Nick and Tesla's Super-Cyborg Gadget Glove

by Bob Pflugfelder

  Tesla watched as the owl turned sharply at the first corner and disappeared without a word. He’d been outgoing and friendly before, but now it was almost as if he was fleeing from her.

  So much for “youth outreach.”

  It didn’t really surprise Tesla, though. The kind of person who makes a living dressing as moonwalking wildlife, she reasoned, might be prone to mood swings.

  Tesla hurried off to the rendezvous point with the boys: the Hall of Genius.

  Silas was studying the equation on Einstein’s blackboard: E = mc2.

  “E equals mick two?” he said. “You know, I’ve seen this thing before but I never understood it.”

  “I don’t know anyone who understands it,” said DeMarco.

  Nick was pacing nervously nearby. “E equals em cee squared,” he said. “It means energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared.”

  “Correction,” DeMarco said. “I know one person who understands it.”

  Nick stopped pacing and started wringing his hands instead.

  “No, you don’t,” he said. “I don’t really get it either.”

  He was staring past the Einstein animatronic at the hidden exit door, which suddenly, finally, opened.

  “Tesla! Where have you been? We thought you’d been—”

  Nick caught himself just in time. He peeked back at Uncle Newt and Hiroko to see if they’d noticed.

  They hadn’t. They were too busy arguing about which head went on which Wright brother.

  “Orville’s the handsome one,” said Hiroko.

  “But this is the handsome one,” Uncle Newt replied.

  Nick turned back to his sister.

  “We thought you’d been caught,” he said in a whisper.

  “I was,” said Tesla.

  And then she told them the story.

  “All that,” Nick groaned when she was done, “and we still don’t have any proof.”

  “Not yet. But I can tell you when we should have some,” Tesla said.

  “A little after 4:30?” Nick guessed.

  “Exactly.” She crossed her arms, looking confident.

  “We’re gonna get proof at the meeting that Ms. Mavis and Ms. Whatever-Whatever are having?” DeMarco said. “How?”

  Now Tesla slumped her shoulders, looking a little deflated.

  “I haven’t figured out the how yet,” she admitted.

  Silas cleared his throat and took a step toward the Einstein animatronic.

  “Allow me,” he said.

  He pried free the little piece of white chalk Einstein was holding and began drawing on the chalkboard. When he was finished, this is what he’d drawn:

  “Glovey?” said DeMarco as Silas stepped back from his masterpiece.

  Tesla plucked the chalk from Silas’s hand.

  “Hey! I wasn’t done!” he said.

  “Oh, you’re done,” Tesla told him. She wedged the chalk back into Einstein’s animatronic fingers and then turned, picked up an eraser, and began wiping away Silas’s diagram. “Before Uncle Newt and Hiroko get a look at it,” she whispered.

  “It’s actually a pretty good idea,” Nick said, “aside from the fact that we don’t have a carrot, a rabbit, an eagle, or a webcam.”

  “Take away all those things, and what’s left that’s good?” Tesla asked.

  Nick stepped up next to his sister and pointed at the one part of the plan she hadn’t yet erased:

  “We might not have a webcam, but there’s something else we could attach to the glove,” Nick said.

  He turned to look at Uncle Newt’s toolbox sitting on the floor nearby.

  Tesla followed his gaze. For a moment she racked her brain, trying to remember everything she’d seen in there earlier. What was it Nick thought they could use? The highlighter markers? The yo-yo? The stuffed rat? The submarine sandwich?

  Then Tesla smiled.

  “The sound chips,” she said. “You’re a genius!”

  “Well…,” Nick said modestly.

  But he didn’t argue.

  NICK AND TESLA’S

  SUPER-CYBORG GADGET GLOVE

  FINGER #3 (RING FINGER):

  NICK’S HANDY ONE-HANDED RECORDER

  THE STUFF

  • Your gadget glove

  • 1 digital sound recorder (9V Recording Module, Radio Shack item #2102855)

  • Wire strippers

  • 24-gauge solid speaker wire

  • Scissors

  • Hot-glue gun

  • Electrical tape

  DIGITAL RECORDING MODULE

  THE SETUP

  1. Very carefully, cut the two wires that connect the button to the sound board. Cut halfway between the button and the sound board.

  2. Very, very, very carefully, use the wire strippers to remove slightly less than ½ inch (1.25 cm) of plastic coating from the cut ends of the sound board wires.

  3. Cut a 6-inch (15 cm) length of speaker cable (you can leave the strands attached if you like). Remove about ½ inch (1.25 cm) of plastic coating from one end of both strands and twist one strand onto each of the sound board wires. Each strand of the speaker wire should be attached to its own sound board wire.

  4. Wrap each pair of twisted wires securely with electrical tape.

  5. Hot-glue the voice recorder securely onto the back of your gadget glove.

  6. Carefully remove some plastic from the ends of the button wires you cut in step 1. Hot-glue the button onto the palm of the glove in a spot so that when you bend your ring finger, it naturally pushes the button.

  7. Cut the loose ends of the speaker wire from step 3 just long enough to reach the button on the palm. Strip the ends of both strands of the speaker wire and twist them onto the two button wires.

  8. Wrap the twisted wires with electrical tape.

  9. Use the scissors to snip the wires attaching the battery connector to the sound board.

  10. Connect the red wire from the sound recorder to the joining spot of the red wires from the False-Alarm Alarm (this page, step 6).

  11. Connect the black wire from the sound recorder to the joining spot of the thumb wires.

  12. Tape the connected wires together with electrical tape.

  THE FINAL STEPS

  1. Hot-glue the microphone and speaker onto the glove wherever there’s room. A good spot for the microphone is on top of the alarm buzzer.

  2. To activate the voice recorder, push and hold the palm button with your ring finger. The voice recorder should record for up to 20 seconds.

  3. To play back the sound, press the button on the sound board.

  The first sound chip that Nick and Tesla pulled out of Uncle Newt’s toolbox already had a recording on it.

  “Hello!” they heard when they activated it. “I em Dimitri Mendeleev and I em Russkie chemeest who inwent Periodic Table! I em tryink to do Russkie accent but I think I sound more like Dracula! Blah! I vant to drink your mercury and cesium!”

  “As an actor, you make a great scientist,” Hiroko said to Uncle Newt. They had finally reattached all the heads and appendages and props that had shaken loose earlier and were now trying to fix a rip in the fake bathtub “water” of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes.

  “Thanks!” Uncle Newt chirped obliviously.

  The next chip Nick and Tesla picked out hadn’t been used for one of their uncle’s sound checks. Which meant that it was ready to do some good old-fashioned bugging.

  They brought it over to Einstein’s blackboard and got set to attach it to the gadget glove.

  “Hey,” Nick said softly as they got to work, “what time is it, anyway? For all we know it’s after 4:30 and we missed Ms. Mavis’s meeting with Ms. Wharton- Wheeler.”

  “I’ll go check.”

  Tesla stood and headed toward the control panel built into Sir Alexander Fleming’s work table on the other side of the Hall of Genius.

  “And you said Ms. Mavis wrote ‘Meeting Room 2’ in her planner, but we don’t even know where tha
t is,” Nick added. He held up the sound chip. “This won’t do us any good if we can’t even find the room we need to put it in.”

  “I’ll scout it out,” said DeMarco, heading for the exit.

  “Me, too,” said Silas.

  “You know,” Tesla said to her brother as their friends left, “you’re really good at seeing why things won’t work.”

  Nick shrugged. “It’s a gift.”

  Tesla walked over to the computer to check the time, but on reaching it something else caught her eye. The control dashboard for the Hall of Genius was still on the screen, and she could see the username that Uncle Newt and Hiroko had used to log in: Carstairs1.

  “Why are you guys logged in as Carstairs1?” Tesla said. “I thought Carstairs was the designer who got fired.”

  “We’re using his old username and password,” Hiroko said. “Mr. Jones was supposed to get us new ones, but he never got around to it. Too much going on this week, I guess.”

  “But doesn’t that mean Carstairs could still—yipe!”

  She finally noticed the time. They had less than half an hour to get the glove ready and find Meeting Room 2.

  “Could Carstairs still yipe? I don’t know,” Uncle Newt said. “What’s yiping?”

  Tesla didn’t answer. She was rushing back to Nick. “Work fast,” she whispered. “It’s already after four.”

  Nick looked up from the gadget glove.

  “You know, even if we have this ready by 4:30, it won’t do us any good if we can’t figure out how to—”

  “Forget your gift. Just hurry.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  He hurried.

  DeMarco and Silas returned just as Nick finished adding the sound chip to the glove.

  “We found the meeting room,” DeMarco said. “There’s a problem, though.”

  “Let me guess,” said Nick. “Since the chip can record for only thirty seconds, we’ll have to be listening to the conversation to know when Ms. Mavis and Ms. Wharton-Wheeler are saying something incriminating. But to do that, we’d have to be in the room with them, and there’s no place to hide.”

  DeMarco’s eyes widened.

  “He’s good,” he said to Tesla.

  “At seeing problems,” Tesla said.

  “Hey! I can see solutions, too!” Nick protested. “This was my plan, remember?”

  Tesla picked up the gadget glove.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go to Meeting Room 2 and see if you can save your plan.”

  “Hide under the table? That’s your brilliant solution?” DeMarco said.

  “Wow,” said Silas, “I could’ve thought of that.” Then he added, “Sorry, dude.”

  Nick gave them a listless, defeated shrug. “It’s the best I can come up with,” he said.

  Meeting Room 2 was long and narrow, with one door, a rectangular boardroom-style table, and a dry-erase board mounted to the wall. There was no closet, no podium, nothing to hide in or behind.

  “Well, I think hiding under the table could actually work,” said Tesla.

  “You do?” Silas and DeMarco said at the same time.

  “Yeah … you do?” said Nick.

  Tesla nodded.

  “The table’s for, like, twenty people,” she said. “It’s huge. But there’s only gonna be two people sitting at it. And it’s obvious where they’ll be.” She pointed at one end of the table. “In the seats closest to the door. So someone hiding under the other end of the table should be fine.”

  “Unless that someone sneezes,” said DeMarco.

  “None of us has a cold,” said Tesla.

  “Or unless Ms. Wharton-Wheeler or Ms. Mavis drops a pen in the middle of the meeting,” said Nick.

  “They don’t strike me as the clumsy type,” said Tesla.

  “Or they don’t sit near the door,” Nick said.

  “Whoever’s hiding can just move away from wherever they do sit,” Tesla replied.

  “Or unless the person hiding ate half a leftover burrito for lunch and feels kinda bloated and gassy and, you know, does something about it,” said Silas. Silas had eaten half a leftover burrito for lunch, and had been feeling bloated and gassy, and had been quietly doing something about it, off and on, for the past hour.

  “Each of them will think the other one’s doing it,” Tesla said.

  “You know what?” DeMarco said. “You talked me into it.” He held out a hand to Tesla. “Give me the gadget glove.”

  Tesla shook her head.

  “No. I’ll do it.”

  Nick shook his head.

  “It was my dumb idea. I’ll do it.”

  Silas shook his head.

  “I am Laserhand, master of gadget glove technology. I’ll do it.”

  “No. Really. I’ll do it,” said Tesla.

  “No. Really. I’ll do it,” said Nick.

  “No. Really. I’ll do it,” said DeMarco.

  “No. Really. I’ll do it,” said Silas.

  “No. Really,” Tesla said again, even more firmly than before.

  Nick jumped in before she could say “I’ll do it.” “We don’t have time for this! We need to pick someone and get on with it!”

  “Fine. We’ll decide the way we usually do,” said Tesla. “By just doing whatever I say.”

  “Not this time,” said DeMarco. “We’ll do rock, paper, scissors.”

  “Does that even work with four people?” Nick asked.

  DeMarco shrugged.

  “Let’s find out.”

  He curled his right hand into a fist.

  Nick and Tesla and Silas did likewise.

  “One. Two. Three,” said Tesla.

  Her hand didn’t change. Neither did Nick’s and Silas’s. They’d all played rock.

  DeMarco, however, had flattened his hand. He’d played paper.

  He’d won.

  “Well, there you go,” he said, smiling. “It works.”

  He flipped his hand over and stretched it toward Tesla.

  “Two out of three?” Silas said.

  “Just give me the glove and get out of here,” DeMarco said to Tesla.

  Tesla glowered back at him but went ahead and handed him the glove.

  “Ahhh,” he sighed as he pulled it on again. “I missed you, buddy.”

  Silas looked wistfully down at the glove. “I want Glovey back,” he whined. “My hand feels all naked without it.”

  “We should be glad we lost,” Nick said to his sister. “Wearing that glove does weird things to people.”

  “No. It. Does. Not,” DeMarco said in a robotic voice. “Now. Must. Destroy. Humans.”

  He lit up the LED finger and pointed it at Silas.

  “P-shew! P-shew!”

  “Just hide and be quiet, would you?” Tesla snapped. “We’re leaving.”

  DeMarco gave her a final p-shew and then flipped off the LED and started toward the far end of the table.

  “Good luck,” Nick told him.

  “Oh, don’t worry about me and Glovey,” DeMarco said. “We’re going to be just fine.”

  Then he ducked under the table and disappeared from sight.

  As Nick, Tesla, and Silas walked off down the hall, they saw Ellen Wharton-Wheeler striding toward them.

  Nick and Tesla decided simultaneously to give DeMarco a warning.

  “Hi, Ms. Wharton-Wheeler!” they sang sweetly—and loudly. Silas joined in at the end. “—Wheeler.”

  The tall, dour curator shot them a not-so-sweet look in return.

  “You’re still here? Isn’t your uncle done yet?” she said as she swept past them. “Time’s running out, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Tesla said under her breath after they passed by. “For you.”

  Ms. Wharton-Wheeler turned sharply and marched into Meeting Room 2.

  The kids lingered in the hallway a moment, waiting for a scream or a furious “What are you doing under there!” But they heard nothing. So far, Nick’s “brilliant solution” seemed to be working.<
br />
  “You know what I don’t understand?” Silas whispered. He pointed at the doorway Wharton-Wheeler had just gone through. “I get that she’s mad about how things have changed around here. But why would that director lady go along with it? I mean, who’d want to hurt the museum they were in charge of?”

  “Ms. Mavis used to work for the Scientastic Explorezone, remember?” Nick said.

  Silas nodded slowly, a confused look on his face.

  He didn’t remember.

  “She was head of marketing for the museum’s biggest rival,” Tesla reminded him. “Well, what if she still is? Maybe this is the Scientastic Explorezone’s sneakiest marketing campaign ever, if you know what I mean.”

  The expression on Silas’s face didn’t change.

  He didn’t know what she meant.

  Nick and Tesla shared an exasperated glance.

  Then Silas looked suddenly satisfied. “Right!” he said. “It’s just like the time the Joker disguised himself as Batman to sneak into Justice League headquarters.”

  “Yes,” Nick said after a moment. “Just like that,” Tesla added. “Now let’s go before she shows up,” she said. “It’s gonna look suspicious if we’re just hanging around out here.”

  Tesla meant to lead Nick and Silas back to the Hall of Genius, where DeMarco would go once the secret meeting was over. But she ended up taking a right when she should have gone left, or taking a left when she should have gone right, or taking a turn when she should have gone straight.

  Whichever way it was, the three of them were lost again.

  “The next time we try to get anywhere in these hallways, we need to bring a compass and a week’s provisions,” Tesla said.

  “Maybe we should ask the bird for directions,” said Nick.

  “Bird?”

  Nick jerked his thumb at something behind them.

  Coolicious McBrainy was stepping out of one of the storerooms about forty feet away.

  “Coolicious!” Silas called out. “Hey, man, how do we get back to the lobby?”