the detail that was visible, it was obvious that the exhibit featured some kind of space theme. Nick recognized a famous photograph of Robert H. Goddard standing beside one of his early liquid-fueled rockets, and a little farther were images of the Soviet Sputnik satellite and Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach space.
Tesla was as nuts about space exploration as Nick was—it was a love they’d both inherited from their space-obsessed dad—yet she didn’t slow down to admire the pictures or try to read the signs. Even when they reached the end of the corridor and the true scope of the exhibit became obvious, Tesla kept hurrying onward while Nick stopped to say “Whoa.”
To his left was what looked like a NASA mission control center. To his right was a life-size re-creation of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Above him hung a model of the ISS, the International Space Station, spanning thirty feet across. And straight ahead was, well, more. There was so much, it was hard to take it all in.
Which is maybe why Tesla wasn’t even trying. She just swept past displays with headings like “There’s Gold in Them Thar Asteroids” and “The Case for Space: Colonization,” two subjects that normally would have stopped her in her tracks.
“Keep your eye out for a hidden back exit, like the one in the Hall of Genius,” Tesla said. “We may need it if Ms. Wharton-Wheeler comes back while we’re still in here. And look for anything that seems out of place. A coffee mug or a water bottle or a laptop. That’ll be where she’s been working.”
“Yeah. Got it. Will do,” Nick muttered half-heartedly.
But he was thinking that it was hard to keep looking for things that were out of place when the things that were in place were so very cool.
There was a hand-cranked wheel loaded with beanbag astronauts to demonstrate how centrifugal force could simulate gravity on a spaceship. There was a “Star Bar” where you could buy samples of the same dehydrated juice and chocolate milk served on the ISS. There was even a kid-size space suit, which was slit up the back so that kids could climb into it. Nick was tempted to give it a try, not only because he’d always wanted to put on a space suit but also because it seemed like a great place to hide.
“You see anything?” Tesla asked him.
“Oh, yeah!” Nick said, the marvel clear in his voice.
“I mean clues.”
“Oh. Right. Nah.”
Tesla gave her brother a sympathetic look.
“Look, Nick, I feel the same way you do,” she said. “From what Ms. Wharton-Wheeler said about the Hall of Genius, I was expecting her exhibit to be a real snooze. ‘The Wonderful Worl
d of Cement’ or ‘An Interactive History of Library Dust’ or something. But this is pretty amazing. We’ll have to come back when the X-Treme Learnasium is open to the public again. Then we can take our time and see everything. Okay?”
“Assuming they’ll let us out of jail for a trip to the museum,” Nick grumbled.
“Oh, come on. No one’s going to send a couple kids to jail for trespassing.”
Tesla paused to push down on a small waterbed-like display that demonstrated how a warp drive might create bubbles in spacetime to move ships faster than the speed of light. A tennis ball rode the resulting ripples from one side to the other.
“If we’re caught, we’ll probably just go to juvenile hall,” Tesla said, watching the tennis ball. “And maybe get placed in a foster home.”
“Not funny, Tez.”
“Who says I was joking?”
“Well, then, let’s get out of—hey.”
“Hey?”
Tesla turned to look back at her brother.
He was standing in front of a display labeled “The Case for Space: Power.”
“Tez, you gotta come check this out,” he said. “It’s about space-based solar power. And there’s something funky about it.”
Tesla headed his way. Fast.
They had been reading everything available about space-based solar power for the past week—ever since a mysterious friend of their parents told them that space-based power is what their mom and dad had been working on when they disappeared. Not soybean irrigation in Uzbekistan, as Nick and Tesla had been told.
The display demonstrated how space-based solar power would work. In a glass case was a blocky gray grid and, about a foot away from it, a tambourine attached to a rod. The grid, as the sign nearby explained, emitted ultrasonic sound—sound with a frequency above a human’s range of hearing. Even though people couldn’t hear the sound, they could see its effect. When the emitter was switched on, ultrasonic sound waves would hit the tambourine and cause it to vibrate. In a similar way, a satellite could beam the energy it collected from the sun to cities on Earth. That energy would be not sound waves but microwaves, but the principle was similar.
Nick read aloud from the sign under the display. “The possibility of the wireless transmission of power,” he recited, “was first championed by Nikola Tesla, who—”
He had to stop because the text after that was covered by duct tape. Just as it was on Tesla’s sign in the Hall of Genius.
His sister reached out for the tape.
Nick grabbed her hand.
“Wait,” he said.
“I know, I know,” she said. “If we can’t get the tape back on right, Ms. Wharton-Wheeler will know someone’s been here.”
“It’s not that. I thought I heard something.”
“Again?”
Tesla sighed and listened, too.
And this time she definitely heard something. A distant muffled … flapping?
That definitely wasn’t DeMarco calling to them to run for it. But it was a reminder of what they were supposed to be doing.
“We’ve only got time for one mystery at the moment,” Nick said to Tesla. “This can wait.”
Tesla turned and hurried off, once again scanning the exhibit for proof that Ellen Wharton- Wheeler was a saboteur.
Nick stayed in place, listening intently. What was that noise?
It must be something innocuous, something he could ignore, he assured himself, because Silas and DeMarco were out there. All they had to do was wait, and watch, and Nick and Tesla would know if there was a real reason to worry.
How could such a simple plan possibly go wrong?
“Or how about this?” the giant dancing owl said to Silas. “I moonwalk, segue into the cabbage patch, then throw in some twerking, and climax with a head spin.”
The owl went gliding backward a few feet and then began hopping from one clawed foot to the other as its wings flapped back and forth.
“Well? Huh? Whaddaya think?” the owl panted as he skidded to a stop. “Better than the electric slide? Or should I go back to doing the robot?”
“Uhh … that’s good,” Silas said to him. Which is what he’d said about the electric slide and the robot, too. And the humpty dance, and Gangnam style before that. But this big dumb bird wouldn’t stop dancing.
Five minutes earlier, the owl had burst out of the darkness, jumping at Silas and saying, “Hey! A kid! Just what I need!”
Silas’s understandable response: “Whaaa!”
“Sorry, kid! Didn’t mean to scare you,” the owl said to him. “I wasn’t expecting to see you, either. I thought I’d be in here working on my moves all alone. But then I heard your singing.”
“Y-your m-m-m-moves?” Silas said.
Once Silas realized the giant owl was just a guy in a goofy suit, he calmed down and found it a little easier to speak. After all, how many owls—even giant ones—wear sunglasses, backward-facing baseball caps, and droopy jeans with their underwear showing? Before noticing all that, Silas had thought he was about to be carried off to a nest and snarfed down like a big squirrel.
“Yeah, my moves,” the owl said. “I’m Coolicious McBrainy, the X-Treme Learnasium’s new extreme mascot. I’m going to be at the museum every day showing youngsters that science and technology can be totally rad!”
“How are you gonna do that?”
The owl shrugged. “Dance routines, mostly. And a little improvised mime comedy. Speaking of which …”
At that moment Coolicious McBrainy leaned forward and began walking, taking exaggerated steps that led him nowhere.
“Uhh, do you need help?” Silas asked.
“No! I’m walking against the wind. It’s a mime classic. All right, forget that. Tell me how this looks.”
The owl-man wiggled his tail feathers, rolled his wings in big circles, and swayed from side to side.
“It’s so hard to tell what a move looks like when you’re inside a new suit,” he said. “Can you tell I’m doing the hustle?”
“What’s the hustle?”
Coolicious McBrainy immediately stopped moving and stood with shoulders slumped.
“Ugh. Okay. How about this?” He began riding an invisible horse while waving one wing over his head. “You recognize this move, don’t ya?”
“I’m sorry,” Silas said, “But could we do this later? I’m a little busy right now.”
The owl stopped dancing and stared at Silas with owl fake eyes the size of dinner plates.
“Doing what?”
Silas considered the two possible answers:
(A) “Being a lookout for my friends, who are sneaking around in one of the exhibits even though a security guard told them to stay here.”
(B) “Oh, nothin’.”
He went with B. Which was how he ended up spending the next few minutes trying to be a lookout for his friends while simultaneously critiquing the dance steps of a six-foot-tall owl.
“Maybe you should try a few spearoettes,” Silas said eventually. He didn’t know anything about dancing; he was just trying to find something to say, because standing there watching the owl dance was starting to weird him out big time.
“You mean pirouettes? Like in ballet?” Coolicious McBrainy asked. “In an owl suit?”
Silas nodded. “Or jazz hands,” he added. “You can never go wrong with jazz hands.” Silas brought up his hands and waved them in the air. Then he waved them like he just didn’t care. “Er, well, I guess jazz wings, in your case.”
The owl’s big, bulbous upper body rocked from side to side. The man inside the costume was shaking his head.
“You’re not getting it, kid.” the owl told Silas. “I’m trying to reach your generation. Get down with the youth, you feel me? Somehow I don’t think jazz hands are going to … hey. What’s with the glove?”
“Huh?”
Coolicious pointed a wingtip at the gadget glove on Silas’s right hand.
“You’re wearing one glove. Is that s
ome kind of fashion thing?”
“Oh. Yeah. A fashion thing. Exactly. All the kids are doing it.”
“It’s the first time I’ve seen it.”
Silas gulped. “All the fashionable kids, I mean,” he said.
Coolicious put his wings on his hips.
“And you’re one of the fashionable kids?”
Aside from the glove, Silas was wearing dirty jeans and tattered sneakers and a faded Star Wars T-shirt that didn’t quite cover his belly. “Totally fashionable,” Silas answered. He nodded rapidly. If he could keep the owl talking, maybe he wouldn’t dance anymore. “Now,” Silas said, “the move you really need to work into your routine is the—eep!”
“The eep? I don’t know that one. I sure am learning a lot today!” Coolicious said.
But Silas wasn’t listening. He was staring, horrified, at a distant figure walking past the gift shop; it was about to turn a corner and start up the broad marble steps that led to the museum’s second level.
It was the figure of Ellen Wharton-Wheeler.
Silas had missed her when she first came inside because he was too busy watching an owl do the cha-cha slide. Now he had only seconds to send the warning signal to DeMarco.
But first he had to distract Coolicious, and fast.
“Look!” Silas said. “An eagle!” He pointed at a spot behind the owl about fifty feet above their heads.
Coolicious turned to look. “What do you mean?” he said. “Like, flying around in here?”
Silas turned on the LED at his fingertip. Wasn’t there some kind of code he should be flashing? Long light, short light? Long light, long light, short light? Short light, long light, short light? He couldn’t remember.
Whatever. He just waved the light in the air and hoped for the best.
“I don’t see anything,” Coolicious said.
Silas turned off the LED just as Coolicious turned to look at him, and then he pointed into space again.
“No, wait. It’s a bat!”
“Really?”
Nick and Tesla's Super-Cyborg Gadget Glove Page 5
