“Hey, it’s hot in here,” the owl whined.
“So that one draws energy from light and beams it out as microwaves,” Tesla guessed, pointing at the piece of equipment being taken from the little Coolicious’s outfit. “And the other one converts the microwaves into electricity.”
Katherine Mavis nodded, looking impressed. “It’s cutting-edge technology. Solanow loaned us those prototypes as a promotional venture,” she said. “In the exhibit, we use a heat lamp to power a lava lamp from across the room.”
Tesla must not have looked impressed, because a moment later the curator added, “A really big lava lamp.”
“It looks cooler than it sounds!” someone from the crowd threw in.
“How is it that you know so much about wireless power transfer?” Ellen Wharton-Wheeler asked Tesla suspiciously.
She shrugged. “Hey, my name is Tesla,” she said.
“What I want to know is who these two are,” Ruffin said with a jerk of the head at the captive Cooliciouses. The guards were still gripping them by the wings.
“Why not take a look?” Nick suggested.
Ruffin laughed in a weary, resigned sort of way. “Why not, indeed,” he said. He turned toward the guards. “Gentlemen, if you would.”
“Off with their heads!” Silas cackled as Berg and another guard took hold of the big round owl masks and whipped them away.
The short Coolicious turned out to be a scowling twenty-something woman with a bald head, pierced nostrils, and tattoos covering half her face.
The tall Coolicious was a man with a long mournful face and dark hair buzzed short into a flattop.
They were both wearing heavy gray goggles.
“What’s with the weird glasses?” Berg asked.
“Night-vision goggles,” Tesla said. “So they’d be able to see after the lights went out.” She turned to her brother. “Looks like we were right about the mastermind.”
“Mastermind?” the bald woman snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“Who are you talking about?” the director demanded.
“The controls for the Hall of Genius had been hacked. The phone system, too,” Tesla said. “We figured there was only one person with the technical know-how to do all that. And now we have proof.”
Nick pointed at the prisoners.
“Don’t they look familiar?”
Mavis squinted at the man and the woman. Ruffin and Wharton-Wheeler and nearly everyone in the crowd did, too.
“Now that you mention it, I do feel like I’ve seen them before somewhere,” Mavis said.
“You have,” said Nick, and he pulled a small flat rectangle from his pocket and walked it over to her.
“No,” she gasped when he handed it to her.
She was looking down at the picture on a Migraine Monkey Missile Test refrigerator magnet.
The Cooliciouses were two-thirds of the band.
Mavis whirled around to face the band’s front man: the museum’s senior system manager, Mojo Jones.
“Mojo! How could you? I onboard you into the most impactful project on my TDL, and you calamatize everything?”
“What? Me? I haven’t calma—calmata—I haven’t done anything!” Mojo said, blinking wide, innocent eyes. “Honestly, Katherine, I’m as shocked by all this as you.”
“Oh, give it up, Mojo,” the little tattooed woman snapped. “I’ll tell you how he could do it, lady. Someone offered him $100,000 to sneak those power gizmos out of the museum, that’s how.”
“Be quiet, Pauline,” the tall man whispered to her.
“He said he was gonna use the money to shoot a video for one of our songs,” she continued.
“Don’t talk till we have lawyers, Pauline,” the tall man muttered.
“Hey, Mojo. I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Pauline went on. “Your rapping stinks.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jones spat back. “I’d have thought you were too busy messing up all the bass lines to notice!”
“Pauline is a great bassist!” the big guy protested.
Mojo rolled his eyes.
“Says the drummer with no sense of rhythm.”
“Hey!” Silas roared, stepping in between Mojo and his squabbling band mates. “Just shut up and tell us where our friend is!”
“Well, which is it?” said the tall man. “Do you want us to shut up or do you want us to tell you—ow!”
Pauline had stomped on his foot.
“We put him in one of the storage rooms,” she told Silas. “Number 31. We were gonna let him go on the way out, I swear.”
“Come on!” Tesla said.
She ran from the atrium, with Nick and Silas close behind her.
Pauline watched them go, and then she stomped on the tall man’s foot again.
“I told you we should’ve quit the band,” she said.
Uncle Newt and Hiroko caught up with the kids as once again they sprinted through the museum corridors.
“We saw the whole thing!” Uncle Newt panted. “Wow! I mean … just … wow!”
“Nice going!” Hiroko said.
“We’re not done yet,” Tesla said.
“This way!” said Nick, taking a sharp left.
Seconds later, they were at a door with STORAGE 31 stenciled on it. It wasn’t locked, and when they burst through they found themselves in a room filled with huge red and gray coils of foam and boulder-sized chunks of what looked like half-chewed pizza. A sign leaning against one wall read GOING WITH YOUR GUT: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM.
“These must be leftovers from one of the museum’s old exhibits,” Nick said.
“But where’s DeMarco?” said Silas.
Muffled grunts erupted from one corner of the room. They followed the sound to what was either a giant bladder or the world’s largest sculpture of a lima bean.
Behind it, they found DeMarco tied to a chair and gagged with a Migraine Monkey Missile Test bandana.
The first words out of his mouth when Tesla untied the bandana were “It’s about time!”
The second words were “What’d I miss?”
“… and then we found you behind the giant lima bean,” Silas said once he’d finished his highly edited (and not entirely accurate) overview of the past hour’s events. “What happened to you?”
“I got captured,” DeMarco said with a nonchalant shrug, as if this was something that happened to him every other day.
“I think there’s a little more to it than that,” Tesla said.
“Not really. Getting captured is pretty boring. I’ve just been sitting in here for, like, ever. I knew they weren’t gonna hurt me—that bald girl, Pauline, kept apologizing and telling Mojo and the other guy they were idiots. So all I could do was wait and wait and wait. I’m just glad I didn’t have to go to the bathroom. That would’ve been awful!”
“What about before you got captured, DeMarco?” Nick prompted.
“Oh. That. It was pretty boring, too. That meeting I was supposed to record? The one where Ms. Mavis and Ms. Wharton-Wheeler—”
“Wharton-Wheeler,” Tesla corrected him.
“That’s what I said.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
“Anyway, that meeting where they were going to reveal their evil plot against the Learnasium? A total waste of time.”
“You’re kidding,” said Nick.
“Nope. See, Ms. Wharton-Wheeler wrote ‘destroying the museum from within’ because that’s what she thought Ms. Mavis was doing. You know, by changing the name of the place and turning it into an ‘amusement park.’ ” DeMarco stretched out his arms as he talked. “Sure feels good to move! Anyway, their whole conversation was all this junk about marketing and ‘rebranding’ and how to ‘position’ the museum with donors. Lucky for me, Ms. Mavis cut the meeting short to go get ready for the big party. Five more minutes of listening to that boring stuff and I would’ve jumped out from under the table and run out of the room screaming.”
“So how’d you get captured?”
Tesla asked him.
DeMarco jogged in place for a few seconds. “Whew, my legs were cramping up. So I waited for the two of them to leave and then I slipped out and headed back to the Hall of Genius. But, well, I took a little detour.”
“You got lost,” Tesla said.
DeMarco ignored her and kept talking. “I guess Mojo Jones wasn’t expecting anyone to be in this part of the museum today, because I came around a corner and there he was, telling two people in Coolicious McBrainy suits where to hide when the lights go out tonight. I turned right around and tried to get out of there, but they caught up to me.”
“But you used the glove to record a message for us first,” Nick said.
DeMarco grinned. “Yup. I tossed it around a corner where they wouldn’t see it. Pretty brilliant, huh?”
“It would’ve helped a bit if you’d said who was chasing you,” Tesla pointed out.
DeMarco’s grin faded. “Hey, I didn’t know I was about to get grabbed and tied up in a storage room! Geez, Tez, sometimes you can be so—”
“I’m sorry, DeMarco. All that stuff wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t pushed everybody into investigating the sabotage.”
“Ah, forget it,” DeMarco answered. He smiled again, rolling his head from side to side to loosen his stiff neck muscles. “You know, compared to some of the stuff my sisters have put me through, having to sit in a chair for a few hours was no big deal.”
At that moment, a small herd of adults came charging in to the storeroom. Uncle Newt and Hiroko, who had gone to find the authorities once they saw that DeMarco was okay, were in the lead, followed by Ruffin, Wharton-Wheeler, and Carstairs (who was still dressed as an owl with a man’s head). They made DeMarco run through what had happened to him all over again, though this time he left out any reference to the meeting he’d been trying to eavesdrop on. He just said he’d gotten lost in the hallways when he ran into Mojo and the other Migraine Monkeys.
“I’m very, very sorry you had that experience in our museum, son,” Ruffin said when DeMarco was done.
“Don’t worry about it,” DeMarco told him. “It was something new.”
“I’m sorry the museum’s reopening was ruined,” Tesla said. “I wish we could have found a way to avoid that.”
To Tesla’s surprise, Ruffin laughed.
“The reopening hasn’t been ruined at all,” he said. “Most of our guests think they just witnessed the most ‘x-treme’ publicity stunt ever. I mean, it’s perfect, isn’t it? A bunch of kids use science to foil a heist in the Learnasium? If you go back out to the party, you’ll probably get a standing ovation.”
“And you’d deserve it,” Ellen Wharton-Wheeler said. “What you did tonight was extraordinary. Young people like you are what this museum is supposed to be all about.” She offered the kids a small, uncertain smile. “I’m sorry if I seemed to have forgotten that today.”
Nick and Tesla smiled back at her.
“We understand,” Tesla said.
“You were under a lot of stress,” said Nick.
“You could always make it up to us by letting me have this,” said Silas.
He patted the giant foam-rubber hot dog he’d been sitting on.
“I don’t think I could do that,” she said. “But I would like all of your help with a new exhibit you’ve inspired.” She looked at the gadget glove on Nick’s hand. “I’m thinking we could call it Building a Cooler You: A Cyborg Workshop. Or something like that.”
“I love it!” Silas said. He turned to stare at the gadget glove, too. “Speaking of which—you don’t need that anymore, do you, Nick?”
Without a word, Nick stripped off the gadget glove and handed it to his friend.
“Glovey!” Silas cried, giving the glove a hug.
“Glovey?” said Wharton-Wheeler. She looked as if she was already having second thoughts about a cyborg workshop.
“You know, I think this glove needs only one more thing to be perfect,” an oblivious Silas said as he pulled the glove onto his hand. “A web shooter!”
“We’ll get on that tomorrow,” Tesla said sarcastically.
“I’m afraid you won’t be able to work in our lab at home tomorrow,” Uncle Newt said to her. “You’ll be spending the day with Silas’s family again, assuming they can take you. Hiroko and I will need to be back at the museum bright and early to repair the Hall of Genius.”
“Again,” Hiroko grumbled.
“But we’ll have expert help this time!” Uncle Newt said. He turned to Carstairs. “I’ll get Katherine Mavis to rehire you, Mark. Now it’s obvious that the problems with the exhibit weren’t your fault, and we’ll need your help to root out whatever bugs Mojo Jones programmed into the controls.”
“Thanks, Newt,” Carstairs said. “I’d like that.”
“Hurrah,” Nick said through a stifled yawn. “A happy ending. Can we go home now?”
Ruffin shook his head.
“Sorry, not yet. We finally got a call through to the real police. They’ll need statements from all of you.”
“Oh, man, that’ll take forever. I was supposed to be home already,” DeMarco said with a groan. “What am I going to say to my mom and dad?”
For the first time that day, he looked as if he was capable of feeling fear.
Silas, meanwhile, hadn’t even heard what Ruffin said. He was too busy turning the lights on the gadget glove on and off while making p-shew p-shew noises.
Nick just yawned again and trudged off to a giant hamburger in the corner. When he reached it, he climbed on top and curled up in a ball.
The grownups launched into a conversation about Mojo Jones and his accomplices and what charges they were likely to face. (“Is unauthorized use of an owl costume illegal?” wondered Uncle Newt aloud. “If so, we might be in trouble, Mark.”)
Meanwhile, Tesla walked over to her brother.
“You okay?”
Nick sighed heavily.
“All the running around and uncovering and confronting and unmasking … it wipes me out.”
“Not me,” said Tesla. “I could really go for some pizza.”
Nick lifted his head just high enough to give his sister a look.
“You eat this stuff up,” he said. “Literally.”
He dropped his head back onto the hamburger and closed his eyes.
“Funny that somebody was after Solanow’s wireless power equipment,” Tesla mused as if her brother hadn’t spoken at all. “Just like someone’s after whatever Mom and Dad have been working on.”
“Tesla…,” Nick said.
“I know, I know. You think I’m seeing conspiracies and mysteries everywhere these days. But haven’t I always been right?”
“Tez …”
“I wonder if there’s a link between Solanow and Mom and Dad’s work for the government. We’ll have to figure that out somehow. Not that I’m looking for more mysteries or trouble. I’m just curious—and I know you are, too.”
Tesla went on for a while, talking about how she and her brother could dig up background information on Solanow via their uncle and Katherine Mavis and the Internet. Nick didn’t interrupt.
He was too busy snoring.
About the Authors
“SCIENCE BOB” PFLUGFELDER is an award-winning elementary school science teacher. His fun and informative approach to science has led to television appearances on the History Channel and Access Hollywood. He is also a regular guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Dr. Oz Show, and Live with Kelly & Michael. Articles on Bob’s experiments have appeared in People, Nickelodeon magazine, Popular Science, Disney’s Family Fun, and Wired. He lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.
STEVE HOCKENSMITH is the author of the Edgar-nominated Holmes on the Range mystery series. His other books include the New York Times best seller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls and the short-story collection Naughty: Nine Tales of Christmas Crime. He lives with his wife and two children about forty minutes from Half Moon Bay, California.
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Nick and Tesla's Super-Cyborg Gadget Glove Page 14
